Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (15 page)

But Morka was not really listening. ‘I trapped the humans in the caves, and Okdel has released them. Now I shall try to destroy them!’

‘It is dangerous to disobey Okdel,’ said K’to.

Morka raised a hand. ‘Silence!’ His third eye started to pulsate as he concentrated. K’to remained watching Morka, wondering what was going on in his mind, and what effect it was having on the humans in the caves.

The UNIT soldiers came along the passageway, all in good spirits now. One or two were whistling a familiar tune. The first one to start behaving strangely was Sergeant Hawkins. He stopped suddenly and blinked. The Brigadier hurried up beside him.

‘What’s the matter, Sergeant?’

‘Don’t know, sir. I just felt a bit peculiar for a moment.’ Hawkins shook his head, then continued to walk forward. From behind them there was a sudden scream. Both Hawkins and the Brigadier whirled round to see Robins fighting desperately with the two soldiers who had been helping him.

‘Robins!’The Brigadier doubled back to the soldier. ‘We’re getting you back to base as quickly as possible, Robins. Now pull yourself together!’

Robins glared at the Brigadier, his eyes wild with fear. Then, using enormous strength, he broke free from the two soldiers on either side of him and darted off down one of the smaller tunnels. The Brigadier rushed after him. ‘Robins,’ he called, ‘I’ve no idea where this goes. You’ll get yourself lost.’

The tunnel was quite short. It opened up into a dome-roofed cave. There was a wide ledge where the tunnel came out, then a black chasm. As the Brigadier came out on to the ledge, his torch picked up Robins perched on the edge of the ledge. Sergeant Hawkins came up behind the Brigadier.

‘What do we do now, sir?’ Hawkins asked.

‘Pray, I should think,’ said the Brigadier. He called softly to Robins. ‘Robins, take a step backwards.’

They waited to see if Robins would respond. Robins lifted one foot, held it poised a moment, then swung it back from the chasm.

‘Good man,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Now bring the other leg one step backwards.’

Again they had to wait to see how Robins would react. He lifted his other leg, held it poised, then stepped back. He was now no longer right on the edge of the chasm.

‘Now then, Robins,’ said the Brigadier, in the same quiet voice. ‘Eyes right, and about turn!’

Robins carried out the order as though he were on the parade ground.

‘That’s very good going,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Now I want you to march, shoulders back, towards me.’

Like a sleep-walker, Robins began to march very slowly towards the Brigadier. ‘He’s going to be all right,’ whispered Sergeant Hawkins. ‘You’ve pulled him through it, sir.’

‘A bit more towards me,’ said the Brigadier, and Robins slightly altered his direction to take himself directly to the Brigadier. As Robins came up close the Brigadier said, ‘Good man! Now you’re safe, and you’re with friends.’

Robins smiled at the Brigadier. Then some strange wild look flashed in his eyes. ‘Grab him,’ shouted the Brigadier, and Sergeant Hawkins lunged forward. Robins recoiled backwards in sudden panic, then turned and ran straight for the chasm. His body hurtled into the darkness. The Brigadier and Hawkins rushed to the edge and looked down. A long-drawn-out scream came up to them, a scream that never seemed to end. The scream went on, fading further and further into the distance, as Robins plummeted into the bowels of the Earth. The Brigadier and the Sergeant remained standing where they were for some time. Then the Brigadier moved away from the chasm. ‘There’s nothing we can do for him, Sergeant. We’d better press on.’

Sadly the two men made their way back to the waiting soldiers.

Morka’s third eye stopped pulsating.

‘What have you done?’ asked K’to.

‘Killed one of them,’ said Morka. ‘They have moved out of range. I can only control the weakest.’

‘Or the least mutated,’ said K’to.

‘There are other ways to kill apes,’ said Morka. ‘I have released one of our fighting animals into the caves. Later I shall release all our animals to destroy the humans.’

‘Okdel will stop you,’ said K’to. ‘In any case if it is true that so many apes now pollute our planet, our fighting animals will be of little use against them.’

Morka found this a terrible thought. ‘We cannot let the apes over-run us! They are vermin!’

‘I agree,’ said K’to. ‘But our fighting animals alone cannot now destroy them.’

Morka looked more closely at K’to. ‘I think you are really a friend of mine,’ he told the scientist. ‘Before now, I thought you had no opinions, no feelings.’

‘Because I am a man of science,’ K’to said, ‘does not mean that I lack feelings and passions. I have no wish to share the world with furry creatures. They are unclean. Insects sometimes live in their fur. They disgust me.’

‘Do you see some solution to our problem?’ Morka asked. ‘There are few of us but millions of them.’

K’to went to a metal cupboard, opened it and brought out a sealed canister. ‘In our time you worked in the domed city,’ he said. ‘You were not a farmer, so there were things you did not know. As a scientist I had to assist our farmers. When the apes raided their crops, the substance in this canister was used. It is lethal.’

‘Can we be sure that it will work on apes as they are now?’ asked Morka.

‘Fortunately,’ said K’to, ‘we can conduct an experiment.’ He turned and looked towards the prisoner cages. Major Barker was just recovering consciousness, and was rubbing his head.

‘Kill him with this substance?’ said Morka, not yet fully understanding. ‘Killing them one at a time will not help us.’

‘We shall not kill him,’ said K’to. ‘We shall let him free, and he will kill all the others for us.’

The Brigadier and the UNIT soldiers were making slow progress on their way out of the caves. Every foot of the field telephone cable had to be wound back on to the drum, and this slowed them down.

‘We couldn’t just leave the cable, could we, sir?’ asked Sergeant Hawkins.

‘Government property,’ said the Brigadier.

‘But hanging about like this, sir,’ Hawkins persisted. ‘We could get trapped again by a roof-fall.’

‘If we are trapped again,’ said the Brigadier, ‘that is something I could explain to my superiors. But if I lose one foot of that wretched telephone cable, there will be an investigation into the waste of public money.’

The two soldiers winding the cable back on to the drum worked as fast as they could, and the little group of UNIT men moved forward down the passageway. Then Sergeant Hawkins stopped, and pointed his torch on to the cave floor.

‘Look, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m sure that wasn’t here before.’

The Brigadier looked down at a perfect footprint of one of the reptile fighting animals. He felt very worried about the sight of it. ‘We may have to forget that wretched telephone cable after all,’ he told the Sergeant.

Even as the Brigadier spoke, his words were drowned by the roar of the fighting animal which had appeared a couple of hundred feet down the passageway. Its mouth had huge pointed teeth, bared now as it advanced towards the soldiers. To the animal, these humans were food.

‘Shoot for the head!’ shouted the Brigadier, himself taking cover behind an outcrop of rock. All the soldiers dived for the sides of the passageway.’ Fire now!’

The soldiers opened up with a rain of bullets at the monster. The Brigadier could see bullet holes appearing in the monster’s thick scaly hide, but even so the monster continued towards the soldiers, roaring and baring its long pointed teeth.

‘We need explosive bullets for this,’ said Hawkins, as he fired round after round at the oncoming monster.

The Brigadier saw one of the soldiers reach for a hand grenade to throw. ‘No grenades,’ he shouted. ‘You fool – you’ll bring the roof down on top of us!’

All at once the monster stopped in its advance. ‘Hold your fire,’ called the Brigadier. ‘And put out the torches.’ They all snapped off their torches. There was total darkness. Through the darkness came the heavy breathing of the monster. ‘The torches were attracting it,’ said the Brigadier, just loud enough for everyone in the confined space to hear.

‘But we can’t see how close it is now, sir,’ said Sergeant Hawkins. ‘It’s got the advantage.’

‘We can listen,’ said the Brigadier.

The heavy breathing continued. Then they heard the monster move its feet. ‘I think it’s going away,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Keep those torches turned off until we can’t hear it.’

The men waited, hardly daring to move. Eventually there was no sound of the monster. The Brigadier switched on his torch. The passageway ahead was empty. He straightened up. ‘Torches on,’ he said, and the other men switched on their torches. ‘Now let’s get out of these caves as quickly as we can.’

‘What about the cable, sir?’ said Sergeant Hawkins.

‘That’s right,’ said the Brigadier, ‘what about it?’ He grinned at the Sergeant. ‘For once, let’s forget about government property and look after our own necks!’

The Brigadier and the soldiers ran as fast as they could down the passageway towards freedom.

Major Barker found himself lying on his back on the floor of the great cathedral-like cave. Daylight filtered in from the opening up near the roof of the cave. He sat up and tried to remember what had happened. Everything was rather confused. He could remember the man-trap that caught him by the ankles, and those horrible reptile faces advancing on him. Then he was a prisoner for some time, held in a cage like an animal. There was another prisoner, that Doctor fellow, but one of the reptiles took him away. Now his memory started to come back. The Doctor had been a traitor, and had wanted to help these lizards.

Perhaps they had taken the Doctor away to kill him. No decent person liked traitors. But these were lizards, not ‘persons’. Major Barker rubbed his head. It was all very strange.

His arm itched. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket to scratch his arm. He looked at the flesh of his forearm, saw a little cut in the flesh. How had he been cut there? He could not remember. Anyway, it was a very tiny wound, nothing to worry about. But it itched badly, and he scratched at it viciously. Then he looked at the blood on his fingers from the wound. Perhaps best not to scratch it, he thought. His hands and fingers were filthy with cave dust, and he might infect the wound. He steeled himself not to feel the itch, and to leave his arm alone.

He stood up and looked about himself. So, he thought, he had somehow escaped. The trouble was, he couldn’t
remember
escaping. Still, the mind can play strange tricks. Obviously he must have escaped or he would not be in this cave now, a free man. Somehow in his escape he must have banged his head against a rock, and that’s why he was lying unconscious on the cave floor. All he had to do now was to find his way out of the caves, and obviously the quickest way was to climb up to that little circle of daylight near the roof.

He started to move off when his foot kicked something. For a ghastly moment he expected a man-trap to grab his ankles. But nothing happened. He looked down, saw his rifle lying on the floor. He picked it up, checked that it still worked. Then he started to climb up the rocks leading to the daylight.

From a dark recess between rocks, the reptile scientist K’to watched Major Barker with considerable interest. Once Major Barker had reached the circle of daylight, K’to moved towards the great rock, pulsated his third eye and opened the rock. He went inside, and the rock closed behind him.

The Doctor was alone in the inner room, where Okdel had left him. The moment Okdel left, the Doctor tried the door, only to find Okdel had locked it. The Doctor interested himself in a screen in the wall. There were a number of dials and buttons set in the wall immediately under the screen, and experimentally the Doctor tried some of these controls. Instantly the screen lit up showing a map of Earth before the Great Continental Drift. He touched the controls again. The map vanished from the screen and was replaced by an aerial view of a domed city. Then the door opened and Okdel entered, carrying a metal canister.

‘You must have had a great civilisation,’ said the Doctor, indicating the picture of the city on the screen.

Okdel ignored the Doctor’s remark. ‘I have spoken to the others of your plan,’ he said. ‘Some wish to live in peace with the humans, and others do not. But without my knowing, something has happened which may change all our plans. The other prisoner has been released.’

‘I’m very pleased to hear that,’ said the Doctor.

Okdel raised a scaly hand to silence the Doctor. ‘No, you will not be pleased. He has been infected with a deadly virus which may destroy all his species.’ Okdel paused, and swayed a little from side to side. ‘It is not my doing. I am sorry.’

‘What will this virus do?’ asked the Doctor.

‘I saw it used against the apes,’ said Okdel. ‘It was very cruel. First it causes a surge of energy which burns up the body’s resources. With some, death follows almost immediately, with great pain. With others, the afflicted ones wander mindlessly over great distances, infecting all others. The disease spreads with incredible speed.’