‘Sorry …’ The umpire was as baffled as he was cross. ‘Are we talking about the Australians?’
‘No.’ The Doctor pointed up at the sky. ‘I think something really dreadful is about to happen.’
This remark played badly with the group. As far as they were concerned, a man had strolled into the middle of their ceremony, had inveigled the Ashes out of them, and was now issuing threats. Wasn’t that dreadful enough? Also, his tie was unspeakable.
Soon, the Doctor was discussing the matter quite pleasantly with one or two red-faced, blustering gentlemen. They had seized the Ashes, and were trying to pull the trophy out of the Doctor’s hands.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing I’d like better than to let go, but I can’t.’
At that point, the Doctor heard the worst sound in the universe.
It was the sound of the entire crowd at Lord’s Cricket Ground slowly, derisively clapping him.
And then the booing began.
‘Oh dear,’ the Doctor said.
All in all, it was something of a relief when the Killer Robots finally showed up.
CHAPTER FOUR
FINALLY, KILLER ROBOTS
The English love a good lunatic, particularly at cricket matches. But, there was a feeling that the crowd wanted something more, that the Doctor might at least take his clothes off and leap over the wicket so they could all be shocked by it.
The few people who talked about what happened next all chose to remember different things.
Some spoke about the way that a neat little cricket pavilion edged its way out of thin air and hovered a little above the pitch, as though concerned about not damaging the grass.
Some spoke about the way that the eleven figures, all attired in perfect cricket whites, strode out of the pavilion and towards the podium. The eleven were, to all intents and purposes, role models, from their tidily laced plimsolls to their neat helmets protecting their faces. Even their bats were polished so much they shone.
Most, when pressed, chose to talk about the killing.
It did not start at once. The figures waited until they were noticed, until people spotted what was wrong with them. True, they walked perfectly, their cricketing gear was immaculate – but there was one thing missing. There was nothing inside their uniforms. They were empty suits of gleaming white armour, marching in unison.
One of the commentators could be heard blaring from a radio saying jovially, ‘Well, the supernatural brigade really seem to be out in force here this afternoon.’
A ripple of alarm spread through the crowd. Some people swore it was a marketing stunt (mainly the kind of people who have never witnessed a marketing stunt, which normally involves handing out cereal bars to commuters or floating a really large lump of polystyrene down a river). Many declared confidently it was being paid for by an Australian margarine manufacturer.
To start with, only a few people screamed. After the event, they claimed they’d been trying to warn other people – but they’d simply realised that there was something about these striding white empty knights that was insultingly wrong.
One thing all the witnesses could agree on was that even Australian margarine manufacturers wouldn’t stoop this low.
The eleven figures arrived at the podium and arranged themselves in a neat, white line. Waiting.
Normally, at this point, the Doctor would have naturally taken charge. If there was one thing he liked doing, it was ordering about automata. Instead he stood still, his mouth agape.
So, it fell to the captain of the England cricket team to step forward and address the figures. He’d been to a reasonable public school, so had a natural ability to talk to anyone, whether they wanted to be talked to or not. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Can we help you?’
The figures said nothing. But the captain of the England cricket team was not abashed. ‘Have you come far?’ he pressed on. In his experience that never failed, and he was already donning the facial expression of a man who’d like to hear about your B-road.
The figures said nothing about B-roads, service station coleslaw, or even that tricky tailback at Biggleswade junction. There was something about their silent emptiness that crept into the soul, leant forward and whispered, ‘Ssssssh.’
Even the captain of the England cricket team fell silent.
Everyone in the stadium was now watching the new arrivals.
The new arrivals were not watching anyone. They did not have eyes. Just blank white helmets with a nasty darkness within. One that glowed a really sinister red.
One of the figures raised a white arm and pointed with a padded glove at the urn.
The Doctor spoke, a tiny stifled croak: ‘Let me give it to them. Now.’
The captain of the Australian team laughed. ‘Well, now …’ he began with that jovial reasonableness that made the rest of the world want to beat them at games. ‘That’s all very well, but they’ve not won the Ashes, have they?’ Here he laughed again.
His ghastly attempt at camaraderie fell on completely deaf ears.
The Doctor spoke in that weird hiss again: ‘Look at their bats.’
You can, if you wish, find out a lot about the manufacture of cricket bats, either from consulting an encyclopaedia, a woodworking teacher, or the most boring man you can find in a bar. A simplified summary is that a decent cricket bat is carved from willow, and kept supple with linseed oil.
They are not, as a rule, made out of steel and their sides do not taper to sharp knife edges.
‘Well, crikey,’ said the Australian captain. He sniffed. The bats still smelt of linseed. That was something. ‘Enough’s enough, though, isn’t it, fellas?’ he couldn’t help saying, and started laughing as though he’d lost his head.
Which, a moment later, he had.
Everyone later agreed that the decapitation did it. The strange white robots had little time for bonhomie or the nicer things in life. They had clearly not come to Lords to marvel at the pitch, to eat sandwiches or to talk about problems with motor homes and foreigners. They had come, for some unfathomable reason, to steal a cricketing trophy and they were, as robots so often are, lethally determined to get it.
Inside those empty helmets, something lit up. Dark red lines that formed an angry frown.
The place was suddenly overwhelmed with a storm of fire, smoke and noise. What amazed observers as they staggered about, choking, almost deafened and blinded, was that in the middle of it all, in the middle of the smoke and fire and noise, the eleven newcomers actually appeared to be playing cricket. This seemed to display a quite staggering degree of fortitude in adversity until it slowly dawned on the onlookers that whatever it was they were doing was actually the direct cause of the devastation around them. Every ball they hit exploded somewhere and killed people.
They sliced their way through the players, who were, to be fair, all in a hurry to get out of their way. The robots raised their bats and, from the ends of them, fired lethal bolts of light into the now screaming crowd.
One of the most beautiful sounds in the pantheon of audible England is the pock! as cricket ball meets bat. It fills the mind with summer and shady willow trees and cups of tea with a saucer and a gentle game that can be played at a casual trot. But, for everyone at Lord’s that day, the sound forever crowded their minds with images of fire and horror, as row after row of seats collapsed, grass burned, brick shattered, and the fleeing crowd were cut down by strike after strike of bat on ball.
There was only one person standing still. Only one person seemingly unaffected. That one person was the Doctor, and he was holding the Ashes.
The Killer Robots having burned, slashed, blasted and diced their way across the pitch, came to a halt before the Doctor. Their leader pointed to the trophy. The other figures raised their bats.
The Doctor did not even flinch. There was something frozen, despairing about his posture.
The bats were ready to swipe down.
Which was when the air in front of the
Doctor shimmered, and the cricket ground filled with a defiant bellow.
The Doctor’s time machine landed in front of him, on its side. Eleven cricket bats sliced pointlessly into it and stuck. The door opened and Romana popped her head out.
‘Romana,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘Why is the TARDIS on its side?’
Romana didn’t have time for this. ‘A barricade. Get in. I’ll send K-9 out.’
‘Not this time,’ the Doctor said.
Romana raised an eyebrow. The Doctor didn’t normally seem to care that much when K-9 got fused, trampled or battered. Neither did the dog – he enjoyed a scrap. ‘But,’ she began. ‘Surely—’
One of the white figures had clambered on top of the police box.
Romana stared at it. ‘Oh,’ she said, aghast.
The robot looked down at her, and nodded slightly. The red glow inside the helmet formed into a smile. It plucked the trophy from the Doctor’s numb fingers. Then it leapt back to the ground, tucked its bat under its arm and marched back towards the cricket pavilion.
The other white figures turned and followed suit, firing indiscriminately into the crowd, spreading more chaos and confusion.
One of the white robots raised a last ball and tossed it into the air. It swiped at it with its bat, smacking it straight into a tea tent which promptly exploded. Then the white figures climbed neatly into their cricket pavilion which melted into the air.
For a few moments, the Doctor stood there. In front of him were the bodies of the finest cricketers in the world. Around them was chaos, screaming, and, from the pitch itself, the smell of burning grass.
Romana climbed out of the TARDIS and offered the Doctor a steadying arm. Together they surveyed the devastation.
‘So, they’ve come back,’ said the Doctor eventually.
Romana nodded, a sick little nod. ‘But it’s preposterous, absurd.’
‘It is neither,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘We’ve witnessed the single most shocking thing I have ever seen in my entire existence.’
‘But were those really the Krikkitmen?’ Romana whispered.
‘I think so,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘I used to be frightened with stories of them when I was a child.’
‘Me too,’ agreed Romana, wondering again why so much of Time Lord education involved terrifying the young.
‘Until now,’ the Doctor’s mouth was still working slackly, ‘I’ve never seen them. Never quite believed in them.’
‘They were supposed to have been destroyed over two million years ago.’ Romana’s tone was petulant, as though already writing a stern letter to whoever was responsible. ‘This can’t just have happened. It can’t.’
The umpire was staggering towards them through the smoke and carnage. He was managing to be both red-faced and also pale with shock, which was quite an achievement. ‘What?’ he began.
‘Hush,’ said Romana.
‘But really, what just happened?’ the umpire persisted.
Romana and the Doctor both shook their heads glumly, then shrugged.
‘But why,’ the umpire wailed, ‘were those things dressed as a cricket team? I mean, really, it’s ridiculous!’
‘Isn’t it just,’ the Doctor agreed.
CHAPTER FIVE
UNFORGIVABLE THEFTS FROM A HAIRDRESSER
No one has ever written a tourist’s guide to Gallifrey because, to be truthful, no one has ever really wanted to visit. Plenty of races have had angry, tentacled thoughts about invading, but that’s not the same as fancying a holiday there.
If you find yourself with a fortnight to spare, there’s not that much to see. True there are silver trees, ochre mountains, and the odd smug daisy, but mostly there’s a lot of orange. Orange and beige – two colours which, whether on a planet or on wallpaper, say that whoever’s in charge should be thinking hard about redecorating.
The only problem about Gallifrey is that no one has ever thought about redecorating. Gallifreyans, more than any other civilisation in the universe, don’t like change. The mobile telephone has never taken off on Gallifrey because the entire population thought it a step too far.
The orange skies reflect that reluctance to change – the whole day looks either like sunrise or sunset, perpetually stuck in the same moment of time. And, really, that’s just the way the people of Gallifrey prefer it.
In a rare, long-ago racy moment, the Gallifreyans became the Lords of All Time. They immediately decided the best thing to do with this vast power was as little as possible. If they did interfere in the affairs of others (and they did so with the soft pedal firmly pressed) it was solely with the intention of keeping the status most quo. Just as nothing changed on Gallifrey, then nothing in the universe ever would, either.
There were one or two flies in this orangey-beige ointment. Most of the people of Gallifrey were happy to grow up, live long lives composed of identical marmalade days, and then eventually potter off into an afterlife of more of the same, thank you. Instead of developing an internet, the Gallifreyans had built a library of souls and opinions, a vast databank of ‘I told you so’. Their acquired wisdom was available to anyone who asked. This wisdom could be summarised as, ‘No sudden moves’.
By and large, everyone was quietly happy with life on Gallifrey, except for a few rebellious souls who had decided to leave home and wander eternity. A few, such as the Master, tried to take over as much of the universe as possible, but most settled in a quiet corner and devoted themselves to harmless hobbies, such as beekeeping or making a really nice cup of tea.
The Doctor was, of course, an exception to the exceptions to the rule. He’d never made a bid for universal conquest and was hopeless with bees. Instead, he strolled through eternity with the attention span of a gregarious goldfish. He somehow managed to fit saving planets in between a roster of formidable interests, ranging from fishing (badly) to reciting poetry (loudly) to namedropping (badly and loudly).
He did, in fact, very much enjoy making tea, but did it with so much collateral damage that you could say the Doctor enjoyed making tea in the same way the Daleks enjoyed landing softly on a planet and saying hello.
When Romana had first met the Doctor, she had only just graduated from the Time Lord Academy with a Triple First. She’d been looking forward to her next thesis when she’d been ordered to help the Doctor find the Key to Time and save the universe. Obviously she’d obliged, and, afterwards, they’d celebrated by saving the universe a bit more. And they’d carried on so doing for, actually, quite a long time now, since you mention it.
Also, she’d shown the Doctor that you could boil a kettle without burning anything down whatsoever; and gone to Paris; and stopped a few interstellar wars; and gone shopping; oh, and saved the Mandrels, and the Bandrils and the Quarks, and what were the floppy little things that went bloop? Them too. They’d saved those.
The point was that Romana’s life plan had originally included only a brief leave of absence from the apricot world of Gallifrey. And then she’d met the Doctor, and quite a lot of things had got in the way, and she’d figured, since no one had brought up the subject of popping back to Gallifrey, that perhaps she didn’t need to after all. Time Lord society was still there, and always would be, ergo it had got along quite well without her, and there was a lovely little ball gown she’d seen in Venice the other week that she meant to go dancing in.
But then the Krikkitmen had turned up and all that had changed. She guessed that she and the Doctor would have to go back to Gallifrey after all. There was no getting out of it. The chances were that, if she survived this calamity (which, frankly, she doubted), the Time Lords of Gallifrey would suddenly remember that the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar had gone missing. And they wouldn’t be happy about it. Not by a long beige chalk.
The TARDIS pushed its way angrily onto the surface of Gallifrey and settled with a thump. The door opened and the Doctor stepped out, patting it gently. ‘No, none of us are keen to be here, old girl. Sorry.’
Romana followed with
a slouch, which in her heels was impressive.
Their robot dog K-9 shot out of the ship and raced excitedly on ahead.
‘Well, you soon find out who your friends are,’ remarked the Doctor, drily.
They stood at the heart of the Time Lord empire and sighed. The Gallifreyan Capitol was either the pinnacle of ambition or an idiotically large snow globe. Turrets and spires threatened to pierce the vast glass dome. The whole effect said loudly, how very pleased with itself it was.
Once, Romana had felt only wonder as she’d walked the hallways and peeped down the vast shafts of knowledge that spiralled to the planet’s data core. If ever time had a home, she’d thought, it was here, and it was a privilege to be a part of it. The Capitol had felt definite, absolute and unquestionable. The centre of the universe.
Now she’d actually travelled the universe she felt a little different about coming back here. Like a tuna to a canning factory. She shivered.
‘Home sweet home?’ The Doctor had the ghost of a smile on his face.
Romana nodded glumly. ‘Could we not have just rung them up?’
The Doctor frowned. ‘Good point. Still, we’re here now.’
He scowled off down the corridor, then stopped.
‘Oh, that’s obscene.’
Romana joined him and shuddered.
They were stood in front of a large and magnificently ugly sofa.
‘Doctor,’ whispered Romana, ‘I think we’ve discovered the real reason why nothing ever changes on Gallifrey. Our people have remarkably bad taste.’
They sat on the sofa. No matter how they tried it, it refused to be comfortable.
‘I bet it cost a packet,’ mused the Doctor sadly. ‘I’ll write a stern letter to whoever’s in charge …’ Then he paused, aghast.
Romana hadn’t noticed. ‘Somewhere out there, in one of those buildings, my tutor’s ears are glowing. I’m in for quite the lecture: “What sort of aeon do you call this, young Romanadvoratrelundar?” Oh, it’s going to be quite ghastly.’
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 3