Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (4 page)

Meredith opened the door and they went into a small, windowless private ward with one bed, a washbasin, and as always the faint hum of the air-conditioning. The bed was ruffled but empty.

‘Where’s the patient?’ Liz asked.

Meredith had already crossed to the other side of the bed. ‘Down here,’ he said.

The Doctor and Liz went round the bed to see where Meredith was pointing. The young man, Spencer, was squatting on the floor, crouching against the wall. Using a felt-tipped pen, he was drawing on the wall, putting the final touches to a picture of a sabre-toothed tiger. There were many other pictures drawn on the wall – buffaloes of a type extinct many thousands of years ago, mammoth elephants covered in fur, and strange birds with scales instead of feathers. In among the drawings of pre-historic animals were pictures of men-like figures, except different from men they had no visible ears and there was a third eye in the forehead. The Doctor knelt down and examined the drawings with interest, while Spencer now sat back on his haunches and grinned like a very small child pleased with his own drawings. Then the Doctor straightened up.

‘How long has he been like this?’ he asked.

‘Ever since he was brought in here,’ said Meredith. ‘At first he was violent, and tried to throttle me. Then I realised all he wanted was something to draw on the walls with. So I gave him that pen. He’s been as good as gold since then.’

‘Doctor,’ said Liz, ‘aren’t those drawings like the ones at Lascaux?’ Liz had once visited the famous caves at Lascaux in southwest France. Those French caves had been discovered by four schoolboys back in 1942. They were playing a hide-and-seek game, and one of them fell into a deep hole in the ground. He called to the others that he was in some sort of cave, so they scrambled down to see. To their amazement, they found themselves surrounded by drawings on the cave’s walls – drawings of animals and hunters made by some Stone Age artist tens of thousands of years ago. The French government opened up the caves so that scientists, and later tourists, could see the remarkable wall drawings.

The Doctor nodded in agreement, then turned to Spencer and pointed at one of the strange human-like figures in amongst the animals. ‘What’s this one, old chap?’ he said in a kindly voice.

Spencer looked where the Doctor was pointing. Then with wild eyes and a groan like a stricken animal, he leapt up from the floor and tried to grab the Doctor’s throat. As the Doctor grappled with Spencer, Dr Meredith jumped back in alarm. ‘I’ll get the guards,’ he shouted, and made to open the door. But already the Doctor had Spencer’s wrists held in a firm grip.

‘It’s all right, old man,’ said the Doctor. ‘Calm down. No one is going to hurt you.’

Just as suddenly as he attacked the Doctor, Spencer slumped back on the floor, cringing in a corner. Dr Meredith tried to apologise for his patient. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that. I thought we had quietened him down over the last couple of days.’

As they left the private ward, the Doctor turned to Dr Meredith and said, ‘Tell me about the other man, Davis, who was killed in the caves. Did you see his body afterwards?’

‘Naturally,’ said Dr Meredith. ‘They were late getting back from their pot-holing, so we sent in a search party in case they were in trouble. When they found Davis’s body, they sent for me immediately.’

‘What had killed him?’ asked the Doctor. ‘I fall of rock?’

Dr Meredith rubbed his chin. ‘I suppose it might have been partly the cause. There was a livid gash down one side of the man’s face, and that could only have been caused by a lump of rock falling from the roof. Even so, there was something odd about the wound.’ Dr Meredith stopped, as though he felt that what he had to say was too silly.

‘What sort of wound was it?’ said the Doctor.

‘Like a claw mark,’ said Meredith. ‘You know what it’s like if a cat scratches you. But this was a much bigger claw – a claw the size of a man’s hand.’

Liz said, ‘A piece of rock could have jagged edges, like a claw perhaps?’

The Doctor gave Liz a look to tell her to be quiet, and continued questioning Dr Meredith. ‘What did you put on the death certificate as “cause of death”?’

‘Under the circumstances,’ said Dr Meredith, ‘I refused to issue one. There will have to be an inquest to decide on that. But if you want my opinion, the gash on the face couldn’t possibly have caused death.’

‘Then what,’ asked the Doctor patiently, ‘did?’

Again Dr Meredith looked embarrassed by the answer he was about to give. He said, ‘If you really want to know what I think, the man simply died of fright.’

Miss Dawson was worried. She had been one of the first scientists selected by Dr Lawrence to work at the research centre, and she was thrilled to get the job. All her life she had had to live in London, which she had come to detest, because of her elderly mother. Her brothers, older than her and all scientists, had got married and gone to live in America and Australia. Miss Dawson had been the one left at home to look after their ailing mother. True, she had had some interesting research jobs in London, but whenever she saw an advertisement for an electronic scientist needed abroad, or even in another part of Britain, her mother’s health had mysteriously taken a turn for the worse. The years rolled by, and people stopped calling her a ‘young woman’ and said instead ‘such a faithful daughter’. Sometimes she met men who seemed to want to marry her; but her mother always knew somehow, and promptly became ill again so that Miss Dawson even had to stay away from work to look after the old lady. In her heart Miss Dawson feared the moment when people would stop asking, ‘Why don’t you get married?’ and replace it with the dread, ‘Why
didn’t
you get married?’

Miss Dawson’s mother had died, of incredibly old age, a year ago. At last free, Miss Dawson immediately applied for, and got, this job at the research centre at Wenley Moor. Derbyshire wasn’t exactly Australia or America, but at least it was some distance from London, and it was the start of her new life.

At first her mind was filled with the excitement of the project. To turn nuclear energy
directly
into electrical power, without using a turbine in between, could bring enormous benefits to Mankind. Really cheap electrical power would mean more factories, more hospitals, more everything in all the underdeveloped parts of the world. The research centre was the best equipped scientific establishment she had ever worked in. Her specific task was to release the atoms that raced round the cyclotron tube – a tube so large that the cyclotron room in which she worked was surrounded by the tube.

Dr Quinn joined the team a couple of months after Miss Dawson’s arrival. She was immediately attracted to him. He was rather older than her, and had had a terrific amount of scientific experience. Also he was a very kind man, always friendly, and with that trace of a Scottish accent that fascinated her. Above all, he was single. He had been married, but his wife had died in a car accident some years ago. Instead of living in the staff’s quarters in the Centre itself, Dr Quinn had taken a small cottage on the outskirts of a nearby village. Miss Dawson quickly made it clear to Dr Quinn that she would be glad to help decorate his cottage and make curtains and even clean and cook if he so desired. With that nice smile of his, Dr Quinn had declined all these offers, but said that he’d be very glad for Miss Dawson to call at any time as a guest.

So the pattern became set. On Sunday mornings, Miss Dawson and Dr Quinn would go walking together over the moors, returning to his little cottage to play at cooking Sunday lunch together. It was after Sunday lunch one day that Dr Quinn told Miss Dawson that he had been down into the caves under the hills, and what he had found there. He had met, and talked to, a reptile man.

At first Miss Dawson refused to believe it. The Age of the Reptiles ended millions and millions of years ago. In any case, the reptiles never produced a species with a brain larger than that of a present-day kitten.

‘I assure you it’s true,’ said Dr Quinn, filling his pipe and settling back in an armchair, as though he was talking about nothing more extraordinary than meeting another pot-holer in the caves. ‘He was well over six feet tall, with green scales instead of skin, and he had a third eye in the middle of his forehead.’

With a lifetime of scientific training, Miss Dawson was not one to accept the fantasy of a talking reptile. ‘We know from the fossils that have been found that no such animal ever existed,’ she said. ‘You must have imagined it.’

‘But I’ve been having conversations with them,’ said Dr Quinn, now lighting his pipe and blowing out a huge amount of blue smoke.

Miss Dawson persisted. ‘The structure of the typical reptile mouth doesn’t lend itself to speech. The most vocal reptile can only produce a very limited sound range.’

‘I’m not going to say the fellow talked with an Oxford accent,’ smiled Dr Quinn. ‘More of a dreary monotone. What struck me particularly was how he could detect
my
language – English – and speak to me in it.’

Miss Dawson decided that possibly Dr Quinn had gone mad. Perhaps he had spent too much time alone since his wife had died. She tried to change the subject. But Dr Quinn just smiled, puffed at his pipe, and went on talking about his reptile men.

‘Of course you can’t believe it, Miss Dawson,’ he said – she had never got him to call her Phyllis – ‘because we are educated to believe that the reptiles are a low class of animal with primitive brains. All the fossils tell us that. But what if something else happened, in prehistory, that we know nothing about? For some reason those reptile people are down in the caves, and they’ve been there for millions of years.’

Miss Dawson asked, ‘Then why haven’t the pot-holers found them? There are always people trooping down into the caves.’

‘Because,’ said Dr Quinn, ‘the reptile people live in some special shelter they’ve got there. The one I met showed me the entrance, after I’d promised to be their friend.’

‘Their friend?’ said Miss Dawson. It was at this moment that Miss Dawson really started to worry.

‘They want information,’ said Dr Quinn, ‘about how we humans live, and where, and how many there are of us.’

‘Are you going to give them that information?’

Dr Quinn slowly shook his head. ‘I shall play them along, that’s all. You see, what interests me is the information that I can get from
them
.’

‘But surely,’ said Miss Dawson, at last believing Dr Quinn might not be mad, ‘if you’ve found these creatures you must let everyone know! It’s the most remarkable discovery since …’ She was not a zoologist so she didn’t know quite who had discovered what living species. ‘Well, you know, that fish they found off the coast of South Africa.’

‘The coelacanth,’ said Dr Quinn, as though giving a lecture, ‘caught off Natal in 1938, and thought to have been extinct for seventy million years.’ His memory for facts always amazed her.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that fish.’

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘do you know who discovered the coelacanth?’

Miss Dawson shook her head. ‘I thought you’d know, since you know all the other details about it.’

‘But you know who discovered steam, and gravity, and electricity and evolution?’ he said, more as a statement than a question.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at.’

Dr Quinn sat back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling. ‘I’ve given all my life to science, Miss Dawson. But somehow I’ve always been someone else’s assistant, just as I am now assistant to our dear Dr Lawrence, director of the research centre. If I reveal these creatures the world’s top zoologists and anthropologists, and probably the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, will be fighting to get into those caves to be seen on world-wide television talking to a reptile man. In years to come the name Matthew Quinn will be as unknown as – as that of D. E. Hughes.’

‘I’m sorry to be so ignorant,’ said Miss Dawson, ‘but who
was
D. E. Hughes?’

‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Dr Quinn, then returned to his lecture-hall voice to reel off more information from his mental store of knowledge: ‘Professor D. E. Hughes, a professor of music, invented radio in 1879, and built a primitive transmitter in his home in Great Portland Street, London. I bet you thought Marconi invented radio!’

Miss Dawson didn’t answer that. ‘What do you hope to find out from these creatures?’

Dr Quinn blew smoke and thought for a moment. ‘How the world was millions and millions of years ago,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘what the temperature was like, the flora and fauna. Above all, I believe that they knew the true ancestors of Mankind.’

‘What will you do with this information?’ she asked.

‘I shall publish a paper – perhaps a book. It will be the most widely read book in the world.’ He turned and looked at her with his disarming smile. ‘Wouldn’t you like to know someone who is as famous as Charles Darwin?’

Miss Dawson could see now that Dr Quinn was not the quiet little man she had imagined. She asked, ‘Do you think you can get all this information from your reptile people, and walk away with notes for your book? What do you think
they
are going to do?’