The Doctor looked over to Jeffip for some help.
The old man took the hint and stood, bit his lip a little nervously.
‘So… Doctor. What would you do after that?’
‘Once I’ve decommissioned the weapon, I’ll be on my way. Things will change here, obviously, but it’s not up to me to say how.’
Some of the adults were agitated, some angry. No one seemed terribly happy. Except Alsa.
This is why I should avoid politics, the Doctor mused.
‘Why abandon us?’ Qerl said.
‘I’m not “abandoning” anyone. You were getting on fine without me.’
‘The problems we have to overcome can’t be solved in one day. Another pair of hands, another brilliant mind, could be of such benefit.’
‘I know that. I—’
‘Why can’t you return to us after you’ve destroyed the weapon?’ Jennver suggested.
The Doctor toyed with agreeing. He’d told them the truth before, though, and didn’t want to start lying now.
‘You don’t see the bigger picture,’ the Doctor insisted.
Uproar.
‘We don’t matter?’
The Doctor faltered. ‘You matter.’
‘But not as much?’
The Doctor’s smiled flickered. ‘It’s not the way I would put it…’
He was saved from being glared to death by Alsa, of all people.
‘Look… shut up, everyone. The Doctor’s right. There’s a bigger picture.’
The Doctor didn’t have to wait long for the sting in the tail.
‘It’s not about him helping out with the crops and chores. Don’t you get it? We need the Doctor to do something none of us can: sort out the Fortress. But after that, it doesn’t matter if he stays. If he gets rid of the lightning and the ghosts, we can move back into the city.’
Stern silence from the adults, all their attention on the girl.
‘Here we go,’ moaned Alsa, gearing up for a blazing row. ‘Look, we’ve had good reason to be scared. But it’s just a building, there’s no magic.’
Jennver sighed. ‘We should stay out of the city. All of us.’
‘Whyyyyy?’
The members of the Council were shifting in their seats, but had begun to look more relaxed. There’s a point in every argument where one of the people crosses the line: goes too far, says something that’s demonstrably wrong, steers themselves onto a different point, one that can be knocked down more easily. They all thought Alsa had arrived there.
Jennver was looking kindly at her. ‘Because that is the past and we have to live in the future. We can’t be dependent. We need to start afresh, not… cannibalise what was lost. That would be slow suicide.’
‘There is a whole city there, full of stuff.’
‘A finite amount of “stuff”.’
‘Plenty for three hundred people. There are apartments with real beds and bathtubs. Tools and other equipment.
Games. Clothes. There’s just about everything we need and it’s going to waste.’
‘Once, yes, we could live in the city. Not any more. It isn’t practical.’
‘Why not?’ said Alsa, a real flash of fire in her eyes.
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Oh, here we go. I wasn’t alive before. I don’t know what it was like before. Life was so different before. I wasn’t even born. I know that. I know what it’s like now.
And it’s rubbish. You’re scared. That’s all it is. Cities are for living in. Let’s live in the city.’
It was clear to the Doctor that this was not the first time they’d had this out. The arguments must have been endlessly rehearsed and repeated, and the whole discussion had the air of a well-worn ritual.
Maybe it was his headache, or he wasn’t concentrating, but the Doctor couldn’t see where Alsa was heading with this, why she thought she’d change anyone’s mind this time. Was she just arguing for argument’s sake?
‘It’s not just the ghosts and lightning,’ Jennver sighed.
‘We can’t just move into the ruins.’
The Doctor tried to race ahead of what was being said, tried to get to where Alsa was going. This wasn’t just a teenager kicking against the system. Alsa was cunning –the bruise on his head throbbed its agreement at that – and had something up that designer-suited sleeve of hers.
What had changed?
Jennver was carrying on with what sounded like a familiar lecture. ‘A great city needs lighting, heating. A whole infrastructure, all mechanised. Clean water didn’t just miraculously come out the taps, the buildings didn’t repair themselves. That was done by machines… and machines need power. We have no way of activating the energy satellites. Unless you have some magical power supply—’
‘No!’ the Doctor – who had just worked out what Alsa was up to – shouted. ‘No. Alsa, no.’
Jennver was distracted, but soon got back to her script.
‘Without a power supply for the whole city… we can’t live there. We don’t even know that the satellites are still there. Jeffip wasted years trying to turn on a small portion of the grid. It wasn’t built that way, couldn’t be altered.
Arcopolis long ago exhausted its fossil fuels. Wood burning just isn’t efficient enough.’
The Doctor was on his feet, seriously considering just making a dash for the door. ‘The weapon at the heart of that Fortress has to be destroyed.’
Jennver was looking around, bewildered, like he had just changed the subject.
Alsa spelled it out. ‘The Fortress. The Doctor says there’s this weapon, yeah? He says that it can project holograms and fire death rays, and that there are—’
‘We’ve always known—’
‘Yes. We’ve always known that that thing had a power source. The difference now is the Doctor. He says the Fortress has got infinite power.’
Jeffip had been thinking. ‘You know how it runs, Doctor?’
‘Yes. The Fortress doesn’t have a power plant that also supplies the weapon, it’s the other way round: the weapon powers the Fortress. The fact that the Fortress has power is the proof that the weapon is still in there and is still active.’
Alsa smirked. ‘Infinite power sounds like plenty to run a city with. That’s what the Doctor should be doing: instead of destroying the weapon, he should take that power and harness it.’ She pointed straight at him. ‘The Doctor can lead us out of the darkness and back where we deserve to be: into a city of light and heat and safety. The Doctor could do that. Don’t you see – he’s our saviour.
Him.’
Everyone was looking straight at the Doctor. Alsa was practically licking her lips, a glint in her eyes.
‘If he wants to leave us after that, let him.’
The Doctor closed his eyes, slumped.
‘No,’ he said.
‘If we could harness that power…’ Jeffip began.
Fladon was scratching his hairy chin. ‘Alsa’s right, isn’t she, Doctor? You could do this.’ It was the first time the Doctor had seen him smile. ‘As soon as we get the power back on, we could get some robots running, they’d start fixing things.’
Jennver was looking upset. ‘We make our own salvation,’ she said in a faltering voice. Then, stronger, ‘We will survive through the efforts of our own hands.
Not by praying for angels to come down and save us.’
‘We don’t need to pray, we can just ask,’ said Alsa.
‘You’ll save us, won’t you, Doctor?’
He realised he was glaring at her through narrowed eyes.
‘No,’ he repeated.
Utter silence.
‘Can’t or won’t?’ Alsa asked after a moment, leading.
She’d known that he would refuse. ‘Instead of being selfish and destroying that power source, you connect it up to the grid for us. We can go and live in the city. We could live in the Fortress itself.’
It all sounded so reasonable, but she was so angry. It was infectious
, too – the Doctor could feel himself losing his temper.
‘I came here to deactivate the Fortress,’ he spat.
‘Destroy it. Not to do it up as flats.’
‘Now you know we’re here, though, that changes things, surely?’
‘Not enough,’ the Doctor said curtly. ‘That weapon can’t fall into the wrong hands.’
‘No space travellers have ever come here. Except you.’
‘If they did, having a weapon to defend ourselves wouldn’t be a bad idea.’
The Doctor walked up to Fladon, who’d said that, and jabbed a finger at him, before turning to address the other Council members. ‘You all saw that? That’s how it happens. It starts with “we could really use this around the house” and then – not one minute later – suddenly it’s “we could use it to kill our enemies”. That’s fine when it’s a stone tool, or fire, or a knife, or a hunting rifle. It’s even fine when it’s a missile.’ The Doctor hesitated. ‘Pushing it a little by that point, admittedly, but it’s still fine. The weapon in that Fortress is too powerful.’
Alsa was angry. ‘Says who? Too powerful for you, perhaps. Not for us.’
‘Doctor, Arcopolis was a place of peace. We had not known war or even serious crime for many thousands of years,’ Jeffip said. ‘A weapon is no temptation for us.’
‘Perhaps the Doctor wants it for himself. We should take stewardship. We know we wouldn’t use it.’
‘We have no ambitions except survival. We could be guardians of the weapon.’
The Doctor took a deep breath, understood that his answer had to be diplomatic, had to be considered, couldn’t under any circumstances include the phrase “you imbeciles”. He looked over at Jennver. The leader of the Council hadn’t spoken, or even moved, for ages. Her little world was collapsing. She glanced up at him, willed him to say something to convince the others.
‘Doctor, we have already experienced the very worst thing that could happen,’ Qerl said.
This time, the Doctor couldn’t keep it in. ‘You think that the worst thing that can possibly happen has already
happened, because you’ve seen one civilisation fall?’
‘As the victims of a terrible attack,’ Jeffip began, ‘I think we can understand the dangers. If the weapon was in our custody, we would prevent it from falling into the hands of people who would misuse it.’
‘We lost everything,’ Qerl said.
‘You don’t know the meaning of the word,’ the Doctor muttered.
‘And the people who built it?’ Jeffip asked. ‘Won’t they just build other weapons like it anyway? They might attack us again.’
‘They are all dead,’ the Doctor snapped back, ‘and there’s a lot less of their planet left than there is of this one. The war it was built to fight is long over. That is the last weapon of its type.’
Jennver was looking over at Alsa, thoughtfully.
Everyone had lapsed into silence.
The Doctor was beckoning to Jeffip. ‘Stand up. Come on. Remind me: what was that you said about star maps?’
‘That there was an atmospheric effect that was blocking out the stars, that—’
‘The stars were vanishing?’
‘Surely you’re not suggesting that the weapon’s disintegrating stars, one at a time?’
‘No.’ The Doctor straightened. These were reasonable people. He would reason with them.
‘Words like “infinite” and “ultimate”… they’re too big.
There’s an old saying: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” When you think about the people that died here, I imagine you don’t think of the 200 million…
you think of your parents, your children, your best friend, even your pets. You remember the countless millions through the ones you cared for.’
He saw a few of them nodding warily, and decided to press his advantage.
‘I’ll try to explain what this weapon does. All right…
imagine you really wanted to destroy your enemy. Really wipe out all trace of them.’
‘We don’t have enemies, we don’t want to destroy anyone.’
‘Which is why I said “imagine”,’ the Doctor said testily. ‘Back in the day… the Bronze Age, say, you’d start by burning down your enemy’s village if you really wanted to destroy them, not just defeat them or enslave them or steal their stuff—’
‘You’d just kill everyone,’ interrupted Alsa.
‘Exactly. Put them to the sword. Well, put the sword to them, it’s far easier. I digress. So… kill all the people. Not just the soldiers, but all the women and children.’
‘Barbaric,’ Jennver muttered.
‘Well, yes. Trouble is: what if someone managed to hide? What if a group of soldiers was out on patrol? What if there was a merchant away from town at the time? Let one puny little boy go and he’ll end up as Conan the Barbarian. It’s practically the rules. He’ll be back.’
‘You’d need good information,’ Jeffip said.
‘Exactly. Know your enemy. But even if you really managed to kill every last person and burn all their stuff, there would be traces. Statues and gravestones. Even bits of broken crockery. You could just about get rid of all that, if you put a lot of effort into it.’
‘You wouldn’t need to go that far,’ Jeffip objected.
‘Not normally, no. But what if you did want to remove all traces?’
‘You could never remove them all,’ Jeffip said.
‘Course you could,’ Alsa countered. ‘If you wanted to hard enough.’
‘Even if you dropped a bomb on it you’d leave a crater.’
‘And rubble,’ the Doctor chipped in. ‘Don’t underestimate rubble. Even when the last building of Arcopolis falls, there will still be debris. A good archaeologist could come along in 10,000 years and piece things together. After that… well, it’s terrible to admit it, but plastics and radioactives and refined metals…
pollution, I guess… would be there. You’ve carved out tunnels and cuttings for roads and so on. But I guess you could build a bomb powerful enough to smash all that to dust. Would that be enough?’
‘No,’ Alsa said finally.
‘No?’
‘Because the next village along, they’d remember the destroyed village. They’d be able to… I dunno, draw pictures of it. It would be on their maps.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Good.’
‘So you’d have to kill them too,’ Alsa added, sounding almost gleeful. ‘And… the next village along. And…
the…’
Jeffip was thinking it through, now. ‘A technological civilization… one with radio and satellites, you’d have to
kill everyone else on the planet. No… more than that, you’d have to go to other planets to make sure they hadn’t seen it through telescopes or heard any of their broadcasts.
Everything in the light cone.’
‘Yes.’
‘So… that’s what that weapon does?’
The Doctor almost laughed. ‘No. That’s just if your enemy lived in one village on one planet. That weapon was designed to use against an enemy with footholds in different galaxies.’
‘That would be… impossible.’
‘Why?’
‘It would be too much work. It would take billions of people thousands of years to do all that.’
‘So you build a labour-saving device,’ the Doctor said.
Every single person in the room turned to look over his left shoulder. That was the direction of the Fortress.
The Doctor nodded. ‘Touch a button and no more enemy. No more traces of enemy. They’d be gone. The weapon doesn’t just kill them, it kills everyone who’s ever heard of them. Destroys everything they’ve ever built and drawn and written. Everything they’ve ever seen, even the stars in their sky. Erases it all. It’s a weapon that would give your run-of-the-mill ultimate weapon an inferiority complex.’
‘How?’ Jeffip asked. ‘I mean, how could anything do that?’
The Doctor waved his hand airily. ‘Quantum physics.
The observer effect. The superforce. Vunktotechnology.
Vundatechnology. The people who built that weapon
knew their stuff.’
The Doctor checked his watch.
‘Wait,’ Alsa said. ‘Even when it had killed your enemy… there would still be you. You’d be left. You’ve heard of the enemy. If you wanted to erase every trace, you’d have to kill yourself.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Logically, pretty much whoever your enemy is, you’d end up destroying the entire universe, including – obviously – yourself. It was a weapon of last resort, to be used only when all was lost.’
‘Who would be stupid enough to build a weapon that did that?’
‘Building it isn’t the issue,’ Fladon said.
‘No?’ the Doctor asked.
‘They could build as many as they wanted to. The problem’s when you use it.’
The Doctor sighed. ‘“When” being the operative word.’
‘Quite a deterrent,’ Jeffip said.
‘A what?’ Alsa said.
‘A threat,’ the Doctor said. ‘If your opponent knows he’s going to be utterly destroyed, he won’t attack… four times out of five.’
‘I’d attack,’ said Alsa.
The Doctor motioned for her to continue.
‘Well, if I knew my enemy would destroy themselves when they fired, I’d know they’d never actually fire it.
When it came to it, they’d hesitate and –’ she mimed herself smashing them.
‘When it came to it, they didn’t hesitate,’ the Doctor
pointed out.
‘Why is the universe still here?’ Alsa asked, sounding almost disappointed. ‘What stopped it?’
The Doctor paused.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve asked myself the same question. There might be some kind of protective field around the weapon. If you’re near enough, you’re immune. It would explain why you survived.’
There was a murmur around the room.
‘That travel tube you were all in must have been directly underneath the Fortress when the weapon fired.
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