'A Long Way Down' by Jenny T. Colgan

An asteroid hits the TARDIS, turning the ship upside down. Hearing the Doctor shout, Clara races to the console room and sees her friend outside the ship, falling towards the planet below, along with a window box of delphiniums. Clara tells the TARDIS to rescue the Doctor, but the ship goes back in time to just before he fell; Clara shouts out a warning, but this only distracts the Doctor, causing him to fall in the first place. The TARDIS refuses to obey Clara, jumping back in time again and again; to Clara’s dismay she now sees dozens of TARDISes and dozens of falling Doctors and delphiniums, all plummeting to their deaths. In desperation Clara throws the scroll of Alexandria that she was reading to the Doctor to catch, and then watches as hundreds of Doctors catch hundreds of the same scroll, hundreds of window boxes falling around them. Finally the TARDIS starts falling too, so Clara bravely jumps out and sky-dives to her falling friend; together they use the scroll as a canopy, slowing their fall towards the ground below. At the last minute the duo stops in mid-air, and all the other Doctors vanish; then Clara and the original Doctor fall the last ten feet, softly landing in a mound of delphiniums. Later, back on board the TARDIS, the Doctor explains that the ship wove a time field to save them, but needed more time to do so, why is why it went back in time. Clara grudgingly accepts that she should have trusted the TARDIS – even though the ship still doesn’t quite trust her…


Publication Date:
5th March 2015

Notes:
*Featuring the Twelfth Doctor and Clara

*A BBC Books 'Time Trips' short story

*This story was printed in sections all over the fold-out dust jacket of the ‘Time Trips’ compendium; the ‘Time Trips’ stories were originally available as eBooks