Doctor Who: The Green Death

1
‘Wealth in Our Time!’

In his forty years as a coal miner Ted Hughes had never seen anything like it. He stood in one of the deserted mine’s main galleries, not believing his eyes...

Llanfairfach Colliery, in a mountainous part of Wales, had been closed for some time. No one in the village saw the sense of this—particularly the miners who had spent their lives hewing coal from the pit. There was still ample coal down there, enough for another hundred years of mining. But government economists in London had ‘proved’ it was better business to buy oil overseas than to mine coal here in Britain. So, Llanfairfaeh’s coal mine had been closed and its miners put out of work. But just in case it should ever be needed again, a handful of older miners were kept on to make monthly inspections. Today it had been Ted Hughes’s turn to put on the traditional helmet with its miner’s lamp, and to descend alone the 500 yards into the mine...

The inspection followed a set pattern. He walked along one gallery after another, checking the props that held up the roof, checking water levels where water seeped in, pausing from time to time to listen. Sometimes he would hear a faint creaking sound—the mine talking, as he and his mates called it. If the sound was soft and gentle, like a woman murmuring in sleep, the mine was safe. But if the sound was ever harsh and sharp, it warned of danger, and the possibility of a gallery roof collapsing. In his forty years as a miner, Ted had known four major roof collapses; men had been crushed to death or left trapped to die of suffocation. And the minor accidents—chunks of rock falling from the roof, breaking an arm or leg, injuries which left a man crippled for life—were too numerous to remember.

After two hours of walking the galleries and checking the props, Ted sat down for a ten-minute break. He had a thermos flask of tea and some cheese sandwiches that his wife had made for him. As he pourecl himself some tea the old sadness came over him. He looked up and down the section of gallery where he was sitting, thinking back on the old times when the mine had been worked and was full of his friends. There was no one to talk to now. Economists in London had made a calculation, and the friendly world of Ted Hughes had been brought to an end.

He finished his sandwiches and was just about to start on the next part of the inspection when he noticed the green phosphorescent glow. It was coming from the far end of the gallery.

There is no natural light in a mine. The only light is artificial, and comes either from bulbs along the galleries or the lamps on the helmets of the miners. Ted’s first reaction, therefore, was that he was no longer alone.

‘Hello,’ he called, ‘who’s down there?’

Pleased at the prospect of human company, he walked down the gallery towards the green glow. Then it struck him as odd that anyone should bring a
green
light into a coal mine.

‘Hello?’ he called again, pausing this time. ‘Who’s down there?’

Again no answer, but this time a faint bubbling sound. Ted hurried forward. He still could not see the source of the light. It was apparently round a corner of the gallery, and he was eager to know what caused it. If anyone had been given permission to come down into the mine, Ted should have been told. But he couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to.

Finally Ted reached the corner of the gallery, and then he saw it. Green glowing sludge was pouring in from a crack in the roof, cascading down a wall and forming a pool on the floor. The pool of sludge was already two or three inches thick in some places, and it bubbled as though alive.

Ted moved forward cautiously. Instinctively he wanted to touch it, but common sense told him to keep his distance. He backed away. Then, as he turned to go, a crack appeared in the ceiling above him. He looked up in time to see green sludge start to pour through from above. Before he had time to jump out of the way, a droplet of sludge landed on his left trouser leg. Without thinking, he tried to brush it off. The sludge stuck to his fingers and he could feel it bite into the skin. He rubbed them against the rocky wall of the mine. The surplus sludge went from his fingers on to the wall. But the parts of his fingers that had touched the sludge now glowed green.

He raced along the gallery towards the mine’s lift shaft. When he got to the lift, panting for breath, he looked at his fingers in horror. The whole of his hand was now glowing bright green. He fell into the colliery lift, slammed the gat., and pulled the lever that would hurtle him 500 yards up to the surface.

While the village of Llanfairfach had lost its coal mine, it had gained Panorama Chemicals. This was a new industry in the village, with a small oil refinery, very modern office buildings, and an imposing set of gates and high fences to keep out intruders.

A large number of villagers were gathered outside the main gat. when Dr Thomas Stevens, managing director of Panorama Chemicals, arrived in his big black chauffeur-driven car. As the gates opened to admit the car, angry fists waved at Dr Stevens and a number of posters were held out in front of him. They read ‘Free Wales’, ‘English Out!’, and ‘Jobs for Coal Miners. The elegantly dressed Dr Stevens smiled back at everyone through the glass windows of his vast limousine, and the car glided forward to the front entrance of the main administration block. Mark Elgin, the company’s public relations officer, was standing there to greet Dr Stevens. Elgin opened the car’s door, and Dr Stevens stepped out.

‘Welcome back, sir,’ said Elgin. ‘What’s the news?’

‘It’s all good,’ said Dr Stevens. Then he gestured to the crowd on the other side of the main gate. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Since early this morning,’ said Elgin. ‘The usual un-employed layabouts.’ Elgin came from a working-class background himself, but through being bright at examinations had gone to university, and now considered himself superior to others less fortunate.

Dr Stevens, who was feeling in a slightly more benevolent mood, put on a show of concern for the people crowded on the other side of the gate. ‘But what’s worrying them this time?’ he asked.

‘I suppose, sir,’ said Elgin, ‘they want to know what is going to happen.’

‘In that case,’ replied Dr Stevens, ‘I shall tell them.’ He went forward to the gate so that the people could hear him, and waved a piece of paper at them. ‘I have here in my hand,’ he said slowly and loudly, ‘a paper which will mean a great deal to all of you.’ He paused for dramatic effect, then called out: ‘Wealth in our time!’

A small cheer went up from some members of the village crowd. Dr Stevens took a couple of steps nearer to the gates.

‘Of course we all regret that the National Coal Board closed down the mine,’ he said, not regretting it at all himself but knowing this would please his listeners. ‘But we must not be bitter. We have to face facts. Coal is a dying industry. Oil is our future now, and the Government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans—they have promised us money for expansion. I have it here in black and white.’ He waved the paper again. Actually it was the menu from the hotel where he had stopped off to have lunch, but he knew no one could get near enough to read it. He really did have a letter from the Government in his brief case in the car but he couldn’t be bothered to fetch it. ‘This means money for all of us. More jobs, more houses, more cars.’

A tall young man shouted something in Welsh. He had a tousled head of black hair, blue jeans and a polo neck sweater, and stood out from the crowd.

Dr Stevens smiled, as he had been taught to smile at his minor public school when he couldn’t understand something. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t mastered your language yet.’

‘Then I’ll repeat it in English,’ shouted the young man. ‘What you’re offering means more muck, more devastation, and more death.’

Elgin sidled up beside Dr Stevens and spoke quietly. ‘That’s Professor Jones. He’s a trouble maker.’

‘If he’s
the
Professor Jones,’ said Dr Stevens, ‘he is also a Nobel Prize winner.’ Dr Stevens was always impressed with success because he was a snob.

‘Because of that Nobel Prize,’ said Elgin, ‘he gets his name in the newspapers a lot. I suggest, sir, you go easy with him.’

Dr Stevens nodded, then raised his voice again to the crowd. ‘It seems that some do not agree with my vision of the future. But there are always those who resist progress.’

‘You call it progress?’ shouted Professor Jones. He turned to the villagers. ‘Don’t listen to him. He’s only interested in fatter profits for Panorama Chemicals at the expense of your land, the air you breathe, and the health of your kids.’

Dai Evans, one of the older villagers, spoke up. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he shouted at the young professor. ‘You can afford to live the way you want to. We need jobs. We don’t want to live on nuts.’

The crowd laughed. In Llanfairfach, young Professor Jones was respected but not accepted. To be accepted you had to have three generations of dead behind you in the village graveyard; above all, both you and they had to he miners. Professor Clifford Jones had come to the village only two years ago. He and some friends had bought a big old house where they set up The Wholeweal Community. They lived together communally, refused to own motor cars and would cat only natural foods. Thus they carried out a living protest against pollution and the destruction by industry of our natural environment. The villagers recognised the good intentions of The Wholeweal Community, but couldn’t help joking about them. Their house was known locally as The Nut Hatch because the Wholewealers were believed to eat nuts instead of meat.

Professor Jones went red in the face at Dai Evans’s mark. He earnestly wanted to help the villagers—to help everybody—and it threw him off his stroke when they were too ignorant to understand him. He replied in a stream of Welsh.

Morgan the milkman cut in sharply: ‘For goodness’ sake, man, stop talking Welsh with that stupid Cardiff accent. You only learnt it out of a book. You know half of us have forgotten how to speak it.’

‘Then more’s the pity,’ said Professor Jones. He turned to Dai Evans. ‘I’m surprised with you, Dai Evans. Of course you need a job—it’s every man’s right to have work. But there should be a coal mine for you to work in, not a chemicals factory!’

‘I’m facing facts,’ replied Dai Evans. ‘The Government says coal is finished. It’s oil now.’

Professor Jones asked, ‘Were you facing facts when you went on strike for seven months?’

Dai Evans blushed and everyone went quiet. The memory of the General Strike in 1926 was still with many of them. For seven bitter months the coal miners had remained on strike until finally they were defeated because they had no food.

‘I was only a boy in those days,’ said Dai Evans quietly, remembering the humiliation of the miners’ de-feat. ‘I learnt that sometimes you have to give in.’

‘Even if it means you are being exploited?’ asked Professor Jones.

‘The workers have always had bosses,’ said Dai Evans, ‘people who live off our backs, so we might as well accept that. It’s all right for you to tell us what to do, boyo, with your university education. But we’re simple people, and none of us has got himself tens of thousands of pounds winning a Nobel Prize—’

Dai Evans stopped mid-sentence. From the direction of the mine they all heard the wail of the pit head siren. It could mean only one thing—a disaster in the mine. Without another thought the crowd of villagers turned and ran towards the closed mine.

‘There’s no one down there,’ said Professor Jones as he ran beside Dai Evans. ‘How can there be an accident?’

‘There was Ted Hughes went down for an inspection this morning,’ Dai Evans answered, panting to keep up with the younger man.

The first villager to reach the mine was Bert Pritchard, in his fifties but lithe and wiry as a whippet. He went straight into the pit head office. Whoever had pulled the siren lever must be in there. He came out at once, his face white, and his hands raised to the crowd.

‘Maybe the professor should come in here,’ he shouted. ‘He might be able to understand it.’

Professor Jones pushed his way forward. ‘What is it?’

‘See for yourself,’ said Bert Pritchard.

Professor Jones entered the office, followed by Dai Evans and Bert Pritchard. Ted Hughes was seated there, his hand still on the siren lever as he had pulled it. By his stillness and staring eyes they knew he was dead.

His hands and face and neck were glowing bright green.

In the Doctor’s laboratory at UNIT Headquarters Jo was reading the morning newspaper, eating an apple, and occasionally looking up to see what the Doctor was doing. The door of the TARDIS was open and the Doctor kept popping in and out making adjustments to an electrical circuit unit. After a while Jo asked:

‘What
are
you trying to do?’

The Doctor, about to enter the TARDIS again, paused. ‘I’m not
trying
to do anything. I’m doing it.’