Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [57]
Benny apologised to the Rastafarian girl whose foot she'd just stood on. 'Doctor, I hate to point this out, but we're trying to get there, too.'
The Doctor turned around, continuing to walk backwards without even slowing. Unlike Benny, he wasn't having any problem slipping through the throng. 'We are doing so out of scientific interest, and because we might prove invaluable as impartial negotiators in this little dispute.'
Benny squeezed past two of the fattest men she had ever seen and came up alongside him. 'How do you propose to start the negotiations, Doctor?' she asked sweetly. 'By shouting up at them?'
'I don't think my voice would be loud enough,' the Doctor said in al seriousness.
They could see the ship properly for the first time.
It took Benny a couple of seconds to realise that the reason the hul was strobing with bright blue light was that it was being photographed by thousands of people, all using flashbulbs. She hoped that the Martians, from a planet in perpetual twilight, didn't take the bright light as some sort of attack. The flickering glare of the flashbulbs made the Martian ship appear even more nightmarish than it already was. The ship was too large to take in at one attempt: it just left impressions of a surface like that of a seashell or a snail, fins like a deep-sea fish.
Despite that, Benny recognised the basic design of the spacecraft - Martian rockets had remained unchanged for a hundred thousand years. The Martians had followed the pattern of technological development familiar on ten thousand worlds throughout the galaxy, and they had evolved many millennia before the human race. The Martian Industrial Revolution had taken place at the same time as the Pliocene on Earth. On her expedition, Benny had discovered the remains of documents a mil ion years old that were evidence of Martian space travel.
The Martians, the Ice Warriors as the Doctor insisted on calling them, would have conquered the solar system, even the galaxy, but for the lack of resources on their home world. Energy sources were scarce, few of the necessary metals were present in sufficient quantities. Martian astronomers knew that both the Earth and the asteroid belt were abundant with mineral wealth, but other planets remained tantalisingly just out of reach.
One of her contemporaries had suggested that another reason why the Martians never developed their space travel was that their military culture was never geared to rocketry. The Martians lived in nests and cities deep underground, and such dwellings were scarce and impossible to attack from the air. Wars were fought to capture such possessions and territory, not to destroy them. The Martians favoured sonic guns and germ warfare, not
'dishonourable' bombs that destroyed civilian populations and turned whole cities into radioactive craters.
'Why aren't the Martians doing anything?' Benny asked.
'The same reason that there was a delay when the human astronauts landed on Mars,' the Doctor shouted back at her, 'the ship's crew are acclimatising to the gravity and the temperature. They are probably a little confused by their reception - they wil want to assess this crowd, try and work out whether it's an army or not.'
'What made them pick London?' Benny asked.
The Doctor slipped through a group of German tourists. 'They must have tracked the source of the radio transmissions to the Orbiter: the Martian ship took a direct course for the National Space Museum. Something of a coincidence, otherwise, isn't it?'
55
The mass of people was almost stationary now. Most of the men and women had began to realise that they weren't going to get much closer. Or they had chosen not to - the object filled the sky, and every detail on its hull was visible from this distance. Sections of the flank were covered in wicked-looking spines. People were hesitating, holding still.
So, as the crowd became denser and denser, it became easier to move through it. Benny realised that she and the Doctor were the only people really trying. Everyone else stood staring