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Doctor Who_ Cave Monsters - Malcolm Hulke [13]

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would affect the Doctor's power to think clearly. 'Pictures on the wall?' he said.

'That's right,' said Liz, brightly. 'Buffaloes, mammoth elephants, and birds with scales instead of feathers.'

'And men,' said the Doctor. 'Men without ears and with three eyes.'

'Really, now,' said the Brigadier. 'I saw the medical report on Spencer. It said he'd blown his top after losing his friend in the caves.

But this is ridiculous.'

'Perhaps you should have visited him in the sick-bay,' Liz said.

'You'd have seen for yourself.'

The Brigadier tried to put his best face on the situation. He was now convinced that he was talking not to one, but two, mad people.

'Our business at hand, Doctor, and Miss Shaw, is the disastrous loss of electrical power in this research centre. If someone in the sick-bay is drawing pictures on the wall, that is hardly our concern!'

'Do you know,' asked the Doctor, 'what Jung meant by "the collective unconscious"?'

'Jung?' said the Brigadier, 'the psychologist fellow?'

'It's the memory that animals inherit,' said Liz Shaw. 'You know the way a dog walks round and round before lying down, because it thinks it is treading flat the tall grass that dogs lived in millions of years ago.'

'Or the way salmon always return to where they were born in order to breed,' said the Doctor.

The Brigadier was fast losing his patience. 'Doctor, Miss Shaw, this is all very interesting...'

'But you want to know about the power losses?' said the Doctor.

'Thank you,' said the Brigadier. 'Now let's get back to the point.'

'We must first decide,' said the Doctor, 'what the point is, and I believe it is connected with our inherited memory of something from long, long ago. There is something close to this research centre which is touching on the depths of Spencer's memory—not his own conscious memory, you understand, but instead the inner parts of his mind which come from man's ancestors of thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago.'

At last the Brigadier had a glimmer of what the Doctor was talking about. 'Something in those caves?' he asked.

The Doctor nodded. 'What is the physical relationship between this research centre and the caves?'

The Brigadier got up, pointed to one of the maps on the wall.

'As you see, the hills rise sharply in this ridge. Inside, the hills are honeycombed with caves, some of them explored, some probably never visited. The research centre is five hundred feet below the top of the hill ridge. For some reason that you probably understand better than I do, the authorities preferred to build the cyclotron very deep in the ground.'

'It's more probably the nuclear reactor they were worried about,' said Liz. 'Just in case it turns into an atomic bomb. Everyone down here would be killed, but it wouldn't do much damage to anyone else.'

The Brigadier hadn't thought of that before. He didn't find it a pleasing thought. 'I'm sure you're right, Miss Shaw,' he said, covering his feelings.

The Doctor was carefully studying the map. 'This means that certain parts of the research centre may be only a few feet away from open cave space?'

'I suppose so,' said the Brigadier.

'Or from anything else,' said the Doctor quietly, 'that might be down here...'

The Brigadier was about to ask the Doctor what he meant when the door of the office flew open and Major Barker entered.

'Brigadier,' he said in his loud voice, 'I must talk to you immediately.'

'Please go ahead,' said the Brigadier, 'although I wouldn't mind if in future you knocked on the door before entering.'

'No time for that,' said Barker. He looked at the Doctor and Miss Shaw, then back to the Brigadier. 'It's private.'

The Brigadier was annoyed with Barker but tried not to show it. 'There's nothing that my two companions can't know,' he said.

'It is about your two companions,' said Barker. 'At least, about one of them.' As he spoke he looked at the Doctor, making it quite clear which one he had in mind.

'Have I left my handbrake off in the car park?' asked the Doctor.

'This is no time for jokes,' said Barker, his face turning more red

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