Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

by Adams, Douglas

  Romana matched his smile. ‘Actually …’

  The door started to melt.

  The Krikkitman pushed its way through the molten door into the small room. The Doctor, Romana and K-9 were standing against the far wall. They were frozen in fear, the woman in the act of saying something brave. The man had his scarf wrapped around her.

  The Krikkitman broadened its glowing red smile into a smirk and angled its eyes. It bore down on the two cowering people. It would leave the robot till last. Let it watch the others suffer. The bat swiped and swiped through the air and then, surprisingly, stopped.

  The Krikkitman reassessed what it was seeing. It was striking at a projected picture of the Doctor, Romana and K-9. It had been hitting a blank wall. It looked around for its prey. They had been standing behind the door.

  Which was when K-9 fired at the ceiling, which poured down on the Krikkitman in a roar.

  The Doctor regarded the rubble.

  ‘We should probably leave,’ he said. ‘I don’t think blowing up a peace conference is going to make me popular.’

  He nervously prodded the Krikkitman under the rubble. The creature’s helmet glowed feebly.

  ‘Where did you come from? Why?’ the Doctor demanded.

  The glow brightened.

  ‘To give you a message, Doctor,’ its voice grated in a clipped, angry buzz.

  ‘Really?’ Now the Doctor was intrigued.

  ‘Just as there are three stumps, you will meet three …’ The Krikkitman’s expression flickered. What it said next seemed to surprise even it. ‘You will meet three gods who prop up the universe.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You will meet three gods,’ the Krikkitman repeated. The glow in its helmet faded away.

  Baffled, the Doctor, K-9 and Romana headed away to the TARDIS.

  For a moment, all was quiet in the ruined projection room. Then a glow flickered deep inside the Krikkitman’s helmet. It was still active and it had one more thing to do.

  It faded slowly away.

  The last thing left, hanging in the air, was its sinister red smile.

  CHAPTER TEN

  GRIM CONCLUSION IN NOWHERE

  The TARDIS brought them a little bit forward in time and a long way off in space.

  ‘This is as near to Krikkit as we dare go,’ the Doctor said, stepping out onto the surface of an unremarkable asteroid. He paced up and down. ‘I need to think.’ He caught Romana’s giggle. ‘Oh come on, I do think. I think about lots of things.’

  ‘Of course you do, Doctor,’ Romana said placatingly.

  ‘Right now I’m worried about where that Krikkitman came from.’

  ‘Why was it attacking us?’ asked Romana.

  ‘Attacking, or distracting?’ mused the Doctor. ‘I do hate a mystery that tries to kill me.’

  ‘Off the Christmas Card List?’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘I haven’t the time for sending Christmas cards.’fn1

  Romana marched over to the edge of the asteroid and pointed at a dark patch – less the inky blackness of space and more a murky puddle of nothing. ‘I guess that’s the great Dust Cloud.’

  K-9 was swift to agree. He produced a list of facts and figures about the nature of the cloud, which, if only they’d been listening more closely, would have saved them a lot of problems later on. Instead the Doctor and Romana were trying to describe the effect of the cloud on them. It was, the Doctor concluded, rather like a really swishy black curtain drawn across infinity. Romana asked him not to use that phrase again.

  The artificial asteroid was pursuing an equally artificial orbit, skirting the edge of the Dust Cloud. Beyond the asteroid was – well, space. Definitely space. Absolutely, assuredly space. And yet there was something un-spacey about it.

  The Doctor picked a coin from his pocket and flicked it away. A few feet away from him it began to behave rather more like a space-borne object. It travelled at a constant speed beyond the asteroid and then stopped. Just for a blink it stopped. Then it carried on as normal.

  ‘That there – that little pause,’ marvelled Romana. ‘Was that the Tick-Tock Interface?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said K-9. ‘The envelope of Slow Time is located beyond us.’

  ‘Just a hunch,’ the Doctor remarked, polishing his sleeve. ‘Objects pass through the envelope without even realising it’s there – there’s a momentary temporal flicker, that’s all.’ His face fell. He watched the small metal disc arcing on through the heavens. ‘Oh dear. That was my lucky coin.’

  After a bit more walking they reached the one architectural feature that occupied the asteroid: a large, glittering sculpture. The forces of the Galaxy had recreated the Wicket Gate. Whereas once it had been a symbol of universal peace, it was now the key to the lock holding the Slow Time envelope in place.

  ‘In my experience,’ the Doctor mused, ‘one should never leave a key just lying around. Especially not as a giant symbol. It looks impressive, but it’s asking for trouble. And over there,’ he squinted at some zero-G cranes, ‘they appear to be building a hotel.’

  The Doctor had always had something against hotels.

  Romana was examining the recreated Wicket Gate. ‘Three long struts of steel, wood and Perspex. One golden bail, one silver.’

  ‘If I’m right,’ the Doctor said, ‘at any moment, that lock is going to be dismantled rather dramatically and scattered through space-time.’

  Romana scrunched up her nose. ‘So that trophy you were making a fuss about at Lord’s – you think that was the wooden stump?’

  The Doctor nodded.

  A battered, burning spaceship roared out of nowhere right at them.

  Without even thinking, the Doctor screamed and grabbed hold of Romana.

  Romana shut her eyes very firmly and multiplied some chewy prime numbers.

  The burning spaceship roared past them and smashed into the sculpture. It hung there, looking both ridiculous and threatening.

  ‘Well, this isn’t in the history books,’ said Romana.

  The Doctor waved airily. ‘We’re well off the piste of history and roaring down a black run of forbidden knowledge.’

  ‘I always worry when your metaphors turn into conceits.’ Romana was walking towards the wrecked spaceship. Then she stopped, looking up at the teetering collision above her. ‘K-9,’ she said, ‘can you analyse that spaceship?’

  The dog whirred happily to itself. ‘It is a Krikkit Scout ship.’

  ‘It looks exactly like the one that appeared at Lord’s.’ The Doctor was getting a dreadful sinking feeling.

  ‘It must have escaped from the war and concealed itself. They’re trying to unlock their home world. But …’

  ‘I think what happens next is going to be embarrassing for all parties. Which is probably why the legends skip this bit.’ The Doctor was looking up at the spaceship jammed into the Wicket Gate. The sculpture was leaning at an alarming angle, steadily collapsing as it uprooted itself from the asteroid. In the distance, the automated cranes continued building their hotel, as the asteroid’s one attraction fell apart, toppling into the Tick-Tock Interface of the Slow Time Envelope.

  Such things just aren’t supposed to happen.

  With a complete absence of noise, the five pieces of the Wicket Gate and the Krikkit spaceship fell into the Time Vortex. As they vanished across the Universe, the reasons why the Wooden Stump had been found at Lord’s and an explanation of where a Krikkit ship had come from became clear.

  ‘I knew it,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘We’re on another quest.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE PRIVATE LIFE OF THE BUSIEST MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

  The smoke hung on the land. It drifted across the setting sun, which lay like an open wound across the western sky.

  In the ringing silence that followed the battle, pitifully few cries could be heard from the bloody, mangled wreckage on the fields.

  Ghostlike figures, stunned with horror, emerged from the woo
ds, stumbled and then ran crying forward – women, searching for their husbands, brothers, fathers, lovers, first amongst the dying and then amongst the dead.

  Far away behind the screen of smoke, thousands of horsemen arrived at their sprawling camp, and – with a huge amount of clatter, shouting and comparing of backhand slashes – they dismounted and instantly started on the cheap wine and rancid goat fat.

  In front of his splendidly bedraped Imperial tent, a bloodstained and battle-weary Khan dismounted. His lunch had been interrupted by a skirmish and he was eager to get back to it.

  ‘Which battle was that?’ he asked his vizier, who had ridden with him. Bastrabon was young and ambitious, keenly interested in viciousness of all kinds. He was hoping to improve on his own Known Cosmos record for the highest number of peasants impaled on a single sword thrust and would be getting in some practice that night.

  He strode up to his lord.

  ‘It was the Battle of Luseveral, o Great Khan!’ he proclaimed, and rattled his sword in a tremendously impressive way.

  Khan folded his arms and leant on his horse, looking over it across the dreadful mess they’d made of the valley beneath them.

  ‘Oh, I can’t tell the difference any more,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Did we win?’

  ‘Oh yes! Yes! Yes!’ exclaimed the vizier with fierce pride. ‘It was a mighty victory indeed!

  ‘Indeed it was!’ he added and waggled his sword again. He drew it excitedly and made a few practice thrusts. Yes, he thought to himself, tonight he was going to go for the six.

  Khan screwed his face up at the gathering dusk, and strode past a fire pit sunk into the ground, over which the Doctor was being smoked.

  Ordinarily, the Doctor had assumed, dictators were cat people. As a dog person, he was baffled, but could sort of see the point. When you’ve got a busy schedule planning universal domination from your secret lair, you can’t take time off to walk the dog around the volcano twice a day. No, you could leave a cat to its own devices while you went off and launched the death ray.

  Mind you, the Great Khan actually was a cat person. His species could be called more or less leonine, in that they had more of the worst aspects of a lion (aggression, bad breath, claws) and less of the good bits (valiant heart, plush mane, lovely singing voice). The Great Khan was currently picking away at the leftovers of his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  ‘Excuse me!’ called the Doctor, as breezily as a man can while hanging upside down over a fire.

  The Great Khan looked up from eating the last of his cabinet reshuffle, and grunted. If the Doctor had been hoping this was a conversational opening, he was disappointed. The Great Khan belched.

  Undaunted, the Doctor pressed on. ‘Funny thing happened on my way here today …’

  The Great Khan licked the last of the meat from a bone, and snapped it in half. He stared pointedly at the sharp end.

  ‘Anyway, long story short,’ the Doctor continued, ‘I’m looking for a sort of pillar. Actually, you know, it’s not a long story after all.’ He was going to say more, but then a tossed skull hit him on the head.

  Finally rewarded with some silence, the Great Khan concentrated on sucking the marrow from his Chancellor’s elbow. It tasted disappointing.

  In a cage a small bird watched him. Feeling judged by it, the Khan took the bird from its cage and flung it onto the fire. That would teach it to be a bird. Then he went to his favourite chair and sat back down in it, putting his feet up in front of the fire on which the bird was now roasting merrily.

  He did so enjoy his quiet moments, and they were few and far between.

  Vizier Bastrabon hung back, watching as the last of his cousin disappeared down the Khan’s throat. He’d quite liked his cousin, but figured this was the wrong moment to bring that up. The Khan, he sensed, was in one of his moods. This was brought on partly by the ennui of endless conquest, but mostly by indigestion.

  ‘Oh dear.’ The Great Khan let out a belch. ‘After twenty years of these two-hour battles, I get the feeling that there must be more to life, you know.’ He turned, lifted up the front of his torn and bloodied gold-embroidered tunic and stared down at his own furry tummy. ‘Here, feel this,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m putting it on a bit? Perhaps I should go to a health farm?’

  The vizier gazed at the Great Khan’s tummy with a mixture of awe and impatience. ‘Er, no,’ he said. ‘No, not at all.’ With a flick of his paws, the vizier summoned a servant to bring the maps to him, ran him through and, as the servant fell, caught the plans of the grand campaign from his nerveless claws.

  ‘Now, O Great Khan,’ he said, spreading the map over the back of another servant who stood specially hunched over for the purpose, ‘we must push forward to the Island, and then we shall be poised to take over the whole of this world!’

  ‘No, look, feel that,’ said Khan, pinching a fold of skin between his paws. ‘Do you think—’

  ‘Great Khan!’ interrupted the vizier urgently. ‘We are on the point of conquering the world!’ He stabbed at the map with a knife, catching the servant beneath a nasty nick on his left lung.

  ‘When?’ said the Great Khan with a frown.

  Bastrabon the vizier threw up his arms in exasperation. ‘Tomorrow!’ he said. ‘We start tomorrow!’

  ‘Ah, well, tomorrow’s a bit difficult, you see,’ said Khan. He puffed out his cheeks and thought for a moment. ‘The thing is that next week I’ve got this lecture on carnage techniques in Zumara, and I thought I’d use tomorrow to prepare it.’

  The vizier stared at him in astonishment as the map-bearing servant slowly collapsed on his foot. ‘Well, can’t you put that off?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Well, you see, they’ve paid me quite a lot of money for it already, so I’m a bit committed.’

  ‘Well, Wednesday?’

  The Great Khan pulled a scroll from out of his tunic and looked through it, shaking his head slowly. ‘Not sure about Wednesday …’

  ‘Thursday?’

  ‘No, Thursday I am certain about. We’ve got Bastrabon and his wife coming round to dinner, and I’d kind of promised …’

  ‘But I am Bastrabon!’ protested the vizier, unable to hide his impatience.

  ‘Well, there you are then. You wouldn’t be able to make it either.’

  The vizier’s silence was only disturbed by the sound of distant pillage.

  ‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘will you be ready to conquer the world … on Friday?’

  The Great Khan sighed. ‘Well, the secretary comes in on Friday mornings.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘All those letters to answer. You’d be astonished at the demands people try to make on my time, you know.’ He slouched moodily against his horse. ‘Would I sign this, would I appear there? Would I please do a sponsored massacre for charity? So that usually takes till at least three, then I had hoped to get away early for a long weekend. Now Monday, Monday …’

  It was at this point the Doctor woke up.

  ‘I say!’ he began brightly. The vizier hit him until he dimmed.

  The Great Khan was consulting his scroll again, mind clearly made up.

  ‘No, looking at it, Monday’s out, I’m afraid. Rest and recuperation, that’s one thing I do insist upon. Now, how about Tuesday?’

  The strange keening noise that could be heard in the distance at this moment sounded like the normal everyday wailing of women and children over their slaughtered menfolk and Khan paid it no mind. A light bobbed on the horizon.

  ‘Tuesday – look, I’m free in the morning – no, hold on a moment, I’d sort of made a date for meeting this awfully interesting chap who knows absolutely everything about understanding things, which is something I’m awfully bad at. That’s a pity because that was my only free day next week. Now, next Tuesday we could usefully think about – or is that the day I …’

  The approaching light was so pale as to be indistinguishable from that of the moon which was bright that night. The light bobbed
and swung gently. Unthreateningly.

  ‘… So that’s more or less the whole of March out,’ said Khan, ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘April?’ asked the vizier, wearily. He idly whipped out a passing peasant’s liver, but the joy had gone out of it. He flipped the thing listlessly off into the dark. A hound, which had grown very fat over the years by the simple expedient of staying close to the vizier at all times, leapt on it. These were not pleasant times.

  ‘No, April’s out,’ said the Great Khan – I’m going off world in April, that’s one thing I had promised myself.’

  The light approaching them through the night sky had now at last attracted the attention of one or two of the Khan’s retinue, who, wonderingly, stopped hitting each other and stabbing things and drew near.

  ‘Look,’ said Bastrabon, himself still unaware of what things were coming to pass, ‘can we please agree that we will conquer the world in May, then?’

  The mighty Khan sucked doubtfully on his teeth. ‘Well, I don’t like to commit myself that far in advance. One feels so tied down if one’s life is completely mapped out beforehand. I should be doing more reading, for heaven’s sake, when am I going to find the time for that? Anyway …’ He sighed and scratched at his scroll. ‘“May – possible conquest of this world.” Now, I’ve only pencilled that in, so don’t regard it as absolutely definite – but keep on at me about it and we’ll see how it goes. Hello, what’s that?’

  Slowly, a soft light streamed into the clearing by the Great Khan’s tent. A strikingly beautiful woman glided forward holding a lamp and a clipboard. She walked slowly towards them, her features wrinkled in disgust.

  In her path lay the dark figure of a peasant who had been crying quietly to himself since he had watched his liver being eaten by the vizier’s dog and had known that no way was he going to get it back, and wondered how his poor wife was going to cope now. He chose this moment finally to pass on to better things.

  The beautiful woman stepped over him with a sad shudder and strode up to the Great Khan. It had been a long time since anyone apart from the vizier had looked him in the eyes, and the Khan flinched slightly.