Eternity (short story)

Eternity was the sixteenth short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Steel Skies. It was written by Jonathan Blum. It featured the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith.

Summary
The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are travelling to Geshtinanna, a world of historical importance; however, Sarah is astonished to learn that their journey will take nine weeks.

At first she and the Doctor amuse themselves exploring the limitless confines of the TARDIS, looking through its countless rooms and contents. But after forty-three days of travelling the ship’s corridors, planning her science-fiction book and listening to the Doctor’s stories, Sarah becomes bored to the point of tears, and even the Doctor has grown tired and listless.

It seems that the journey will never end, until they notice that the clocks aboard the ship have all stopped; the Doctor then detects the remains of another TARDIS adrift in the Vortex, and fears that they may be on a collision course with it. Unable to change the TARDIS’s set course, the two travellers have no option but to wait out the hours until they reach the ghostly vessel, and their destruction in the forces unleashed within its remains.

Finally, they pass safely by the ill-fated ship, realising that the clocks stopped as a mark of their ship’s respect to a fallen comrade. Ironically, when the TARDIS finally materialises on a jungle planet, the Doctor and Sarah discover that they are light years off course, and nowhere near Geshtinanna at all…

Characters

 * Fourth Doctor
 * Sarah Jane Smith

Continuity

 * Sarah Jane notes that it did not take long for the TARDIS to travel 30,000 years into the future. (TV: Planet of Evil)
 * The Doctor tells Sarah Jane that he was involved with the events surrounding Grigori Rasputin's death in St. Petersburg in December 1916. (PROSE: The Wages of Sin)