Big Gay Longcat's Big Gay Longblog: The Time Savers

If The Planet of Dust was the grand finale of Adventures in Time and Space, even though there was one more story after it in that book, then The Time Savers fills the same role in Journey through TIME. It is 10 pages long and is the penultimate story in the book.

To add to the epic scope of The Time Savers, it has an appearance from the Time Lords of Gallifrey, which may explain why they had been referred to several times recently, as a form of foreshadowing.

Switching on his scanner the Doctor noted that he had landed exactly in the middle of the Panoptican, the meeting place of the Council of Time Lords, and that the Council was in session; twenty four of the most important and influential Time Lords were seated in a circle. It was into the middle of this circle that the Doctor stepped when he opened the door of the Tardis.
"Doctor." The deep voice of the Lord President greeted him. "Please be seated - a place has been prepared for you."

I bet the Doctor pood his pants when he heard those words spoken, lol!

"The matter concerns a planet with which you are better acquainted than most of us here," continued the President. "That is why you have been summoned. Earth, Doctor, is in danger of destroying not only itself, but also a large part of the rest of the universe."
"The Earth?" repeated the Doctor, surprised. "What's been happening there? It's usually a peaceful enough planet, and too far away from any other inhabited planet to be a major force in any interstellar war."

Lol, if there's trolling to be done the Doctor gives as good as he gets. The Lord President tells the Doctor that "someone has interfered with time on Earth" and sends him to Cambridge in the future year of 1996 with no more details than that.

Doctor, your mission is to save time. You must leave immediately."

Considering how many of these written stories begin in media res, we could have saved time by skipping this initial 'mission briefing' bit, but it does set the scene quite nicely and the first picture, of the Doctor meeting the Time Lord Council, is one of the best in the book and captures well the appearance of the Time Lords in the 1980s TV series.

After a humorous interlude about the Doctor taking a bar of chocolate with him that goes with this picture but has no other impact on the plot, the Doctor and Peri set out on their mission. They find a manny having sleeps under a hedge.

"Doctor! Look! What's the matter with him?" The man was surrounded by empty bottles, and looked extremely ill.
The Doctor picked up one of the bottles. "Methylated spirits," he announced briskly.

The Doctor wakes the manny up and gives him £10 to tell them the way to Cambridge. When they get there the Doctor sits on a park bench and, having no idea how to get to the plot from there, waits for it to come to him. Obligingly, two mannys "wearing identical brown overalls" appear "suddenly" and then disappear "inexplicably."

The Doctor recognises them.

Those men were wearing the uniform of the Ipsilon Foundation, an organisation which will not exist on Earth for another three hundred years. They were time travellers, Peri, and that is rather ominous."
"How did . . .?"
"Exactly. How did they get here?"

Amusingly, despite having seen the time travellers, the Doctor still has no idea what to do about them, and so he remains sitting on the park bench for "several hours". In the manner reminiscent of the GM of a Role-Playing Game trying to get his errant PCs to get on with the plot, another clue chances by the park bench as if for the benefit of the Doctor and Peri, this time in the form of an overheard radio news broadcast.

"And finally news of mysterious happenings at the Arthur Jeffries Building in Cambridge. Police have received several accounts of strange figures which, witnesses say, materialised out of thin air in and around the building last night. No damage was done and the local police are treating it as a practical joke. That view, however, is not shared by everyone. Miss Aly-sia Jenkins, President of the National Union of Psychic Investigators . . ."

The Doctor is then made to seem very silly by what he says next.

"The Arthur Jeffries Building! Of course! Why didn't I think of that earlier? That's by far the most likely place for any experiments of a dubious nature to be conducted!"

Of course! The Doctor and Peri go to "the Arthur Jeffries Building" and we get a paragraph of exposition so that we know why this should have been so obvious to the Doctor.

The Arthur Jeffries Building was a grim and austere structure which had obtruded upon the beautiful Cambridgeshire countryside for the past six years. It was a squat, graceless building of concrete and steel; a purely functional building designed by an architect with a singular lack of imagination and inspiration. Although nobody knew exactly what went on inside the building everyone suspected that it was something vital to the future of the world and scientists spoke of those who worked there in hushed tones of awe and respect.
Peri, although she had been told of the reputation of the Arthur Jeffries Building by the Doctor, could think of it as nothing but an ugly menace. She shivered.

I like the way this seemingly gratuitous exposition transitions into some quite nice atmosphere building by the end. The Doctor and Peri break in using the Doctor's penknife (whether this penknife is sonic or not is unspecified).

"Well, that was easy," the Doctor said. "I must say, I thought their security arrangements would have been better. Still, we shouldn't complain."

This has the feel of a moment of comic relief before the real action commences - a feling added to by the next bit, when they get lost.

Corridors stretched away endlessly in all directions, all apparently the same.

Mew, this is not an original joke, not even in the 1980s. Once again the plot comes to them.

The Doctor and Peri are captured by guards, but at the same time the Ipsilon Foundation mannys appear again and run away, so some of the guards chase them. The leader of the guards stays with the Doctor and Peri though.