‘Sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience,’ Ty said with a smile.
Martha tried to brush it off. ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘He’s not like that with me.’
‘Yeah?’
Martha nodded confidently. ‘Wouldn’t dare.’
Ty laughed out loud. ‘I can believe that, honey. How long you two been together?’
‘Together?’ Martha suddenly felt herself blush. ‘Oh, it’s not like that.’
‘No? What is it like, then? You his youthful sidekick, like in the movies?’
It was Martha’s turn to laugh. ‘Something like that: Smith and Jones, we are. Like that old cowboy thing – I think. Unless it’s the comedy show…’
‘Oh, I think I’ve seen that. The cowboy one, I mean. And you’re… which one?’
Martha pushed open the door to the zoo lab, tea slopping from the mug. ‘I’m the pretty one,’ she said. ‘And don’t let him tell you otherwise.’
‘What Pallister said,’ Ty asked. ‘What that thing said – about reproduction? What did it mean?’
A couple of dozen Sundayans, along with the Doctor, Martha and Ty, had gathered in the Council chamber around a roaring fire. Ty had found some new, clean clothes for Martha – a weird, shapeless orange kaftan thing that Martha was too polite to decline. She sat alongside the Doctor, picking half-heartedly at a plate of cheese and fruit and fried eggs that she’d been given.
‘That’s what I’ve been wondering too,’ he replied.
He perched himself on the corner of the council table and pulled an assortment of thoughtful faces. Ty brought around a tray of coffee and more of the ‘sap tea’ – which wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded.
‘What do we know about this thing, then?’ the Doctor continued. ‘There’s just the one of it, it’s absolutely massive, and it’s gobbling up everything around it to make itself even massiver. Makes sense that it lives in water, really – the buoyancy will help support its body, a bit like whales. And it’ll have all the seafood it needs. And judging by the bit that Martha here brought back, it reproduces by binary fission, splitting off bits of itself. I had a good poke at it: distributed nervous system, no single brain, no particularly specialised organs. Chop it into a million, billion pieces and before you know it, you’ve got a million billion new ones.’ He pulled a thoughtful face. ‘Would explain a lot about its intelligence too – or relative lack of. With a nervous system and “brain” spread throughout its enormous body, it’s a fairly slow thinker. There’s a limit to how fast nerve impulses can travel through its tissue. One reason why humans are so smart: small, very dense brains, fast communication between different parts of them. This thing,’ he grimaced, ‘was hiding at the bottom of the sea when Mother Nature handed out smarts. Unfortunately for us and the otters, it’s turned a disadvantage into a whopping great advantage. Instead of trying to do its own thinking, it gets other, brighter species to do it for it. And in the process benefits from those other species’ knowledge of the environment that it finds itself in.’
‘And it’s taken our people,’ grunted Henig, sprawled in a wooden chair near the fire.
Martha saw the flicker of acknowledgment in the Doctor’s eyes. He’d tried to get all the kidnapped settlers back, but had failed. And the Doctor didn’t do failure well.
‘It can grow as big as it needs, and has no predators here on Sunday. And judging by its rate of cell division, it’s not planning on dying of old age any time soon so it doesn’t need children competing for resources.’ He shook his head and fixed Henig with a look. ‘So there’s really only one reproductive strategy that makes sense. That picture you drew, Martha, when we brought you back from the otters’ nest: that single great blob enveloping the planet. Well if it’s got this planet sewn up all by itself, what would be the purpose of reproducing, eh?’ He looked round the room like a schoolteacher waiting for the right answer to an algebra question.
‘To spread to other planets?’ ventured Martha.
‘First-class honours!’ he grinned. ‘To spread to other planets. After all, I think we can be fairly sure that it arrived on – or in – the meteorite that caused the flood.’
‘OK,’ said Martha thoughtfully, settling back into a chair and putting her fingers together like some sort of evil genius. ‘But it can’t exactly conjure itself another meteorite out of nowhere to hitch a ride on; it can’t repair the settlers’ ship; and it doesn’t have the brains to make itself a great big space catapult to shoot its little babies into outer space with.’ Suddenly, Martha’s mouth dropped open. ‘Unless that’s what it was getting the settlers to build – you know, what we learned from them with the psychic paper!’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Too small. Much too small. And too simple, judging by how few parts were involved.’
‘Maybe it naturally has the ability to fire bits of itself out there,’ Ty suggested. ‘There are a few plant species that do that, you know. The stage trees, for example, and the Krynoids, and the comet flowers on Besseme. Maybe this thing does too.’
‘It’s possible,’ considered the Doctor. ‘But remember what it said about Pallister – that the information he contained “would facilitate its reproduction”. I don’t imagine Pallister was a secret expert on building a giant space catapult—’ He stopped suddenly. ‘What was Pallister’s speciality?’
Henig pulled a gruff face.
‘He was a jumped-up little nobody, that’s what was so special about him. That thing sticking its fingers in his head was the most special thing that happened to him in his life.’
There was a murmur of discontent from the assembled settlers. Whatever anyone had thought of Pallister whilst he was alive, they didn’t like hearing ill spoken of him now.
‘What?’ said Henig, rounding on them. ‘Don’t pretend that you lot didn’t think the same? He weaselled his way to the head of the Council, we all know that. And not one of us had the guts to stand up to him and put him in his place.’ He scowled. ‘If you ask me, that thing and him were made for each other – no wonder it chose him.’
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s what I was getting at: why did it choose him?’ He scratched the back of his head. ‘It might just be that it saw some sort of kindred spirit in Pallister, I suppose, or that it recognised him as your leader and thought that he’d make the best figurehead. So what did he do – before he became head of your Council?’
‘He was a technician,’ said Henig.
‘What kind of a technician? Where did he work?’
Henig’s eyes suddenly went wide. Ty was a step ahead of him already. ‘He worked in the power station and helped set up the refinery,’ she said. ‘The ore refinery.’
The Doctor’s shoulders fell. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said heavily. ‘Uranium ore. For that beautiful uranium-powered spaceship of yours.’
Ty nodded, her mouth suddenly dry.
‘And a man that knows all about how to refine and use uranium,’ said the Doctor slowly, ‘is now dangling from the end of that creature’s tentacles. If we thought things were bad before, I have a terrible feeling that they’re only going to get worse. Much, much worse.’
‘Why?’ barked Henig, frowning. ‘The ship needs more than power to get it off the ground – it needs a miracle. It needs parts and repairs and—’
‘You’re thinking like a human,’ the Doctor interrupted, his face becoming grimmer by the second. ‘If you lot wanted to leave Sunday, you’d need a ship. Slimey out there, on the other hand, doesn’t. And you can do a lot more with refined uranium than just power a spaceship…’
He caught Martha’s eye. It took her a few moments to catch up – and even then, she didn’t quite believe it. ‘You have so got to be kidding,’ she said eventually. ‘That thing is going to build a bomb?’
The Doctor’s gaze didn’t waver.
Martha went on, hardly believing the words she was saying. ‘It’s going to use Pallister’s knowledge to build an atomic bomb – and blow itself into sp
ace? That’s what the settlers were making?’
Ty shook her head. ‘I might only be a zoologist, but even I know that setting off a nuclear bomb right under your ass isn’t just going to fling you to your next home.’
The Doctor gave a shrug. ‘It’s survived the journey to Sunday well enough, though – floating between the stars as a little blob on that asteroid. There’s a lot of very hard radiation out there, extremes of temperature.’ He drummed his fingers against his bottom lip. ‘In fact,’ he said, in that tone of voice that made Martha’s spirits sink, ‘that would make perfect sense. But I don’t think we need to worry about that. After all,’ he grinned, ‘to make a plan like that actually work, it’d need a shaft down into the planet – ooh, a few hundred metres deep, at least. And where’s it going to find one of those around here…?’
Martha looked round the room. An awkward hush had fallen. It couldn’t have been more obvious, she thought, than if someone had pulled out a great big photo of a hole in the ground, with all the Sundayans standing around it, pointing, holding up a sign saying ‘Great big hole in the ground’.
‘Oh great,’ said the Doctor, his shoulders sinking. ‘Just great!’
FIFTEEN
Candy knew she ought to feel guilty for coming back here on her own, ignoring the Doctor’s instructions. But, really, she didn’t. She’d never been good at taking orders, even from someone as likeable as the Doctor. And besides, she knew that his ‘Tell the settlement!’ had just been an excuse to get her out of danger. What could she have told them that they didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed?
No, it made more sense for her to find the rest of the kidnapped Sundayans. Even if she couldn’t actually rescue them, she could at least let everyone else know exactly where they were. Brains might not have been Candy’s forte, but getting stuck in certainly was.
So she started off back to the city, and then took a wide loop around, bringing herself out near the riverbank, a kilometre upstream of where she’d left the Doctor and Ty. Poking her head out of the bushes, she pulled out her monocular and used it to scan downriver: she could see the buildings clearly, but there was no sign of the otters, the brainwashed settlers or the Doctor and Ty. She hoped that meant they’d got away.
So… where were the rest of the settlers? She’d had plenty of time to think as she’d made her way back, and it seemed only common sense that if they weren’t at the settlement then they’d be somewhere else doing the creature’s dirty work. And that surely had to mean the ship, the One Small Step…
Candy shuddered inwardly at the memory of finding Col and what he’d done to himself – all to stop the creature from finding out any more. But she – and, Candy suspected, Col too – reckoned it was probably too late.
After she’d realised that it was pointless trying to drag Col’s body from the ship, she’d noticed the shipbrain’s illuminated control panel; and, curious, she’d checked it out to see what could have brought Col all the way out here in secrecy.
What she saw puzzled – then angered – her: Col had been deleting records from the ship’s memory. Pallister’s records. It took her a few minutes to work out why. And when she did, the anger kicked in.
‘Why, Col?’ she’d whispered, scrolling through Pallister’s records. ‘Why d’you do it?’
Col had been deleting Pallister’s history file – the record that had come with him aboard the ship. Normally only for the eyes of the ship’s Captain and the previous Chief Councillor, both of whom had died in the flood, Pallister’s history file seemed somewhat at odds with the picture of himself that he’d presented at the elections. Elections that Col himself had been in charge of organising.
A few moments of thought and it was clear to Candy what Col had done: Pallister’s history contained numerous convictions for petty crime, fraud and embezzlement. And yet none of that had been mentioned during the elections. Quite the reverse, in fact. The history file placed on public record, in the run-up to the election, had shown Pallister to be a model citizen, beyond reproach. A selfless, hardworking, dedicated man.
Col had helped to fix the election so that Pallister would win.
And then when news of the One Small Step’s return had reached Sunday City, Col must have panicked, thinking that someone might check the ship’s records and discover that someone had fiddled with them. So he’d rushed out here to delete them, covering his – and Pallister’s – tracks. Maybe Pallister himself had suggested it.
Was that what he’d been apologising about?
Col’s words came back to her, sharply, as though he were speaking them now: ‘Tell them I’m sorry,’ he’d said. ‘For letting it find out about Pallister.’
But why? It made no sense. Why would it matter whether the creature discovered that Pallister was a petty criminal and that his election had been fixed?
She was still puzzling over that as she hid in the bushes. Still puzzling over it, as the sound of her own breathing began to subside, and she heard a faint and distant noise. A low, mechanical droning, it drifted across the treetops from well beyond the far bank. And for a few moments she sat there wondering where she’d heard the noise before. Only when it finally came to her did she heave herself to her feet. She looked back towards Sunday City, wondering if the Doctor and Ty had heard the sound. But it was so faint that she wasn’t even sure she was hearing it herself.
Quietly, she stepped into the open and began to make her way upstream, looking for a shallow crossing point, pausing every few metres to listen. And the more she listened, the more certain she became – and the more puzzled.
Why had someone decided to start up the drill?
On the other side of the forest, nearly two kilometres away from the original settlement, stood the spindly tower of the deep drill – a skeletal column of metal scaffolding over a hundred metres tall. Thirty metres away stood the drill’s squat control room. And wandering between the two, silently, were the remaining kidnapped settlers.
And watching over them all in the darkness was the man that had once been Pallister. Suspended a metre above the ground, he hung like a broken doll above the water’s edge, slick pipes of flesh still pumping chemicals in and out of his brain, feeding back to the thing that waited beneath the waters. There was no longer any real Pallister there. There hadn’t been for a while – not since the Doctor had attacked it. Now he was just an encyclopaedia for the swamp creature to flick through at will, a database, a source of knowledge and information. Raw brainpower, tied directly in to the creature. Brainpower that the alien was putting to good use.
The thing controlling him held no bitterness, no anger. The Doctor’s action had been understandable – he had sought to survive. The body that housed Pallister’s brain had been damaged by what the Doctor had done, but the brain still functioned. After a fashion.
Even filtered through Pallister’s senses and memories, the creature could make little sense of the Doctor’s earlier questions. It simply could not comprehend how any creature could not understand life’s prime directive: to reproduce, to make more, to colonise and spread.
There was nothing else.
‘You know,’ said the Doctor, his eyes sweeping grimly around the room, ‘I’m half afraid that if I tell you that the worst thing, just at the moment, would be an army of killer robots with flashing red laser-beam eyes, someone would open a cupboard door and point out that you’ve already got one…’
He was seething, Martha could tell.
‘Anyway…’ He seemed to calm down a little. ‘This drill: tell me more about it.’
A youngish man – early twenties, Martha guessed – with long, straggly blond hair raised a hand at the back of the crowd. ‘It’s for extracting low-grade uranium ore,’ he said. ‘The drill tower’s a hundred metres tall, but the extensible bit can go as deep as five hundred. There’s a reasonable seam of ore down there. The drill makes a hole and then we drop low-grade explosives down to fracture it.’
‘And then leach it ou
t with a chemical solution?’ asked the Doctor. ‘And pump it back up to the surface for processing?’
The man nodded, his mouth tight, worried.
‘So much for your intentions to switch to fusion power,’ he said darkly, glancing at Ty. ‘Looks like you’ve already got yourself a long-term energy policy.’
‘But what’s this got to do with that creature wanting to set off a nuclear bomb under our backsides?’ Henig put in.
‘Never heard of the Orion Project?’ asked the Doctor. His eye caught Martha’s. She gave a shrug.
‘Today’s been a real history lesson for you lot, hasn’t it,’ said the Doctor wearily. ‘It was an idea,’ he said eventually, ‘back on Earth in the 1940s, for a nuclear pulse rocket. The idea was to build a big spaceship – a really big spaceship. Whopping, in fact. The size of a city. And to power it by setting off nuclear bombs under its bum.’
‘And it worked?’ This was Ty, eyes wide with disbelief.
‘Oh, they never actually built it – too many practical problems. But in theory it could have done. The back end of the ship was nothing more than a huge steel plate, designed to absorb the radiation and act as a cushion, letting the energy of the bombs push the rocket forwards. A bit brutal for my tastes, but where would we be if everyone thought the same, eh?’
Henig shook his head. ‘You’re mad!’ he said, looking around the crowd for agreement. ‘You expect us to believe that this thing’s going to take the power core from the ship, turn it into a bomb, drop it down the bore hole and then sit back and go surfboarding into space on a chunk of rock?’
‘Oh, I’ve known people try to surfboard into space on far more unbelievable things,’ the Doctor said. ‘But yes – you’ve summed it up nicely, Henig.’
The Doctor pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket for the umpteenth time and waved it around. A faint blue light came from the tip and it emitted a feeble buzzing, like the sound of a dying fly. Henig and the other Sundayans were arguing about what the Doctor had told them. Martha couldn’t quite tell which way it was going. Some of them had started crying. Others just shouted and banged their fists on tables, as if that would help.
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