Hunger from the Ends of Time! (comic story)
Hunger from the Ends of Time! was a two-part Seventh Doctor comic story in the pages of The Incredible Hulk Presents. It featured the return of the Foreign Hazard Duty, a kind of futuristic version of UNIT that had debuted in the strip Echoes of the Mogor.
Summary
The Seventh Doctor fights bookworms on the library world of Catalog.
Plot
The Seventh Doctor arrives on the library world of Catalog to discover their new storage system has a major flaw in it. The planet's librarians have recently started storing the collection in time, rather than space. Although this has practically eliminated planetary clutter, the system seems to be infested with tiny "bookworms".
The Doctor is quickly brought up to speed on the situation by the Foreign Hazard Duty, a group that's been trying to purge the system of the bugs. The Doctor knows that the FHD don't really have the tools to deal with the situation, so he bundles them into the TARDIS. He wants a better look at his new adversaries. When the TARDIS analyses the threat, the Doctor gets very worried. Apparently, the bugs are, as he puts it, "agents of chaos". They're only supposed to live at the beginning and end of the universe. Because Catalog's new filing system has stretched backwards and forwards through time, however, it's become a significant temporal event. The bugs have noticed it and are crawling around creation on the Catalog-generated timelines. If they keep advancing, they'll undo the fabric of the web of time.
Acting quickly, the Doctor simply returns the library collection to real space. This deprives the bugs of their food and they shrink back to the Big Bang and the collapse of the universe. Though he's saved the universe, the Doctor's made a mess on Catalog. It's now covered in books and other physical archival material.
Before leaving for his next adventure, the Doctor promises to return when they get the library organised again. He imagines it'll only take about a century.
Characters
References
- It's unclear when this story is set. But whenever it is, crosswords are no longer known.
Notes
- The Foreign Hazard Duty were created and exclusively scripted by Dan Abnett.
- The story was reprinted in Doctor Who Magazine #157-158.
Continuity
- The Seventh Doctor claims Catalog is the greatest library in the universe. The Tenth Doctor would make a similar claim of another archival world. (TV: Silence in the Library)
External links
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