A few seconds later, the man she knew only as the Doctor strolled out of his incongruously disguised space-and-time machine with his hands in his pockets. He side-stepped around her, and began to poke around with a clownish curiosity.

“Doctor, where are we?” Rose asked slowly.

He took that cylindrical metal device he was always carrying out of his pocket; the end hummed and glowed blue. “We’re indoors,” he said. He almost made it sound like he considered it a far-from-obvious feat of deduction.

“Exactly. We’re meant to be on the beach.”

The Doctor shrugged and rapped his knuckles on the side of one of the tall crates beside the Tardis. The sound was tinny, but with depth, a hollow sound.

“This doesn’t look like a tropical beach world to me, Doctor.”

The Doctor chuckled. “You have to understand that when telling the Tardis where to go you should always leave yourself open to liberal interpretation.”

“Liberal interpretation,” she muttered, looking around.

The room they were in was dark, about twenty yards across, and half as tall. It was lit by faintly glowing red safety strip-lights, but most of the light by which Rose could see was coming through the open door of the Tardis.

“Yes,” the Doctor said finally, pocketing the cylindrical device. “If you tell the Tardis to take you to a beach, it might just as easily take you to a desert.”

“That’s not liberal interpretation, Doctor. That’s just getting it plain wrong.”

“Hey, they’ve both got sand, haven’t they?”

Rose tucked her fair hair behind her ears. “I suppose.”

“Well, the Tardis doesn’t like sand, anyway.”

Rose wrapped her hands around her bare arms and approached what looked like an automatic door; it was rimmed with what looked like green neon. It didn’t open and there was no sign of any button to open it with.

She sighed. “Well, from the looks of it, it’s not in any danger of coming into any contact with the stuff round here. Where are we, Doc-?”

As she turned round, the words fell out of her mouth. The Doctor was leaning against the Tardis, fascinated by a pink plastic yo-yo he was playing with.

“Doctor, what are you doing?” she said.

“I’m doing a scientific experiment,” he explained.

She chuckled. “You’re having a laugh.”

“I’m entirely serious, Rose. This little pink device allows me to test the gravity in here. Indeed, it’s at exactly the level to which humans are accustomed.”

“So we’re back on Earth, then?” It didn’t look like it.

“I don’t think we’re on a planet at all.” He flicked his wrist a final time and the yo-yo wound itself up into his hand. He tossed it to Rose; she caught it.

“Check the side,” he told her.

She turned the yo-yo over. In the semi-darkness she saw there was a compass set into the side. The needle was turning gently, failing to settle on a north.

“No magnetic poles,” the Doctor explained.

“So we’re on a spaceship; a human one; in the future?”

He wagged a long, bony finger at her. “Nice theory, but I don’t think so.” He bent down and put his hand on the deck in several places; as if feeling for a heartbeat, thought Rose. Then he stood up again, and felt the wall several times too.

“I can’t feel the vibrations from any engines,” he said.

“Well, a space-station, then?” Rose suggested.

He turned back to her. “I reckon so.”

Rose sighed again, and ran her hand around the edges of the doors. “So there’s no chance of finding a beach nearby, then. Is that thing malfunctioning?”

From inside the Tardis came a distant splutter.

The Doctor placed a comforting palm on its outer hull. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said softly, quickly closing the door in case Rose might say something else the Tardis considered offensive. She rolled her eyes.

“The Tardis goes precisely where it wants to,” he added.

Rose started running her hands around the edge of the room door to trip a motion sensor or something. “You have no idea when and where we are, do you, Doctor?” she said without turning to face him again.

She could feel his indignant stare.

“Mankind progressed from the colonial era to the computer age in less than eighty years, Rose,” he said. “But for most of your third millennia, one space-station looked much like any other. From the inside, at least.”

“Excuses, excuses,” she muttered.

She decided to give up on the door. It wasn’t budging.

“So why did the Tardis want to come here, Doctor?” She turned.

He was already heading over, the metallic cylinder held up in his hand, its tip glowing blue again. “That, Rose, is what I intend to find out.”

With a quick flourish of his contraption, the door hissed open. The Doctor snatched his yo-yo back off Rose, then led the way out.

After twenty minutes walking down endless poorly-lit passages, following interesting-looking bisecting tunnels that turned out to be dead-ends, and taking turns choosing which direction to go at four-way junctions, they still hadn’t encountered anyone. Rose sighed loudly and stopped, with her hands on her hips.

The Doctor turned and mirrored her expression.

“Doctor, I swear we’ve already been this way once before.” She cocked her head at the level plan mounted on the bulkhead before the junction.

He walked over and examined the map. “Hmm.”

“Now I know I was right; I must have said go left when it was my turn.”

“No, you said go right; I’m sure of it,” said the Doctor.

“I can’t have done. You said go left at the last junction. You also said go left at your chance before that. And if I said go left when it was my turn, well, that means if we go left now, we’ll end up back at the Tardis, won’t we?”

The Doctor grinned. “Then let’s go right.”

Rose sighed. “We’ve been walking for ages; we must have covered at least two miles, and we still haven’t met anyone. Face it; this is a ghost-ship.”

His eyes widened at the prospect. “Fantastic!”

“Let’s go back to the Tardis.”

He brushed off the suggestion, heading right at the junction.

“At least just to make sure we know where we are,” she called after him.

He strolled back again. “Okay,” he mouthed.

They turned left at the junction and walked for another couple of minutes. The Doctor remembered what the door of the small cargo bay in which the Tardis had materialised looked like. The plaque above it read: E38-Beta.

Eventually they reached another four-way junction, and there was no sign of the bay with the Tardis in it. The Doctor went back to check the nearest door.

“A39-Beta?” he said, emphasising the nine.

“Oh, god, we’re lost, aren’t we?” Rose held her forehead.

“Lost is just an unimaginative way of saying we’re having fun exploring, Rose, as I’ve told you before.” But this time he wasn’t sure of that himself. “Do you remember getting in any elevators or going down any stairs, by the way?”

“What?” she said, sounding exasperated.

“I swear we were on level thirty-eight ten minutes ago. All the bays had it in their identifier. But now we seem to be on level thirty-nine.”

Rose sighed. “All the junctions had steps.”

“Not a whole level’s worth of them, though.”

“Maybe all the junctions combined would have done.”

“Yes, but sometimes we went up the steps.”

“No; all the left turns went down.”

“Yes, but sometimes we went right.”

She groaned. “Oh, I don’t know, Doctor; we are lost!”

It irritated the Doctor when people said that like it was some sort of problem. It was generally a human concern, and even then, only for humans from Rose’s time period or earlier, when they were never any further from their roots than a day’s flight away. As for a Timelord from Gallifrey, being almost a googolplex human miles - and several thousand human years - from home, that put a unique spin on things.

“Okay, we’ll look for the Tardis,” he decided.

“You really should get a remote control for that thing,” Rose grumbled as they began to retrace their steps. “Then you could call it when you needed it.”

“It’s not a dog, Rose,” the Doctor said flatly.

They turned right at the previous junction. They passed a freight elevator shaft the Doctor remembered walking past when they had been going the other way. Had Rose not been prodding him from behind whenever he slowed down, the Doctor would have suggested they got in and seen where it took them.

Instead, they carried on to the next junction, turning right again. They hadn’t got very far when the Doctor heard a double-chime behind them and stopped.

Rose had heard it too; they exchanged glances.

Then they headed back to the junction.

Had the soldiers piling out of the freight elevator looked down the passage to their right they might have seen two faces peering around a corner, one above the other, some three hundred yards away. The troops were gathering in the passage, awaiting directions. Their commanding officer left the elevator last and pointed his rifle in the direction of the faces’ corner, at which point they both disappeared.

“Rose, let go of my jacket,” the Doctor said.

She had a firm grip on his leather coat and wasn’t letting go. “You can’t go out there, Doctor. Didn’t you see what they were carrying?”

“These are the first people we’ve seen; I just want to say hello.”

Her eyes widened in disbelief. “Doctor, you’ve been all over the galaxy: how many planets have you been to where guns mean friendly?”

“Oh, d’you think they’re coming for us?”

She gave a sarcastic “Uh-huh!”

He glared at her. “Can you run in those flip-flops?”

The answer was no, but she did anyway. The plastic soles slapped the deck loudly as they ran to the next junction. If the soldiers hadn’t known where they were beforehand, they would now, thought Rose. They stopped at the bulkhead.

The Doctor threw his hands up in despair. “Why can’t they put room numbers on these maps?” he cried, standing in front of a level plan.

Rose heard the repetitive chug-chug of marching army boots approaching the corner from which they had just fled, and grabbed the Doctor’s hand.

“Come on!” she cried, and took the left at random.

As they ran, hand-in-hand, to the next junction, a door opened automatically on their right; the first one to do so. The Doctor jerked Rose to a halt.

“We don’t have time for this!” she cried.

“Let’s hide down here; it looks nice and dark,” he said.

The marching feet were getting nearer.

She sighed. “Okay; quickly.”

They entered the new passage, and the door swished shut again.

This passage was different. The ceiling was lower and the walls were curved; it was as if the grated deck-plates were bisecting a tubular corridor. It was lit by the same red strip-lights as the room where the Tardis had materialised.

As they ran, Rose glanced over her shoulder, and realised that the passage was curved; she couldn’t see the automatic door anymore. It also sloped downward.

Eventually they came to the end of the passage. Another automatic door swished open before them, and the Doctor stopped.

“Doctor, I don’t think the Tardis is this way,” Rose said.

It was completely dark on the other side of the door, but in the meagre light from the passage they could see yet another door a few yards in. This one did not open. Beyond the automatic door, the passage - if it even constituted a passage anymore - became wider, rectangular, but at the same time, their route narrowed because of two large upright consoles, boxing the passage in from both sides.

As they stood there looking in, Rose heard a swishing sound behind them that filled her with dread. She looked up at a blank-faced Doctor.

“What was that?” he murmured, frowning.

She didn’t need to answer him. A moment later there came the sound of the marching soldiers again. The Doctor bent down and put his hand on the deck.

He looked up at Rose with wide blue eyes. “Oh.”

Rose started back up the passage, looking for any doors or junctions they might have missed in their haste, but there weren’t any.

And all the while, the sound of the soldiers was getting nearer.

She headed back to the Doctor.

But the Doctor had mysteriously vanished.

“Doctor?” she hissed, going through the doorway.

An exuberant face popped out from behind one of the consoles.

“Hullo,” the Doctor said cheerfully.

Rose jumped. “Doctor, don’t do that! Come on!”

“Get behind the other console, Rose; there’s plenty of room.”

She stared at him for a moment, panting as much from fear as from exertion, and then his face disappeared behind the console again.

She realised he was perfectly hidden. This might work, she thought.

She squeezed through the gap between the console and the wall; there was just enough room to squat down and remain hidden.

And then Rose Tyler held her breath.

Leaning against the back of the other console, the Doctor tucked the ends of his coat into his lap and wrapped his arms around his knees.

He breathed slow and deep, silent; it also helped him focus. His ears picked up on sounds they wouldn’t normally. He could hear the soldiers getting nearer; he reckoned there were about twenty of them. He could also hear every movement Rose was making and willed her to be quiet; the soldiers would pass by in seconds.

He stared idly at the walls and ceiling and frowned. There was something odd about this section of the passage, something different, but before he could place it, the automatic door closed, plunging them into darkness.

It didn’t stay closed for long. The Doctor heard the marching feet approach, muffled though they were, and then the door swished open.

The Doctor held his breath. Rose had stopped fidgeting too.

The first soldier through the automatic door stopped to use the console behind which the Doctor was hiding. The other door, the one that had not opened for Rose or the Doctor, opened, but with a clunk, not a swish. The Doctor frowned again.

The rest of the soldiers followed the first through.

Then the inner door clunked shut again.

A red glow lit up the space between the doors.

The Doctor waited a couple of seconds, then emerged from his hiding place, but as he approached the automatic door, it stayed firmly in place.

Rose had just begun to emerge from behind the other console when the deck suddenly seemed to lurch beneath them. She yelped.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“I don’t think we can,” the Doctor said, stricken by a horrible realisation.

Rose approached the automatic door. It didn’t open for her, either.

“Use your magic wand-thing!” she cried.

The Doctor already had his hand on the sonic screwdriver in his pocket, but he turned to Rose slowly and said, “I don’t think that’s going to help us this time.”

“What? That always works; at least try it!”

The Doctor looked at the console, looked at the buttons. If Rose hadn’t been panicking beside him, he would have slapped himself and groaned. If only he’d looked at the console before hiding behind it - it revealed everything.

He pressed the button that said ‘inner airlock door’.

The clunking door clunked open.

On the other side of the door, along another short passage, beyond another pair of consoles, were two rows of flight-seats, back to back; the soldiers were strapped into them. Even further forward was a large view-screen.

“Perhaps this wasn’t the best hiding place, after all,” said the Doctor.

When Rose stepped up beside him and saw the grey planet looming up on the view-screen, her mouth fell open. “Where are we?”

“Well, either the space-station is landing on that planet,” the Doctor said slowly. “Or we’re not on the space-station anymore, Rose.”

NOTES:
I really like that final line. I think I gave the Doctor some good dialogue in this chapter, such as his euphemistic definition of being lost. I tried to capture the character of Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor, who seems rather upbeat most of the time, always looking on the bright side. Having seen only two episodes of the new series at time of writing, I had to flesh his character out the way I wanted, which may yet be contradicted. I did manage to fit in "Fantastic!", which seems to have become the ninth Doctor's catchphrase. Part of my intent with this chapter was to send up (affectionately), the pre-disposition of the old series to have the Doctor and his assistant(s) spending the first episode of each story running around identical corridors, exploring and getting lost.

Throughout, I've written TARDIS as Tardis, which I never used to do. After all, TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space, so should be capitalised. However, the old novelisations always wrote it as Tardis, and as I decided almost to give the time machine a bit of personality (or a temperament, at least), then Tardis seems more like a name, instead of TARDIS, which is a description of what it is.

The Doctor using a yo-yo to test the gravity was lifted directly out of the Tom Baker story, "Ark In Space". But his didn't have a compass built into the side.