‘Was I?’
‘Yes, but luckily I’d factored that in to my equations.’
The doors to the Great Parliament of the Elders of Krikkit smashed open. The Doctor and Romana rushed in wheeling two gurneys. On each of which was a small pile of robot parts.
‘Elders of Krikkit,’ boomed the Doctor to the astonished and revolted crowd. ‘You’re part of the biggest lie the Universe has ever been told.’
He threw something onto the floor. It was the head of a Krikkitman.
Pleasingly, that got their attention.
‘I’m the Doctor and this is my friend Romana.’ The Doctor paused, savouring the lovely rolling acoustic in the Parliament. ‘We’ve spent a nice afternoon being tortured in your cells.’
‘And jolly bracing it was too,’ Romana said politely. She saw Elder Grayce in the crowd, and waved. He shuddered.
‘But we’ve not just done it for our health,’ boomed the Doctor. ‘You’ve now got scans of our brains – lovely clear scans that will tell you, should you care to check, that what I am about to tell you is the absolute, unvarnished truth.’
Romana nodded. It was a good nod that said, ‘Listen. It will do you good.’ Romana never lied with a nod.
The Elders of Krikkit suffered two conflicting reactions – the first was the urge to recoil in revulsion and the second was the desire to lean forward and learn more. The result was a quivering stillness suggestive of constipation.
‘How dare you,’ Chief Elder Grayce began, heaving up his angry bulk to protest, but the Doctor had dealt with his sort before.
‘How dare I? Easily, you poor old man. I’m the Doctor and I dare on behalf of the Universe.’ He flicked up his scarf and dangled it like a yo-yo for invisible kittens. ‘I disgust you, I revolt you, just looking at me makes you squirm. You think I’m your enemy, and it’s true that before I finish here –’ he checked his watch – ‘in about four hours, I’ll have changed civilisation as you know it, and destroyed every single Krikkitman. But one of the reasons for doing this is you. Because all of you are the victims of a strange and awful lie.’
‘So you said,’ Elder Grayce grumbled. If he didn’t like aliens, he really didn’t like show-stopping aliens. ‘What is this lie?’
The Doctor glared at the Elder and then pinched a bit of air with his finger and thumb. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘This entire planet has been stage-managed. Your whole history consists of a series of events which are in themselves possible yet put together become highly improbable as a series of mere accidents of history. When viewed together, they can only be the product of terribly careful planning.’
The Doctor let that one land as softly as a walrus.
‘What is a god?’ he proclaimed. ‘I’ve met a few pretenders to the throne. Mostly stark staring mad. I’ll tell you the thing they all get wrong. They nail the trimmings – the togas, the crazy worshippers, the wide-eyed priests, the sacrifice and the awful proclamations that sound like they were written by a drunk in a bus shelter – but the thing they fail to do is to achieve anything. I’m standing here in the middle of this hall, and I am awed to be in the presence of the work of an actual god.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE SHARP-SIGHTED WATCHMAKER
Had a pin dropped it would have been deafening.
‘But,’ the Elder’s voice croaked, ‘we don’t worship any deity.’
‘Exactly!’ The Doctor was laughing now. ‘You’re the product of a bashful god. Isn’t that wonderful? Imagine being omnipotent and yet rubbish at parties!’
‘Erm …’ Romana used her most careful mutter. ‘Are you sure about this?’
‘Totally.’ The Doctor beamed at her. ‘Krikkit has a god that does not want to be seen.’
Elder Grayce started laughing. ‘Have you, by any chance, come to make us worship them? Perhaps in exchange for some beads?’ He turned, chuckling to the other Elders, ‘We believe that’s how it works.’
There was the nervous, sneering laughter of people who’ve decided the best thing to do with an inconvenient truth is to laugh at it. One old, tired woman stood at the back of the hall. She was not laughing – either because she was considering the Doctor’s words, or because her grim face was incapable of mirth. Her name was Elder Narase. She’d never been important – a lot of the Elders viewed Narase as too bloodthirsty, even for a Krikkita, and quietly avoided inviting her onto any exciting committees. This petty act was about to cost them all dearly.
‘Sadly your god isn’t a quack.’ The Doctor was shaking his head sadly. ‘I want you to think about what I’m going to tell you. Think about the freak conditions which separated Krikkit, isolating the planet from the rest of the Galaxy. That’s Point A.
‘Point B is the apparent mental block (caused by A) which prevented you from ever even speculating that something might lie beyond the great Dust Cloud. It stopped you wondering if anything was out there. It stunted your curiosity and also, uniquely, prevented you from wondering about deities in general. Funny that.
‘Point C is the quite fantastic odds against a wrecked spacecraft actually intersecting with the orbit of a planet. There’s a lot of empty space, you know. It’s why we call it space. Because of the space. It is littered with broken-down spaceships. Some of them make quite nice second homes, but that’s by the by. My point is that for an unpiloted spacecraft to crash-land on a planet is remarkable. To crash-land on the one planet in the Universe that wouldn’t just assume it was an alien or a chariot of the gods? The chances against it are so obscene they should pull their trousers up.
‘Point D is the miraculous rapidity with which you lot mastered the technology of the crashed spaceship and used it for interstellar war. Considering you had no experience behind you, your progress would make a Rutan greener with jealousy. Especially as, before then, you’d never even had a war.
‘Point E. Once you’d decided on war, you were single-minded about it. Obsessively so. No referenda, no second thoughts, you simply dedicated your entire selves to the total annihilation of alien life. You didn’t even think about how any of the remarkable advancements you’d got from the craft could have helped you in harvesting crops or making better television programmes. You just thought WAR.
‘Point F. When the rest of the Galaxy captured the Krikkitmen, they failed to destroy them because they mistook them for sentient robots. Not only did your great war fail – it was meant to. The remaining Krikkitmen were supposed to be placed in storage.
‘Point G. Did you notice that while you were sealed away in your Slow Time envelope you became a lot less single-minded (see Point E – keep up now)? In the last five years, haven’t you achieved less, argued more, discovered paperwork? Haven’t your Krikkitmen production factories stopped working? And haven’t you noticed how, since the envelope has been unlocked, you’re all suddenly single-minded, the dissidents have grown less … dissidenty and progress on your Ultimate Weapon has speeded up quite remarkably?
‘In summary …’ The Doctor concluded. ‘Divine intervention.’
If he’d been hoping to stun his audience into silence, he failed. There was a lot of murmuring.
‘Murmuring’s not good,’ Romana said softly.
‘No,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘That’s why I miss having K-9. He normally drowns that kind of thing out. Shame he’s babysitting.’
Chief Elder Grayce gulped as though trying to swallow a live fish. ‘Are you accusing us of having a god?’
‘I’m not even sure what a god is,’ someone shouted from the crowd.
‘Some would say that’s the point.’ The Doctor grinned.
The Chief Elder turned angrily on him. ‘Alien – not only do you dare to come here, but you talk to us of your abhorrent beliefs. Other life? Strange beings in the sky? No, the people of Krikkit will not be happy until the skies are completely empty.’
There was a surge of agreement. The surge had a strange tone to it – the sound is the same across the Universe. It is the sound that p
eople make when they’ve discovered something they don’t like and want the world back the way it was. Again, an exception was the narrow-lipped face of Elder Narase. She’d clearly been sucking lemons all her life and wasn’t about to stop now.
She strode forward, glared at the Doctor and then spat theatrically at his feet. ‘This disgusting creature may have a point.’ Her voice was sour. ‘Leaving aside this god nonsense, he is arguing that something alien has been shaping events on our world, leading us on to the point where we destroy the rest of existence.’
‘No, he’s a dangerous subversive!’ the Chief Elder snapped. The old woman favoured him with a look. He was the last chocolate in the box and her least favourite one.
Narase snapped her fingers. The air in front of them leapt into being, projecting a picture onto the ceiling.
‘See,’ she said. ‘This is what sways me towards the words of this revolting alien. The Ultimate Weapon. It is complete.’
Hovering in the air was the projected image. It showed a group of Krikkitmen. They were standing guard around what had to be the Supernova Bomb. It was as disappointing as the plans suggested it would be – a small red ball. Standing by it was a Krikkitman, wielding a bat with delicacy. The Supernova Bomb, as though in an attempt to give it some more gravitas, was on a small podium.
Chief Elder Grayce was having none of the Doctor’s wild ideas. ‘The Supernova Bomb is the proof that we are not ruled by an outsider. We built it ourselves, while we were in isolation. It is all our own work.’ There was relieved muttering from the crowd. Finally a bit of good news.
‘Sure?’ The Doctor was jabbing a finger at the projection of the bomb. ‘I’m presuming you’ll command the robots to strike and release the Supernova Bomb? Only, I’ve seen the plans, and that bomb’s a dud.’
The Elders nodded, their nods a tiny bit uncertain. Elder Narase laughed at them. ‘The Krikkitmen returned, helped us finish the bomb, offered to launch it at our command.’
‘Is that so?’ the Doctor mused. ‘And there’s absolutely no chance that they only freed your planet from Slow Time in order to do precisely that?’
‘Clever, awful alien, yes,’ the old woman cackled. ‘Isn’t their timing a bit too perfect? They explained that we lacked the necessary advancement to complete the bomb. That’s all they wanted to talk about.’
Once you’ve got your hands on the Ultimate Weapon, thought Romana, you’re naturally going to become a little preoccupied with when you use it. You’re going to wake up every day and think, ‘Today may well be the day that I wipe out the Universe. Events might just tip me over the edge. So everyone had better be on their best behaviour. And maybe I’ll skip the post office.’
She found herself gloriously imagining having that power. The power to end existence. To wipe everything out. What would be her tipping point? Would it be a distant alien atrocity, or the Doctor’s unwashed mug on the TARDIS draining board? At the back of her head, something stirred – a tiny trace of the control of the Krikkitmen. A little whisper about how nice and dark and quiet and peaceful the Universe would be, if only she’d turn the lights off. Then she remembered the glorious things she’d seen – the impossible worlds, the outrageous civilisations, the wondrous sunsets, the feeling of huddling with a bunch of rebels waiting for dawn and knowing that, at any moment, there was going to be a loud explosion and the Doctor would come dashing past yelling ‘Change of plan …’
Yet here she was. Standing in a roomful of disbelieving duffers, and realising that, for a long time in the Universe there had, in fact, been no change of plan.
For his part, the Doctor was marvelling. He’d never expected to prove the existence of God. Still less to discover that God wanted to blow up the Universe.
‘Your god has sent the Krikkitmen to you. Your god has literally controlled every aspect of your life – shaping you from long before the point he sent a spaceship crashing onto your shore.’
Elder Narase was laughing. Some of the elders had gone to a window and were staring out at the empty sky. Elder Grayce was looking old. ‘Where … Where is God?’
‘I shan’t bore you with a philosopher’s answer.’ The Doctor strode to the great window. He pointed upwards into the great darkness. ‘What is it that has kept you isolated for millions of years? Where did that spacecraft drift from? What is it that has been carefully nudging your minds this way and that, teasing little ideas in and out of them, slowly carefully subtly manipulating you into manic genocides?’
‘But where?’ demanded the Chief Elder again.
The old woman was looking out of the window and laughing and laughing.
‘They say that God cannot be seen,’ said the Doctor gravely. ‘And in your case that’s true. But you know it’s there. You see it, and yet you don’t see it, every day. Your god is in the Dust Cloud that surrounds your world.’
The entire hall turned to stare at the window, at the terrible blackness beyond. Silence fell, apart from the horrid cackling of the old woman.
‘Congratulations, Krikkit,’ said the Doctor. ‘You have a god.’
Elder Grayce turned running to the projection, shouting at it. ‘Stop! For God’s sake stop the bomb!’
The cry was taken up by the other elders, all of them urging and screaming and pleading with the picture.
‘The robots,’ the Chief Elder groaned. ‘They’re not listening.’
‘Of course not.’ As if Elder Narase’s laugh wasn’t bad enough, her triumphant smile was worse. ‘You’re all too late.’
‘God is done with you,’ said the Doctor. ‘You gave him his bomb. And that’s it for you, me and all life in existence.’
Projected across the hall, the last adjustments to the great bomb were made. The Krikkitman strode up to the Supernova Bomb, and lifted up its bat. It swept it back, preparing a stroke it had been planning for many million years.
‘It is too late!’ Elder Grayce wailed. ‘There is nothing we can do.’
The Krikkitman’s bat reached the top of its stroke and then swung down.
The Doctor put his fingers in his ears.
The bat hit the bomb.
CHAPTER THIRTY
GOD HAS A PLAN-B
The bat hit the bomb.
A lot of sentences in the Doctor’s life were complicated. Or, they started out simple and became complicated and a little worn at the edges.
But ‘The bat hit the bomb’ had a nursery-rhyme plainness to it which was admirable.
The bat hit the bomb.
The Universe did not end.
The Universe did not end, and the Doctor was laughing. A lot of Romana’s days were like this. She adored them.
The great and mighty Supernova Bomb fizzed a bit.
That was all it did.
For a moment, the image on the screen threatened pantomime. The Krikkit robot, having swiped the bomb, reached the end of its stroke and stopped. The other robots stopped. Nothing happened.
The Doctor took his fingers out of his ears and laughed. His laughter was so loud that it drowned out the cackling of Elder Narase. Realising she couldn’t compete, she stopped, and glared at him.
‘All that time, and it’s still a dud!’ The Doctor was fishing in his pockets. He passed a copy of The Beano to Romana. She noticed the top corner of here was folded down. She glanced at it, shrugged, and dropped it to the floor.
The Doctor had found what he was looking for and unfolded it. The blueprints to the Supernova Bomb. He made great play of studying them.
‘Don’t worry, just checking the top secret plans for your Supernova Bomb. You may well worry that I’ve stolen them, but I assure you they are long out of copyright. By several billion years.’
He unfolded them on the floor of the Parliament. ‘Gather round,’ he commanded.
No one did. They just stared at him in angry horror. Occasionally their eyes would drift to the screen, or to the suddenly sinister darkness hanging over them. Sometimes Chief Elder Grayce would interrupt the Doctor�
�s explanation to demand an explanation. Sometimes Elder Narase would utter her entirely disagreeable chuckle. Mostly the Doctor and Romana just talked.
‘You may be wondering why the Universe is still existing and what you can do about it. I wonder that a lot.’ He winked at Romana. ‘A long time ago, when the original Supernova Bomb was planned, a flaw was designed into it. When you started work on its replacement, your god may have guided your hand in a different direction. But you completed the bomb whilst you were sealed away from his influence. And you’ve only gone and repeated the original mistake. One the Krikkitmen failed to correct.’
The Elders stared at the Doctor.
‘Well,’ Romana added, ‘turns out you gained free will, but lost scientific advancement. With sad consequences for your – well, we can hardly call it a bomb any more, can we?’
‘A sparkler?’ the Doctor offered. ‘Did it cost a dreadfully large amount of money? I bet it did.’
There was silence.
The Doctor drew up his scarf, bundled it together and threw it through the projection before catching it again. ‘Here we are,’ he offered. ‘It’s the end of the line. The longest-running program in the Universe has finished. The Krikkitmen have run out of instructions. Your bomb is a dead end. That’s it.’ He turned to Romana. ‘You know what? I’m growing to appreciate an anti-climax.’
Well, thought Romana, the Doctor may be here of The Beano but I’m already here, and it’s not looking good for Biffo the Bear. She appraised the Elders. Half of them could be summed up by the look on Chief Elder Grayce’s face.
‘You know,’ he was muttering, sliding into a large marble chair, ‘this has all been a lot to take in.’
Another faction was grouping around Elder Narase. She was sneering and cackling and shaking an enthusiastic fist at things. She’d come to laughter late in life and was making the most of it. The old woman turned on the Doctor with a wild triumph in her eyes. That look was normally step one in a sequence that led to a big red button and a cry of ‘Nothing in the world can stop me now.’
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 23