Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [76]
Newton didn’t seem to share Ryman’s enthusiasm for the alien homeworld.
‘What’s it called?’
‘In our native tongue?’ asked Ryman. ‘ Fen’vetch Suxa Canavitch. It means
“the beautiful world of blue and gold”. It loses a lot in translation.’
‘And humanity?’
There was a long pause as Ryman looked into the distant clear blue sky as though he were a lost traveller searching for a recognisable reference point that would lead him to his home. ‘Before your puny race crawled from the primordial slime and achieved awareness,’ he said with a bitter anger, ‘we had an empire that covered seven galaxies.’
The pair walked to the observatory and climbed up to the giant telescope.
Newton looked out across Los Angeles, tracing the path of the ruler-straight freeways all the way to the ocean on the shimmering, early morning horizon.
The city was coming alive like a giant beast after slumber. For a moment, and for no explicable reason, Newton was terrified. What was worse, he was unsure about what he was most afraid of. The aliens with whom he worked, or the idea of the power that was within his grasp.
‘They have no idea what’s coming, have they?’ he asked, wistfully.
‘Somebody said something similar to me only a few days ago,’ Ryman noted as he fiddled with the controls of the space telescope. ‘Of course, the irony there was that whilst humanity has little idea of the war that is to come, the Jex have even less. Though that may be about to change from what I understand.’
Newton thought he understood. ‘War in heaven?’ he asked.
‘An interesting way of putting it. War in hell might be a closer analogy.’
Ryman turned the telescope towards the patch of sky he had indicated earlier. ‘Somewhere out there a thousand Canavitchi craft, containing a million warriors, are poised. Waiting for one word from me.’
‘What word?’
‘“Attack”,’ said Ryman simply and took his eyes away from the lens. ‘You know, the funny thing about humanity is that they’ve never even suspected.
On other worlds we’ve had a presence for far less time and they’ve known that somebody was interfering with their planet’s development, even if they haven’t known who exactly. But you . . . ’ He began to laugh again. ‘We’ve been on Earth for nearly a thousand years, waiting for the warriors to come.
And you never even knew.’
145
Curiosity got the better of Newton. ‘What do you mean?’
Ryman sat down on the wall outside the telescope tower. ‘Messing with your minds.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Newton strongly. ‘You’re a liar.’
‘Not at all,’ replied Ryman.
Newton began to walk away from the alien. ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ he said.
‘I’m sure you don’t,’ noted Ryman. ‘Which kind of proves my point. Humans never want to see or hear the obvious. We faked the Turin Shroud,’ he continued. ‘That was my idea. A good one, don’t you think? We’d watched the Crusades and set up the Knights Templar. We’d seen how much you guys were into your ridiculous religions. We gave the Spanish Inquisition all sorts of strange ideas about how flat the Earth was.’
An appalled look crossed Newton’s face. ‘Satan is Lord of Lies,’ he said, horrified. ‘I’ve been used by the devil himself.’
‘Whatever!’ said Ryman. ‘It wasn’t just religion, you know? We’ve got more talent than that. The War of Independence, that was us. The Wall Street Crash. That was most definitely us! We’ve managed to slow down your scientific evolution to a piss in the wind. If it wasn’t for us, you’d have achieved interstellar travel by the 1850s. You name any man who’s been out of time in any field in the thousands of years of your pathetic planet’s history and I’ll show you somebody that a Canavitchi sent on a detour!’
‘Lies!’
Ryman was clearly enjoying himself. ‘We put obstacles in the way of Bab-bage so the difference engine was never built. We burned the instructions for how to build a pyramid in six easy stages.’
‘But Nostradamus says . . . ’
Ryman roared with laughter. ‘We helped Nostradamus write his prophecies,’
he said with a cynical smirk on his face. ‘So it’s only natural that