Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter One: Important And Exciting Galactic History. Do Not Skip.

  Chapter Two: Sandwiches and Outrage

  Chapter Three: An International Incident

  Chapter Four: Finally, Killer Robots

  Chapter Five: Unforgivable Thefts from a Hairdresser

  Chapter Six: Further Important and Exciting Galactic History. Again, Do Not Skip.

  Chapter Seven: More on the Galaxy Reeling

  Chapter Eight: So Much for Universal Peace

  Chapter Nine: Running on Imagination

  Chapter Ten: Grim Conclusion in Nowhere

  Chapter Eleven: The Private Life of the Busiest Man in the Universe

  Chapter Twelve: Damp Resentment of a Planet

  Chapter Thirteen: Why Fish Don’t Need Mortgages

  Chapter Fourteen: The Perfect Planet

  Chapter Fifteen: The Boring Test

  Chapter Sixteen: Contains Nice Biscuits

  Chapter Seventeen: Hit for Six

  Chapter Eighteen: Regrettable Acts Between the Swimming Pool and the Car Park

  Part Two

  Chapter Nineteen: From A to Not to Be

  Chapter Twenty: A Short History of the Rebellion on Krikkit

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Marriage of Inconvenience

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Parliament of Fools

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Birth of a Notion

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Brownian Study

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Interruptions to a Great Mind

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Further Interruptions to a Great Mind

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Cell Division

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Caught in a Really Big Lie

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Sharp-Sighted Watchmaker

  Chapter Thirty: God Has a Plan-B

  Chapter Thirty-One: The First Eleven

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Iron Lady

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Danger into Escape

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Saving the Universe

  Chapter Thirty-Five: This Just in from the Universal Conquest

  Chapter Thirty-Six: All Dogs Go to Heaven

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Turning It Off and then On Again

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: All Heavens Go to the Dogs

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Everyone Should Have a Spare God

  Chapter Forty: The Great Knot

  Chapter Forty-One: The Most Important Man in the Universe

  Chapter Forty-Two: The Meaning of Life

  Appendix 1: Life, the Universe and Photocopying

  Appendix 2: Douglas Adams’s Original Treatment

  Appendix 3: The Krikkitmen – Sarah Jane Smith Version (An Introduction)

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  The lost DOCTOR WHO adventure by Douglas Adams, novelised by James Goss from recently discovered archive material.

  The Doctor promised Romana the end of the universe, so she’s less than impressed when what she gets is a cricket match. Even worse, the award ceremony is interrupted by eleven figures in white uniforms and peaked skull helmets, wielding bat-shaped weapons that fire lethal bolts of light into the screaming crowd. The Krikkitmen are back.

  Millions of years ago, the people of Krikkit learned they were not alone in the universe, and promptly launched a crusade to wipe out all other life-forms. After a long and bloody conflict, the Time Lords imprisoned Krikkit within an envelope of Slow Time, a prison that could only be opened with the Wicket Gate key, a device that resembles – to human eyes, at least – an oversized set of cricket stumps.

  The Doctor and Romana are now tugged into a pan-galactic conga with fate as they rush to stop the Krikkitmen gaining all five pieces of the key. If they fail, the entire cosmos faces a fiery retribution that will leave nothing but ashes…

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge in 1952, and was educated at Brentwood School, Essex, and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he read English. As well as writing all the different and conflicting versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he has been responsible for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and, with John Lloyd, The Meaning of Liff. In 1978–9, he worked as Script Editor on Doctor Who. He wrote three scripts for the programme – ‘The Pirate Planet’, ‘City of Death’ [under the name David Agnew] and ‘Shada’. Douglas died in May 2001.

  James Goss is the author of the novelisation of Douglas Adams’ City of Death and The Pirate Planet, as well as several other Doctor Who books. While at the BBC James produced an adaptation of Shada, an unfinished Douglas Adams Doctor Who story, and Dirk is his award-winning stage adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. He won Best Audiobook 2010 for Dead Air and his books Dead of Winter and First Born were both nominated for the 2012 British Fantasy Society Awards. His novel Haterz has been optioned as a movie.

  INTRODUCTION

  BY DOUGLAS ADAMS

  ‘Without logic there is no surprise and no joy.’

  [From a presentation for the film of The Krikkitmen]

  1) Science fiction in films

  It is a question of getting the angle right. It has been tried many times unsuccessfully because the concepts are usually Earthbound and based on re-workings of the 1984 vision of the future. c.f. Logan’s Run, Soylent Green etc.

  This is probably because the average non sci-fi reading member of the public probably sees sci-fi as being gloomy extrapolations of present tendencies towards totalitarianism.

  Verdict: Boring. Even I, as a Science Fiction fan did not go to see them.

  2) The Apollo Space program rather took the carpet out from under the feet of the old space opera type of film which used to pay no lip service at all to what we do actually know about Space and Space travel.

  Science Fiction must not ignore what we already know. It can go way beyond it on fantastic flights of fancy, but the structure of the fantastic must be logical. And this is a lot of the beauty of Science Fiction – the wild fantasies that can be created from imaginatively logical extrapolations of what we already know.

  For instance – it is completely unacceptable in modern sci-fi to talk of spaceships travelling faster than light, because Einstein must be taken into account. However, theories of hyperspace which allow instantaneous transposition are acceptable. In other words, current knowledge can be argued against, but not thrown out of the window.

  Again – Black Holes, a marvellous area for fantasy, but it must be informed fantasy. Anything a writer invents about Black Holes must take into account the arguments put forward by the theorists.

  A Science Fiction audience … wants to make that suspension of disbelief, and you must allow him to do that by not insulting his intelligence. However, this does not in any way preclude the adventure romp like Doctor Who, Harry Harrison, etc., which is one of the brightest and best areas of sci-fi because it can be so outrageous in its fantasy. But the fun and the skill of it is the maintenance of the inner logic.

  All the best wild ideas in surreal comedy, science fiction, spy thrillers, etc., adhere to a strict inner logic. Without logic there is no surprise and no joy.

  3) One is concerned a great deal with problems and their solutions. The trick is to find your solution within the framework of the logic you have constructed. In many ways the James Bond films illustrate some of the points excellently, and any attempts to make Doctor Who films should be done very much in the light of what the Bond films have achi
eved in the outrageously structured.

  I suppose this is why I’ve always mistrusted the term Science Fantasy as opposed to Science Fiction because it suggests the lack of logical construction.

  Douglas Adams

  [From the initial presentation for The Krikkitmen, c.1976fn1]

  PART ONE

  ‘Aggers, for goodness’ sake stop it. He hit a four over the wicket keeper’s head and he was out for nine.’

  Brian Johnston, 1991

  What are the Ashes?

  (A) What England have

  (B) What Australia want

  (C) What Granny is.

  Sign on a van, 2016

  CHAPTER ONE

  IMPORTANT AND EXCITING GALACTIC HISTORY. DO NOT SKIP.

  Before Time began, a lot of things happened that hardly bear talking about.

  This story starts a little later than that. It is based in this Galaxy, the one we all know and love, with its millions of suns, its strange and wonderful planets, its eerie moons, its asteroids, its comets, its gas clouds and dust clouds and its immensity of coldness and darkness.

  It affects, however, the Universe.

  Just occasionally it should be remembered that this Galaxy is just one of infinite millions, but then it should be forgotten again, because it’s hard for the mind to stagger around with that kind of knowledge in it.

  Since this Galaxy began, vast civilisations have risen and fallen, risen and fallen, risen and fallen so often that it’s quite tempting to think that life in the Galaxy must be:

  a) something akin to seasick – space sick, time sick, history sick or some such thing

  and

  b) stupid.

  When you get down to street level, however, you realise that the phrase ‘life in the Galaxy’ is pretty meaningless, since it describes billions of separate short-lived beings all of whom have for some vicious reason been programmed to be incapable of learning from each other’s mistakes.

  Here is a very simple example, at street level.

  The street is a cold but busy one in a city called New York on a planet that hardly anybody has heard of.

  A man is walking along it, looking up at the stars, wondering, perhaps, just how many of them there are. It is a purely local problem. What happens to him has happened before to others and will happen again. He walks past a site where an extremely tall building is being put up in the place of another extremely tall building which has been pulled down. (An explanation of why this happens would only confuse matters at this point.)

  As he passes, a small tool falls from high up in the scaffolding with which the building is surrounded and buries itself snugly into the man’s skull. This has the effect of bringing his life, with all its memories, its loves, its hard-won battles, its instructive defeats, its rewards, its disappointments – in short, his entire experience – to an abrupt end. The last thing the man sees before his personal light is shut off is a sign on the scaffolding that says: ‘We Apologise for the Inconvenience.’

  From across the street, a woman – the man’s mate – sees this happen. Failing to learn from the incident that the Universe in general and New York in particular is a randomly dangerous place, she runs pointlessly to his aid and has her own life, with all its experiences, brought to an end by a yellow taxicab, whose driver would never apologise for anything. The cab driver was only there at that point because he was completely lost in one of the most rationally laid-out cities on the Earth, but that, again, is another purely local problem.

  This story is about a much, much larger problem, but strangely enough it does come to involve this otherwise harmless planet in rather curious ways, and explain the reason why no one likes it.

  It also involves a large number of mistakes. The first, and worst, mistake, was made during the height of the very first major civilisation to rise and fall in this Galaxy. The mistake lay in thinking that you can solve anything with potatoes.

  There was a race of people called the Alovians, who were insanely aggressive. They fought their enemies (i.e. everybody else) and they fought each other. The best way of dealing with an Alovian was to leave him in a room on his own because sooner or later he would beat himself up.

  As their level of what they liked to call civilisation increased, so, for the sake of sheer survival, they had to find ways of curbing and sublimating their mad aggression. Each war they had did greater and greater damage, and, before too long, they were on the brink of self-destruction. History says it’s a great pity they didn’t just go straight ahead with it.

  Eventually they saw that this was something they were going to have to do something about, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone who had to carry a weapon as part of his normal work (policemen, security guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had to spend at least forty minutes a day punching a sack of potatoes in order to work off their surplus aggression. (Interestingly, they would not be the only race to try out this solution to warmongering. Indeed, people thought that this was what potatoes were for, until the surprising invention of the deep-fat fryer.) For a while the potato solution for world peace worked fine until an Alovian decided that it would be much more efficient and less time consuming if they just shot the potatoes instead. This led to a renewed enthusiasm for shooting all sorts of things and they all got very excited at the prospect of their first major war for years.

  Skipping a century or two here, we next come across the Alovians as a major interstellar power sweeping through the Galaxy and ravaging everything they could lay their hands on and shooting anything they couldn’t. Since this behaviour was going down so badly with the rest of the Galaxy, they decided that, in order to protect themselves they needed a very special weapon – an Ultimate Weapon.

  How Ultimate is Ultimate?

  They built a computer to find out what could be done, and it came up with a perfectly staggering answer.

  The computer was called Hactar. It began as a large black moon which orbited the planet of Alovia, and it did all its thinking in space. It was of a special organic design, like a natural brain, in that every cellular particle of it carried the pattern of the whole within it. This allowed it to think more imaginatively.

  In answer to the question about an Ultimate Weapon, it said that the Universe could be brought to a premature end, and was this ultimate enough?

  At this news, there was dancing in the streets of Alovia, street parties, fetes, carnivals of a particularly nasty kind and a wild sense of having arrived somewhere.

  They sent out a message across the whole Galaxy to the effect that they, the Alovians, were now in a position to destroy the entire Universe, and that if anybody had anything they wanted to quarrel about they’d be happy to hear from them.

  To add bite to this message, they described how the Ultimate Weapon that Hactar had designed for them worked. It was a very, very small bomb. In fact it was simply a junction box in hyperspace which would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously. This would convert the entire Universe into one gigantic hyperspatial supernova and, unless the whole thing started up all over again in another and better dimension, that would be that.

  That was how it worked, except that, when it came to it, it didn’t.

  The Alovian fingers which hovered over the button that would set the bomb off were very itchy, and eventually of course somebody somewhere in the Galaxy said or did something which got them really riled, and left them, they were afraid, with absolutely no alternative but to detonate the Supernova Bomb. To themselves they said, ‘What’s the point of having a thing if you don’t use it?’

  The button was pressed, the bomb fizzed and popped and then just fell apart in such a way as to suggest that it had been rather badly made.

  For a moment, the loudest noise heard anywhere in the Universe was that of a computer clearing its throat.

  Hactar spoke.

  Hactar said that what with one thing and another it had been thinking about t
his Ultimate Weapon business and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it off, and it had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober reflection, feel that —

  That was as far as Hactar got before the Alovian missiles got him straight between his major synapses and the huge black moon computer was reduced to radioactive smithereens.

  It was not a great deal later than this that the Alovians managed to blow themselves up as well, to the great relief of the rest of the Galaxy.

  The way in which they blew themselves up is very interesting and instructive, and is a mistake that no one has yet learnt from.

  As a purely sensible and practical measure, they had entirely surrounded their planet with thermonuclear weapons. This was for safety, and to stop anyone on the planet from annoying anybody else on the planet, because of what that could lead to. It was called ‘the nuclear umbrella’. It made it difficult to see the sun because the sky coverage was so thick, but that didn’t matter because they had plenty of energy-generating stations on the planet providing heat and light. This, it must be emphasised, was all a perfectly rational and controlled situation, and any reasonable Alovian could have explained to you over breakfast why it was necessary, without looking up from his newspaper.

  It goes without saying of course, that the entire system was riddled with every conceivable safeguard, the greatest safeguard of all being the sure knowledge that the entire arsenal of the other side would be launched automatically if you so much as popped a toy balloon. (That’s not quite true. There were computers which knew what a toy balloon popping sounded like and would discount that. There were other computers that knew what a flock of geese looked like and wouldn’t be alarmed by that.)

  Unfortunately there was also a telephone company computer that didn’t know what to do with someone’s change of address card and panicked.

  So much for the accepted history. As we will eventually find out, much of what you have just read is wrong. If you think that you have just wasted your time, then it is to be hoped that, like the rest of existence, you fail to learn from your mistakes.