Doctor Who: Tomb of the Cybermen (3 page)

Klieg, his body tense, moved a step nearer the elderly professor. But the Professor stood his ground. There was a silky rustle behind them.

'Of course, Professor,' came the soft, accented voice of Kaftan,

'it's
quite
clear that you and you alone will run the expedition. Is it not, Eric?' she added with surprising sharpness.

Klieg looked at her, held still for a moment, then relaxed and nodded, controlling his anger.

'Of course, Professor,' he said evenly. 'No one questions your leadership.'

'All settled?' said the Doctor in the bright irritating voice that adults use to settle children's quarrels. 'Then let's open these doors, shall we?'

They watched him as he took out of the baggy pockets of his coat a small pocket instrument with a dial. This he clamped on the door. Whatever was on the dial must have been satisfactory because, with a sly grin, he stretched out his hands towards the large silver handles.

'Careful, man!' shouted Parry. 'Look out!'

'Whist ye!'

'No, Doctor!' jerked from the others.

The Doctor paused.

'I'm sure it's quite safe—now,' said the Doctor. He reached out his hands and touched the door handles.

The others gasped but nothing happened. No flash. No sudden death.

He gripped the door handles and tugged, exerting all his strength, but they did not budge.

'You'll be killed, man', whispered Viner, unable to keep away from the horrible sight of a man deliberately touching the fatal doors.

Timidly he put out a hand to drag the Doctor away.

'No!' said Haydon. 'Viner! Don't touch him!'

Viner pulled back his quivering hand.

'One more heave,' said the Doctor jovially while the others stood round apprehensively sweating with fear.

The Doctor yanked again at the giant doors but they remained set fast, as unmoving as they had remained through the centuries.

'Phew!' The Doctor breathed hard, leaning against the doors while he got his breath.

'Beyond my strength, I'm afraid,' he said. He brought out a handkerchief blotched with chemicals and knots, and wiped his sweating face with it.

'Here,' said Jamie, stepping forward and baring his arms. 'Let me have a go.'

'Certainly, Jamie,' said the Doctor. He smiled, stepped aside and sat down on a nearby rock to watch.

Jamie, hearing his own heart thump like a battle drum, stretched out his hands and touched the doors.

No shock. After resting a moment to let the black thump of fear die down, he began to pull in earnest. He pulled, yanked, and heaved with all his strength, but the doors would not budge.

Surely there couldn't be a weight in the world, in the universe, that strong Jamie couldn't shift? He pulled again, angrily, his heart thumping and the muscles in his neck standing out like wood. Of course he could do it, he, Jamie of the Highlands, Jamie who'd pulled redcoats off their horses at Culloden and tossed them into the gullies.

But even he could not move the terrible doors one fraction of a millimetre.

'Aye, well,' said Jamie, turning back from the doors and trying not to show how winded he was. 'Och, I've no had much exercise lately.'

'Quite. Quite,' said the Doctor. He looked at the group who stood before him. 'Now,' he said slowly. '
There
is a man who could open these doors for us.'

They turned round to see who he was pointing at.

Toberman! The dark giant towered silently over the other humans with his great bald head gleaming with oil and his massive arms folded.

'Him? Toberman?' asked Kaftan. 'He is my servant. I will not have him risk his life.'

'Surely it was just for such a contingency as this,' said Parry sharply, 'that you insisted we bring him with us.'

Kaftan hesitated.

The Doctor turned to her. 'Madam, there is no danger now,' he said urbanely. 'You have seen. Two of us have touched the doors without harm. Two very ordinary beings... of course, if he is afraid...'

Parting the group of ordinary humans, a menacing frown on his face, Toberman stepped forward and strode up.

They watched as he tensed his massive body, every muscle ridged, against the huge doors. He pulled, pulled, and they could see his muscles stand rigid with the strain. The others could see the sweat burst out of him, shining on his skin as he panted with the effort.

He won't be able to do it, they thought. To open those doors is beyond human strength. Those doors were meant for Cybermen, creatures with metal limbs ten times stronger than the strongest human being.

There was a long creaking groan from the doors. Everyone in the group stood transfixed as Toberman leant back and rested for a moment, communing with himself.

Crrrk! Crrrk! This time the doors visibly moved. They moved a few millimetres and dust fell on to the gigantic shoulders of the man. This time he didn't stop for a rest but heaved steadily and the doors edged open, until they could see the darkness inside.

Toberman stopped for a moment, gaining his strength for a final effort, still not turning, like an athlete in a prize jump in the Olympics. Then once again he lifted up his great arms and pulled.

This time, grating heavily as they moved, the doors swung open.

Darkness yawned in front of them, and they felt the chill of the tomb air, as for the first time in centuries it seemed to move out towards them from the imprisoning doors.

Everyone took a step back from the evil darkness. Even the Doctor allowed fear to show on his face, but, as always, for a very different reason from everyone else.

'I would be very careful in there, if I were you,' he said. 'Doors that a human can open?' he added to himself thoughtfully.

'Why weren't you killed?' asked Haydon suddenly.

'Yes,' came Klieg's threatening voice. 'What do you know about this place?'

The Doctor relaxed again into his usual casual pose. 'Very little.'

'What killed the crewman?' asked Viner.

'A very high amperage shock,' said the Doctor.

'Yes, obviously, but where did it come from?'

'Perfectly straightforward,' replied the Doctor. 'There must be a very large electrical capacitance around here, associated with a large and very good conductor.'

He examined the ground by the doors as he spoke, kicking the sand away.

'In fact, I think it must be... Yes!'

He looked round as if searching for something, glanced at Toberman's great leather belt and picked from it a small sharp trowel-shaped instrument.

'If I may?'. he asked the giant, smiling up at him. Toberman grunted and nodded.

The Doctor crouched down and with the trowel scratched at the dust by the doors. Gradually he worked his way through the loose dust on top and the trowel scraped against something harder.

Something brighter—underneath the shine of metal. He stopped scraping, raised the handle of the trowel and thumped the ground with it. A dull clanging rang though the thin air.

'It's not earth at all... It's
metal
!' said Victoria in wonder.

Haydon, the junior archaeologist, crouched down to examine it, felt it with his fingers and nodded.

'Exactly,' said the Doctor. 'Metal. There is metal sheeting under the top surface of this planet—and metal is the perfect conductor of electricity.'

'Allow me,' came from the Professor. He too knelt down, took the trowel and tapped the hard ground. Again it clanged, disturbingly—like a large empty boiler.

'Of course. Of
course
,' muttered the Professor. 'There must be underground workings under here.'

'But if there is electricity?' asked Victoria.

'That other poor fellow drained it all out through his body,'

replied the Doctor quietly. 'It is now perfectly safe to enter. As far as the electricity is concerned, that is,' he added.

'Come on,' said Klieg's voice. 'We're wasting time.' He started for the entrance. Then, he felt a hand on his arm, a gentle hand.

Kaftan indicated to the Professor with her head. The Professor was standing trowel in hand, erect, ready to be furious.

'But, of course,' said Klieg with ill grace. 'After you, Professor.'

Before them was the dark space between the great doors. Parry took out a large pocket torch and stepped across the threshold, half-expecting to be electrocuted, not sure whether to believe the Doctor.

Viner, nervously polishing his glasses as though every step was to be his last, followed him inside and then Haydon, Kaftan, Toberman and Klieg.

'But we'd still better be careful,' said the Doctor as he watched their figures being swallowed up by the dimness, 'very careful.'

Victoria and Jamie stood beside him, watching.

'Come on. Let's join them,' said the Doctor, and he and Jamie stepped forward. But Victoria, frightened—more by instinct than by knowledge, because she alone knew little about the Cybermen—

hung back.

'Come on, Victoria,' said the Doctor. But she didn't move.

He walked up to her and smiled gently. 'You know, really you look very nice in that dress,' he said as if it had just popped into his head.

'Oh!' said Victoria, startled out of her fear. 'Thank you, Doctor.' She looked down at her skirt. 'It still seems a bit, er—'

'Short?' joked the Doctor to make her less embarrassed. 'Well, don't worry about that—look at that great Jamie there!'

'What's that?' Jamie, waiting to go in the fearful entrance, couldn't understand what the Doctor meant. Then he looked down at the kilt that left his thick knobbly knees in full view. 'If you're saying anything against the kilt...' he began indignantly, then saw the twinkle in the Doctor's eye.

'Oh. Aye, well, it's a wee bit short for young Alice there,' said Jamie.

'Not at all.' Victoria forgot her fears and turned on him. 'Just because you come from the wilds...'

'When you've both finished,' said the Doctor casually. 'Let's go and see what they're up to in there.'

4

The light of the Doctor's torch showed a dark passage leading directly into the crater wall. Once inside the cold dark of the tomb seemed to cling to them as if the place could never be warm or know sunlight.

Cautiously they walked along the entrance passage, their footsteps muffled in fine ancient dust that had sifted through the minute crack of the entrance doors.

'Look! It's opening out,' whispered Jamie, and Victoria was glad he had taken her arm. Their eyes were becoming used to the gloom now, and in the light from their space-torches they could see the roof lift and the walls widen until they were in a vast chamber, gleaming as if the rock it was cut from was a kind of metal.

Along the walls on the far side were control desks with levers, dials, blank TV monitor screens and arrays of hieroglyphic figures, coils of fine wires, and everywhere, on the floor, festooning from metal wall to metal wall, long linking cables. In the middle control console, a thin arrow, like the hand of a clock, stood in a circle of blocks of letters and numerals.

'Just look at this,' breathed Victoria.

Around the room above the computer controls, marched a gigantic procession of Cyberman bas-reliefs. As large as the Cybermen themselves, glistening in the slightly phosphorescent metal, they loomed in frightening order. A march of exactly similar beings.

As Victoria's space-torch shone on to first one then another, they seemed to move, to bulge slightly towards her and then sink back as her torch found the next one.

Cybermen marched across space between planets, they marched over a rubble of tiny crushed people, they climbed out of their long cigar-shaped spaceships, and, in one bas-relief, two whirling worlds spun so close to each other they seemed to clash.

'That was the last time we had the pleasure of their company,'

said the Doctor. 'They lived on the "Tenth Planet", Mondas, then.'

'Pleasure!' began Jamie. 'What's the pleasure in those...'

Victoria stopped him, placing her finger on his lips—she was quicker than Jamie in understanding when the Doctor was speaking ironically.

In the gloom of the other side of the control room, they could hear Professor Parry's voice, scholarly, assured, in his element:

'These controls are of their earlier dynasties,' he was saying. Haydon and Viner were leaning with him, close over the dust-covered metal and stone.

Where they were standing the console certainly looked clumsier, with attempts at decorated columns like early television sets and cables thick as boa-constrictors. Over one of them stood the bas-relief of an early Cyberman, something remarkably like a normal human being.

'Yes, in those dynasties they still had many human traits...'

continued the Professor, staring at the ancient carved figure as if it could tell him the truth about what happened when a man changed to a Cyberman. Although it was human, already the figure had a pose as stiff as the Cybermen and already it was encased in metal and plastic.

But you could see the shape of human muscles in the thighs and calves, and there was still a face behind the helmet, although a blank face. What had that man thought? Had he realised what was already happening to him—the transition from man to machine?

'Primitive, Cyberman Level Nine,' murmured Viner. 'You can tell by his artefacts.'

'Not so very early by the look of it!' exclaimed Haydon in excitement. 'Look, it's already got the ancillary breathing apparatus!'

'I'm quite capable of making my own deductions, thank you,'

snapped Viner, never off his guard against someone beating him in the scholarly race.

'Suit yourself,' shrugged Haydon, unperturbed. He moved on to the next bas-relief and its console and computer, and was immediately absorbed in the marvellous problems and solutions it offered him.

'This must be the central control,' he heard Parry say, and the group moved across to the main console. 'Yes. The latest. This is the one that activates the whole of Telos.'

The Doctor and his companions followed him over. The console was the magnificent centre-piece of the high metallic hall, like the high altar of a cathedral. Haydon had rigged up an emergency lamp that gave an eerie yellow light to the whole apparatus.