‘Ah,’ said the people of Devalin. ‘Fish tokens.’
He’d then explained that they couldn’t leave their boats cluttering up the small shore, as this would spoil the view of the Harbourfront Development.
‘What’s one of those?’ they’d asked.
‘Well,’ he’d told them, ‘you’ll have to have somewhere to sleep while you’re building the bank.’
So, as they could no longer sleep in their boats, they’d built houses in the harbour. And a small shop for the selling of fish. And, of course, the bank which gave them money. They needed the money to buy the fish, and, also, to pay for their houses.
You’d have thought that, at this point, someone would have smelt a rotten herring. Instead, the little old lady who ran the fish store said that, while she wasn’t quite sure what money was, she was getting an awful lot of it for handing over fish, which as everyone knew, grew on seas. So it seemed worth the bother. And really, what harm did it do? She actually had so much money she was able to get a house in the harbour with a really nice view of her boat. Which was almost as nice as being on the boat.
Ognonimous Fugg knew he was winning the day a second fish shop opened. Then he built a second bank.
That stymied the people of Devalin a bit. Why were there two banks?
Choice, Fugg told them. One bank, you see, might offer you three coins for three fish one day, but only two coins for three fish the next. Whereas the bank next door might offer you four coins for two fish.
‘Why would you do that?’ the Devalinians demanded.
‘It’s called a free market.’
As well as a second bank, he also built some more houses on the other side of the island. These, he said, had an even better view of the sea. They also cost more money. For a while, the people in the original houses laughed – what better view of the sea was there than theirs? But then they worried – what if he had a point? So they decided to swap their houses on one side of the island for the other. This was the point at which they discovered that they needed more money in order to do this.
‘Ah well,’ they said, ‘not a problem. We’ll just get a few more fish. After all, how much can it cost? A house, well, it’s hardly worth an octopus, is it?’
Fugg explained, politely but firmly, that the exchange had to be made in money. A lot of money. Which was, of course, available from the banks in the form of a loan. With, naturally, a modest interest rate.
‘What’s an interest rate?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain that when we’ve built some more houses,’ said Ognonimous Fugg.
This goes some way to explaining why the Doctor and Romana found themselves working in a canning factory and living in an incredibly cramped apartment in a narrow, totally impractical tower block teetering over the tiny island.
They’d found jobs in the canning factory. For some reason, no one really went out in a boat and caught fish by hand any more. Opening a can of fish was so much more efficient, even if, perhaps, a bit more expensive.
To start with, the harbour had still bustled with little boats, nipping back and forth. But people had got busier, worked harder, and the boats had dwindled and the canning factory had spread out, blocking the views of all those rather nice harbour front cafés. If the wind was in the right direction (and it often was) the smell from it forced the people choking from their hard-earned balconies.
The Doctor found the whole process of squeezing fish into a tin reprehensible. Fish here, he thought, had a definite shape. They were long and finny. But the canning factory expected them to be round. Or square. Or, for a few shillings more, square with arty rounded corners. At the end of every miserable day, he made a joke about tins that were smaller on the inside than the outside, but Romana no longer smiled. She was working in quality assurance, which involved, for the most part, checking that a tin was indeed a tin, and then pasting a jolly label of a grinning fish on it. On balance, she’d had more laughs working in a Dalek slave mine.
She found this new life utterly bemusing. When they’d first arrived, the Doctor had taken one look around and shuddered.
‘The Golden Bail is around here somewhere.’ The Doctor was checking some readings he’d jotted down on his cuff. ‘Popped out of the Time Vortex and just sat around being completely ignored for two million years until the planet suddenly developed an economy. Economies are dreadful things. Now it’s in that building.’ He pointed to a structure of grand columns and smug arches. ‘A bank. How very boring.’
‘Bound to have a lot of security,’ said Romana, looking dubiously at her sonic screwdriver.
‘Only interesting thing about a bank,’ the Doctor smiled.
‘But we’re still going to steal the bail?’
‘Yes. But cleverly.’ The Doctor tapped the side of his nose. ‘The first thing to do is to drum up some pretext or other to get inside.’
‘Such as?’
‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ the Doctor said, strolling into the bank.
A quarter of an hour later, the Doctor and Romana had a key and a mortgage.
According to Romana, that was when it had all gone wrong.
Previous attempts to change Romana’s behaviour had proven patchy. In her travels she had experienced mind control, evil clones, and even dispatched a robot double with the fashion sense of a cat lady. But, for some reason, the pressure of having to go out and work for a living was insidiously successful. There’d been no hypno-ray, no rasp of ‘Obey Zarl!’, just a rather sad-looking ex-fisherman in a tie talking them through a brochure.
The change in the Doctor had been quick and worrying. For the first time since she’d known him, he looked trapped.
‘Can’t we just go back to the TARDIS?’ she’d asked.
‘We can’t do that now. It’s illegally parked,’ he’d muttered, much to Romana’s amazement. ‘We’d have to work off the fine.’
The whole concept of a mortgage had annoyed the Doctor. He was appalled by the idea of a loan that would only make you pleased if you died. In theory it was paying off their flat in increments, but in practice, what with the rising service charges, the rates, the water bill and the fish tax, they didn’t seem to be making any headway. ‘At this rate,’ he’d moaned, ‘we’ll need to live another 2,000 years in order to pay this off.’
‘Doctor, is living like this really your plan?’ Romana had asked as he’d served up a dinner of boiled fish omelette. ‘Because if it is, I’m not sure I like it.’
‘Me neither,’ admitted the Doctor. He’d not spoken for the rest of the night.
It seemed as though the Doctor had given in. As if all he could do was cram fish into tins and hope for the best.
Romana was almost hoping the Krikkitmen would turn up.
It was another grim day in the factory when the Doctor decided to put seven fish into a tin rather than six. He didn’t like pilchards, and he was fairly certain the people buying the tins didn’t like them either. But there was something so regimented about putting just six fish, every single time, into a tin. Why not seven, or sometimes, five? Shake things up a bit – well, as much as a tinned fish can be shaken. After more trying, he’d accepted that the tins would take only six fish. They looked crammed with seven and meagre with five. Six looked just right. Insultingly right.
The Doctor let out the long, long sigh of a man whose spirit has finally broken.
‘How boring,’ he announced. ‘Boring!’
A hand landed on his shoulder.
‘That was quick,’ said the Doctor.
The Doctor and Romana sat in a glum side office. The room had been given the exact level of design afforded to budget hotels. Someone had clearly looked at what rooms required and decided to do away with all the frills, like a window, carpet, painted walls, and chairs. The only frippery was a very solid lock on the door. The Doctor looked up at the bare lightbulb and blew a raspberry at it.
‘I hate it here,’ he said.
Romana broke into her first smi
le in days. ‘Do you? I’m so glad. I’ve been worried about you.’
‘Me too.’ The Doctor flashed her a ghostly smile. ‘I think I’m allergic to normality.’
The door swung open, and a very angry man stormed in. He was licking his lips in a way that would have made a sandwich flinch. He slapped down a very thick wodge of printouts on the desk.
‘Got you, sunshines, got you!’ he snorted with porcine triumph. ‘You beauties are for the high jump.’
‘Are we?’ Romana raised a glacier of an eyebrow. ‘I’m rather more of a javelin girl.’
‘And I’m quite definitely quoits.’ The Doctor’s insolence was back and it was marvellous.
The angry man rapped a knuckle against the livery of his uniform. ‘Don’t come the clever-clever with me. You have no idea who you’re dealing with.’
Romana toyed with the possibilities. Intergalactic Assassin? Agent of the Black Guardian?
‘I’m a traffic warden,’ the man snarled.
The Doctor made a brief attempt to take the man seriously. He bit his lip and muttered, ‘Is that so? Goodness.’
‘You thought you could just run off and leave your … box … in the road where it had no right to be, did you?’ The man was practically drooling with glee. ‘Well, we found you, oh yes we did. And do you want to know how?’
‘Oh, how?’ Romana was all politeness.
‘Your little pinkies,’ the man sneered. ‘You left your fingerprints smeared all over it.’
(Not surprised, thought Romana. There had, after all, been that time when they’d both been clinging to the outside as the TARDIS flew over Whipsnade Zoo.)
‘How terribly careless of us,’ the Doctor said. ‘Imagine that.’
‘Wasn’t it?’ the traffic warden laughed. ‘We ran them through the system and found you working here. But not any more. No.’ The man pattered his paws on the folder. ‘You’re fired. Any wages owed will go toward the fines. If you can’t settle the outstanding balance, then your property will be forfeited. One mistake, and you’re finished in Fuggville – why, you may as well build a raft and go live on the sea.’ He clearly found the idea absurd, and the Doctor clicked his teeth.
‘Well now,’ the Doctor confessed. ‘I’m afraid I just had to leave my box there. Because it’s very special.’
‘Is that so?’ the man snorted. ‘Well, it won’t let you off the fine.’
‘Won’t it? It’s worth a lot of money.’ The Doctor played his Ace. ‘If an estate agent would care to meet us there.’
Ognonimous Fugg himself was standing outside the TARDIS. He’d had a boring day and fancied a laugh.
‘I’m a busy man, but intrigued.’ He rapped a fat knuckle on the side of the blue wooden box. ‘So, would you care to explain to me how this thing parked on my pavement is worth a lot of money? It’s barely large enough for a family of four.’
Suppressing a small shudder, the Doctor shook Mr Fugg by the hand and marvelled at how the man had managed to get fat to deposit around his knuckles. ‘Mr Fugg, delighted to meet you!’ the Doctor lied. ‘You’re in for a treat.’
And with that, he unlocked the door of the TARDIS.
The richest man on Devalin gaped.
‘Not an optical illusion, not a projection, not a virtual reality, not a hallucination,’ Romana ticked them off her fingers.
‘Go inside and have a look!’ the Doctor encouraged.
Mr Fugg walked into the TARDIS. He didn’t even notice the robot dog which warily followed his every move. Well, until his fingers hovered over a shiny gold trifle on a desk and K-9 cleared his throat with butlerish aplomb.
‘How big is this house?’ Mr Fugg eventually called from the rear of the control room.
At this, the Doctor threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Infinite!’ he said.
Mr Fugg came uncertainly out of the ship, a nervous swimmer fighting against a strong tide.
He looked back in, blinked, and then turned to the Doctor, rubbing his hands together.
‘What a wonder!’ Mr Fugg exclaimed, a sly look hooding his eyelids. ‘And how unfortunate for you, my dear sir, that your magnificent box should be sadly forfeit.’ He glanced back inside. ‘I’ll be only too glad to make better use of this.’
‘Ah, no.’ The Doctor shook his head. He held up his parking tickets. ‘You might want to check your new laws. I’m allowed to leave my vehicle here so long as I keep paying these excessive fines. I consider it Ground Rent.’
Mr Fugg’s face wanted to look crestfallen but couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Surely, surely you misinterpret my laws.’
‘No!’ the Doctor laughed. ‘I got my dog to check the small print.’
‘But …’ began Mr Fugg. ‘You’re off world. And that means …’
Now Romana shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. We paid the fines with our wages. Earned here.’
The Doctor clapped his hands together. ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ he beamed, throwing an arm around Mr Fugg’s shoulder. ‘Think how many people I could offer free homes to in here.’
‘Free?’ Mr Fugg’s smile finally ran away.
‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor leaned in. ‘And these boxes? We have them all over my home world. Imagine what’ll happen when I tell my friends to park a few along here.’
Their eyes all wandered up to the glum grey buildings towering over them.
‘But surely—’ began Mr Fugg, and then his brain stopped. All he could see was the total collapse of his economy overnight. Caused by a magical shed owned by a man who smelt of fish.
‘Just imagine …’ Romana took off her apron, began to fold it neatly, then threw it away. ‘People will learn they no longer have to pay to live somewhere. No longer have to work to pay for their house and spend the leftovers on eating tinned fish.’
‘Perhaps,’ suggested the Doctor, ‘they’ll think about going sailing again.’
‘I forbid it!’ snapped Mr Fugg.
The Doctor closed the door of his blue box and strolled away. ‘I think it’s too late for you to forbid anything!’
‘No it isn’t,’ protested Fugg. ‘No one knows about this. It’s just an idea.’
Without stopping to turn, the Doctor answered him. ‘No. You can’t stop ideas. Not once they’re out of the box.’
They walked through town, Mr Fugg trailing behind them, shouting and pleading and screaming and begging.
Along the way, Romana noticed a sound buzzing through the narrow streets. It was the sound of an idea catching on, of people saying ‘Bother it’ and putting down their tins and casting aside their aprons and going out for a stroll.
The Doctor was whistling, looking happier than he had done for days. His plan had worked brilliantly. When the banking system collapsed, all he’d have to do was to ask nicely and they’d give him the Golden Bail of Prosperity.
Which was when the Bank blew up.
Mr Fugg stared in horror. The air was full of a burning cloud of money and mortgages.
Soaring out from the smoke was a cricket pavilion.
‘Ah well,’ the Doctor said philosophically. ‘Still, not a bad day’s work.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE PERFECT PLANET
‘No purple.’ The Doctor was barely out of the TARDIS and he was already complaining. ‘The problem with this planet is that it has no purple.’
They’d come to Bethselamin to find the Silver Bail of Peace. They’d failed in their quest to secure all the parts of the Wicket Gate. The Krikkitmen weren’t far behind. And the Doctor was still grumbling about the lack of purple.
‘I checked the readouts before we left the TARDIS.’ The Doctor announced this unusual news proudly, as well he might. ‘I expect it’s some slight imbalance in the refractive index caused by crystals in the upper atmosphere.’ He mumbled the end of the sentence hastily in case Romana challenged him on the science. He could already hear K-9 clearing his throat. ‘Anyway, the big thing is, no purple.’
Romana looked at the gente
el cityscape stretching before her. ‘They seem to be getting along perfectly well without it.’
‘I miss it already,’ the Doctor announced. He was clearly in that mood. ‘I mean, what happens if I want to mix blue and green together? What will happen then?’
‘You’ll get cyan,’ said Romana. ‘If you want purple you’ll have to mix red and green.’
‘Exactly,’ the Doctor wandered away to kick some stones.
Romana crouched down next to K-9. ‘K-9,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t think the Doctor is going to enjoy Bethselamin.’
The Doctor hadn’t stopped grumbling as they’d made their way to the city. Romana was worried – the Krikkit robots had three parts of the Wicket Gate. Would the one bit in their possession be somehow enough to stop the creatures unlocking their home planet? At the very least, they’d be facing an awkward arbitration process.
The Doctor was sanguine about it. ‘It’ll be like swapping football stickers,’ he said, showing off his mercurial talents. ‘Yes, they’ve got Giant Haystacks plus Torvill and Dean, but we’ve got Kevin Keegan and are about to get our hands on Eric Bristow.’
‘Um,’ said Romana.
The Doctor didn’t listen. He still wouldn’t stop grumbling. Not even when a crowd of revellers had offered them refreshments, including delicious slices of a blue sort of watermelon. He’d scowled at it.
By the time they reached the city walls, you could have grown turnips in the furrows in his brow. Gaily dressed people had come skipping, yes skipping, out from the city. The fearsome walls turned out simply to be gaudy canvas backdrops against which a variety of lyrical numbers could be performed by musicians and dancers and acrobats. The streets were thronged with smiling, waving people.
‘They seem pleased to see us,’ said Romana.
‘I know,’ the Doctor groaned. ‘It’s a trap.’
If it was a trap, it persisted for a long, very enthusiastic while. As the sun set, more dancers came out with torches and tambourines, followed by children offering around sweetmeats and roast nuts.
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 11
