Doctor Who_ The Doomsday Weapon - Malcolm Hulke [10]
'The spaceship,' said Mary. 'The main dome is linked to its generators. This is our dining-hall.'
Jo was led into a room with a single long table, on either side of which were long benches. Like the few items of furniture in the Leesons' little dome, the table and benches were poorly made with rough surfaces. Jo sat to the table, while Mary went to ladle thick soup from a big black cauldron that stood on a small electric ring. Mary brought the soup to Jo and gave her a roughly-made wooden spoon.
'I'm afraid that's all we can offer,' Mary said. 'It's not very much, is it?'
Jo looked into the soup. It seemed to contain root vegetables. 'It looks very nice,' she said. Then she tried some. It had almost no taste. 'It's marvellous,' she lied.
'I'm glad you like it,' said Mary, and sat down beside Jo. She looked at Jo's clothes. 'Is that what they're wearing on Earth now?'
'More or less,' said Jo.
'Things change so quickly,' Mary sighed. 'It was all quite different when we left back in 'seventy-one.'
'You left Earth in nineteen seventy-one?' Jo asked. By 1971 only a handful of astronauts had travelled beyond Earth, and then only for very short spells on the Moon.
Mary laughed. 'You're a bit out with your time,' she said. 'Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-one - that's when we left, just a year ago.'
'You mean the date is now 2972?'
'That's right,' said Mary, 'of course it is.'
Jo realised that she had not only travelled through Space; she had also travelled through one thousand years of Time!
4 The Monster
Jane Leeson trudged through the darkness by the side of her husband. The gun she carried weighed heavily in the crook of her arm, and she wondered if she would ever get used to having to carry it every time she left their dome.
'Who do you think those people really are?' she asked her husband.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Ashe will sort it out.' He walked a little faster, so that Jane had to hurry over the broken rocks to keep up. It was his way of showing that he didn't want to talk.
She thought back on the life they had had together on Earth. From the history books and the history films, she had learned of a time when there were open spaces on Earth, when both people and animals could roam free in great areas of grass and trees. But Earth hadn't been like that for hundreds of years. Every square kilometre of land had been built over, with roads and monorails over-running the great sprawling built-up areas. This area, which extended everywhere, was twenty to thirty storeys deep, with linking corridors and escalatorways so that people could go shopping and get to work - all under cover, with fresh air sucked in by huge ventilators from above. As a special treat, on nonwork days, you could pay to go up to the surface in an elevator and spend a few hours sitting on concrete in the sunshine. Another treat was to go for a Walk. This meant you paid to go into a special cubicle with a floor that rolled from one end of the cubicle to another. To stay in one place you had to keep walking. Meanwhile, all around you, there was a moving picture on the walls of passing grass and trees, and sometimes wild animals, films that came from the State Archives. To further the illusion they blew gusts of fresh air at you, sometimes with funny smells that were supposed to resemble those of animals and grass.
She met her husband during such a Walk. The roller had jerked suddenly, owing to a power failure, and she had fallen over. Leeson helped her to her feet, and so they met. By getting married they qualified for a room of their own. Previously she had had to share a room with her parents and three sisters. The marriage was conducted by a friendly computer that played music to them as well as announcing that their State records had been stapled together in the great Automatic State Personnel File, which meant they were then married. Then the computer gave