Doctor Who: The Zarbi (2 page)

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is.’

The light on this planet was pale and cold, like moonlight, and peopled with harsh shadows. Strange, pointed crags like large stalagmites rose here and there from its surface.

Several satellites glowed faintly in the twilit sky. Beyond them glimmered a few distant stars.

It was near one of the crags that the police-box shape of the ship
Tardis
slowly materialized, appearing as if from nowhere. Its searchlight beam circled, exploring the place, swept over a crag, hovered, and held it in its light.

The beam passed on, inspecting the planet slowly, and slowly flooded over a pool. A faint mist rose from the pool. The searchlight continued to turn, lighting up a glassy surface scattered with small rocks, creating eerie moving fingers of shadow as the ray revolved.

It was as quiet and as ghostly as a cemetery. There was no sound, not even a wind.

Then a slithering, scraping noise broke the stillness. It came from a crag whose shape reared steeply out of the ground some fifty yards away, just beyond the wash of the searchlight, silhouetted blackly against the orb of a satellite.

Something high on this crag moved.

A long thin foreleg came into sight, gripping the rock.

The moving leg shone in the faint light like gun-metal.

Then a sleek, shiny head appeared, and with it, two eyes which shone like large torch bulbs. These eyes turned in the direction of the ship and fixed steadily on it.

Then the creature gave a harsh chirruping sound, like a cricket. It echoed and re-echoed in the uncanny stillness.

The sound was answered from another direction.

There, too, the eyes of another shone from the shadowy side of a crag.

The local inspection screen inside
Tardis
was now picking out the features of this strange landscape more clearly as the searchlight turned further.

‘Do you recognize it?’ Ian asked Doctor Who.

But Doctor Who seemed too busy checking his instruments and watching the inspection window to reply.

He transferred his stare to the scanner as it started to speckle again with small spots of light.

‘This interference!’ he muttered. ‘Most extraordinary –

in a place like this...’

‘There can’t be anything out there, surely?’ Ian said. ‘It looks as dead as a dodo.’

‘Really?’ Doctor Who muttered.

‘Just crags and pools,’ Barbara said. ‘No movement...

nothing growing. Not a living thing in sight.’

A gasp came from Vicki. She clapped her hands to her ears. The others turned and stared at her.

‘What’s the matter?’ Barbara asked.

‘My ears! There is something! Listen!’

The others listened a moment, and looked blank.

‘Can’t
you
hear it?’ Vicki cried. She screwed up her face, pressed harder on her ears. ‘Oh! It’s so... piercing, it hurts!’

‘It’s probably your ears singing,’ Ian said. ‘Try swallowing.’

Doctor Who was looking keenly at Vicki.

‘—or something extra-sonic,’ he murmered. ‘Something so high-pitched that only children or animals pick it up.

What kind of sound, my dear?

‘A sort of... humming, very high! You must be able to hear it! Please, make it stop! It’s going right through me!’

‘Shall I switch off our detectors? Ian asked.

Doctor Who nodded. But suddenly Vicki took her hands away from her ears. Her face cleared. The relief seemed so great that she smiled, puzzled.

‘It’s gone!’ she said. ‘It’s stopped!’

Ian’s hand was poised over the switches on the control table. He looked at the dials and called abruptly.

‘Doctor! Some of our instruments are responding!’

He pointed. The time pointer was wavering unsteadily near the A.D. 20000 mark.

Doctor Who crossed to his side.

‘So it is. Hmm. Now the question is, what’s been causing these failures? What kind of... force, eh? Look –

dimension scale – negative response. Astral computer – out of order! Gyros at Zero. Now what
can
be holding us here?’

‘Holding us?’ Ian said. ‘Couldn’t it just be that something is wrong with
Tardis
?’

‘Certainly not!’ Doctor Who snapped. ‘We did not stray into this place through any mechanical fault. We’ve been plucked off course by... something. Now – is it some natural phenomenon... or something intelligent...

deliberate? With... a purpose?’

‘You mean – something more powerful than the ship?’

Vicki asked a little wide-eyed.

Doctor Who waved a reassuring hand.

‘Whatever it is, I’m, er, sure I can find an answer to it.

Chesterton, we’ll try maximum power. Switch on boosters.

Let’s see if they’ll lift us clear of... this place.’

Barbara stared at the forbidding landscape through the inspection screen and shivered. ‘I hope so,’ she murmured.

Ian snapped on all five booster switches. There was a steady hum of machinery in response, rising slowly in volume. Doctor Who’s face cleared a little as he heard it and watched the power response dials.

‘Power’s responding,’ Ian reported.

‘Yes, yes. Wait till it reaches maximum before we switch on the motors.’

Behind them Vicki relaxed a little, her face clearing. She rubbed her temples.

‘I can’t wait for us to get away from here,’ she said. ‘I never want to hear that sound again. Not ever!’

The comforting hum of the ship’s motors continued to rise steadily. Ian looked across at Doctor Who, but the old man never took his eyes off the power response dials. He grunted, ‘Mm! Power build-up very satisfactory.’

He paused, waiting, watching the dials, his hand straying to hover over the motor levers.

‘Now – motors!’

He snapped the levers down and scanned the instrument confidently.

‘They’re responding!’

The police-box shape of
Tardis
, nestling in a space between the crags, gave out a powerful whirring from its motors and its outlines began to fade until it was almost transparent against the strange lunar background of the planet.

But away on a neighbouring crag, movement showed again – and sound. There was a slithering. The eyes of the watching creature shone out of the shadows. Its feelers came into sight, manhandling something, and a slim cylinder appeared from behind a ledge of rock.

It was manoeuvred into position and could now be clearly seen – a strange barrel, sleeved in a coil of something which looked like glass tubing, mounted on a conical base.

The slim, shiny forelegs of the creature swivelled this cylinder downward until it pointed directly at the fading shape of the
Tardis
.

The creature now lowered its shiny, insect-like head until it was peering through a sight mounted on the barrel

– a sight shaped like a small web.

A chirruping noise came suddenly, shrilly, from a near-by crag where the twin eye-lights of another creature glowed. As if this were a signal, the creature aiming the cylinder-gun moved a foreleg suddenly, slamming home a plunger in the rear of the barrel.

Immediately the coiled glass sleeve around the barrel glowed and crackled into life.

As it did so the shape of
Tardis
, which had all but melted and vanished among its surroundings, returned and grew more solid.

Its motors whirred frantically, and in response the shape of the ship again began to fade. A concerted chirruping sound echoed around among the crags where a number of pairs of eyes now shone. The gun aimed at
Tardis
glowed more brightly, its crackling drowning the chirruping of the companion creatures on the crags surrounding the ship.

The motors of
Tardis
, throbbing furiously to clear the ship from this place, faltered, failed. Its police-box outlines now materialized clearly until it cast its own shadow.

Doctor Who and his three earth companions all heard the change in the sound of
Tardis
’ motors as their powerful

whirring faltered. Barbara and Vicki stared at each other in dismay.

A new sound now rose over the faltering of the ship’s machinery – a high-pitched humming, speckled with a loud chirruping, and as it grew in volume Vicki screamed.

She covered her ears and shut her eyes tightly against the pain of it. Barbara, too, gasped and clutched her temples, pressing her own ears to keep out its piercing, knife-sharp insistence.

Suddenly the whole ship lurched to one side. Ian and the Doctor grabbed at the control table to steady themselves, but the sudden jolt caught Vicki, who reeled away and fell sprawling on the floor where she lay writhing and moaning, still clasping her ears.

The shock hurled Barbara across the floor in the direction of the scanner. Now the ship settled and was still.

She looked up. The scanner screen was again a mass of dazzling interference, the blobs of light speckling and bursting on it like millions of exploding lamps As suddenly as it started, the humming with its overlay of shrill chirruping faded again. The crackling of interference on the scanner ceased. The motors, too, faltered finally and were still.

All was quiet again – uncannily quiet, now.

Ian released his grip on the control table and looked around him.

‘That noise – I heard it too this time! Did you?’

‘Yes,’ Barbara said. ‘I certainly did.’ She took her hands from her ears wonderingly.

Doctor Who did not answer. He was furiously busy now, trying the motor switches. With a gesture of disgust he slammed the control table with his hand.

‘No use! The response is nil.’

Barbara was looking up at the scanner... It had cleared completely of interference now, and its neighbouring inspection window now showed the planet’s terrain surrounding them clearly.

Suddenly she cried, ‘Ian, Doctor – look!’

Ian joined her, staring up at the inspection window.

Doctor Who, with a final glance at his controls, followed.

‘Well?’ Ian said.

‘I saw a light – out there. It came from behind one of those crags.’

Ian stared more closely. He shook his head unbelievingly. ‘Where? I can’t see anything.’

‘I tell you, I saw it flash! It came from the top of that crag on the extreme left of the scanner!’

There was a pause while both Ian and Doctor Who studied the window. Finally Ian said ‘Well it’s not there now.’

‘I can see it isn’t –
now
!’ Barbara said sharply. ‘But
I
saw it
!’

Doctor Who put up a soothing hand. ‘All right, all right, no need for us to snap at each other.’

‘Very well, but...’

‘... what you saw, my dear’, Doctor Who said gently,

‘was most probably cosmic interference. The picture broke up.’

‘But the screen was clear when it happened. The landmark were distinctly visible. I’m... almost sure...’

Ian had turned away. He saw Vicki still sprawled on the floor, but rising feebly on one elbow now, dazed and a little tearful as her senses returned. He moved swiftly over to her, knelt, and gently helped her up. Vicki was wide-eyed now, a memory returning of the awful sound she had heard.

‘It’s... gone again...’ she whispered.

Barbara came and helped Ian with her. She put an arm around Vicki and nodded towards the dormitory section.

‘Yes, it’s all right now, Vicki. I think you’d better have a lie down.’

Barbara slid open the dormitory section door and Vicki allowed herself to be led towards her bunk.

Ian turned to Doctor Who. He spared a glance for the dead landscape showing in the inspection window and looked at the control dials, now all wavering near their zero marks. Ian tried to sound light-hearted but he couldn’t keep the grimness out of the look he passed to the Doctor.

‘There
is
some force, then — out there.’ He waved at the scanner. ‘And we’re stuck with it.’

Doctor Who pondered the scanner, straightened, and said briskly, ‘Nothing for it, my boy, but to explore this place. Determine what this, um, interference is, and —

how to counteract it.’

Ian sighed gloomily. From the sight of the planet on the screen, the prospect was not attractive. He nodded. ‘Be right with you — I’ll just tell the girls.’

Ian moved towards the dormitory door. Doctor Who turned back and stared thoughtfully at his control panel, stroking his chin, muttering uneasily to himself.

Barbara was coming out of the dormitory section. Ian nodded towards Vicki’s bunk beyond the sliding door.

‘How is she?’

He smiled now at her, and Barbara forgot the irritation she had felt with him.

‘Better.’ She turned. ‘Doctor, do we have such a thing as a, well, a sedative?’

Doctor Who roused himself from glumly staring at his controls.

‘Eh? Oh, should be with the first-aid kit, over there, in one of the cupboards.’

He pointed to a small movable table housing the astral computer. Barbara nodded, crossed to the table, began searching. Intent as she was on finding a medicine for Vicki, she seemed to have forgotten their plight in the ship, marooned and powerless on a bleak and alien planet.