Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones

by Mark Speed

  “Tough day at the office, Doc.”

  “You’re right. I’m sick of today. Let’s go back to yesterday.”

  Some distance east of Streatham Hill, the polyp slid to a halt at the convergence of a couple of pipes. There was the faint scent of something that it recognised. It trailed its tentacles in the water to check. The scent was not something it had experienced directly itself as an individual, but from before its split. It was more than just a memory – deeper than that, far deeper. It was the kind of memory that a species has programmed into it from inception: an instinctual memory. In the way that a bird doesn’t need to be taught that a worm is a meal, the polyp recognised this as the most desirable food.

  It splayed its tentacles out wider to confirm that the scent really was there.

  The scent was definitely not in the water coming from the pipe it had just left, but was in the water after the convergence. The polyp backed up and tested the water in the other pipe. It was rich in the smell, and that triggered a powerful feeding response in the polyp. This was the smell of home, and nothing would stop it from getting to the source. And when it got there, it would gorge itself. It set off with purpose.

  “Congratulations,” said the Doctor. “You’re just about to become a proper time traveller. Outside the Spectrel it’s yesterday, and you will step into it.”

  “Oh, man. This is incredible.”

  “I’d agree with you as the original meaning of the word. To your primitive society it is indeed hard to believe that we have done this. But in your meaning of the word it may be somewhat of a disappointment. You may be aware that yesterday was very much like any other. Furthermore, you will find that a Chinese factory is just as boring as a British factory.”

  “Doc, you’re always raining on my parade.”

  “It’s my parade, and I determine whether or not there is precipitation.”

  “Whatever. But this is huge for me. I’ll be in two places at once!”

  “Yes, but if you recall, you were blissfully unaware of that yesterday. Only one of you knows, or ever will have known.”

  “Unless…”

  “Don’t bother speculating.”

  Kevin could see he was on a losing wicket. “Why’s Trini coming in her cat form?”

  “She has her reasons. Now come on.”

  “Do I need to wear my goggles?”

  “Stick them on your head in case you need to slip them on. Thankfully, this isn’t a sewer.”

  “Yeah, otherwise you’d be staying here.” Kevin sighed, slipped the balaclava back over his head and set the goggles on his forehead. He unclipped the retainer on his Con-Bat’s holster. The Doctor led the way out of the Spectrel, his Ultraknife at the ready. Trinity followed Kevin silently.

  The factory was just as bland as the Doctor had said it would be. The big industrial lights thirty feet above had only been dimmed, lending the place a ghostly look. Over the stacks of palletised cardboard boxes he could see that the roof continued for at least a hundred yards in every direction. They’d emerged from the Spectrel near the start of an assembly line. There were two others close by, each running for about fifty yards towards an area where boxes of the finished goods were being assembled into pallets. Cardboard boxes were piled at various points along the line. The only difference Kevin could see, in his limited experience of factories, was that the lettering on the boxes and on signs was in Chinese characters.

  “Like, aren’t they going to see us?” whispered Kevin.

  “They’ve not bothered with internal CCTV for a factory making cheap plastic goods by the million – just a couple of guards to go on the occasional patrol. Even if we do encounter them, I’ve got full masking on, you’re in camouflage mode and Trini’s a cat. Now do you understand?”

  “Right. They just see a cat. And cats are lucky in Chinese culture. Or they might even keep cats to kill rodents.”

  “Well done.” The Doctor moved over to the assembly line to examine it. He picked up what Kevin recognised to be a green plastic leaf from a toy flower like the ones they’d seen back in London. “Bingo!” said the Doctor. “Looks like they were making them again today, and they’ll be making them tomorrow too.” He nodded over at a cardboard box full of the leaves.

  “But if we left on Monday and yesterday is today, then today’s Sunday, innit?”

  “This is China. In the run-up to Christmas I bet this place runs twenty-four hours a day.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “This is just the assembly line. We need to find the line where the plastic leaves are made. The circuitry is inserted at that stage. I don’t care if they make these things or not, just so long as they don’t contain this technology.” He pocketed the leaf. “I have to say that moving only that one leaf makes me feel pretty awful.”

  “Why? The lights in here surely aren’t bright enough?”

  “Remember that the solar cell is only there to make the leaves move. It’s the movement through the Earth’s magnetic field that energises the circuitry that’s embedded in the leaves.”

  “Oh, gotcha. I wish I could feel it.”

  “You should be glad you can’t. I can sense them.” The Doctor’s eyes seemed focused at a greater distance than Kevin could actually see, as if he were seeing through the warehoused stock.

  “Sense what?”

  “The components.” He started walking slowly but deliberately away from the assembly lines, as if in a trance.

  “Are you alright, Doctor?” asked Kevin, tagging along behind. Trinity was padding silently along behind, looking around her, scanning for danger.

  “I’m concentrating, lad. Just the slight alterations in the Earth’s magnetic field are proving enough for me to be able to sense them.” He began to walk more briskly, and now they found themselves on a broad walkway, whose polished concrete bore painted marks like a road. The sides were lined with yet more cardboard boxes.

  Kevin fingered the tip of his Con-Bat nervously, but was relying on Trinity to spot anything untoward. He spotted a CCTV camera of the variety that comes as a mirrored globe – the same kind that he’d grown up with on his estate in Tulse Hill. He wondered just how well-masked the three of them were. He looked down at Trinity and saw that she’d adopted the same light grey as the concrete, but wasn’t too concerned. She gave him a reassuring meow.

  They made some sharp turns and then headed through some plastic strips that separated the production lines and warehousing from a different unit. The ceiling was as high as the previous unit, but the scene was totally different. This was what Kevin understood to be a proper factory, and he realised the difference between an assembly line – like the ones he’d just seen – and a production line. There were large machines of varying heights, each with an array of metal and reinforced plastic tubing, red and green buttons, control panels, LED displays, conveyor belts, and rotating moulds. Over all of these grey metal machines someone had splashed a riot of multi-coloured waxy-looking drops, which he realised were plastic. There were few near the tops of the machines, but the density increased nearer the floor, and the floor itself was covered in them. The room was warm – his combat suit let him feel the ambient air temperature. He saw a furnace in the corner.

  “Total disregard for health and safety,” said the Doctor, coming out of his trance.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s all hot, molten plastic that’s been splashing around. Nasty. No natural gas supplies, so they’re using an oil-fired furnace to provide the heat to melt the plastic for all of these machines.”

  “Uh. Okay. Well, they’re not on, so it’s safe. Right?”

  “Safe? You don’t see what I see. This is a disaster area. That,” he stabbed a finger at one of the smallest machines, “is the source of all our current woes.”

  “Come on, let’s have a butcher’s.”

  They walked over to the machine and looked it over. To Kevin’s eyes it looked innocent enough. There was a large rotating metal mould into whi
ch he could see that green plastic would be injected, and the cooled green leaves ejected into a hopper which fed onto a small conveyor belt, at the end of which there was a cardboard box half-filled with green leaves.

  “Very clever,” said the Doctor. “See that?” He pointed to a hopper. Beneath the pointed end of the hopper ran a compressed air hose. He traced it down towards a small nozzle which pointed at the moulds just before they reached the enclosed part of the machine. “It fires one of the tiny little printed circuits into each mould before the plastic is injected.”

  “Can’t we just sabotage it, then?”

  “They’ll just replace it. I need to destroy these.” He pointed at a box full of what looked like fine, polished gravel. There are seventy-five thousand left in that box alone, and it’s three-quarters full. If you look over there, there are a hundred and twenty boxes.”

  “Wow! That’s enough for… for a lot of these things, innit?”

  “Yes,” said the Doctor. “Enough to make life just about impossible for me and my cousins.”

  “No time like the present,” said Kevin. “Well, except that it’s actually yesterday.” He bent down, picked up the cardboard box and took two steps towards the furnace.

  “Aaargh!” the Doctor let out a strangled cry and fell against the conveyor belt. Trinity leapt at Kevin and landed inside the box, her large frame filling it. His combat suit took the extra weight for him. She looked up and hissed angrily.

  “Oh, man. Oh, Doc I’m so sorry.” He began to lower the box of circuits very slowly, watching the Doctor contort as he moved the seventy-five thousand components through the Earth’s magnetic field. “I didn’t think, man.”

  He put the box down on the floor and Trinity stepped out, glaring at him. “How was I to know?” he said to her. If a cat could have told him that he should have worked it out for himself, then that’s what her look said to him. She jumped up onto the conveyor belt and nuzzled against the Doctor’s head. He groaned.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Kevin.”

  “I said I was sorry, Doc.”

  “Don’t ever not think through your actions, is what I meant. Please. Although they were moving very slowly, there were an awful lot of them. I can’t imagine how painful it would be when that machine’s working and there are three or four per second shooting down that pipe at high velocity.”

  “I was going to incinerate them in that boiler.”

  “You’re right, that wouldn’t half be a bad idea,” said the Doctor, getting back on his feet. But you’d just clog it up and it’d stop working.”

  “So are we going to burn the factory down then?”

  “That’s an option. The way I feel right now it’s very tempting to take it out. But it’s not the fault of these Chinese. They’ve been duped.”

  “Duped? By who?”

  “No. He’s got nothing to do with it. They’ve been duped by those blasted illegal aliens. The ones whose idea of fun was to bring giant gas-guzzling beetles to Earth, and who tried to hack into my Spectrel. They’ve co-opted this factory. That’s another law they’ve broken – bringing yet more advanced technology to this planet.”

  There was a noise behind Kevin. He spun round. Two uniformed Chinese guards pushed aside the plastic flaps that separated the production area from the assembly lines. He stood still, knowing his suit would blend into the background. The Doctor was on the other side of the machine, in full view. Kevin knew his memory masking should cover him. That left Trinity.

  Trinity was sitting on the conveyor belt. She’d turned herself white and pink, and flattened her fur to make it sleek and shiny, like plastic. Her right foreleg was waving rhythmically back and forward like a giant version of the good luck cat in the window of Kevin’s local Chinese restaurant.

  The guards looked at each other and then back at Trinity. They walked over slowly, apparently oblivious to the Doctor, who was standing with his back to the machine, just three feet away from her. From where Kevin was standing, he could tell that they must be looking straight into her eyes, and he remembered what the Doctor had told him about her hypnotic powers. Her right forearm continued to wave back and forth, but ever more slowly, until after half a minute it stopped. He found that he was holding his breath. The two guards stared with wide eyes, their faces blank. They turned and walked silently, zombie-like, back through the plastic strips, and were gone.

  “Good girl,” said the Doctor, stroking the back of her head. In that instant, Trinity’s fur changed back to black and she nuzzled her head into the Doctor’s hand. “It never pays to create a fuss. We don’t need any fancy pyrotechnics to deal with these situations.”

  “So what are you going to do about these dangerous chips then?”

  “Well that’s ea –”

  The Doctor was frozen in mid-sentence.

  “Doc? Wassup?”

  He could see that the Doctor was straining, but unable to move.

  Kevin heard the faint purring of an engine getting closer. It was coming from behind the fronds of plastic. A forklift truck burst through. On its prongs was a pallet of boxes. It slowed down as it closed the thirty yards between them.

  Kevin twigged in an instant what was in the boxes, and that they didn’t need to move quite so fast as they got closer. Something from his Physics classes about distance and inverse squares with electromagnetic fields popped into his head.

  He ran forwards and the forklift truck veered towards him. He spun to the side to avoid one of the prongs and collided with the wooden edge of the pallet. Remembering the powers of his suit, he pushed back and stopped the vehicle in its path, its rubber wheels making a scuffing noise against the polished concrete. Something metal whooshed past, followed by another and another, but he didn’t have a chance to see what they were.

  There was a gasp from behind him as the Doctor was released from the agony of the time-disruption.

  Kevin turned around and pushed his back on the wooden edge of the pallet and dug his heels in. He could now see the Doctor, and what had got past him.

  It was the robots. Clones of the ones they’d had to fight in the lair of the illegal aliens.

  One of them had picked up a box of the chips from the pallet on the forklift and was making rapid circles twenty-five feet above the Doctor, who was frozen once again and clearly in pain.

  “This is war!” shouted Kevin. He took the Con-Bat in his right hand and swung it underneath the pallet. There was a loud and satisfying bang as it took out the truck’s front wheel assembly. He pushed himself forward off the pallet. A metal cable whipped itself around his upper arm and he pulled back. He heard the robot hitting the driver’s cage of the truck. As the robot pulled at his right arm again he tossed the Con-Bat into his left hand, rotated his body so that he was facing the driver’s seat, and dealt a massive blow to the robot, which slammed down into the bottom of the cab, its cables still on the controls. A couple of sparks fizzed from its circuitry. He unwrapped the limp cable from his arm and took in the scene.

  All three robots were now airborne, each with a box of chips, moving in figures of eight high above the Doctor. Trinity was hissing at them. She settled down on her haunches the way a cat does and then sprung up, reaching twenty feet into the air, her claws extended. The robots had little difficulty avoiding her. She landed deftly on top of a machine on the other side of the production area and hissed again. She dropped down out of sight underneath the machine.

  Kevin fought down a rising tide of panic. If they were being held here, what was happening to the Spectrel? He knew that if the Doctor wasn’t able to function in these conditions, then the chances are that it was disabled too. And where had Trinity gone?

  The forklift truck was powered by a couple of butane cylinders. He holstered his Con-Bat and lifted one off its mounting, tearing off the end of the hose. The gas hissed loudly out of the cylinder. He felt the power of his suit as he knelt down and then heaved it into the air at the robots. It arced up towards them, hissing uneve
nly as it spun, leaving a white trail of chilled butane vapour behind it. The robots dodged it easily and it hit a light fitting, bounced off the far wall and banged and clanged down to the floor amidst the machinery.

  He took out his Con-Bat again and bashed at one of the nearby machines, breaking off a heavy chunk of metal several inches in diameter. He threw it a few feet in the air like a tennis player with a ball, and hoped his suit and Con-Bat could figure out what he wanted as he swung to hit it.

  His suit powered up his forehand swing and he felt the metal make jarring contact with the Con-Bat. As his Con-Bat followed through and his suit slowed his arm back down, he saw the piece of machinery rocket through the air and smash into one of the robots. It was knocked out of its circuit, spun on its axis, bounced off the ceiling and then continued spinning against the ceiling. It was still contributing to the time disruption, but presented a much easier target now. Kevin holstered his Con-Bat again, jumped back behind the forklift, tore off the second of the butane cylinders, hunched down and then threw it with all his suit’s might at the disabled robot. The cylinder spun through the air, trailing a cloud of butane vapour behind it. It connected with the robot and slammed it heavily into a metal cross-beam with a loud crash, bending the beam. A sheet of metal roofing was dislodged, and Kevin saw stars in the night sky beyond. The cylinder fell heavily to the floor near the furnace, bounced once and rolled. The robot fell less quickly, one of its cables still clasping the box and the others flailing in the air. It hit one of the machines, which turned itself on, spewing out a cascade of white flowers with yellow centres.

  The other two robots were still circling. The Doctor was contorted in pain against the machine. Where the hell was Trinity?

  One of the robots stopped moving in its figure of eight, slowing down, and then began trying to move in different directions. It seemed that an unseen force was stopping it. Kevin caught the tiniest glint of a thread. The second robot was stopped in its path. Both robots deployed their cable arms to try to cut through the web that had caught them, but found that they became snagged. The more they struggled, the less they were able to move. The cardboard boxes full of components were suspended in mid-air by the near-invisible threads of the web Trinity had spun.