Babysitter of the Daleks, part 4
Chapter 14
Dawn
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Dear Mom,
By the time you read this, I will be in California. I certainly will if you forget where you put the mail and leave it in the cat’s litter box again. It’s nothing personal, I was just having trouble thinking straight. Say goodbye to Mary Anne for me! I don’t care about anyone else.
Love,
Dawn
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I leaned against the dirt wall of the secret passage. It was the only place in my house that felt safe, for some reason. I could almost think clearly there.
Last year, my parents had gotten divorced. I remembered. It wasn’t surprising. My mom is a scatterbrain and my dad’s not. I don’t mean to say that the divorce was her fault. But that’s what happened. I know it was last year, because I was in the seventh grade and now I’m in eighth. We moved to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, and I met my best friends… I mean, I hate most of them, but we’re still friends. It’s not their fault they’ve never been anywhere civilized… Stacey pretends to be so sophisticated but she can’t imagine what it’s like in California. You can buy Tofu sticks right on the beach there, like decent people do.
That was a year ago. Then Mary Anne and I found out about our parents being high school sweethearts. We set them up together. That was in the winter, when it was so cold I could barely stand it! I didn’t know if it would ever get to be summer again. Then, my brother moved back to California. It was Spring by then. I was helping with the beauty pageant. Mr. Spier and my mom got married… Mary Anne moved into my house… then, the next year…
I felt a buzzing noise in my head. I’d felt it upstairs, too, but it was quieter down here. I thought I was going crazy! Maybe I’d eaten some meat by mistake yesterday. (My mother had made hot dogs and tofu pups for dinner, and maybe I’d gotten a hot dog by mistake.) Everyone in California knows that in addition to acne, obesity and leprosy, eating junk food can cause dementia. That must be what was happening! I hadn’t eaten any meat for two years, since around the time of my mom’s wedding-
There was the buzzing again. My head ached. I held it against the cool dirt. Something was seriously wrong. If only I could get my mind together long enough to get to the airport, maybe I could-
Buzz! Went my brain. What had I been thinking? Why was I holding a suitcase?
Suddenly, the door to the secret passage swung open with a creak. The Doctor and Claudia’s sister Janine were standing there. (Janine looked really excited, for some reason.)
“Dawn!” the Doctor said in his cheerful voice. It made my head ache more. I must have eaten more than one hot dog to be feeling this sick! “Just who I wanted to see! Where are you going?”
I looked down at the suitcase in my hand. “I… I don’t know,” I said. I must have sounded as stupid as Claudia! I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
The Doctor came down the stairs to me, looking serious. “I was afraid of this,” he said. He started to shine his funny screwdriver around-the light made me even sicker. “It’s getting worse… the time vortex has been disrupted. The whole illusion of normalcy is collapsing… everyone’s feeling it. Things are going to get even stranger from now on.”
“What could have initiated such a disruption?” Janine asked.
“Me, of course! I’ve spoiled everything. I tend to do that. Sorry.”
“You’re hurting my head,” I said. I leaned harder on the wall-something about it made me feel steadier. I could almost remember why I’d gone down here in the first place… almost.
“Dawn!” the Doctor shone his flashlight on me. It hurt, but it made my head feel clearer.
“I’m leaving!” I shouted.
“That’s right,” the Doctor said, nodding. “You’re leaving. Try to remember. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to California!” I said. “I borrowed my mom’s credit card… okay, I stole it. She won’t mind. Anyway, I bought a ticket and I’m going back to California. Things are getting too weird here!”
The Doctor nodded. “Good girl. Well, not about the stealing… anyway, you came down here for a reason, yes? What was it?”
I nodded, moving away from the wall a little. “It’s so hard to think… down here I can almost feel normal.”
“Why?” the Doctor stepped past me, tapping his chin with the screwdriver. “Why, why? That’s the question… something funny about this place. Just about… there.” He shone the green light on a patch of the wall. Letters or numbers I didn’t recognize appeared in blue.
The Doctor’s face lit up. “Eye of the storm, eh? Probably deliberate. And clever. So whoever’s doing this can come here and not be sucked into it all. Living here might get to her eventually; she’d start to believe the illusion. We’re close, very close.” The Doctor tapped a few of the numbers with his finger, as if they were a keypad. He tilted his head, waited, and then tapped several more.
“Doctor?” said Janine. “What are you trying to accomplish?”
The Doctor glanced up. “No idea,” he said. “Here’s what I need you to do. Take Dawn to the airport. Take the car and leave. Got it?”
“What should I do upon my return?” Janine asked.
“Don’t return,” said The Doctor, staring at the funny letters. “No one should return. This is serious. More serious than I thought. Just get out of here. Get out of state if you can!”
“Am I in danger of amnesia like hers?” asked Janine. “If so, perhaps I should not attempt to operate a motorized vehicle.”
“No, no, you’re fine… it’s trying to call her back.” The Doctor gestured to me with his head, still studying the numbers. “She’s not from Stoneybrook anymore, she got away. It’s trying to correct the time vortex by erasing her existence… she’ll be out of danger as soon as you get away.”
“But Doctor,” I said, desperately trying to think. “You’re not from Stoneybrook either!”
“That’s right,” said the Doctor solemnly, looking up at me again. “But I’m not human either. Now run for your life!”
I was about to answer, when Janine grabbed me by the arm and pulled me upstairs into my bedroom.
“Are you really going to help me run away?” I asked.
“If that is what the Doctor suggests,” Janine said. “His manner indicated extreme urgency. We had better comply.”
“You’re so weird,” I said, rolling my eyes. I really could have used that ride to the airport, but Janine was getting on my nerves. Everyone in this town was weird! Not like California, where we sit on the beach bleaching our hair and eating bean sprouts all day like civilized people. I looked down at my suitcase. “What am I doing here again? Don’t I have school?”
“It is Christmas Break,” said Janine. “That is why you are in Stoneybrook. But you are from California. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I’m from California!” I said. “That’s my… thing. Everyone has a thing. I’m from California, Stacey’s diabetic, Claudia’s an artist… what were we talking about again?”
“I am taking you to the airport,” said Janine firmly. “When does your aircraft depart?”
“Ah… I don’t remember…”
“You will reason more efficiently when we get there, if the Doctor is correct,” said Janine. “Our conveyance is in the driveway.”
“I can’t even understand what you’re saying!” I cried, stomping my feet like a two-year-old. “Why can’t you just talk like a normal person? Do you think you sound smart when you do that? You sound like some kind of robot!”
Janine looked like she didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have anything else to say either, so I just stood there.
Just then the doorbell rang!
Chapter 15
Janine
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Dear Yusuke (GundamLover54@aol),
It has come to my attention that I now cannot see you as the most brilliant man on Earth. I have had the pleasure of meeting a man who is most intriguing. He calls himself “The Doctor” and while I cannot be certain that he is actually a doctor, I can say that he is quite smart. His IQ must be much higher than mine and I believe he might very well be an alien.
I know it pains you to read that as it does for me to write it, but it is the only way I can explain his strange knowledge.
Chat soon,
Janine (SailorMercurcy88)
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As I led Claudia’s friend Dawn toward the front entrance to her home, the bell upon the outside of the home rang. We both looked at each other in utmost confusion and were not sure if we should open the door. I called out as to the identity of our visitor, but was only met with the door suddenly bursting into many tiny, wooden particles.
We jumped back, the suitcase swinging from Dawn’s hands and the forward momentum of it causing her to drop it. As the dust from the debris blew up around us as a great fog cloud, we saw a squat shadow coming toward us. It cleared its way through the fog, revealing that it was one of the mechanical extraterrestrials that had exploded my home.
“WE ARE LOOKING FOR THE ONE CALLED STA-CEY. GIVE HER TO US OR YOU WILL BE EXTERMINATED!”
I was frightened, but I felt that in these types of tense scenarios it was best to stay quite stoic. It has the effect of calming others around you and is thus quite effective in proceeding through such events. The machine came closer to us and waved its plunger-like object as well as the one that was akin to a potato peeler at us. I was about to throw a projectile at it, but I heard the sound of loafers coming from behind us.
“Well, so you’ve returned have you?” the Doctor’s voice said.
“GIVE US STA-CEY! SHE HAS TAKEN WHAT DOES NOT BELONG TO HER! WHERE IS STA-CEY?” the machine yelled.
The Doctor stepped up next to us with his hands in his pockets. His hair had begun to flop down before his eyes as the sweat caused it to sag with moisture. We had been moving quite fast for quite some time and I had only now noticed the effects of our aerobic activities. This was a most drastic situation indeed, but I knew that the Doctor would prevail. Something told me that this would be the case though I did not have any concrete evidence to support the hypothesis.
“We’re on the case,” he said, looking at us with quite a sly smile. “We’re detectives. You, on the other hand, are merely junk parts polished to look like real Daleks. Even if we do tell you where Stacey is, you won’t get to her in time.”
“SHE HAS STOLEN OUR TECHNOLOGY, SHE MUST BE EXTERMINATED.”
The Doctor shook his head and stepped forward again, but then swiveled and went into the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to get a food article from it, though I had no idea what could possess him to believe he was in need of nourishment at this moment. When he shut the door I could see that he had some sort of white, gelatinous cube between his thumb and index finger. As he returned, he held it out before him and proceeded to stand in front of both Dawn and I.
“What’s going on? Why is that thing back!” Dawn said rather loudly.
“Your friend Stacey is not who she says she is. Not unlike myself, she is an alien. Though whereas I am a charming, lovely alien in a bow tie,” he paused there to turn and smile at us, “she is a greedy, petty alien. She has taken on the form of a human in order to come here to Earth.”
He then proceeded to wave the cube around in front of the machine-alien. Now that I could see it in a clearer manner I noticed that it was nothing but a cube of tofu. The Schafers are a vegetarian family so it only stood to reason they would have such food. Though these aliens before us started to back away for some strange reason.
“And this is a bomb. A bomb that you lot cannot withstand because you’re shoddy copies sent here by mistake, by Stacey’s own race,” the Doctor said as the aliens focused on the tofu.
“But, Doctor, if that is to be the case then how are these lifeforms able to survive here now?” I queried.
He gave me a sidelong glance. “Because ‘Stacey’ wasn’t able to modify the device that she stole. She was too weak when she arrived and then got too wrapped up in this life she created for herself,” he said as the aliens fidgeted- as much as they could anyway.
“Babysitting, trips, school, boys,” he said, because Dawn huffed a bit. “All of that distracted her. She figured if she kept the device she had stolen confined to a small area that the Daleks wouldn’t notice. They couldn’t sense that there was a timelock in only one, smallish Connecticut town.”
I tapped my chin with my finger, seeing all the pieces of this puzzle fall into place. Then I recalled Stacey’s affliction. She was a diabetic which meant that she had to be human! I could not imagine an alien could have diabetes. Though Dawn spoke up before I could.
“Stacey isn’t smart enough for that. I mean, she ended up in the hospital because she ate chocolate for a week and had a super-huge diabetes attack,” Dawn said, rolling her eyes.
“Aha! The diabetes! Yes, that isn’t at all diabetes. Well, sort of. Her alien body can’t process sugar from this planet. She merely got lucky that diabetes is a disease here on Earth that she could use as a cover,” the Doctor said with a smug look.
I nodded in agreement as it was a highly logical solution. Though I knew we had to quickly vacate the premises. These aliens were quite hostile and the Doctor was adamant that Dawn had to leave.
“But if you’re telling the truth, then why did Stacey come here at all?” Dawn asked in quite an annoyed fashion.
“She was escaping her planet. Quite an oppressive one at that. Once she escaped she charted a course for any planet that was far enough away... She took their timelock device knowing that she’d want to preserve herself to live years she had lost on her home planet,” the Doctor paused as he realized he was no longer holding the tofu up all the way. “Right, yes, bomb. Going to go off you know. In about... five... ten... eleven... minutes. Something like that.”
“ENOUGH OF THIS TALK. THAT IS NOT A BOMB. THAT IS EARTH FOOD-STUFFS. TELL US WHERE STA-CEY IS OR WE WILL EXTERMINATE ALL WHO RESIDE ON THIS PLANET.”
The Doctor’s face changed. He looked quite sullen now, knowing that it was not merely an idle threat. He dropped the tofu and spread his arms out before us. Then I began to wonder something of my own. Perhaps my hypothesis was correct, but I had to find out.
“Doctor, did these aliens destroy my residence in search of Stacey, figuring that if she was on the premises that they would destroy her with the house?” I asked softly.
The Doctor nodded, though shushed me. He looked squarely at the mechanical aliens. “Go left at the corner, then right at the intersection. Keep going straight, then left. A second intersection will be there, but keep going straight. Are you listening?”
“YES, WE ARE LISTENING. NOW YOU ARE USELESS TO US AND WILL BE EXTERMINATED,” the alien hollered.
It lifted what I could only assume was the gun with which it had obliterated the door. The Doctor pushed Dawn and I into the kitchen and ran after us. A loud sound of a laser shooting was echoing behind us along with the sound of the destruction of a wall. We merely ran through the kitchen and into the hallway which lead toward the back door. Never had I thought that I would be fleeing from aliens with another self-confessed alien with quite the British accent and mannerisms. It was quite exciting though it was also very frightening.
“Quickly, the back door!” the Doctor yelled out as he threw it open and shoved Dawn out.
She yelped as she all but tumbled out, though I caught her before she fell. I grabbed her hand and quickly bade the house goodbye with the Doctor right behind us. He was running backward as he aimed the item he called a Sonic Screwdriver at the door. Though as he turned back to run with us there was another explosion.
“I’d better get to Stacey’s before they do. Let’s hope they take those bad directions first,” he said as we looked over our shoulders.
Chapter 16
Stacey
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Dear Blargoff,
I cannot tell you how that man can make one feel so... human. I’m sure he could have helped you as well.
Merry Christmas, too. It’s an Earth holiday. Something about gifts from an overweight religious person. I don’t get it, but it’s pretty.
Yours,
Stacey
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I hid in the wooded area around the corner from my house until I saw Jessi running past, probably on her way to get help. That, or maybe on her way to her ballet class.
I knew I needed to get away from here, but running out of my house like that had been a mistake. There were... things I needed.
I attempted to straighten out my hair. Crouching down in the bushes hadn't done wonders for my perm. If I wasn't careful, I'd emerge looking like Jane of the Jungle!
I peered up and down the street from behind the thicket of brambles. It looked like the coast was clear. Cautiously, I squeezed myself up against the fence dividing the wild area from the property next door, and edged along it, avoiding the prickly branches that tried to clutch at my outfit. I was was just wearing ordinary pale blue Levis, but my blouse was a lovely, pale pink, floaty one, with stylised floral patterns embroidered along the sleeves. I had left it unbuttoned at the top, just enough that if a cute guy who was a little taller than me glanced down, he would be able to see the top of my dark pink lacy bra! It was a bit naughty, and I wasn't half freezing out in the snow, but it was worth it! I looked stunning.
My perilous sidle along the fence complete, I stepped out onto the sidewalk. Brushing myself down (there were a few leaves caught on my clothing), I started back towards my house.
“Stacey? Is that you?”
I almost jumped out of my skin! But spinning around, I saw that it was only Charlotte Johanssen, standing a little way up the street. She is- was, I corrected myself- my favourite babysitting charge in Stoneybrook. We're very close. Sometimes, because we're both only children, lonely for siblings, we even pretend to be sisters.
“Hey, Char!” I smiled. “What are you doing out on your own?”
“I'm just walking over to Becca's house!” she replied. “Anyway, see you later!”
“See you,” I called after her, as she waved and ran off in the opposite direction.
I drew a deep breath as I approached my front door. Seeing Charlotte had been a bit of a blow. But I couldn't allow myself the luxury of dwelling on it. I had to compose myself and get on with what was necessary.
Inside my house, the first thing I did was drag Mallory's still unconscious form into the cupboard under the stairs and slide the lock across.
That accomplished, I ran up the stairs to my room. I needed my insulin with me when I left.
My insulin, and the key.
I'd kept it hidden, sellotaped to the bottom on my dressing table, ready for when I needed it. I knelt, and brushed my hand frantically around. Where was it?
“Looking for this?”
For the second time in scarcely ten minutes, I spun around, my heart pounding. It was that man, the Doctor! He was holding up a small silver rectangle, roughly the dimensions of a credit card, with holes punched in a seemingly random pattern across its surface, and a series of little green lights blinking along one edge.
“Give it me!” I cried, lunging for him.
He easily stepped out of the way.
“I don't think so,” he said, shaking his head.
“Give it to me, now!” I almost sobbed, leaping again.
“No.”
Suddenly, he was right up in front of me, one hand still holding my key up high, the other levelled straight at my face, that screwdriver of his near blinding me with its pulsing blue light.
I threw my arm up to shield my eyes... only... it was no longer the smooth-skinned pink arm of a human girl that I had got used to seeing when I looked down. The skin was a pebbly, mottled green and brown. The limb ended not with a delicate five-fingered hand, but a waving, suckered tentacle. Six more of these supported me as I drew back across the floor, away from that ghastly, buzzing light, and another waved out towards the Doctor, imploring him to stop.
“Please...” I gasped. “No...”
He lowered his device.
“So that's what you really look like,” he murmured. “No wonder you wore all that make up.”
“I'm sorry,” I whispered. “I needed to get away, I had no other choice!”
“No other choice!?” the Doctor cried, suddenly angry. “There's always a choice! You could have chosen not to violate the conditions of your contract, not to steal from one of the most powerful races ever to travel in time and space, and not disrupt and endanger the lives of hundreds of innocent people!”
I looked up, startled.
“Yes, I know where you're from,” the Doctor nodded. “The shoddy imitation Daleks were a dead give away. Yours was not the only colony to be drafted into their industrial corps, though it was,” he held up a finger, “the only one set to manufacturing the type of weapon you brought here, with the time lock as a side effect of its presence.”
“Then you also must know how unbearable it was to live such a life.” I lowered two of my glowing yellow eyes. The third, I kept focussed on the Doctor. “I stand by my actions.”
“Trapping all these people in a never ending time loop? Do you even know how many of them might have been made to suffer through your actions?” the Doctor countered. “Just so you could, what, date earth boys?” he threw up his hands.
“I wanted a life that I was denied!” I cried. One of my tentacles whipped against the wall. Pure tendon and muscle, it made the house tremble. I tried to calm myself. It wouldn't do to go destroying the neighbourhood. Probably that would annoy the Doctor even more.
“I'm sorry,” I breathed. “But is that so wrong?”
The Doctor's face was set hard. “Always, if it costs the lives of others.” he said. “Your friends. If you even truly think of them as friends. You've been leeching off poor Claudia for years, cutting off the energy flow to her brain, just so you could remain young! Dawn's been driven to the brink of madness, living on top of your treasure trove! And Mallory and Jessi! Doomed, by your will, to be eleven for, if you had it your way, the rest of their lives! Can you remember?” he questioned, his brow crinkling. “Can you remember how awful it is to be eleven years old?”
I reflected on the people he had mentioned. Those human girls I'd called 'friends' for who knew how many years. Did I care about what happened to them? I searched inside myself for some semblance of guilt.
...And felt nothing.
But then... The image of Charlotte skipping away from me across the snow-covered road wavered in front of my eyes. She'd been as lonely as I was. In each other, we'd found companionship, friendship, and someone to trust. She was a kind, bright young girl. Was it really my right to deny her the rest of her life?
I squeezed all three of my eyes shut.
“The weapon I stole would stop the Daleks,” I murmured. “They are, as you say, shoddy copies, built by my people with the hope that they would assist us in an uprising... But, reaching maturity, they were still compelled to follow their true master's wishes: To find and destroy me.”
I opened my eyes, and levelled them at the Doctor.
“My own people mistakenly sent an army to follow me here.”
“Lucky for us we have the means to stop them,” he replied, simply.
“No,” I shook my head. “You don't understand. The weapon would destroy the soldiers and their ship... But the aftershock, and the damage already caused by me, would wipe this whole town from existence.”
Then the Doctor did something surprising: he grinned, and winked at me.
“Not if I can help it.”
Chapter 17
Kristy
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Dear Nannie,
I know it’s ridiculous to send Christmas cards to someone in your own house, but I wanted to anyway... for various reasons I might not be able to see you this Christmas. I hope it all turns out to be nothing, but I’m kind of tied up for the moment. So tell Karen and Andrew and Sam and David Michael I miss them, and tell Charlie to be ready with the Junk Bucket, if I ever come back, okay?
Love,
Kristy
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The first thing I knew was that my head hurt-- bad, worse than when Jackie Rodowski hit me with that baseball. I’ve been through a lot of baseball-related injuries because I play so much. I happen to be very talented at sports, almost as talented as I am at Having Ideas and Running Things. I don’t mean to sound conceited. It’s just the truth. My sort-of boyfriend Bart says I’m going to be famous someday. Right now, though, I was just surprised (and grateful) not to be dead.
I opened my eyes. At first, all I could see were stars, but soon I saw a big black circle. I didn’t recognize what it was at first. Then I realized I was staring at the eyestalk of one of those strange robots, just inches from my face. It looked like the one I had kicked a minute ago (was it just a minute ago?) but it was black, while the one I’d kicked had been white.
“She is conscious!” the thing shouted.
I tried to cringe away because it was shouting so loudly. Then I realized I couldn’t. I was standing against a metal wall with my wrists and ankles handcuffed to it. I didn’t know how the robot had handcuffed me, since he didn’t have hands. Maybe he did it with the suction-cup thing on his arm, if that part was his arm. I couldn’t think what else it could be. That really didn’t seem relevant right now. I felt like I just needed to get home. I had three more sitting jobs lined up before Christmas-- not to mention two meetings! I knew Claudia would make a mess of things somehow. She seemed to get dumber by the minute.
The thought of Claudia and maybe never seeing my attractive friends again made me sad, but I didn’t have the time to think about that. Two more robot things came into the room. (I seemed to be in some big metal room with a control panel at one end-- it looked like a space ship from a TV show. I could see another space-ship looking room through the door the robot things used, as well)
“you will obey our orders!” shouted one of the new robots in a voice just like the other’s. “You will tell the inhabitants of Earth to fear us! Daleks will be the masters of Earth! Obey! Obey!”
“What are you supposed to be?” I asked, cringing from the loud voice. “Some kind of giant trash can?” (I was scared, but not THAT scared. They were only alien robots after all. They’d probably never babysat for Jackie Rodowski before. How dangerous could they be?)
“i will answer no questions from inferior beings!” shouted the space robot-- Dalek, I guessed.
“You don’t have to get upset about it,” I said. “You sound really conceited.”
“This social interaction will cease!” said the dalek.
The other Dalek scooted over to the control panel on the wall. He touched part of it with his suction cup, and a TV screen turned on. I could see an aerial view of Stoneybrook through it. (“Aerial” is a word I learned in school the other day. It means “from the air.”)
“We will override every television channel on your planet!” said the Dalek at the control panel. “You will appear on television and order your subjects to obey us or they will all be exterminated!”
“My subjects?” I said. “I don’t have any subjects... except for the club members... and the kids, I guess. Who do you think I am?”
“You are the empress of earth!” answered the Dalek closest to my ear. Those funny voices were beginning to get on my nerves. “You informed our scout dalek that you were the empress of earth before you were teleported to our base!”
“Teleported?” I said. “The empress of Earth? What are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, the Dalek at the control panel touched another button with his suction cup. Another screen popped up on the wall. This one showed a picture of an annoying-looking little girl in a turtleneck talking to the Dalek that had showed up at Claudia’s door.
“I’m in charge here!” said the little girl in an irritating whiny voice. “Me!” Then it kicked the Dalek with a hollow thunking sound.
Suddenly, it hit me. That little girl was me! Immediately I realized that she was actually very attractive looking, not like I’d thought before. Quite charismatic, too. Not sophisticated like Stacey, but still. And the turtleneck wasn’t really that dirty-- just a little dingy. Maybe I should wash them more than once a week... or maybe buy more than two turtlenecks. It never occurred to me before.
I looked at the Daleks. “You think I’m the empress of earth?” I asked. “Look, you’ve got it all wrong.”
“You are in charge here!”
“I’m in charge of the Babysitters’ Club,” I said, “Because it was my idea. I’m always coming up with ideas. It’s my best trait. But I’m not an empress, I’m just a middle-schooler. You see--”
The Dalek leveled his eggbeater-thing at me (the same thing he’d shot me with before). “If you are not the empress of earth,” he shouted in that annoying voice, “You are of no further use to us! You will be exterminated!”
The other Daleks also leveled their eggbeater things at me. Getting shot had hurt the first time. I had a feeling it would be worse this time. (And I might stay dead permanently!)
“Okay! You got me. I’m really the empress of earth.” I felt bad for lying, but it really wasn’t that much of a stretch. My stepfather is a real live millionaire, after all. “What do you want me to say?”
“You will tell the humans that the daleks are the new masters of earth!” yelled the Dalek in the doorway. “You will order them to obey us! We will build a new weapon factory on this planet! The daleks will rule the universe! You will obey!”
“Okay!” I said, wishing I could cover my ears. “I’ll do it, I guess. Just start the camera or whatever.”
Just then a red light started flashing on the control panel; it made a whooping noise that was almost as annoying as the daleks’ voices.
“we have located the Doctor and the refugee with our device!” cried the Dalek at the control panel. He touched another place on the panel. The screen that had been showing the aerial view of Stoneybrook suddenly showed a picture of a bedroom I recognized as Staceys. But Stacey wasn’t there! There was only an ugly octopus thing sitting in Stacey’s makeup chair. The Doctor was also there, talking to it. He had a metal thing in his hand.
“It works like a standard key, yes?” the Doctor asked. “Twist it clockwise, and the spaceship will implode?”
“Correct,” said the octopus in a voice I thought I recognized. “But as I told you, there’s more to it than that.”
“Exterminate the doctor!” shouted all the Daleks at once. “All available forces disembark immediately! We will exterminate the doctor!”
The three of them scooted out of the room, repeating themselves over and over again. I heard other Daleks shouting the same thing in the next room. It sounded like there were dozens of them.
Pretty soon, the sounds had stopped. I had a feeling the spaceship was empty except for me.
The octopus thing on the screen was speaking again. “You see, Doctor, I wasn’t only being selfish. Once I began my strange new life here, I realized I had no way of stopping it without destroying everyone. I had no choice but to allow it to go on for this long. Should I kill all these innocent people to save them from what I began?”
The Doctor smiled. “But now that I’m here, the temporal loop can’t maintain itself anyway, can it? Besides... what if someone else... not a human, but another highly intelligent alien being, had been able to break into the programming on the external panel of the Dalek ship?”
The octopus threw up all its tentacles excitedly. “Doctor? What have you done?”
“I’ve programmed the ship to teleport before it self-destructs. There’s a lunar body orbiting earth right now, you see,” the Doctor said happily, “That I don’t really need anyway-- don’t ask how I got it, long story. Never trust a Raxacoricofallapatorian realtor, even if he seems honest, and you can tell him I said so. I’ve almost managed to rig the whole ship so that it’ll teleport itself and all of your shoddy Daleks there before it implodes!”
“You have!” The octopus looked joyful for a moment. Then it cringed. “And what will become of me, then?”
“You?” the Doctor looked critically at it. “I’ll give you a lift in my TARDIS to whatever planet you like... you don’t get the key back, though. Too dangerous. And you’ll go as yourself.”
“Very well,” said the octopus. “I suppose you want something in return?”
“And how,” said the Doctor. “Now, this is a counterfeit Dalek ship we’re dealing with, but it should have the same basic layout as the genuine ones, am I right? If so, there’s a button on the central control panel-- big purple one, we can’t miss it-- that needs to be pushed. That’s all it’ll take to finish reprogramming the trajectory; then it’ll be safe to use the key. I’m going to try to warn the locals to get out, just in case anything happens while we’re in there.”
“We?”
“Of course!” said the Doctor. “We’re the only ones who stand a chance of getting inside the ship and finding that panel.”
“Doctor, that ship is massive! What if we can’t find it?” asked the octopus. “What if the Daleks stage an all-out attack on the town first? That many Daleks could take out the whole planet, even if they are defective.”
“Then,” said the Doctor solemnly, “It gets serious. One more thing... where’s Mallory?”
I flexed my wrist inside the cuff, gratefully thinking of the escape artist classes I’d made the whole club take last Summer.
I was starting to get a Great Idea.