reading

The Pirate Planet would not have been possible without the help and encouragement of the Douglas Adams Estate, and the Archivists of St John’s College, Cambridge – Mrs Kathryn McKee, Special Collections Librarian, and Miss Mandy Marvin, Manuscripts Cataloguer. I’m grateful to Lee Binding who made this book less boring and more funny. Any remaining boring bits are my fault.

Material from the Douglas Adams Archive appears by permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO

This book portrays the Fourth Doctor, whose physical appearance later transformed as the Black Guardian finally caught up with him.

THE CHANGING FACE OF THE KEY TO TIME

This book portrays the Second Segment of the Key to Time, which has been waiting for the Doctor for a very long while.

‘Trip-trapped Trolls,’ Donna red. ‘That’s not a very nice headline.’

‘They keep finding dead people who were…prominent on the internet. And the papers seem to think it’s funny.’

When internet trolls start to drop dead, the Doctor thinks there might be more to it than just a sedentary lifestyle and high blood pressure.

From the backstreets of South Korea to the jungles of Brazil, the Doctor and Donna follow the leads until they find the source of this online infection. But they aren’t the only ones interested in these sudden deaths at the computer screen, or what’s causing them.

Before long the Doctor and Donna are fighting for their lives – and the lives of everyone else on planet Earth who uses the internet. Including people very dear to Donna…

This novel features the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble, as played by David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

‘You’re tinkering with time. That’s always a bad idea unless you know what you’re doing.’

The Doctor takes Romana for a holiday in Paris – a city which, like a fine wine, has a bouquet all of its own. Especially if you visit during one of the vintage years. But the TARDIS takes them to the 1979, a table-wine year, a year whose vintage is soured by cracks – not in their wine glasses but in the very fabric of time itself.

Soon the Time Lords are embroiled in an audacious alien scheme which encompasses home-made time machines, the theft of Mona Lisa, the resurrection of the much-feared Jagaroth race and the beginning (and quite possibly the end) of all life on Earth.

Aided by British private detective Duggan, whose speciality is thumping people, the Doctor and Romana must thwart the machinations of the suave, mysterious Count Scarlioni – all twelve of him – if the human race has any chance of survival.

Inside this book is another book – the strangest, most important and most dangerous book in the entire universe.

The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey wields enormous power. It must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.

Skagra – who believes he should be God and permits himself only two smiles per day – most definitely has the wrong hands.

‘Isn’t life terrible? Isn’t it all going to end in tears? Won’t it be good to just give up and let something else run my mind, my life?’

Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged into he bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word.

Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch brothers; Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction.

Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up…

AFTERWORD

When working on a book (The Doctor: His Lives and Times) in 2013, I’d kept coming across intriguing quotes about The Pirate Planet…

That was [Douglas Adams’s] first television credit. I had heard about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was being prepared for Radio Four at that time, and I think in fact [previous Script Editor] Bob Holmes had come across this and passed the thought on. I picked it up and read it and thought, ‘Now here’s a guy who obviously has a very lively imagination. He could be very valuable and give us a whole new dimension to Doctor Who.’ I was very taken with him. Ideas were sparking off him.

The problem was harnessing him to the format, because he had a tendency to go off in his own directions. In the end it worked extremely well.

The first draft was way over the top and looked as though it was unworkable. [Producer] Graham Williams was away at the time, and at that point [BBC Head of Drama] Graham McDonald saw the initial scripts and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, we will make it work.’ The director Pennant Roberts went in with me and said he could shoot it. So we managed to calm him down.

Anthony Read, Doctor Who Script Editor
(speaking to TV Zone magazine)

The original idea for Pirate Planet was just the basic concept of a hollow planet, Graham was interested in Space Pirates, so we just married the two. The original storyline was of a planet being mined by the Time Lords. The plot was so complicated, I remember reading a synopsis of it to Graham, after which he sank into his chair, mumbling that now he knew how Stanley Kubrick felt.

The whole adventure trod a narrow line between being dramatic and being outright funny, which I think is the most interesting area to work in, as I think humour plays a very important part in Doctor Who.

I felt that I had caused so many problems that I would be lucky to get anywhere else, but everyone seemed very happy with the script.

Douglas Adams
(speaking to TARDIS magazine)

I wondered how much of this was true. After all, good stuff always gets cut. This happens because, if life is cruel, television is more so.

When I was novelising City of Death, I’d been lucky enough to be sent the original rehearsal scripts for that story, which had contained a joyous amount of extra material – totalling a few extra lines here and there, the occasional entire page. So I wondered, with The Pirate Planet, if all this talk of extra material was true, or simply pleasant anecdotage? How detailed were these original outlines? Did a ‘way over the top’ first draft still exist? Had it ever existed?

If it did exist, I knew just where to find it. Jem Roberts had just written The Frood, a biography of Douglas Adams, and had had access to the Douglas Adams Archive at St John’s College, Cambridge. I knew that, if extra material existed, I should look there.

Luckily, the estate consented, and I was put in touch with Douglas Adams’s archivist, the splendid and splendidly named Miss Marvin. She replied to my email of enquiry:

I did think that you might be in pursuit of The Pirate Planet and am happy to say that we do in fact have some material that should help you a bit.

It’s been twenty years since I’ve been inside a college, and the whole experience was gratifyingly strange. Yes, the porters magically knew who I was before I stepped through the gate, and yes, I did get to sit in a Gothic building full of impossibly precious books. If you thought you had your sock drawer neatly filed, you have nothing on the archives at St John’s College.

The Adams Archive has little on City of Death. Famously written over a weekend, there really isn’t much beyond the script. But The Pirate Planet was composed over a long, arduous summer, by a man twisting from Doctor Who to Hitchhiker’s and back, fizzing with ideas he was desperate to find the right home for.

I’d always wanted to write comedy sci-fi, ever since the early days of Doctor Who and Dan Dare in The Eagle. I sent the first episode of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in to Doctor Who – hoping that they would then want me to write for the show. I was then commissioned for both shows at once, so was deluged with masses of work.

Douglas Adams
(interviewed in TARDIS magazine)

Miss Marvin carefully, slowly, and with quiet delight showed me the evolution of The Pirate Planet. We had paper jottings, doodles, notes taken during meetings, typewritten attempts at a treatment which suddenly stopped crossly, a short thesis about the Key to Time, and then, finally…

Douglas Adams hadn’t just had an idea for a hollow planet, he’d developed it as an almost completely different story. To summarise ‘The Perfect Planet’, the Doctor arrives on a world where life is perfect, and he becomes immediately annoyed. No invaders to thwart, no villainy. Something must be wrong because nothing is wrong. You’ll be delighted to hear that the treatment follows in a few pages. It’s full of striking images and scenes, a few of which made the long journey into The Pirate Planet; some others may make you question how involved Douglas Adams was in the last two episodes of The Armageddon Factor.

There were more notes, more treatments, more ideas, and then, in a box all by itself, the very first draft of The Pirate Planet. Perhaps a little snow-blind from the sheer amount of archive, I nearly discounted it. Formatted like a radio script, it seemed to be very like the rehearsal scripts occupying the next box. This was a little hard to tell, as centuries of experience of muddled papers and even more muddled dons have taught the archivists to issue one document at a time. But the two drafts seemed pretty identical. Someone had simply taken Douglas’s weirdly formatted typescript and turned it into a proper television script.

About two pages in, that theory fell apart. The first draft of The Pirate Planet was extraordinarily different and very, very long. Each episode ran to nearly forty densely typed pages. Forty densely typed and very, very funny pages.

So, in order to novelise The Pirate Planet, I now had a wealth of sources to choose from. Not only did I have the final televised version, but I had Douglas Adams’s notes, his treatment for ‘The Perfect Planet’, his treatments for The Pirate Planet, a rehearsal script and the very long, very different first draft.

It would be so much easier if Douglas Adams had submitted a draft script, which was then cut down into the rehearsal script, which was then cut down still further to make the televised version.

The real story is much more complicated, and joyously so. At every stage, Adams revised his own dialogue, or went off on tangents, or picked up the pieces after his work had been thrown into the thresher of the BBC rehearsal room.

A peculiar example takes place in Part Two, when Romana meets the Captain. The first draft contains TWO very different versions of this scene. The rehearsal script is different again.

CAPTAIN: By the mountains of hell I will not ask you again, but obliterate you where you stand! Your name girl!

ROMANA: Romanadvoratrelundar. Well, you did ask. My friends call me Romana, but I think you’re probably going to have to call me Romanadvoratrelundar though, from the look of you.

CAPTAIN: Silence! Or the silence of death descends upon you in the winking of an eye!

ROMANA: By Tardis. I’m a sort of Time Lord you see. Not actually a proper Time Lord yet because I’ve still got some exams to take, and all the dinners as well which are terribly dull, but…

CAPTAIN: By the Alpha storms of Cignus, plain speaking! For by the mealymouthed prophet of Agranjagzak, obliteration is at hand!

ROMANA: Sorry, yes, plain speaking. Well, I, as a Time Lord, or a nearly Time Lord, travel around in space…

CAPTAIN: By the mountains of hell I will not ask you again, but obliterate you where you stand! Your name girl!

CAPTAIN: Silence! Or the silence of death descends on you in the winking of an eye!

ROMANA: It’s a sort of space time machine. I’m travelling round the Universe in it. I’m a Time Lord you see.

ROMANA: Well not actually a proper Time Lord yet because I haven’t done all the exams yet, but…

CAPTAIN: By the Alpha storms of Cygnus, plain speaking! For by the mealymouthed prophet of Agranjagzak obliteration is at hand! What is your function?

ROMANA: I only ask because whoever patched you up obviously didn’t know much about the new developments in cyboneutraulics. Do you get a squeak when you move your arm like this…?

CAPTAIN: Silence! Or the silence of death descends on you in the winking of an eye!

ROMANA: By Tardis. I’m a Time Lord you see…or at least I will be soon, I’ve still got a couple of qualifying exams to take, and all the dinners to eat as well which is terribly dull, but…

CAPTAIN: By the mealy mouthed prophet of Agranjagzak, speak plainly. Obliteration is at hand!

Again, marvel at Part Three, as Romana goes off to lead a rebellion. In the draft script we touch on exactly what the story is about for Adams, with Romana and Mula and Pralix having impassioned speeches, exploring themes of guilt and responsibility and free will, and the power of the younger generation to wash away the sins of the old. In the finished version, this rebellion is told through two short silent film segments of Mary Tamm striding through a wet field with some men in orange cloaks.

One fascinating sidebar is Douglas Adams’s speculation on the nature of the Key to Time. Having extensively debated what his segment of the Key could be (see endpapers), Adams’s notes seem to settle on Africa:

Africa – the Key from Earth. The Africa we know was a substitute, specially designed. The Doctor was actually involved in the operation of putting it there, during which Atlantis was accidentally submerged. The original Africa is now stowed in the hold of the Tardis.

When they try to reach the Earth in order to retrieve the Africa key they can’t land, something is stopping them, so they materialise in orbit…

The Forges of Bethsalamin. Ancient. Deserted. Bloody enormous.

When the substitute Africa was put there, alien power was embedded in it secretly for the benefit of the Witch Doctor who is a renegade in hiding who managed to blackmail one of the Bethsalamin into building the continent in this way.

The Doctor has to go to Bethsalamin, revive the sleeping giants, and get a new Africa made at Time Lord expense.

They went into suspended animation when the bottom fell out of the continent market – waiting for the economic recovery of the Galaxy.

Their revival switches are geared to the Galactic stock market index.

Weight-conscious hitchhikers will encounter a planet called Bethselamin elsewhere in Adams’s work. Curiously, at the bottom of Adams’s original typewritten document on segments of the Key he has added a single handwritten word. The word is ‘Mice’.

Right from the start of development of The Pirate Planet, Adams is determined on a female villain:

‘…Cleopatra? No. Who is the archetypal spoilt evil woman? (other than Jackie Onassis)

Why the Earth? What’s the reason, other than wanting to collect beautiful planets?

Nero? But how and why?…

We think it’s Nero. In fact…oh blah blah blah. Stop this rubbish.

If she’s the Master’s daughter, she is collecting the planets which witnessed his defeat. Because she loved him…or hated him?

If she’s going to do Gallifrey instead of the Earth, then why not just say straight out that she’s the Master – no further problems about motive.

Preserved in the Archives are the steady progression of the various treatments. Several ideas are worked on ceaselessly that don’t make it through to the final production. The Captain’s torture chamber is agonised over by Adams – what would be in there? How would it be defeated? Sometimes it is a menacing, yet ineffectual Dalek. At one point it is sand. At another, Adams doodles the Doctor drowning. The placement of this segment varies – in many breakdowns it is in Part Two. And yet, if you look at the finished Part Three, is there an odd remainder of it, as the Captain brings a (possibly tortured) Doctor and Kimus back from unconsciousness?

Another key element, carried from ‘The Perfect Planet’, is the Doctor falling into the centre of the planet. The Pirate Planet is immaculately structured (Adams even uses quadrant diagrams to illustrate the impacts of various themes on his characters). Just as the Doctor and the Captain are shadows of each other, there are originally three big uses of the TARDIS. Firstly, Romana makes a simple landing by the book. Then she has to make the TARDIS do the impossible to rescue the Doctor, and finally, the Doctor has to outdo even her in order to save the Earth.

Responsibility and Guilt are a key theme to Adams’s development of the story. (They even get one of Adams’s quadrant diagrams showing how guilty each group of characters feels.) It’s not just about a cannibal planet – it’s a fable about a world where refusing to face up to past sins brings down society. The Mourners are an unfocused force of guilt, the hidden conscience of the people of Zanak. Adams is clear that the older generations knew, or suspected, the terrible source of their pointless wealth. With each generation, the young are shown as becoming more questioning, more powerful until, finally, Pralix emerges, someone from an innocent generation who can finally use that power to win back the soul of their planet. On TV the mysterious cult are called the Mentiads, but I’ve gone with Adams’s original name of the Mourners – it seems more evocative of what he was trying to convey.

Douglas Adams started work on The Pirate Planet while the new companion was still being developed. In ‘The Perfect Planet’, the Doctor’s companion is a nameless Time Lord referred to as X. He becomes Komnor, who becomes Gravity (sex unknown), before finally arriving as the Romana we know and love. Sort of.

The Romana of the first draft has, not surprisingly, been written before Mary Tamm has been cast. Yet she’s still amazing – she’s aloof, she sends the Doctor up rotten (try and imagine Mary Tamm standing on one leg and clucking sarcastically. Yes. That image will stay with you all day), and she knows everything. Jem Roberts’s biography of Adams, The Frood, touches on the author’s worry that he didn’t write strong enough female characters. Arguably he writes nothing but strong women when he writes Doctor Who. His Romana is a gun-toting, evil-genius-thwarting Time Lady, who is never afraid to open her mouth, whether it’s to say something brilliant or talk witheringly about her tutor.

The first draft has a few odd moments that vanish in later versions. The Doctor constantly refers to her throughout as ‘silly girl’, ‘wretched girl’ and once, gloriously, as having the brains of a goose. ‘Just because I’m a woman he thinks that I’m not as clever as he is,’ Romana laments quite fairly. It doesn’t fit the characters we see on screen. Imagine Tom Baker’s Doctor calling Mary Tamm’s Romana ‘you silly girl’ – he’d have been wandering around the story with rather more than a bruised lip.

Mind you, this Doctor still occasionally refers to Romana as ‘Romy’, a pet name which clearly didn’t find favour.

Novelisers have a strange life. Gareth Roberts had the joy of finding an entire unused scene for Shada. For City of Death, I had two extra pages by Douglas Adams, and that was a delight. For The Pirate Planet, not only did I have a plethora of unused scenes – I ended up leaving some of them out. Adams makes a lot out of Pralix’s family – Balaton and Kimus have endless discussions like characters from a Greek comedy. I reproduced it all faithfully, and found my eyes skipping over it when I re-read it. So did an early reader. Consequently, their material in Part One has been substantially reduced – there’s still a vast amount more of it than even makes it to the rehearsal script, mostly to do with whether or not to throw Pralix out into the street. I feel bad about leaving it out, but I hope I’ve kept as much as I can of it without making you grind your teeth.

I think the problem is that Adams’s Doctor and Romana are so engaging that when you’re not reading about them, you’re twiddling your mind thumbs.

Talking of which, the Captain’s swearing has been reduced. Again, we still have lots more of it than on screen. It’s all great stuff, and would have been a joy to hear performed, but on the printed page the Captain came across as that friend we all have who still texts in caps.

Fans of K-9 will be delighted to discover that Adams loves him as much as we do. Not only does he get a cascade of extra lines, he also gets an entire extra subplot, in which K-9 has to rescue himself from a crashed air-car, repair it, and then fly to the Captain’s Citadel. Adams is clearly having a whale of a time – he perfectly conveys K-9 landing on his back by typing a pathetic ‘Master?’ upside down. Surprisingly tricksy on a twenty-first-century word processor, Adams simply rolled the page out of his typewriter, put it back in upside down, and typed, no doubt laughing.

Structurally, Adams works hard at getting Part Four in the right order through the various drafts. In the scripts, much more is made of Xanxia’s tyranny. Of the Nurse’s true identity, the crew are innocent (as much as a bunch of planet-murdering pirates can be), which begs all sorts of questions that Adams does not, for once, answer. He’s rightly more fascinated by the idea of Queen Xanxia, a typical supervillain, being taken in by a sales brochure. There’s so much to explain that in the first draft Mr Fibuli lives to the end, so that he can explain a bit more. Meanwhile, Adams is having fun depicting the assault on the planet Earth, in scenes eerily familiar from the TV version of Hitchhiker, as startled commuters watch the skies darken.

The shooting of Queen Xanxia is quite odd. In the first draft she is symbolically shot by Kimus and Mulov. In the first draft, Mulov was Pralix’s brother. He’s shown as practical where Pralix is spiritual. Kimus was always the vaguely hopeless rebel leader, but it is Mulov who does the heavy lifting of actually organising a rebellion. By the rehearsal script, Mulov has become Pralix’s sister Mula, which avoids Zanak having a reproduction-troubling all-male population. Given Mula / Mulov and Kimus’s journeys through Adams’s script – from wanting to do something to leading a rebellion – they’ve earned their shot at the evil Queen. By the time this reaches the screen, however, you may be a bit baffled as to why Kimus fires a gun at her and she just dies. Why has no one else thought of this? And why just Kimus? Poor Mula stands on the side lines.

A possible explanation is a copy of the rehearsal draft of the script lodged in the archives. It includes some curious handwritten alterations, clearly by someone with a tin ear for the humour of Douglas Adams. For example, the Doctor’s final speech goes from ‘This is quite a good part of the universe for Zanak to settle in. Reasonable sun, good neighbours, some quite convenient stars…’ to ‘Reasonable sun, good neighbours in the next star system.’ It’s a painful example of the gradual shaping that The Pirate Planet underwent to take it from a brilliant outpouring of ideas to four episodes of broadcastable Doctor Who.

By the end of the Key to Time season, Douglas Adams was already in place as Script Editor, and was assigned the job of writing the last half of the final episode – the epic confrontation between the Doctor, Romana and the Black Guardian. The Key to Time has been reassembled, the fate of the universe is in the Doctor’s hands…and Adams put his own spin on it.

What if, he argued, the Doctor had been doing the Black Guardian’s work all along? Had he ever even met the White Guardian, or had he simply been conned into collecting something that was never supposed to be found? Adams’s revolutionary take on the concept of the series was watered down by the time it reached the screen, but the final scripts still credit the raging figure who appears on the TARDIS screen simply as ‘the Guardian’. So, given this reading of the Doctor’s quest, it seemed appropriate to drop in a few hints that the Black Guardian is standing behind the scenes of The Pirate Planet, nudging events gently along.

At the end of the treatment for The Pirate Planet, I found an intriguing note. Whereas the television version ends with the Doctor and Romana walking off laughing, there’s a curious final scene:

The Doctor and Gravity make their farewells and go back to the Tardis, rather worried about what sort of state it’s going to be in inside. As they enter a breath of fresh air brushes past them and they discover a totally new interior – a large open conservatory with plants and small fountains and large French windows apparently looking out on to a pleasant English Garden. In the centre is a large stone sundial. The Doctor walks up to it and runs his hand over it. Lights wink on over its surface. He presses one and the doors close, he presses another and the central part of the sundial rises up. The Doctor is delighted…

It’s clear from the treatment and the scripts that the TARDIS control room is pretty much destroyed. (On screen we get a puff of smoke.) Experienced fans know that an old TARDIS control room set had been pressed back into service for the previous season – could this paragraph be a hint that producer Graham Williams was determined to put his stamp on the show and try and create a control room of his own? As an abandoned idea it’s intriguing – as a potential end to a book, it’s irresistible.

The final, mystifying words will be left to Part Three’s rehearsal script, where at the bottom of page 41 is a small typed note: ‘(No Page 42)’. And the typist is quite right. There isn’t.

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 and The Deeper 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 Adams died in May 2001.

James Goss is the author of the novelisation of Douglas Adams’ City of Death, 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.

About the Book

The hugely powerful Key to Time has been split into six segments, all of which have been disguised and hidden throughout time and space. Now the even more powerful White Guardian wants the Doctor to find the pieces.

The Doctor, Romana and K-9 have traced the second segment of the Key to the planet Calufrax. But when they arrive at exactly the right point in space, they find themselves on exactly the wrong planet – Zanak.

Zanak is a happy and prosperous planet. Mostly. Ruled from the Bridge by the mysterious ‘Captain’, it’s just one New Golden Age after the next, raining enough gems and minerals for everyone. It’s an economic miracle – so obviously something’s very wrong…

DOCTOR WHO BLANKET THEME: THE SIX KEYS

The Doctor has to find the six keys which are hidden in different parts of the Universe. In each case they may be something fairly large and significant (eg Great Pyramid of Cheops) which once taken revert to their original form. The problem in each case is that the object plays some significant role in the life of the planet on which it is located, either for good or evil, and the Doctor has to consider how its removal will affect life on that planet.

B) Person. (Apparently a person, though the Doctor knows him to be a robot, or rather android)

C) Piece of rubbish, like empty tin, bit of string. But it must be something he uses conspicuously. Tin that he puts his jelly babies in, dog lead for K-9, hat band. Something he hangs round his neck and annoys his companion with.

Here’s a thought. If his companion is the undergraduate Time Lord who is actually causing the Doctor a certain amount of embarrassment by showing him up rather too often then this could be a ploy of the Doctor’s to get his own back. Therefore by getting hold of and displaying the key very obviously from the beginning he is scoring some fairly good points.

Now, clearly whatever it is that the Doctor pretends to look for must have some ulterior purpose. He must have some reason for wanting to move it from where it is.

a) have some significance in the Doctor’s relationship with the Time Lord (i.e. because the Time Lord knows that they are searching for a key)

or b) be something that the inhabitants of the planet on which it is located would only be prepared to give up if they knew that it was one of the six keys.

1) Because everyone knows of the search for the Six Keys and is anxious to help. No, unlikely, difficult and boring.

2) Because they are in some sense special and in a privileged position in the galactic hierarchy. Not actually Time Lords but perhaps not too far removed from them in importance. Now if whatever it is that they give up is in some way a source of malignant power which they use (perhaps not overtly malignant, but let’s say oppressive) and is either a person, a computer or a powerful crystal, then they must believe that the utilisation of the key will in some way be to their positive advantage. Perhaps this serves to make the Doctor suspicious at the end of the ‘God’ in a white hat.

3) The undergraduate Time Lord, being young and earnest and keen to do things by the book would not interfere in a bad situation unless he was forced to. Therefore the Doctor leads him (and of course us) into believing that the computer or whatever is the key simply so that he can get rid of it without the Time Lord protesting…and then casually mentions at the end that he’s got the key all the time. Egg on the face of the u.g. T.L.

The Doctor himself. That of course puts another slant on his decision not to go through with it, which may be a problem.

Set it in the future by a good few years so that you can’t actually recognise the incumbent, thought possibly make him/her Windsorish.

If it’s our own moon, there could be a nice scene with the Doctor examining the footprints and debris left by the Apollo astronauts.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE PERFECT PLANET

Komnor is obviously very bright and anxious to learn from the Doctor. But he takes everything to do with being a Time Lord very seriously, and is frequently outraged by the Doctor’s flippancy, and his habit of flouting Time Lord convention and going his own way. Obviously since Komnor is going to be a Time Lord it is in his own interest he thinks to do everything he can to enhance the power and prestige of the Time Lords. By and large they get on reasonably well, but are inclined to over-react to each other at times.

Komnor sees these missions as being simple clear cut jobs – simply fetching the keys. He disapproves of the Doctor’s insatiable curiosity and thinks he should simply stick within his brief and otherwise leave well alone.

The Tardis lands on the planet of Jetral, which in the distant past was the Time Lords’ major source of a crystal used in Tardis construction. The Doctor is curious to notice that it seems to have several more moons than are recorded on the ancient star charts. Because of his curiosity he refuses to tell Komnor immediately exactly what they are looking for.

The planet appears to be almost unbelievably peaceful and pleasant, the people charming and polite almost to the point of absurdity. This is embarrassing to the Doctor who rather enjoys being rude to people occasionally, and he finds it hard to cope with people who won’t take offence.

A feast is held in honour of the visitors. The Doctor quite deliberately behaves disgracefully, to the fury of Komnor. When a toast is proposed from a fabulous ornamental stirrup cup, the Doctor prefers to drink from an old tin mug he has found lying by the side of the road, after which he hands out some totally gratuitous insults and leaves. He wanders about outside deep in thought.

Later that evening Komnor finds him sitting alone staring at a moon. ‘There is something here which is very very wrong’ says the Doctor. Komnor, still furious, says that the Doctor simply doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it – he’s an incurable meddler, why can’t he simply recognise and accept the beneficent influence of the Time Lords on this planet?

Komnor explains that he has been taken to see a large square in the city which has an enormously tall totem-pole-like statue of a Time Lord in it, which appears to be the centre of the planet’s religion.

The statue is very impressive. It seems to be radiating some sort of power. It is clearly treated with enormous devotion and awe by the people of the planet, and there seems to be some connection between the power of the statue and the tranquillity of the people. That makes Komnor very proud and the Doctor very worried.

The Doctor says ‘What’s cylindrical, metal, and forty metres high?’ and turns to stare at the statue.

Komnor is horrified. How can they possibly take that from the people of this, the perfect planet?

The Doctor consults Galactic records in the Tardis computer, and discovers that in the time when the Time Lords used to mine this planet, many millions of years ago, the inhabitants were brilliant, excitable, emotional and politically unstable people. This was a constant problem for the Time Lords, who even had to prevent a full scale nuclear war at one point. They decided as a temporary measure to impose a new religion on the planet, the worship of the Time Lord totem. The totem in fact generated a hypno-ray which drained all aggression, hatred and evil from the mind taking with it a significant proportion of the mind’s intelligence as well. When the Time Lords perfected a process for producing the crystal artificially they despatched a Lord to go and disconnect the hypno-ray. He never returned, but the Time Lords had gratefully lost interest in the planet and failed to follow the incident up. The Doctor is very worried to know what happened to the missing Lord.

Suddenly a hideous voice rings through the Tardis. ‘So the Time Lords have come to find me at last have they? You are too late. Far too late! Far far far too late!’

The Doctor and Komnor decide it’s time they went to investigate the statue. They find their way in by means of a concealed entrance, and are immediately captured by some strange shadowy forms, and led along a series of underground passages. They manage to escape and find their way into a chamber from which the ancient Time Lord mining equipment was operated. The Doctor is staggered to discover that it is still operating, not only because it hasn’t worn out, but…how can you possibly mine the same planet for millions of years? There’d be nothing left…

He is an indescribably hideous travesty of a Time Lord, the embodiment of everything evil, he sits gaping at them in the middle of a pool of boiling yellow mud. Cackling monstrously, he tells his story.

He had arrived on Jetral to disconnect the machine generating the hypno-ray. Something went wrong and he accidentally wired himself into the machine, so that all the aggression and evil intelligence that was being drained from the population of an entire planet was being pumped into his own mind. He was totally trapped, and as the centuries passed he became more and more evil and more and more intelligent – the dark alter ego of a million billion artificially contented people. And as his evil mental powers grew he learned the power of telekinesis to overcome his physical immobility, and with this tool he began to formulate his gigantic plan of revenge on the Time Lords.

He continued mining the planet for crystal, and when all the crystal was found he continued mining anyway.

But what was he mining for? demands the Doctor. And if he’d been mining at the same rate for millions of years, where on earth was all the debris?

Suddenly he realises…the Moons! Gigantic slag heaps in space! But why, why why?

He manages to escape again, runs back down the corridors to the chamber where the mining equipment was controlled, and reads off some figures. Hearing sounds of pursuit he leaves the chamber again and goes off into another passage running deeper, whilst doing some rapid calculations in his mind. He works out exactly how big the planet is, exactly how much has been mined, how big the moons are. Hearing the sounds of pursuit gaining on him he comes across a large plate let into the floor and begins to prise it open. As he is doing so, he suddenly realises the significance of his calculations. Over three quarters of the interior of the planet has been removed and is now circling the planet in the form of moons. The planet must be entirely hollow! At that moment the plate comes up and the Doctor finds himself staring down into the interior of the planet, billions of cubic miles of nothingness.

The Doctor twists round to evade capture by the shadows pursuing him, and falls straight down the hole…into nothingness.

The Doctor falls through nothingness for miles and miles and miles – he will not stop till he reaches the precise gravitational centre of the planet.

Komnor, hearing what has happened to the Doctor, also manages to escape and finds his way back to the outside world and the Tardis. He has never flown a Tardis before but knows the general principles. He also knows that his only chance of saving the Doctor is to try and make the Tardis materialise round him – at the precise gravitational centre of the planet.

Amazingly enough, he manages to do this, and the Doctor is rescued. They return to the surface. The Doctor is puzzled; he has computed the total mass of material that has been removed from the centre of the planet, and the figure seems oddly familiar. But he still doesn’t know what it is that Malchios is up to so they have to go and find him again.

They re-enter the labyrinth beneath the statue, are re-captured by the shadows, and are taken once more to Malchios. He is in a gloating mood, and talks wildly of his terrible revenge on the Time Lords for having allowed him to stay buried underground for these millions of years.

A door flies up revealing a chamber full of immensely sophisticated equipment. It seems very familiar to the Doctor, but he can’t quite place it. Another door flies up revealing a chamber full of time crystal.

The Doctor is stunned: it takes one piece of crystal the size of a finger to run the Tardis, yet here is nearly a thousand tons of the stuff wired together. There’s enough there to make an entire planet jump through space…

But why a hollow planet? Why scoop out the centre of the planet, leaving a hole the size of…a hole the size of Gallifrey…!

The Doctor, horrorstruck, finally understands the bizarre immensity of Malchios’s plan. The planet Jetral is going to jump through space like the Tardis and materialise round Gallifrey.

Malchios howls in triumph that the Time Lords will be buried alive for eternity whilst he harnesses the power of Gallifrey to take over the Universe. And nothing the Doctor can do will stop him.

But the Doctor suddenly produces a device he has brought from the Tardis, and clamps it round his head. He has realised that the shadows which captured him and Komnor were just Malchios’s thought projections. This device is a thought shield which should give him some protection from them. He starts to make a run for it, back down the passages. The shadows are ineffectual against him, but Malchios has other tricks up his sleeve – using his telekinetic power he starts to make objects fly through the air at the Doctor. Twisting and turning, the Doctor reaches the end of the passage. He can hear a familiar noise starting – the asthmatic grinding of a Tardis engine. He reaches the surface of the planet again. The cylindrical Time Lord statue is beginning to pump up and down like the central column of the Tardis – the entire planet is preparing to dematerialise. He races towards his own Tardis brushing aside some of the local people who still want to give him baskets of fruit and maybe sing the odd song together.

Inside the Tardis he sets the controls for Gallifrey in the hope that by trying to materialise in the same point in space as Jetral they will simply jam each other, and neither will be able to materialise.

Gigantic shock waves pass through the Tardis and Jetral. We see the night sky above the planet disappear and a new one begin to appear but as the Tardis sets up its space jam the two night skies begin to oscillate – the planet can’t materialise.

Malchios is totally occupied in trying to materialise the planet and Komnor finds himself left unobserved. He finds his way into the chamber containing the space jump controls, and tries to find his way round them. He dithers terribly because he can’t work out which controls what. Eventually he just picks up a large piece of equipment and takes a swing at the control panel. All hell breaks loose, but the mechanism slows down, the grinding dies away and the planet rematerialises in its own space.

He is about to put him to death when the Doctor bursts in and severs the lifeline which feeds Malchios with the mindpower drained from the hypno-ray. Malchios shrivels away with a dreadful shriek.

The Doctor sets about sabotaging the hypno-ray mechanism and he and Komnor then race back to the surface of the planet as a series of muffled detonations break out behind them.

They reach the surface. Komnor reminds the Doctor that they have to take the key with them, i.e. the statue. The Doctor says oh yes he’d forgotten about that, and at that moment the statue explodes. The people who have been gathered in peaceful adoration around it suddenly appear to wake up, their faces fill with anger, and they turn against the Doctor and Komnor, who have destroyed their idol. Chase back to the Tardis – they only just make it.

As they prepare to take off, Komnor is appalled that the key they came to find is not only left behind, but totally destroyed. The Doctor, rather to Komnor’s astonishment, says everything is under control, he’s got the key with him, and produces the old tin mug he found by the roadside. Komnor demands to know why he had told him that it was the statue.

‘But I didn’t,’ insists the Doctor. ‘I set you a riddle. What’s metal, cylindrical, and forty metres high?’

‘Yes I know,’ says the Doctor, ‘but you’re an intelligent lad and I didn’t want to insult you by making it too easy. I lied about the forty metres.’ He explains that he was convinced there was something wrong with the planet, that the statue was something to do with it, and the only way he could overcome Komnor’s reluctance to meddle in Time Lord affairs was to mislead him.

‘But never mind, you did save Gallifrey as a result of it, so that’s worth at least three out of ten for effort.’

CHAPTER ONE

THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

It rained diamonds that day, but no one cared. The people of Zanak simply held up their umbrellas made of gold and got on with their lives, which, for the most part, involved shuffling through streets already clogged with emeralds and rubies. No one looked up. No one wanted to see the rain of precious stones, far less get hit in the eye by one. But that wasn’t the real reason. If you lived in Zanak’s capital city and you looked up, you couldn’t help but see the mountain. And no one wanted to see the mountain. So, their gold-leaf umbrellas dented with diamonds, the people of Zanak went about their business, looking dead ahead.

Crowning the mountain was the Citadel. It was a peculiar building, a haphazard mingling of ancient stone and burnt metal that looked pretty much as though a starliner had fallen into a mountain. Which, curiously enough, was exactly what had once happened.

The jutting heart of the Citadel was a room called the Bridge. Mr Fibuli was wanted on the Bridge. But Mr Fibuli wasn’t coming. Not today.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS