Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (11 page)

It took me only a moment to understand what had happened. Of course: the helmet was TARDY technology. It was, accordingly,
much
bigger on the inside than the out. I ran to the nearest portion of the wall - it was a brisk, ten minute jog away - and tried to slide my hands under the rim and lift the huge dome off me. But it was hopeless: It was like trying to - no: let me be precise, it was
exactly the same
as - trying to lift an entire eight-hundred-metre tall aircraft-hangar built of steel girders and iron claddings with my bare hands.

I couldn’t even get my hands underneath the lip of the helmet. It was being pressed into the floor with a weight of many hundred thousand tonnes.

I sat back. This was bad. The space was chilly and I wasn’t even wearing a sweater. Not even a
cardigan
.

The situation was dire.

‘Help! Somebody!’ I shouted. ‘Doctor? Can you hear me? I’m trapped inside here! Lift up the helmet Doctor - take hold of this helmet and lift it up . . .’

My words re-echoed. It was hopeless. I bashed my fist against the wall and it rebounded. The metal felt at least a metre thick: a huge and impenetrable barrier between myself and the outside world. And even if I could have communicated through this wall, the Dr was snoozing in some alcove deep inside the TARDY. And Linn - Linn must be trapped just like me.

I stepped back, and walked towards the middle of the dome again. Craning my neck I could see the window high above me - clearly I was looking at an inside view of the face-plate of the helmet: it might only be the size of a postcard on the outside, but it was a colossal expanse of glass on the in. For a while I idly speculated about climbing up to it - but it was many hundreds of meters above me and any climb would be a dangerous prospect indeed. And even if I could scale the sheer, curving wall, what would I do then? Wave at the Dr through the glass? But what if he didn’t see me? He was still napping, somewhere in the bowels of the TARDY. If a spacecraft could be said to have bowels. Which, come to think of it, I rather doubted.

It was alright, I told myself. He would eventually wake up. Then he could come back through to the control room, and pick up the helmet. Though fantastically heavy on the
inside
, it weighed a matter of a few grams on the outside. The Dr would notice it lying on the floor, and lift it up to put it away - revealing me underneath it. All I had to do was wait out the intervening time.

It was a bore. But, I was unlikely to freeze to death in the space of a few hours. Even without a sweater.

I ran my fingers of my right hand up my left arm. The goosepimples there spelt out, in Braille (a script I had had to learn as part of my prose-tailor training) the message: HYPOTHERMIA CAN KILL IN MINUTES. I ignored this message. And, to be absolutely exact, because of the chance positioning of a large mole on my forearm next to a small crescent-shaped scar, it actually spelt out: HYPOTHERMIA CANNED KRILL IN MINUTES, which sounded more to me like a advertisement for a brand of tinned seafood. Which, by a strange chance, I have actually eaten. In a Krill restaurant upon my home world. But this is by the bye.

There was no immediate danger, then. But, insofar as I have always been an impatient fellow, I will confess that the prospect of several hours of shivering did not appeal to me. I decided that I had to think of a way out of this prison.

I turned myself about through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees to scan the whole inner surface of the thing. But I discovered that, whilst three-hundred-and-sixty degrees would have been enough to rotate the helmet through one entire turn on the outside,
inside
it barely covered a fifth of the perimeter on the inside. I turned and turned and turned until I was dizzy, and eventually I was again looking at the giant hose.

It took me a moment to stop feeling nauseous.

No more turning about, I decided.

The thing to do, clearly, was to take a closer look at this hose. From a distance its purpose seemed clear: it would feed oxygen into the mouth of anybody wearing the helmet. Of course, on the inside it was much too large to fit into any actual mouth. But I wondered if it would be possible to - for instance - climb inside it, work my way up the tube and perhaps find some egress to the outside world? It was a long shot, I knew; but I couldn’t think what else to do.

As I walked towards it, the oddly pronged and curved shape of the thing grew larger and larger, until it lost all resemblance to a mouthpiece and became nothing more than a vast ebon blob, suspended in space. It looked like something Henry Moore might have sculpted out of eight tonnes of partially chewed liquorice. Which is to say, it looked extremely unappealing.

Finally I arrived at the foot of the structure. It was connected to the wall, some thirty metres above me, via a tube large enough to run trains underneath the English Channel. In both directions. The mouthpiece itself hung perhaps five metres from the floor - maddeningly too high to reach, even if I stood on tip-toes. Even if I stood on tip-toes and jumped up. I tried doing this, standing on tip-toes and leaping up, four or five times before it occurred to me that the muscles
in my toes
might be less effective at propelling my entire bodyweight into the air than, you know, the muscles
in my legs
. So I stood on the flat of my feet and bent my legs and tried jumping again. I jumped higher this way, but it was still useless.

What to do?

What happened next surprised me. A rope dropped from the open mouth of the huge rubber object above me. It trailed down like the first tendril of water from a giant black rubber bath-tap, silvery and glinting.

A moment later a figure came shinning down the rope - the figure, in point of fact, of a beautiful young female. She was dressed in a silvery top that was large enough to cover her upper body; and also in tiny green shorts that seemed to be made of some silky material which were quite inadequate to cover her lower body. When I say ‘shorts’, I could perhaps qualify the phrase and note that they were, in point of fact, knickers. As I later discovered. Her legs were long, lithe, lovely, and possessed several other alliteratively legsy ‘l’ qualities. They were wrapped tightly about the rope. She slithered down and came to a halt standing upon the floor facing me. For a while she did nothing but blink in the light. Then she said ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

This was a puzzler.

I said: ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was supposed to.’ That looks a bit ridiculous written down, I know. It sounded pretty ridiculous coming out of my mouth. But when a beautiful woman abseils down a silver rope in her knickers from the cavernous entrance to a fifty-metre-wide rubber mouthpiece suspended five metres in the air and demands to know why you didn’t wake her up, it’s hard to think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous. In fact, ridiculousness-sounding was the appropriate response, I feel.

‘I can’t
believe
I slept through it!’ she cried in rank frustration. ‘Whom was it who lifted the helmet? Was it you?’

‘It—I—er, yes.’

Her next question was: ‘whom are you?’ But before I could answer her eyes left me and stared at the cavernous space in which we were both standing. Her jaw fell, leaving her mouth completely open in astonishment. She gawped as if seeing her environment for the first time. ‘It’s so huge!’ she gasped. ‘Oh it’s been so
long
since I saw it! So very long! I had forgotten - no matter how many times I felt my way around the perimeter with my fingers’-ends, it’s not the same as actually
seeing
it like this. It’s
astounding
!’

‘Who
are
you?’ I asked. I was ravished by her beauty. Her beauty was like an anchor, fixing me to that spot. She, in other words, was a ravish-anchor.

‘It’s
so
good to see another living being!’ she cried, throwing her arms around me. ‘It’s been
so long
. . .’

‘Nice to meet you too,’ I said, politely, in a squeaky voice. I could feel the soft and lovely warmth of her body in close proximity to mine. It had been a very long time since any woman, of whatever physical disposition (let alone one as beautiful as this one) had been in close proximity to me. Or middling proximity. Or far proximity, come to that. I was gobsmacked.

‘Forgive me for my rudeness,’ she said, stepping back and facing me squarely. ‘And allow me to introduce myself. I am Lexanco, daughter of Panzpipl, from the planet Tapov. I am from the country of Lithe.’

‘I am delighted to meet you, Lexanco,’ I said. ‘From the planet of . . .?’

‘Tapov.’

‘I see. You are not human, then?’

‘I am Lither.’

‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,’ I said. ‘My name is Prose Tailor. I’m a tailor of prose - a human, from the twenty-third century. Might I ask about how you came to be here? This,’ I added, gesturing to the relevant area, ‘is my helmet.’

She looked amazed.

‘Surely not!’ she cried. ‘How can it be
yours
? You seem so young! For I have been here for many years - too many years to count easily upon the fingers of my hands and my feet.’

‘More than twenty years?’ I gasped.

‘More than thirty-one years,’ she corrected. When I looked a little startled, she added: ‘I am not human, after all.’

I glanced at her hands - each of which contained exactly five digits - and boggled briefly. But, I reflected, the ways of alienkind are generally strange. And in all other respects this figure was gorgeously and alluringly feminine. Now, I would like to describe her to you (I am, after all, a tailor of prose) but I’m afeared that my words would be inadequate - that they would merely skate over her figure; that they could not stay abreast of her breasts, would pip her hips, that I would, to put it in plain words, be telling lies about her eyes, being unfair to her hair. For my words could never capture the rapture of her stature. Which wasn’t flature. I mean, flat. I mean it was
curvy
. The truth of the matter is that her figure was in
all respects
shapely.

I seem to be losing the thread a little.

Let me put this in as simple a manner as I can: I fell instantly in love with Miss Lexanco. Have you heard the phrase
love at first sight
? Have you ever experienced
love at first sight
? - or, I should say, have you ever experienced
sight
? Because until you have fallen in love at first sight you don’t know what sight, in its fullest possibility, is. Unless you have fallen in love yourself then you can have no sense as to how I felt, at that moment, inside that aircraft-hangar-sized helmet, standing before that gorgeous, curvaceous and twenty-one-toed woman.

‘You are staring,’ she observed.

‘I—I—apologise,’ I stammered. ‘It’s just that I have never before seen so beautiful a woman!’

‘How old are you?’ she asked.

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘Then you and I have something in common,’ she said, smiling kindly. ‘For as I stand here before you, I can comment that I have never seen so handsome a man. At least not for the same period of time to which you alluded.’

‘You’ve never seen a better looking man than me?’ I asked in frank disbelief.

‘Not in the last twenty-nine years at any rate.’

‘But you’ve been inside this helmet for . . . oh I see what you mean.’ I was momentarily a little discouraged; but then the enormity of Lexanco’s fate finally sank in.
Three decades
alone inside a gigantic helmet! It was beyond belief. It was
so far
beyond belief that it circled the planet of incredulity and arrived at the back of the head of the same belief of which it was beyond. I mean that I believed her. You see? That was the point of my metaphor.

’Three decades inside this prison?’ I gasped. ‘Without a single other sentient creature to keep you company? How terrible!’

‘Indeed.’

My chivalrous instincts were aroused. I was, as it happens, aroused in other ways too, but let me not dwell upon those in what is, after all, a memoir designed for family reading. ‘I shall rescue you!’ I cried.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘How?’

‘Well—’ I said. ‘In a couple of hours I’m pretty sure that somebody outside will lift this helmet up.’

‘You’re
pretty
sure?’

‘Pretty sure, yes.’

‘It doesn’t - forgive me for saying this - it doesn’t sound like a
plan
, exactly. More a sort-of wait-and-hope strategy.’

My chivalrous instincts, formerly aroused, were now piqued. ‘In that case,’ I said, boldly, ‘I shall rescue you straight away! We need not wait on the vagaries of fate. We shall make our way out of this prison without delay.’

‘I am impressed,’ she said. ‘What will you do?’

I had no idea. To give myself time to think I asked. ‘How have you survived for so long in here? Is your race of aliens one that has no need for sustenance?’

‘On the contrary, I must eat all the time. My race of aliens, dear Prose, is not so very different to humanity. In my former travels I encountered humans many times, and I am very familiar with them. My people and yours are close enough genetically to permit friendship, marriage and even divorce.’

‘So,’ I said, trying to swing my arms in an insouciant manner and thereby express my eminent suitability for a session of experimental interbreeding, should she wish to test the possibility. ‘So how did you manage to survive for thirty-two years inside this helmet? What did you eat?’

‘I ate pap. There is a supply - it can be accessed by climbing up the mouthpiece tube. There is water there too.’

‘Enough for thirty-two years?’

‘Yes indeed. The portions, you see, are considerably magnified. The food is coarse and without flavour, but it contains enough nutrient to maintain life.’

‘It doesn’t sound very pleasant.’

‘It is not. But it is preferable to the alternative.’