Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen

by Adams, Douglas

  ‘Discussions are ongoing,’ muttered Wedgwood sourly.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ Richfield chuckled.

  ‘There’s talk of a little plaque on every inhabited world.’ Wedgwood’s face brightened. ‘Something discreet. Barely a mile long.’

  Narase leaned back against the cooling concrete of the wall and bared her lips to show them both of her teeth. ‘What interesting lives you lead,’ she said. ‘Go and help us win the war, or I shall take great pleasure in watching the Krikkitmen rip you limb from limb.’

  Richfield and Wedgwood glanced at each other. Richfield drummed his fingers on his mood board so hard the word ‘Elegiac’ fell to the floor.

  Dismissing them, Narase walked into her office. It had only recently become her office. She’d not really had a chance to redecorate it. But one thing she knew it shouldn’t contain was a Krikkitman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Sir Robot. ‘I have a message for you from the Doctor. He wants to tell you something clever.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ALL HEAVENS GO TO THE DOGS

  The Doctor threw a notional stone into an illusory stream and heard it go ‘plop’.

  The blank face of Hactar watched him do it.

  ‘Tell me, Hactar,’ he said, his eyes on the constant branches of the willow tree. ‘Does it worry you that you’ve failed again?’

  The left tape spool tugged slightly, like a nervous tic. ‘Have I failed?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor nodded. He grinned. ‘The thing about winning is that, if you’re clever, you can get your opponent to do all your work for you.’

  Elder Narase’s office was full of Krikkitmen. She was watching them march back and forth.

  ‘Say it again,’ she said to Sir Robot.

  ‘The Doctor wants you to know that he has turned the Krikkitmen off.’

  The solid white, threatening robots reached the end of the room, turned smartly and marched back.

  ‘Are you sure that’s exactly what he said?’

  Sir Robot nodded. ‘Precisely.’

  Elder Narase allowed herself a thin smile. ‘As you can see by this demonstration, they are still functioning. More to the point, I notice that so are you.’

  Sir Robot nodded again. ‘I am aware.’

  ‘We can soon take care of that,’ the Elder Woman shrugged. She clicked her fingers and two Krikkitmen advanced on Sir Robot.

  They stood in front of her, and waited for orders.

  There was a cold shiver to the air. So this, thought Narase, is what power really feels like. Not the meetings, the jabbering, but the lovely electric thrill of being thoroughly mean.

  The Krikkit warriors were taller than Sir Robot. They were more solid. Their superior manufacture showed. These were machines built for blasting and gouging and shredding and tearing things apart. Compared to them, Sir Robot was as sturdy as a watering can.

  The Krikkitmen advanced on Sir Robot, vicious red smiles flickering inside their helmets.

  ‘Dismantle that,’ Narase ordered them.

  ‘But,’ said Sir Robot, as the warriors bent over him, ‘I have a family—’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Elder Narase as she swept from the room.

  ‘Was it anything important?’ asked Richfield. He knew what was important. He’d just appointed a committee to redesign the uniforms.

  ‘Oh,’ Narase sighed. She’d been in power only a few hours and already she had mastered the sigh. ‘A robot came to tell me that all our robots have been deactivated.’

  ‘Have they?’ Wedgwood stepped aside as a phalanx of Krikkitmen marched past.

  ‘Clearly not,’ said Elder Narase. ‘The robot which gave me the news was faulty so …’ She paused. Beyond the door she could hear the slightly muffled yet entirely satisfying sounds of metal being ripped apart. ‘So I had it deactivated.’

  ‘But was there any truth to it?’ Richfield asked. ‘It may interfere with the rollout of our initiative. If so, we’ll need to revisit the entire project plan.

  Wedgwood nodded glumly. ‘We’re already on a tight timeline.’ He held up a chart. It showed their progress against a box labelled ‘End of the Universe’. There really did seem to be quite a lot of things to fit in before then.

  The Chief Elder made a sound which may have been ‘humph’. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ she smiled. ‘Just to make sure, I’ll send a Krikkitman down to Robot Control to tell me whether or not it has been turned off.’

  She turned to a Krikkitman, repeated the instructions facetiously and watched it march away.

  ‘There we go,’ she said. ‘Problem solved.’

  She had no idea how wrong she was – and, also, how right.

  While the Doctor sat in a cloud, Romana was tearing through the Cosmos in a Krikkit Pavilion. All around her was destruction on a massive scale, as the various Krikkit fleets sliced through solar systems and galaxies. She had done what she could, but she was aware that things weren’t going smoothly. A phalanx of Krikkit ships had peeled away and was pursuing her. She looked around the ship, trying to find something on the controls that would fire back, or, at least, protect her. There was nothing. Even the robot deactivation switch wasn’t any use – unless she could find a way to get close enough to the fleet to trigger it.

  Romana was worried. She’d reached the end of the road.

  ‘Hurry up, Doctor,’ she said, not for the first time.

  Back on Krikkit, a Krikkitman entered Robot Control.

  It expected to find nothing. It found nothing. No intruders. It went, more as a precaution, over to the main lever. It would, of course, be turned On. Otherwise, logically, it would not be functioning.

  The Krikkitman checked the lever.

  It was set to Off.

  If a Krikkitman could have paused, it would have paused. But it did not. Without stopping to reflect that the lettering for On and Off appeared to have been written in felt tip on masking tape, it leaned forward to correct a mistake.

  The lever said it was Off.

  It really should be On.

  The Krikkitman leaned forward, flicking the lever up to On.

  At which point, allowing for interspatial relay delays and what not, every Krikkitman in the Universe switched off.

  So ended the terrible curse of the Krikkitmen for ever.

  Only, the weight of the Krikkitman as it deactivated plunged onto the master lever, pushing it down again.

  At which point, allowing for interspatial relay delays and so forth, every Krikkitman in the Universe switched back on.

  The suddenly reactivated Krikkitman in Robot Control looked down at the lever. It was now at Off again.

  This would not do.

  The Krikkitman leaned forward, flicking the lever up to On …

  You will have realised by now that the Doctor had been very clever.

  Up in the great Dust Cloud, the Doctor was skimming a gold pebble across an imaginary stream. The Great Computer Hactar watched him from the comfort of his chaise.

  ‘The thing about winning, Hactar,’ the Doctor was using his wisest tone, ‘is that, if you’re smart you can get your opponent to do all your work for you.’

  ‘Really Doctor?’ Hactar spun an intrigued tape loop. ‘Do tell me more …’

  Meanwhile, in Robot Control, the Krikkitman was shifting the lever up, powering off, slumping forward, pushing the lever down, and then shifting it up again.

  There is a theory that when a robot carries out an action, it should take exactly the same time, no matter how many times it does it.

  This is countered by the observation that over time, it speeds up by infinitesimal increments. This should not be so. It makes sense for humans – talk to any chef about the peeling of potatoes, or any builder about the laying of a brick wall. With expertise comes a pleasing turn of speed that allows you to charge a fortune for doing less and less work.

  Not so with robots. Surely. And yet, it has been observed that a robot carrying out a repetitive task speeds up. The be
st theory put forward (and it is not a good theory) is that familiarity breeds contempt, even in atoms. Things get used to leaning forward and back, to being slid up and being slid down. To turning on and off.

  The Krikkitman in Robot Control was proving this. Its movements were speeding up, turning into a blur. Across the Universe, every other Krikkitman was having the same oscillations pumped into its power circuit.

  But here’s the thing – while repeated actions may speed up, interspatial relay delays remain constant. Therefore, each time the Krikkitman turned the lever, two things happened:

  One – the action speeded up a little.

  Two – the time it took for the signal to transmit itself across the Universe remained exactly the same.

  It shouldn’t require a blackboard and a precocious teenager to tell you that fairly soon the speeding-up-ness of some things and the exactly-the-same-ness of other things would cause a problem. Namely, that the On-Off signals started to overlap themselves.

  Robots like binary decisions. Tell it to turn on? Fine. Tell it to turn off? Splendid. Tell it to simultaneously turn itself off and on? Well, now, at that, any sensible robot would pause and suck its paws.

  As robots cannot believe six impossible things before breakfast, a third thing happened:

  Three – the time it took the Krikkitmen to decide whether to turn off or on slowed down fractionally.

  Which made the situation worse. Instructions were spewing out from Robot Control at an ever-increasing pace, and were now taking an ever-increasing time to carry out. Which meant …

  You’ll have realised this section is going to end in an explosion, but there’s no harm in showing you the workings.

  Tell a human to do one thing, then another, then the first thing again, and they would simply assume, as everyone does, that their boss is an idiot and get on with it, while quietly letting off steam and finding a way to inflate the bill or steal some pens.

  Robots cannot let off steam. Faced with a barrage of endless and conflicting orders and unable to resolve which ones to process, and entirely lacking in stationery supplies to steal and take home, the power circuit of every Krikkitman took a terrible battering.

  Put simply, all across the Universe, every Krikkitman started to glow, to smoke, blow fuses, and catch fire.

  Documentary-makers were rewarded with some marvellous shots of the most frightening space fleets ever assembled exploding magnificently.

  Romana blinked. The craft pursuing her had vanished, and vanished really dramatically.

  ‘Well done, Doctor,’ she said, and realised she’d been holding her breath. Of course she trusted him. She trusted him implicitly. But, well … some habits are hard to break.

  ‘Have I failed? No, failure doesn’t bother me,’ remarked Hactar. ‘If I haven’t already fulfilled my function, then it’s too late now.’ The computer shifted just a little on its couch. The Time Lord didn’t notice.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ the computer asked.

  The Doctor didn’t reply directly. ‘I was just listening to the music of the spheres.’ He grinned. ‘For once, they’re playing my tune.’

  The Great Khan observed a large, burning chunk of spaceship. It tumbled slowly, gracefully from the sky, swooping and diving through clouds of fiery debris with a fluttering delicacy. As it approached the land, it angled itself like a diver and hurled itself at the spot where the Great Khan’s vizier stood.

  Just before he was atomised, the vizier was still gaping and, if he hadn’t vanished into bright red steam, about to protest about the way things were turning out.

  The Great Khan observed the blazing shard sticking out of the ground. Then, with the patience of a man who knows precisely when his next nap is, he removed first one, and then the other glove and warmed his paws over the fire.

  ‘You see,’ he remarked to no one in particular, ‘I said we didn’t have an invasion scheduled today.’

  For a moment the Dust Cloud lit up, the illusory sky flashing. A great wind stirred across the meadow, tugging at the grass and completely failing to stir the leaves of the willow tree.

  ‘Well, that’s that then,’ the computer terminal of Hactar blinked.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘Do you mind if I get a second opinion – K-9?’

  The robot dog raised his head. ‘Hyperspatial relays confirm that the entire force of Krikkitmen is now inactive.’

  ‘Pleasing,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Quite,’ agreed Hactar. ‘Congratulations on your destruction of my Krikkitmen. Elegantly executed, I thought. I should probably be making a move …’ His voice passed into another gust of breeze that shivered through the meadow. The Doctor once more noticed the willow tree remained unmoved.

  ‘You realise my next act is to disable you?’

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ Hactar replied. ‘I suppose you’re going to disperse me. That will destroy my consciousness. Please be my guest. After all these aeons, oblivion is all I crave.’ A long and weary breath stretched back to the days when History wore short trousers.

  ‘Oblivion?’ The Doctor sat back down in his deckchair, and tapped his fingers against his teeth. There was a long pause. ‘It’s easily done.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Hactar wearily. ‘I’m not a sore loser. Bit of a relief, to be frank. Shall we be off?’

  ‘But I’m not doing it.’

  ‘Master?’ K-9 felt he had to intercede.

  ‘Come on, Hactar.’ The Doctor leaned forward and poked the computer. ‘You’ve been working on this plan for billennia. And you expect me to believe that I thwarted it with smart logic and a felt-tip pen?’

  Hactar remained silent. But that was all right as K-9 was already speaking. ‘Master, you have for once correctly identified the threat to the Universe and have disabled it most efficiently.’ That was as far as he went, but for K-9 this was quite an admission.

  ‘Ummmm …’ The Doctor put his hands together. Here was the church. Here was the steeple. Open the doors. And here were, of course they were, all the people. ‘Yes, K-9, yes. But tell me this. When have I ever been efficient?’

  The robot dog was utterly foxed.

  The Doctor sprang to his feet. ‘This plan – this audacious, horrible plan, isn’t even over yet. Disperse you, Hactar? What kind of an idiot do you think I am? Dispersing you in the first place is what got us into this mess. Those particles of you – scattered throughout the Universe, every one a little Hactar. There’s been a little bit of Hactar in every computer since, hasn’t there? Helping you out, working on the grand plan? Why else do you think computers crash so often, eh? Could it be that the owners have become inadvertently close to stumbling onto the truth of what their computers have really been doing all this time?’

  Neither Hactar nor K-9 said anything. The Doctor nudged K-9 gently with his foot.

  ‘See? I bet there’s even a tiny bit of Hactar in K-9.’

  ‘Negative,’ the dog protested, a touch sullenly.

  ‘Don’t feel bad about it, autopooch,’ said the Doctor. ‘You can’t help it. Most of the time, I’m sure it doesn’t get in the way. But if it’s in you, then I bet it’s in all the Krikkitmen. Hactar, you could have shut them all down in a trice. No, letting them all blow up was just for effect. And if I dispersed you, then I’d just be spreading you out further. Imagine that, eh?’ The Doctor noticed that, without seeming to move, the computer terminal had slid off the couch and was now eyeballing him, tape spools whirring nastily. The Doctor met its spinning gaze unblinkingly.

  ‘I’m not going to be hoodlepoodled by you any more. The simple fact is that you’ve had so long to work on your plan that you’re unbeatable. You’re not going to be fooled by a simple logic trick. But you’re counting on my own ego. The thing is –’ the Doctor turned his back on the computer – ‘I’m bored of the organ grinder. I want to meet the monkey.’

  He strode away through the meadow. K-9 glided after him, gently trying to correct his master’s phraseology.

 
The Doctor stopped in front of the willow tree. ‘Is there anything as lovely that can be,’ he sang tunelessly, ‘as lovely as a tree?’

  He knocked on the trunk. It sprang open. The Doctor walked inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A SPARE GOD

  ‘Master?’ said K-9.

  The robot dog had taken the Dust Cloud in his glide. But this … this was strange.

  ‘We’re in the control room of a War TARDIS,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s just like mine would be if you installed a dimmer switch.’ He glanced around at the various sharp angles. ‘And hadn’t baby-proofed the control room. I wish I could remember why I did that.’

  K-9 narrowed his eyes. ‘Master, we have been here before.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor looked around. ‘How curious. It really is like trying to tell your fortune from Christmas cracker jokes.’

  K-9 said nothing. K-9 had never won a Christmas cracker, but then that was because the Doctor cheated. K-9 kept silent on topics in which he was not an expert.

  The Doctor strode around the weird deck of the sinisterly ticking craft. ‘Imposing,’ he said. ‘As in, it’s mentally imposing. This is Cardinal Melia’s War TARDIS. Well, it was until he went missing. Shortly after he’d brokered the peace deal that saw Krikkit sealed away in Slow Time. Because …’ The Doctor whipped around to K-9. ‘K-9. We have to get out of this tree right now.’

  Which was when the door slammed shut and the lights went off.

  ‘Run!’

  A sign flared up in the darkness:

  ‘WE APOLOGISE FOR THE DISRUPTION TO NORMALITY.

  PLEASE ENJOY THE CHANGE.’

  The Doctor and K-9 found themselves in a corridor. So far, so business as usual. Except that this corridor was in total darkness, the only light coming from the Doctor’s screwdriver and the three-bar gas-heater glare of K-9’s eye.

  ‘Keep running, K-9,’ the Doctor ordered.

  ‘Master?’

  ‘I thought I heard your motor slowing down.’

  ‘Negative,’ K-9 corrected him. ‘Master, why are we running?’

  ‘Because,’ the Doctor announced, ‘I’m trying to run away from the voices in my head. Or rather, a voice.’