Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (5 page)

‘Go back into their hole in the ground,’ said Dr Quinn, ‘if they’re sensible.’

It was some time after this conversation that the power losses started at the research centre. Just as the nuclear reactor was building up to maximum power, all its current would be mysteriously drawn off, sometimes plunging the research centre into temporary darkness. After it had happened twice in one week, Miss Dawson went one day to Dr Quinn’s office. She found him looking at a model globe of the world, which he quickly put out of sight in a cupboard.

‘My dear Miss Dawson,’ he said, ‘do sit down. Not that the chairs in this office are very comfortable…’

He produced a metal-backed chair for her, and she sat. ‘It’s about these power losses,’ she said. ‘Do you know what causes them?’

‘I thought our dear director, Dr Lawrence, was looking after that,’ said Dr Quinn.

She nerved herself to say what was on her mind: ‘It’s got something to do with those creatures you told me about, hasn’t it?’

Dr Quinn got out his pipe, then thought better of it and put the pipe back into his pocket. ‘The truth is that the enormous volume of electrical power we create down here triggered off the reptile people in the first place.’

‘Triggered off?’ She didn’t understand.

‘They were hibernating,’ said Dr Quinn. ‘I’ve no idea how or why – they haven’t explained that to me yet. But our electricity woke up one of them, and he set about waking up the others. When it suits them, they draw off our power to de-hibernate more of their kind.’

‘How have they managed to build cables,’ she asked, ‘from their shelter to our research centre?’

‘They haven’t,’ he said. ‘In some ways their civilisation was more advanced than ours. By induction
¹
they can transfer electrical power through earth, rock, anything.’

‘You must tell them to stop!’ She realised she had spoken like a schoolmistress talking about naughty children.

‘I think that’s more than my life is worth,’ said Dr Quinn. ‘In any case, they’re not holding up our work too much. And what we’re doing here isn’t half as important as what
I’m
doing getting to know these creatures.’

‘But Dr Lawrence is going to bring in UNIT,’ she said. ‘Were you aware of that?’

For the first time Dr Quinn frowned. ‘No, he didn’t tell me. He should have done.’Then he smiled his usual cheery smile. ‘Still, we shall have to see how it all works out, won’t we?’

‘You must tell them to stop,’ she repeated.

He looked at her squarely, appeal in his eyes. ‘I can’t, Miss Dawson. They wouldn’t understand. Remember, they think of Earth as
their
planet.’

‘But they hid themselves away for some reason,’ protested Miss Dawson. ‘The Earth belongs to Mankind!’

‘They don’t think Mankind is very important,’ said Dr Quinn quietly.

‘But that’s ridiculous!’

For a moment Dr Quinn said nothing, studying the neat arrangement of pens and writing pad on his desk top. Then he looked up again, giving that winning little smile of his. ‘Miss Dawson, if for some reason you went to sleep in your house for twenty years, and when you woke up you found the house was inhabited by thousands of mice and rats, what would you do?’

‘It’s obvious,’ she said. ‘Get poison, traps – kill them, drive them away.’

‘Exactly,’ said Dr Quinn. ‘And that, I imagine, is what they intend to do to us.’

‘Then keeping this to yourself is’ – she couldn’t think of a strong enough word – ‘is criminal!’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so. Because, you see, I shall kill them first, after I have found out all that I want to know.’

In the weeks that followed that conversation the power losses became more and more frequent. Every time the lights flickered and the electrical output meters registered zero for a few minutes, Miss Dawson presumed that yet another creature in the caves had been de-hibernated.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart appeared with some UNIT soldiers to see if someone was sabotaging the research centre. Both the Brigadier and their own security officer, that red-faced Major Barker, spent many hours together in private conference. Every type of rumour went round the research centre, even the idea that the director, Dr Lawrence, had gone insane and was doing it all himself. Throughout it all, Miss Dawson kept Dr Quinn’s extraordinary secret. Although they still met every Sunday to walk across the moors and then make lunch together, she did not even mention what he had told her. At least, not until one of their technicians, Davis, was killed while pot-holing in the caves. As soon as Miss Dawson heard of the accident she went to Dr Quinn’s office again.

‘I
must
speak to you, Dr Quinn!’

Dr Quinn was making some complicated calculations, and gestured her to sit on the metal-back chair and wait a moment. When he had finished, he looked up to her. ‘More power losses, Miss Dawson?’

‘No. Someone’s been killed in the caves by one of your reptiles!’

‘Not one of
my
reptiles, Miss Dawson,’ he said, apparently not perturbed. ‘In any case, are we sure?’

‘One of our own people is dead!’ She was almost in tears. Davis had been a particularly popular technician in the Centre. It was still impossible to think she would never see him alive again.

‘Dr Lawrence has already told me about it,’ said Dr Quinn. ‘Neither Spencer nor Davis were experienced pot-holers. Some of those caves are very dangerous. Perhaps he fell.’

‘Then why is Spencer blabbering like a demented idiot?’

Dr Quinn shrugged. ‘It’s to be expected. If two of you are together and one gets killed in an accident – it’s bound to have its effect.’

Miss Dawson was nearly at breaking point. At last she said what had been on her mind for a week or more now. ‘You don’t mind
what
happens, do you? All you want is to publish that book of yours and be famous!’ She got up from the chair. ‘I’m going to tell everything I know to the Brigadier, to Major Barker, and to Dr Lawrence!’

Dr Quinn seemed quite unruffled. He simply said: ‘If you do, I shall tell them what I know about you.’

Miss Dawson stopped dead in her tracks. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s very simple,’ he said, as calm as ever. ‘I shall say that you found the creatures first, that you swore me to secrecy, but that I finally decided to denounce you because of Davis’s death. You, however, said that if I denounced you, you would try to denounce me. Then they’ll have to make up their minds which of us is telling the truth.’

‘I don’t tell lies!’

‘I know that, Miss Dawson,’ he said. ‘But do they?’ He paused, then gave that smile of his. ‘Look, we’ve been friends ever since we started working together. Our Sunday mornings wouldn’t be the same without those walks on the moors, and cooking lunch together at my cottage. Now why don’t we forget all about it?’ He made a little gesture to invite her to sit down again, but she remained standing exactly where she was, confused and not knowing what to do. Dr Quinn realised this, so continued with another argument. ‘Poor Davis is dead, Miss Dawson. We cannot bring him back. But together we can make one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time. Incidentally, may I call you Phyllis?’

Miss Dawson sat down on the chair. She had always wanted Dr Quinn to call her by her first name. ‘You’re a very clever man, Dr Quinn…’

‘Oh, please,’ he cut in, speaking gently. ‘Matthew, if you don’t mind.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Matthew. But I don’t want to steal the fame you are going to have.’

‘It’s not a question of stealing,’ he said, ‘but sharing.’

‘I have heard something you ought to know,’ she told him. ‘These UNIT people are going to bring in their special scientific adviser, someone from London.’

Dr Quinn frowned. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know. I heard the Brigadier talking to Dr Lawrence about him. The Brigadier just calls him “the Doctor”.’

‘Oh well,’ said Dr Quinn, ‘practically everyone in this place is a doctor of something. One more won’t make any difference. At least, I hope not.’

¹
The transfer of electric or magnetic force through proximity but without direct contact.

When the Brigadier arrived at the research centre he set up his base in the conference room. The research centre was rather like the inside of a warship, in that every square inch of space was used to the fullest. The conference room was the only place where no one worked regularly, so that it was the obvious choice for a temporary UNIT headquarters. He had a telephone installed with a direct line to UNIT in London, and he had his sergeant get maps of Wenley Moor to pin up on the walls. He also had a plan of the entire research centre on the wall behind his desk. He started work by trying to detect some pattern to the power losses – were they daily, or every two days, or weekly? He soon discovered that there was no pattern to them, nor did they relate to any of the work being done by Dr Lawrence and his fellow scientists. The Brigadier then carried out a security check on everybody employed in the Centre, but could find nothing suspicious. So, finally, he called in the Doctor.

Now the Brigadier was seated at his desk, in a plush swivel-chair that he had ‘borrowed’ from one of the scientists’ offices, with the Doctor and Liz Shaw facing him. He hoped sincerely that at least the Doctor could make some sense of the mysterious happenings at the research centre.

‘Well, Doctor,’ he said, ‘what are your conclusions?’

‘I was going to ask you the same thing,’ said the Doctor.

The Brigadier was never quite sure when the Doctor was joking. He smiled, to show that he thought it
was
a joke.’ Come now, Doctor, I’m not scientist. Just a plain military man. Surely you have some ideas about these power losses?’

‘The output of the turbine which is motivated by the nuclear reactor,’ said the Doctor, ‘is being drawn off.’

The Brigadier studied him. This didn’t seem to be getting them any further. ‘We know that must be the case,’ the Brigadier said, as patiently as he could manage. ‘The question is – how?’

Liz asked, ‘Have you checked that no one’s linked themselves up with the electrical circuits here?’

‘My dear Miss Shaw,’ the Brigadier beamed, ‘my men have checked and double-checked every inch of cable in this entire centre.’

‘I thought you would,’ said the Doctor. ‘Not very imaginative, but correct procedure. I’m more interested to know why that poor fellow Spencer is drawing pictures on the sick-bay wall.’

The Brigadier looked at the Doctor, wondering whether the Doctor had gone out of his mind. So many other people in this place were behaving oddly, although the Brigadier had always believed nothing would affect the Doctor’s power to think clearly. ‘Pictures on the wall?’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ said Liz, brightly. ‘Buffaloes, mammoth elephants, and birds with scales instead of feathers.’

‘And
men
,’ said the Doctor. ‘Men without ears and with three eyes.’

‘Really, now,’ said the Brigadier. ‘I saw the medical report on Spencer. It said he’d blown his top after losing his friend in the caves. But this is ridiculous.’

‘Perhaps you should have visited him in the sick-bay,’ Liz said. ‘You’d have seen for yourself.’

The Brigadier tried to put his best face on the situation. He was now convinced that he was talking not to one, but two, mad people. ‘Our business at hand, Doctor, and Miss Shaw, is the disastrous loss of electrical power in this research centre. If someone in the sick-bay is drawing pictures on the wall, that is hardly our concern!’

‘Do you know,’ asked the Doctor, ‘what Jung meant by “the collective unconscious”?’

‘Jung?’ said the Brigadier, ‘the psychologist fellow?’

‘It’s the memory that animals inherit,’ said Liz Shaw. ‘You know the way a dog walks round and round before lying down, because it thinks it is treading flat the tall grass that dogs lived in millions of years ago.’

‘Or the way salmon always return to where they were born in order to breed,’ said the Doctor.

The Brigadier was fast losing his patience. ‘Doctor, Miss Shaw, this is all very interesting…‘

‘But you want to know about the power losses?’ said the Doctor.

‘Thank you,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Now let’s get back to the point.’

‘We must first decide,’ said the Doctor, ‘what the point
is
, and I believe it is connected with our inherited memory of something from long, long ago. There is something close to this research centre which is touching on the depths of Spencer’s memory – not his own conscious memory, you understand, but instead the inner parts of his mind which come from man’s ancestors of thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago.’

At last the Brigadier had a glimmer of what the Doctor was talking about. ‘Something in those caves?’ he asked.

The Doctor nodded. ‘What is the physical relationship between this research centre and the caves?’

The Brigadier got up, pointed to one of the maps on the wall. ‘As you see, the hills rise sharply in this ridge. Inside, the hills are honeycombed with caves, some of them explored, some probably never visited. The research centre is five hundred feet below the top of the hill ridge. For some reason that you probably understand better than I do, the authorities preferred to build the cyclotron very deep in the ground.’

‘It’s more probably the nuclear reactor they were worried about,’ said Liz. ‘Just in case it turns into an atomic bomb. Everyone down here would be killed, but it wouldn’t do much damage to anyone else.’

The Brigadier hadn’t thought of that before. He didn’t find it a pleasing thought. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Miss Shaw,’ he said, covering his feelings.

The Doctor was carefully studying the map. ‘This means that certain parts of the research centre may be only a few feet away from open cave space?’

‘I suppose so,’ said the Brigadier.

‘Or from anything else,’ said the Doctor quietly, ‘that might be down here…’

The Brigadier was about to ask the Doctor what he meant when the door of the office flew open and Major Barker entered. ‘Brigadier,’ he said in his loud voice, ‘I must talk to you immediately.’