Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (6 page)

‘Never!’

‘Then you leave me no choice. Cydergentlemen, fire away.’

All the Cydermen in unison lifted their hands and pointed their finger-clickin’ guns in our direction. We three ducked back down behind the ridge. There was a deafening volley of gunshots, mixed with the sound of small cannon fire: smoke and ice engulfed us. Shards and chunks of ice flew through the air.

‘We’re doomed,’ said the Dr.

‘We may indeed be,’ said Linn. ‘Can’t either of you think of
anything
?’

There was an especially loud explosion, and larger pieces of ice scattered and rolled. ‘Quick,’ said the Dr. ‘I think they’ve just blown a hole in the wall behind us . . . through it! Quick! Whilst the smoke still covers our retreat!’

We ran as fast as we could, and stumbled through a ragged gap in the ice-wall and into the corridor beyond. Blocks and chunks of ice littered the floor, like scatter-cushions, although markedly less downy or soft. ‘Along here!’ cried the Dr, running left.

As we sprinted away we heard the voice of the Master Debater behind us: ‘but there’s nowhere to run
to
, Doctor! We’ll catch up with you eventually!’

 
The corridor led to steps, which brought us to an upper deck. The bodies of British soldiers lay sprawled and scattered all about. ‘Back to the TARDY,’ I urged. ‘Let’s get away!’

‘It’s not as simple as that,’ said the Dr. ‘If we leave this ice ship floating with its complement of deadly Cydermen, they almost certainly will indeed over-run the Earth. They’re immune to all the weaponry that these humans can muster. It’d be no contest. And an Earth conquered by the Cydermen . . . that’d be disastrous. That would completely mess up millions of lives.’

‘Surely, and without wishing to sound callous,’ I said, panting a little as we ran, ‘that’s
their
problem, not ours?’

‘It’ll alter the timelines. The Cydermen aren’t supposed to conquer the Earth in the twentieth-century. Not until the beginning of the twenty-first.’

‘So some time lines get a little kinked . . .’ I said.

‘It’d mean
you’ll
both cease to exist, for instance,’ the Dr said. ‘Both of you. You see, you were both born on Earth
after
this event.’

‘We really must defeat these Cydermen,’ I said. ‘We can’t leave Earth to its terrible fate.’

We reached the bridge.

It had obviously seen some fighting since we had last been there: the teak was scorched, and water pooled on the icy floor. The Commodore and his helmsman were both lying face down.

‘Poor souls!’ cried the Dr. ‘
Mortem
, and without leaving their posts.’

‘Unless you want to join them,’ said Linn. ‘We’d better think quick.’

Behind us we could hear the war-chant of the Cyderman, getting implacably and horribly closer. Ooo Aur. Ooo Aur. OOO AUR.

‘There!’ said the Dr triumphantly, pointing through the navigation slit at the front of the bridge. ‘You see that ship?’

It was the profile of a mighty liner, visible against the black sky by virtue of its glittery banks of illuminated portholes, and its gaily lit upper decks. Its four fat funnels blocked out the starlight, passing bales of smoke up into the cold night air.

‘We’ll contact them,’ the Dr said. ‘Recruit them . . . as reinforcements.’

‘Recruit them
how
?’ I boggled.

‘Tell them the truth! They can send people aboard
this
craft. It looks like an affluent ship: they’ll surely have gold.
That’s
what we need to defeat the Cydermen - gold.’

‘So,’ I summarised. ‘You’re suggesting we radio a strange ship, tell them that we’re the only survivors aboard a secret Naval experiment that nobody has ever heard of, and that they must come aboard
with all their gold
to help us fight a race of implacable cyborg creatures who otherwise will conquer the Earth?’

‘Yes!’

‘There’s the chance,’ I said, ‘—and I appreciate that it’s only a chance - that they
might not
believe us.’

‘The future of the whole world is at stake! They
must
help!’

‘The radio,’ said Linn, ‘is broken, I’m afraid.’

The Dr and I looked at the radio. It was a charred mass of twisted metal and burnt wood.

‘There’s nothing for it,’ cried the Dr, grabbing the ship-steering-wheel-y-thing and hauling it as far to starboard as it would go. Or to port. I’ve never, if I’m being honest, been quite sure which is which when it comes to those two directions.

‘Doctor! What are you doing!’

‘It’s our only chance. I’ll pull this ship across their bows. Bump into them, if necessary, to attract their attention. ’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘And by
sure
I mean,
absolutely insane
?’

‘Certainly not,’ said the Dr. ‘Drastic measures are called for. The fate of the whole world is in the balance.’

We all three of us peered through the forward viewing hatch.

‘We seem to be powering directly towards the ship now,’ said Linn.

‘So we do,’ agreed the Dr. ‘Well, the rudder is hard down, as far as it will go. I suspect that we’ll keep turning, and pass in front of their bows soon.’

We stared anxiously forward.

‘We
seem
,’ said Linn again, ‘to be heading straight for them still.’

‘Hmm,’ said the Dr. ‘That does seem to be the case.’

‘Doctor . . .’ I said, increasingly alarmed. From behind us the
ooo aur ! ooo aur !
chanting was becoming ever-louder.

‘This Habbakuk-type ship seems to be much less manoeuvrable, ’ said the Dr, in a worried voice, ‘than I had anticipated. Perhaps we should . . .’ and he seized hold of the steery-wheely-circle again. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘This seems to be . . . more . . . sort of . . .uh!
uh
!’—he was heaving with all his might—‘stuck,’ he concluded.

We were almost upon the hapless other ship.

‘Watch out!’ cried Linn. But it was no use.

With a massive shuddering cacophonous crunch we collided with the mystery ship, careering into its side in a glancing but nevertheless catastrophic blow. I was knocked from my feet and slipped about in the cold pools of the bridge floor. The whole structure trembled and shook, and a rain of ice chunks plummeted from the ceiling.

The Dr was supporting himself by clinging onto the big steering wheel. I hauled myself to my feet hand over hand on one of the consoles, barely keeping upright as the bridge shimmied and shook. Straight ahead I saw the black flank of the other craft sliding past us, close enough to touch.

And then the shuddering stopped, and we were floating free again.

Linn screamed, pointing to the door.

Behind us the Cydermen were crowding in at the entrance to the bridge. ‘Oo Aur !’ they bellowed, levelling their guns at us.

‘We’re doomed!’ cried the Dr. ‘Hide!’

Then everything happened very quickly. The three of us jumped behind the steering column. The leading Cyderman fired a volley from his thumb, and it thudded into the floor of the bridge a few metres in front of us, exploding in a violent burst that turned the pools of water to steam, and sent shards and shrapnel of ice spraying everywhere. Then there was a moment’s silence, just enough to hear a deep, distant groan pass through the fabric of the ship, a vast deep sound like a gigantic beast moaning in pain. Then - like a giant diamond crystal struck in
exactly
the right place by the jeweller’s hammer - the mighty craft began to split. Jarred and sheared by the impact with the mystery ocean liner, this explosion (to the front of and along the dead centre of the craft) proved the tipping point. A crack spread the length of the bridge. In moments it widened, gaping and parting for all the world like a huge grin. ‘Hold on!’ shouted the Dr as the ice groaned and heaved. We clung together, and felt the angle of the bridge floor tip as the left side separated from the right. The
oo-aur
s of the Cydermen had taken on alarmed tones, and then everything was blotted out by a massive crumbling roaring symphony of structural collapse.

The floor rocked left, tipped right, rocked left again and finally turned through ninety degrees, sloughing us all off. We fell into the blackness of night, plummeting through cold air until we struck the icy black water with a swallowing splash of cold agony. The water felt like it was cutting all parts of my body at once. It was bitterly and agonizing cold.

Momentarily we were submerged, and I felt my chest constrict. Then we broke the surface, still all clinging together, gasping and crying.

I blinked the seawater from my eyes, and tried to look around. The two portions of the
Icetanic
were falling away from us on either side, rotating slowly in the choppy water as they searched for their new points of flotational equilibrium. The swell from this motion buoyed us up. The twin halves of the ship slid and rolled steadily away from us.

‘The cold!’ cried Linn. ‘The water is so
cold
!’

Then I saw the Cydermen. They were tumbling from the slippery ice, shelled out of the internal chambers and caverns of the mighty ice-structure like peas from a great white pod. The distant calls of ‘
Ooo! Aur!’
were cut short with
gloop!
and
glurg!
noises, and then they disappeared.

They were all falling into the freezing waters and sinking into its depths.

‘What,’ I gasped, through chattering teeth, ‘what will happen to them?’

The Dr was treading water by kicking his legs in froggy motions. ‘Straight to the bottom,’ he said, grimly.

‘Will they drown?’

‘Dear me no,’ said the Dr. ‘They’re far too toughly designed to
drown
.’

‘Well - will the pressure down there kill them?’

‘Certainly not. They’ll gather themselves and start walking - slowly but surely - for the shore.’

‘Then the Earth is doomed!’ I moaned. ‘We have failed!’

‘Well,’ said the Dr, kicking more furiously as the swell dipped us all down, ‘I don’t think so. They’ll all be dead long before they
reach
the shore, you see.’

‘But how?’ I gasped.

‘The sea water of course,’ snapped the Dr. ‘It’ll poison them. They’ll be walking through a fatal medium.’

‘I thought you said that only gold could kill them?’

‘That’s quite right. There’s a surprisingly large amount of gold dissolved in the ocean, you know. Approaching two milligrams per tonne. And if that doesn’t sound like a lot, then consider how many tonnes of seawater there are in the world . . . something like one and a third billion cubic kilometres of the stuff. The Cydermen will have to march through billions of tonnes of the stuff, and all that gold will accumulate in their chest-grills. They’re doomed.’

‘That’s good news,’ I said. Actually what I said was
ththththats gg ggg ggood n-news attshOOO!
. But I feel sure the Dr and Linn understood me.

‘What about the ship we hit?’ asked Linn.

The swell carried us up, and we caught a glimpse of the mystery ship over the top of the still slowly tumbling right-side half of the
Icetanic
. It was sailing away, apparently unharmed. ‘Looks alright, don’t you think?’ said the Dr.

‘I suppose so. But what about
us
?’

‘I think we need to find the . . . ah
there
we go - there she is: the TARDY!’

‘Can the TARDY float?’ I asked, shiveringly. I was thinking how very heavy it must be.

‘When you consider the relationship between the compact external shape of the thing, and the amount of air
inside
the structure,’ said the Dr, ‘the TARDY may well be the most buoyant object in the history of the universe.’

‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ I said.

‘Come on.’

We broke apart, and swam, our limbs aching with the ferocity of the cold, towards a rectangular shape. The Dr was right: it was so buoyant, in fact, that it was in effect
standing on top
of the water. We opened the door and crawled up onto the floor inside, shivering and soaking but alive.

It was a relief beyond words to shut the door on that freezing environment.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the Dr, pulling towels from the central console and passing them around. ‘I do believe we’ve done what we came to do . . . averted catastrophe once again.’

Time.

Have you ever really
thought
about it? Neither had I, until I met the Dr.

What is time? Whither time? Whence? Thither or hence? Who knows? And whom? And
why
does Whom know?

What?

Hold up: go back a mo. Start again.

Let us define time. Time is the difference between a hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of coffee. It is the difference between a cold beer on a hot day, and a
warm
beer on a hot day. It turns young to old, and via the mystery of parturition it turns old into young. It’s what makes yesterday different to today: it’s the difference, in other words, between yester and to. Since to is the opposite of fro, it follows that yester and fro are the same thing. Yesterfro. What am I talking about?

Time will tell.

Time
began
at the
beginning
. This is why, strictly speaking, we should call it the
beganning
.

Time is a dimension.

But (and pay close attention, for this bit is really
really
important) - even though it is a dimension, Time is
not
space. This is because one day
in time
you will die. That’s coming closer and closer, I’m sorry to say. You can’t avoid it by moving around in space. You can’t take three steps to the left and watch your death slide past you, shaking its fist in impotent rage like a bobsleigh-man who’s lost control of the steering. It doesn’t work like that. Time is a
two
-dimensional, not a three-dimensional, thing. You can move along it from
before
to
after
, and if you’re clever enough you can move from
after
to
before
. But you can’t go sideways in time.