Doctor Who BBCN17 - Sick Building Read online

  The Doctor waved his away. ‘Never touch the stuff, hardly. Well, I do admire all this, Tiermann. Very, very nice. Must have cost you a packet, this place.’

  ‘Everything was imported from Earth,’ Tiermann pronounced, with a faint sneer. ‘All the woods and marble, the stone and the metals.

  Everything needed to build the Dreamhome. It was my dream that brought this place alive. And we thought that we would be here for-ever.’

  ‘Oh dear, never mind,’ said the Doctor – rather glibly, Martha thought. ‘Funny how things don’t work out sometimes, isn’t it?’ He took the sherry glass out of Martha’s hands with one easy movement and sniffed the drink sharply. ‘You wouldn’t like it. Bit too sweet.’

  ‘Solin, go and tell your mother,’ Tiermann addressed his son, who had been standing uneasily to one side, feeling responsible for the presence of these two strangers in the Dreamhome. ‘Would you fetch her and tell her that we have the most delightful, unexpected company?’

  Solin nodded and hurried off fretfully.

  The drinks cabinet swung round to offer Tiermann his own drink.

  Tiermann took it absent-mindedly, with the air – Martha thought –of one quite used to being waited on hand and foot by robotic servants every day of his life. He was grinning at his guests now but his expression still wasn’t a very friendly one.

  ‘We are grateful that you would come here to give us warning of the advancing danger, Doctor, Miss Jones,’ he said graciously.

  ‘All in a day’s work,’ said the Doctor, draining Martha’s sherry glass with a large gulp. ‘I’d be interested to hear what your plans are. You’ve been here a long time. The world beyond this one has changed quite a lot, I imagine.’

  Tiermann grimaced. ‘There should still be a place in it for Ernest Tiermann, Doctor. I was famed, you know. Right across this sector.

  For my inventions. My toys.’

  ‘Rather valuable toys,’ noted the Doctor.

  ‘Robotic servants like

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  these. They can be made to do anything. You could raise a whole army of them. That could be worth a lot to some people.’

  Tiermann pulled a face. ‘Mere toys. They could never hurt anyone, Doctor. That’s not what the Servo-furnishings are for. Look at Walter, here. The drinks cabinet. His sole function is to supply us with our favourite tipple at the appropriate moment.’

  ‘And I am very happy in my work,’ said Walter, in a rather fruity mechanical voice. He was right behind Martha at the time, and she jumped. The Doctor laughed and held out his purloined glass for a refill.

  ‘And they’ll all be going with you, when you leave, I imagine?’ He smiled at Walter and then at Tiermann. ‘I imagine it’d be hard to leave your servants behind, eh? I mean, after all this time, you must have got quite fond of them, eh?’

  Tiermann’s face had gone dark. ‘They are simply machines, Doctor.

  It is pure foolishness to get attached to them. Machines run down and need replacing eventually. Quicker even than human beings do. My wife has fond, foolish ideas about the Servo-furnishings. And so does my son. But they are nothing really. Mechanical toys, that’s all.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Doctor. ‘That seems a bit cold-hearted to me.’

  He reached over to pat the wooden head of the drinks cabinet called Walter. The head jerked abruptly and the Doctor snatched back his hand. ‘There, there, Walter. I’m sure he didn’t mean it. You’re real to Martha and me, isn’t he, Martha?’

  Martha stared at the wooden robot and smiled uncertainly. ‘Of course he is.’

  But Walter turned and plodded away to his place by the wall, the bottles stowed in his interior clinking dully as he went.

  ‘I’ll never understand that ridiculous, sentimental impulse,’ Tiermann sighed. ‘To suppose that everything has feelings. Hal Only we have feelings, Doctor. Only us. The human race.’

  The Doctor slurped his sherry, grimacing at its sweetness. ‘Don’t be too sure of that, Professor Tiermann. That’s a very narrow, heartless philosophy.’

  Tiermann shrugged carelessly. ‘We could debate that point for a 22

  very long time, Doctor. But we have only a very few hours – a little more than a day – before we have to leave. Philosophy must be put aside.’

  ‘And compassion?’

  ‘I leave such tender feelings to my wife and my son,’ Tiermann said.

  The Doctor and Martha were inspecting their allotted quarters. Even though they had protested that they weren’t really going to be here for very long, Tiermann had insisted on taking them into two gorgeously appointed rooms with a connecting door. Tiermann was adamant that they stay and prepare themselves for dinner. Martha was glad to put her feet up after their traipse through the woods, but the Doctor kept interrupting her.

  Three times he had rapped on the middle door and come marching in, saying: ‘And another thing. . . ’ as he aired his many and varied thoughts on their visit so far, and vented his observations about their host. ‘What did you think of him, eh? Bit chilly? Bit creepy?’

  Martha had experience of surgeons and doctors, and some of them had struck her as just as heartless and dispassionate as Ernest Tiermann seemed to be. To them, their human patients were simply problems to solve. Their bodies were intricate machines that needed examining and possibly fixing. Rarely did these particular doctors think about the everyday lives or the feelings of the people whose ailments they considered. Perhaps, Martha thought, it would be distracting, or too upsetting, to think of them as real people. Perhaps that was how the medics protected their own emotions.

  But Tiermann. . . About him she wasn’t so sure.

  Meanwhile she wanted to luxuriate and relax and think it all over.

  She had already discovered that her en suite bathroom contained a large claw-footed iron tub painted pale blue. She smiled at the Doctor, ushered him out, and told him to come back in at least half an hour.

  ‘And another thing. . .

  he’s so complacent,’ the Doctor burst out.

  ‘There’s less than one and a half Earth days until this whole valley goes ker-splat, and what’s old man Tiermann doing? He’s inviting us 23

  to dinner! He’s telling us to get all dressed up and how much his wife is looking forward to meeting us. . . ’

  The Doctor was exasperated, stomping up and down on the thick pile of the carpet in Martha’s room. She had only just finished dressing, and the two robots that had been quietly helping her were standing back discreetly, to admire their handiwork. Martha was a vision in a pale cream gown, one run up for her especially by the robotic seamstress that had swept in, forty minutes ago, and taken her measurements in the wink of an eye. Now Martha was admiring her own reflection in a tall burnished mirror and eventually the Doctor’s rant petered out and he stared at her.

  ‘You look very nice,’ he said. ‘Why am I still in my same old suit?

  Where’s my new threads?’

  Martha shrugged bare shoulders. ‘You’ve been too busy stomping up and down complaining about everything.’

  The Doctor threw himself down on a silken divan and pulled at his hair distractedly. ‘I’ve been checking this place out. It’s outrageous, Martha. These people don’t seem to do a single thing for themselves.

  These rooms are full of. . . pampering and preening machines. . . ’

  ‘I know,’ she smiled, as one of the robots leaned in to help with her earrings. They were so quiet and skilful, it was almost like they weren’t even there. It had only been an hour or so since she had entered Dreamhome, but already Martha was getting used to the easy luxury of the place. The bath she had slipped into had poured itself, adding just the right amount of bubbles and lotion. It had startled her only once, as she lay back, by speaking to her directly and asking if she wanted the hot water topping up. Apart from the occasional surprise like that, she could see herself getting quite accustomed to the automated facilities here.

  The Doctor wasn’t half so imp
ressed. ‘Mechanical chicanery! Cheap and nasty gee-gaws! That’s all they are. Tiermann’s no genius. He’s just showing off with his tacky robots.’

  One of Martha’s helpers swung her slim fibre-glass body round and seemed to give the Doctor a nasty stare. Then she and her companion turned and swept out of the bedroom, apparently in high dudgeon.

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  ‘Now you’ve upset them,’ said Martha. Her whole body was tingling with sheer luxurious delight. She felt as if she had indeed been pampered from top to toe and, what was more, she was looking forward to a civilised dinner.

  ‘I’m just a bit wound up,’ he sighed.

  ‘By Tiermann?’

  ‘I hate people putting on airs like that,’ the Doctor said. ‘I don’t like his pomposity and his hubris and his. . . cockiness. Even when he knows everything here in this valley. . . the Dreamhome, the woods and everything, it’s all going to be sucked up and stripped away, right into the waiting maw of the Voracious Craw. Hey, that rhymes.’

  ‘He’s a strange one, all right,’ Martha said. ‘But I think, underneath all the showing off, he’s pretty conflicted.’

  ‘I should cocoa,’ said the Doctor, coming to examine his own tousled reflection in the mirror.

  ‘It’ll be hard for him, leaving here,’ said Martha. ‘Supposedly he’s put his whole life into creating this environment. Surely he won’t give all that up, without a fight?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no fighting when it comes to the Voracious Craw,’ the Doctor told her. ‘It’s a case of run away very quickly indeed, or be sucked up into the sky with everything else animal, vegetable and mineral, and be turned into the biggest and nastiest smoothie in the world. Tiermann’s not daft. He knows he has to go. We all have to go.’

  The Doctor grinned at her and turned to lead the way out of their sumptuous suite of rooms. His words had sent a chill through Martha, however, as he brought home the danger that they were all in, just by staying here till the last moment. She thought that the Doctor was putting them both at risk, just as Tiermann was his family. The TARDIS

  was still back there, somewhere, in the dark heart of the frozen wilderness. Shouldn’t they be setting about retrieving it?

  But Martha took a deep, calming breath and decided that the Doctor probably knew best. She tested out walking in her new, exquisite shoes, and turned to follow her friend in to dinner.

  25

  Tiermann’s wife was called Amanda, and the first impression that the Doctor and Martha had of her was that she was very beautiful, but very quiet and demure.

  ‘Small wonder,’ the Doctor whispered, ‘the way her old man keeps rabbiting on.’

  Martha shushed him, as the canapé robot slid by, delectable nibbles arranged on his flattened head.

  But it was quite true about Tiermann. He kept pacing up and down, spouting off about the wonders of the Dreamhome and his ubiquitous Servo-furnishings. As he stood by the fireplace, holding forth about everything he had invented, Martha could sense the Doctor’s hackles rising as his irritation mounted.

  Now Tiermann was bragging about the ship that had brought them to this world, and that would bear them safely away. ‘I designed it myself, so many years ago. And its design still has never been surpassed.

  Here we are a few parsecs from Station Antelope Slash Nitelite, and that is where we will make our way to. They’ll be very glad to see us and our miraculous craft, I am sure.’

  Amanda Tiermann sat in a high-necked dress with flowing sleeves, cradling a tall glass filled to the brim with a foaming blue concoction.

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  She smiled gently at Tiermann’s braggardly statements and occasional jokes, but she volunteered few comments of her own. On being intro-duced to the Doctor and Martha she had simply said that she was delighted, and that they had had very few guests at Dreamhome over the years. Her eyes were a brilliant emerald, Martha noted, and there was a glint in them of. . . what? She wondered. Apology? Fear?

  Pleading? Something, at any rate, that Amanda could not express in front of her swaggering husband.

  Solin, too, was quiet this evening. He was in a dark green suit and he seemed wary and watchful of his father.

  ‘I’m just not convinced that you’ve made adequate plans for your escape, y’know,’ said the Doctor airily. Martha saw Solin flinch at the way the Doctor interrupted his father’s flow.

  ‘Oh, really, Doctor?’ purred Tiermann. He waved the canapé robot away from him crossly.

  ‘Leaving it till the last minute. And, from what I’ve seen, you lot haven’t done any packing yet or anything. I know some worlds, when they’ve had wind of the Craw on the way, they’ve upped and fled with weeks to spare.’

  Tiermann shrugged. ‘I don’t like unnecessary panic. And there is no need for panic, Doctor.’ He was growing agitated. ‘It was this kind of niggling that I became a recluse to avoid. . . I got out of the rat race in order to prevent contact with. . . ’

  ‘People like me?’ grinned the Doctor.

  ‘People who get worked up. Who never sit long enough in one place to really think about things. . . about their place in this world. . . ’

  ‘You’re a cool customer, Tiermann,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ll give you that.’

  Tiermann took it as a compliment. Then his wife startled them all by speaking up: ‘Ernest likes everything to be very civilised. He would hate to make an undignified exit from this planet which has been our home for so long.’

  The Doctor studied her pale, perfect face. ‘Well, yes. I can imagine.

  And it’ll be a wrench, won’t it? Zooming off to some manky old space port. Finding digs on Antelope Slash Nitelite for a bit. You’re gonna 28

  be out of pocket when the Craw gobbles this place up, aren’t you?’

  ‘We’ll hardly be paupers, Doctor,’ Tiermann snapped. Then a tall, butler-like robot came to the drawing room door, and bid them all come through for dinner.

  Martha was hardly aware of what they ate, as the courses came and went in the tense dining room. She sipped carefully at a pale orange soup, and picked at a delicate fish in creamy sauce and she could hardly taste a thing. She was on tenterhooks, knowing that some almighty row was brewing between the Doctor and Tiermann.

  She could feel it crackling on the air: palpable as the approach of the deadly Craw itself.

  The Doctor almost seemed to be baiting their host. ‘Ah, you can have too much luxury and ease, is the way I see it,’ he was saying, sitting back in his chair. ‘You lot, here, with all your gizmos and gadgets and servants doing everything, well, you don’t really have to struggle or try to do anything for yourselves, do you? You can’t have any zest or energy or relish in anything, can you?’

  Tiermann glared back at him. His wife looked uneasy. There was a faceless robot sitting right next to Amanda and everyone had been too polite to draw attention to it. But Martha thought it was downright weird that, whenever Amanda leaned forward to take a mouthful of food or a drink or something, the robot next to her nipped in first and consumed it for her. Amanda didn’t seem to mind at all. She behaved as if this was perfectly normal.

  ‘You, Doctor, don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Tiermann said.

  ‘I think perhaps you envy us our lives here in the Dreamhome. Perhaps you’ve never known luxury and peace of mind.’

  ‘Ha!’ cried the Doctor. ‘I’ve known enough to know that the former certainly doesn’t lead to the latter. I think you’re just burying your heads in the sand here. That’s what you’ve been doing all these years.

  Hiding from the cosmos. Hoping it’ll go away. Here in your perfectly tasteful paradise.’

  There’s nothing wrong with good taste,’ Tiermann said.

  ‘But everything’s so bland!’ the Doctor burst out. This place is so tasteful, it’s painful! Everything’s beige and cream! There’s nothing 29

  out of place! Everything’s trying so hard to be inoffensive and easy on the eye! Even the food we’re eating. . . It’s tastel
ess! Boring!’ He shoved his plate away with a clatter and there was an embarrassed pause. ‘Um,’ said the Doctor. ‘That was a bit impolite, I suppose.’

  Amanda smiled at him. ‘Never mind, Doctor. . . ’ Tiermann interrupted then, taking great offence at the Doctor’s words. ‘You can say what you want about my aesthetic tastes, Doctor. That’s hardly going to hurt my feelings. But it does hurt me that you think I would gamble with the safety of my family.’

  As their discussion went on and became ever more heated, Solin motioned to Martha. He whispered that maybe there was time, before dessert, to pop out onto the veranda for some cool air.

  Outside there was a slight, ruffly breeze. Martha was amazed that there could be any such thing, under the crackling force-shield dome that covered Dreamhome. But the stars were out and the air was cool, and the whole place gave the illusion that it was a gorgeous, perfect summer night. Even though she knew that, just beyond those trees, a hellish midwinter reigned supreme.

  She sipped at her drink and smiled at Solin as he joined her, sitting on the concrete balcony.

  ‘My father gets quite upset if he feels our way of life is being criti-cised.’

  ‘The Doctor knows how to push people’s buttons,’ Martha admitted.

  ‘And Father is touchy, too, because all this is coming to an end: He has to face the busy universe again. He dreads it. He feels like the Dreamhome experiment has failed, in a way.’

  A slim robot slid out onto the veranda to stand by them. It held out a packet of cigarettes and, before Martha could protest that she never smoked, the machine had lit two and started smoking both.

  ‘They really do everything for you, don’t they?’

  Solin grinned. ‘It’s a filthy habit.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Martha. ‘But your poor mother. Does she never eat anything?’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘And only when she’s alone. Mother is very shy.’

  30

  ‘What about you, Solin?’ Martha asked. She watched him get up and wander away. He looked very pale and almost sickly in the stark moonlight. ‘Haven’t you been very lonely, growing up here with no one else your own age?’