Doctor Who: The Doomsday Weapon (5 page)

The Doctor followed Ashe out into the darkness. The clear night sky was bright with stars, not all like white pinhead dots as seen from Earth but some close enough to appear as small discs of intense light. With such a radiant night sky it was easy to see the shapes of the hills all around the main dome. Ashe strode ahead in a dead straight line for the Leeson' dome. He said not a word to the Doctor as he went ahead purposefully. Finally, they came to the crest of a little rocky hill and Ashe paused to look down. In the valley a few hundred yards ahead of them they saw two or three lights moving about, the flashlights of other men who had arrived there first.

'We. aren't alone!' Ashe charged down the hill towards the lights, calling, 'Hello! Is everything all right?'

The Doctor ran after Ashe, taking care not to trip and fall headlong on to the rocky uninviting ground. When he came up with Ashe just outside the little dome, Ashe was staring at something on the ground. Another man was standing close by; it was the young man called Winton whom the Doctor had seen at the meeting in the main dome. Winton had a torch in his hand.

'It's no good,' Winton was saying, 'he's dead.'

'I want to see,' Ashe said.

Winton pointed his torch at the object on the ground. It was Leeson's body. The face and chest had been hacked as though by knives. There was blood everywhere. Winton switched off his torch.

'What about the woman?' asked the Doctor.

'The same,' said Winton. 'They're bringing her body out now.'

Ashe stood staring at the form lying on the ground, then crossed to the dome. Winton and the Doctor followed, saying nothing. As they approached the door, two other colonists came out carrying a make-do stretcher. On it lay the body of Jane Leeson.

'We thought of taking them both to the main dome,' one of the men said to Ashe, partly as a question.

'Yet' said Ashe. 'I suppose that's the right thing to do.' He turned to the Doctor rather shamefacedly. 'We never reckoned on people dying or being killed in the colony. We'll have to work out what to do.'

The three men waited until the stretcher had been carried out. Then they entered the little dome. The simple furniture had all been wrecked. 'We found her over here,' said Winton, indicating the radio-telephone. 'He was outside, where you saw him.'

'How did you get here before us?' asked the Doctor.

'We were patrolling,' said Winton. 'We heard the thing.'

'Did you get a shot at it?' asked Ashe.

'Yes,' said Winton. 'All three of us blazed away like mad.'

'So you actually
saw
it?' the Doctor said.

'For a few moments,' said Winton. 'Like a big lizard it was, from the picture books.'

The Doctor found the last remark strange, then remembered that these people of the year 2972 had probably never seen any real animals. All the Earth animals had been systematically exterminated by Mankind by the year 2500.

Ashe asked,

'Where did it go?'

'It vanished,' said Winton. 'Just vanished into the darkness.'

While Ashe and Winton discussed the possibility of finding blood tracks - assuming the monster had been hit - the Doctor examined what appeared to be claw marks in the wood of the smashed kitchen table. From a claw mark it is possible to estimate the size of the claw, and from the size of a claw, one can calculate the probable size of the animal.

'This monster,' said the Doctor to Winton, 'was it about twenty feet high?'

'Feet?' said Winton, puzzled.

The Doctor had forgotten that Earth had completely converted to metric measurements a thousand years ago. 'About six metres high?' he repeated.

'That's right,' said Winton. Then, suspiciously, he added, 'How do you know?'

'The size of these claw marks,' said the Doctor. 'And you found Mrs. Leeson's body by the radio-telephone?'

Winton nodded.

'Then we have a rather strange problem,' said the Doctor, 'because how could a twenty foot high - I mean, six metres high - lizard come through that door?'

John Ashe felt that his whole world was starting to fall to pieces. It hadn't been easy finding a group of people who might mix well together in a colony. Of the many people who replied to his advertisements, he had turned down the majority because they were too young, or too old, or just didn't seem right in some way or other. After each interview Ashe had taken the decision whether to accept or reject the applicant. Then, of the many secondhand spaceships that he looked at, he had decided which to buy for the group. The others all had their own ideas on how much food to take, but finally it was left to Ashe to decide on the exact quantities. He was now tired of taking decisions, but he knew that if he showed his feelings to the others the whole colony would collapse. They expected him to lead, and he tried not to let them down.

Then came trouble on the journey, when the spaceship almost blew itself to pieces shortly after lift-off. With the help of Leeson and Winton, both good engineers in their own ways, Ashe solved that problem. The journey took longer than they expected, but once they had landed everyone was happy. Then they saw the Primitives, and some of the women were terrified. Some of the younger men, who had never possessed a gun before, wanted to shoot the Primitives. Ashe had restrained them, and explained that they could and must live in peace with these strange people. The first days of sowing seeds brought great excitement because none of them had ever done physical work before; on Earth machines did everything. But the excitement soon gave way to aching backs and calloused hands, and sheer tiredness. Ashe had explained that this was part of their new life, and that they would get used to it. Then the crops failed to grow. And now two of the colonists had been killed - by a monster six metres high who could somehow enter a door less than two metres high.

By the time the Lessons' bodies had been carried to the main dome, the first rays of their alien sun were shooting like fiery fingers into the eastern sky. All the colonists had come to the main dome, and now they all looked at Ashe and expected him to
do
something, to take another decision. When people died on Earth it was always in a hospital, and the hospital operatives sent the bodies to a crematorium. Ashe looked at the two bodies laid side by side on make-do stretchers in the main area of the big dome, each covered now in old sheets, and wondered what he ought to do. It was impossible to build a fire such as they had in the crematoria, because they could never find enough wood.

It was this stranger, the Doctor, who somehow saw into Ashe's troubled mind and came up to him and spoke very quietly 'You'll have to bury them.'

Now Ashe remembered reading an old audiobook about burying dead people, back in the time when Earth still had open land. 'Yes,' he said, 'we must dig holes.'

' Graves ,' said the Doctor, so quietly that no one else could hear.

'Yes,' said Ashe, 'graves.'

'I have already asked two of your men to start preparing them,' whispered the Doctor. 'You and I must be pall-bearers.'

Ashe didn't understand him at first. But the Doctor went to the end of one of the stretchers, and Ashe realised he was expected to go to the other end. Two of the other men present got the idea, and went to lift the other stretcher. The Doctor lifted, and Ashe lifted, and the sad little procession left the main dome. All the other colonists followed in silence.

As the Doctor led the way to where two other colonists with spades were waiting by freshly dug graves, he turned his head and spoke over his shoulder to Ashe. 'Tell your daughter to have tea or coffee or something ready for our return.'

Ashe was bewildered. 'Why?'

'I'll explain afterwards,' said the Doctor.

Ashe called his daughter over to him as he walked carrying the stretcher, and gave her the order. She, at least, never questioned him. From the corner of his eye he saw her hurrying back to the main dome.

At last they were beside the holes, which the Doctor called graves. Here Ashe was glad to let the Doctor take over. The Doctor had ropes ready, so that the two bodies could be lowered gently down into their respective graves.

'Thanks,' said Ashe, glad that someone knew what to do.

'Now we have a service,' said the Doctor. 'What religion were they?'

'Religion?' said Ashe, not understanding.

'You must stand here and say some nice things about them both,' said the Doctor, still in no more than a whisper. 'You must say that they did not die for nothing.'

'Why?' asked Ashe.

'Because,' said the Doctor, 'all these people standing here expect it. They don't
know
that they expect it, because they've never met death before, not on your computerised, sanitised Earth.'

Ashe looked at the colonists. They were all standing there, eyes to the ground. waiting for something. 'All right,' he told the Doctor. 'I'll try.' He cleared his throat. He was used to speaking to the whole group, but never before like this. 'We shall miss Jane and Eric Leeson. Jane was always kind, and kept her head when the spaceship nearly blew up. Eric was a hard worker, and never afraid of anything. Some of you may think that they died for nothing. But they didn't, not really... they died trying to make a better life, not only for themselves, but for all of us. We shall not forget them.' He stopped and looked at the Doctor for approval. The Doctor nodded, picked up some of the dug out soil in his hand and dropped it into first one grave then the other. Then the Doctor walked off quietly towards the main dome. Almost involuntarily Ashe did the same, picking up a few grammes of the powdery soil, and scattering them onto the corpses within the graves. Then he, too, walked away. One by one the other colonists did the same, scattering the soil of their planet onto their dead friends.

Back at the main dome Mary, helped by Jo, had synthetic tea waiting for them all. Ashe found the Doctor already there, joking with Mary about something. Ashe went up to him.

'Thanks,' he said. 'But is this a time for jokes?'

The Doctor drew Ashe away from the two girls, now busy serving tea to the other colonists as they sadly trooped back inside. 'To live away from your Earth,' said the Doctor, 'you've got to learn more than how to sow seed and use a plough. With death, there has to be a time for tears, and then a time to rejoice in the continuation of life. Hence the tea.'

'How do you know all these things?' asked Ashe.

'You might say, said the Doctor, 'that I'm something of an historian. Except that to me the past, the present, and the future are all one.'

'All one?' said Ashe 'That's impossible!'

But there was no time to pursue their talk. Martin, the colonist who had first seen a monster, came up to them. He talked loudly so, that all the others could hear. 'It's no good, Ashe. We've got to admit defeat! We've got to go back to Earth!'

Ashe said, 'We've invested a year of our lives into this planet. We've got the beginnings of a colony...'

Martin didn't want to listen, and cut in, 'We can't even support ourselves, and now two of us are dead.'

'I wonder if I might join in the discussion?' enquired the Doctor.

Now young Winton came forward, to support Martin. 'This has nothing to do with you, whoever you are!'

'The Doctor is our guest,' Ashe reminded them. 'Please let him speak.'

'All right,' said Martin. 'But make it short.'

'What I have to say is very simple,' said the Doctor. 'I've spent some time studying your crop records. I believe that growth is inhibited by some unnatural force. We must isolate it and overcome it.'

'What about the monsters?' asked one of the women colonists. 'Can we have children grow up in a place overrun with monsters?'

'For a start,' said the Doctor, 'we know it isn't overrun with them. Only two have been sighted - and for that matter, it may be the same one seen twice. Now are you going to run like children from terrors in the dark?'

This quietened the colonists for a moment. None of them wanted to admit to being afraid. Ashe took the opportunity to speak again, 'This colony is our only chance, friends. If we leave it, we'll have nothing. If we stay, we may have a chance.'

It was Mrs. Martin, who herself had been terrorised by the monsters, who spoke up for Ashe's attitude. 'I think he's right. We've put too much work into this place to leave it now.'

'You see,' said Ashe, spurred on by Mrs. Martin's support, 'there's a chance if we keep pulling together. What we've got to do is to organise patrols for all the domes. The Doctor will help its with the agricultural problems...'

Ashe's voice trailed off as he saw the man stagger in through the main entrance He was only about twenty-five years old, but his sunken eyes and hungry face made him look fifty. His clothes were in tatters. As he entered the dome he stood there for a moment as though trying to say something, then fell forward to the ground. Mary and Jo were the first to reach the man's side. Ashe and the Doctor quickly followed with all the colonists crowding around. The Doctor gently turned the man over onto his back; Mary raised his head. Jo hurried away to get the man something to drink.

Ashe asked, 'Where are you from?'

The man opened his mouth, but he was too parched to speak. Jo brought one of the little cups of synthetic tea, and put it to the man's lips. As he drank greedily the Doctor asked Ashe, 'Isn't he one of your colonists?'

'No.' Ashe again spoke to the man, 'Can you understand me? Where are you from?'

'Colony,' the man said.

Now Winton also crouched by the man. 'There's another colony on this planet?'

The man tried to nod his head. 'I've been wandering... for weeks... hundred of kilometres... wandering.' He seemed ready to faint.

Winton shook the man roughly. 'The other colonists, your friends. Where are they?'

The man's eyes closed, then opened again suddenly, and stared straight up at Winton. 'A year of hunger... crops wouldn't grow... then the lizards.' He closed his eyes tight, and his weather-beaten hands clawed into the ground as some memory of terror swept through his mind. 'Giant lizards... so many of them... then the Primitives.'