The great starship swung into an orbit around the startingly beautiful blue planet, coasting high above the northern landmass, casting finicky electronic sensors at the continent, scanning and recording, noting and annotating.
'It seems suitable,' commented the Captain, nibbling nervously at a fingernail. The Senior, more experienced, merely cast a knowing eye over the readings. 'Ahum,' was his considered opinion.
'I mean, an environment the cargo could sustain,' added the Captain. 'Until expiration date.'
'Ahum,' commented the Senior. After reviewing and exploring the various worlds of this particular solar system, this particular world was indeed the last viable option for dropping the cargo they carried, given their fuel and time constraints.
'Nor do the natives seem able to interfere,' added the Captain. The Senior looked sideways at his superior.
'They seem quite able to interfere with each other,' he commented.
The Captain got a little snooty at this.
'Chemical explosives. Hardly what I would call the highest form of scientific endeavour, Senior One.'
The Senior kept his own counsel. The city below called "Constantinople" had been rendered different by chemical explosives recently, rendered from one religio-political entity to another, something called "Istanbul".
'No, sir. Hardly the highest,' he confirmed. 'Hardly able to interfere at all.'
'Give the Trans-Mat team the go-ahead, then,' said the Captain. 'And split the cargo up. Don't deliver them all to the same site.'
ONENickel Extraction Combine Number One
Trivelho
Pechenga Oblast
USSR
March 21st 1969
Evgeniy Klimentov checked the clock on the wall of his corrugated shack. Five minutes to ten. He checked his watch. Again, five minutes to ten. On cue – all the clocks were synchronised to Radio Moscow – the siren in the quarry sounded once, a long blast that sent mournful echoes winging round the slopes.
Donning a protective hat, he went to the door and opened it to lean out, looking into the quarry in the direction of the mine entrance. From here he could see the three men waiting below, safe in the lee of the big vehicle sheds, stnading in small circle of light cast by the lamps. One of them spotted the Chief Mining Engineer looking paternally down, and waved a helmet at him. Evgeniy waved back, allowing his attention to wander across the buildings and structures in the quarry. Nothing moved; excellent. The lights were still on, holding the bitter night at bay, and that was all to indicate the site still existed as a going concern.
The clatter of footsteps coming up the metal staircase to his shack, perched aloofly atop the worker's accomodation block, caused him to step fully outside the office. Karel, the Czech doctor, came into view, puffing up the steep risers and clutching the metal handrail.
'Whew! Evgeniy, you must be part mountain goat to work up here,' he said.
Deriving a wry amusement from the doctor's discomfort, Evgeniy remained silent. Personally, he thought the doctor would find it easier if he ate less and exercised more. For a doctor he was a terribly unhealthy fellow.
'Anyway, I came up here to get a better view.' The doctor's bald, pinkish face looked disappointed when he took in the view. 'Even if nothing seems to be happening.'
Evgeniy handed him a spare hat, hung up outside the office door.
'We shut down everything apart from the generating plant before blasting. Safety. The same reason we have you loitering around for tonight. Likewise, I don't allow anyone to go wandering about the quarry at times like these. If one of my beloved troglodytes got brained by flying rocks I'd never hear the end of it.'
The siren sounded three short bursts, indicating sixty seconds to go. Evgeniy leant on the railing along the balcony, aware of the doctor at his side. The seconds ticked away on his watch –
A muted, distant and vibrating thud came from both underground and the mine entrance; simultaneously every light in the quarry dimmed for a second before regaining normal brightness. Tired flurries of dust emerged wearily from the mine entrance, their egress dampened by tarpaulins hung in galleries below.
Evgeniy waved in acknowledgement to the inspection trio below. He ducked back inside his office, nodding to the doctor.
The samovar inside helped to keep the icy northern night at bay. Doctor Karel gratefully accepted a glass of tea, stirring in a teaspoon of jam to sweeten it.
'Bit of an anti-climax, that,' he murmured. Evgeniy laughed.
'What do you expect, a live version of the 1812 Overture! That blast was over a kilometre inside the mine, doctor, and about a hundred metres below the level of the quarry. Nice and muted is how we like it up here.'
Pouring a cup of tea for himself, he sipped the dark, hot drink reflectively. The doctor made an ahh face, and was then struck by a new question.
'How long does the mine stay inert like this? Surely not for long, not with norms to meet.'
Evgeniy nodded in agreement.
'Those men you saw by the vehicle sheds have the unlovely job of inspecting the new gallery for structural safety. After waiting ten minutes to let dust settle and loose debris fall, they will walk to the blasting site and check it out. Gas masks, goggles, helmets, they need it all. They ought to report back here in about an hour, after which we'll get everything moving again.'
The two men played a desultory game of chess whilst Evgeniy waited for a telephone call from the inspectors. After forty-five minutes elapsed, a loud rap sounded on the door, and another man came in, without waiting to be asked. He had dark skin and a ferocious moustache, which he tugged.
'Evgeniy Sholokovitz. Doctor,' he said, by way of a greeting, bowing very slightly.
'What brings you up here, Avtandil?' asked Evgeniy, curious. The Georgian didn't mix very well with the local miners; looks, language, religion and temper all tended to clash. Still, he knew his stuff, which went a long way in Evgeniy's book to making him acceptable.
The Georgian tugged on his moustache again, a habit of his when nervous.
'To be honest, Evgeniy, I can't really say. A chill in the bones, maybe.' He shrugged ruefully. Being a hard-headed mining expert meant ignoring his Caucasian roots and all the superstitions that accompanied them, but tonight – tonight he felt an amorphous unease about the mine. 'And your inspectors have been gone a long time.'
Evgeniy checked the clock: ten to eleven. Not that long a time, given that they had to walk all the way underground to the newly-blasted gallery; no driving allowed until structural safety had been affirmed. He pursed his lips at Avtandil, then carried on with the chess game.
By half-past eleven, Evgeniy had pushed the game aside and was pacing the room. If anything had gone wrong underground, then the inspectors ought to have been able to call back on the emergency telephone network, with a phone every two hundred metres. No call back. Not even with such an unusually long inspection.
He ground his palms together.
'Damn it! If they knew it would take this long they ought to have rung back.'
Avtandil tugged one side of his moustache, then the other.
'Call out the Mine Rescue Team,' he suggested. Evgeniy gave the inspectors another five minutes, then did just that. Karel expected a frenzy of action and alarms, only to be disappointed once again when all Evgeniy did was ring the Accomodation Block and talk quietly to whoever answered. Avtandil went out onto the balcony to watch the dozen men who assembled wearing bright yellow jackets, helmets, gas masks, torches, gas detectors and special bronze non-sparking picks. Several men carried folding canvas stretchers. Karel came out to watch, too, shivering in the transition from hot inside to cold outside.
'Should I go with them?' he asked Evgeniy, who came out to wave the team off, led by the stocky figure of Konstantin.
'Don't be a mutton-head,' said the engineer, shortly. 'How much experience do you have in mines? None. Exactly. So be sensible and hang around here.'
Privately Evgeniy didn't hold much hope for the inspection team. To be absent without communication for that long bespoke serious, very serious, trouble.
Only minutes afterwards, the phone in his office rang: Konstantin of the MRT doing the standard check-in.
Evegeniy went outside to the two men getting cold on the balcony.
'Nothing to report from the rescuers.'
The phone rang every ten minutes or so after that, still with nothing to report. Finally the MRT were nearing the newly-blasted gallery and Konstantin rang again.
'The lights are out down here, Chief. The dust has settled, and there seems to be a hole in the gallery wall. Subsidence, I would – hey! Did you see that!' which came only faintly to Evgeniy's ears, as Konstantin must have been shouting to the other team members. 'Chief, they might still be alive, I just saw movement in that cavern. Get a light –' and there came a silence from the other end.
'Hello? Konstantin?' said Evgeniy, puzzled. The connection hadn't gone dead, he could still hear the buzz of an open line.
'HOLY MOTHER!' shrieked Konstantin, the connection broke abruptly and Evgeniy never heard another word from him again.
Avtandil came in from outside, looking pale. He saw the stunned chief engineer looking at the phone as if it had bitten him and knew there was bad news.
'They're dead,' said the Georgian, shivering and not with the cold. Evgeniy looked from the miner to the phone and back again.
'What can have happened! That makes fifteen people inside there. None of them were novices, certainly not Konstantin, and they wouldn't all be in the same place at once. It can't have been a rockfall.'
Karel came in, concern on his bland, round face.
'Hadn't we better get another team together? And notify the sanitarium. In fact I'd better get there myself, if we may get fifteen injured miners in.'
Evgeniy stopped to think for a moment.
'I need to see the MVD captain in town; I'll come with you. Avtandil, you are in charge until I return. Until I do come back, nobody – absolutely nobody – is to go into that mine.'
There were four MVD soldier and a sergeant in the on-site dormitory, but Evgeniy wanted more men, more equipment and more time to think.
MVD Communications Room
MVD HQ
Lastochka Prospect
Trevilho
USSR
March 22 1969
'So, why, exactly, do you want a platoon up by the entrance?' asked the MVD captain yet again. Evgeniy made a sound that mixed grating of teeth, sigh and snort in equal amounts.
'Because of what happened in the mine! Look, the inspection team didn't report back, but the rescue team did, right up until the newly-blasted gallery. Therefore access isn't a problem, that isn't what caused everybody to stop talking to us. Besides that, it's practical policy to move one rescue team section two hundred metres ahead of the other. That way a roof-fall or rockslide doesn't get both of them at once. Konstantin – who went through Stalingrad, I may remind you, and doesn't scare easily – would keep one team well back from the rock face. And – and he said there was movement in the cavern the blasting created. Movement.'
The officer looked blandly unconcerned.
'Yes, movement. And?'
'Oh, use your brains! If people were able to move, then the inspection team would have walked out of there, and so would the rescue team. As things stand, the Mine Rescue Team went in nearly three hours ago and neither have they returned nor called us to explain.'
The MVD captain, one Kopensky by name, looked unconvinced. Evgeniy silently cursed the retirement last year of Captain Osipovitch, a man who knew exactly how the system functioned or not and adjusted his behaviour accordingly. This new guy seemed far too suspicious, slow and by-the-book. It was important not to upset him, since he commanded the largest body of troops in the area, all fifty of them, bar the five up at the mine. Important, yes, and difficult.
'You want us to bring rifles but won't say what for?'
'Not "won't", "can't". I don't know what happened in there but I can tell you it wasn't normal.'
Kopensky cocked his head to one side.
'What about sabotage? This mine produces the largest volume of the highest-grade nickel ore in the Soviet Union, which is why you have five men permanently on guard duty.'
Sabotage? mused Evgeniy to himself, if only for a second.
'No. That won't work as an argument. The nearest hostile force would be over the border in Finland, eighty kilometres away. Surely you can't imagine a force of Finns managed to walk that distance across the oblast, without being challenged or spotted, then got into the mine unseen and survived the blasting.'
'Perhaps they tunnelled,' suggested Kopensky.
Evgeniy slapped his forehead.
'No! the nearest point they might be able to tunnel from is in Finland, over a hundred kilometres away. They'd have millions of tonnes of spoil to get rid of, and we'd pick up their mining on the geophones.'
The phone on the captain's desk rang. He answered it and frowned in surprise, handing the set over to Evgeniy.
'For you. Be quick.'
'Hello? Evgeniy? This is Karel here. I have the sanitarium ready to accept any injured miners, and an ambulance waiting to head back up to the mine. Just give us the word.'
Evgeniy passed the news on to Captain Kopensky. The officer insisted on a full and detailed account of the night's happenings so far, which he noted down in an official file. By then the engineer felt his temper beginning to slip.
'I shall transmit this to Moscow, to the Interior Ministry headquarters. They may be better able to advise us.'
'Aren't you going to do anything?' asked an exasperated Evgeniy.
'Not yet,' admitted Kopensky. 'This is only one mine. They may have heard of similar events at other mines, with reasons and explanations.'
He raised his pen to make a point, just as the door to his office swung open when knocked upon. In came a soldier from the mine's MVD detachment, sporting a splendid black eye, ushering in Avtandil, who sported handcuffs and a look of mixed disgust and embarassment.
'What are you doing here!' asked Evgeniy and Kopensky simultaneously. The soldier jerked a thumb at Avtandil.
'He tried to prevent the sergeant from carrying out his duty, sir. Pulled a knife on him, and thumped me when I got it off him. The sergeant put him under arrest and sent the two of us down here in the GAZ. I think my nose is broken, sir.'
The officer seemed stunned into silence by this turn of events.
'Sorry, batano. I tried to stop them going into the mine, but Fatty wouldn't listen. He wants a medal, or promotion,' explained Avtandil. Evgeniy rolled his eyes in exasperation. Trust the hot-tempered Georgian to annoy the soldiers! And double-damn the sergeant for not taking any notice.
'When did Sergeant Grigorenko go into the mine?' asked Kopensky, using Fatty's real name and rank. Nearly forty minutes ago, came the answer.
'No reply from them, either,' muttered Evgeniy. 'Give them another twenty minutes just to be certain they're in trouble.'
Kopensky made certain to get the details about Avtandil's encounter with the sergeant, scribbling carefully in pen, finally making sure the miner was securely cuffed. By which time a fretting Evgenity pointed out that the MVD soldiers had entered the mine an hour ago, still without calling back.
For perhaps the first time, the officer seemed a little uncertain.
'Yes. Yes, true enough.' He flipped through a notebook, found the number for the MVD hutment at the mine and rang. There was no reply.
'Let me ring the Accomodation Block,' asked Evgeniy. 'There's always a man on the phone there.'
No there wasn't. The phone rang and rang, for at least thirty seconds, to no avail. Evgeniy frowned, thinking dark thoughts, scowling at the MVD officer as if he was to blame. Then he tried the extension at the mechanic's workshop, again to no answer. Nor was there a reply from the vehicle garage. Finally, he rang the power plant. Still no answer.
'This looks bad, chief,' commented Avtandil. His boss nodded, wondering what could have happened at the mine to close down communication so completely.
'Well?' asked Kopensky, looking interested. 'Nobody answering? It is –' and he checked his watch ' – nearly six in the morning.'
'Regardless, there are always men on duty in the power plant and the vehicle sheds. And if you ring for thirty seconds in the accomodation block at this time of the morning, someone will answer, if only to curse you for waking them up!'
Kopensky continued to play devil's advocate.
'Perhaps the lines are down.'
'The phone was ringing!'
A real edge of annoyance and anger crept into Evgeniy's voice. The two men locked stares until the engineer looked away, more worried than he could express verbally. Only a disaster could prevent everyone at NEC One from replying.
The phone rang, making him jump. Kopensky took the call, only for the I-told-you-so look on his face to vanish quickly. He passed the handset to Evgeniy.
'Doctor Pavel again. Be quick, someone else might try to use this line.'
Evgeniy took the black plastic handset with a twinge of unease.
'Hello? Evgeniy? Listen, I need to be quick. We've just had two men, miners, come into the sanitarium, absolutely terrified out of their wits. They ran here from the mine, can you believe that?'
Calculating, Evgeniy worked backwards, figuring that the men must have started running not long after Sergeant Grigorenko made his way into the mine.
'Did they say what's happening up there? I've tried to ring but nobody will answer.'
The doctor took an audible breath.
'They aren't able to say much, Evgeniy. I've had to sedate one already for his own – hey! NURSE!'
A loud clack came over the earpiece as the doctor dropped the handset at his end. Background noises sounded; indecipherable shouting, running footsteps, a door slamming. The noises petered out until there was silence and then more footsteps.
'Hello, are you still there, Evgeniy?' asked Pavel's voice again, sounding a lot grimmer.
'Yes, I am. Are you okay?'
'I am,' said the doctor. 'But one of those miners just commited suicide. Cut his throat with a scalpel.'
A stunned Evgeniy sat silently for several thunderous heartbeats.
'The other man did speak, before the drugs knocked him out,' continued the doctor, before halting again.
'Go on!' encouraged Evgeniy.
'He said something came out of the mine. Something terrible, something dreadful, that killed. And it's headed this way.'
TWO
UNIT UK HQ
Aylesbury
Buckinghamshire
1975
Lieutenant Walmsley stalked through the distempered brick corridors of UNIT HQ Aylesbury, his big boots rapping loudly on the tiled floors like a man with a mission, which in fact is what he was. His mission this morning was to track down Doctor John Smith, the peculiar boffin and official "Special Scientific Advisor" to UNIT, who tended to be hard to track down. Most especially when he didn't want to be found, which seemed to be the case today.
The lieutenant knocked loudly on the Signal Room door, looking in at a bored corporal dozily smoking a cigarette and flicking through the pages of a newspaper.
'Any sign of the Doctor?'
'No, sir.'
The officer sighed.
'No signals for him, I suppose?'
A shake of the head in the negative.
Off went the lieutenant again. He'd already circled the building's interior, and even left the entrance to see –
that the lemon-yellow vintage car the Doctor lavished care and attention upon wasn't in the car park. Doubtless it was off in the country lanes, moving at a ridiculous speed, scaring the cattle and passing motorists.
Walmsley went back into the HQ, calling into the Guard Room.
'Can you call me in my room when the Doctor gets back in?' he asked.
Private Ely, an old acquaintance of the officer, looked up in surprise.
'He's not left, sir.'
Walmsley frowned. Where could the man be hiding? Ah!
'The garage workshops. The only place I haven't looked yet.'
Ely nodded in agreement, secretly hoping that the officer would leave soon, so he could carry on with his paperback horror novel.
'He must be working on that souped-up old banger of his, sir.'
This proved to be the case. The Doctor had wheeled "Bessie" off into Workshop One, an area set into the rear wall of the huge garage where the battalion transport parked. Redolent with petrol, diesel, grease, smoke, rubber and Swarfega, it was the haunt of various vehicle mechanics and fitters. Walmsley, in the role of Battalion Transport Officer, had found it a useful refuge for doing paperwork undisturbed by phone calls, radio messages, chits to sign and other ranks determined to ask silly questions.
'Hello, Doctor?' he called. Bessie, the ancient yellow roadster, stood over the service pit. Of the Doctor there was no sign. Walmsley, his besetting sin that of curiosity, edged closer to the car, looking inside.
'Yes?' replied a voice at his feet, making him start, nearly dropping his clipboard.
The Doctor's head and shoulders appeared from beneath the car, and within seconds he had pulled himself upright out of the pit, wiping his dirty hands on a cloth, standing alongside the soldier and looking small in comparison.
'Ah, Lieutenant Walmsley. More paperwork for me to sign?' he asked resignedly, indicating the clipboard.
'This? Oh, no, Doctor. No. I wanted to see you for a quick word.'
The Doctor didn't respond with an acid barb. For a soldier, he considered Walmsley to be fairly intelligent, with a quick mind and a touch of wit, qualities enough to warrant a listen at the very least.
'Well, carry on. I've finished sorting out the anti-gravity circuits anyway. Quite how a vehicle as unstreamlined as this one will cope – sorry, do carry on, old chap.'
The lieutenant nodded warily. With the Doctor, you could never be sure if he was pulling your leg or not, and he talked such unintelligible gibberish at times –
'Yes. Quite. Ah – anyway, Doctor, I've decided to put in for a permanent transfer to UNIT.'
The Doctor looked slightly surprised.
'Why on earth would you want to do that!'
The lieutenant blushed.
'Er – don't laugh, will you – after going toe-to-toe with those plastic horrors the Autons, I realised that the Russian hordes aren't the real threat. UNIT has a vital job to do, and I intend to be part of it. Don't laugh!'
The Doctor rubbed his chin thoughtfully, any ideas of scornful laughter receding into the distance.
'Very well put, Lieutenant. One day, perhaps, enough people will think like you to stop humans from killing other humans.'
Walmsley carried on.
'Now, to get accepted onto UNIT's permanent strength isn't easy. The budget is always tight and the panel want to look at my Regular Army service history, my UNIT service log and I need a referee. No, no, not yourself!' he added when the Doctor's eyebrow rose in inimitable sardonic fashion. 'The Brig is willing to put in a good word for me. The crux of the matter is that they also want a five-thousand page monograph on a subject of relevance to UNIT.'
'Go on, go on,' encouraged the Doctor, slightly exasperated and hoping that the officer would get to the point.
'My choice is an area nobody else has covered before: the Soviet Union and it's role in the creation of UNIT.'
A grin spread across the Doctor's craggy features.
'My dear boy, you have chosen an abstruse area! I remember Alistair being absolutely livid when they kept prevaricating in the Security Council.'
The Lieutenant grew more animated.
'That's just it, Doctor! For a good fifteen months they stonewalled every attempt to create UNIT, then, literally overnight, they stop opposing UNIT and pretty nearly demand that it be established.'
'Hmm. Yes, I can see that there is potential for intelligent speculation there,' agreed the Doctor, almost interested despite his feelings about politics and politicians.
Walmsley nodded ruefully.
'Maybe, apart from the total lack of information about why they changed tack so dramatically. The only hint that's ever been found is mention of "Trivelho" a few months back from a defector.'
The Doctor finally lost patience.
'Look, what is it you want, Lieutenant? Just get to the point. Time is more precious than you know.'
'Ah – I wondered if you had ever heard of this Trivelho place?'
With a seriousness that the lieutenant had rarely seen, the older man shook his head briskly. For long seconds his vision went far beyond the walls of the workshop, looking into the past, maybe, or the future. Finally, with a visible start, he recovered himself.
'"This Trivelho place"? No, Lieutenant. No, I have not.'
The hulking officer tutted disappointedly.
'I was hoping maybe you had, since you seem to get around to odd places here and there.'
Once again the Doctor's expression became grim.
'My dear boy, I do not intend to travel to the Soviet Union until – what year is this? – well, not until 1991.'
'Oh?' commented Walmsley, cocking his head to one side, wondering exactly what the significance of the date incurred.
'I was there in 1917 and again at Sta – that is to say, in 1942. Quite enough for me, I assure you. Now, do be a good fellow and let me get on with my work on Bessie, will you?'
Bewildered by such cavalier disregard for the truth, not to say raving insanity, the officer went on his way, shaking his head sadly.
One reason the Doctor didn't want to be found, and his isolation in the service pit, was the sudden departure of Jo Grant. To his surprise, he'd taken her disapperance badly. Only belatedly did he realise that he'd come to see her almost as a surrogate daughter, and the emptiness of his laboratory or the TARDIS without her made him flee to other, more secluded quarters. Only the well-informed or persistent came to dig him out from there, like that large officer asking questions about Russia. Peculiar questions, too; as if he knew anything about – what had that name been? Did it in fact stir a fragment in his memory?
The Doctor didn't encounter Lieutenant Walmsley for several weeks, finally coming across him in a corridor at Aylesbury. The young officer took up so much room he stood aside to let the Doctor pass.
'Have you finished your essay yet?' asked the Doctor, politely, remembering that encounter in the vehicle workshop.
'No! Not yet,' replied Walmsley with vigour. 'But we did get a censored debrief from the British Army of the Rhine, from a defecting Russian GRU man. A friend of mine, on the interrogation team, slipped in a question about Trivelho.'
There came a pause in the conversation as Walmsley stopped, feeling slightly foolish.
'Er – he went white as a sheet, muttered about "Dark Children" and refused to say anything for the rest of the day.'
'I see,' commented the Doctor, rubbing his chin. There it was again, that feeling of prior knowledge. He'd need to check his 750-year diary for any mention. Trivelho, Trivelho, what for art thou.
'Carry on!' he said brightly to the officer, going on his way and returning to the lab. One of his current concerns was trying to get hold of a decent molecular analyser, a rectifying one if possible.
'Except, of course, that it isn't possible,' he grumbled to himself. 'Not in this century, anyway.' The last one he'd managed to jury-rig himself, from parts of an electron microscope, several oscilliscopes and miscellaneous spare parts from the TARDIS. The device functioned erratically; when working it worked well; when feeling temperamental it misread, miscued and misfired. Eventually the contraption gave out altogether. Quarter-Master Sergeant Campbell failed to appreciate that his scientific equipment – the "spare" oscilloscopes – had perished for the greater good of science. It would be extremely hard to squeeze any more out of him.
There was always Lieutenant Munroe, mused the Doctor. That other officer, Big John (to distinguish him from several other officer "John's"), recommended Munroe "if you ever need anything". Perhaps the information wasn't meant quite that literally – still, you never knew.
One thing that came back to him, irritatingly, with the persistence of toothache, was that word "Trivelho". Thanks to the Time Lord's subtle interference with his memory, the Doctor remained unsure if he'd really forgotten about Trivelho or had never known about it in the first place.
'Yes, I've heard the name,' revealed Lethbridge-Stewart when the Doctor popped in to ask the question. 'Town in Russia, got flattened. No more than that. No idea what's involved. And what makes you ask about it, Doctor?'
The Doctor pursed his lips and shook his head in exaggerated denial.
'Oh, just curious, just curious.'
'You don't fool me, Doctor! Given that Trivelho is behind the Iron Curtain I strongly suggest you leave well alone. Now, if you've quite finished?'
Recognising a dismissal when he heard one, the Doctor left for his office, where he dug an atlas out of the tottering pile of books in his cupboards.
'"Trivelho", he read, quietly and to himself. "Estimated population 5,000. Located 20 miles north of the Arctic Circle, 60 miles from the Finnish border. Principal industry: nickel mining. Town established in Tsarist times to run and service the nearby nickel and tin mines. Deemed of strategic interest to the Soviet Union due to the quantity and quality of the nickel ore extracted; tin seams now either exhausted or uneconomic of extraction." A small mining town, then.'
Once again he felt the tug of a memory, the ghost of knowledge. How annoying! And what of the "Dark Children" Walmsley mentioned? Where did they fit in?
The atlas went back on the bookpile and the Doctor went off to find a rather better-filed atlas, one of the Special Intelligence Strategic Summaries, kept under lock and key in the Library. The sniffy military clerk in charge of the books insisted on a proper signing-out, to the Time Lord's annoyance; he hated petty bureaucracy in any form.
'I'll only need it for a few minutes. Five at the most,' he protested.
'Five minutes or five hours, sir, you still need to sign for it,' insisted the clerk, keeping hold of the key, well aware of the Doctor's reputation for taking and keeping books.
Grumbling, the Doctor signed in his flowing boilerplate, then swooped on the atlases in their case. He wanted the North European-Scandinavian volume, which included the northern regions of Russia.
'"Trivelho,"' he read aloud, to the muted horror of the watching (and listening) clerk. '"Population 4,570" Very precise, aren't we. "23 miles north of Arctic Circle", etcetera etcetera, just the same as before. Oh, here we are. "One company of MVD troops, numbering ninety in total, are permanently stationed in the town, where they serve as mine security and escorts for vehicles. KGB representation is at cell level in Mayor's office. Location of the so-called "Trivelho Plaque." ' Closing the volume, he noticed a small strip of paper with red inking glued into the frontispiece and looked at it only in passing. Then he recognised the word "Trivelho" and read more carefully.
"ADDENDUM: after going to print it was reported that the town of TRIVELHO ref. Page 45 Series N72 83.54 127.45 had been designated target zone for artillery practice range and destroyed."
Naturally that gave him cause for thought. The "Trivelho Plaque" had less mysterious qualities; it was a rectangle of pure zirconium, incised with indecipherable characters, found at the mine in 1897. To date nobody had translated the script, and the plaque itself vanished in the Soviet archives during the Purges.
Other people were interested in Trivelho too, most notably Lieutenant Walmsley, who sat himself down next to the Doctor in the canteen at lunch.
'Hello there, Doctor. Things must be looking up with the – the Rootans, is it? You look less gloomy that before.'
'I have been thinking about the town in Russia that you mentioned, Lieutenant. Trivelho. Apparently –'
'It no longer exists!' interrupted the eager young man. 'I know, I know, I went back over newspaper clippings in the microfiche section.'
'Used for artillery practice, I understand,' continued the Doctor, pondering the sheer vandalism of destroying people's homes. The officer wagged a finger at him.
'Not just any artillery, Doctor. The Russians used nuclear artillery shells. Nine of them. They also claim that the nearby mine was destroyed in an accidental fuel-tank explosion. "Accidental" my backside! The Swedes declared that a tenth nuclear explosion had taken place.'
This unexpected information made the Doctor blink in surprise.
'But – my dear fellow, the town is located near the Finnish border. Was located. The fallout –'
'Exactly!' interrupted an enthusiastic John Walmsley. 'A big cloud of fallout went headlong over the border into Finland, driven by the winds. The Finns were hugely unimpressed. In fact they started to make encouraging noises to NATO, and the Swedes were pretty livid, too.'
'Understandably so. Nevertheless, they didn't join NATO.'
'No, since the Russians put a lot of political pressure on them, alongside a big fat soft loan totalling billions of roubles in a blatant bribe. It's all there in the English translations of various Scandinavian papers and magazines.'
Interestingly enough the news failed to make front pages in the West – there was the aftermath of a large-scale Viet Cong offensive occupying media attention, not to mention the death of Dwight Eisenhower, the first rumblings of the My Lai massacre and, more forbiddingly, large-scale skirmishes between the Red Army and the Chinese People's Army along the Ussuri River.
'Using nuclear artillery to destroy a town is pretty odd in itself. Why throw a lot of small shells at it when you can simply drop a single bomb that does the same job, except quicker. Afterwards some of the experts speculated that the Russians were hinting to the Chinese that they were ready to use tactical nuclear weapons if things escalated in the East.'
The Doctor tipped his chair back, stroking his chin with one hand. Desperate measures, shelling your own town with atomic artillery, especially since it risked sending your quiet, neutral neighbour into the arms of a hostile alliance. Desperate indeed. What might be the cause?
'That's another thing,' continued Walmsey. 'Lack of any stories from Trevilho survivors. The whole thing took place last decade yet we're no better informed from defectors or emigres or spies. If you ask me, I think that town was still full of people when it got nuked.'
'That's outrageous!' replied the Doctor, genuinely horrified at such a possibility.
'That's the Soviet Union,' replied Walmsley, in a hard voice. 'They're quite willing to mow down strikers with machine guns, Doctor. This would merely have been an extension of policy.'
'Politicians. Disgraceful,' muttered the Doctor. Walmsley remained silent; he'd done a degree in Politics before joining the Army and knew quite as much about them as he ever wanted to.
Before he left, Walmsley pointed another coincidence out.
'The day after Trevilho got flattened by atomic artillery shells, the Soviet Union stopped stonewalling in the Security Council and put it's weight behind the UNIT charter. The two are connected, if only I knew how.'
THREE
The next morning saw Walmsley ordering replacement parts for UNIT's fleet of aging Bedford lorries. This duty fell to him as the Battalion Transport Officer, and he got to be BTO by dint of having done the job efficiently on joining UNIT several years before. Necessary it might be; exciting it was not. The Doctor's arrival, therefore, came as a welcome break.
'Ah. Lieutenant Walmsley. Hard at work, I see,' announced the Doctor. Walmsley couldn't tell if this was sarcasm or not.
'Most people bother to knock, you know,' he grumbled, putting his pen down. The Doctor perched himself on the edge of the lieutenant's desk.
'Maybe so. I am not "most people", you have to admit.'
Walmsley nodded emphatically. No, the Doctor certainly wasn't. Technically you couldn't even call him a "person" in the strictest sense of the word.
'And interrupting an order form for carburettors and gearboxes is hardly compromising National Security, is it?'
The officer moved his hands over the order sheets.
'That's top secret information. Fate of nations rests in the balance. Officer responsible goes mad due to stress. Or boredom, whichever comes first.'
The Time Lord tutted.
'You made me so curious about that town in Russia that I intend to go and have a look for myself. You might care to come along.'
Used to strange behaviour and requests from the Doctor, this bizarre statement nevertheless rendered Walmsley speechless for a moment.
'Just like that! I don't think so, Doctor. The Russians are highly reluctant to let any Britons in, full stop, let alone a British soldier. A British soldier working for UNIT,' he added. 'And you need things like passports and visas to get behind the Iron Curtain. Plus internal travel documents for leaving towns once you get there. And some parts of the Soviet Union are completely off-limits to foreigners.'
'Nevertheless, I intend to go,' stated the Doctor, quite calmly.
Lieutenant Walmsley still had more to say.
'Look, Doctor, Trevilho will be utterly off-limits to foreigners. Not only that, if you managed to get there – by some miracle – then it would be an extremely unhealthy place to hang around, given all that radiation and contamination.'
The Doctor merely responded with a toothy grin, manifesting an air of being privy to a secret that Walmsley didn't know of.
'Of course!' he replied, standing and heading for the door. 'That's why I'm going back before the town gets destroyed.'
He reached the door and was opening it before Walmsley spoke again, in a puzzled voice.
' "Before"? how can you get there before it's destroyed? It got levelled five years ago. Hang on, when are you intending to travel?'
'Right away,' said the Doctor over his shoulder, walking away, whistling a refrain from "Rigoletto" in carefree fashion.
'Potty. He'll need locking away soon,' muttered the officer to himself. A sudden realisation hit him: how was the Doctor going to get to the Soviet Union? In UNIT transport, doubtless, as his antique yellow motor didn't have the range or stamina to travel across Europe.
Oh no! realised Walmsley. He's gone off to "borrow" a Landrover without signing it out, if I know him, and taking twenty gallons of diesel to boot.
He left the room in a hurry, heading for the Doctor's lab, hoping to catch the boffin before he departed for foreign climes.
'A wandering minstrel I, a thing of – oh, hello, Lieutenant. Changed your mind?' said the Doctor, breaking off in mid-song.
Lieutenant Walmsley wagged a stern clipboard at him.
'Don't try the soft soap with me! Exactly how are you planning to travel to the Soviet Union? Tell me that!'
With an operatic gesture, the scientist pointed to the police box set in a corner of the lab.
'In the TARDIS.'
The officer's eyes darted to the blue police box, then back to the Doctor.
'In a police box. Do you wear a pair of red shoes with heels as well?'
The Doctor sighed. He ought to be used to human incredulity and ignorance by now, but really –
'No, Lieutenant, it only looks like a police box. A superficial resemblance, just as I only look similar to a human being.'
The young officer's curiosity was piqued by the comparison.
'Okay,' he pronounced, doubtfully. 'I shouldn't rush to judgement so quickly. Let's see inside it.'
The Time Lord unlocked the TARDIS doors, leading Walmsley inside. Walmsley promptly leapt outside again, checking that he had in fact walked into a police box that ought to be six feet square but which instead had the dimensions of the canteen. He walked back inside, slowly, staring alternately at the Doctor and the TARDIS' console.
'I expected a transporter. Like the ones on television.'
His companion wryly rubbed his chin.
'You mean Trans-mat. No, that particular human technology isn't due until the twenty-third century. This is the TARDIS. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.'
For the second time in a few minutes Lieutenant Walmsley felt his brain suffer an information overload.
' "Time"? Is that why you mentioned getting to Trivelho before it was destroyed? This thing is a time-travel machine?'
'And a spaceship. Don't forget the "Space" part of TARDIS.'
Seeing a chair, Walmsley sat down.
'Fine. So we're going to have a little jaunt to Trivelho in your spaceship. And go back in time. The Brig will never believe this. Hell, I hardly believe this.'
Tweaking controls, the Doctor looked at his guest with mingled amusement and sympathy.
'Tell me, what date did the town of Trivelho get destroyed?'
'March twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty nine. Oh six hundred hours.'
Fiddling with dials and settings, the Doctor inititated the time rotor, which rose and fell whilst the characteristic wheezy dematerialisation of the TARDIS echoed around the control room.
'There we go,' he announced, in a satisfied voice. 'Ten days before March the twenty-seventh. We'll have time enough to do a little investigation and see if what you suspect is right or not.'
The officer, still seated, looked at the roundel-decorated control room, taking in the instrument panels, the monitor screens, a hatstand and several unidentifiable pieces of equipment. Suddenly, he started.
'Hey! You mean to say we're really going to end up in Trivelho!'
'Certainly. That was the whole idea of leaving UNIT Headquarters.'
'The damn Russian air defences are going to have a field-day with this thing – they'll shoot it out of the sky, but not before creating merry hell at an intruder over –'
He stopped at the Doctor's slow shake of the head.
'No, no, no. Don't think so literally – our transit is over time and space in five dimensions, totally ethereal in respect to outside observers in the normal four-dimensional continuum. We shall arrive entirely unexpectedly in Trivelho. And may I call you something else besides "Lieutenant"?'
'Uh – John. What's that!' he exclaimed as the TARDIS made a croupy, slightly bumpy landing. 'Are we taking off?'
'My dear chap,' sighed the Doctor. 'We've arrived.'
In order to find out exactly where the point of arrival was, he turned on the exterior scanner, seeing a dim, blank brick wall stretching out in front, upwards and to either side. Twisting the controls brought the interior of a dark, deserted brick building into view, the prospect broken only by lines of metal pillars marching off into the darkness.
'Excellent,' muttered the Time Lord. 'A nice secluded spot.' Behind him, looking over one shoulder, John goggled at the screen.
'Night-time! It doesn't get dark for another four or five hours. What happened to your lab!'
The Doctor pursed his lips.
'At a guess I would say we are in an empty warehouse. A good place to have landed; nobody around to see us materialise, nobody likely to discover us. Excellent!' and he slapped John on the back. 'Now, let's see about getting you some slightly less – er, inconspicuous clothes, shall we?'
Clothing that fitted John was in short supply in the wardrobes. With a little creativity, however, they managed. From being a spick-and-span military officer, Lieutenant John Walmsley became plain civlian John Walmsley, clad in down-at-heel second-hand clothes. Nor was he allowed to keep his pistol.
'I look like a tramp,' he complained, to unsympathetic laughter from his companion.
'Nonsense!' chortled the Time Lord. 'You look very presentable, for a provincial Russian worker.' With a slight pang of sartorial regret, he traded in his own impeccably tailored suit for an anonymous combination of trousers, old shirt and slightly battered jacket. 'Now, let's see what lies out there.' At his touch the TARDIS doors swung open.
John followed after, feeling the chill air in the warehouse. It was dank, and gloomy, and smelt of indefinable foreign things. Truly, this wasn't the UNIT labs back at Aylesbury.
'The way out,' murmured the Doctor, pointing to great double doors set in the near wall. 'The plan is to get out, circulate, see if the local population is still in place and take steps accordingly.'
'Hang on!' said John, with genuine alarm. 'Doctor, you may be fluent in Russian for all I know – after today I shan't doubt your word ever again – but I only speak half-a-dozen words, and those with a definite Lancashire accent.' Without slowing down, the Doctor replied over his shoulder.
'Don't you worry about language, John. I have a gift for languages. I think you'll find you have, too.'
'You'd better have, matey,' muttered John, bringing up the rear.