Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters

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Book: Read Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters for Free Online
Authors: Malcolm Hulke
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction
thing,’ said the Doctor.
    The Brigadier was never quite sure when the Doctor was joking. He smiled, to show that he thought it was a joke.’ Come now, Doctor, I’m not scientist. Just a plain military man. Surely you have some ideas about these power losses?’
    ‘The output of the turbine which is motivated by the nuclear reactor,’ said the Doctor, ‘is being drawn off.’
    The Brigadier studied him. This didn’t seem to be getting them any further. ‘We know that must be the case,’ the Brigadier said, as patiently as he could manage. ‘The question is – how?’
    Liz asked, ‘Have you checked that no one’s linked themselves up with the electrical circuits here?’
    ‘My dear Miss Shaw,’ the Brigadier beamed, ‘my men have checked and double-checked every inch of cable in this entire centre.’
    ‘I thought you would,’ said the Doctor. ‘Not very imaginative, but correct procedure. I’m more interested to know why that poor fellow Spencer is drawing pictures on the sick-bay wall.’
    The Brigadier looked at the Doctor, wondering whether the Doctor had gone out of his mind. So many other people in this place were behaving oddly, although the Brigadier had always believed nothing would affect the Doctor’s power to think clearly. ‘Pictures on the wall?’ he said.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Liz, brightly. ‘Buffaloes, mammoth elephants, and birds with scales instead of feathers.’
    ‘And men ,’ said the Doctor. ‘Men without ears and with three eyes.’
    ‘Really, now,’ said the Brigadier. ‘I saw the medical report on Spencer. It said he’d blown his top after losing his friend in the caves. But this is ridiculous.’
    ‘Perhaps you should have visited him in the sick-bay,’ Liz said. ‘You’d have seen for yourself.’
    The Brigadier tried to put his best face on the situation. He was now convinced that he was talking not to one, but two, mad people. ‘Our business at hand, Doctor, and Miss Shaw, is the disastrous loss of electrical power in this research centre. If someone in the sick-bay is drawing pictures on the wall, that is hardly our concern!’
    ‘Do you know,’ asked the Doctor, ‘what Jung meant by “the collective unconscious”?’
    ‘Jung?’ said the Brigadier, ‘the psychologist fellow?’
    ‘It’s the memory that animals inherit,’ said Liz Shaw. ‘You know the way a dog walks round and round before lying down, because it thinks it is treading flat the tall grass that dogs lived in millions of years ago.’
    ‘Or the way salmon always return to where they were born in order to breed,’ said the Doctor.
    The Brigadier was fast losing his patience. ‘Doctor, Miss Shaw, this is all very interesting…‘
    ‘But you want to know about the power losses?’ said the Doctor.
    ‘Thank you,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Now let’s get back to the point.’
    ‘We must first decide,’ said the Doctor, ‘what the point is , and I believe it is connected with our inherited memory of something from long, long ago. There is something close to this research centre which is touching on the depths of Spencer’s memory – not his own conscious memory, you understand, but instead the inner parts of his mind which come from man’s ancestors of thousands, perhaps millions, of years ago.’
    At last the Brigadier had a glimmer of what the Doctor was talking about. ‘Something in those caves?’ he asked.
    The Doctor nodded. ‘What is the physical relationship between this research centre and the caves?’
    The Brigadier got up, pointed to one of the maps on the wall. ‘As you see, the hills rise sharply in this ridge. Inside, the hills are honeycombed with caves, some of them explored, some probably never visited. The research centre is five hundred feet below the top of the hill ridge. For some reason that you probably understand better than I do, the authorities preferred to build the cyclotron very deep in the ground.’
    ‘It’s more probably the nuclear

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