Second of The Darkness In Men series and part of the Fifth Doctor Fiction collection
"Well," I said, sardonically, "it's better than a bunch of homicidal Jimmy Page clones after my guitar."
"Who's Jimmy Page?" Nyssa asked me.
The Doctor was tinkering about in the TARDIS. Occasionally I heard him mutter something in a foreign language. He was repairing, or at least he claimed he was repairing, the ship's food machine which at the moment was dispensing nothing but apple flavour Mars Bars, which the Doctor seemed to like a lot, but which Nyssa and I both found disgusting. I'd attempted to help him but in the end he'd landed the ship in London, 1967, and told us to wait outside. I suspected the problem with the food machine was more serious than he was telling me and Nyssa. Still, it was a nice day and the park we'd landed in was lush and green. The smell of London was in the air. It was nice to be back on Earth, even if it was just while the Doctor fixed the TARDIS.
"Musician," I told her. "Played with Led Zeppelin."
"What's a zeppelin?"
I looked at her. She'd changed out of her usual velvet outfit into a loose fitting sky-blue velvet skirt and jacket, with a lacy bodice beneath. "A zeppelin," I said, continuing to be amused by our sometimes complete lack of common ground, "is a sort of huge balloon that carries people around."
"Why would you make one out of lead then?" Nyssa asked. "Lead is a very dense element. Wouldn't some form of polymer be more efficient?"
"It's just a band name," I said, my face cracking into a smile.
There was a small explosion from inside the TARDIS and the Doctor walked out in a puff of smoke.
He coughed. "This could take slightly longer than I had anticipated," he admitted, sheepishly.
"Are you sure we can't help, Doctor?" Nyssa asked.
"Positive. Now, why don't you two er..."
"Go on a date?" I supplied for him.
"If that's what the kids are calling it these days," the Doctor said, blushing slightly. He pulled at his nose as if it was itchy, leaving a soot mark there.
"How about we check out the local concert halls?" I suggested. "Maybe Jimmy Page is playing somewhere."
Nyssa shrugged, doubtless still unsure of why a band had been named after a dirigible.
The Doctor looked at his watch. "I doubt it, Robbie," he said. "However, I think the Beatles are just down the road."
"Urgh!" Nyssa exclaimed.
"Not insects, Nyssa," I chided her. "They're a band."
"Why do all your bands have such strange names?" she asked.
"Creativity, I guess," I shrugged. "Either that or they just dropped a bit too much acid. That's LSD, by the way."
Nyssa looked at me as if I had just accused her of being stupid.
"Oh, come on, Nyssa, I'm just trying to educate you to the strange ways of us human beings."
At my self-derogatory put-down, she smiled and I unhooked my leather jacket from the park bench. "Where'd you say the Beatles were playing at, Doctor?" I asked.
"Down the road," he said, from inside the TARDIS.
"Right," I said, and we started walking off.
"Aren't you forgetting something?" the Doctor asked, emerging from the still lightly smoking console room.
"Er," I said.
"Tickets," he said, holding them up. "I've had them lying around in the TARDIS ever since Ben said he wanted to go and see them." He handed them to me.
"Cheers, Doctor."
"Say hi to John for me," the Doctor said, heading back into the TARDIS.
"Name-dropper!" I called after him.
***
"RINGO!!!!!" one mad girl in the crowd was crying out.
"John! There he is! John! I love you! Marry me!" another was shrieking.
I'd long be seduced by the very idea of the sixties; my mother's record collection, Rubber Soul, Penny Lane, Sticky Finger, Waterloo Sunset, Bob Dylan, free love all the way, Woodstock, the moon landing.
Since joining the Doctor I'd tried to get him to take me to the sixties several times, but each time he'd tried, we'd ended up fighting alien monsters on a space station or on some isolated colony world. Now we were here. Things the Doctor had told me about the sixties; like the Yeti in the Underground, the Daleks nicking the TARDIS, made it part of the Doctor's world: Magical.
I had no idea whether or not I could explain this to Nyssa, in fact, I wasn't sure if I wanted to.
I handed the bouncer the ticket and he tore off the stub and let us in. As we took our seats, I could see the band on stage setting up.
If I just shouted out to John to avoid being in Madison Square Garden in 1980, would I change history? From what Nyssa had told me, it was impossible; to whit, I responded, aren't we changing history simply by being here? Nyssa had responded by saying that Time (yeah, that's right, capital T) smoothed over little creases.
If I told John Lennon about his murder in 1980, most likely he would dismiss me as a nut and it would still happen.
The doors closed behind us and the house lights went down. The stage lights came up and the band walked on stage.
"Good evening," Paul McCartney said. They launched straight into a rendition of I Feel Fine.
At the interval, I asked Nyssa if she wanted anything from the bar. She said no. I decided I could murder a cold bottle of beer.
I headed down to the bar and joined the jostling queue. The conversation was full of criticism for the new album, Revolver. I restrained myself from laughing out loud.
"A bottle of beer, please," I asked the barman. He was a strange looking guy; his eyes seemed too big for his head and he just looked alien.
As a test, to pay for the drink, I tossed a Calumar 12 ubar note over the bar. The ubar is a generally accepted form of currency throughout the civilised universe. Or so the Doctor tells me.
The barman takes the note and is about to put it in the till when something seems to occur to him. He looks at the note; then looks at me.
"Alien?" he asked in his own language. Thanks to the TARDISes telepathic circuits I pick it up fine but I can tell that's his own language.
"Not here," I told him.
"Later?" asks the barman.
"Yeah. After the show." I took my beer and the 12 ubar note and headed back to where Nyssa was.
"Guess what I've just met," I said.
"What?" asked Nyssa.
"An alien who doesn't want to kill us or eviscerate us or otherwise be a nasty bugger," I said.
"An alien, in 1967?" Nyssa said, the incredulity blatant in her voice.
"Why not?" I replied as the band got back up on stage and John started a monologue about how one of his songs came to be written. "I mean, it seems as if Earth's rife with them at the minute. Daleks, Yeti, funky Chameleon things. Why shouldn't one of those aliens here be nice?"
"If he's nice why's he here?"
I shrugged as Tomorrow Never Knows started up. "Maybe his ship crashed or something."
Nyssa turned to face me, obviously uninterested in the historical event that was playing out before her. "At this point in it's timeline, Earth is way off the major shipping lanes. It's a society that hasn't even developed interplanetary travel yet."
The guy sitting a couple of chairs over turned to us, cigarette hanging from his mouth and a scowl cut into his forehead. "We'll keep it down," I said, my voice little more than a whisper. "Look, Nyssa, maybe his navigation malfunctioned or something. There's a hundred reasons why he could be here."
"He could just as easily be cover for an invasion," Nyssa told me.
"Well," I replied, "we'll soon find out, won't we?"
***
After the show, and after I had managed to get the entire band's autograph on an LP of A Hard Day's Night, Nyssa and me went outside.
Sure enough, the barman was standing there.
With a ray gun in his hand.
Why does this always happen to me?
"Are you carrying any weapons?" he asked, his alien accent now fully pronounced. It was guttural and hard.
"No," Nyssa said before I could say anything.
Looking at us cautiously, as if with those big bulbous eyes of his he could see whether we were carrying any weapons or not, he slowly lowered his gun.
"How do you come to be here?" he asked.
"We're travellers," I said. Where the hell was the Doctor when you needed him? Probably gorging himself on apple flavoured Mars Bars.
"Human?" He made it sound almost like an insult. I ignored the inflection. Now I just wanted to ram that ray gun down his throat. He was still holding it. To the untrained eye, it might have seemed as if he had dropped his guard, but I could see his trigger finger still resting lightly on the trigger. At a moments notice, he could bring it up and zap both Nyssa and myself.
"Well," I said, slowly, "I am. I wouldn't like to speak for Nyssa though."
"Humans will not develop interstellar travel for two hundred years," the alien coughed.
"Yeah, well, I'm a time traveller."
That sparked the alien's interest. Crap.
"I have been stranded on Earth for many years," he said. "Perhaps you could take me back home."
"Sorry dude," I said, "no can do."
The alien raised the gun again and fired.
Instinctively, I ducked and dragged Nyssa down with me. We hit the cold road and behind us a brick wall simply vanished, revealing the road beyond.
Acting on a split-second decision, I pulled Nyssa back up, almost yanking her arm out of its socket as I did so, and dived down the road.
The alien loosed a few more shots after us but he missed and we kept running.
***
"Your arm," I asked, tentatively, as we pulled up outside the park where the TARDIS was parked, "is it okay?" We'd apparently lost the alien.
Nyssa experimentally moved it around. "I think you bruised it a little," she said, "but I'll be fine."
"Oh God," I said, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry Nyssa. I didn't mean to hurt you."
"It's okay, Robbie," she said, cuddling me. Then she kissed me, her soft lips pressing against my own.
"You will help me," came the alien's voice, making us jump out of our skin. He was standing right in front of us, the aroma of ozone emanating from the end of the ray gun.
Shit, I swore under my breath.
I backed round in front of Nyssa, to protect her, should the alien nutter decide to open fire.
"Why should we help you?" I asked, suddenly wishing I'd gone to the gym more. This alien guy was a good foot taller than me and at least as half wide again.
"Because I have the gun," the alien said.
"What are you doing on Earth anyway?" Nyssa asked.
"I am an advance scout for an invasion force. Our home planet is dying, and we need a nitrogen rich atmosphere to live in. Earth is an ideal candidate."
"That is it," I muttered, "that is just it. I wasn't going to help you before, what with all the possibilities for breaking the laws of time and everything, but now I know you want to colonise Earth, I'm definitely not going to help you." I closed my eyes waiting for the fatal zap of the ray gun.
It didn't come.
I opened one eye slowly. The alien was still standing there, the gun still levelled at me, but a quizzical look was creasing his forehead.
"Why should you care what we do? You said yourself; you are a time traveller."
"Yeah, from this planet's future, man. You invade Earth now, you crap up the time stream and we're all screwed. You know this planet is going to be the centre of a galactic empire one day?"
The alien shook his head.
"Where's your planet? Far from here?"
"Twenty seven light years," the alien said.
"Not far at all really then," I replied. Unnoticed by the alien, I was edging closer and closer to him. "We'll probably come along and colonise you at some point."
I smacked him out. Green blood erupted from his face and he stood there; stunned, for a second, before falling backwards with a groan. He hit the ground.
My fist hurt.
"Come on," I told Nyssa, rubbing my knuckles, "we'd best get this guy back to the TARDIS. Don't want any alien bodies lying around for the hippies to find."
"Is he dead?" Nyssa asked, picking up his legs.
I grabbed him beneath the shoulders, balking slightly at the foul-smelling sweat there, and began inching into the park. I looked down at his face. Green blood bubbles were forming at his nose and mouth and his chest was still falling and rising. "Nah," I said, "I've just put him out for the count."
***
"You know, Robbie," the Doctor said, emerging from the TARDIS with hundreds of wires strung over his wiry body, "I'm beginning to suspect you're rather too handy with you fists."
"Look, Doctor," I said, laying the guy out on the console room floor, "I don't ask for these people to threaten us."
The Doctor, however, was ignoring me, or it seemed he was ignoring me. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a stethoscope and held it to the alien's chest. "He's not human!" he exclaimed.
"Well, I thought that the green blood was something of a give-away," I said. The Doctor scowled at me.
"Our friend seems to be a..." he reached into the guys collar, seemed to find something and pulled. The guys face came away, revealing a lizard face beneath. It seemed as if it was wearing contacts, because it's eyes were completely human looking; apart from their unnatural bulginess. "Yes, as I suspected, a Handab. Native to the planet Handabania. Quite nasty creatures. Like eating live meat if I recall correctly. Nyssa," he said, changing tack completely, "could you get me some rope."
Nyssa went and got some rope so we got the Handab tied up before he came round.
"So what now?" I asked as the lizard, lying up against the chaise lounge, began to wake up.
"You say he said he was the scout for an invasion force?" the Doctor asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"I suggest we return him to his people. You'll give a very negative report, won't you, hmm?" the Doctor asked.
"Can we trust him?" Nyssa asked. "If we take him back to his people, isn't there a possibility that as soon as we're gone he'll arrange the invasion of Earth?"
"Nyssa does have a point, Doctor," I said.
"We will exterminate you all!" the Handab suddenly screamed, startling Nyssa.
"I suspect you learned that turn of phrase from the Daleks," the Doctor said. "Okay, setting co-ordinates."
***
Once the TARDIS had landed I stepped out. "This is where our lizardy companion comes from?" I asked.
"No...not quite," the Doctor said. "We can drop him off here; he'll be able to live out his life in relative luxury, the trees round here bear fruit all year round...and he won't warn his fleet about Earth. They'll simply take Earth as a hostile prospect and move on to the next likely candidate."
"Won't he be lonely?" asked Nyssa.
"I shouldn't think so," the Doctor said, "after all, this is the planet his people settled in the end."
I brought the Handab out of the TARDIS and cut the ropes. He went running across the plains.
"One of these days, Doctor," I warned him as we walked back into the TARDIS, "your messing about with the time stream is going to get you in deep-" My last word was cut off by the TARDIS door closing.
