‘You stupid great oaf,’ he yelled. ‘Might have got killed. Why don’t you…’
His voice tailed away as, for the first time, he got a clear look at the giant figure bearing remorselessly down on him. The bloke was enormous, he thought. A giant. And the face! Blank and lumpy and shapeless, like a waxwork left in the sun.
Forbes became aware that the giant was ignoring him and making straight for the ammunition-box lashed to the back of the wrecked jeep. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the lid of the box had flown open. The sphere was flashing rapidly with a kind of furious brightness. Forbes ran to the back of the jeep and grabbed his rifle. Training it on the advancing figure, he stood guard over the box.
‘Now listen, mate,’ said Forbes, his voice showing none of the panic he was beginning to feel. ‘This is government business, see, so just you clear off! I don’t want to open fire, but just you believe me, if I’ve got to, I will.’
His words had absolutely no effect on the advancing figure, now coming very close. Forbes, realising that his enemy wasn’t even human, opened fire without the slightest hesitation. He emptied a full clip of bullets into the massive chest. The giant was by now so close that Forbes plainly saw the line of holes appear across the breast of the dark coveralls. But there was no blood, thought Forbes frantically. No blood, and the thing just kept on coming.
Swinging his empty rifle as a club, Forbes landed a tremendous blow on the huge, smooth head. The giant staggered, then smashed the rifle from his grasp, casually, as if swatting a fly. The last thing Forbes saw, as another blow struck him to the ground, was that blank, expressionless face looming over him.
The Auton lifted the body of Corporal Forbes in one hand and tossed it into the ditch. Then moving to the back of the jeep, it took hold of the ammunition-box. The tough manilla ropes snapped like cotton. The Auton lifted the box clear of the jeep, and carrying its flashing, pulsating burden almost reverently, disappeared amongst the trees.
In the restricted zone of the plastics factory, strange alien machinery whirred and hummed and glowed. There came a soft glugging sound as the plastic mix flowed through the pipes. In the centre of the area stood a vast opaque container, shaped very like a coffin. Thick pipes coiled around it, feeding in nutrients. Channing stood watching with quiet satisfaction as deep inside the container something moved and stirred, and grew. Along the walls stood a motionless line of Autons. They seemed to be watching the thing in the tank, waiting eagerly for something to happen.
A buzzer sounded from the doorway. Channing did not move. ‘Yes?’
A nervous voice said, ‘It’s me. Hibbert.’
Channing touched a control button and the door slid open. Hibbert entered cautiously. He hated coming to this place. ‘General Scobie has arrived.’
Channing nodded. ‘I have almost finished.’ He turned his burning eyes on Hibbert. ‘I shall need more carbon disulphide tomorrow.’ The creature in the tank needed constant nourishment if it was to grow and live. Hibbert glanced curiously at the coffin-shaped tank. He hadn’t been told what was in there. He didn’t like to think about it.
Channing watched him. ‘It would be better if you did not come to this section again. We are approaching a critical point. It could be dangerous for you.’
Hibbert looked at the motionless Autons lining the wall.
‘I thought you had control over them. You said they were just walking weapons.’
Channing said softly: ‘I have some control over them. But they also have a life of their own. Their over-riding function is to kill. You will appear to them as just another target.’
Hibbert shuddered, and thankfully followed Channing from the room. The thing in the tank continued to move and grow. The line of Autons watched and waited. At the feet of one of them was an ammunition-box. But now it was empty.
7
The Horror in the Factory
Angrily the Brigadier snapped into the ’phone: ‘For heaven’s sake, man, what happened?’
Munro’s voice was apologetic. ‘We just don’t know, sir. The jeep was in the ditch. So was Corporal Forbes, with his neck broken. No sign of the ammo-box or the meteorite.’
‘Could it have been an accident?’
Munro sounded dubious. ‘It could, sir. But Forbes was an expert driver. He could have driven into a ditch and broken his neck in the fall. The box with the meteorite could have broken loose in the crash. But in that case where is it? We’ve searched the entire area.’
‘Well, keep searching! I’ll try to send you down some more men. Let me know as soon as there’s news.’
The Brigadier went to see Liz Shaw and told her the bad news. ‘It seems as if somebody, or something, doesn’t want us to get hold of one of those meteorites,’ he concluded gloomily. The internal ’phone on the wall buzzed and he sighed in exasperation as he grabbed the receiver.
‘Yes, now what?’
‘Main gate security here, sir. Someone insists on seeing you.’
‘Didn’t you give him the usual cover-story?’
‘Yessir. Told him this building was a branch of the Pensions Department, and we’d never heard of you. He said nonsense, it was UNIT H.Q., and he insisted on seeing Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Er, he said you’d pinched some of his property, sir,’ finished the voice apologetically.
‘What does he look like?’
‘Tall thin bloke, sir, old-fashioned clothes. Driving an old-fashioned car, come to that.’
The Brigadier was jubilant. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him get away.’
‘He doesn’t want to get away, sir,’ said the voice. ‘He wants to come in and see you. Most insistent he is.’
‘Then don’t stand there dithering, man,’ said the Brigadier rather unfairly. ‘Send him in at once.’
He turned to Liz, almost spluttering with excitement. ‘It’s him. That chap. He’s actually had the cheek to turn up here. How the blazes did he find this place?’
‘Wait and ask him,’ suggested Liz practically. A few minutes later the Doctor was shown into the room.
He strode across to the astonished Brigadier and shook him warmly by the hand. ‘Lethbridge-Stewart, my dear fellow!’ He looked at the TARDIS and patted it affectionately. ‘And here she is, all safe and sound. How kind of you to look after her!’
From behind her laboratory bench, Liz watched the Doctor with interest. This was a very different figure from the deathly-still form she’d seen stretched out on the hospital bed. It was obvious that the Doctor, if that was who he was, was now fully recovered. He was tall and elegant in the old-fashioned clothes that seemed to suit him so well. And he positively crackled with life and energy, completely overwhelming the somewhat stunned Brigadier.
‘Now then, old chap,’ the Doctor went on briskly, ‘there’s just the little matter of the key. Don’t happen to have it, do you?’
‘As a matter of fact I do,’ said the Brigadier. ‘But it doesn’t seem to work.’
‘Ah, but it will for me,’ said the Doctor, with a charming smile. ‘It’s personally coded, you see, keyed to my molecular structure.’ And he held out his hand.
But the Brigadier didn’t respond. ‘Not so fast. I’ve got one or two questions to ask you.’
‘Questions? My dear chap, it’s not a bit of use asking me questions. I’ve lost my memory, you see.’
The Brigadier was sceptical. ‘Have you now? That’s very convenient.’
‘Not so much lost it exactly,’ explained the Doctor, ‘as had it taken away. Not all of it, of course. I mean I remember you quite clearly. But quite a lot of other things are a bit cloudy. Things will probably come back to me in time.’ He smiled, as if everything had been made perfectly clear.
‘I see. So you claim to be suffering from some kind of partial amnesia?’
The Doctor looked distressed. ‘You do like to spell things out, don’t you?’
‘And you also claim to be the man I once knew as “the Doctor”?’
‘That’s
it, old chap, you’re getting there,’ said the Doctor encouragingly. Liz suppressed a smile.
‘And yet,’ said the Brigadier triumphantly, ‘your whole appearance is totally different. How do I know you’re not an impostor?’
The Doctor seemed delighted. ‘Ah, but you don’t, old chap, you don’t! Only I know that.’ He noticed a mirror and immediately began pulling faces into it. ‘How do you like my new face, by the way? I wasn’t too sure about it myself at first, but it’s beginning to grow on me. And it’s flexible, you know, very flexible.’ To prove his point, the Doctor began to pull a variety of extraordinary faces.
The Brigadier took a deep breath and sank rather groggily onto a laboratory stool. ‘All right, Doctor, all right! Say I accept this rigmarole, there are still quite a few things to be explained.’
Liz, deciding she’d been ignored long enough, cleared her throat meaningfully. The Brigadier waved a distracted hand towards her. ‘This is Miss Shaw, our new Scientific Adviser.’ The Doctor was waggling his eyebrows into the mirror.
‘Did you know that on the planet Delphon they communicate only with their eyebrows?’ He waggled his eyebrows ferociously at Liz. ‘That’s Delphon for how do you do.’ He grinned infectiously and Liz couldn’t help smiling back. There was something very engaging about this colourful madman. ‘How do you do,’ she said. ‘What are you a Doctor of, by the way?’
He waved his hand airily. ‘Practically everything, my dear, practically everything.’
The Brigadier harrumphed. ‘You arrived last night slap in the middle of a shower of very unusual meteorites.’
The Doctor said: ‘Did I really now? How fascinating.’
Briefly the Brigadier summarised recent events. The meteorite shower, the finding of the Doctor, the attempted kidnapping and the disappearance of the one whole meteorite that had been found. The Doctor listened with an air of deep interest.
‘So you see,’ said the Brigadier, ‘I can’t possibly let you leave until I’m sure there’s no connection—’
The Doctor interrupted: ‘That’s most unfair. I’ve no recollection of last night. Even that kidnapping business seems just a sort of nightmare…’ Suddenly his attention was attracted by the fragments on the lab bench. ‘What are these?’
Liz said: ‘Those are fragments of something the Brigadier thought was a meteorite.’
The Doctor looked at her. ‘And you don’t?’ He began to finger the fragments, turning them over and over. ‘Plastic!’ he said in a surprised tone. ‘Surely this is some form of plastic?’
Liz nodded. ‘Apparently. But it’s not thermo-plastic, and neither is it thermo-setting. And there are no polymer chains.’
The Doctor’s manner was now completely serious. Liz watched in fascination as his long fingers turned the fragments over and over on their tray. He weighed some pieces in his hand. ‘Most interesting. I wonder what was inside.’
‘Inside?’
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it, this was some kind of hollow sphere?’ Deftly his fingers assembled the pieces into a curved shape.
‘I’d say the space in the middle was about three thousand cubic centimetres, wouldn’t you agree?’
Liz looked at him with new respect. The calculation, if it was accurate, had been done with astonishing speed.
The Brigadier had been watching the two of them with interest. It looked as if they would make a good team. He stood up. ‘Do I gather you’re going to help us – Doctor?’
‘If I do, will you give me back the key to the TARDIS?’
The Brigadier nodded. ‘Certainly – once this matter has been satisfactorily cleared up.’
The Doctor looked keenly at him. There was a hint of resentment in his eyes. Then he smiled, seeming to accept the situation. ‘In that case, Brigadier, I suggest you allow Miss Shaw and myself to get on with our work.’ The Doctor turned back to Liz. ‘Do I have to call you Miss Shaw? Should be Doctor Shaw, I suppose, really. Or even Professor Shaw?’
‘Just Liz will do fine.’
‘Splendid!’
The Brigadier said, ‘Right then, I’ll leave you to it.’
‘Just a moment, old chap,’ said the Doctor. ‘How many of these meteorite things came down?’
‘About fifty, near as the radar people could estimate.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘And all you’ve found is this?’ He indicated the tray of fragments.
‘That, and the whole one, which disappeared on the way here.’
The Doctor slipped out of his cape and threw it across a stool. ‘Well, it’s obvious what’s been happening, isn’t it? Before your search could get really under way, most of these things were collected.’ The Doctor looked from Liz to the Brigadier. ‘Collected and taken somewhere. Question is – where?’
Harry Ransome steered his car carefully down the bumpy forest track. One half of his mind knew that what he was planning was completely daft. But he was determined to go on with it.
After his extraordinary interview with George Hibbert, he’d driven very fast to the local market town and treated himself to several drinks. He went over the interview in his mind time and time again… the strange remote manner of old George, almost as though he’d been hypnotised… the way he’d suddenly seemed more like himself as he’d warned of danger… the arrival of Channing with his burning eyes… the way George had suddenly become a zombie again.
The more he thought about it, the more convinced Ransome had become that there was something very wrong indeed at the factory. Perhaps George was being threatened, or blackmailed. Maybe they had him under some kind of drug. After his fourth drink, Ransome was certain that for George’s sake, as well as his own, he had to investigate further. He’d thought of telling the police. But what was there to tell them? The grumbles of a discontented ex-employee? No, first he had to find evidence. In this mood, Ransome had left the pub and gone to look for a hardware shop.
The track became too narrow to drive any further. He stopped the car and got out. From the boot he produced a pair of heavy-duty wire-cutters. He moved through the trees to the wire fence that marked the boundary between the factory and the woods.
Inside the factory, General Scobie’s tour had come to an end. He’d expressed polite interest in all the impressive new automated machinery. Now the real purpose – the very flattering purpose – of his visit had been reached.
Scobie was a genuinely shy and modest man. It had never occurred to him that anyone would ever consider him as any kind of celebrity. He had been astonished when Hibbert had contacted him, and had needed quite a bit of persuasion before agreeing. ‘Just a simple soldier, you know. Doing my duty.’ ‘Exactly, General,’ Hibbert had said, ‘that’s just the sort of people we want. Not the showy celebrities, always getting in the papers and on television, but the ones who really keep the country going.’ Eventually Scobie had agreed to come to the factory.
Now, in the factory’s Replica Room, he was feeling a little hurt. The blank-faced dummy he was looking at bore only a very rough resemblance to him. Channing hastened to explain: ‘You see, General, this is just the first draft, so to speak. Prepared from measurements and drawings. For the final process we need your actual presence. If you wouldn’t mind standing over there?’
Channing indicated a sort of upright coffin, surrounded with complex instruments. Gingerly, Scobie stepped inside. Immediately, the instruments surrounding him sprang to life. They hummed and whirred and clicked and buzzed excitedly.
‘Every detail of your appearance is being recorded, General,’ explained Channing. ‘The measurements of the facial planes are accurate to millionths of a centimetre.’
Scobie grinned uneasily. ‘Jolly impressive,’ he said as the instruments fell silent, and Channing helped him to step out. ‘I hope it all turns out all right.’
‘It will, General,’ said Channing solemnly. ‘I can promise you that.’
Ransome meanwhile was dodging from machine to machine across the factory floor. Not that
there was anyone about to see him. The whole place was deserted. He reached the door to the Restricted Area, and set to work, using his wire-cutters and an improvised crowbar. Savagely he wrenched at the lock, and in a few minutes he had it open. He slipped inside.
Once through the door, he looked round him in astonishment. The machinery here was far more advanced in design, more alien in purpose, than anything out on the factory floor. Fascinated, he moved towards the huge coffin-shaped tank that dominated the centre of the area. Lights flashed and machinery hummed, as if in warning as he moved closer, trying to get a clear look at the huge thing that writhed sluggishly inside the tank.
Ransome had failed to notice the line of silent Autons as they stood motionless against the wall behind him. Absorbed in what he was looking at, he didn’t see at first when one of them, the nearest, turned its head to look at him, and then suddenly came to life, taking a step forwards. On its second step, some instinct warned Ransome and he looked behind him. He leaped back as the giant figure came towards him.
The thing held out its hand in a curious pointing gesture. Then, to Ransome’s unbelieving horror, the giant hand dropped away from the wrist on some kind of hinged joint. The hand dangled limply to reveal a tube, projecting from the wrist. It was like the muzzle of a gun.
For a moment Ransome stood terrified, then he instinctively hurled himself to one side. A sizzling bolt of energy whizzed past his head, drilling a plate-sized hole in the steel wall. Ransome look at it incredulously, and the Auton raised its hand to fire again.
By pure chance, Ransome made the one move that could save his life. He ducked round the side of the plastic coffin, sheltering behind it. The Auton paused. An over-riding point in its programming was that the tank and its contents must not be harmed.
Lowering its wrist-gun, the Auton began to stalk Ransome round the tank, waiting for the chance of a clear shot at him. By keeping the tank between them Ransome was able to edge near the door. He made a sudden dash through it, leaving the shelter of the tank. The Auton fired another energy-bolt, missing Ransome’s head by inches, and blasting another hole in the wall. Then it pursued Ransome out onto the factory floor.
Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion Page 7
