Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (20 page)

Morka swung round to the technician, his third eye ablaze with redness. The technician gasped, then fell across his desk. Morka looked at the other humans. ‘No more talk!’ Then he turned back to the Doctor. ‘More power, immediately!’

The Doctor said, ‘Liz, lower in number four rod.’

Liz moved the ‘four’ control.

‘Now five and six together,’ the Doctor said, straightening up from his work on the circuits under the console.

Liz moved the final two controls. The fifth and sixth uranium rods slowly sank into their respective holes. The fingers of all the dials held steady at a point well beyond the word
‘DANGER’
.

Miss Travis had finished her work exposing the wires of the destructor unit’s cable. ‘I’m ready to connect,’ she told the Doctor.

‘Thank you,’ said the Doctor. ‘I shall take over now.’ He took the destructor’s cable, crossed to a wall terminal point, checked that it was turned to ‘Off’, then connected the two bared wires of the cable. Then he pulled a switch beside the terminal point to its ‘On’ position. He crossed back to the control console, put his hand on the lever that would make the final connection of power between the generator and the wall terminal point. ‘Let us see how well your destructor works,’ he said.

As the Doctor started to move the lever, K’to sprang forward hissing. ‘It’s a trick! I know it is a trick!’

But the Doctor had already pulled the lever. The destructor hummed with power for a few seconds; then a huge crack appeared along one side of it and smoke belched from the crack.

K’to turned to Morka. ‘Kill him! He has destroyed the destructor!’

Morka turned to the Doctor, but his third eye did not yet glow its fatal red colour. ‘Stop everything! Turn off the generator!’

‘I can’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve destroyed the circuits of the control console. The reactor is at this moment turning into an atomic bomb. In a few moments it will explode. You will die with us. The radiation will leak into your own shelter, destroying all those of you not killed instantly by the explosion. I can only advise you to get back to your shelter as quickly as possible and seal yourselves up. Then you may be safe.’

Morka asked K’to, ‘Can this be true?’

K’to didn’t answer. He was staring at the destructor as it slowly melted with heat. A watery tear ran down the scales of his cheek. ‘With the destructor we could have returned our planet to what it was when we were the masters.’

Morka’s third eye flashed red at K’to, and K’to winced in pain. ‘Can this be true?’ he repeated.

‘It is all true,’ said K’to. ‘We must return to our shelter or die.’ He looked again at the destructor. It was now a mound of shapeless metal on the floor.

Morka looked round the room at the humans. ‘I do not understand,’ he said. ‘You have sacrificed yourselves so that other apes may live. My people would not have behaved like that.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Doctor, ‘that is why the apes – the humans – are such a successful species. They do not only think of themselves.’

‘Well, apes,’ said Morka, ‘you can all die together in the explosion.’ He signalled to K’to and the other reptile men, turned and led them away. None of the humans moved a muscle until the last of the reptile men had gone. Then the Brigadier broke into a grin.

‘Jolly good work, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Now for goodness’ sake turn this thing off.’

‘What I said was true,’ the Doctor answered. ‘I can’t turn it off.’

The Brigadier looked stunned. ‘Are you aware that the lift isn’t working? We’re all trapped down here!’

The Doctor turned to the technicians. ‘If any of you has any idea how to stop the generator from becoming an atomic bomb, now would be a good time to speak up.’

‘I think I know how,’ said Miss Travis. ‘The control console has a fail-safe mechanism. May I show you?’ She crossed to the console, looked under the panel where the Doctor had dislocated the control circuit. ‘It’s here,’ she said. ‘All we have to do is to pull out a fuse.’

Miss Travis calmly put her hand in among the now tangled wires of the control circuits, reached as far as possible and pulled out a single fuse. Instantly all the uranium rods started to rise up into their neutral positions. The fingers of the dials slowly sank from
‘DANGER’
back to
‘ZERO’
.

‘Miss Travis,’ said the Brigadier, ‘you are a very level-headed young woman. I’m sure you will become a great scientist one day.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘After all this, I think I’d rather work in a bank.’

The Doctor and Liz got into Bessie in the research centre car park. The Brigadier had come to say goodbye.

‘Going straight back to London?’ asked the Brigadier.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor.

‘No,’ said Liz.

‘Well, make your minds up,’the Brigadier said.

‘Since we’re in Derbyshire,’ Liz said, ‘I want to see over some of the potteries. You know, Denby and Crown Derby.’

‘What a good idea,’ the Brigadier said. ‘I wish I could join you.’

‘How long are you staying on here?’ asked the Doctor.

The Brigadier shrugged. ‘Just one or two things to clear up,’ he said. ‘Routine matters.’

‘You do understand the caves must not be touched,’ the Doctor said. ‘I want to return here next week with a team of scientists to try to make peaceful contact with the reptile men. There’s a living museum down there, and if we can get on friendly terms with them there’s a great deal we can learn about the origin of life on this planet.’

‘On my honour,’ the Brigadier said. ‘If I so much as see a reptile man, I shall go out of my way to be nice to him.’

‘You don’t really take this seriously,’ the Doctor said. ‘These creatures have as much right to this planet as you have. I’m going to ask the Prime Minister to have it put to the United Nations that the reptile people be formally invited to share the world.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the Brigadier said. He looked at his watch, and seemed now to want to get rid of the Doctor and Liz. ‘No harm will come to your reptiles. Now you’d better be off. Enjoy your trip to the potteries!’

‘Possibly,’ said the Doctor. He started the engine. ‘Where are all your soldiers?’

‘My soldiers?’ said the Brigadier, as though he might be trying to hide something. ‘Oh, they’re out and about, cleaning up the mess and all that.’ He again glanced at his watch.

‘I see,’ said the Doctor, realising that there was something the Brigadier didn’t want him to know. ‘Well, no more violence or killing. I’ll see you in London.’

The Doctor slowly drove Bessie out of the car park and down the gravel road to the main road. As they turned into the main road he said, ‘The Brigadier’s got something up his sleeve, you know.’

Liz didn’t answer. She just looked straight ahead down the road.

The Doctor slowed down the car and stopped; ‘Something’s going on that I don’t know about,’ he said. ‘And you know what it is!’

Liz turned to him. ‘Doctor, not everyone thinks like you…’

Her words were interrupted by a series of violent explosions. The Doctor turned and looked towards the main opening to the caves. A huge cloud of smoke and dust was belching out of the cave. Then there was another explosion, and the entrance to the cave collapsed in a huge deluge of huge rocks.

‘He’s sealed them in,’the Doctor said quietly.

Liz nodded. ‘He had to. They’d never have accepted sharing this world.’

The Doctor felt anger rising in him. ‘We’ve lost the chance to find out now,’ he said. ‘We shall never know.’

The Doctor started up the car again and continued along the main road in silence.

Universal-Tandem’s Target imprint began its
Doctor Who
range with reprints of three stories from the 1960s. The new series of novelisations then got properly under way with
Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion
by Terrance Dicks and
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters
by Malcolm Hulke, both published in paperback on Thursday 17 January 1974. The covers and internal illustrations (used in this edition) were by Chris Achilleos.

This new edition re-presents that 1974 publication. While a few minor errors or inconsistencies have been corrected, no attempt has been made to update or modernise the text – this is
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters
as originally written and published. This means that the novel retains certain stylistic and editorial practices that were current in 1973 (when the book was written and prepared for publication) but which have since adapted or changed. Most obviously, measurements are given in the then-standard imperial system of weights and measures: a yard is equivalent to 0.9144 metres; three feet make a yard, and a foot is 30 centimetres; twelve inches make a foot, and an inch is 25.4 millimetres.

Terrrance Dicks’s adaptation of Robert Holmes’s ‘Spearhead from Space’ embellishes and resequences the television episodes quite extensively, especially when it comes to giving the serial’s many minor characters a variety of back-stories and letting the reader in on their thoughts. Adapting his own scripts for ‘The Silurians’, Malcolm Hulke goes even further.

Rather than attempt to pack all seven episodes (almost three hours of television) into a 45,000-word novel, Hulke opts to rewrite his story from scratch, even rewording the majority of the dialogue. He dispenses entirely with the serial’s opening scene, in which the technicians Spencer and Davis are attacked by a dinosaur while potholing. The event is instead recounted later by other characters, as is the Doctor’s first encounter with Dr Quinn. On TV, this scene shows Quinn being politely evasive and culminates with the Doctor’s discovery that the power-loss log has several pages missing. A number of scenes showing the research centre at work – and suffering power losses – are combined into one for the novelisation, in the process losing a moment in which the Doctor helps to stabilise the cyclotron. Also gone is the Doctor’s night-long examination (equipped only with his sonic screwdriver, to Dr Lawrence’s disgust) of the cyclotron.

A soldier’s report in
Chapter 8
replaces a screened visit by the Doctor and the Brigadier to see Doris Squire in hospital. The tell-tale presence of Bessie at the cave entrance alerts the Brigadier to the Doctor’s expedition in
Chapter 15
, rather than Liz Shaw admitting to Masters that she knows where the Doctor’s gone. In print, the Brigadier takes a far smaller force into the caves in
Chapter 15
than he does on TV, and his grim return, having ‘lost a lot of men’, is dropped completely. Episode 6 features an extensive sequence of montages and scenes showing the Doctor experimenting to find a cure for the virus while Liz and the Brigadier take reports of the epidemic’s spread and fend off demands for a formula. This is all heavily compressed here, with an electron microscope facilitating a much more rapid discovery of the necessary drug. On television, the cure comes too late for Dr Lawrence, who is an early victim of the plague. And the Doctor has one last confrontation with a Silurian after the reactor has been closed down, which culminates with the Brigadier shooting the creature dead – again absent here.

Yet Hulke’s novelisation does much more than simply compress his original storyline. Many scenes are revised or replaced. Miss Dawson is present at Quinn’s death, which is later discovered by Dr Meredith not the Doctor. This also removes Miss Dawson’s important intervention in Episode 4, revealing that Quinn has been killed by a Silurian and so apparently confirming that the creatures are hostile. The effects on the staff of working in the cyclotron room, including Liz Shaw’s headache, are all but absent from the book. When the technician Roberts breaks down on television, he is merely restrained; here, Hulke has him inadvertently killed by Major Barker. The later threat of a police investigation into this helps tip the Major over the edge, a plot development not seen on TV. And the concluding chapter plays up the Brigadier’s keenness to see the Doctor depart, but downplays the Doctor’s disappointed dismay when the reptile base is blown up.

The main supporting characters are all given greatly expanded backgrounds and new motivations: Matthew Quinn, the son of a famous physicist, whose on-screen eagerness to make his mark is given an extra streak of ruthlessness; Charles Lawrence, now a markedly less unsympathetic character, but whose desperation to preserve his professional reputation remains; Phyllis Dawson, an unwilling spinster, who follows years of manipulation by her mother with misplaced loyalty to Quinn, even when he begins to blackmail her. Hulke relates Dr Quinn and Miss Dawson’s walks across the moors and shared lunches, and allows Dr Lawrence to reminisce over his excitement on being appointed director at Wenley Moor and his prep school days with ‘Freddie’ Masters. Masters himself is now a Member of Parliament, introducing a small error – Permanent Under-Secretary is a Civil Service not Government role.

Several lesser characters, too, are fleshed out or invented for the novel. One scene in the fourth episode features a slightly supercilious research centre scientist called Travis; here, Travis becomes Miss Travis, initially a coffee-maker, but eventually key to preventing a reactor explosion. A taxi driver, given a handful of barely audible lines in Episode 7, becomes Jock Tangye, abandoning his tea for a week’s wages and promptly succumbing to the epidemic. As well as gaining various privates and corporals, UNIT loses an officer, as the TV story’s Captain Hawkins and Sergeant Hart are combined into the book’s Sergeant Hawkins. In the serial, the unfortunate – and rather unfit – Sergeant Hart fails to prevent the absconding of the research centre’s wounded security officer.

The portrait of Major Barker is also greatly extended from that of Major Baker, his television counterpart. Baker is presented as obsessively conscientious, understandably convinced that the ‘monsters’ are nothing more than saboteurs, and becoming increasingly unhinged as the story progresses. A line in Episode 1 explains that Baker ‘slipped up badly once some years ago. He’s been trying to make up for it ever since.’ Hulke’s novel goes into the detail of that past slip-up, recounting his experiences combating the IRA, the republican paramilitary group that conducted a terrorist campaign in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain from 1969. Hulke also makes Barker’s psychotic patriotism and xenophobia key to several points in the worsening situation. This is a theme the writer explored in other
Doctor Who
stories, including ‘The Ambassadors of Death’, which Hulke helped to rewrite from David Whitaker’s original scripts.