Doctor Who_ The Sea-Devils - Malcolm Hulke [3]
The little open fishing-boat had now entered a small harbour. The water was calm here, but twice as polluted with muck. Jo kept her eyes on the quayside, to avoid seeing what floated all around her.
‘How long are you going to be?’ queried Robbins, as he stopped the engine, letting the boat glide towards the quay.
‘Maybe an hour,’ said the Doctor. ‘Can you wait for us?’
Robbins nodded. ‘You’ll find me round there somewhere,’ and he pointed to a café on the quayside. ‘Mind, I’ll have to charge extra for waiting.’ He produced a long pole with a hook on the end, used it to secure a hold on a metal ring set in the cobblestones on the quayside. ‘Can you make us up?’
The Doctor jumped on to the quayside, and Robbins threw him a line. The Doctor made fast the rope to the metal ring, then reached out to help Jo from the boat. Glad to be on firm land again, she looked across the murky water of the little harbour towards the open sea. A couple of miles off-shore was a huge metal construction standing out of the water. Pointing it out she said, ‘What’s that?’
‘English Channel oil,’ replied Robbins, as he too now came up onto the quayside. ‘That’s if they ever find it.’
The Doctor asked, ‘How long have they been drilling?’
‘Last two years,’ said Robbins. ‘Ever since they really got North Sea oil going, there’s been no stopping them.’
Jo had heard a lot about the possibility of English Channel oil. North Sea oil had started gushing in 1977, making Britain the envy of every other European country. Now the geologists promised even greater reserves of crude oil deep beneath the sea-bed of the English Channel, and oil derricks were becoming a familiar sight all along the South Coast.
The Doctor asked, ‘How do we get to the château?’
Robbins looked at the Doctor in the way country people do when a stranger asks a silly question. ‘You walks,’ he said. ‘Shanks’s pony. You go that way,’ and he pointed along a road that kept to the sea for a few hundred yards, then turned inland.
‘As you so rightly put it,’ said the Doctor, ‘we walks. Come along, Jo.’
The Doctor strode off, and Jo hurried to keep up with him. On glancing back, she saw that Robbins had gone into the one and only café.
‘You didn’t ask how far it is,’ she said.
‘Not more than a mile,’ said the Doctor, striding along on his long legs, ‘Well, maybe two... Lovely day, don’t you think?’
There was a sharp nip in the ozone-laden air blowing in from the sea, and Jo was cold. Not only that, she hadn’t put on walking shoes, because she hadn’t expected to have to walk two miles to the château and then, presumably, two miles back. ‘Marvellous,’ she replied, ‘as long as I don’t get pneumonia.’
‘Pneumonia isn’t all that serious,’ observed the Doctor, taking Jo as seriously as Robbins had taken him about the size of the château. ‘There was a time when if you humans developed pneumonia it was often fatal. But nowadays, what with all your new medicines, you’d be over it in no time!’
He strode on, then suddenly stopped. By the side of the road there was an ancient moss-covered stone construction with a single water-tap in the middle. ‘That’s very interesting,’ said the Doctor. ‘Most interesting, indeed.’
‘You often see them,’ said Jo. ‘They were built before people had water laid on in their houses.’
‘I mean the inscription,’ the Doctor said. He reached into the capacious pockets of his long frock coat, and produced a little wire brush. It always astounded Jo how many things he could produce from those enormous pockets. He used the little brush to remove some of the moss, revealing words carefully chipped into the stone-work. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘read it.’
Two hundred years of wind had worn away the original surface of the