Doctor Who and the Cybermen

by Gerry Davis

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Also available from BBC Books

  Title Page

  Introduction by Gareth Roberts

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who

  1. Prologue: The Creation of the Cybermen

  2. The Landing on the Moon

  3. The Moon Base

  4. Attack in the Medical Unit

  5. The Space-plague

  6. The Doctor Investigates

  7. The Cybermen’s Plot

  8. The Battle with the Cybermen

  9. Victory, perhaps…

  10. The March of the Cybermen

  11. Into Battle with the Gravitron!

  Between the Lines

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which are against everything we have ever believed in. They must be fought. To the death.’

  In 2070, the Earth’s weather is controlled from a base on the moon. But when the Doctor and his friends arrive, all is not well. They discover unexplained drops of air pressure, minor problems with the weather control systems, and an outbreak of a mysterious plague.

  With Jamie injured, and members of the crew going missing, the Doctor realises that the moonbase is under attack. Some malevolent force is infecting the crew and sabotaging the systems as a prelude to an invasion of Earth. And the Doctor thinks he knows who is behind it: the Cybermen.

  This novel is based on ‘The Moonbase’, a Doctor Who story which was originally broadcast from 11 February–4 March 1967.

  Featuring the Second Doctor as played by Patrick Troughton, and his companions Polly, Ben and Jamie

  About the Authors

  Gerry Davis

  Born in 1930, Gerry Davis was already an experienced television writer and script editor when he came to Doctor Who as Story Editor in 1966. Wanting to explore stories rooted more closely in real science, Davis contacted Dr Kit Pedler. The resulting collaboration resulted in several notable scripts, and in particular in the creation of the Cybermen.

  After leaving Doctor Who, Gerry Davis continued to work with Kit Pedler, and together they created the groundbreaking and controversial BBC series Doomwatch. The series centred on a government department responsible for investigating the dangers of technology and its adverse impact on the world. They also wrote three novels together that explored similar areas of technological crisis – The Plastic Eaters, Brainrack and The Dynostar Menace.

  Gerry Davis returned to Doctor Who in 1975 to write the story ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’, and at about the same time novelised several of his and Pedler’s Doctor Who stories for Target books.

  Davis spent most of the 1980s working in the USA on film and television projects. He died in 1991.

  Kit Pedler

  Born in 1927, Christopher (‘Kit’) Pedler was a medical researcher, and head of the Electron Microscopy Department at the University of London’s Institute of Ophthalmology when he was recommended to Story Editor Gerry Davis as someone who might be useful as an adviser to Doctor Who.

  Davis presented Pedler with hypothetical, fictional problems and asked him to extrapolate what would happen. One of the questions Davis posed was: ‘What if some alien intelligence gets inside the top of the Post Office Tower [which was visible from Davis’s office window] and decides to take over London…?’ Pedler’s considered reply formed the basis for the Doctor Who story ‘The War Machines’, scripted by Ian Kennedy Martin.

  Another of Davis’s scenarios concerned a new planet which is a mirror image of Earth drifting into our solar system. Pedler’s answer again formed the basis of a Doctor Who story, but this time one he wrote himself in collaboration with Gerry Davis: ‘The Tenth Planet’.

  Pedler told Davis that as a doctor his greatest phobia was ‘dehumanising medicine’. He foresaw a time when spare-part surgery had reached the stage where it was commonplace, possibly even cosmetic. There would come a point where it was impossible to tell how much of the original human being remained. Such creatures, he reasoned, would be motivated by pure logic coupled with the overriding desire to survive. They would sacrifice their entire bodies and their minds in the quest for immortality… From this fear was created the Cybermen.

  Together with Gerry Davis, Kit Pedler created the prescient BBC thriller series Doomwatch, and later returned to scientific and ecological writing and presenting. Kit Pedler died in 1981.

  Also available from BBC Books:

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS

  David Whitaker

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE CRUSADERS

  David Whitaker

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

  Terrance Dicks

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION

  Terrance Dicks

  DOCTOR WHO AND THE CAVE MONSTERS

  Malcolm Hulke

  INTRODUCTION

  BY

  Gareth Roberts

  Gerry Davis must have been a bit surprised that day in 1974 when the call came from Target Books. ‘Would you like to novelise a script you script-edited for Doctor Who eight years ago?’ I wasn’t there, but I bet the first thing he said was ‘Er, why?’ and the second thing was ‘When by, how long, and how much?’

  Today, we are much closer to the past than we were in 1974. In those days, television happened once (twice if you were really lucky – this story wasn’t) and then it disappeared into a vault or, more probably, into a skip. (For this story, it was half-vault and half-skip.) So poor Gerry must have been baffled.

  Information of any kind about anything – let alone a TV show transmitted once, in black and white – was really hard to get back then. If you wanted to know something – maybe the life cycle of the koala, the structure of a plant cell, what was Number 1 on the day you were born – you had to look it up. Now I could look up all those things right now, in less than a minute, without even moving. In fact I just have. The answers are interesting, boring, and ‘Young Girl’ by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. But in those days, you looked things up by going to a place where they were written down in books (they were called libraries) and searching, physically searching with your arms and hands, for them.

  In the case of 1960s Doctor Who, you couldn’t even do that, because the information was either stored in a BBC vault or junked in a BBC skip. Either way, you couldn’t get at it.

  So, information in general was precious.

  Information about Doctor Who – especially old Doctor Who – was priceless. And to all intents and purposes, non-existent.

  But, as Gerry sat down at his clattering manual typewriter, with a dog-eared copy of Kit Pedler’s camera script of ‘The Moonbase’, a glass of Mateus Rosé and a general sense of bewilderment, he wasn’t to know the significance of what he was about to do. The moment his finger tapped the first key, he was no longer merely a writer. He was a magician, doing the impossible – revealing lost secrets to rival the mysteries of Eleusis, rending skip and vault in twain to set the past free – to conjure the library at Alexandria back from its flamey fate, to rehang the Gardens of Babylon, to hatch the Dodo once again…

  OK, I got carried away there, but I’m not being facetious. That is what it felt like, to me and a generation of readers.

  This book is a corker. It was my – and many others’ – first encounter with both Patrick Troughton’s Doctor and the terrible Cybermen. The Doctor in this book is simultaneously distant as a star and reassuring as a teddy bear. He has an unreadable agenda of his own, working in the background, muttering to himself like Willy Wonka. The image of him crawling about on the floor of the moonbase – literally ge
tting under everyone’s feet like Columbo in space – has stayed with me ever since (as anybody who saw ‘The Lodger’ will know.)

  The Cybermen here are shadowy figures, lurking through the first half – creeping up on people, hiding, generally sneaking about until their glorious march on the moonbase. Gerry tells us they are there, from the very beginning, even giving the exact time and date of their arrival on the moon. This casualness is untypical of the Target books, giving the reader a headstart on the characters. It’s not so much a question of what’s going to happen, as when.

  I was 7 when I read this book – and my mind was full of Phantom Pipers, Gravitrons, acetone and Cybermen rolling their victims in barrels across the lunar surface.

  That was the first stage of Gerry Davis’s unwitting magic. Sat at that typewriter for, I imagine, not very long and for not very much money, he wasn’t to know that he was performing another trick, an even better one.

  Because Gerry Davis leads to Terrance Dicks who leads to Douglas Adams, who leads to Robert Sheckley, who leads to John Wyndham, who leads to Agatha Christie, who leads to M.R. James, who leads to Dickens, who leads to Shakespeare, who leads to… everyone else.

  A child’s experience of reading can be ruined by one boring book. Gerry and the other Target mainstays never produced a boring page. They were incapable of it. What they proved was that books weren’t dull and dusty, ‘good for you’ like vegetables and PE. Books could be exciting, naughty, creepy, dangerous, silly and fun. Even when the Doctor isn’t in them.

  And now here it comes again – Doctor Who and the Cybermen breathes once more in 2011, thirty-seven years after it was written, defying vault, skip and bewilderment. There you go, Gerry – that’s immortality for you. And you didn’t have to replace any of your limbs with plastic and steel to get it.

  The Changing Face of Doctor Who

  The Second Doctor

  This Doctor Who novel features the second incarnation of the Doctor. After his first encounter with the Cybermen, the Doctor changed form. His old body was apparently worn out, and so he replaced it with a new, younger one. The scratchy, arrogant old man that had been the First Doctor was replaced with a younger and apparently far softer character. The First Doctor’s cold, analytical abilities gave way to apparent bluster and a tendency to panic under pressure.

  But with the Second Doctor more than any other, first impressions are misleading. The Doctor’s apparent bluster and ineptitude masks a deeper, darker nature. But there are moments too when the Second Doctor’s humanity also shines through. There is ultimately no doubt that his raison d’être is to fight the evil in the universe.

  Ben

  Ben is a Cockney sailor in the British Navy. During his time with the Doctor, he never loses sight of the fact that he wants, more than anything, to get back to his ship, HMS Teazer. Practical and realistic, it takes him a while to believe that the TARDIS really does travel through time and space. Never one to shirk action and danger, Ben is also clever and pragmatic.

  While they only meet in a nightclub shortly before departing, accidentally, with the Doctor in 1966, Ben and Polly have become good friends and trust each other. Their relationship is punctuated by good-natured teasing and banter, but they complement each other well.

  Polly

  Polly worked as secretary to Professor Brett, the creator of a mad supercomputer called WOTAN. Ben nicknames her ‘Duchess’ because of her upper-class accent and sophistication.

  Polly has a deep affection for Ben, although she masks it behind banter and teasing. She chats him up at the Inferno nightclub, and in a sense she is still chatting him up when they arrive back in London on the same day as they left, and leave the TARDIS. Polly is rarely completely serious, except when she believes her friends are in trouble. And she is most serious when Ben is threatened.

  Jamie

  James Robert McCrimmon is the son of Donald McCrimmon, and a piper like his father and his father’s father. Coming from 1746, Jamie is simple and straightforward, but he is also intelligent and blessed with a good deal of common sense. Almost everything is new to him, and while he struggles to understand he also enjoys the experience. Jamie is also extremely brave, never one to shirk a fight or run away.

  Ultimately, Jamie sees the Doctor as a friend as well as a mentor. While he relishes the chance to travel and learn and have adventures, he also believes that the Doctor really does need his help.

  1

  Prologue: The Creation of the Cybermen

  Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men on the far-distant planet of Telos sought immortality. They perfected the art of cybernetics – the reproduction of machine functions in human beings. As bodies became old and diseased, they were replaced limb by limb, with plastic and steel.

  Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated, and brains replaced by computers. The first Cybermen were born.

  Their metal limbs gave them the strength of ten men, and their in-built respiratory system allowed them to live in the airless vacuum of space. They were immune to cold and heat, and immensely intelligent and resourceful.

  Their main impediment was one that only a flesh and blood man would have recognised: they had no heart, no emotions, no feelings. They lived by the inexorable laws of pure logic. Love, hate, anger, even fear, were eliminated from their lives when the last flesh was replaced by plastic.

  They achieved their immortality at a terrible price. They became dehumanised monsters. And, like human monsters down through all the ages of Earth, they became aware of the lack of love and feeling in their lives and substituted another goal – power!

  Their large, silver bodies became practically indestructible and their ruthless drive was untempered by any consideration but basic logic.

  If the enemy was more powerful than you, you went away. If he could be defeated, you killed, imprisoned or enslaved. You were unswayed by pity or mercy.

  By the year 2070, they had become as known and feared in the galaxies as the Viking raiders of the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries.

  It was in that year that a raiding party from Telos directed its attention to a small blue planet in a remote solar system… the Earth.

  Every planet, they had learnt, had its vulnerable side. This one seemed technologically advanced and was well protected by missile bases which were capable of blowing a marauding space-craft out of the sky. Finally, they probed out its Achilles heel. In this case, it proved to be a small, lifeless satellite reflecting the solar sun…

  There was even an Earth base there of some kind. Control of that base, armed with Cybermen weapons, could lead to control of the Earth.

  They had no use for the small blue planet. When they had finished with it, stripped it of its precious metals, destroyed any technology that might one day challenge their own supremacy in space, they would leave it shattered and lifeless.

  The only previous time a Cyberman space ship had landed on the Earth, it had been humiliatingly defeated. So, although revenge was not a part of their mental make-up any more than the other emotions, the Earth people needed to be taught a lesson. Or they might, one day, challenge the Cyberman empire.

  The Cybermen circled the moon-satellite in search of a well-hidden landing place. This time they were going to take no chances. Earth people were too resourceful for that. Their conquest of the moon would have to be accomplished by stealth.

  Their small fleet of Cyberman space ships landed on the moon at exactly 4.30 a.m. on October 15th in the year 2070. Nobody at the nearby lunar base or those manning sky-probes at watching stations on the blue planet saw them – so effective were the Cyberman screening devices.

  The huge silver monsters that had once been men had achieved their first objective…

  2

  The Landing on the Moon

  The TARDIS was wildly out of control, spinning helplessly over and over, and throwing the hapless occupants from side to side across the cabin.

  Like a ship in a heavy sea
, it would pause for a moment and seem to stabilise, giving the crew a moment to hold on to any convenient handle, grip or ledge; then plunge sickeningly down to left or right, rolling them headlong against the mercifully padded bulkheads.

  Ben, the young cockney sailor from East Ham, had managed to brace himself between two side struts. His head was bleeding slightly from a cut, but otherwise he was in better shape than his companions, Polly and Jamie.

  Jamie was probably the worst damaged of the three, though, with a highlander’s stoic indifference to pain, he had rolled himself up into a tight, human, tartan ball. His plaid was taking the brunt of the impact as he was rattled from side to side by the space ship.

  Polly, her long legs thrashing around as she tried to find a foothold on the steeply angled deck, was making the most noise – screaming as yet another violent lurch spun her back across the narrow area of deck between the large, hexagonal control desk and the bulkheads.

  ‘Got yer!’ Polly rolled to within a foot of Ben’s arm and he locked it round her waist, bracing himself to take their combined mass when the next lurch came. It was doubtful whether Ben would have been injured at all if he had not been trying to anchor Polly at the same time. Three times he had tried to help the girl, and each time lost his own hold as well and been flung against the bulkheads.

  This time he seemed to be succeeding. Or was the ship finally levelling out? Polly whimpered and clung to him. He tightened his grasp. But there was no doubt about it; the TARDIS was finally steadying down to a level course.

  They looked over at Jamie, the human hedgehog, cautiously uncoiling enough to see out from his enveloping plaid blanket, and then at the Doctor.

  Throughout the crisis, the Doctor had seemed to withdraw into some remote world of his own, apparently unaffected by the plight of his young companions. He had found a way of wedging himself into the control position on the console and had begun by making lightning-quick adjustments to the complex array of switches, levers and buttons before him.