JUST RELAXING
by
STEVEN SAUTTER

‘Silence, at last.  When was the last time I had complete silence?  Not since…
not since after my first adventure.  Adventure?  Listen to me, I make it sound
like a television show or something.’

The Doctor was relaxing.  He was enjoying it, he didn’t often get the 
opportunity.  Sam was asleep in her room, getting some well deserved rest.
Vampires always affected his companions, Adric, Romana, Nyssa, and now Sam.

The Doctor sat in his chair, reading.  The TARDIS whirred quietly to itself, 
undetectable to anyone.  He put down his copy of 2001 on the end table and 
got up.  He opened the door to the interior of the ship, the white roundled
walls both reassuring and frightening him that some things never changed.  
The Doctor walked down one corridor after another, not going anywhere in 
particular, just "making the rounds". He stopped by the TARDIS library and 
fed Jasper and Stewart.  He popped into the butterfly room to check on the 
flutterwing who had been ill the previous day.  He then walked into the 
trophy room.

He had forgotten how large it was.  It was filled to the twenty foot tall 
ceiling with awards.  He walked up and down the cases, occasionally looking in.
Here were all of his degrees from St. Cedd’s, over on the left was the 
statue he’d won from the Aj!acal Institute for being the "Seventh Galaxy’s 
Greatest Chess Player-4408."  All around him were the memories and achievements
of his previous selves.  He was three years old and what had he accomplished?
He walked out of the room.

The Doctor wandered around the TARDIS for hours.  He stopped next to a small
door, easily passed by if you didn’t care to look.  He thought about going 
in but decided against it.  The house could look after itself for awhile.  
Eventually, he came back to the console room and set course for the Eye of 
Orion.  After ten minutes, he arrived.  ‘Best to let Sam sleep.  She can 
always come out when she’s woken up.’  The Doctor pulled the lever and 
walked out the main doors.

The ruins were always the first thing he noticed.  He never had figured out 
how they came to be here.  There was no record of any known civilization here.
A mystery for another day perhaps.  The sun poked out from behind the grayness 
of the sky.  The Doctor’s shadow moved alongside him as he strolled down a hill
and sat in the wet green grass.  He had just missed the rain, again.

‘Never have seen the rain.  Does it rain?  There’s a question: If there are all
the signs of a thunderstorm but no one is around to witness it, did it really 
rain?’  The Doctor laughed to himself.

Without warning a silver bolt thudded into the ground next to him.  ‘What?’ 
the Doctor said, astonished.  There was a flash and standing ten feet in 
front of him was a Raston warrior robot, poised to attack.  The Doctor had 
to be very cautious.  One false move and that would be the end.  Another 
flash and the robot disappeared.  It reappeared two yards to his right.

The Raston robot was designed by Aldevniwonk Fronthihc to end the colony 
wars on the planet of Lluicknom Gamma.  Unfortunately, it worked far too well.
An army of fifty robots wiped out the planet’s entire population.  Then, they 
turned on each other.  The twelve surviving robots had to adapt.  They 
developed technology that would allow them to repair themselves rapidly.  
Even if a robot was torn apart, the pieces would come back together unless 
separated by great distances.  Just before an unsuspecting spaceship was 
about to pick them up and distribute them across the cosmos, the Time Lords 
plucked them out of the space-time continuum for use in the Death Zone.

This particular unit had been in operation for over five thousand 
Lluicknomian years and showed no signs of slowing.  It had faced Cybermen, 
Sontarians and other various alien species.  It had also encountered three 
incarnations of the Doctor, including this current one.  Not that the unit 
knew of this, it was just programmed to protect an area.  And it did, 
frequently with deadly results.

The Doctor was motionless. His mind raced, trying to think of a way out of 
this latest predicament.  He remembered that the Raston series could be 
rendered temporarily inert if magnetically overloaded. But how?, he asked 
himself silently.  He mentally went through his pockets’ contents: yo-yo, 
sonic screwdriver, string, small stuffed bear, Barlowe’s Guide to 
Extraterrestrials, a cassette tape of Johnny Chess.  Of course!, he thought.
He waited until the robot moved and quickly grabbed the cassette and his 
sonic screwdriver out of a pocket.  He reconfigured the screwdriver slightly, 
so it would repel instead of attract.  He placed the cassette on the 
screwdriver and aimed it at the robot.  The magnetic particles on the tape 
were amplified by the screwdriver.  Magnetic waves traveled outwards towards 
the robot until it was overcome.  It fell over in a heap, looking like a 
discarded rag doll.

‘And to prevent this from happening again…’ the Doctor picked up a used bolt.
Walking over to the robot, he lifted its head.  Using the bolt, he sliced 
across the robot’s neck, beheading it.  He had ended it’s existence like it 
had ended so many others.

The Doctor held the robot’s head in his hand as he walked back to the TARDIS.
‘Alas, poor Yorick…  I still remember transcribing Hamlet for Will when he 
sprained his wrist writing sonnets.’  He opened up the TARDIS’s door and 
walked in.  Sam was waiting for him, sitting next to the gramophone.

‘What’s that, Doctor?’ she asked, indicating the head in his hand.

‘Nothing.  Have a nice sleep?’

‘Oh, yes.  What have you been doing all this time?’

‘Just relaxing, Sam,’ he said, looking at the severed head, ‘just relaxing.’