Doctor Who

by Russell T Davies

  ‘What are you blubbing about now?’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Mickey!’ she yelled! ‘Again! How many times are you going to forget him? I’m the one who’s got to tell them. His mates. The boys from football. His Uncle Cliff. All the little kids from the estate, they adored him. Oh my God, I’ve got to tell them he’s dead.’ She looked at him with contempt. ‘Not that you care. You were right. You are an alien.’

  But he wouldn’t back down. Steel in his voice. ‘Listen, if I did forget some kid called Mickey—’

  ‘He’s not a kid!’

  ‘If I did, it’s because I’m trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering about on top of this planet, all right?’

  ‘All right!’

  ‘Yes it is!’ and they ground to a halt, like sulking kids.

  The Doctor sat on a concrete bench and fiddled with his screwdriver-thing. It bleeped and whirred; she supposed he was still trying to find that mysterious signal. And now Rose felt cold, a spring breeze gusting down the river and shivering the trees along the Embankment.

  She looked at this man from outer space, and there was one question she was dying to ask above all others.

  ‘If you’re an alien, how come you sound like you’re from the north?’

  ‘Lots of planets have a north.’

  Oh.

  Fair enough.

  She looked at the TARDIS, reading the sign at the top: POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX. ‘If you’re not a policeman, then what’s this thing meant to be? Why does it look like that?’

  ‘It’s a disguise,’ he said.

  ‘Disguised as what? It’s not a very good disguise if I don’t know what the disguise is. That’s the opposite of a disguise.’

  ‘All right, calm down, it’s a bit out of date, that’s all.’ He looked at her askance. ‘I bet you never lose an argument, do you?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Well if you must know, they used to have police boxes on every street corner, back in the ’30s and ’40s. They didn’t have walkie-talkies back then, just telephones, so there’s a phone inside that little panel. And that’s the disguise. The TARDIS hides itself, like a chameleon. Park it on a street corner, no one notices.’

  ‘D’you think? It’s a great big box!’

  ‘Yeah, and d’you know what the human race does, when it sees something big and strange in the middle of the street?’ He grinned. ‘You walk right past it.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she sighed, and sat down next to him. A silence, just the chug and honk of boats on the Thames. Then she said, ‘You heal fast.’

  ‘I do what?’

  She pointed at his cheek. ‘You cut yourself. On my mother’s glass table. For which she is never going to forgive you.’ She leaned in closer. ‘But there’s nothing there. It was deep, I remember thinking, that’s nasty. But there’s not even a scar. And that was, what, 12 hours ago? Is that an alien thing then, self-healing?’

  ‘No. I cut myself weeks ago.’

  Sometimes, she thought, he says things just to provoke me. Don’t rise to it. She said, ‘That thing mentioned a war. Mickey’s head, it said there’d been a war.’

  He grunted a yes.

  ‘A war between who? Your lot and these plastic people?’

  ‘Oh no.’ The Doctor lowered the screwdriver and craned his head back to look at the sky. The stars were hidden behind the greenish haze of the city, but the Doctor seemed to be looking beyond. ‘There was an almighty war. Out there. Far away. Between my people and another kind. Not this lot we’re fighting now, a different species altogether. The worst.’ He sighed and brought his head back down. ‘Long time ago.’

  ‘But you won.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You said you had a very bad day. Was that it?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She left a silence. Then she said, ‘So the plastic people …?’

  ‘They were victims of the war. Bystanders. The battle swept across their planet. And this wasn’t a fight like laser guns and spaceships and explosions, this was a filthy, stinking war that changed reality itself. Corrupting everything it touched. Ripping life inside out and making it obscene. The Nestene Consciousness didn’t stand a chance.’

  That was the name plastic-Mickey had said. Consciousness. She tested the words for herself. ‘Nestene Consciousness.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘That’s quite a name.’

  ‘Quite a creature. You keep calling them people, but it’s more like a single, vast, physical, thought-hive-aggregation. Huge, restless thing. Ambitious. It’s eyed up the Earth once or twice before. But then the war rolled across and devastated it. In a single second. It ripped apart the Consciousness, devolved it, rebuilt it into a travesty of its old self. And then the battle boiled away into the stars and left the Nestene to starve.’ He gave her a sudden, lovely smile. ‘I haven’t talked like this in a long time.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never heard anything like it!’

  They both laughed.

  ‘So it’s starving,’ said Rose. ‘Is that what the Nestene wants? Is it going to eat us?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘Yes, because out of everything that’s been said on this bench, that’s daft.’

  ‘It can feed off the toxic waste of this planet. Loves it, lots of smoke and oil, plenty of toxins and dioxins, perfect. Just what it needs. Its food stocks were destroyed in the war, all its protein planets rotted. So it made its way here.’

  ‘And it what, it controls plastic?’

  ‘It is plastic. That was the damage the war left behind. The Nestene was flesh and blood, once upon a time, it just had an affinity with plastic, it could resonate organic polymers. Nice party trick. But then the war came. And rewrote its DNA. Like a cruel joke. The Nestene Consciousness became living plastic, an actual living plastic creature. No wonder it found its way here. Earth, the greatest plastics factory in the cosmos. You’ve littered this world with so much junk, there’s plastic in the food, in the air, in the wildlife, you’ve got plastic lining the entire ocean floor. The Nestene looks at you lot and thinks it’s in paradise.’

  ‘All right, Swampy, I’ve got it.’

  ‘He’s a very nice man. I spent a week up a tree with him.’

  ‘I bet he jumped out first.’

  ‘He did, yeah.’

  She folded her arms to ward off the cold. ‘So stopping the Nestene, is that like, your job? I still don’t know who you are or what you really do.’

  ‘I don’t do anything. I just travel.’ He gave a weary smile. ‘Believe it or not, all I want is a quiet life. No job, no wage, no boss, no tax, no home, no responsibilities. Just me.’

  ‘Well, you say that. But you were part of that war, you damaged the Nestene, so what are you doing now? Making amends?’

  ‘Oh, I wish. That would take me a long, long time.’

  ‘But all the same. Have you got a plan? I mean, is there a way of stopping it?’

  He reached into his pocket and took out a phial of deep-blue liquid. He waggled it in front of her with a silly smile. ‘Anti-plastic.’

  ‘Anti-plastic?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘What’s anti-plastic?’

  ‘It’s a polymer-blading reconvertant heuverstatic animotrope.’

  ‘Right,’ said Rose. ‘Anti-plastic.’

  ‘If I can get this inside the Nestene, it’ll stop it dead.’

  ‘Well that’s good news!’

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s the last thing I want to do.’ He pocketed the phial and leapt to his feet, holding his sonic screwdriver in the air like a man trying to get reception on his phone. ‘But first things first, we need to find the Nestene. It’s clever. Hiding the signal, it keeps slipping away.’ Exasperated, he went to the balustrade to look at the river’s expanse. ‘How can you hide something that big in a city this small?’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Rose, going to join him. ‘Hide what?’

  ‘The transmitter. Somewhere round here, there’s a tra
nsmitter. The Nestene can control every piece of plastic with the power of its mind, but the power needs boosting. It had that nest, in your shop, it had lots of little nests all over the place, I’ve dealt with them, but they were just relay points. The control was coming from one central transmitter. Hidden in the city somewhere. And it must be huge.’

  ‘Right,’ said Rose, determined to be useful. ‘Tell me what it looks like.’

  He stood with his back to the river. ‘Huge. Circular. Metal. Like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we’re standing.’

  ‘Doctor,’ she said, and pointed behind him.

  He turned around. He saw the city, the river, the sky. He turned back to Rose, puzzled. ‘What?’

  ‘Doctor,’ she said, and pointed again.

  He turned to look. River, city, sky. Turned to Rose. ‘What?’

  ‘You idiot,’ she said, and pointed once more.

  He looked again, river, city, sky, and …

  The London Eye.

  The great big circular metal radial London Eye, the world’s biggest Ferris wheel, standing over the Thames in all its floodlit glory.

  He turned back to Rose with a grin.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said.

  They ran over the bridge, across the dark river, running headlong towards danger and disaster and death, and she held out her hand and took hold of his, so they ran together hand in hand, and she looked at him and he looked at her and they smiled as they ran, and the smile became a grin as they hurtled along, the lights of the night streaking past them, and in that moment, for all her fear and horror and grief, Rose had never been happier in her life.

  12

  The Living Statues

  The South Bank was busy, the hub of one of the world’s greatest cities lighting up on a Saturday night. Rose and the Doctor pushed their way through the crowds, and Rose wondered if Londoners were showing their defiance after the Henrik’s explosion, refusing to cower at home. She looked around at the tourists, families, buskers, mates, mums with kids, gangs of teenagers, couples of all ages, scrums of rowdy lads already drunk, women in tiny shiny dresses ready to strut until 4 a.m., some people heading for the Eye, some for the Aquarium, some heading further down to the National or spreading out to fill the bars and restaurants and clubs.

  All these people in danger, she thought, panic rising.

  But at the same time, she felt a dark, powerful thrill. She understood now, how the Doctor could look so confident, so detached, so scornful at times; it was astonishing to know so much more than everyone else. The people around her strolled along in ignorance, while she knew about alien worlds, and spaceships, and creatures trying to destroy the human race. Rose Tyler, four GCSEs, an unemployed shop assistant living with her mother, barely £40 in her bank account, but tonight she knew things about life on Earth that no one else knew.

  For once, she felt special. More than that, she felt capable. The Doctor had trusted her, and she wouldn’t let him down.

  Right, Rose thought, to business. Detail. Facts. Answers. ‘So did the Nestene build the London Eye?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. That would be ridiculous. They’re just using it. Although, the Eiffel Tower. That was built by aliens.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘It’s a good thing I stopped it taking off. Mind you. I only left it on idle. One of these days …’

  ‘I can never tell when you’re joking.’

  ‘Assume never.’ He kept whirring his sonic screwdriver as they walked along. ‘I’m looking for the absence of a signal. Sometimes that’s as strong as the signal itself.’

  ‘But what about your TARDIS? It’s full of gear and stuff, can’t we find it with that?’

  He looked at the far side of the river. ‘It’s safer over there, safer for all of us. I don’t want the Nestene getting a sniff. Right now, it doesn’t know the TARDIS exists, and let’s keep it that way.’

  ‘But it does know,’ she said. ‘Mickey’s head, that was Nestene, wasn’t it? And he saw the TARDIS, he recognised it, he said so.’

  ‘Oh, you’re getting good at this.’

  ‘Don’t be so condescending.’

  ‘Yep. Right. Sorry. But Mickey’s head only saw the TARDIS inside the TARDIS. Signals can’t get out. So the Nestene majority is still unaware. And that’s just how I want it.’ He leaned in closer with that dangerous smile. ‘Word of advice, Rose Tyler, when you’re searching for a hostile alien life form, don’t deliver the universe’s greatest technology into its tentacles.’

  ‘Oh my God, does it have tentacles? Really?’

  ‘Depends. It’s changed. Since the old days. I mean, it’s plastic, it could take any shape. But it’s a big old consciousness, I reckon its physical shape must be huge. Where would you hide?’ He kept his voice low, his eyes flicking round the crowd. ‘Could be anywhere. In these buildings. Tube tunnels. Sewers. Under the river. But it’s going to be guarded. It knows what we look like, you and me. Keep an eye out.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Autons.’

  She stayed silent and kept walking, refusing to ask the obvious, waiting for him instead. He blinked, getting into her rhythm. ‘Autons are the Nestene in human form. Like the dummies in the shop. They’re just foot soldiers, they’re crude and simple, but the Nestene can make perfect copies. Like your mate Ricky.’

  ‘Mickey,’ she said, biting back her fury. She’d punch him later. ‘So they could look like anyone?’

  ‘Anyone.’

  ‘So how do we know?’

  ‘They don’t blink.’

  She looked around. Police officers. Security guards. A traffic warden. But why assume they’d be in uniform? She looked at anyone and everyone, that laughing mum, that sullen emo, those two boyfriends hand-in-hand. It was impossible to spot whether people were blinking or not. Instead, she thought: If I were made of plastic, on the banks of the Thames, how would I hide?

  And she felt a chill of horror down her spine.

  The statues.

  The living statues.

  Those people standing along the Thames, in costume, staying frozen in position, to earn money from people throwing coins at their feet.

  Rose and the Doctor were just walking past a living statue, a comedy tramp like Charlie Chaplin, battered suit and bowler hat, but sprayed silver from top to toe. He stood on a little box, the crowd passing him by. Jackie always used to complain about living statues. ‘Creepy,’ she’d say. ‘What a way to make a living. If they want to earn money by standing still and doing nothing all day, they could work for BT.’

  The tramp was perfectly static. Not breathing. Not blinking. Not the slightest tremor. He was holding out his hand, offering a plastic daffodil, his arm fixed and unmoving. Rose stared. This was either the best mime on the South Bank, or not a mime at all.

  ‘Doctor,’ she said. ‘You don’t think …’

  The word Doctor was a trigger.

  The tramp moved.

  It turned its silver face to look at her.

  It did not blink.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Rose.

  The Doctor, perversely, was delighted. ‘Well done!’

  The tramp stepped off its box and walked towards them. Some people laughed, a lad yelled, ‘I can see you moving!’ and a woman who’d just dropped a pound in the hat grabbed it back and stomped away. But the silver tramp paid them no attention. Bright black eyes fixed on the Doctor and Rose. Slowly, it advanced. Holding out its flower like a threat.

  A posh little boy stood in front of the tramp. He said crossly, ‘You’re supposed to stay still.’ The tramp swatted the kid aside, whack! Then it kept walking, remorseless.

  ‘Come on,’ said Rose, taking the Doctor’s hand to hurry him, to draw the tramp away from the crowd. But should she shout, should she fight, should she get people out of the way?

  ‘They’re still in hiding,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘The Autons, they don’t want to draw attention. If we can just keep ahead of them.’

&nbs
p; They heard shouting behind them. ‘Hey, you!’ They turned to look as a large, red-faced man grabbed hold of the tramp. ‘Did you hit my little boy?’

  The Doctor started back towards them, but too late. The tramp shoved the man and sent him flying. He collided with a gang of drunk lads, which perhaps saved his life as one of them grabbed the man and started waltzing with him, his mates cheering. The tramp turned back to face the Doctor and Rose and resumed its march.

  Rose could see the drunken waltz and, behind that, the little boy crying, pockets of aggression spreading in the tramp’s wake. What should they do? She’d only fought these things with the Doctor, with no one else as witness, but this escalation in public terrified her. Already, a policeman was heading over as the father fought off the drunk. And the tramp kept walking.

  Then the Doctor said, ‘Uh-oh.’

  Ahead of them, another living statue. A ballerina, painted entirely white except for blotches of red on cheeks and lips. Eyelashes like spiders. She’d been fixed in an arabesque, but then onlookers laughed, surprised, as she suddenly moved, snapping her head round to look at the Doctor and Rose.

  They hurried past but the ballerina pirouetted in their direction, then lowered her leg to step down from her box, five or six people applauding her. She ignored them. Stalking her prey.

  Behind her, the tramp continued its march. Behind that, the drunks were arguing with the policeman, and now a woman was holding the crying boy, his mother, pointing at the tramp, ‘It was him!’ People looked around, blaming anyone, everyone. The crowd was brittle, panicky, thinking of last night’s explosion, fear jittering along the South Bank.

  ‘What do we do?’ muttered Rose.

  ‘No idea. Keep going,’ said the Doctor.

  They ran past the London Eye, then stopped. Ahead of them, a third living statue was stepping off its box. A knight in armour. It raised a sword as sharp as steel.

  Little kids running around it. So close to the sword.

  Rose looked back. The ballerina was advancing, her arms in fourth position, and behind her, the tramp was still proffering that sinister flower. Behind him, the crowd jostled with violence, the drunks pushing the policeman, people running away, the woman yelling, the place like a powder keg.