by Brian Hayles
Clent, standing in the background, answered Jamie’s query patiently. ‘The instruments on the ice face have the highest heat and shock resistance known to man,’ he said. ‘When they cease to function, everything about them will be destroyed – including the alien spacecraft.’
‘And its reactor too?’ Victoria asked the Doctor. He nodded. He didn’t trouble to remind her that their own fate was also in the balance. There’d be little enough time to worry about that if disaster did strike!
Penley, his hand poised on the power lever, took a deep breath. ‘Here we go,’ he muttered tensely. ‘All the way – now!’ He rammed the throttle to full.
In the midst of chaos, Varga stood, majestic and alone. All about him, his warriors slid weakly to the floor, almost physically crushed by the combination of heat and humidity. Only Zondal remained conscious – close to collapse, he worked desperately at the smouldering controls. His choking voice barely reached Varga through the thick yellow fumes that were filling the ship. ‘Must… achieve… lift-off!’ were the Martian lieutenant’s final gasping words. His commander looked down at his dying comrade and spoke words that Zondal never heard.
‘It was not power in our engines, Zondal,’ he rasped. ‘It was the heat! Our greatest enemy: heat – from the Earthling’s Ioniser!’ Coughing from the fumes, he continued, ‘A magnificent weapon!’ Then, still standing, he saluted his dead comrades in the Martian style. ‘No… surrender!’ he cried as he, his ship and warriors, were blasted into infinity…
As Clent had predicted, all the seismic probe readings were dead – but the long-range seismograph print-out gave the minor blast recording that meant survival!
‘Only a sub-tremor reading!’ cried Jan, elated. ‘We’re safe! We’ve done it!’
‘Miss Garrett—’ responded Penley with a calm smile, ‘perhaps you’d better set all circuits to automatic and tie in with World Control?’
Jan suddenly realised that several of the technicians were observing her happy outburst with amusement. With an embarrassed, apologetic smile, she moved to the Ioniser controls and made the correct connections. Penley approached Clent, who was sitting at the back of the room, his head in his hands.
‘Clent, perhaps you’d care to check over the report we’ll need to make?’
Clent looked up, surprised. He had expected only scorn and humiliation from his colleagues. And now, of all people, it was Penley suggesting that they had a job to do – together! For a moment, Clent’s face was blank and disbelieving. Then he smiled tiredly.
‘Penley – you are the most insufferably irritating and infuriating person I have ever—’ he stopped in mid-sentence, and then grinned broadly – ‘been privileged to work with!’
Penley simply thrust out his hand to meet Clent’s, and they held the grasp for a brief moment, ‘Thanks, Clent…’
‘Never could write a report, though, could you?’ jibed the Leader gently, hiding his brief display of emotion. ‘Don’t worry, it’s something I’ve been trained to do.’
‘Without the computer?’ twinkled Penley cheerfully.
‘I think I can manage quite well, thank you…’ declared Clent, then added – ‘anyway, I can always get the Doctor to help out.’ He turned to smile at the Doctor and his young friends – only to find they weren’t anywhere to be seen. He turned back to Penley and Miss Garrett, his face puzzled. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. ‘Where on earth have they got to?’
Outside the great dome that protected Brittanicus Base, the snow had almost melted. Green shoots of long-covered grass were just beginning to show through on a mossy bank that had once been a snowdrift, and which still bore the imprint of a certain heavy, blue, twentieth-century police box.
But the box itself had long since gone…
DOCTOR WHO AND THE ICE WARRIORS
Between the Lines
Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors was originally published on 18 March 1976, almost a fortnight after ‘The Seeds of Doom’ had concluded Doctor Who’s thirteenth season of television adventures. It was the twenty-first of Target Books’ novelisations, and the second by Brian Hayles, following the previous year’s Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon, also featuring the Ice Warriors.
The cover was by Chris Achilleos (Target had by this point dropped the internal illustrations from its Doctor Who range). This new edition re-presents the original 1976 publication. A few minor errors or inconsistencies have been corrected, but no attempt has been made to update or modernise the text – this is Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors as originally written and published.
This means that the novel retains certain stylistic and editorial practices that were current in 1975 (when the book was written and prepared for publication) but which have since adapted or changed.
Most obviously, measurements are mostly given in the then-standard imperial system of weights and measures: a yard is equivalent to 0.9144 metres; three feet make a yard, and a foot is 30 centimetres; twelve inches make a foot, and an inch is 25.4 millimetres. There’s just one metric measurement, given by Miss Garrett as the Ioniser comes back under control; oddly, there was just the one metric measurement in the TV version, too, but a different one.
Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors sticks very closely to the scripts of Brian Hayles’s televised episodes. The most noticeable change in the novelisation is that Hayles shifts several of the cliffhangers – Jamie’s apparent death at the end of Chapter 5, for example, came several minutes before the end of Episode Three of the TV story. That episode instead ends with Victoria warning the Doctor and Clent about the Ice Warriors while Zondal prepares to fire on Brittanicus Base, events seen midway through Chapter 6 of this novelisation.
Brian Hayles had by this time written two television stories for the Third Doctor (‘The Curse of Peladon’ and ‘The Monster of Peladon’). While his descriptions and characterisation of the Second Doctor are unmistakably Patrick Troughton, there are a few dialogue flourishes that are more suggestive of Jon Pertwee’s incarnation. The Doctor can frequently be found addressing Clent as ‘old chap’ or ‘my dear chap’ and, on occasion, calling Jamie ‘lad’, neither of which is especially redolent of Troughton’s Doctor (although Clent does get a single ‘old chap’ from him on screen in ‘The Ice Warriors’).
Clent (minus the walking stick used by actor Peter Barkworth) and the personnel of Brittanicus Base all closely resemble their television originals, although Jane Garrett is renamed Jan Garrett. Hayles also invents a new designation for the Base computer’s communications unit – ECCO – that was never heard on screen.
In his television scripts, Hayles’s description of the Ice Warriors makes no suggestion of any reptilian or lizard-like traits:
Inside the ice, distorted but recognisable, is what appears to be a helmeted warrior. The helmet is hood-like and ominous, in the style of that used under the opening titles of ‘Hereward the Wake’. This is Varga.
Costume designer Martin Baugh, reasoning that an ‘ice warrior’ would be hard, cold and armoured, took upright crocodiles as the starting point for his design. The novelisation follows Baugh’s design, with Hayles suggesting that each warrior’s armour and weaponry is somehow ‘part of the creature’s physical anatomy’. He also makes full use of the Martians’ breathless, hissing vocal delivery, something devised in rehearsals by actor Bernard Bresslaw, who had played Varga.
The transmission of ‘The Ice Warriors’ in 1967 followed on directly from ‘The Abominable Snowmen’. When the TARDIS first arrives outside Brittanicus Base, Victoria notices the snow and Jamie wonders if they’ve landed on the same mountainside. This back reference to the previous story works considerably better in print, since ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ was set among the Tibetan mountains but filmed on the distinctly snow-free hillsides of North Wales. The Doctor also mentions Tibet, telling Clent that he and his companions have been on retreat there, though his further claim that they are ‘sanctifiers’ is dropped. (Terrance Dicks’s novelisation, Doctor Who and the Abomina
ble Snowmen, was published 16 months earlier, so there was continuity within the book range, too.)
One last – and minor – difference between broadcast story and print adventure comes when the Doctor is preparing to use his ammonium sulphide solution towards the end of Chapter 8. When Victoria identifies it as ‘what they use for making stink bombs’, the Doctor commends her ‘sound English education’. On screen, this is ‘a classical education’, which is ironic – a sound English education in the Classics would not have left Victoria with the impression that Mars was the Greek god of war, as she seems to think in Chapter 3…
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Published in 2012 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group Company
First published in 1976 by Tandem Publishing Ltd. & Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd.
Novelisation copyright © Brian Hayles 1976
Original script © Brian Hayles 1967
Introduction © Mark Gatiss 2012
The Changing Face of Doctor Who and About the Author © Justin Richards 2012
Between the Lines © Steve Tribe 2012
BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
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Series consultant: Justin Richards
Project editor: Steve Tribe
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Cover illustration: Chris Achilleos
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