Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [114]
But most people who found themselves down to their last tin of spaghetti 215
and their last packet of chocolate-chip cookies, did what anyone sensible would do in such circumstances. They found an end-of-the-world party at the bottom of their street and asked, nicely, if they could join in.
And so, out of the adversity, many new friendships were formed.
There were some great parties. Celebrity ones in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London. Those world leaders who weren’t hiding under the beds in former nuclear shelters held their own. It was said that Nelson Mandela’s end-of-the-world party was the best in all Africa.
The grid held. A few holes were breached within it late on the second day when the buffeting became a deluge. Molten debris from the fire-fight above rained down upon a dozen, mostly uninhabited, coral islands in the Pacific. Pieces of crashed spacecraft also got through the defences in some other places, although thankfully these were mostly large stretches of open sea or desert. An unlucky few people died when hit by stray debris. Two houses in West Yorkshire, one in Devon and a street in south London were destroyed.
A small farming community in Virginia. A hamlet in Croatia. A village in Senegal. In the largest single incident a burning Canavitchi ship ploughed through the hole over the Pacific and then flew on, under the grid, and finally crashed into a town on the eastern coast of Japan. Sixteen hundred people were killed in the disaster and many thousands more injured. Thankfully, nothing else even approaching this scale happened elsewhere and the grid was patched up, keeping fatalities to a minimum.
The BBC, which would eventually win numerous awards for its eighty-three-hour live coverage of the catastrophic events, managed to arrange a satellite interview with Lethbridge-Stewart in the bunker in California, through a contact who had been to school with him. The old soldier was as honest and forthright as he had ever been, or would ever be, about the causes of the crisis.
‘It’s our own fault, at least in part,’ he told the startled audience at home.
‘We embrace new technology without fully understanding its uses. We allow companies to take control of our lives because they provide us with something we want. And we casually believe that every alien in the universe, no matter how powerful, can be stopped because we’ve got UNIT. Maybe we need to become a little more cynical and stop being so trusting.’ A little later, during a second interview, he was able to confirm that the aliens had used a front organisation in the shape of InterCom to try and take Earth from within. ‘Who knows how many other aliens might be out there, in your workplace, in your schools, in your streets.’
When he had finished the interview, the Brigadier turned to find the Doctor looking concerned behind him.
‘That was all a little hysterical, don’t you think?’ the Time Lord asked.
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Lethbridge-Stewart was genuinely puzzled. ‘All these years you’ve been telling me to be vigilant, to watch the skies . . . Well, I believe you. Today more than ever. You were right, Doctor, the universe is full of the most terrible evil. And it must be fought.’
‘Just so long as you don’t start looking for it where it doesn’t exist,’ the Doctor said sadly. ‘That way lies madness, the Salem witch trials and Nazi Germany.’
And still the Jex and the Canavitchi threw every last instrument of death that they possessed at each other. With livid hatred they fought on and on, as ship after ship was attacked, strafed by lasers, pummelled by explosives, shaken by sonic bombardment, subjected to lethal doses of radiation and, finally, dispatched to atoms by sustained bursts of energy. Spectacular pictures flashed around the globe of Jex and Canavitchi