'Increase the food allowance and you'll get better results,' said Ivo. 'They're too weak to work any harder.'
Almost everything the Village produced went to the Tower, leaving the villagers just enough to survive.
'I'm the one who has to report to the Tower,' said Habris. 'Am I supposed to tell Them they're taking too much?'
'You're the one who has to tell Them about poor harvests, too,' Ivo pointed out unsympathetically. It was an old argument between them, never resolved.
'I'll see what I can do,' growled Habris. 'But I can promise nothing.'
'That's what you said about my son.'
'He was taken to the Lords, with the others. That's all I know. When there's news, I'll tell you.'
'News!' said Ivo disgustedly. 'When is there ever news?'
'Hullo,' said a cheerful voice behind them.
They turned and saw the Doctor and Romana in the doorway.
'You're not from the Village,' said Ivo in astonishment.
Habris, too, was amazed. 'Or from the Tower!'
'That's right,' said Romana brightly. 'We're strangers.'
It isn't possible,' muttered Ivo. 'There is only the Tower and the Village, nowhere else. How can you be here?'
Habris decided to take no chances. It was obvious that these two were not peasants or guards-which meant they must be Lords. He stepped forward and bowed stiffly. 'My Lord, how may I serve you? I am Habris, Captain of the Guard.'
The Doctor looked at him in astonishment. 'How may you serve me?'
'I am at my Lord's command.'
The Doctor decided to take advantage of his unexpected status. 'We were just wondering if there happened to be any scientists in your charming village?' Habris and Ivo exchanged looks of utter horror. It was almost as though the Doctor had asked after sorcerers or black magicians.
The Doctor looked at their appalled faces. Perhaps if he used some more primitive term ... 'Witch-wiggler?' he said hopefully. 'Wangatur? Mundanugu? Fortuneteller?'
Ivo shook his head vigorously. 'Such things are forbidden. We know nothing of them here.'
Habris gulped and backed away. 'If you will excuse me, my Lord. My duties...'
He edged past them and fled through the door.
The Doctor said, 'I take it you don't get many strangers here?
'Strangers?' repeated Ivo stupidly.
'Yes. Visitors. Foreign devils. People you don't know.'
'Everyone here is known.'
'What about people from the next village?' asked Romana. 'Or the nearest town?'
'There is only the Village and the Tower. Nowhere else.'
'Who lives in this Tower of yours?' asked the Doctor.
'Why do you ask what everyone must know?' shouted Ivo in sudden anger. 'Are you sent to test me? I am Ivo, headman of the Village, like my father before me, and his father before him. The Lords know I am loyal.'
'There's no need to shout,' said the Doctor soothingly. 'So you serve the Lords, do you? Splendid, I'm sure. And what do the Lords do for you?'
'They protect us-from the evil that stalks the night.' Ivo made the ritual gesture the Doctor had seen before. He turned away. 'You must go elsewhere with your questions. I have work to do.'
By now Romana was convinced that they had stumbled on the village idiot. 'Come on, Doctor, this is silly. We're just wasting time.'
The Doctor lingered for a moment longer. 'One last question, Ivo. These Lords of yours, how long have they ruled over you?'
'Forever,' said Ivo dully. He turned away.
The Doctor rubbed his chin. 'Forever, eh? That's a very long time.'
The Doctor turned and followed Romana from the Centre.
As soon as he was gone, Ivo hurried over to the door and opened a hidden locker in the wall beside it. He produced a small black hand-communicator, pressed the call button and held it to his lips. 'Kalmar? Kalmar can you hear me?' There was a brief distorted crackle of response.
'Two strangers, here in the Village,' said Ivo urgently.
The device gave a crackle of astonishment.
'That's right, strangers,' repeated Ivo. 'And Kalmar - they were asking about scientists!'
The Stowaway
By now K9 was happily absorbed in his calculations - but not so absorbed that he did not hear a stealthy footstep behind him. He spun round, extruding his noseblaster. 'Halt!'
Standing frozen before him, one foot poised off the ground, was a small, round-faced, dark-haired youth who looked strangely familiar.
'Your presence here unauthorised,' said K9 severely. 'Explain.'
'You remember me,' said the young man cheerfully. 'Adric?'
K9 scanned his memory banks. They had encountered Adric on the last planet they had visited. 'Immature humanoid, non-hostile.' He retracted his blaster.
'That's better!'
'Your presence is still unauthorised. Explain!'
'I stowed away.'
'Stowed what away?'
'Myself. I'm a stowaway.'
Again K9 scanned his data bank. 'Stowaway. One who hides in a ship to obtain free passage.'
'I thought I'd join up with the Doctor and see the universe. Where are we?'
'On an unidentified planet on what the Doctor refers to as E-Space.'
'What space?'
'E-Space. The term is used to distinguish it from the normal or N-Space from which we originated.'
'Oh, I see,' said Adric, not seeing at all.
'The concepts are unfamiliar to me. The Doctor will explain.'
'Where is he?'
'The Doctor and Mistress Romana have gone in search of astro-navigational data. Their journey was dangerous and ill-advised. As soon as I have finished my calculations, I shall go and rescue them.'
'Just you stay there and get on with your sums,' said Adric hurriedly. 'I'll go and find them.'
'Stop! Your journey is also dangerous and unnecessary.'
Adric looked thoughtfully at the little automaton. He had no intention of hanging about in the TARDIS while the Doctor and Romana had all the fun. But he knew K9 was quite capable of setting his blaster to stun and shoot him down - purely for his own good, of course.
Adric thought fast. 'Now listen, I'm a stowaway, right? And that means I shouldn't be here at all.'
'Correct.'
'Then the sooner I leave the better! Just let me out will you ?'
K9 operated the remote control and Adric headed for the door. He paused in the doorway and gave K9 a cheeky grin.
'Gotcha!' he said, and disappeared.
The Doctor and Romana were following a path through the shadowy depths of the forest. 'There's something going on here,' the Doctor said thoughtfully. 'Something very odd indeed.'
'Just a standard medieval culture, Doctor. Repressive aristocracy and terrified peasants.'
The Doctor shook his head. 'It's more than that. The situation is more complicated than you think.'
'How far are we going anyway?'
'Oh just to the next village.'
'But there isn't a next village-or so they said.'
A high-pitched chittering sound came from the gloomy shadows above their heads.
'What's that noise ?'
'Sounds like bats. They come out at dusk, you know.'
The Doctor stopped and looked indignantly down at Romana. 'What do you mean, there isn't another village? There's got to be another village somewhere-' He broke off. 'Just a minute though, maybe you're right. Remember K9's orbital scan? That settlement was the only one to show up on it.'
Romana was staring ahead of them. 'Doctor, look!'
A grey-cloaked, grey-hooded figure had appeared at the end of the path looking incredibly sinister and ghostlike in the gathering shadows.
The Doctor heard a rustle behind him and spun round. Another hooded figure had appeared on the path behind them. More came out of the woods on either side. They were surrounded.
Warily the Doctor watched the approaching figures. They were armed wit
h staves and pikes and cudgels - primitive weapons, but enough to make resistance impossible, at least for the moment. As always, the Doctor's overriding feeling was one of curiosity. Here was yet another aspect of life on this strange planet, and he wanted to know more about it.
'Doctor, say something!' hissed Romana.
With a welcoming smile, the Doctor said, 'How do you do? I'm the Doctor and this is Romana.'
No answer. The hooded figures moved closer.
The Doctor tried again. 'We were just passing your charming planet, and we thought we'd drop in, take a look around. Look, I know this may seem a silly question, but I was just wondering if you could tell me anything about the nature of E-Space? Oh well, perhaps not . . .'
The hooded figures closed in. Ignoring all the Doctor's attempts at conversation or explanation, they seized the Doctor and Romana by the arms and hustled them away through the forest.
Habris quailed beneath the savage anger in Zargo's voice. 'Vanished? What do you mean, vanished?' As before, Zargo and Camilla were on the twin thrones, Aukon standing between them.
This time Habris had good reason to be afraid. He was the bearer of disturbing news, and the Lords were not pleased. 'I returned to the Village with a patrol, as you ordered, Lord Zargo. Not a moment was wasted. But the strangers had vanished. We searched the Village, we scoured the surrounding woods, but there was no trace of them.'
Zargo stroked his beard. 'They had no time to travel far, no friends to hide them ...' He stared at Camilla in sudden alarm. 'Unless they made contact with the rebels.'
'Strangers,' said Camilla broodingly. 'Strangers at a time like this.' She turned angrily to Habris. 'Why did you yourself not seize them as soon as they appeared?'
'I had no orders, my Lady.' Habris hesitated. 'And besides ...'
'Well?'
'There was something about them. They were no peasants, that I swear. They were - Lords.'
'We are your Lords, Habris,' said Zargo fiercely. 'There are no others.'
Habris fell to his knees. 'Forgive me, my Lord, I meant no disrespect.'
Zargo waved him to his feet. 'More patrols, immediately, Habris. They must be found.'
'At once, my Lord.' Thankful for a chance to redeem himself, Habris bowed low, and turned to leave.
Aukon said, 'Wait!' The quiet word froze Habris in his tracks.
'Master?'
'I will discover the whereabouts of these mysterious strangers, Habris! You can spare the efforts of your guards.'
Zargo leaned forward on his throne. 'But strangers, Aukon. And at a time like this! Are you sure?'
As always, Aukon spoke quietly, but every word carried immense authority. 'If the strangers are still on this planet, my servants will find them.'
Habris shivered. He knew that Aukon referred not to human servants but to his winged messengers of the night - the bats.
Arms held firmly by their hooded captors, the Doctor and Romana were hustled along secret forest tracks to a point where the woods gave way to wasteland. Soon they reached an area of straggly grassland and bare earth, broken up by oddly shaped mounds overgrown with weeds.
The Doctor looked round. There was something oddly familiar about the desolate landscape. It reminded him of the site of some long-ruined city, where the forces of nature had almost obliterated the signs of civilisation. Had the planet once held a technological civilisation? But the area was too small to be the remains of a city. They passed a mound which had been eroded by wind and rain. The surface had fallen away to reveal the angular, rusting shape of some giant machine.
'It's a dump, Romana,' whispered the Doctor. 'A technological rubbish tip!'
Their hooded captors led the way to another, larger, mound. One of them hurried forward and opened a hidden door, its surface cunningly camouflaged with grass and weeds.
The door opened onto a downward-sloping tunnel, and the Doctor and Romana were thrust along it until they emerged blinking into a blaze of artificial lights.
Eyes alight with curiosity, the Doctor looked around him. He was in a large, roughly circular chamber, carved, he guessed, out of the heart of the mound, though its walls had been re-inforced with a strange mixture of rusting metal plates and wooden pillars. The room was filled with an amazing assortment of partly dismantled equipment - control panels, computer terminals, sections of rocket engines, all kinds of machinery, all jumbled together. Much of the machinery was old and rusting, but some sections were newly cleaned, as if some attempt had been made to get things working again.
All around the edges of the room there were simple living areas, chairs, beds, tables and a scattering of personal possessions. All in all, the place was a strange combination of laboratory, workshop and living quarters.
In the centre of the room one piece of equipment was receiving particular attention. It consisted simply of a battered metal cabinet which incorporated a small vision screen with a row of controls just below it. An inspection panel had been moved from the back and a tubby white-haired old man in a shabby robe was peering rather bemusedly inside.
The Doctor surveyed the extraordinary scene with delighted interest. 'Well, well, well, quite a technacothaka you've got here.'
'Doctor,' whispered Romana, 'what's a technacothaka?'
'Well, I think it means a museum of technology. On the other hand, I might have made it up !'
During this exchange, the men who had captured them had been stripping off their hooded cloaks, to reveal rough homespun clothing, much like that worn by the peasants they had seen in the Village. But there the resemblance ended. Except for Ivo, the Village peasants had been cowed and apathetic-looking. These men had a fierce, wolfish look about them, the wary alert look of hunted men. These were outlaws.
Throwing aside his cloak, the tall man shoved his way to the front of the group. 'Well, we found them, Kalmar!'
The old man blinked up at him. 'You are sure these are the ones Ivo spoke of, Tarak?'
'Look at their faces, look at their clothes! They're the strangers all right, just as Ivo described them. The man calls himself "Doctor".'
'Doctor?' said the old man eagerly. 'It is a word I have seen in the old records. It is a title used by scientists,' he spoke the last word with a kind of reverence, looking hopefully at the Doctor. 'Are you a scientist, Doctor, like me?'
'Well, I dabble a bit,' said the Doctor modestly. He wandered over to the metal cabinet and peered inside the inspection hatch.
Tarak watched him suspiciously. 'He was asking about scientists in the Centre.' Grabbing the Doctor's shoulder he spun him round. 'All right, Doctor, it's time for a few answers.'
'I suppose you mean: who are we, where do we come from, what do we want? All that old stuff?'
'It'll do for a start,' growled Tarak. 'Well?'
'Oh, come on, let's not talk about me all the time.' The Doctor waved expansively around him. 'All this looks much more interesting.' He turned to Kalmar. 'I see you've actually got some of it working again.'
'We have a generator,' said the old man proudly. 'It gives us power for air, light and heat. We have communicators - '
'But no weapons, eh, Kalmar?' interrupted Tarak harshly.
Kalmar gave him a look of dignified reproof. 'When we have rediscovered basic scientific principles we shall make weapons, Tarak. These things take time.'
Tarak sank wearily onto a wooden stool. 'Time!' he said bitterly. 'How many of us have lived and died in misery, because everything takes time!'
Romana said, 'Tell me, how long have things been like this?'
'Forever!' Kalmar said, 'It seems like forever, certainly. The Lords rule in the Tower, the peasants toil in the fields. Nothing has changed here for over a thousand years.'
The Messengers of Aukon
Adric followed much the same route as the Doctor and Romana when he left the TARDIS, taking the track that led along the edge of the forest, past the ploughed land and into the Village. He saw scattered groups of peasants toiling in the field
s, but their heads were bowed over their work and they paid him no attention.
Adric walked up the village street, looking around at the deserted buildings. It was, he thought, as unattractive-looking a place as he had ever seen. He saw the open door of a large building at the end of the street; walked up to it, and slipped cautiously inside.
At first the big room seemed deserted, but the smell of food led his eyes to a kitchen area in the far corner, where he saw a homely middle-aged woman slicing vegetables into a cooking pot. Adric suddenly realised he was very hungry, and his renegade's instinct urged him to take what he wanted without asking. He probably would not manage to get his hands on any of the stew, but there were big round loaves of brown bread on a table just behind the woman. One of them had been cut into chunks. If he could swipe a piece of bread and a bit of cheese ... Adric began sidling mouse-like along the edge of the room.
He reached the kitchen area undetected and was just reaching out for a particularly tasty-looking crust of bread when some instinct made the woman turn round. She grabbed Adric's wrist with a work-toughened hand and dragged him forward. 'Got you!'
Adric was just about to launch into a sad tale about being a poor starving orphan, when the woman gave a gasp of horror and thrust him away from her. 'Who are you? How did you come here?'
'I walked,' said Adric. He hadn't expected his arrival to make such a big impression.
'But I don't know you !'
Adric was baffled by the strength of her reaction. 'That's all right, I don't know you either!'
The woman backed away. `It isn't possible ...'
Taking advantage of her confusion, Adric grabbed the crust and began gnawing at it hungrily. Through a mouthful of the coarse wholemeal bread he said, `I'm looking for two friends of mine. Don't suppose you've seem them, have you? Tall man with curly hair and a silly scarf. There's a girl with him.'
The woman was still staring at him with a kind of superstitious awe. 'There were two such strangers here earlier. A Lord and a Lady.'
'Any idea where they could be?'
The woman shook her head.
Doctor Who - [113] - [E-Space 2] - [Vampire Trilogy 1] - State Of Decay Page 2
