'More Short Trips' edited by Stephen Cole

Here on Earth or out in the depths of the cosmos, the Doctor and his companions are never far from adventure. More Short Trips - the cleverly-titled follow-up to the popular Short Trips volume of short stories - takes the time travellers on another careering course of exciting escapade throughout time and space.

Showcasing the talents of both established authors and first-time writers, More Short Trips features every TV Doctor and a whole host of companions - plus a few surprises...

Discover things on Earth you were never meant to know. Get around the universe. Get short tripping.

'Totem' by Tara Samms

In order to atone for the crimes of his previous incarnations, and to come to terms with his latest one, the Doctor asks Senora Panstedas, a poor Mexican widow, if he can undertake some hard labour for her on her farm. During the months that follow, they become close friends, but one day, while digging, the Doctor discovers the body of the woman's missing husband, and finds that he was in fact murdered. He is unable to determine the murderer, but the woman arranges a funeral, and achieves a sense of closure.

Notes:
*Featuring the Eighth Doctor

'Scientific Adviser' by Ian Atkins

The Doctor is called in to assist a film crew that is shooting a movie about the 1975 Cyberman invasion of London. Although he is supposed to be helping to make the story more plausible, he is in fact there to downplay UNIT's involvement, in order to keep the organisation a secret. The Doctor notices that the producer's daughter is acting strangely, and becomes suspicious. He discovers that a Cyber-infiltration unit has implanted her with a tracker and is using her to observe him, and to gather data for a second invasion attempt, by noting the Doctor's observations of their previous attempt. The Doctor reveals that all of his suggestions are beyond the current resources of the Cyber-army; he threatens to expose the infiltration unit's location to UNIT, who are forced to restore Kate's buried memories and to leave the Earth.

Notes:
*Featuring the Second Doctor

*Time-placing: The Doctor describes the Brigadier as an 'old soldier'. Seeing as the only known time that the Doctor meets the Brigadier at this stage in his life is in 'The Five Doctors', and in that story he is aware of Jamie and Zoe's fates after his trial, this should be placed after 'The War Games', when the Doctor is working for the Time Lords

'Missing' Part 1 : 'Business as Usual' by Gary Russell

After travelling with the Doctor for some time, Melanie returns home to Brighton.

Notes:
*Featuring Mel

*Time-placing: This should be placed after Melanie's experiences in the New Adventure 'Head Games'

'Moon Graffiti' by Dave Stone

The Doctor decides to recalibrate his damaged TARDIS, and looks for a pocket sub-dimension in which to carry out the repairs. He and Peri arrive on Earth in the far future, after the planet has been invaded by Pararachnoids. Although the alien swarm has now left, it has left behind some of its number, that, although weak and crippled, are still capable of violently killing humans. After meeting a young man, Chimoani, the Doctor and Peri are attacked by Pararachnoids. The Doctor and Chimoani are captured, but Peri escapes, and discovers that the glowing disc the Chimoani was carrying is actually a tiny ship populated by a species of explorers called the Wibbly-Wee. Chimoani has escaped from The Line, a hideaway from the Pararachnoids, where humans are safely held in suspended animation by Monitor robots. Through a system fault, these Monitors have concluded that the best way to protect the humans is to keep them in The Line, where they will never encounter a Pararachnoid again. The Wibbly-Wee woke Chimoani from his slumber hoping that he could carry them to the materials they need to repair their damaged spaceship. The Doctor and Chimoani escape from the Pararachnoids, and find that Peri has been frozen. As the Pararachnoids break in, the Doctor and Chimoani take the Wibbly-Wee ship to the control room, where Chimoani takes the place of the dead operator, and reprograms the Monitors to repel the attacking Pararachnoids, before awakening the last members of the human race. The Wibbly-Wee help the Doctor to repair the TARDIS before going, and he leaves the human race to begin rebuilding.

Notes:
*Featuring the Sixth Doctor and Peri

*Time-placing: This occurs immediately after 'Vengeance on Varos', as the Zeiton-7 ore obtained by the Doctor is only the first step in his repairing of the TARDIS

*This story was first published in 'Out of the Darkness' BBC Audio release

'One Bad Apple' by Simon Forward

The TARDIS arrives on a planet that lies near the Cyber frontier, where the Doctor and Leela find a squad of partially converted Cybermen, who are seeking the weapon that destroyed a previous squad that attempted to establish a bridgehead there. When the soldiers kill a native, Leela contacts the other natives and attempts to organise a resistance. The Doctor learns that the soldiers have turned to religion in order to help them deal with their current status, which they now see as the perfect balance between humanity and Cybermen. The Doctor discovers that the natives have encoded all of their cultural information in RNA patterns held in the local fruit, and they only eat it when the knowledge is needed. Leela encourages the natives to eat the fruit, and so regain the ability to make war, but the Doctor stops them from attacking the soldiers, whose leader has also eaten the fruit, and who has been emotionally restored. The leader is shocked when he realises the number of people he has killed over the years, and commits suicide. The rest of the squad offers to remain on the planet, so that they can protect the natives and their idyllic existence.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela

'64 Carlysle Street' by Gary Russell

At number 64, Carlysle Street, the staff are concerned with the overfamiliar behaviour of a new servant called Dorothea, or 'Dodo', who spends her time watching their master daughter Anne rather than carrying out her duties. While the suffragette Anne spends her time in the company of the charismatic Marquis of Rostock, her father, Greystone, has made the acquaintance of the Doctor, an intriguing old gentleman whom he subsequently invites to his home. However, Greystone soon discovers that the Doctor and Rostock already know each other when the old man refers to him as Roztoq; it seems that this Roztoq is an alien criminal from the planet Quinnis, located in the Fourth Universe, and has arrived on Earth using the trail of the Doctor's TARDIS. Even though his presence on Earth is damaging the fabric of reality, Roztoq refuses to return to his home, and instead attempts to infect Anne's body with the symbiont that controls his own body. After the Doctor successfully encourages Anne to resist the will of the creature, his chauffeur, Steven, knocks Roztoq unconscious. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo leave take Roztoq to his proper universe, leaving Greystone, Anne and their staff with an unbelievable story that no-one will believe...

Notes:
*Featuring the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo

*Time-placing: Steven has been in Tombstone, so this must be set at the end of 'The Gunfighters', as the stories from 'The Ark' to 'The Savages' are directly connected

'The Eternity Contract' by Steve Lyons

When the TARDIS arrives in a stormy forest, the Doctor and Nyssa are herded by wild beasts into Carnon Manor, a Gothic castle, and are prevented from leaving by a telepathic force field. They find that the manor is occupied by six lost souls who believe that the lord of the manor captured them at the moment of their death, and that whenever the house goes over this quota, Death arrives to take one of them away. The Doctor discovers that these 'deaths' are random, and that the house has been designed to terrify its occupants purely for the amusement of Lord Carnon, who has struck a deal with Death - he may borrow six souls with which to amuse himself, in exchange for delivering the Doctor to Death. Carnon offers to restore the souls to life if they kill the Doctor, but the Time Lord overpowers some of them, and the others refuse to take his life. Death instead takes Carnon for failing to keep his bargain, and as the house vanishes, the occupants return to where Carnon found them. The Doctor hopes that the house was just a telepathic construct, which crumbled, once he resisted Carnon's mental attacks...

Notes:
*Featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa

'The Sow in Rut' by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Sarah takes a holiday in the Lake District, in Cornflower Cottage. One night K-9 spellchecks the latest chapter of her novel, as she goes to the local pub, but on the way a local witch who gives her a circle of heather. At the pub, she learns that the cottage used to be an inn called "The Sow in Rut", whose owners would murder lonely travellers, and, after cooking and eating them, would feed the remains to their pigs. On hearing that at their trial, they claimed their pigs told them to do it, Sarah is reminded of the legends of a demon cast into a herd of swine. She returns to the cottage to find that K-9 has been possessed by a swinish intelligence, and is intent on killing her. He is repulsed by the heather sprig, and is restored to normal when Sarah accidentally electrocutes him after breaking a table lamp. The two leave the cottage, but when Sarah tells Brendan, her ward, about the incident he reveals that he had been playing computer games on K-9, and puts the events down to nothing but a computer virus derived from hog-monsters in the game. Sarah is disgusted with Brendan and herself, but, unknown to her, back at the cottage, the evil swine-spirit awaits its next chance to possess a machine host and take its revenge upon humanity...

Notes:
*Featuring Sarah and K-9 Mk III

'Special Weapons' by Paul Leonard

The Doctor and Mel arrive during World War II in Pax Lucis, an English village that has been occupied by Nazis in order to test a new weapon. The village has been cut off from the outside world by a mysterious barrier; inside there is no light and the temperature is dropping. The Doctor is questioned by Luther, the Nazi commander, and discovers that the invaders have captured a creature called a Lightwanderer, a being that lives in the vacuum of space and feeds on solar radiation. The Nazis believe that the creature is part of a machine designed to create an impenetrable barrier, and are feeding it power. But the Lightwanderer cannot cope with this amount of power, and the barrier is a side effect of the resulting space disruption; if the Nazis plan to form a barrier around the whole of England is carried out, they will destroy the planet. While Mel and a young man named Oliver, find explosives stored in the local mines, Luther heeds the Doctor's warnings of destruction, but is shot by his own men when he attempts to halt the experiment. Mel and Oliver use the dynamite to cause a distraction, enabling a dying Luther to destroy the weapon and set the Lightwanderer free. Sunlight returns to the village, but the remaining Nazis commit suicide using poison pills. Oliver decides to join the army and kill Germans.

Notes:
*Featuring the Seventh Doctor and Mel

*Time-placing: Mel has met Pex, so this takes place after 'Paradise Towers'

'Honest Living' by Jason Loborik

A woman named Tuala uses a time machine from Earth's Dalek-ruled parallel future to travel back and kidnap Jo. The Doctor follows them to an old mansion, where he finds a safe containing money and a newspaper reporting the death of financier Bernard Forbes in a car accident; but when he and the Brigadier investigate, they find that Forbes was never in such an accident, but instead is inexplicably losing his mental faculties. Jo is being held by Tuala, and her uncle Krashen; the latter is using time machines to earn money by preventing people's deaths, but this is causing temporal paradoxes as the people's descendants then see no need to pay him, and Time is beginning to repair the damage. The two time travellers have used Jo to lure the Doctor to them, in the hope that he will repair their failing time machines. But when the Doctor tells them that he is unable to do so, as the machines are from a future which no longer exists, Krashen attempts to blackmail the Doctor by transporting him and Jo to an previous point in time, when they will meet themselves, and be killed in the resulting release of temporal energy. Time finally catches up with Krashen and Tuala, who promptly vanish, but their machine lasts just long enough for the Doctor to carry out minor repairs, enabling him and Jo to return before their younger selves arrive.

Notes:
*Featuring the Third Doctor, Jo and the Brigadier

'Dead Time' by Andrew Miller

The TARDIS is forced to land in a strange, lifeless environment filled with twisted, distorted statues of people in agony. When the Doctor realises that they are in an ancient, dying TARDIS, Sam is trapped in a temporal stasis field and the Doctor is assaulted by insane telepathic voices. He receives a telepathic message from himself from a few hours in the future, warning him that his attackers are insane Time Lords who converted themselves into electrochemical impulses in an experiment to follow the temporal psychic pathways of Time Lords. These Time Lords learned how to manipulate the past of their subject, but were unable to leave his body, as a loose thread caused his entire timeline to unravel, trapping them in this spectral form, and forced to move from host to host. Trapped in this dying TARDIS when its owner suffered a brain seizure, they have gone mad over the millennia, but now that they have the Doctor, they will possess him, and travel along his timeline to return to Gallifrey. Unfortunately, leaving his body will kill him in his past, unravelling the causal nexus. The Doctor allows them into his body, monitoring them as they travel back along his timeline; he manages to trap them in his mind at the moment of his first regeneration, explaining to Sam that it is as though they are beneath a cut that has healed over.

Notes:
*Featuring the Eighth Doctor and Sam

*The 'Jones-Richter Scale of Trouble' was first introduced in 'Genocide'

*Time-placing: This story is featured on the 'Earth and Beyond' BBC Audio release

'Romans Cutaway' by David A. McIntee

The TARDIS falls off the side of a cliff. Ian and Barbara attempt to get it upright, while the Doctor and Vicki set off to find help. They have arrived near a Roman villa, where Lucius, the caretaker, lies dying after being attacked by a rogue lion. Lucius' master is away fighting in the Gallic wars, and the Doctor promises to look after the villa for him. Leaving Vicki at the villa, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS to warn Ian and Barbara about the lion, but it has already attacked them, and Ian has been forced to kill it in order to save Barbara. They travel to the villa, where Ian finally admits to himself that he is in love with Barbara, but unable to tell her just yet; he is unaware that Barbara already knows, but is trying to find the courage to admit to herself that the feeling is mutual.

Notes:
*Featuring the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki

*Time-placing: This story occurs during the start of Part 1 of 'The Romans'

'Return of the Spiders' by Gareth Roberts

The TARDIS arrives in a suburban housing development on Earth. After Romana makes a bet with the Doctor that she can find something unusual even here, they hear an alien scuttling sound from the sewers, and meet a pizza delivery boy who tells them that the people living at 9, Honeysuckle Close have been ordering the 'Meat Special' four times a night for the past two weeks. The Time Lords investigate and discovers that some giant spiders from Metebelis III have taken over the Fordyces; the spiders escaped the destruction of their comrades by travelling along psychic ley-lines to this estate, and their Queen is now living in the Fordyces' attic. Realising that her eggs are about to hatch, the Doctor orders K9 to destroy the attic, but the Queen puts out the fire. Firemen arrive in response to the blaze, and the Doctor is uses their hosepipes to knock the Queen off the roof, where she falls to her death. The Doctor refuses to pay Romana for winning the bet, citing that things like this are always happening to him.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fourth Doctor and the Second Romana

'Hot Ice' by Christopher Bulis

Investigating a neutrino pulse that appears to be from a malfunctioning star drive, the Doctor and Peri arrive on Earth. While they are searching for the stranded alien, it breaks into the TARDIS and hides a stolen gem in the console room. The Doctor and Peri are accused by two Ventrosian priests of conspiring to steal the sacred Eye of Gaar, but before they can kill the time travellers, the thief instead kills them. Having been successful in his plan to use the Doctor and Peri as dupes in order to kill his pursuers, the alien prepares to leave, but he is attacked by a burglar, who steals the gemstone. The alien pursues him, but is killed when his damaged life-support unit ruptures. The Doctor tracks down the burglar, but he has already smashed open the gem's containment case. As the Ventrosians come from a frigid world, the gemstone was actually a chunk of frozen ammonia and methane, which boils away in the Earth's atmosphere, killing the burglar in the process.

Notes:
*Featuring the Fifth Doctor and Peri

*Time-placing: Peri is unfamiliar with the Ice Warriors, so this occurs before 'Red Dawn'

'uPVC' by Tara Samms

The Second Doctor and his companions meet a time-travelling double-glazing salesman, whose uPVC windows come not only with a lifetime guarantee, but also with a view of the customer's choice, something that catches the Doctor's interest. Years later, the Seventh Doctor finds Ace trying to break into a padlocked room in the TARDIS, which is where he has hidden the windows. When he bought them, he wanted a view looking out at Gallifrey as it was when he was a child; having grown up, he now sees as a reminder of what he can never have again. He sends Ace away and determines to find a way to seal the doors to the room forever.

Notes:
*Featuring the Second and Seventh Doctors, Jamie, Zoe and Ace

*Time-placing: Ace tells the Doctor that she thought they didn't keep secrets from each other, suggesting that she hasn't been with him long

'Good Companions' by Peter Anghelides

An elderly Tegan Haybourne returns from her husband's funeral in Exeter, and meets a man named Doctor Smith, who reminds her of the imaginary Doctor she invented during her nervous breakdown when in her twenties, and who gives her a brooch. Tegan has missed her train, so Anna, Smith's housekeeper, offers to let her spend the night in Smith's London house. When the two ladies attend a performance of a play by the Sigrarnon Troupe, they are unnerved by the actors' intensity, and are convinced that they are following them when on their return home. Tegan notices that Anna is wearing the brooch that Smith gave her, but when she storms off to bed after the resulting argument, she finds her own brooch lying in the guest room. The actors break into the house and attack Anna, but before they can consume her, the two brooches glow and explode causing the Sigrarnons to vanish. The next morning, Tegan is convinced that the previous night's events were a dream; Smith then returns and takes Tegan to her train. But when she meets him again on the train, he doesn't recognise her from the previous night. Tegan falls asleep, but when she wakes Smith has gone, and taken the brooch with him. Bizarrely, when she next visits London, Tegan finds that Smith's entire house has also disappeared. Elsewhere in space and time, Anna, who is travelling with the Doctor, finds a book containing the story Tegan that wrote about her experience. She realises that the Doctor manipulated her and Tegan into disposing of the alien Sigrarnons for him, using the resonance between the two brooches, which are actually the same brooch but at different points in its timeline, in order to banish them. The Doctor claims that he had no idea that Tegan had suffered as much as she did from her time spent travelling with him, and he assures Anna that he would never abandon her. Anna, however, is not so certain any more...

Notes:
*Featuring a future incarnation of the Doctor and Anna

'Missing' Part 2 : 'Message in a Bottle' by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker

Mel ponders the fate of a message in a bottle, which she wrote and threw out into space to seek out the Doctor, wherever he may be.

Notes:
*Featuring Mel

*Time-placing: This story occurs after 'Missing' part 1

'Femme Fatale' by Paul Magrs

After her regeneration on the planet Hyspero, Iris Wildthyme visits Andy Warhol's Factory in order to relax. Just as her new friend Valerie prepares to confront Warhol about the play that she has written, but which he has refused to film, as she is too uncool, the Doctor and Sam arrive. In another time and place, two suave secret agents, the Doctor and Mrs Jones, are ordered by the British government to investigate a book that details their top-secret adventures. The Doctor realises that he must rewrite the fictions, written by one Iris Wildthyme, in order to cover up the truth. The sexist Valerie shoots Warhol, paradoxically while at the same time she is in Paris writing a book. The Doctor and Sam fail to prevent the shooting, as it is part of established history. Following the publication of Iris' book, the Doctor and Mrs Jones, who are too dangerous to be left at large, are gassed and wake up in an mysterious Village...

Notes:
*Featuring Eighth Doctor, Sam and Iris Wildthyme

*Time-placing: Sam says that she saw Iris' video of her regeneration from Hyspero four months ago, so this probably takes place between 'The Face-Eater' and 'The Taint'


Publication Date:
March 1999

Notes:

*A BBC Books publication