‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Simple mining project really. Simple for other civilisations, not this one.’
‘Excuse me!’ said Donna.
‘What happened to sweetness and light Donna from now on, eh?’ said the Doctor, smiling.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Donna. She looked at it. ‘It just looks like a manhole,’ she said. ‘I mean, I could fit down it.’
‘You never make tunnels wider than they need to be.’
‘Where does it come out?’
‘Donna! Geography!’
Donna had a think. ‘Seriously? Korea?’
‘It’s the antipodes to here.’
She frowned. ‘Well, surely you can’t just take the top off? Wouldn’t that do something really weird to it?’
‘Well, it’s not weird – it’s just forces. But yes. If you open it up, gravity will cause the sides of the tunnel to drop in because of the pressure. There’s a fluid in there that holds the integrity of the structure that has the filament running through it . . . kind of a jelly. But once you expose it to the air, the structural integrity disappears and . . . Kaboom. Or splurge. Whatever the noise of a tunnel falling in is.’
The blue pulse of light ran up again to the ceiling. Another billion Rempaths flowing through, heading up through their pipeline into the rockets outside. Another however many credits in Gully’s pocket, so he could head back to Calibris and live like a king.
‘Won’t that do something bad to the Earth?’ said Donna.
‘Oh yes,’ said the Doctor. He went back to work. ‘But it can be open for a little while. Any more than a couple of minutes could really cause problems. Then we have to close it up again, let the pressure disperse underground. If it keeps drawing the air in, we have a situation we really don’t want. So. It’s simple, but it has to be quick.’
*
The last bolt was stiff to get, and Fief knelt down to help him turn it with his brute strength. ‘And will this be the end of it?’ he asked calmly.
‘It will,’ said the Doctor, looking up at him. ‘You know, Fief, there are kinder paymasters than yours. There are better ways of doing things altogether. But I suppose that’s something you have to feel in your gut.’
They tugged hard at the incredibly strong bolts.
The Doctor glanced at Fief’s earpiece. ‘Why don’t you stop the sounds, Fief?’ he asked gently. ‘Why don’t you let yourself feel? Take part in the universe?’
Fief looked at them both. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said calmly. ‘You don’t get it at all.’
‘What don’t we understand, Fief?’
‘Your futility . . .’ He shook his head. ‘And yet I shall do my duty. Return to Australia. Inform my employer that the job is done. For now.’
‘You’re not interested in making the sick better?’
‘People are people,’ said Fief. ‘Nobody is any different.’
‘But that thing in your ear . . .’ said Donna. ‘You know it’s just a distraction?’
If Fief could have laughed, he looked like he might have done then. He turned to her. ‘Distractions. Distractions like computers, phones, television, books. Music. Drink. Drugs. War? Everything to take away actually having to look at yourselves, contemplate your own existence? I think our way is simpler, that’s all.’
‘You’re wrong, Fief,’ said the Doctor vehemently. ‘You have to experience everything. Otherwise you’re not living at all. You have to live in the universe. You have to let the universe in.’
Fief gave the Doctor a long look, with his strange yellow eyes that glowed like a tiger’s in the undergrowth. ‘Some people . . .’ he said, still with that uneven penetrating stare. ‘Some people are so ill at ease with the universe they live in that they run away. They steal away and they run and bounce about it and never cease to give themselves endless distractions, cause themselves endless trouble in case they accidentally have to stop and think about things. I don’t suppose you know anybody like that.’
There was a pause. And then, with one final wrench, the bolts were off and the cover lay on the ground.
‘Donna, stand back,’ said the Doctor. ‘Fief, prepare to run. If you stumble, it will suck you in; it’s like the undertow of a ship. We cut the filament, drop the manhole cover, then we run to the TARDIS, OK?’
Fief nodded.
‘OK. One. Two . . .’
Chapter
Fifty-Eight
The cover made a great creaking, grinding noise. It was immensely heavy, and Donna had to come round, finally, to help pull it up. As they did so, a great noise filled the air; a hurricane of wind blew around them with a whoosh.
‘Get back!’ shouted the Doctor as they hauled the lid to the side of the room. ‘Get back! Back to the TARDIS!’
They dropped the lid with relief, where it clanged heavily on the floor, and staggered back against the window; every sheaf of paper in the room was flying around in the air, hitting them in the face.
‘Back!’
And then, suddenly, the wind changed.
The Doctor shot up. The wind had ripped the very last of the ice off Gully, and he had shaken himself free and, in the blink of an eye, shot himself into the hole; surrounding the filament; protecting it. As they watched, horrified, he started beaming the blue light up again, lighting up his entire translucent body which conducted it up into the rockets that surrounded the ice station.
‘I will take it all!’ he screamed at the Doctor. ‘Oh, the rage in this planet will make me strong. It will come through me! And I will leave you the blasted remains of this Earth! You had better shut us back in! The filament sustains me! I have its power. And once everyone is dead, this hole can collapse in itself. I’ll be long gone.’
The blue light sped up, shooting through him. His deranged face was gleeful. The wind whipped up again, faster and faster.
‘Put the top back on!’ screamed Donna. ‘Hit him with something!’
Gully used the Rempath stream to form a force field of blue light above himself, which crackled and rejected all their efforts to penetrate it with heavy objects. He cackled again.
‘And if you survive this, Doctor – which I doubt, unless you never use a computer again – but if you do, don’t worry. I shall come and find you. And you,’ he said, jabbing a tentacle at Donna.
The Doctor blinked.
If he took off the force field and cut off the sustaining filament, then that would expose Gully to the same physical forces as the rest of them. Once his entire body stopped conducting the Rempaths, he could disintegrate into the tunnel, then they could put the cover back on before it sucked in the Earth.
He’d need to be held down, of course. He’d be taking the Doctor with him. It was a one-way trip.
‘Stand back,’ the Doctor shouted at the other two, grabbing his screwdriver to power down the force field. ‘Stand back. And as soon as the blue light goes out, you put the cover on. You understand? You put the cover back on. You do.’
Then he looked at Donna.
‘You know everything you just said about yourself in the TARDIS?’ he said. ‘Everything you said at the airport? Every single time you’ve been down on yourself? Felt that envy and worry and anger and hate of modern life all around you, and turned it in on yourself?’
She stared at him, heart thumping.
‘You must know that, to me, you are the opposite of that.’
Donna felt like she was moving in slow motion, as she shot her head round, realising what he was about to do; that he had turned off the force field and was preparing to throw himself down the hole.
‘Noooo!’ she screamed.
And then Fief turned too, his yellow eyes burning, and suddenly something was rattling, falling through the wind, down at her feet. He briefly, strangely, ran his hand through her long hair, and touched his mouth to her head, just once, then he shouted, loud above the noise of the wind and the screeching insane cackling of Gully; shouted at full pitch:
‘I want to live! I want
to live!’
He pushed the Doctor out of the way with no little force, and hurled himself down the tunnel, his huge body smothering the monster, and breaking the beam of blue light.
There was a hideous high-pitched scream from the octopus, and suddenly the walls of the tunnel started to suck themselves in and down, crumbling from the sides, as the two plummeted downwards, through the now disintegrating structural gel.
The entire room began to pull towards the hole, the wind a maelstrom, as the Doctor and Donna, bent over, hauled, panting, the huge manhole cover back to the centre of the floor. As everything now – the fan, the telephone – was pulled into the sucking orbit, more and more things dragged in, the Doctor pushed Donna to the back. In total exhaustion, they made their final heave and, finally, landed the manhole back on top of the hole.
The collapse stopped, but too late for Gully and Fief, now sucked deep down below into the guts of the Earth.
There was a distant boom, from an unfathomable depth below as the space below more or less reasserted itself and the laws of physics came to bear, the liquid just about holding its integrity; the Earth not blown apart.
Donna and the Doctor both collapsed on the floor, exhausted. Donna looked around the room, and out at the rest of the world, and wondered what was left of it.
Chapter
Fifty-Nine
‘I just don’t know,’ the Doctor was saying. He was pacing up and down in the console room. ‘The harvest has stopped, but I don’t know, now, honestly. For the people who are already sick. If you can persuade the entire human race into doing an act of painful kindness for one another.’
‘Humans haven’t even got the hang of cleaning rotas,’ said Donna. ‘Or, like, parking nicely. Or sorting out their recycling. Or . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah, all right.’
The Doctor had called up the news reports. There was nothing good in any of them. Those who were angry seemed destined to stay angry. Until they died. Imminently. And there was so, so much anger out there.
‘How?’ he said again. ‘How are we going to persuade people of this? I love humans, but you can be right selfish so-and-sos.’
‘Poor old Fief,’ said Donna. She picked up the discarded earpiece. ‘So weird. Doesn’t work for me. Mind you, I did wash it.’
The Doctor’s head shot up. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Give me that.’
Donna handed it over. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Amazing,’ said the Doctor. ‘Imagine a different species from a billion light years across the galaxy daring to evolve a different audio structure to you.’ He messed about with the sonic. ‘Tell me what he was like without it?’
‘Dizzy,’ said Donna. ‘A free spirit. Cute, really. Like a kid who’s had too many E numbers . . .’
The Doctor glanced up. ‘Without the sound fields of Cadmia suggesting he conform to the good of the species . . .. like a soft wind through wheat. He’s been entirely reared, evolved, brought up to be suggestible. To do the calmest thing. Through this. No wonder he was all spun around.’
He blinked.
‘Do you remember when you were speaking Korean? And you couldn’t find a phrase for feeling proud of yourself?’
‘Yeah,’ said Donna.
‘Collectivism,’ said the Doctor. ‘The good of everyone over the good of the individual. Taken to the end extent.’
He paced up and around the console, then looked up at Donna.
‘Shall we give it a shot?’ he said.
‘Can’t hurt. Can it? Can it hurt, though? Does it have to?’
The Doctor hit his head with his hand. ‘You know what I have to do?’
Donna shook her head.
‘If I can programme it to send out a signal to make humans suggestible . . . It’ll need to travel.’
‘You mean you’d have to send it back out.’
They both looked at the door of the TARDIS.
‘Back out through that filament?’
‘Yup.’
‘That filament you just got Fief to break?’
‘Yup.’
‘In that tunnel that’s only got milliseconds left before it collapses for ever?’
‘When you put it like that . . .’
They stared at the door thoughtfully for a moment.
‘Also, what if it turns humans into Fiefs?’ said Donna. ‘What if it turns humanity into emotionless robots who kill stuff at the drop of a hat?’
‘I thought you quite liked him by the end,’ the Doctor reminded her. He twisted the earpiece around his fingers. ‘I think it’s our only shot.’
‘What if we don’t know how to stop it? He didn’t.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Let me set a timer on it. Just in case.’ He looked at her. ‘You know, it won’t work on me.’
Donna blinked. Then she realised. ‘So I’m the guinea pig.’
‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘And a lot else.’
She smiled back at him. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You know, I just realised that I am in fact so awesome, a completely emotionless man fell for me. A man with no capacity for love.’
‘Well, maybe you’re quite something, Donna Noble.’
Donna thought of how overwhelming all those feelings of anger and rage had been. How empty she had felt.
And how much hope there was after all; and how much there was still to be done. Could they convey that to all those sad, desperate keyboard warriors out there? Could they?
She took the earpiece.
The Doctor switched it on.
‘It should just calm your emotions about anything you might want to do. And then render you susceptible. I might suggest things. Things that are good for the whole of society, not just yourself. You don’t have to hurt yourself though. There’s no one here for you to cure. So. Please. Don’t hurt yourself.’
Donna blinked. ‘I could probably do with just a bit of emotion calming. After all that.’
‘So could I,’ said the Doctor. ‘OK.’ He took her hand. ‘Are you ready?’
‘You’re not to make me dance like a chicken.’
‘OK.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise. What about doing the cha cha ch . . .’
It started.
Chapter
Sixty
Oh, but it was quite the strangest thing, the Cadmian implant.
Afterwards, Donna couldn’t have told you exactly what it sounded like.
Fief had been right: it wasn’t music, not in the sense of a melody or an instrument. Rather, it was a cascade of different memories and sensations that were obviously in her ear, were made up of sound, but she couldn’t tell you what the sounds were. The sense, more, of hot buttered toast and a cascading waterfall and waving grass and the sound of familiar, happily awaited footsteps running up the garden path; and a row of shopfronts she remembered as a child; and the sense of being held very closely; and lavender and seawater and running full pelt through a yellow field with her hair shaking out behind her and toes in sand and rabbit fur and there was perhaps a tune she knew, or rather, a tune she thought she recognised, but she couldn’t identify, a silvery tinkling of notes reminiscent of something happy and sad all at once and very far away, something she couldn’t get hold of, something that she had once had but was now out of her reach, and it made her sad and excited and happy all at once . . .
An angry, noisy buzzer went off. She blinked back to reality. The Doctor had his arms folded and was watching her with a slight grin on his face.
‘Did you feel that?’ said Donna. ‘Wow! That was . . .’ She blinked. ‘Calming. Yes. Yes it was.’
‘Very, very impressive,’ said the Doctor. ‘If we magnify the signal as crowd control . . . Yes, it could definitely work.’ He shook his head suddenly and glanced away. ‘Could have done with it on Skaro,’ he muttered, mostly to himself.
‘How long did you set the buzzer for?’
‘Three hours,’ said the Doctor.
‘Whoa,’ said Donna, whisking ar
ound. ‘How did he ever get anything done?’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? You went and did about three months’ worth of laundry.’
‘Did I really?’
‘And made this.’
In front of them both was a three-tiered wedding cake with a large piece out of it. Donna glanced down at her finger. There was icing on it.
‘Whoa,’ she said again, sticking her finger in her mouth. ‘Mmm . . .’
‘And . . .’ The Doctor held up his hand to show her what was in it.
‘I whittled you a wooden sonic screwdriver?’
‘You thought I’d like it.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Let’s just say yes, shall we?’
‘Does it work on wood?’
‘No.’
They looked at one another.
‘This is our only hope,’ said the Doctor.
They both looked outside at the tunnel. It was shifting uncomfortably, the pressure starting to disintegrate the floor around it. The Doctor opening it once had mixed it up, had started the terrible creaking of a hole that shouldn’t exist; a hole the Earth didn’t have the technology or the infrastructure to support.
It didn’t have much longer.
‘Well,’ said the Doctor. ‘No time like the present. I’ll fix it to the Rempath filament link. You’re going to have to close it on top of me, stop it collapsing while I do it. Otherwise we’ll run out of time.’
‘Lock you in a tunnel that goes right through the centre of the Earth with two corpses inside and collapsing in on itself?’
‘Maybe I’ll just play that thing again and suggest you do it,’ said the Doctor.
‘I bet a real Time Lord could pause time for the entire universe.’
They stepped out together, holding hands.
Donna glanced down at the tiny piece of kit. ‘It really doesn’t work on you, does it?’ said Donna.
‘No,’ said the Doctor.
‘Isn’t it weird being so hoity-toity above everyone all the time?’ said Donna.
‘It probably won’t be when I’m crawling down that filthy tunnel, no,’ said the Doctor.
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 19