Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace (6 page)

Their escort pushed them towards a burly, coarse-faced figure whose gruff imposing manner and the armed gun by his side marked him out as the supervisor of the mining operation.

‘I’ve another two for you.’

The supervisor looked Ben and Jamie up and down, deciding the sort of work best suited for them. He considered for a moment and then took them over to the coal face. There two workers – a sandy-haired, ruddy-faced man and a younger West Indian – were talking in a huddled whisper. Their backs were to them but they seemed to be looking at something in the sandy-haired man’s hands.

‘You there,’ the supervisor said, addressing the sandy-haired man. ‘What’s that you’ve got in your hand?’

‘Who? Me, sir?’ the man asked innocently in a thick Irish brogue. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ As he turned around to face the supervisor he deftly passed whatever it was behind his back to his colleague.

‘Guards, search this man,’ ordered the supervisor, ‘and the other one.’

As the guards began their search the West Indian passed the object into Jamie’s hand. The startled Scotsman held it firmly behind his back. The sleight-of-hand had gone unnoticed by the supervisor and the guards.

The guards shrugged their shoulders. ‘They’re clean.’

The supervisor eyed the two men suspiciously. ‘All right, this time you’re lucky.’ He nodded over to Ben and Jamie. ‘These two have just joined us. Teach them to be useful.’

As soon as the supervisor was out of sight Jamie opened up his hand to look at the object which Jacko, the West Indian, had passed to him.

‘What is it?’

Ben recognised the object but was as confused as Jamie.

‘What’s so secret about a compass?’ he asked.

Sean, the Irishman, snatched the compass from Jamie’s hand. ‘A compass is as important as eyes down here,’ he explained. ‘If they’d found it I’d’ve been for the high jump.’

‘But they might have found it on me!’ Jamie protested indignantly.

Sean laughed. ‘Well, they didn’t, did they!’

‘Are you planning an escape then?’ asked Ben.

‘That’s our business,’ said Sean defensively.

What’s the matter?’ persisted Jamie. ‘We’re prisoners too. We’re all in the same boat.’

‘That’s right, Jock,’ interrupted Jacko. ‘And we don’t want anyone to rock it. OK?’

‘The name happens to be Jamie!’ said the Highlander and took a threatening step towards him.

Sean laid a restraining hand on Jamie’s shoulder. ‘Take no notice of him, boy. He gets a bit uppity at times.’

‘Watch it,’ hissed Ben. ‘One of them guards is looking this way.’

Sean immediately took up his pickaxe. ‘Make out like you’re working,’ he said. ‘There’s a rest period soon. We’ll talk then.’

Back in the laboratory one of his Atlantean technicians had called Zaroff over to a bank of computers and flickering video screens. With Zaroff no longer watching him the Doctor began to edge his way slowly towards the door. In spite of Zaroff s assurances that he was not a prisoner, the Doctor doubted that he would ever be allowed to wander freely through Atlantis again, especially as he had now learnt of the scientist’s plans. But it was imperative that he find Polly and the others and some way of halting Zaroff s mad schemes.

He was almost at the door when Damon once more stormed into the laboratory searching for Zaroff. The Doctor instantly turned on his most dazzling smile.

‘Ah, Damon, you’re back,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Did your operation go well?’

Damon looked down contemptuously at the little man.

‘The girl escaped,’ he said angrily. ‘As if you didn’t know...’

‘Oh dear... how very frustrating for you.’

‘We’ll get her back. Guards have already been sent out.’

‘Yes, yes, of course you will get her back,’ said the Doctor patronisingly. ‘It’s very important to you, isn’t it?

You need all the human labour you can get, don’t you?’

‘It’s cheap and plentiful,’ said Damon matter-of-factly.

‘We pick up survivors from shipwrecks who would otherwise be corpses and convert them into Fish People, or set them to work in the mines. We save their lives, Doctor.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m sure,’ said the Doctor. ‘But what about the people who work in the mines – slave labour to power Zaroff’s experiments.’

‘The Professor is a scientific genius, Doctor. In the past twenty years he has improved life in Atlantis beyond all imagining. Now he plans to restore our land to its former glory. We need workers and our population is very small.

They should be grateful; without us they would be dead.’

The Doctor regarded Damon in a new light. He was unpleasant, dangerous, a bully even; but he wasn’t really evil – he had been blinded by Zaroff’s promises as, he guessed, had everyone else in Atlantis.

‘Damon, do you know how Professor Zaroff intends to fulfil his promise?’ he asked.

Damon flushed and shook his head. ‘That is not my field,’ he said defensively. ‘I have been trained only in surgery and fish conversion. Others have an understanding of the Professor’s operations. We each have our separate fields, each a small cog in the machine, but contributing to the running of the whole. I accept the fact that Zaroff knows what he is doing.’

So, thought the Doctor, Zaroff’s scientific education of the people of Atlantis had been highly selective. He doubted that even the technicians who were close to Zaroff fully understood the final implications of the Project on which they were working. And poor Damon here, although he might be an accomplished surgeon, had only the barest understanding of other scientific disciplines. He trusted Zaroff; after all, his operations were a success. But he didn’t understand why. Blind acceptance of science, reflected the Doctor, was just as had as blind acceptance of superstition.

‘But don’t you think it’s dangerous for just one man to have so much knowledge, so much power?’

‘The Professor leads the field in scientific discovery,’

intoned Damon as automatically and as unthinkingly as one of the temple priests would recite a ritual prayer to Amdo.

The Doctor shook his head, saddened by the surgeon’s blind faith in Zaroff. ‘What a fantastic dream,’ the Doctor said as he moved backwards towards a workbench loaded with scientific apparatus. ‘To control the world from a test tube.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Damon, failing to detect the sarcasm in the Doctor’s voice.’

‘Well, two can play at that game,’ he said and grabbed a vial of chemicals from the workbench. ‘Have you seen this one?’ He threw the vial to the floor, smashing it and releasing its contents. As soon as the liquid met the air it gave off noxious fumes of gas.

Damon fell back, gagging for breath. The Doctor took advantage of his momentary confusion to dart past the surgeon.

‘Stop him!’ Damon cried to the guards in the laboratory.

‘Don’t let him get away!’

Ara had led a dazed Polly through what seemed like miles of tunnels, passageways and, at times, the vast caverns in which the Atlanteans lived. Polly had no chance to marvel at either the natural beauty of the vast caverns, nor the spectacle of people living in them in tiny buildings; no sooner had they paused to rest than a troupe of jackbooted guards would appear, forcing them to move on to escape detection.

Finally Ara led Polly through a small natural fissure in a cave wall, down a narrow passage and a spiralling flight of stairs and into a bare but spacious stone chamber.

‘You’ll be safe here,’ Ara reassured her, and indicated that she should sit down on a small bench. ‘Few people know of this place.’

‘But where are we?’

Ara opened up a small panel in the wall, above what appeared to be some sort of speaking grille. ‘See for yourself,’ she said, with a slight smile on her face. Polly looked out through the panel and into the temple where she had nearly been sacrificed a few hours before. Now it was empty, except for a few silent priests deep in prayer.

‘We’re in the statue!’ she gasped.

‘In a secret chamber behind the idol,’ corrected Ara.

‘Even Lolem doesn’t know of its existence. My father showed it to me before he died.’

Polly noted the tremor in the girl’s voice but decided not to enquire further for the moment. Instead she asked,

‘Ara, why are you doing this for me?’

‘Because I hate Zaroff, hate him more than you can possibly imagine,’ she said. Her eyes flashed with anger.

‘Before his coming Atlantis was a happy place. There were no Fish People, no slaves. But Zaroff has taken our people’s dreams of Atlantis reborn and turned it into an obsession. He has taken our religion and turned it into a bloodlust. Now everything works towards his great project, and his black-suited guards are everywhere.’

‘Ara, you said your father was dead...’

‘And Zaroff killed him!’ she burst out. ‘Nothing can be proved – Zaroff is too clever for that. But my father was one of the few councillors who spoke out against him. He said we had lived in these caves and on the island for thousands of years; what need did we have to raise Atlantis above the waves, to inhabit a world no longer our own, a world where men fight and kill each other with weapons of destruction we cannot even imagine? My father was on the point of convincing our people when he died mysteriously.

I was only a child at the time so my life was spared; but I am forced to work as a serving girl for my father’s sin of having spoken the truth.’

‘But that’s terrible. Why isn’t something done to stop him?’

‘The people are blinded by Zaroffs great promise, the promise of thousands of years realised at last. He has the whole of Atlantis in his thrall.’

The two girls sat together in silence for a moment.

Finally Polly said, ‘Ara, we must find the Doctor. He’s the only one who can help us.’

Ara nodded. ‘You will need some Atlantean clothes and some food. Wait here where you’ll be safe. I’ll come and fetch you.’

With a half-hearted smile Ara stood up and slipped out of the chamber, leaving Polly alone with her thoughts.

In the mines a rest period had been called and bowls of plankton handed out to all the workers. Ben and Jamie, Sean and Jacko sat together, away from the ears of the guards. Sean was more trusting than Jacko and soon accepted Ben and Jamie for friends. Jacko was more taciturn, preferring to keep his thoughts and feelings to himself for the moment.

Ben grimaced at his bowl of plankton, longing for one of the cafes on the King’s Road. ‘Don’t you get sick of all this seafood?’ he asked.

‘You get used to it,’ smiled Sean and added, ‘I’d eat it quickly if I were you. They’ve no way of keeping it fresh –

in a few hours it’s putrid.’

‘So how did you two get down here?’ asked Ben.

‘We were sailors on a merchant ship; we must have hit a mine left over from the Second World War,’ explained Sean. ‘The ship went down and most of the crew died. But these Atlanteans rescued us and took us down here to work as slave labour.’

‘What’s that humming I can hear all around me?’ asked Jamie.

Sean shrugged. ‘I don’t rightly know. They say it’s the drill for some secret project of Zaroff. Most of the stuff we mine here is to fuel it.’

Jamie nodded and then asked, ‘Why do you need a compass?’

‘There’s no point in making a break down here without one, is there?’ said Sean. ‘There isn’t exactly a series of road signs saying “This way to the surface”, is there?’

‘Mind what you’re saying, man,’ warned Jacko. ‘You don’t know if we can trust them.’

Ben by now was thoroughly fed up with Jacko’s suspicions. ‘Look, mate, do yourself a favour and stop treating us like we’re one of them! Jamie and I don’t intend to stay here long either.’

Sean, who was a better judge of character than his friend, urged the three to shake hands and make up.

Reluctantly they did so.

‘So how are you planning to make a run for it?’ Ben asked Sean.

‘Well, when I was mining a shaft I came across the entrance to a little tunnel –’

‘Where does it lead?’ asked Jamie.

‘We haven’t been able to explore it yet,’ admitted the Irishman. ‘We’ll just have to take the chance.’

‘Anything’s going to be better than staying in this place,’ added Jacko.

‘If we go there’ll be no turning back,’ warned Sean. ‘We make it or we don’t. Are you two lads with us?’ Ben nodded.

‘Count us in.’

‘When do we go?’ asked Jamie.

‘We wait for the right moment,’ said Sean. ‘And when it comes we move out fast.’

Sean’s opportunity came sooner than he expected. The rest break had barely finished and the four men had just resumed their work when a guard new to the mineface arrived.

‘Zaroff needs extra labour up at the Project,’ he told the supervisor. ‘Line up the men for inspection.’

Resentfully the supervisor summoned his workers around him. In any other circumstances he would have protested against the order – he had little enough slaves as it was – but it was more than it was worth to call into question an order from Zaroff.

‘Here’s our chance,’ Ben whispered to Sean as the workers made their way to the assembly point. ‘We’re off.’

Sean agreed. ‘You’re right; if we go now they’ll think we’ve gone to the Project work bank. They won’t miss us for hours.’

The four men took advantage of the commotion as their fellow workers moved to slip off into the shadows at the back of the mine. Taking great care not to be seen, Jacko showed them the way to a narrow fissure concealed behind a pile of unused machinery. As they darted down behind cover, Sean picked up two electric torches which he had hidden for just such an occasion; they would need those in the tunnels.

The entrance to the tunnel was small, barely two feet high and it was going to be necessary for them to crawl on their hands and knees for a while; but Sean assured them that the ceiling would slope upwards a few yards further on and they would be able to stand upright.

Before he entered the tunnel Ben turned worriedly to Sean. ‘Suppose this tunnel doesn’t lead anywhere and we want to come back?’