Doctor Who: A Whale of a Tale

“Blimey!”

The Doctor slumped against the polished wood hiding his face in his hands, and snarled an uncharacteristically foul swearword in response.

“Language!”

“Sorry.”

“This is a university, you know!”

“Oh, I know that well enough, trust me.”

The object that had slammed onto the wall was a large, leather-bound book. Nardole picked it up and tentatively placed it on the desk with a sigh.

“They want you to teach this, don’t they?”

The Doctor had melodramatically reclined in the classic “Edwin Booth Thinking Hamlet” pose and looked just about ready to start bemoaning his too, too sullied flesh or the rotten state of Denmark, but he managed an answer.

“No, no, no, it’s just, I’ve become a masochist lately, very particular in my tastes, didn’t you notice? Yeah, baby. Bring on the pain”.

“To be fair, it is an Earth classic.”

“Yeah, yeah, do you know what a classic is? It’s a book everyone wants to have read, but nobody actually wants to read”.

“You stole that from Mark Twain.”

“No, I didn’t, he told me himself when I dropped by for an autograph. No, not recently, I didn’t leave”, he clarified, seeing the other man’s alarmed expression.

“So…what page are you on?”

“Uuuh…” The Doctor picked up the tome with great reluctance, flipped through it, and started reading aloud so dispassionately that a Cyberman would have either envied him or run away in fear. “Chapter 32: Cetology. Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow…”

The Doctor’s expression was slowly morphing into that of a man reading his own death sentence or a particularly outrageous gas bill on his wedding day. A haze seemed to come over his eyes.

“…Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy.  Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in some small degree…”

Nardole sneezed loudly and it became quite clear that the Time Lord had become completely oblivious to his presence. He wisely decided to take that as his cue to leave.

“Run over a few:— The Authors of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner; Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson; Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier; John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what ultimate generalising purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts will show…”, the Doctor droned on, an expression of utter resignation etched on every line of his face.

Nardole felt the sudden urge to laugh and then felt slightly guilty for feeling it.

“Oh, if only the mighty Rassilon had known…” he muttered under his breath and closed the door.

-O-

“You can always use Sparknotes, or Cliffnotes, or… something”.

“Really? That’s what all the students will be doing.”

“No, they won’t, the Internet still has a good decade and a half to go!”

“…True. But you know, that just means they will have no other choice. So they will read it. And trust me, the two or three bookworms of the class will actually completely enjoy it, all of it, and they will come over and be like “Oh, Professor, about chapter 96, I’ve got a question…”

“Okay, I was just saying”.

“And… it’s not fair. It would be cheating”.

“I suppose.”

-O-

“Come on. Please. Just a little trip.”

The TARDIS made a clearly disapproving sound.

“Oh, shut up! I know I promised. Okay, so what? Who will notice? You’re a time machine; we can be back before we left!”

Disapproving sound.

“Look, we just pop back to the 19^th century, we find the bastard, and I convince him to cut, say, 300 pages from the novel. Or else. And we return immediately, I swear!”

Disapproving sound.

“Oh, come on! It’s not that big of a change! Who noticed when I did it with War and Peace? It’s still huge in any case. And a terrific success to boot!”

Disapproving sound.

“The Web of Time can go to hell!”

An even more disapproving sound.

“Can we- can I just go brain him with the book really hard? Insult his beard? Something? I need to let off some steam.”

Disapproving sound.

“You know, that’s getting really repetitive.”

-O-

The weather continued to be unusually nice. And so at a narrow point of the Bristol Channel, the various sailors, fishermen, tourists, and water-sports enthusiasts took little notice of the gloomy, grey-haired, stick insect of a man who came to walk by the seaside and glared both at the dark waters and the people with a loathing that suggested they had all done him a great personal wrong.

-O-

“Susan. Forgive me. Please, will you forgive me? I never even asked. But you see, I didn’t know. How could I? I’m so sorry. Did they make you read this at Coal Hill? I’ll have a good word with them about the curriculum if they did.”

The Doctor turned wearily to the other picture on his desk.

“I mean, she chose Earth, she chose the century, she liked it here, River! And then I always went and scolded her for copying her homework from the future. If it included this, I shouldn’t have, there are limits.”

He briefly eyed the book in front of him as if it might attack him. Or vice versa.

“Oh, don’t you start! Yes, I know; a masterpiece that explores the human condition, mankind's treatment of nature, class and social status, the value of revenge, good and evil, the existence of God, blah, blah, blah. And among other things, nobody mentions this, at what point a novel becomes a whaling textbook.”

He gazed morosely at Chapter 58 in front of him, painfully aware that the book consisted of, in total, 135.

“I bet there were at least twenty copies in that Library of yours. No, I bet every single one of those people had gone there to read this, because it’s so good!”

The Doctor chuckled humourlessly and pulled the chair closer to continue reading.

“You know, we should have left all those buggers to their fate, that was really stupid of us. I mean, that was natural selection. And karma.”

-O-

“I don’t need all these details, Herman dear. Why are you doing this to me? I’ve been on every ship you can imagine. If the students are so curious, they're certainly welcome for a trip. And Nardole can guard the Vault just fine during it”.

There was a brief silence which was interrupted by a laugh.

“Or I could take them to meet you. Oh, that’d be hilarious. If they don’t murder you, that is”.

Silence again.

“You know what, this is silly. I don’t have to do this. I’ll just quit, we’ll move the Vault… somehow… This place is getting dull anyway.”

After a bit there was a murmured, half-sobbing “Oh, dear God, please”, and a sound like a head hitting wood, but then the silence stretched on for quite a while.

“IT’S CALLED ‘MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE! THE WHALE! WHERE THE FLYING FUCK IS THAT WHALE?!? GET TO THE BLOODY WHALE ALREADY! GAAAH!”

Nardole stopped listening at the door, and deciding that the avoidance of bodily harm was more important than the common enjoyment of tea and muffins, walked off.

-O-

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and I will FINISH this damn book if it kills me!”

The Doctor banged his fist on the floor, immediately regretted it, and opened his eyes to observe the damage.

What he saw was the head of a long-haired, barely twenty-something young man poking through the door.

From what he knew, most of his colleagues didn’t read while sitting in the lotus position on the floor, failing to meditate, and spontaneously reciting the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear when things got tough.

Then again, from what he knew, most of his colleagues were humans, idiots, and didn’t have to read Moby Dick to prepare a lecture about it. So really, anything the boy found strange was his problem.

“Oh. You knocked. Sorry, I didn’t make an announcement, no office hours this week, okay?” he said matter-of-factly. The kid nodded. “Good lad. Remember to close the door”.

As soon as he was out of sight, he turned the page with determination. “You’re going down”, he whispered threateningly.

-O-

The thing has gotten fractionally more interesting. White whale in sight. Hallelujah. Guard the Vault carefully. It ends tonight.

The Doctor

Nardole removed the rather dramatic sign from the door of the Quantum Fold chamber and gave a long-suffering sigh. 

-O-

“Well, congratulations, there goes another boat. I'm all for never giving up, but doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the very definition of insanity. Or idiocy. I’ll go with idiocy.”

-O-

Nardole knocked on the door, received no answer, and opened it carefully, with slight hesitation.

Childishly, he half-expected to see the aftermath of an epic battle of demons. Smashed furniture and windows, a broken electric guitar, sonic screwdrivers scattered across the floor, an upturned TARDIS, the desk filled with equations written in blood, the unhappy book nailed to the wall with pieces of the destroyed Rembrandt self-portrait, and the Time Lord lying on the floor clutching the bust of Shakespeare and incoherently muttering Captain Ahab quotes. Something like that.

Of course, the office looked completely normal. But sure enough, the Doctor was sprawled against his desk, limp, pale, his clothes a mess, hair like a traditional mad scientist, bloodshot and unfocused eyes gazing at a miraculously unscathed cover of Moby Dick.

He jerked back with a cry when the door opened like a man roused from a nightmare.

“Wha- Oh, it’s you.”

Slowly, he sat back in his chair, and made a truly valiant but doomed effort to straighten his jacket and comb his hair into some semblance of normality with his hands. He didn't seem to be 100% sure about where he was.

“Victory”, he announced in a hoarse voice, throwing his arms wide. “It is accomplished”.

The Doctor got up, walked to the side, steadied himself against the desk, and closed his eyes for a few seconds. That seemed to help, and much more focused, he gestured for him to come closer.

“Now”, he said in a stronger voice, grabbing the novel, “Nardole, into your hands I commit this… book; please get it out of my sight as quickly as possible, before I start inflicting serious harm on myself and others, or break Time itself, thank you very much.”

The man nodded and quickly hid the book behind his back.

“And now, if you will excuse me, there’s a Zero Room in the TARDIS with my name on it”, the Doctor said, heading towards the box and swaying a little. “Figuratively speaking”, he added.

“If I don’t come out in the next... 24 hours, don’t worry. Rest, peace, tranquility… I think I need actual neurological healing after this”. He stumbled at the blue doors. “Oh, and the Vault. Do a, uh… thing with the, the –keep an eye on it. And thank you.”

Nardole lingered uncomfortably for a few seconds, just in case of an emergency. He was at the door when he heard the characteristic sound of a body hitting the floor and he let out a groan, but the TARDIS emitted a reassuring hum. He took that to mean that the Time Lord had managed to reach his destination in time and left, thanking the time machine that could rearrange rooms at her thief’s convenience under his breath.

-O-

And so it came to pass, that after a few particularly unorthodox lectures, the board of trustees of St Luke's University finally gave up, and decided to let the Doctor lecture on whatever he wanted; and generally do whatever he liked.

Moby Dick wasn’t brought up again, but the man surprised everyone with a series of very nice presentations on Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and the Brothers Grimm, as well as a truly memorable performance of three of Beethoven’s symphonies on the electric guitar that ended with many students asking for autographs.

In the end it wasn’t that bad. Really.


                                                                           
                                                                           -the end-