Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

by Adams, Douglas

  Anyway, conversationally, the Doctor had done it, torn it and taken the biscuit. Mareevians don’t see red, more a sort of angry grey, but the man opposite the Doctor was now shouting very loudly and sneering with delight. ‘Sir! You’ve insulted my planet!’

  ‘I haven’t!’ the Doctor protested.

  ‘I find your denial extremely upsetting!’ the man gasped, staggering back against a wall. ‘I really am finding this utterly distressing. I simply haven’t time for this. Coming to our planet and insulting us? You’re the worst kind of alien. And I find your nose offensive.’

  ‘But—’ began the Doctor.

  The little man was hammering on windows, screaming up at them. ‘Citizens! Citizens! I have been verbally attacked!’

  Windows opened and heads popped out. Initially, they popped out to remark on how upset they were at being disturbed. The angry little man shouted back at them, saying how their attempt to silence him was profoundly distressing. The people at the windows told him to shut up even more loudly. Shoes were exchanged.

  The Doctor leapt onto a bollard, blew a whistle, and windmilled his arms around. ‘People, please! A bit of hush! Surely you don’t have to be so awfully loud, do you?’

  The crowd looked at the Doctor, and, as one, narrowed their eyes.

  Ten minutes later Romana left the TARDIS. She’d found a pair of leopard-print wellington boots to go with her cagoule. She looked around. There was no sign of the Doctor.

  Clearly, he’d been locked up already.

  The Doctor passed a long and annoying night in a prison cell. It had begun with a letter posted under his cell door:

  Dear Prisoner

  As you are now in custody, you are required to complete some mandatory online training about this prison’s Standards and Values (‘Values’ and ‘Standards’).

  This includes the following three modules:

  – Safer Securing (Tier 2): This module covers our status as an Official Prison, our care undertakings to you (‘Your Rights’) and explains the necessary Containment Criteria you will need to fulfil during your stay (‘Your Responsibilities’).

  – Secure Standards: This module covers this Prison’s Values and explains our Custodial Guidelines under the Tier 3 ‘Beyond the Bars’ Programme.

  – Safeholding Policy: This module explains your Rights and your Freedom of Expression Guidelines. This includes information on how to format a complaint to the Governor and a framework for acceptable Protest Redecoration of your ‘cell’ (Individual Containment Unit).

  Each module will take about twenty minutes to complete. You will need headphones to hear the sound whilst not disturbing your co-prisoners.

  If you have any problems completing the training, please speak to a Warder who will be only too happy to provide the necessary assistance and restraints.

  Regards,

  Executive Manager, Prisons and Punishment (Regulations)

  Manager, Punishment and Regulations (Prisons)

  ‘Paperwork!’ The Doctor crumpled the note and threw it into a corner. He then picked it up and uncrumpled it. He sat down at the terminal in his cell, realising that, with a bit of luck, he’d be able to use it to hack into the overall Prison Mainframe and then engineer his escape. It turned out the terminal was broken. The Doctor sighed, and mended it. At which point he realised the screen was covered with dried soup. He tried scraping it off, but it wouldn’t budge.

  The Doctor sat down, cracked his knuckles and set out to hack into the prison while squinting through old soup.

  An hour later he gave up.

  Two hours later dinner was delivered, and he realised why someone would have thrown soup at the terminal. The corridor outside filled with complaints – one inmate had a cockroach in his soup, another demanded to know why he hadn’t been given a cockroach. The complaining and yelling went on, until the prison warders came back and threatened everyone with more soup.

  Things went quiet. Not peaceful quiet, but the quiet that goes with resentful muttering.

  On a psychic level the Doctor found it hard to relax and, faced with nothing else to do, went into a deep trance, concentrating on eroding the lock on his door through sheer willpower.

  The next day, he found himself in court. The courtroom was dingy, with high windows looking out onto the rain clouds. The courtroom’s tin roof rang to a constant raindrop tattoo.

  A crowd leaned against railings, muttering about how they’d always known about the Doctor. Others had terrible stories about things he’d said and done, printed up onto T-shirts and placards. Occasionally one would point at another and angrily declare that they’d done nothing, as yet, to publicly distance themselves from the Doctor.

  ‘But …’ said the Doctor, worried that it sounded like a wail. ‘But I don’t know any of you! I’ve never met any of you before in my lives!’

  This went down very badly.

  A judge stared at him, her face lined with bored anger. ‘You are brought before us, the very worst sort of criminal. Have you any complaints to make before you hear the state’s complaints against you?’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said, easily. ‘So far, actually, everything’s fine.’

  The judge scowled, making a note in a book. ‘That, in itself, is a terrible indictment of our justice system, and, as a judge, I can only feel personally attacked by it.’

  The Doctor boggled. ‘How?’

  The crowd hissed.

  The judge slammed her book shut. ‘You dare question a judge? That is insulting to my profession and status.’ She glared at him with a fury it normally took centuries of defeat at the Doctor’s hands to stoke.

  The Doctor was lost for words.

  ‘Refusing to answer?’ the judge scowled. ‘That’s derogatory. I find your silence highly offensive.’

  The crowd hissed again. Someone took a photo.

  ‘Oh good grief,’ the Doctor cried. ‘How does anyone get anything done around here? If this is your legal system, I dread to think what your fitted kitchens are like.’

  ‘Incorrigible! Malicious allegations! I find that an attack on our entire way of life,’ yelled the judge over the roaring crowd.

  ‘Fine,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘Take it any way you like. I’m just here to get a plastic tube and go home. I don’t care about anything else, but have you ever thought about smiling? You’d look wonderful. Try it. Go on.’

  The judge did not smile.

  Several people in the crowd informed the Doctor that he was criticising the judge on her external appearance and that this was not on.

  The Doctor protested that he wasn’t. The crowd jeered even louder.

  The judge silenced them. ‘Before disgusting myself by having to pass sentence, have you a court-appointed disapprover?’

  The Doctor shook his head. He stuck his hands in his pockets and pulled them inside out. ‘Alas, no.’

  ‘Then,’ the judge said with malicious glee, ‘we will pronounce on you.’

  The crowd roared. Several took photos of themselves roaring.

  There was a cough. A precise, digital clearing of an electronic throat.

  The court fell silent.

  To the Doctor’s immense delight, K-9 glided forward, wearing a human barrister’s wig. He rolled up onto a small, official-looking platform.

  ‘Your Honoured Judge,’ announced the robot dog. ‘If it does not displease you, I offer myself as the accused’s disapprover.’

  The judge looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded grimly.

  ‘I request permission to enter into evidence my open letter to the court.’

  The court went very silent.

  The judge nodded once more.

  ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ began the dog, clearly enjoying himself. ‘As an independent legal robot, it saddens me to learn that you are guilty of hatred towards alien life. Furthermore, I find it shocking that you have deprived an innocent alien of their liberty, and have, indeed, traduced the principles of your justice system in order to o
rganise a xenophobic hate rally. I submit that the only course of action for you is to resign your position.’

  The court remained silent, apart from a whisper from the Doctor. ‘Bit strong, wasn’t it K-9?’

  ‘Silence,’ the dog whispered. ‘Master.’

  The judge looked up from her notebook. ‘Thank you for your communication,’ she said to K-9. ‘In reply, I can only express how saddened I am to find that you have allied yourself with this alien spy, who proposes wiping out our race.’ There was a roar from the crowd. ‘You have conspired with an invading species,’ she went on over another roar, ‘with someone who is so evil that, if, when this trial is over, he is not locked up, I shall lock him up myself.’

  There was wild applause.

  ‘Excuse me,’ K-9 pressed on. ‘I find it offensive that you have not yet clarified what the Doctor has done.’

  ‘Oh, haven’t I?’

  ‘Negative.’

  ‘Well then, I’ll tell you what he’s done.’ The judge was standing now. ‘He has done a wide range of outrageous things, all of which would be denounced by any right-thinking citizen. Simply by refusing to distance yourself from your client, you are risking, well, I won’t say punishment, but we’ll see what happens to you when this trial is over. Furthermore, and this is something we can all agree on –’ The judge pointed at a man in the crowd. ‘You sir, that is a lovely hat. Isn’t that a great hat?’

  The crowd burst into applause. Even the Doctor nodded. It was a nice hat. He wondered if he could borrow it.

  K-9’s protests were drowned out by the crowd. The dog was baffled. He had loaded Mareeve II’s judicial system into his databanks, studied it thoroughly, and could not comprehend how it worked. It seemed to be a mixture of venom and distress, combined with the childishness of the Doctor when he was beaten at Cluedo.

  ‘I must protest, and urge all citizens to sign my petition!’ K-9 said. ‘You have not presented a single argument. You have derided and mocked me and, by failing to argue rationally with me, you have disrespected me in a heavily codified manner.’

  ‘Have I?’ the judge thundered. ‘By making that allegation, you are in fact disrespecting me and the law.’ She turned to the guards placed at the corners of the room. ‘Remove that robot!’

  The guards rushed forward. The judge raised her Rod of Justice and was yelling ‘Guilty!’ when the Doctor noticed something.

  So did Romana, who started running from her place at the back of the crowd.

  And then the Krikkitmen burst into the courtroom, firing indiscriminately.

  In the chaos, the Doctor and Romana found themselves under a desk.

  ‘The Rod of Justice!’ Romana shouted.

  ‘I know!’ the Doctor shouted back.

  The Rod of Justice was a transparent plastic tube. Their suspicions that this was part of the Wicket Gate were only confirmed when the Krikkitmen began cutting their way (quite literally) through the crowd towards it.

  The judge was waving the Rod about her. The Krikkitmen closed in. The judge looked up at them. Her voice was commendably calm.

  ‘I find you threatening and intimidating. I feel insulted by your continued presence. I shall ignore you, thus denying you the dignity of a reply. Please consider this correspondence closed.’

  The Krikkitmen raised their bats to strike.

  At which point the Doctor sailed through the air between them, snatching the Rod of Justice and throwing it to Romana.

  ‘Run,’ he shouted as he landed in a heap, bringing the judge down with him.

  But Romana was already running. She hadn’t been hatched yesterday.

  The Krikkitmen looked around, their faces glowing red with fury.

  Taking advantage of their momentary confusion, K-9 emptied his entire weapons charge into the air bringing a good deal of light fittings down on the androids.

  The judge groaned. ‘No hard feelings,’ the Doctor told her. ‘I’m most awfully sorry about the mess.’

  Then he picked up K-9 and ran from the courthouse.

  The Krikkitmen followed.

  The Doctor was running through the rain. He was being chased by five Krikkitmen across a dismal concrete square. Small, horrible bombs exploded around him. He was facing a dilemma. True, running while holding K-9 was slowing him down, but, if he put the dog down, then the dog’s low energy levels would mean that it couldn’t keep up with him.

  Actually, put like that, it wasn’t much of a dilemma. He wasn’t going to leave his best friend behind.

  A blast smacked into a cement statue, sending sharp stone chips towards the Doctor’s face. He raised K-9, and the flints smacked off the dog’s metal casing.

  There, another victory, another chance to keep going. Keep running, Doctor, keep running. But there was also a problem. The Krikkitmen were good shots and they didn’t get tired and – now, that was a thing – he couldn’t remember where the TARDIS was waiting, and it was probably a long way away and it’d probably be raining and really, was it too late to give all this up and open a teashop in the Cotswolds?

  Three Krikkitmen splashed into view at the end of the square. Their helmets glowed with a triumphant smirk. They aimed their bats at him.

  The Doctor looked over his shoulder.

  The Krikkitmen were closing in, their helmets flickered with ruby smiles. The Doctor kept running, trying to ignore the bats being levelled at him. He closed his eyes …

  He stopped running, but only because he’d smacked into the TARDIS control console. ‘What?’

  The Doctor stared around. He was inside the TARDIS.

  Romana looked up from the controls and smiled at him. ‘I materialised her around you.’

  ‘You did what? You’re getting very nimble.’

  ‘It was the short hop that was the tricky thing. I could show you, if you wanted.’

  The Doctor shook his head. He’d had quite enough for one day.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Romana, holding up the Rod of Justice. ‘We have one bit of the Wicket Gate. That’s something.’

  She flicked the controls and the TARDIS roared away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WHY FISH DON’T NEED MORTGAGES

  The people of the planet Devalin were really excellent fishermen. The problem was that they’d long since stopped catching fish.

  Their world was a large mass of splendidly fecund water, teaming with all sorts of aquatic life, from fantastically succulent prawns to rainbow-coloured fish, to jewel-shimmering seaweeds that were as rich in flavour as they were dazzling in beauty.

  One of the things that Devalin didn’t really have was land. There were a few islands here and there, but no one really cared for them. The people of Devalin loved being at sea. They loved the feel of their coral boats as they glided through the water. All a Devalinian really had to do in life was learn how to build a boat – and, really, that was fairly easy. Once that was done, they could just float along the calm waters as limpid as those limpid pools that secretaries in novels have instead of eyes. Every day was a glorious day of just gliding over the waters, pulling out a snack whenever you were hungry, maybe joining a neighbouring boat for a chat, or to try out some of their squid wine (admittedly, an acquired taste). So it followed, glorious day in and glorious day out, until, of course, one day when, after you’d eaten your last prawn, sailed your last wave, and somehow managed to swallow your last squid wine, you slipped gently over the side of your boat and sank steadily, happily to the bottom.

  This merry life was bobbing along very nicely until a small escape pod smacked onto the seas. Inside was a man in a tearing hurry. His name was Ognonimous Fugg, and he was, unfortunately, an estate agent. He’d been on his way to complete a really very complicated deal which had involved selling off the historic offices of the Cosmic Broadcasting Bureau and turning them into flats. He’d been met by a heavily armed flotilla of angry news anchors.

  ‘You’ll never get away with this!’ he’d cried. Because Ognonimous Fugg was just the sort o
f person to cry that instead of just saying it.

  It turned out he was wrong. If you are going to upset the CBB, you should probably remember they own all the cameras, and quite a few very well-armed battleships.

  Hence his sudden, fiery arrival on the planet Devalin.

  Ognonimous Fugg was terribly grateful for the rescue, delighted by the reviving seafood platter, a little bit alarmed by the squid wine, and wholly curious about the world he now found himself on.

  The Devalinians told him of their endless lazy days spent in coral boats, and, filling his fist with more prawns, Fugg was inclined to agree that their lives were perfect. Until he spotted something looming on the horizon.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ they told him. ‘That’s land. We don’t bother with that.’

  The Doctor and Romana stood in their small flat enjoying a hasty breakfast.

  ‘You’ll be late for work,’ she told him, speaking mostly into his shoulder.

  The Doctor growled and looked for somewhere to put his plate down. As usual, there wasn’t anywhere. The flat really was very tiny, with just enough room for their bunk beds and a small folding kettle. He squeezed past Romana and tried to open the door without hitting his elbow against the bed. He failed.

  Romana rinsed the plates in the sink under her pillow, dried them, and then followed the Doctor out onto a walkway that was even narrower. There was a slouch in his walk and a slump in his shoulders. She was getting worried about him.

  The problem with the city was that no one in their right mind would have built it. But Ognonimous Fugg was an estate agent, and he’d seen an opportunity. He’d explained to the Devalinians that, as they had so little land, it was worth a large amount of money.

  They’d laughed at him, as none of them were interested in land, and had no idea of money.

  So, they’d let him buy the land off them in return for a recipe for paella.

  Then he’d started building.

  The first thing he built was a bank. It took a while, as first he had to convince some Devalinians to stop sailing and come and learn how to build. They’d offered to pop by in their evenings and help out, but he’d been firm. No fishing for them. Instead, he explained, other people would bring them fish in return for money. Which was what the bank was for.