The Scientific Secrets Of Doctor Who Part 12

The Doctor grabbed Clara by the hand and led her backwards towards the door.

'Wait!' wailed the half-woman.

'But she's...' said Clara, still stricken.

There was a sudden whirring noise outside.

'Clara, she's not a confused old lady!' said the Doctor, furiously. 'Have you seen how they make sausages?'

They ran out of the old boarding house but it was already too late. Four s.p.a.ceships were hovering above the ground, surrounding them. They were small ships, open at the top, and in each was a young man or two, staring at them, laughing, pointing their blasters in their direction.

The s.p.a.ceships were silver: pointed at the front, short range, nippy-looking things, and they bobbed strangely up and down in the air. They reminded Clara of something, but she couldn't think what.

'Hands up!' came a loud, ent.i.tled voice. The Doctor let out an irritated growl.

'Nice ships,' whispered Clara, putting up her hands.

'What!? They're all round... and slick, and aerodynamic-y,' said the Doctor in disgust.

A young man in a bright red jacket popped his head out of the top of one of the ships and waved his arm crossly. 'I say, what the ruddy h.e.l.l are you doing in my hunt?'

'Your what?'

'My hunting grounds. It's clearly marked. All of the Pleasure Beach is a hunting ground.'

'It's a what?' said Clara again.

The man sighed. 'Oh lord, are you frightfully dim? My friend and I have hired out the Hunt. You're trespa.s.sing on my shoot.'

'Climate change drove people out... so they turned it into a hunting zone?' said Clara, incredulously.

'Well, you would keep electing those posh boys,' murmured the Doctor.

The man's lip curled. 'Anything that comes across our path is fair game, what?'

All his fellows laughed and pa.s.sed a bottle amongst themselves, and one launched a silver disc straight up into the air. It caught the sun as it fell, slicing through the air. The man took a large swig of his own hip flask, and smiled unpleasantly.

'We were hoping to bag a big one today it's my stag night.' He glanced at his fellows. 'Shall we bag an oik, boys?'

The other men laughed unpleasantly.

'Debag the oiks, more like!' squealed one excitedly. 'Let's go, Triss!'

The Doctor stepped forward, gripping his lapels. 'I don't think so.'

'Oh, it talks!' said Triss. 'Calm down, dear.'

The other men guffawed.

'You probably want to think very seriously about what you're doing here,' the Doctor went on.

Triss whirled round in his silver ship, his mouth slack and wide.

'No we don't!' he roared suddenly. 'We have to live in a world your generation ruined. We have to live in a world n.o.body your age "thought seriously about" at all. You left us with black sand and black water and black pools. And all we have left is a d.a.m.n rare chance to have a little sport. And this is my stag night. And I shall have my sport, old man.'

He unleashed a disc that struck the Doctor's foot, and would have made anybody else jump.

'Hang on... Who on earth would marry you?' said Clara, stepping forward.

'I own the very last snow-topped mountain in Switzerland,' said the man called Triss. 'They're queuing up, I a.s.sure you.'

His friends laughed again. Triss looked down on Clara and the Doctor, a dangerous look on his face, and took another swig from his flask. 'The landlady wasn't expecting you,' he said. 'Which means n.o.body knows you're here. I wonder if you'll be missed?'

The others laughed. He raised his circular blaster.

'Three... two... one tally ho!'

And one of the others blew a hunting horn.

The Doctor and Clara pounded down the esplanade and hurled themselves into the first building they came to, a huge old crumbling edifice of brown stone. They found themselves in a large ticket office with gla.s.s windows facing inside and out.

Clara looked around. 'Oh my G.o.d,' she said. 'This is the old circus! My nan brought me here!'

'What animals did they have?' said the Doctor.

'Oh, now you're interested in my childhood... Are they really trying to kill us?'

'Hunting is a savage pleasure, and we are born to it,' quoted the Doctor, then leapt forward and pulled Clara to the ground, as a jagged silver disc shot right through the rotten wood, embedding itself where her neck had been moments before.

The Doctor got up and pulled the disc out of the wall. It was incredibly sharp. Clara looked at him from the floor, her heart thudding in her chest. She looked around the ruined palace.

'Is this what happens? Is this it? Is this what happens to the town I was born in? To my home? To the world?'

The Doctor shrugged. 'It's not a fixed point in time, if that's what you mean.'

Clara's face brightened, a little, and she straightened up. 'Then that's good enough for me.'

She crept very carefully closer to the small window, and eyed up the little silver ships, buzzing and bouncing around the sky, the men boasting and shouting to one another.

'Is it just me, or is there something odd about those ships?' said Clara. 'They don't look like they're being steered properly, they just b.u.mp all over the place.'

'You're right,' said the Doctor, joining her. 'You'd expect them to move differently depending on who was driving them. But they don't. They all look the same. Like-'

'Like dodgem cars!' burst out Clara, suddenly. 'They wobble around each other like they're being really badly steered. Like dodgems!'

'But dodgems have an overhead power source.'

'I know.'

The Doctor held up his sonic and did some fast triangulation. 'If you connect up the angle of their aerials,' he said. 'You come back to the power source...' He followed the line with a long finger. Then he stopped and stabbed at the sky. 'It stops just overhead. What's overhead?'

'The tower,' gasped Clara, suddenly realising. 'We're at the bottom of the tower.'

'Hunting ships for hire,' said the Doctor. 'But attached.'

Triss suddenly stood up out of his ship again, laughing dangerously and pointing at them.

'Why is he laughing?' said Clara nervously.

'You know how I was asking what animals they had in the circus?' said the Doctor.

There was a sudden, low growl just outside the dusty s.p.a.ce.

Clara jumped up. She could see the lion now, through a window in the office door. It was prowling through a great cavernous dusty s.p.a.ce, with a wooden floor and old peeling posters for long-gone attractions. It was old, s.h.a.ggy of mane, thin and hungry-looking, pacing the floor as if it didn't know what else to do; occasionally raising its great mangy head to sniff the air.

'Oh, my goodness,' said Clara. 'The circus! The zoo! The donkeys!'

'The hunt,' said the Doctor, opening his hands.

Clara glanced around the office desperately. There was a large works cupboard in the corner. As she opened it, a harsh hot wind blew down into the room, and a rattling noise filled their ears. The large s.p.a.ce was completely filled with rubble.

'What's that?'

'Lift shaft,' said the Doctor. It was full of collapsed metal equipment. 'Can you climb it?'

Outside the office on one side, the lion threw back its ancient head and roared. On the other, another disc smashed the one remaining gla.s.s window, and Clara caught a glimpse of flashing silver.

Clara glanced at the lion and back at the Doctor. 'You know, he reminds me of someone.'

'Up!' said the Doctor sharply, as Clara pulled herself onto the oily metal chain.

They managed to climb two floors up the lift shaft before it became impa.s.sably blocked by machinery.

'There must be another lift,' said the Doctor.

Clara pushed up the hatch, and they both leapt out to run across the floor.

'Careful,' shouted the Doctor. 'It might be rotten.'

But Clara had made it as far as the middle of the floor, then stopped stock still.

The red velvet curtains bloomed with flowers of rot. The famous Wurlitzer organ lay in pieces, scattered amongst the vines that trailed across the famous sprung wooden dance floor; the gilded balconies crushed and collapsed one on top of the other.

'The tower ballroom,' said Clara reverently.

The Doctor had made it to the end of the floor already, and was opening up the opposite shaft with his sonic. 'Come on Clara!'

'I always... when I was a little girl I was too shy. But I always wanted to dance on this floor. I always dreamed of it. Of coming back here one day...'

'You can't go home again,' the Doctor said. 'But you can get shot at by a bunch of overbred chin-free maniacs, if that helps.'

Clara wasn't listening; she was caught in a spell. She moved a step across the floor, then another, then looked up at him. 'Can you dance?'

The Doctor paused in exasperation. 'No, of course I can't dance! Come on, get climbing!'

'Never mind,' said Clara, sadly, as she followed him out and up.

The exterior lifts had long collapsed to the bottom, and the only thing to be done was to climb up and out, scaling the struts of the tower itself, hand over hand. It was frightening and exhausting, as they got higher and higher, and Clara looked out over the black water as far as she could see, and down, over her ruined town; and across, to where she saw great tall electrified fences, wild animals roaming the abandoned streets, the endless jungle and great lakes beyond, and above, a thick blanket of cloud, keeping in the oppressive heat, the sun blazing just beyond.

A hot wind swayed the tower, and the Doctor's foot slipped, but he managed to grab back on. The noise, however, startled a great company of parrots, who rose in the air, squawking wildly, and the Doctor and Clara heard the noise of the hunting horn, as the birds attracted the silver ships, which came rushing up towards them, b.u.mping each other in their hurry. They felled a couple of the beautiful birds, but their real target was the Doctor and Clara themselves, who ducked underneath to attempt the far more difficult job of climbing up the inside. After two agonising floors of this, they reached a small platform with a service ladder, and started to move at full tilt, as the noise of connecting discs jarred their way up the metal structure.

They reached the trap door to the top viewing platform just in time, as one disc sliced through a cable, and an entire section of the ladder peeled off the side of the building and clanged its way a hundred metres below, smashing through the ballroom roof.

They found themselves in a high room lined with heavy gla.s.s that hadn't yet cracked: for the first time since they'd landed, Clara realised, there was power on. The room hummed with it. There was a central console with a large connecting wire that shot straight through the ceiling the aerial.

The Doctor ran to the computer.

As soon as he touched the keyboard, immediately the alarm went off: 'NO GUESTS! NO GUESTS! NO GUESTS!!'

And from the dim shadows in the tiny control room at the top of the Blackpool Tower appeared another hideous half old lady, half robot; this one in a huge floral day dress covered in a stiff blue nylon tabard. Her face was more metal than the other's; the little skin left on it was dried and fraying off, like old leather.

'Sausages!' it said, starting to slowly raise its hand with the circular launcher. The silver pods surrounded the gla.s.s control room, buzzing back and forth and laughing. One was filming from a tiny device.

'Now that,' said the Doctor, typing furiously, 'would be a terrible last word to hear, wouldn't it? I mean, even "blood sausage" might have worked a bit better.'

He continued working feverishly on the console as the robot landlady advanced despite Clara's best efforts to kick at her swollen ankles in the sheepskin slippers.

'Doctor!'

Clara was back to back with the Doctor now, looking over his shoulder.

'Leave me alone,' said the Doctor, huffing in frustration. 'I need to do this... stupid computer...'

'Yeah I know,' shrieked Clara, as the hand rose higher and the scent of old breakfasts and popcorn and Rothmans filled the s.p.a.ce. 'But you've left the Caps Lock on.'

'Oh yeah,' said the Doctor tutting. He typed some more, and suddenly the humming noise stopped, and the robot landlady abruptly powered down and collapsed onto the floor.

Clara let out a sigh of relief that turned to a yell of fright as she saw through the gla.s.s walls the four silver pods surrounding them lurch, and then, suddenly, drop out of the sky.

'They're falling!'

The Doctor paused. For a barely an instant.

Then, with a sigh, he took out his screwdriver and planted it into the circuit, where it connected up the overhead power again.

'I think I've had a fall,' said the woman, querulously. Clara looked at the Doctor, who shook his head tersely, typing with one hand. Instead, she peered out of the windows. The silver ships had juddered to a halt, and now were descending slowly and gracefully, round and round the tower, like a fairground ride, until they gently reached the ground and came to a halt. The lion leapt out of the booking office window to have a sniff about. The men's bravado did not extend to them getting out of their pods.

The Doctor complained about his burnt-out screwdriver all the way back down the endless climb and halfway across the ballroom.