Doctor Who_ The Doomsday Weapon - Malcolm Hulke [12]
Now they had reached their dome and were going inside. 'We'll talk about it in the morning,' said Leeson.
'I want to talk about it now,' she said. 'We should never have come here.'
Leeson took her gun, hung it in its place on the wall. 'On Earth we had one room. Here we own land.'
'Land that grows nothing,' she exclaimed bitterly. 'Ashe knows we're beaten, and so do you. You just won't admit it.'
But Leeson wasn't listening to her. He was standing in the middle of their room, listening intently to something outside. He put his fingers to his lips to tell Jane to be quiet. From somewhere she could hear a low growling sound.
'You get on the radio,' ordered Leeson. 'I'm going outside.'
'No, please,' his wife implored. 'Stay here!'
There was another growl, this time much louder and closer.
'I might be able to frighten it off,' said Lemon. 'Now do as you're told!' Without another word Leeson walked back into the night outside. Almost instantly there was a roar from the darkness beyond, the sort of sound Jane had only ever heard before from the films during a Walk on Earth when you saw non-existent animals called elephants and lions.
Jane went to the radio-telephone, put on the earphones, took up the microphone and pressed the transmitting button. 'Hello, main dome. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?'
Within a few moments Mary Ashe's voice came through the earphones. 'This is main dome. Please identify.'
'This is Jane Leeson. Our dome's being attacked! Please you must send help...'
Jane stopped as she heard from outside a human scream rend the air, unmistakably that of her husband. She dropped the earphones and rushed to the door to go out. But the door was already filled with something infinitely more terrifying than she had ever imagined in her wildest dreams.
Jane retreated backwards into the room. 'No,' she whispered, finding it almost impossible to speak. 'Do you understand what I say? Please don't touch me. I'll do anything... We'll go away... We'll leave the planet - all of us! But please don't kill me!'
Then she fainted.
5 Starvation
After Jo had been taken to supper by Mary Ashe, and the Lessons had gone back to their dome, the Doctor spent some time with Ashe discussing the colonists' basic problem - how to make their crops grow. Ashe, a reasonable man, accepted the Doctor's story that he and Jo were simply travellers in space, and had nothing to do with the mining combines that the colonists feared so much.
'What convinced you,' asked the Doctor, 'that crops would grow on this planet?'
'I visited this planet when I was a member of the crew of an astro-merchant-ship,' said Ashe. 'It has atmosphere that humans can breathe, and a temperature that humans can tolerate with comfort. The soil was exhausted, but I decided it could be reclaimed.'
'How?'
'Plant a cover crop,' Ashe said, 'plough it in, and repeat the process. That way we should have had a subsistence crop within a year. But even the cover crop refuses to grow.'
'What exhausted the soil originally?' asked the Doctor.
Ashe shrugged. 'The Primitives, I suppose. Before they were Primitives.'
The Doctor asked Ashe to tell him about the people called 'the Primitives'. Ashe explained that they were a simple people, similar to humans except for their six-fingered hands 'They don't wear any clothes at all,' said Ashe, 'which shocked some of our lady colonists a bit at first. Instead, they paint their bodies all over with dyes that they make somehow from the rocks.'
The Doctor asked, 'What do they live on?'
'The shrubs,' replied Ashe. 'I think they're half-starved most of the time. They're just clinging to existence. But they're not a people struggling to develop. They're going backwards.'
The Doctor found this intriguing. 'What makes you say that?'
'Wait till you see them,' said Ashe.