Wetworld

by Mark Michalowski

  ‘Especially without your sonic thing.’

  ‘Oh, who needs gadgets? Told you before,’ the Doctor said, tapping the side of his head. ‘Greatest tool in the galaxy.’

  ‘Someone was being a bit unkind,’ Candy couldn’t help but joke.

  He threw her a sharp look.

  ‘Please, Candy – just go. Tell the settlers what we’ve found. We’ll be back – honest.’

  ‘Why not come with me now, then?’

  ‘Because I want to find out more about what’s going on.’

  Candy’s shoulders fell – she knew that he wouldn’t give up until she’d gone.

  ‘Right,’ she said eventually. ‘Fine. Just… you know.’ And before she could stop herself, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘Come back, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he smiled. ‘Trust me.’

  ‘What, ’cos you’re a doctor?’

  ‘No: ’cos I’m the Doctor! Now get moving!’

  Candy glanced back down the slope: the wave of otters was closer, much closer. With a quick squeeze of Ty’s hand, she headed back towards Sunday City.

  The otters approached in a broad wave, pausing fifty metres or so away.

  ‘Oh… now that’s interesting…’ The Doctor gestured down the slope.

  The otters, like a sea of brown fur, were parting – moving aside to leave a clear path through the centre of them.

  ‘Come into my parlour…’ whispered the Doctor. ‘Am I the only one to get the feeling we’ve been set up here?’

  Ty glanced to the left and the right and saw that the otters, without being noticed, had executed a perfect pincer movement, slipping behind them. Trapping them.

  ‘I think we’re being invited in for a cuppa.’

  ‘We’re not going, are we?’ said Ty.

  ‘It’d be rude to refuse.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Ty.

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor primly. ‘Just very well brought up. Come on – if we don’t hurry, the tea’ll be stewed. And there’s nothing worse than stewed tea.’

  ‘Apart from death at the claws of a thousand otters,’ she pointed out as the Doctor stepped forward and began to descend the slope.

  ‘Yes,’ he said airily over his shoulder. ‘There is that.’

  Down on the mud flats, the half-dozen humans went about their business silently, like robots. And the otters parted further, funnelling the Doctor and Ty to the edge of the water, which slopped gently up onto the bank and then dropped back, dark and oily, reflecting the growing clouds above them. Ty shuddered.

  ‘If they think I’m going swimming,’ she said, ‘then they’re out of their tiny minds.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think they have tiny minds at all,’ the Doctor said. ‘Not the slimeys at any rate. In fact I think they have rather large ones. Not their own, granted, but still pretty big. Think of them as time shares.’

  He looked down at her and smiled.

  ‘SETI!’ Ty cried and snapped her fingers. ‘Not settee – SETI! That computer thingy. But that was abandoned years ago. My grandpa was really into it. Grandma kept complaining about him leaving the computer on all the time.’

  ‘Knew you’d get there eventually’ said the Doctor. ‘SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. So, Professor Benson, tell me what you know about it while we wait for the sandwiches and cakes to arrive.’

  ‘This is just so’s you can look all smug and clever, isn’t it? Go on then: it was some sort of government scheme – American I think – to look for alien signals, radio messages.’ She looked at the Doctor. ‘Right?’

  He just smiled.

  ‘And ‘cos it needed loads of computing to analyse the signals, they came up with a sort of time-share plan. People all around the world – ordinary people with computers at home – sort of logged on to this network and let their computer do some of the work for them. I’m right, aren’t I?’

  ‘Gold star, Professor,’ beamed the Doctor.

  ‘So you’re saying that the slimeys are like that – but with brains?’

  ‘It fits the evidence. And, as a scientist, you know that that’s what science is all about – looking at the evidence and coming up with a theory that fits it. In their natural state, I bet they’re pretty stupid – tiny little brains. But when they land on a planet, they find some smart creatures and hijack their brains for a while – get them to do some of the thinking for them. They hive off some thinking, some processing, into – well, say, otters, or people or whatever they can – and then, later, the otters or people go back to the slimeys, upload the results of all that thinking, and the slimeys repeat it again with other otters.’

  ‘Or people,’ Ty finished. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s very effective, though.’

  Ty was appalled at the Doctor’s attitude.

  ‘The slimeys use the resources of the planets they infect – no need to carry around whopping great brains of their own. And it means they begin with a head start, as it were. Who better than the natives to know how the local environment works, where stuff is, what the weather’s like, where the best coffee shop is. Instinct becomes intelligence – just like that! Straight to Mayfair, collect two hundred pounds. Brilliant!’

  But the expression on his face changed as the waters before them began to swirl and churn. Ty took a step back – only to discover that the otters had enclosed them, trapping them against the shore.

  ‘You know what you said earlier,’ Ty whispered. ‘About the slimeys being aquatic, and how we’d be safe if we stayed away from the water…’

  Suddenly, the surface of the river was broken with a huge, foamy splash.

  A figure rose up from the water, drenching them all. Ty steeled herself for one of the tendrils that had attacked Martha in the nest.

  But the thing that came towards them was the last thing she had expected to see.

  It was Pallister.

  THIRTEEN

  Pallister stared at them with dead, black eyes, sparkling wetly like the carapaces of monstrous insects. His upright body swung limply, like a corpse, as it floated towards them across the water. Its feet dragged the surface, and they could see the huge tendril that supported him from behind. It split into three smaller ones, moistly green, piercing his skull at the back and the sides, like fingers stuck into a ten-pin bowling ball. They pulsed and throbbed, as if they were pumping fluids in and out of the man’s brain. Ty shuddered, realising that this must have been how Col had died.

  ‘You,’ said Pallister, his voice bubbling and dribbling from his mouth like oil, ‘will be me.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said the Doctor archly, folding his arms. ‘Well excuse me if I decline your very kind offer. I rather enjoy being me, actually.’

  Pallister – or the thing that controlled him – seemed to consider the Doctor’s words for a moment. Water dripped from the man’s clothes into the river, sending little ripples out across its surface.

  ‘It’s processing,’ the Doctor whispered to Ty out of the corner of his mouth. ‘The thing that’s operating poor old Pallister is using his brain to translate. Much quicker than time-sharing the otters’ brains, I imagine.’

  ‘Why?’ came the reply, after what seemed like forever.

  ‘Why?’ said the Doctor indignantly. ‘Why? Why d’you think? I was born me, I’ve lived my life – well, most of it – as me, and I’d rather like to carry on being me. That’s the way I am.’

  Pallister’s body twitched as one of the creature’s tendrils jerked.

  ‘To work as one,’ it said slowly, ‘is better. Unity is better than diversity.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Pallister thinks that. It is in accord with me.’

  The Doctor blew a raspberry.

  ‘I wouldn’t take much notice of poor old Pallister. Bit up himself if you ask me. And if you had better access to his brain, you’d see that there’s a big difference between “unity” and “obsessive single-mindedness”.’ He paused and leaned forwards sl
ightly. ‘But you can’t, can you? I mean, you weren’t exactly at the front of the queue when evolution handed out brains, were you?’

  Pallister blinked slowly with a cold superiority. He said nothing.

  ‘See!’ cried the Doctor smugly. ‘You haven’t a clue what I’m talking about! All your intelligence is just time-shares, isn’t it?’ The Doctor turned to Ty with a grin. ‘What did I tell you? This thing’s just renting rooms in other people’s heads.’

  ‘Well,’ Ty muttered dourly, ‘the landlord isn’t going to be too pleased about what his new tenant’s done to the property.’ She looked at Pallister, his skin puffed and bloated, the holes in his head where the creature’s tentacles fed in.

  ‘Interesting evolutionary tactic,’ the Doctor mused, peering at Pallister again. ‘Just squat in the brains of the creatures on whatever planet you find yourself on. Shame that I’m here to hand out an eviction notice to you. You’ve got exactly ten minutes to vacate the property before I send the bailiffs in.’

  Pallister said nothing – and Ty suspected that the creature controlling him hadn’t understood a word of it.

  ‘What the Doctor means,’ she added loudly, ‘is Get your miserable ass out of there!’

  The Doctor looked at her, a hurt expression on his face.

  ‘That’s what I said!’

  ‘Like you said,’ Ty whispered, ‘it’s not the brightest of things.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but it’s bright enough to trick us into coming here, I think. What’s that all about then?’ He was addressing Pallister. ‘I mean, you obviously need these people to do some dirty work for you. But you’d programmed the otters to bring us to you before we even arrived, otherwise they’d have torn us to pieces by now. Why?’

  ‘To assess you,’ Pallister said. ‘He and the others knew you would come to me. Pallister thinks that you are intelligent, that you might serve my purpose.’

  ‘What d’you hope to gain from using Pallister, anyway?’ Ty asked the crumbling husk hanging before them.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘What’s the point of this ridiculous puppet show? Not going to bring on a crocodile with a string of sausages, are you?’

  ‘Sausages?’ said Ty.

  ‘Never seen a Punch and Judy show?’ sighed the Doctor.

  ‘Normal communication with you is inefficient,’ Pallister intoned, ignoring the Doctor’s ramblings.

  ‘Well it would be,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘We’re not well equipped for your particular brand of chemical chat.’

  ‘This mode will facilitate the extraction of information useful to reproduction.’

  The Doctor pulled a face.

  ‘You do realise that you’ve put images in my head that even industrial-strength mind bleach isn’t going to erase, don’t you?’ he said. ‘How many of you are there, then? How many of you came down with that meteorite?’

  ‘I am one.’

  ‘Just the one? Well, you have been putting yourself about a bit. You must be huge then!’ He stopped. ‘And what d’you mean, “useful to reproduction”? What has Pallister got to do with it? And do I really want to hear the answer…?’

  Ty noted the change in tone in his voice, from bright and cheery to thoughtful and concerned. It didn’t sound good.

  ‘The information Pallister contains will facilitate my reproduction. And Pallister thinks you can add to that information.’

  The Doctor rolled his eyes.

  ‘We are going to be here all day. What information could Pallister possibly have that could help you spawn or bud or whatever it is you do?’

  There was another agonising pause whilst the swamp thing processed the Doctor’s words through Pallister’s brain. The man’s eyes were still coal-black and emotionless, but Ty thought she saw just a twitch of his mouth. One arm shuddered, sending more drips of water into the river below.

  ‘It believes that I should not tell you,’ came Pallister’s voice after a few moments.

  ‘It?’ the Doctor shouted. ‘It?It is a human being; it is a man called Pallister. He might have been a bit rough around the edges, but at least he had the interests of the people here at heart. Sort of,’ the Doctor finished a little lamely.

  ‘And I have my interests,’ replied Pallister. ‘Reproduction is the purpose of life.’

  ‘Oh tosh!’ snapped the Doctor. ‘It might be quite useful but it’s not the be-all and end-all, you know. What about exploring? What about music and dancing and climbing mountains? What about adventure and love and laughing? What about jigsaws, eh?’ He jabbed a finger in Pallister’s direction. ‘That’s what the purpose of life is – living.’

  ‘Reproduction is my purpose.’

  The Doctor shook his head and threw up his hands theatrically.

  ‘Well there you go, then.’ He turned to Ty. ‘I told you this thing had no brain – and now we know it’s got no heart or soul either. And what exactly does your reproduction involve, then, eh?’ he said to Pallister. ‘Spores? Buds? Dozens of little slime babies popping out of your tentacles?’ He paused and pulled a face. ‘Ew, slime babies.’ He gave a theatrical little shudder. ‘I’ll never eat a jelly baby again.’

  ‘Pallister thinks you are asking in order to use the information against me.’

  ‘Oh does he? I’m not sure you can trust the word of a man with a couple of pounds of slime squidged into his head. Plays havoc with the synapses, believe me.’

  ‘Doctor,’ said Ty suddenly. Extruding itself from the main tendril supporting Pallister’s body was another, thinner one. Glassy and glistening, like the one that had attacked Martha in the nest, it was heading towards the Doctor.

  ‘Time for bed,’ whispered the Doctor as it wove sinuously through the air.

  ‘You will be me,’ intoned Pallister soullessly. ‘Not today, thank you!’ shouted the Doctor – and reached down to grab one of the tranq guns from Ty’s hand.

  ‘Will that penetrate it? Remember how tough the one that attacked Martha was!’

  ‘Oh,’ he said casually, ‘it’s not slimey I’m aiming for!’

  The Doctor stretched out his arm and there was a soft pht as the dart embedded itself in the remains of Pallister’s chest.

  Seconds later, the barely living body twitched as if it were being electrocuted, and the tendrils supporting it jerked back. The one lancing through the air, heading for the Doctor, began waving and thrashing about aimlessly.

  ‘I think I might have given it a bit of a headache,’ the Doctor noted drily.

  Around them, the otters were motionless. The zombified settlers continued to drift in and out of the grey building as if nothing were happening.

  Suddenly, Pallister’s body shuddered, like a dog shaking itself dry. Then, still suspended by the pulsing green ropes boring into its head, it plunged back into the water.

  ‘Wait!’ called the Doctor, his tone mock-offended. ‘Where are you going? You were going to tell me about how babies are made and everything! You were going to give us tea and cake!’

  But it was too late. Without another word, Pallister vanished beneath the black waters, leaving just a trail of tiny bubbles.

  ‘Oh!’ said the Doctor snappily. ‘How very rude!’

  ‘What did he mean?’ asked Ty. ‘About the reproduction.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ replied the Doctor. ‘But you have to admit – it didn’t sound good, did it? I mean, one of those things is bad enough. But if it’s planning on reproducing…’ He rubbed the back of his neck and stared at the now-placid surface of the water.

  Ty looked at the otters, standing along the bank. Their faces were blank, but she could feel their eyes boring into them.

  ‘Now what?’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ said the Doctor, ruffling his hair. ‘My guess is that the otters are still following their instructions to guide us down to the water and not let us retreat. And if we try to move, I suspect that they’ll have a pretty good go at tearing us limb from limb.’

  He scratched his chin. />
  ‘What we could really do with now is a miracle.’

  ‘A miracle?’ scoffed Ty, watching the otters as they stood, teeth bared, all around them.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor firmly. ‘A miracle. A miracle a bit like that one.’

  He was staring over Ty’s shoulder. She turned to see what he was looking at.

  Over the crest of the hill, whooping and shouting fit to scare cattle, was Martha Jones – accompanied by the dirtiest dozen of otters Ty had ever seen – all screeching and squealing and leaping up and down as they came.

  ‘You have got to be kidding,’ Ty gasped.

  Martha had been no less amazed herself, as she stood at the brow of the hill, accompanied by the otters, and watched the dangling figure of a man, supported by a whopping great tentacle, crash back into the water.

  She’d arrived just in time to see the end of what looked like a showdown between the ‘man’ and the Doctor and Ty, down at the edge of the water. The Doctor had raised his arm and fired what looked like a tiny gun at the puppet-man. Seconds later, it had all been over. Well, apart from the fact that Ty and the Doctor were now surrounded by dozens of otters, hemming them in, trapping them on the mud.

  ‘Do something!’ Martha urged her furry friends. ‘Help them!’

  An outbreak of squeaking broke out amongst the otters at her feet, interspersed with odd words: ‘Call them!’, ‘Help them!’, ‘Talk! Talk!’

  ‘Will they understand you?’ she asked the otters.

  ‘They?’ the one with the smudged ear repeated whilst his (her? Martha hadn’t thought to check what sex he was – and, to be quite honest, couldn’t tell even now) fellows squeaked and chattered.

  Martha pointed to the otters surrounding the Doctor and Ty.

  ‘Can you talk to them? You – talk? To them?’ She jabbed her hands back and forth frantically, like an inadequately prepared foreign tourist.

  But the smudgey-eared one stared at her. ‘Talk, no,’ he squeaked. Martha’s shoulders fell. ‘Shout, yes!’ he added.

  ‘Shout?’

  ‘Yes – can shout. Might scare.’

  ‘Nice one!’ cried Martha, reaching down to stroke his head – but he pulled back, a look of alarm on his little bear-face. ‘Might scare is good! Definitely might-scare! Shout,’ she added. ‘Oh yes!’