‘I just came around this tree and it was facing me,’ she whispered. I kept my eyes on it but there wasn’t a single movement. It was half hidden in some bushes but I could see the unnatural shine of two squat legs and the scales of its body gleamed dully in the speckled sunlight that shone through the trees above us. It was about the size of a small pig and eyes sprang out of the monster’s head on long stalks. I heard Susan and the Doctor crashing through the forest after us and when they came into view I motioned to them cautiously.
‘Get ready to run.’
I eased Barbara away from the tree that was giving one or two ominous creaks anyway as the pressure of her body increased. I led her away slowly and still the animal didn’t budge an inch.
Susan said, ‘I think it’s dead.’
‘I wouldn’t like to test that theory,’ I replied grimly. I had just caught a glimpse of its mouth and the jaws looked as dangerous as a small crocodile, with sharp teeth jutting out hungrily.
‘The eyes don’t move at all,’ murmured the Doctor. He bent down and picked up a twig and threw it at the animal and the protest died in my throat when it still didn’t move a muscle. I picked up a fallen branch carefully, feeling it beginning to crumble in my hands, and edged my way forward. I prodded with the stick into the bushes and there was a slight tinny sound as the stick broke over the animal’s back.
‘You were right, Susan, it is dead. Looks as if it’s been petrified like everything else in the forest.’
The Doctor walked over and rapped his knuckles on the animal’s scales. As he pushed the bushes away we had a full view of the thing. It had a tail at least twice as long as its body and sharp spikes ran from the head right down the spinal column to the tip of the tail.
‘It isn’t petrified,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s solidified. This is metal.’
Barbara had overcome her fear and she knelt down beside him. ‘But that’s impossible!’
‘Why? Because you can’t imagine an animal that might be made entirely of metal? I tell you this is a metal monster, or rather was. Held together by some inner magnetic force, I shouldn’t wonder. It probably had the ability to attract its victims towards it, for quite clearly it fed upon metal as well.’
He stood up suddenly. ‘Ashy soil. Crystallized flowers, dead trees and solidified metal. What does that suggest to you, Chesterton?’
‘Heat, obviously. Concentrated heat and yet…’ I stared at him. ‘An atomic explosion of some sort.’
‘Precisely. A gigantic one, too, and yet not an atomic or a hydrogen one as being experimented with on your planet. That would simply sweep everything away from the crust of this planet. Here, we have things in some sort of preservation.’
Susan said, ‘There’s a kind of path over here.’
The Doctor motioned us to follow her. ‘I hope I haven’t brought you to a dead planet, Chesterton,’ he murmured glumly. His disappointment was so obvious I had to smile and I looked across at Barbara on the other side of him.
‘You don’t imagine we’d rather have met a live one of those monsters, do you?’
‘It would have been a good subject for study,’ he muttered and I saw Barbara raise her eyes in mock surprise. Then Susan ran back towards us.
‘There’s a city!’ she cried in excitement. ‘I can see it where the forest ends.’
We ran after her and I found myself caught up with her excitement, as if finding a city was the discovery of the century. The Doctor hurried on ahead of me, his long white hair streaming out behind him, his arms working away at his sides and when we came up to where Susan was standing I noticed that he didn’t seem to be out of breath at all. I only hoped that I’d be as fit as he was when I reached his age.
The forest did end, just as Susan said, and the little path broadened out into a clearing where the ashy soil was very loose and deep. Ahead of us, there was a long line of tall rocks and Susan was standing on a small boulder, shading her eyes against the sunlight and looking through a cleft just ahead of her. She turned back and watched us ploughing our way through the soil and laughed at us suddenly. I imagined from what Barbara had said that Susan was aged about fifteen but silhouetted there as she was, with her dark, short cut hair against the white rocks behind her, she looked like a young woman in her twenties, very attractive and vivacious. I wondered briefly what would happen when she met a man she wanted to marry and decided not to travel in the Tardis with her grandfather any longer. This opened up too many questions about what planet the Doctor and his granddaughter had come from originally and whether the people on it knew about such Earth-like customs as marriage. I put the questions aside for another time and helped Barbara climb up on the boulder and the four of us (for the Doctor had scrambled up beside Susan with remarkable agility) stared through the cleft in the rocks at the city.
It was about a mile away, I judged, and looked like a cluster of electrical gadgets. There were polished metal domes that shone in the sunlight, all sorts of tall, square shaped buildings and what I described to myself as electric pylon masts and radar scanners dotted liberally around the domes and buildings.
‘Quite magnificent,’ breathed the Doctor, and I had to agree. Whoever had designed it and whatever its purpose, there was an exact and beautiful symmetry about the construction and the lay-out.
Barbara said, ‘Well, that doesn’t seem to have been affected by the explosion or whatever it was that destroyed the forest.’
‘Do you think anyone lives down there, Grandfather?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘I don’t quite know why the city is still intact but I’m certain there was some sort of huge explosion in this area. People couldn’t survive. Not,’ he went on slowly, ‘people as we know them, at any rate.’
I digested this. I’d seen for myself a creature made of metal in the forest. It seemed possible that there might be survivors of some sort living in the city. I was so busy with my thoughts that I only just caught the gist of what the Doctor was saying.
‘I’m afraid I can’t let you do that, Doctor,’ I said slowly.
‘That city, I repeat young man, is a subject for examination and I intend to make a survey of it.’ I shook my head.
‘Not without preparation. Not without discussion either. We don’t know what’s down there and it may be dangerous.’
‘I intend to go alone,’ he replied tartly, ‘so you needn’t be afraid.’
‘But I am afraid, Doctor. You control the Ship. You’ve uprooted us from our own world and brought us to this one, but we have some say in our safety. And yours, too. I’m afraid I can’t let any of us go down there alone until we’ve worked out all the possibilities.’
I really thought he was going to hit me for a moment, his anger was so great. Anyway, he controlled himself and turned away from me and looked down at the city once more. Susan looked at me anxiously. She had a healthy respect for her relative and obviously hated it when there were any arguments. The Doctor turned back and astonished me with a genial smile.
‘We’ll go back to the Tardis and have some food and discuss it then.’
I nodded and jumped off the boulder, handing down Susan and Barbara. I looked up at the Doctor who was taking one last look at the distant city. The rays of the sun just caught his eyes but I had a sudden impression that something else was making them shine. I tried to dismiss the feeling that came to me but it clung stubbornly. I was in a new and unreliable world and it didn’t help to think that the least trustworthy factor was the Doctor.
The light was fading when we got back to the Tardis and I became anxious because Susan had dropped behind. All of us were as sure as we could be in the circumstances that there was nothing to fear in that dead place, but I didn’t much care for the way darkness was closing in. I imagined Susan blundering about for hours, perhaps even all night, trying to find her way back. The Doctor and Barbara went back into the Ship and I started to look for her.
My feet made no sound as I tramped through the wood, the only occ
asional noise being when I happened to touch a twig or one of the branches and it snapped and powdered around me. It was eerie and uncomfortable because I had the distinct feeling that someone was watching me. Twice I stopped and turned round quickly, feeling a slight prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck, only to curse myself for an over-sensitive imagination.
Suddenly I heard a cry of sheer terror up ahead of me and the sound of wildly running steps. It was a part of the forest we’d passed through before and we’d left plenty of shattered wood behind us. I heard the running feet snapping and breaking the dead wood underfoot and then Susan ran into view. I caught her in my arms and she sobbed gratefully.
‘A hand touched me,’ she gasped. ‘I was picking one of those flowers I found, the crystallized ones and the hand just came out from behind me and touched my shoulder.’
‘But you know nothing could be in this forest, Susan.’
I helped her along the path leading back to the Tardis and it was several seconds before she answered me.
‘We’re in the forest. Why shouldn’t someone else be?’
I told her it must have been a branch that she’d backed into but she wouldn’t have a bit of it and neither the Doctor nor Barbara could make her change her mind.
‘It was a hand, a human hand. I didn’t imagine it and I didn’t make it up. I tell you there are other people in the forest besides ourselves.’
We were gathered around what the Doctor called the food machine and the Doctor finally rapped on the top of it, stopping both Barbara and myself in the middle of further arguments with Susan to try and make her see she was wrong.
‘It doesn’t matter now anyway, because we’re not going to stay on this planet. Whether Susan felt anything or not is a little mystery we’ll leave unexplained.’ He looked at me. ‘Chesterton, as soon as we’ve eaten I shall operate the controls and we’ll go somewhere else. Perhaps back to your own planet Earth. How would you like that, eh?’
After the silence Barbara said quietly, ‘Can you do that, Doctor?’
He shrugged. ‘As I told you, the computer that calculates the journeys is out of order. Its behaviour is too erratic for me to make any promises. And remember, we have not only space to cover but time as well.’
I saw a pulse quickening on the side of Barbara’s throat. ‘Do you mean you may never take us back to our time on Earth?’ she demanded. The Doctor nodded.
‘I mean exactly that, Miss Wright. But don’t let us pursue that line of conversation any longer. I’m sure you’re both hungry; I know I am. What would you like to eat?’ He looked at me inquiringly.
‘Anything? Anything in the world?’ I asked.
‘Yes, even on your world.”
‘I think I’d like some bacon and eggs, then, if that’s all right with you?’
He waved a hand, as if he were the head waiter at some exclusive restaurant and I’d asked him whether he had such a thing as a fork. He stood in front of the food machine and pressed a variety of buttons.
‘XL4 285 J,’ he muttered. There was a moment’s pause and then a little bank of bulbs lit up and we heard a buzzer sound three times. The Doctor lifted a flap and produced what looked to me like a Mars Bar on a paper plate, except that it had the colour of white icing. He handed it to Barbara, turned back to the machine and intoned the same numbers and pressed the buttons again and then handed me a similar plateful. Barbara and I glanced at each other doubtfully and Susan laughed.
‘Go on, try it. It’s all right,’ she said, her eyes sparkling with amusement. I bit into mine, not knowing quite what to expect and there I was eating eggs and bacon! I could taste the two things quite distinctly and the food was just preserved at the right heat. I felt the Doctor waiting for me to say something.
‘The eggs are a bit hard,’ I said casually and winked at Barbara. The Doctor wasn’t even put out.
‘You should have told me. I’d have adjusted one of the numbers by a fraction. It’s all very easy. Susan, what will you have?’
Susan shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry, Grandfather.’
He looked at her sharply. ‘That’s unlike you, my child. Still, I won’t press you. For myself…’ He turned his attention to the machine again and it was as if he were surveying a tray of hors-d’oeuvres… ‘I shall have some of that Venusian Night Fish we discovered. I’m very glad I laid in a supply of that.’
He muttered some numbers and letters and extracted a paper plate with three long rods on it, a little like bread sticks. I asked him how the machine worked and how I was able to taste the eggs separately from the bacon.
‘Perfectly simple, Chesterton. Tastes are very much like colours, you know. You blend two to get a third and so on.’
It was at that moment that we all heard the tapping. I was just about to take my last bite and my hand froze near my mouth. It was a distinct noise, one-two-three on the doors of the Ship. The Doctor put down his food on the machine and hurried away.
Susan said: ‘I told you there was someone in the forest.’
We went after the Doctor and found him in the control room operating the scanner. The pictures on it changed and changed again as he searched around outside, but whatever had been responsible for the noise had totally disappeared.
‘I have very strong searchlights accompanying this picture,’ he told me. ‘They’re quite invisible outside the Tardis, of course. They merely serve to make a picture possible at night-time. Well, there’s nothing there now, at any rate.’
He switched off the scanner and smiled at me in the most guileless fashion. ‘It would seem to support what I said about leaving this planet.’
He made me feel uneasy but I agreed. There was something behind his face and I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was. He motioned to Susan to stand nearer to him and his hands began to run over the dials and switches as I had seen him do before. This time, however, the engines, or whatever power-force it was that drove the Tardis, didn’t respond in the same way. All I could hear was a complaining growl blending in with a screech as if gears were being changed badly. Susan looked at her grandfather anxiously and he shook his head.
‘Have a look at the fault locater, Susan.’ Susan ran away and Barbara moved nearer to the Doctor.
‘Doctor, it isn’t broken, is it?’
He looked at her benevolently. ‘No, Miss Wright, not a bit of it. We’ll soon track down the fault.’
Susan had been peering into a small glass panel and even from where I was standing I could see numbers spinning round inside it.
‘K Four, Grandfather.’
‘One of the fluid links.’ The Doctor moved around the control column slightly, beckoning me to join him. He lifted up a panel and I bent down beside him. I could see a small row of glass rods nestling together side by side. He lifted out one of them and asked me to hold it while he fixed his glasses more securely on his nose. Then he took it from me and tapped it.
‘Yes, this is the one all right. This is similar in a way to a fuse that you would employ to conduct and control your electricity on Earth.’
‘What’s the matter with it?’
‘Mercury is the conductor in this case, not little pieces of wire.’ He held it up and showed me one end of it. ‘The end has become slightly dislodged and the mercury has escaped.’
‘So all you need is to replenish it with more mercury.’
He beamed at me as if I’d propounded the theory of relativity to him. ‘I couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself, Chesterton.’
‘Can I get it for you?’
‘I’m afraid you can’t, no.’
I stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I haven’t got any.’
There was a fairly long silence as he and I stared at each other. I looked right into his eyes and now I knew exactly what lay in them, but there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. Barbara broke the silence.
‘But surely you carry a spare supply of mercury, Doctor?’
He shook his head sadly.
‘There’s none left. I used the last of it for some experiments about a month ago. A trifle foolish of me not to replace the stock, but there it is.’
‘Haven’t you got a barometer that you could…?’
‘Nothing like that at all, my dear young lady,’ he interrupted. He examined the fluid link as if searching for an answer then shrugged his shoulders in despair. It was all most convincing if you had an unsuspicious nature. I stood there, waiting patiently for the Doctor to work his trick. His playacting obviously fooled Barbara because she touched his arm gently.
‘Don’t worry about it. It isn’t such a tragedy.’
‘Ah, but that’s just it, I am worrying.’ He moved about slowly, gesturing with one hand in a most dramatic way. ‘Miss Wright, Susan, Chesterton…’ he surveyed us all with sombre eyes, ‘… because of my absent-mindedness in not renewing my stocks, we are destined to live out the remainder of our lives on this inhospitable planet.’
I glanced across at Susan and her eyes seemed to fill her face. I thought it was a bit cruel of the old man to play on his own granddaughter’s feelings, too.
Barbara said, suddenly, ‘What about the city? There may be some mercury down there.’
The Doctor stopped in his tracks and swung his head round at her. His mouth dropped open and then he crossed to her and wrung one of her hands with joy.
‘My dear, of course! The city! This business of the fluid link had quite put it out of my mind.’ He darted a look at me and the triumph in his eyes was as clear as daylight. ‘Even you can’t object to that, Chesterton.’
I was conscious that they were all looking at me.
‘No, we’ll go down to the city. Doctor,’ I replied as calmly as I could. ‘There isn’t any other choice, is there?’
‘I’m glad you take that attitude, though it’s too dark to go now.’
Doctor Who and the Daleks Page 5
