The Prologue Pain! Oh, such pain! The Doctor was not sure if he really wished to open his eyes; just feeling the pain was bad enough. To see the cause of it was almost more than he could stomach. The Doctor had lived a long time now, some five hundred years, and he prided himself on that fact that he had survived much danger and much pain. But in all those years he had never experienced such pain as he did now. Gingerly he opened his eyes; a task not made easy by the dry blood that caked his eyelids. For a few moments all he could see was blackness, but then his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could make out shapes around him. He tilted his head from side to side, taking in his surroundings. He was in a large cave. One end carried on deeper into the planet on to which they had crashed, the other... The Doctor’s face creased in concern. The mouth of the cave was blocked by the wreckage that was “Earth’s Pride”. The small ship was a mess. No matter how the Doctor looked at it he did not see how it could be salvaged. Nick and Alf! He craned his neck around, but of his companions there was no sign. They must still be in the ship, he realised. With that prospect in mind the Doctor made to stand up but found that he could not. With a strange sense of foreboding he looked down to the rest of his body. His left leg was wrapped around a small boulder. A broken bone was jutting out of his trouser leg. The Doctor tried to wiggle his toes but there was no life in his leg at all. He tilted his head and glanced back across at the wreckage. The ship looked squashed. He remembered the crash, and how “Earth’s Pride” had come down very fast. The speed of impact would have been incredible. He did not like to think too much on the state of the inside of “Earth’s Pride”. All he knew was that he had to get Nick and Alf out of there. He reached out at a nearby rock and used it as leverage to pull himself over to the wreckage. But as he moved pain shot up from his leg, sparking every nerve in his body. The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut. His eyes shot back open at the sound of metal grinding against metal. It was only then that he noticed how “Earth’s Pride” was pushing at all sides of the cave mouth, but the rock was not giving way. Instead “Earth’s Pride” was being squeezed together ever so slowly. And still Nick and Alf were in there. He closed his eyes again and concentrated. Twice he had regenerated, once brought on by old age, the other time a condition forced on him by his own people. In truth the Doctor knew he had been forced to regenerate a third time, but his third incarnation had barely the chance of life, so he chose to ignore that regeneration and considered his present body his third. It was a known fact that Time Lords could also control their regenerations. Indeed some of his people had made great show of that fact, moulding their bodies into forms that they liked. The Doctor had never been one of those people. For him regeneration was a necessity brought on by danger and turmoil, not a luxury to be used to benefit his status as a Time Lord. But as he thought of Nick and Alf inside the wrecked “Earth’s Pride” the Doctor realised that regeneration was his only option. He needed to be at full strength to rescue them, and his body was too damaged to perform that task adequately. The Doctor reached into himself, focusing his mind on the cell cluster that would start his third regeneration. His eyes snapped open, a look of pure horror sweeping over his face. The cell cluster wasn’t there. I can’t regenerate!