Doctor Who: The Also People Read Free

kilometres high and hundreds deep, ready to break against this artfully rocky coastline where a man stands atop a villa that stands upon a hill that overlooks the sea. Ready to roll inland and die stranded amongst the sculptured hills of this manufactured continent.
    The man tries to open his arms wider, spreading his fingers to grasp at the wind. He is imagining the air as it streams around his limbs, the complicated mandelbrot shapes of the pockets of turbulence that trail behind him, the same partial vacuum that had lifted him into the cold sky over the English Channel. No null gravity units or clever avionics on the biplane, just the simple differentiation of air pressure, the ancient principle of flight, the physics of a gliding bird.
    He remembers struggling with the controls, those unpowered contraptions of wooden levers and piano wire. No power assistance, no autopilot; his strength alone against the thousand vagaries of the wind.
    He is leaning forward now, into the rising gale and over the edge of the parapet. He peers down the side of the building calculating the fall, his chances of survival if the wind fails. As he dares himself forward he feels the tightening in his stomach, the speeding of his heart, the strange scrunching sensation of his scrotum shrivelling up. He is waiting for the hit, the sweet rush of his own adrenalin. The wind is singing to him now, singing of the joy of falling and the ecstasy of fear. His urge to jump frightens him more than anything else. He seizes the fear and as the storm approaches raises his head to stare straight into its blazing heart. His eyes are full of lightning and dangerous ideas.
    Bernice slept for most of the day in a room filled with sunlight and the scent of the sea. She woke once to find the Doctor watching her from the doorway. He was smiling but his hat brim cast a dark shadow across his eyes. She wanted to ask him something but she was too tired and the bed too comfortable. She slipped back into a dream of the endless summer afternoon of her early childhood. Of herself skipping through the checkerboard shadows on the road-grass, a small figure between her mother and father, holding tight to their big hands. Safe in the grip of the long-since dead.
    She woke again to the smell of fresh coffee and the insistent pressure of her bladder. The room was narrow and tall with walls and floor of polished hardwood and a ceiling that was three-quarters glass skylight. The quilt she was lying under was stitched together from scraps of cloth, all different materials and shapes. She decided that she liked this rag-quilt. Liked the randomness of the colours and shapes. For reasons she couldn't define it made her think of home.
    She lay still for a while, snug under the quilt. She tried to ignore the coffee smell and the demands of her body. There wasn't any reason to get up yet. The Doctor had said so. So it must be true.
    Then she remembered where she was.
    Remembered the Doctor turfing them out of bed in the middle of the night. Stumbling out of the TARDIS into the warm darkness of the clearing in the forest. Trees rose all around them, silver grey in the moonlight. Insects clicked and popped amongst trunks as straight as telegraph poles.
    Summer, thought Bernice sleepily, somewhere at the warm end of a temperate weather latitude. Could be somewhere along the coast of the Mediterranean – Greece perhaps?
    She flinched as a huge moth floated past her face and started to lazily circle the Doctor. Its wings were pale blurs in the dark, each as big as Bernice's hand. The Doctor stretched out his arm and let the moth alight daintily on the tips of his fingers.
    'Where are we, Doctor?' asked Chris.
    'Somewhere you've never been before,' said the Doctor.
    'Oh, good,' said Roz. 'That will make a change.'
    And that was when Bernice looked up and saw that the world curved over their heads.
    Bernice had only seen a night sky like that once before, on the remnants of the Dyson sphere at