Doctor Who_ Dinosaur Invasion - Malcolm Hulke [15]
‘This is the Doctor, sir,’ said the Brigadier, ‘our scientific adviser.’
‘We’ve all been waiting for you to show up. May I ask where you’ve been?’ said the General.
‘Certainly,’ replied the Doctor.
There was an awkward silence. The General realised the Doctor was making a fool of him. ‘Well?’ he rapped.
‘You may ask,’ replied the Doctor, ‘but I don’t intend to give an answer, not if you speak to me in that tone of voice.’
The Brigadier stepped in quickly. ‘Doctor, this is General Finch. He has overall charge of this entire operation.’
‘Really?’ said the Doctor. He smiled disarmingly and extended his hand to the now red-faced General. ‘How do you do? I’m terribly pleased to meet you.’
Before the General could utter a word, the Brigadier spoke rapidly. ‘The Doctor’s already come up with a most interesting theory, sir. He believes that these creatures are coming to us from the past.’
The General touched his closely cropped moustache. ‘Very interesting. How?’
The Brigadier turned back to the Doctor. ‘That’s a good point, Doctor. How do they do it?’
‘Somebody or something,’ said the Doctor airily, ‘is causing temporal displacement on a massive scale.’
‘Temporal displacement?’ queried the Brigadier, not understanding the terminology.
‘Putting it another way,’ continued the Doctor, ‘someone is mucking about with Time.’37033036
‘Rubbish,’ said the General. ‘Absolute nonsense!’
‘I take it you have a better theory, General?’
The General cleared his throat noisily. ‘Some mad scientist fellow has been secretly breeding these things. Now they’ve escaped.’
Sarah piped up, ‘That wouldn’t account for the man from the Middle Ages we met in the garage! ‘
General Finch turned and stared at Sarah, as though he hadn’t noticed her before. ‘Who is this person?’
‘Sarah Jane Smith. I’m a journalist.’
The General swung back to face the Brigadier. ‘No journalists are allowed in this zone. Have her evacuated immediately.’
‘Miss Smith is acting as my assistant, General,’ the Doctor turned to her. ‘You were saying, my dear?’
Sarah quickly told of their encounter with the peasant from the time of King John. ‘Don’t you see, General,’ she concluded, ‘it’s not only reptiles, it’s people. Maybe anything will pop up from the past now.,
The General rocked on his heels, his favourite stance. He tapped his leg with his swagger cane. ‘Have you never heard of mentally deranged people believing they were Napoleon? I suggest your so-called peasant was mad.’
‘He vanished before Miss Smith’s very eyes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Madmen can’t do that.’
From his radio console, the operator turned excitedly to Sergeant Benton. ‘Another sighting, sarge. Just come through.’
In a flash Benton went to take the note the radio operator had scribbled down while listening to reports of the new sighting.
‘Where is it?’ asked the Brigadier.
Benton helped himself to a green flag from a little cardboard box on the desk top, and stuck it carefully on the map. ‘There, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a stegosaurus this time.’
‘Get on to the artillery right away,’ the General ordered the Brigadier. ‘We need field guns to blast it into eternity.’
The Doctor stepped forward. He was a good six inches taller than the General. ‘You’ll do no such thing! We must study that creature, not shoot at it. How much do you think we’ll learn from a dead dinosaur?’ He took the Brigadier’s arm. ‘Come on, Brigadier, I want you to get me there as quickly as possible.’
The Brigadier looked startled. ‘What do you intend to do? Make friends with it?’
‘Possibly,’ said the Doctor. ‘But first we’ve got to catch it.’
The stegosaurus, thirty feet long and weighing two tons, stood bewildered in a narrow Hampstead side street. In the distance it could see the green of Hampstead Heath, and the prospect of so much lush foliage made its salivic juices run. But immediately ahead was a little group of mammalian midgets coloured brown, and they were frightening because they carried sticks that made big bangs. Each time one of the sticks banged, the