Grip of Ice (short story)

Grip of Ice was a short story published in Doctor Who Annual 1970. It featured the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot.

Summary
After discovering damage to the TARDIS's space-time locator, Dr. Who lands on an icy planet to make repairs. Jamie and Zoe leave to explore. While investigating a crevasse at the edge of a glacier, they get caught in a snowstorm and are blown into the crevasse.

Dr. Who completes his repairs and leaves the TARDIS to look for his companions. Upon noticing a lack of footprints in the snow, he deduces there must have been a snowstorm. He finds one of Zoe's buttons from her uniform near the crevasse and sees another on the other side. Following along the edge of the crevasse, he finds a bridge of snow spanning the gap. Although it collapses under him, he manages to get to the other side, from where he can see an abandoned city.

He goes down to investigate and discovers a storehouse full of cubes that pulse with light. The cubes make telepathic contact with him, revealing that they are thought-cubes and are all that remain of the Morrains, the original inhabitants of the planet. The cubes explain that after the planet's sun exploded, the planet was engulfed in an Ice Age. A Morrainic scientist named Cosmos offered a plan: their race would be transformed into thought-cubes and stored until the ice receded, with Cosmos guarding the cubes.

However, Cosmos secretly planned to build a spacecraft in which to escape the planet, using the concentrated energy from the cubes to power his ship. The Morrains resisted by minimizing their thought energy, and Cosmos did not have enough power to drive the ship, until now. He has just captured two more intelligent beings with his snowstorm machine and intends to convert them into thought-cubes.

Realising they must mean Jamie and Zoe, Dr. Who takes one of the Morrainic scout cars to the centre of the city. In his approach to the central tower, he sets off the alarm system and fights off several robot guards using the scout car's armaments. He enters Cosmos's laboratory and finds Jamie and Zoe, under some kind of hypnosis. In order to set them free, Dr. Who offers to take their place, promising Cosmos that his brain will yield more thought-power.

Cosmos accepts his offer and begins the process of converting Dr. Who into a thought-cube. During the process, Dr. Who reverses his thought-power, which overloads the machine and destroys Cosmos.

Characters

 * Second Doctor
 * Jamie McCrimmon
 * Zoe Heriot
 * Cosmos

Worldbuilding

 * Jamie, Zoe, and Dr. Who wear atmospheric density jackets.

Continuity

 * The Doctor's space-time locator was damaged while escaping the robots on the planet Korad. (PROSE: Peril in Mechanistria)