Doctor Who: Apollo 23

by Richards, Justin

  Jackson seemed happy to show the Doctor and Amy round the base. He was friendly and helpful. ‘Sorry about the military,’ he said as soon as he was alone with the Doctor and Amy. ‘They like everything regimented and ordered, not surprisingly. If it doesn’t fit into one of their boxes, they get rather worked up about it.’

  ‘Whereas you have a more open mind?’ the Doctor said.

  ‘I’m a scientist. New and strange ideas are my business. Same as you, I guess?’

  The Doctor nodded. ‘I’m a scientist. Amongst other things. And Amy certainly has an open mind.’

  ‘You must have,’ Jackson said to Amy, ‘if you accept quantum displacement.’

  ‘I’ve seen weirder things,’ Amy told him.

  Jackson raised an eyebrow, but didn’t ask what she meant. ‘How about I give you a quick tour of Base Diana? Then we can go to my office and talk about how you intend to proceed.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Sound good to you?’ he asked Amy.

  ‘Delightful.’

  Just as it looked from the outside, the base was constructed from large modules connected by rectangular corridors. What could not be seen from outside was that the base also extended downwards, into more of the modules buried in the ground. Most of the base was taken up with living accommodation for the dozen soldiers, their three officers – Reeve, Carlisle and Devenish – and the few scientists that worked for Jackson. The majority of what was left was storage. Huge metal tanks held oxygen and hydrogen. Dried food was kept in large plastic drums and cartons. There was a canteen and a large kitchen, where the soldiers took it in turns to play chef.

  ‘Someone had the foresight to keep you well stocked with food and water and oxygen,’ the Doctor remarked. ‘Rather than just relying on the quantum link for supplies.’

  ‘I think it’s habit,’ Jackson confessed. ‘Base Diana was first set up in the mid 1970s. The quantum displacement link was just a theory then, so they relied on moonshots to deliver supplies, though we have ready access to water. No one knew how long they could carry on before someone found out and called a halt.’

  ‘Found out?’ Amy said. ‘But everyone knew didn’t they? I mean, I know about Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong. One small step for man and all that.’

  ‘I’m guessing there’s stuff the public didn’t know,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Hell, there’s stuff the President doesn’t know! Officially, the moon missions stopped with Apollo 17. Too expensive, everyone said. Shows how much they know.’

  ‘You mean it wasn’t expensive?’ Amy asked.

  ‘Oh, it sure was.’ Jackson paused to open a bulkhead door – typing a number into a keypad alongside it. ‘But for every dollar spent on Apollo, the US earned fourteen dollars back from the technology, from related exports, from patents and expertise. Pretty good investment, really. But people forget that.’

  ‘So it all stopped.’

  ‘Officially,’ Jackson said, gesturing for the Doctor and Amy to go through the door.

  They found themselves in a large, narrow, curving room. One side was almost entirely taken up with a huge window that looked into the inside of the curve. It was broken by more of the bulkhead doors, stretching out of sight. Beside each was a numeric keypad. Outside the window a low, narrow corridor extended from each door to a central, circular hub. It was strange to see the elegant curves of the inner building after the straight lines that formed the entire construction of the rest of the base.

  ‘And unofficially?’ the Doctor was prompting.

  ‘Unofficially, here we are. Base Diana. Apollo 18 brought the first module. Flat-packed, tiny, weighed almost nothing. A breeze would have blown it away, so we’re lucky there’s no atmosphere.’

  ‘How many unofficial Apollo missions were there?’ Amy asked.

  ‘The last was Apollo 22, in June 1980. It brought the final components for the quantum displacement link. After that, we could just walk from Diana across the lunar surface, and into the Texan desert close to Base Hibiscus. And all this – the current base – came back the same way.’

  ‘Just sent it in on trucks?’ Amy said, amazed.

  ‘Something like that.’

  Amy nodded at the huge expanse of thick glass. ‘And is that your laboratory? Where you do research into whatever it is you do research into?’

  ‘I do research into the human mind,’ Jackson said. ‘Into what makes one man good and another bad. What makes someone so fanatical they can maim and kill without troubling their conscience.’

  That wasn’t what Amy had expected. ‘And you do it in there?’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘That’s another storage facility, isn’t it?’

  His expression had darkened as Jackson was speaking. Now he was staring at the man, his eyes hard as flint.

  ‘That’s right, Doctor,’ Jackson said, not seeming to notice the change in the Doctor’s demeanour. ‘That’s where we keep the prisoners.’

  Chapter

  5

  ‘You knew, didn’t you,’ Amy accused the Doctor as they followed Jackson through the long, narrow room.

  ‘I guessed, but only when I saw this room. There’ll be a whole penal colony here in a few hundred years, not just a dozen cells in an isolated block down vacuum corridors.’

  ‘I suppose you know ’cause you were locked up in it?’

  He grinned. ‘Pretty cool, huh?’

  Professor Jackson’s office was a contrast to the neat military efficiency of the rest of Base Diana. His moulded plastic desk was piled high with papers and journals. An in-tray overflowed onto a nearby chair. Shelves strained to hold their contents.

  The clearest shelf was occupied by a large, upright, steel cylinder with a tap at the bottom. There was a black plastic lid on the top, and the Doctor prised it open and peered inside. Steam drifted out past his nose as he sniffed at the contents.

  ‘Earl Grey?’

  ‘That’s right. My tea urn. My one vice.’ Jackson smiled. ‘That and a passion for tidiness, as you see,’ he joked. ‘Let me get you a cup.’

  ‘Thank you. No milk.’

  ‘Quite right. I don’t have any milk.’ Jackson turned to Amy. ‘And for you?’

  ‘No thanks.’ Amy wasn’t sure she fancied tea without milk. Even Earl Grey.

  ‘Find yourselves seats. I’ll only be a moment. Just move anything that’s in the way. Once we’ve had some tea, I’ll show you the quantum displacement equipment and with a bit of luck you can fix it and be on your way.’

  Jackson busied himself at the tea urn, while the Doctor and Amy liberated two upright chairs from their contents. Jackson’s desk was almost the full width of the room. Behind it a large window gave out across the desolate lunar surface.

  ‘Nice view,’ the Doctor said. ‘So, tell us about the prisoners.’

  ‘We have eleven at the moment, in the cells you saw.’ Jackson sat at his desk, blowing on his tea to cool it. ‘The corridors from the reception area to the prison hub are kept airless unless we need to get to a cell, or to have a prisoner come to us. They’re kept in solitary confinement, obviously, but they have everything they need.’

  ‘Everything except freedom and company then,’ Amy pointed out.

  ‘They’re well looked after. They get food sent over from the canteen, just like we eat. If we need to evacuate, the cells open automatically and the access tunnels are oxygenated. If a prisoner gets ill, we take them to the medical section.’

  ‘Haven’t seen that yet,’ the Doctor said.

  Jackson shrugged. ‘Not much to see.’

  ‘So why are they here, the prisoners?’ Amy asked. ‘I mean, what did they do?’

  ‘I don’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘That’s handy, especially for a scientist,’ the Doctor murmured. ‘Nice tea, by the way.’

  ‘They’re all recidivists,’ Jackson went on. ‘All criminals that have resisted any conventional attempts to rehabilitate them. Re-offenders. But most o
f them are here because of what they know, what they learned from their crimes – from hacking government systems, or stealing sensitive information and documents. That makes them too dangerous to set free, or to keep in the standard prison system back in the States. Most of them can’t even see that their behaviour was wrong. No moral judgement or ethical awareness whatsoever.’

  ‘That’s ironic. So, you just keep them locked up here?’ the Doctor said. He sipped his tea. ‘How moral and ethical is that?’

  Jackson set down his tea on one of the few empty spaces on his desk. ‘They’re here for their own good.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before,’ Amy retorted.

  ‘No, I mean it. They’re here for treatment.’

  There was silence for a moment. Then the Doctor said: ‘I thought you told us they were beyond help.’

  ‘Beyond conventional help, yes.’

  ‘Ah!’ The Doctor leaped to his feet. Tea slopped over the edge of his cup, but he seemed not to notice. ‘Your research – you’re experimenting on them, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson said, apparently relieved the Doctor had worked this out. But then he saw the Doctor’s face darken. ‘No,’ he corrected himself. ‘Not experimenting as such. We have a process. It works. But we…’ His voice tailed off.

  ‘You’re experimenting on the prisoners,’ Amy said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I guess so. But it isn’t like you think.’

  ‘Tell us what we think,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘It isn’t scalpels and brain surgery. It isn’t dangerous. It won’t harm them.’

  The Doctor nodded. ‘So you do it up here on the dark side of the moon for convenience, then. Not because what you’re up to is dangerous or illegal or would offend the sensibilities of any decent human being on the planet where you daren’t use this process of yours.’

  ‘I thought you had an open mind,’ Jackson snapped. ‘But you’re jumping to conclusions without knowing anything about our work here.’

  ‘I know…’ the Doctor said slowly, ‘I know that you believe what you are doing is for the best. I don’t doubt your motives for a moment.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean we have to agree with it.’

  ‘Then perhaps we must agree to differ.’

  Amy watched the Doctor as his expression relaxed from grim determination into a boyish grin. ‘Yeah, maybe,’ he agreed. Then he drained the rest of his tea in a single gulp. ‘First things first, though. Where’s this quantum displacement equipment of yours?’

  The Doctor was in his element. Amy was bored.

  Professor Jackson had led them down an incongruously old-fashioned metal stairway to a level deep below the main base. The corridors down here were formed not from walls but from pipes and cables. The idea that people might have to navigate through them seemed to have been very much a secondary consideration.

  ‘So where’s the quantum stuff?’ Amy asked as they walked past pipes that leaked jets of steam and tubes that dripped oil.

  ‘It’s here,’ Jackson said simply. ‘All of this.’ He gestured around them.

  ‘Could be better maintained,’ the Doctor said, running his finger along an especially oily plastic tube and showing them the resulting stain. ‘But the design is basically sound.’

  ‘But we can fix it, right?’ Amy asked.

  The Doctor winked. ‘We can fix anything.’

  Ahead of them, through the maze of cables and wires, tubes and pipes, Amy saw something move. Just a glimpse of grey overall.

  ‘Are there many technicians working down here?’

  Jackson shook his head. ‘No one comes down here.’

  ‘I thought I saw someone.’

  ‘Only us,’ Jackson insisted.

  ‘Amy’s right,’ the Doctor said. ‘Someone else is down here. Wearing size seven boots.’

  ‘You can tell the size of their shoes just from a glimpse of someone through the pipes and stuff?’ Amy was impressed.

  ‘Probably,’ the Doctor said. ‘You can estimate from their height, weight, speed. But it’s much easier if you just look at the print they’ve left in the spilt oil.’ He pointed down at the ground – at the smudged, oily black boot print close by.

  ‘OK,’ Amy decided. ‘Less impressive.’

  ‘It’s Major Carlisle,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘That’s more like it. You checked out her boots and can recognise the distinctive pattern of the sole?’

  It was Jackson who punctured the illusion this time. ‘No, she’s standing right behind you.’

  Amy almost yelped with surprise. But she managed to keep it bottled in. ‘Didn’t hear you sneaking round from the other side,’ she said.

  Carlisle frowned, but ignored her. ‘It’s time for the process run on Nine,’ she said to Jackson.

  ‘I thought we’d postpone, under the circumstances,’ Jackson said, glancing uneasily at the Doctor.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’d love a chance to watch you at work.’

  ‘The circumstances have nothing to do with the process,’ Carlisle said. ‘Colonel Devenish is happy for you to go ahead. He knows you like to stick rigidly to your schedule.’

  ‘By “happy”, I assume you mean “insisting”,’ Jackson said. ‘Very well.’ He checked his watch. ‘We still have a little time.’

  ‘You’ll have to set up yourself, remember,’ Carlisle said.

  ‘Shortage of staff?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘Professor Jackson’s assistant is… unavailable,’ Carlisle said.

  From the way Jackson shifted uneasily again at her words, Amy guessed this was information he had not been about to volunteer himself.

  ‘We can help,’ she offered brightly. ‘We’re good at setting things up.’

  ‘And knocking them down again,’ the Doctor added. ‘In fact, there’s no end to our talents.’

  Major Carlisle regarded them both impassively. ‘Imagine that,’ she said.

  Prisoner Nine was a tall, thin man. He didn’t look to Amy like a hardened and uncontrollable criminal. He was brought into the Process Chamber by two armed soldiers. The man’s head was bowed, revealing a bald patch in his dark brown hair. The overall effect was to make him look rather like a monk wearing plain grey overalls.

  The Process Chamber itself was a small room rather like a surgical theatre. Instead of an operating table there was an angled chair like a dentist might use. On the wall facing the chair was what looked a bit like a CCTV camera pointing at the subject as he sat down.

  The man’s dark brown eyes were as weary as his general demeanour, and Amy sensed that he had been here before, knew what to expect, and was resigned to it.

  For a moment, the man’s eyes fixed on Amy. There was a frown of interest, or possibly suspicion. Then he quickly looked away again, as if embarrassed.

  ‘You know the routine,’ one of the soldiers said to the man. ‘So no trouble this time, right?’

  The man grunted what might have been an agreement or a threat. But he didn’t resist as the other soldier strapped his wrists to the arms of the chair, then fastened a belt tightly across his waist. Finally, straps across the ankles ensured the man could hardly move.

  The Doctor was watching Professor Jackson as the scientist busied himself at a control panel behind the operating chair. Jackson turned and glared at the Doctor at one point when he leaned right over his shoulder. Otherwise he seemed to ignore the extra attention.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Amy asked as Jackson straightened up.

  ‘We operate the process from the observation room,’ Jackson said. ‘Like X-rays, brief exposure is harmless enough so the subject is in no danger. But we don’t like to prolong exposure more than we have to.’

  Something else that was like the dentist, Amy thought. It always worried her that when she had a routine X-ray of her teeth the dentist and nurse disappeared out of the door.

  The observation room was behind the wall in front of
the chair. The wall itself was actually a window, though it looked just like another wall from the prisoner’s point of view.

  The device that ended in the camera-like projection from the wall extended back through the observation room like a large articulated metal arm. There were controls set into the side of it, and Jackson adjusted several of these.

  ‘I think we are ready,’ he decided at last. The prisoner – Nine – stared back at him. Amy was sure he knew they were there, watching.

  ‘What happens now?’ Amy asked. ‘How’s this thing work?’

  ‘It is rather complicated, and difficult to explain in a few words,’ Jackson told her dismissively. Obviously he wasn’t willing to share.

  ‘Doctor?’ Amy asked.

  ‘Oh it’s simple enough, from what I can see.’ The Doctor ignored Jackson’s irritated glare, and went on: ‘Looks to me like it bombards areas of the brain with adapted alpha waves in an attempt to overwhelm the neural pathways and neutralise the electro-activity.’

  ‘Brainwashing,’ Amy said, hoping that this vague, blanket term was in some way applicable.

  ‘Exactly,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘You’ve been reading my classified research reports,’ Jackson accused.

  The Doctor’s excitement immediately grew. ‘Really – you mean I’m right? That’s terrific. It was just an educated guess. But hang on…’ He tapped his chin with his finger. ‘That means…’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not actually treating the patient at all, you’re not correcting the impulses in their brains. You’re removing them. Wiping them. Like Amy says – washing them away.’

  ‘Only the bad, negative inclinations. The Keller-impulses.’

  The Doctor’s tone was quiet and dark. ‘And who gave you the right to decide which ones are bad and which ones are normal?’ he demanded.

  Jackson was saved from having to answer as the door opened and Major Carlisle came in. With her was another woman, wearing a simple nurse’s uniform. She looked about Amy’s age, with mouse-brown hair cut into a bob and a scattering of freckles across her nose.

  ‘This is Nurse Phillips,’ Jackson said quickly, keen to change the subject. ‘We have to have a medic on hand whenever we process a prisoner. And now,’ he went on, ‘we are already behind schedule, so allow me to begin.’