by Gerry Davis
Later, as the machine seemed to take on some frenzied life of its own, he withdrew slightly, held on to the control levers for support, and let the time-vehicle have its head; intently studying the ever-changing lines of data on the read-out screen before him.
There was no doubt about it. The dizzying motion of the TARDIS had ceased. The roar of overworked motors, driven almost beyond endurance during the last few hectic minutes, was dying down.
‘We’re coming down!’ Ben’s trained ear had caught the different inflection of the TARDIS’ mechanism – the slowly descending whine made on landing.
‘Let me go.’ Polly tried to free herself from Ben’s iron grip which had tightened involuntarily. ‘Ben! Please!’
Ben looked at her and released his hold. She sat up almost crossly, yanking down her short skirt. ‘I’m a mass of bruises all over. What happened, Doctor?’
The Doctor had finally moved. Still in an intense concentration like a chess player, he gently flicked over a row of switches.
‘Doctor!’ Polly’s voice had an edge to it. ‘Won’t you at least talk to us?’
Ben straightened and stood up a little painfully, his muscles aching from the strain. ‘Yeah, Doc. Tell us.’
‘Aye,’ Jamie was finally uncoiled from his protective cocoon, ‘if it’s always like this, ye can leave me back at Culloden field. I’d rather tak’ my chances wi’ the redcoats.’
Jamie had just joined the Doctor’s motley crew. In contrast to Polly and Ben, both from stable backgrounds in 1970s London, he was a hunted man, a refugee: not only from the British and Scottish soldiers searching his native Highland moors for survivors from the Culloden battle-field; but also from his age, 1745. An age before the invention of electric lights, trains, cars, aeroplanes, space ships or any of the modern marvels that the other two took for granted.
Luckily, while Jamie had the courage of a lion and all a Highland crofter’s resourcefulness and cunning, he was a little thick, even by 1745 standards. Otherwise, this sudden leap-frogging of two and a third centuries might have unhinged his reason.
He accepted each new wonder philosophically, relating it to his primitive world when he could, accepting it without question when he couldn’t. Much as his father would have accepted the first sight of a stagecoach or a sailing ship as he journeyed from his mountain home.
‘Just a moment…’ The Doctor had reached into his capacious pockets and brought out his diary. He took out a pencil and began making notes from the figures on the computer read-out screen in front of him. The others clustered around him, nervously waiting for a word. He remained utterly absorbed.
‘Don’t you even care what happens to us?’ Polly stamped her foot. ‘We’ve nearly been killed. We don’t know where on Earth… or space… we are, and all you do is ignore us.’ She burst into tears.
Suddenly, the Doctor became aware of the others, snapped his diary shut, replaced it in his pocket, and became all contrition. ‘Yes, yes, of course, my dear. You’re none of you hurt, are you?’
‘Nae thanks to ye if we are.’ Jamie glowered at him. Ben, his service instincts aroused at this rudeness to the captain of the ship (he was a naval rating, Able Seaman, with five years’ service, man and boy, behind him) nudged the Scot and stepped forward, just resisting the temptation to salute.
‘We’re all right, sir. Barring the odd bruise and scrape.’ He hesitated. ‘Doc, we’d like to know what happened and where we are.’
‘Ah yes!’ The Doctor had been glancing anxiously at his three companions, looking for injuries or broken bones. Reassured, he nodded. ‘Of course, good question!’
‘First, what happened?’ Polly turned round, her tears dried.
‘Interference,’ the Doctor began to explain, then stopped.
‘Interference with what?’
‘The TARDIS’ motors. From some kind of force-field. Very strong one by the feel of it.’
‘I’ll say!’ Polly tenderly felt her back and thighs.
‘I’m really most sorry…’ the Doctor began.
‘Second question now, sir.’ Ben took over the questioning of the chronically vague and evasive Doctor. ‘Where are we?’
The Doctor punched a button on the TARDIS’ control console and a picture appeared on the monitor screen in front of them. It showed a brilliant expanse of arid, lifeless plain with foothills in the near distance. The three crew members winced and covered their eyes. The Doctor adjusted a control like the brilliance control of a TV set and the screen darkened.
‘Is it Mars? It must be!’ Polly’s eyes were shining. ‘Doctor, you’ve actually done it, haven’t you? You’ve landed the TARDIS exactly where you said you would. It’s almost worth not being able to sit down for a week!’
‘Whar’s Mars?’ Jamie began. ‘I dinna ken where yon place is. Is it near to Glasgow, maybe?’
‘Hold on,’ Ben cut in. ‘I ain’t seen Mars, but that looks very like somewhere I have seen, on TV, lots of times.’
Polly’s face began to fall. ‘Yes, I see what you mean, it does look like…’
The Doctor was edging away, his diary out again, pretending to be absorbed in his calculations.
‘The moon,’ Ben continued from Polly. ‘Yeah! It’s the moon’s surface, all right.’
They all turned towards the Doctor.
‘Is it the moon, Doctor? Is that where you’ve taken us?’ Polly said.
The Doctor nodded unhappily.
‘You’ve goofed again… sir,’ said Ben.
The Doctor nodded.
‘Oh well,’ Ben continued, ‘only missed it by two hundred million miles this time. We’re improving!’
Jamie was looking at the screen and shaking his head. ‘The moon. Nay, yon canna be the moon. The moon’s up in the sky.’
‘Well!’ the Doctor finally put away his diary with a dissatisfied, puzzled air, ‘let’s get moving… while we can,’ he added under his breath, turning back to his controls.
There was a chorus of protests from the others and the Doctor looked up in surprise. Polly spoke:
‘Now you’ve got us on the moon – after going through all that – you expect us to leave – without even seeing it?’
‘Yeah, Doctor,’ Ben added, ‘always wanted to be an astronaut meself. First giant step and all that. Can’t we take just a little step while we’re here? To say we’ve really been on the moon’s surface?’
The Doctor looked from one to the other then across at Jamie, still absorbed in the monitor screen.
‘Yon wee picture canna be the moon, not the moon in the sky!’ Polly opened her mouth to explain. ‘Oh, leave him,’ said Ben, ‘he’ll get it figured out eventually.’
‘Please, Doctor,’ Polly did another of her instant switches. This time it was from, as Ben put it, the ‘toffy-nosed Duchess’ giving orders, to the coy ‘little girl lost’ act. All big eyes and wheedling, she took his arm. ‘Just a little look around… no more.’
The Doctor became thoughtful. ‘There’s some danger present here.’
‘What, Doctor?’
‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged, ‘not yet!’
‘Then we can go, can’t we?’
The Doctor smiled. ‘I suppose you’ve earned some – what do you call it, Ben? – shore leave. We’ll go out for half an hour. Give the TARDIS time to cool down.’
‘Great… super…’ They all rushed towards the door like excited children.
‘But you’re not going out like that!’ The Doctor’s voice stopped them. ‘We all need space suits. There’s no atmosphere out there. You’ll find space suits in the equipment room.’ Then, as Ben looked puzzled, ‘Here, I’d better help you on with them. They’re tricky if you’re unfamiliar with the air and heat systems.’
The Doctor led the way out, followed by Polly. Ben turned back to Jamie, still staring fascinated at the TV screen. ‘Hey, Jamie boy! Did you hear any of that?’
‘Aye.’ Jamie’s eyes were still fixed on the bright landscape shown on the sc
reen. ‘Do ye think we’ll meet the Auld Man in the Moon?’
‘You won’t meet a dicky-bird, mate, if you don’t follow me and get some gear on.’ Ben led the way into the TARDIS’ equipment room, followed by a still bemused Jamie.
Standing together on the moon surface, the Doctor’s three companions, each clad in bulky white space suits numbered one to four, took their first long look…
Through their transparent head globes, sun visors pulled down to shield their eyes from the intense glare, they looked slowly around the glittering moon surface.
The TARDIS had landed on a long slope inside a huge crater. Behind them rose the high rim of the crater, like a series of small broken hills. Ahead of them a long, white plain stretched out to a black horizon.
Had they landed on top of the crater rim, they would have seen an even more extraordinary sight: a fleet of Cybermen space ships. Long sleek and black, like marine torpedoes with small swept-back wings, they lay in a protective circle, their Cyber-weapons mounted like sharp snouts in the bows of the craft.
Their nuclear-powered engines emitted a high-pitched winnowing sound, which died down as the last arrival manoeuvred into landing position. The engines cut. A long streamlined observation bubble mounted on the top of the craft began to pulse red.
Outside the TARDIS, only Polly was looking back at the ridge. She noticed the red glow gilding the topmost hill and pointed. ‘Look… back there!’
The Doctor was locking the TARDIS’ door when Polly’s words filtered through the inter-com which was built into each helmet. He finished locking-up and turned to follow her pointing arm. The glow had faded.
The other two men had also turned too late to catch it.
‘I dinna see anything, Pol.’ Jamie tried to shake his head inside the space helmet.
‘What yer see, Duchess?’ Ben asked.
‘A great glow in the sky.’
‘Probably your eyes getting used to the lunar light, eh Doctor?’ Ben looked slowly round at the Doctor who had just joined them.
‘Possibly.’ The Doctor looked thoughtfully back over at the crater rim but, as usual, did not reveal his thoughts to the others.
‘That’s more interesting, Doc. What is it?’ Ben pointed down the slope. As their eyes became accustomed to the white landscape, they were able to follow Ben’s keen gaze to a low plastic dome apparently imbedded in the lunar surface. Inside, the shapes of other buildings and a long gun-like object were just visible…
‘A lunar base of some kind, I imagine,’ said the Doctor.
‘Lunar base! Do they have such things?’ Polly said excitedly.
‘If, as I suspect, we’ve gone forward in time. There were certainly manned lunar bases by the twenty-first century,’ replied the Doctor.
Jamie, meanwhile, had found something else to look at: a small white and blue globe high above them in the black, space ‘night’.
‘I thought you said we were on the moon, Doctor?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘We are.’
‘Then what’s that?’ The others looked upwards. To Ben and Polly, photographs brought back by the astronauts had made the sight a familiar one.
‘The Earth, of course,’ Ben answered impatiently.
‘Then where’s the moon now?’ Jamie tried to understand.
‘You’re on it,’ said Ben impatiently. Polly had already started off down the slope with long swinging strides, each one of which propelled her some ten or twelve feet in the reduced moon gravity.
The Doctor, concerned, followed her down. Still Jamie stood there, looking up at the Earth.
‘Are you coming?’ Ben took a leap that carried him twenty feet but nose-dived him into the thick lunar dust as he landed. The Doctor looked back at them. ‘Careful. One tear in these space suits and you’ll suffocate. Now you try, Jamie.’
Giving up his struggle to understand where they had touched down, Jamie took a great thirty-feet leap that landed him right beside the waiting Doctor. He grounded with a rock-scrambler’s sense of balance.
‘Och, I like this.’ He leant back and touched Ben, who had gingerly stood up. ‘Ye canna catch me.’ In two seconds both of them were leaping down the slope, like goats with gigantic strides, chasing Polly and calling out to each other with the sheer physical pleasure of near weightlessness. ‘Just like a trampoline,’ Ben thought.
The Doctor looked back once again, but all was quiet and still behind the crater rim. He followed the others towards the base.
Five minutes later, still chasing each other and playing a moon version of tag, the three companions had almost reached the plastic dome. They could now see that it was an enormous size – like a gigantic upturned bowl.
Suddenly Jamie, easily the winner in this game of moon-tag, leapt over a small rise in front of the dome and vanished from sight. Polly and Ben stopped, wobbling as they tried to keep their balance.
‘Where did he go?’ Polly’s face looked anxious through the thick plexiglass face globe.
‘There, in line with that gun, or whatever.’ Ben pointed to the side of the dome where the long gun-shaped object was visible through the clear plastic.
Carefully, they climbed the last low rise, scrunching in the thick lunar sand, and looked down. A twenty-yard gap, rather like a dry moat running all round the lunar base, divided the rise on which they were standing from the plastic dome.
Polly caught her breath and touched Ben’s arm with her glove. As they looked down, they saw Jamie lying in a twisted position at the edge of the dome beside an entry port. He was lying very still, one leg doubled awkwardly under him. He had obviously over-leapt the rise, crashed against the plastic dome and had slid down to his present position in the ‘moat’.
‘Quick! We must get down to him,’ said Polly. But, before either of them could move, the curved sliding door of the entry port slid open. Two figures emerged, both in space suits and, expertly lifting the unconscious Scot, carried him inside. The port closed behind them.
‘We’d better tell the Doctor.’ Ben started to turn. But the Doctor was standing beside them and had seen the men carry Jamie inside. ‘We’ll go down… carefully,’ he said sharply.
They jumped down into the moat, landing lightly on their feet and strode, with the curious, plunging moon jog they had now mastered, towards the entry port. There was no sign of a bell push.
‘Not expecting visitors,’ muttered Ben. ‘Well, they’ve got ’em, expecting or not.’ He banged on the plastic dome. They waited. It was Polly who noticed the entry port glide soundlessly open. They hesitated for a moment then, led by the Doctor, filed inside.
3
The Moon Base
A large weather control room dominated the interior of the huge plastic dome of the moon base. In this room were housed the two main instruments which, in the year 2070, controlled the Earth’s weather.
The first half of the large room was dominated by a flat, illuminated projection of the world. As in a conventional atlas, the continents were picked out in green and the oceans in blue. Over the top of this projection a grid of ruled red lines and figures had been traced. A number of flat, transparent indicators or cursors were in constant motion across it. They were directed by operators who sat by a console underneath the screen.
To the right, could be seen large computer assemblies, their magnetic tape memory heads exposed, and all the ancillary apparatus of computer machinery.
The second half of the control room, separated from the first by a transparent plastic partition, was a large circular room-within-a-room. This housed the principal weather-control machine: a huge Gravitron, or gravity controller.
This Gravitron, directed at the Earth by means of its tall, gun-like probe (noticed by the Doctor’s party) was a large torodal, or doughnut-shaped object, which stood alone in the middle of a large space. A number of very thick and powerful-looking cables snaked out from its external surface. The doughnut-shaped object was parallel to the moon’s surface. Its long probe rose up f
rom its centre.
Inside the Gravitron room it was essential to wear helmets to block out the sound of the machine – a very low-pitched, high-energy rumble, which could destroy a man’s hearing. Unless the door to the room was open, the sound was scarcely audible.
At the time the Doctor and his party were exploring the moon’s surface, the operators, all dressed alike in one-piece brown overalls with only a number to reveal their rank or identity, were facing a full-scale emergency.
The lights on the huge central map of the world had started to flash wildly and, at the far end of the room, there was a sustained high-pitched buzz. A red light over the console was flashing on and off and, above it, the words ‘Emergency Signal’ appeared.
The operators had been monitoring and controlling the direction of a hurricane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. One of them, seemingly suffering from over-tiredness, had not paid full attention to the vastly important task he was performing on the controls in front of him. In collapsing over the controls, he had moved them from their former position.
At the sound of the buzzer the Director of the moon base, Jack Hobson, a large, thick-set Yorkshireman of forty-five, jumped to his feet from the Director’s seat at the console and strode over to the collapsed operator.
He was followed by his second-in-command at the multi-national base, Jules Benoit, a tall, thin Frenchman in his mid-thirties. Together, they lifted the unconscious man from his seat at the console and laid him on the floor.
‘What do you think it is?’ Benoit and Hobson looked down at the man’s face. His neck was swollen and it had a curious black appearance. As they watched, the black lines seemed to move up the side of the man’s face.
‘The same as before!’ Hobson’s face was grim. He beckoned to a man with No. 7 on the front of his tunic. ‘Get him down to the Medical Unit.’ Benoit shrugged his shoulders. ‘What’s the use? Dr Evans has gone down with it as well. He is pretty ill, I think.’
Hobson nodded wearily, the lines of strain showing on his brow. Nobody on the base had had much sleep over the last two days since the mystery virus had started wreaking havoc amongst the crew. Hobson had not been to bed at all for over forty-eight hours.
