‘We’re definitely moving towards it,’ said Linn, nervously. ‘Those gunshots and explosions. They’re getting louder.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘If all your men are dead, Captain, what are these silver men shooting at?’
‘Just at things in general I think,’ said Antenealle. ‘They don’t seem too particular. They may just really enjoy shooting.’
The corridor opened into a wide ice cavern, a large groined space. Which is to say shaped (perhaps I should add for the sake of clarity) like a female rather than a male groin. Which, I mean, is what I’ve always assumed the phrase ‘groined arches’ to refer to. Unless I’ve got the wrong end of the stick there. That’s very possible, you know.
‘Ah,’ said Antenealle. ‘
There
they are!’ He sounded pleased. Pulling off one of his mittens and unbuttoning his holster, he drew his gun.
Directly in front of us was a rank of silvery, gleaming, robotic men. Nothing could be imagined that looked less like ghosts than these figures. They were the most solidly metallic and material fellows I ever saw. And what’s more, they were marching slowly towards us.
‘Tally ho!’ said Antenealle. He levelled his pistol and fired three shots in quick succession. Then he started running directly towards the silvery men. There were pinging noises as his bullets ricocheted off their metallic chests.
One of these silver warriors lifted his hand, and a blast of smoke and a blaze of noise slammed Antenealle off his feet. He landed on his back with a large, gooily tomato-coloured hole evident in his chest.
‘Ooo,’ said the Dr. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Dead right. Perhaps a strategic retreat . . .’ suggested the Dr. We turned to return, back the way we had come, but more of the silver men were visible coming along the corridor.
‘Trapped!’ cried the Dr. ‘Quick!’
The three of us ducked into the left of the wide ice-chamber, passing in front of the row of advancing robotic soldiers and sprinting away to the side. It was obvious to me at once that there was no way out in this direction.
‘What are we going to do?’ demanded Linn, as we slid to a halt. ‘We can’t stay here.’
The menacing-looking, silvery humanoids had wheeled about, and now were advancing upon us in a single rank, marching in perfect step. They moved unhurriedly; implacably; determinedly, deadly-ly. They looked, in fact, like a rank of Nazi stormtroopers parading down Evilstraße, Berlin, in 1938. Except they were all silvery, rather than wearing any kind of black uniform. And that they were marching through a large chamber carved from solid ice, rather than along a city street. And that they wore no insignia, and carried no banners or flags or anything like that. And that they weren’t, to be fair, lifting their legs
quite
so high as Nazi stormtroopers might have done. So, on reflection, not
very
like the Nazi stormtroopers then. You see, you need to understand that I chose just now the ‘Nazi storm-trooper’ analogy to convey their sinister orderliness and threat, rather than wanting to create a whole
visual
picture that would inevitably be more distracting and less expressive.
‘Cydermen!’ cried the Dr. ‘The second most feared evil creature in the galaxy! But what are
they
doing aboard a British experimental naval craft in nineteen-twelve? ’
‘Cydermen?’ I said ‘What sort of being might they be?’
‘Terrible, implacable creatures,’ said the Dr. ‘Implacably terrible. Their terror really knows no plac.’
The approaching humanoids were chanting something as they advanced: ‘Ooo Aur! OOO AUR!’
‘What are they saying?’ I asked.
‘It’s their war cry. If I remember correctly, Aur means gold in their language.’
‘Gold? That’s their
war
cry? -
gold
?’
‘It has religious significance for them, I believe,’ said the Dr. ‘It means they can always believe in their
soul
, and that they have the
power
to
be
. . . to be, um, very much like a reactively
inert
and non-corrosive metal.’
‘OOO AUR!’ bellowed the Cydermen, stepping closer with every goosey-gandering step. One of the silvery men lifted his hand. I saw then that it consisted not of fingers and a thumb, but of four silver pistol-barrels and a small thumb-sized cannon. The middle finger detonated, puffing smoke, and the ice-wall behind us burst under brief fire. The ice-chamber rocked, and chunks of ice fell from the ceiling.
‘Also,’ said the Dr, ducking behind a large ridge of ice at the far end of the chamber. ‘They’re allergic to it. Gold, I mean.’
Linn and I were not slow to join him behind the ridge of ice. It was the only cover in the place.
‘What kind of creature is allergic to gold?’ said Linn. ‘Given how perfectly inert and unreactive it is? There’s nothing in it to be allergic
to
.’
‘A good point,’ agreed the Dr. ‘Nevertheless, they are. Gold allergic, I mean.’
A second explosion clattered away behind us. Once again, chunks, stalagtites and stalaglufts of ice showered down around us. We were in a situation of some peril.
‘Have you
got
any gold?’ I asked.
‘Not on me,’ said the Dr. ‘No. Nor, indeed, off me. Neither on me nor off me, do I have any gold. Not really my
style
, gold, now, is it?’
‘Linn?’ I asked. ‘Do
you
have any gold?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ she replied.
‘Well that’s not much use,’ I pointed out.
‘OOO AUR! OOO AUR!’ bellowed the advancing Cydermen.
‘If we could get some gold, could we stop these Cydermen?’ I asked the Dr.
‘Easily,’ he said.
‘And what if we can’t get the gold?’
‘Then they will be - literally, as well as metaphorically - unstoppable. They won’t stop until we’re dead. And, actually, they won’t even stop then. They’ll carry on after we’re dead just as implacably as they are presently doing, before our deaths. Nothing will stop them. In conclusion,’ he concluded, ‘they won’t stop.’
I hazarded a look around the side of the ice ridge behind which we were hiding. The Cydermen were continuing their implacable slow advance, their silver limbs moving with weird machinic co-ordination.
‘Do you see their heads?’ the Dr asked.
‘Yes.’ Their crania looked like hard, shiny jar-shaped containers.
‘
Slopping
with Cyder,’ said the Dr.
‘Cyder?’
‘The cybernetically enhanced conducting fluid that is the medium of their intelligence. You see, the Cydermen used to be men and women, like you and me. Well, like you, at any rate. But one day, they realised that the jelly-like substance that constitutes naturally occurring organic brains was an inefficient conducting medium for intelligence. The neurones are fixed, trapped in static relation to one another. So the reinvented themselves; reconfigured their brains as a true
fluid
, in which every neurone could connect with every other one as they swirled and swished about - that enables a
huge
number of possible connections, many more than can ever be the case in the normal,
solid
brain tissue. The entire race abandoned their grey-matter brains and uploaded their intellect into the fluid of their jars - a special blend of electrolyte enhancer and accelerant, alcohol-derivative, and an organic-based nutrient solution, derived from some fruit or other I think.’
‘It’s . . . it’s incredible,’ I gasped.
‘I . . . I know,’ said the Dr. ‘With the advantage of their new thought-medium their IQs increased a
hundred
fold overnight. It drove them mad . . . for what creature could acquire godlike intellectual and processing powers in an instant and
not
become insane? But their insanity was of a cold, calculating, machinic sort. They reinvented their bodies to be immune to almost all attack, encasing their delicate inner organs in a shell of hard silver. And then, with their invulnerable bodies and their vastly superior medium for thought, these half-human, half-scrumpy creatures began to spread through the galaxy, ruthlessly imposing their caravan-based habitation upon hapless worlds; scooping up whole armies in their monstrous Combine War-Harvesters. The Cydermen!’
‘Never mind the history lesson,’ urged Linn. ‘What are we going to
do
?’
‘A good question?’
‘And the answer?’
‘A
good
answer,’ replied the Dr. ‘That would be best.’
‘And what
is
the good answer?’ Linn pressed. ‘In this circumstance?’
‘I don’t know.’
There was another explosion, much closer, and a rain of slush and small pieces of ice rained down upon us. ‘But we’d better think of it soon, or we’ll be goners. The Cydermen take no prisoners.’
‘Think of something, somebody!’ I cried. ‘Can’t you - I don’t know - remote-control the TARDY to materialise here, so that we can escape?’
‘Nope,’ said the Dr. ‘Can’t do that.’
We were silent for a bit.
‘They do seem,’ Linn observed, ‘to be firing fairly randomly. If they coordinated their fire they could have killed us by now.’
‘The cold may be affecting their processing power,’ said the Dr. ‘Computers. They don’t like the cold.’
‘They’re still coming, though,’ I pointed out. ‘They’ll be on us in a moment.’
I
Suddenly the gunfire, explosions and the sound of metallic limbs marching on ice ceased. There was complete silence. A man’s voice called across the chamber. ‘Doctor?’
‘I know that voice,’ said the Dr. ‘But it
can’t
be!’
‘Doctor! Show yourself! Or I shall have to ask my friends here to eliminate you.’
‘It is my nemesis, my adversary!’ gasped the Dr. ‘The Master Debater!’
This was the first that I had heard of this mysterious and villainous figure; but it was not going to be the last.
‘Stand up Doctor,’ he boomed. ‘And your two companions. ’
‘We’ve no choice,’ said the Dr. ‘We’d better do what he says.’
We stood up.
Standing in the midst of the mass of Cydermen was a tall dark-haired man dressed in black velvet, and sporting an arrowhead-shaped beard on his chin. I mean, I
call
it a beard, but it barely covered the chin. It was more of a beardette. A hemi-beard. A bea. But it was nattily trimmed and sculpted, and it made a nice accompaniment to the black-velvet three-piece and pointy brogues the fellow was wearing. They were exactly the sort of clothes you’d expect an evil genius to wear. It was as if he’d been to a clothes-maker not on
Saville
Row, but on
Eville Row
. Hah! Do you see? D’you see what I did there, with the joke? That’s an example of the sort of joke that substitutes one word for another than sounds similar but . . . what? What’s that?
Alright, alright, I’ll stop.
‘So, Debater,’ declared the Dr. ‘We meet yet again.’
‘And this time,’ the suavely evil figure announced, ‘
I
have the upper hand.’
‘How did you manage to persuade the Cydermen to work for you?’
‘It’s a long story. Too long to go into here, I’m afraid. Instead of worrying about the hows of the situation, Doctor, you should be worrying about the imminence of your own death. Not to mention the deaths of your two charming companions-stroke-victims, there.’
‘But what are you
doing
here?’ the Dr demanded. ‘On this prototype British Navy Habbakuk warship?’
‘That’s another long story,’ said the Master Debater. ‘Suffice to say that, due to an involved and interconnected set of events, I have been deprived of my TARDY, which has stranded me on this backwater world. My plan was to use these Cydermen to capture
this
ship, and then use it to harass the world powers, sink their navies, that sort of thing. In six months I anticipate conquering the entire globe. Then I can use its resources, and direct its best scientific brains, to build me a new TARDY, and - escape!’
‘And what do the Cydermen get from the deal?’ the Dr demanded.
‘They get the world when I’ve finished with it . . . a whole planet to enslave and dominate. But now that
you’re
here, my dear Doctor, I don’t believe I need to go to the bother of making war on the whole of humanity after all. Instead of conquering this world and enslaving it to make my TARDY I can simply . . . steal yours!’ He laughed. It was not an attractive laugh. Nor, if I’m honest, was it an especially effective laugh. It didn’t capture that penetrating
nya-ha-ha-ha-ha!
laugh that the best evil geniuses have down pat. Instead it was a high-pitched shrieky sort of bray, the sort of noise a very small woman might make if strapped to a kitchen stool and tickled with a feather.
‘Steal my TARDY!’ exclaimed the Dr. ‘Never!’
‘I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter. I shall take your TARDY whether you like it or not.’
One of the Cydermen, to the Master Debater’s left, spoke up: ‘
But if you zteal der man here’s cra-a-aft and buggeroff . . .’
it said, in a raspy metallic burr, ‘
what shall us do about conquerin’ der world and all, oo-aur ?’
‘
Ooo Aur
,’ grumbled the ranks of Cydermen, uneasily. ‘
Ooo. Aur
.’
‘Don’t be foolish,’ said the Master Debater. ‘You’ll still have control of this warship. You can conquer the planet yourselves. It might take you a
little
longer than it would do if I were here to guide you, what with my tactical brilliance and all. But you’ll get there eventually.’
‘
Oi zuppose so
,’ said the Cyderman. ‘
Ooo Aur
.’
‘Master Debater!’ said the Dr. ‘You have surpassed yourself! Or, to be strictly accurate, you have
sub
passed yourself. Which is to say, you have gone
lower
than ever you have before.’
‘Give
me
your TARDY!’ retorted the Master Debater.