Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication by Adam Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

swallowing splash of cold agony. The water felt like it was cutting all parts of my body at once. It was bitterly and agonizing cold.
    Momentarily we were submerged, and I felt my chest constrict. Then we broke the surface, still all clinging together, gasping and crying.
    I blinked the seawater from my eyes, and tried to look around. The two portions of the Icetanic were falling away from us on either side, rotating slowly in the choppy water as they searched for their new points of flotational equilibrium. The swell from this motion buoyed us up. The twin halves of the ship slid and rolled steadily away from us.
    ‘The cold!’ cried Linn. ‘The water is so cold !’
    Then I saw the Cydermen. They were tumbling from the slippery ice, shelled out of the internal chambers and caverns of the mighty ice-structure like peas from a great white pod. The distant calls of ‘ Ooo! Aur!’ were cut short with gloop! and glurg! noises, and then they disappeared.
    They were all falling into the freezing waters and sinking into its depths.
    ‘What,’ I gasped, through chattering teeth, ‘what will happen to them?’
    The Dr was treading water by kicking his legs in froggy motions. ‘Straight to the bottom,’ he said, grimly.
    ‘Will they drown?’
    ‘Dear me no,’ said the Dr. ‘They’re far too toughly designed to drown .’
    ‘Well - will the pressure down there kill them?’
    ‘Certainly not. They’ll gather themselves and start walking - slowly but surely - for the shore.’
    ‘Then the Earth is doomed!’ I moaned. ‘We have failed!’
    ‘Well,’ said the Dr, kicking more furiously as the swell dipped us all down, ‘I don’t think so. They’ll all be dead long before they reach the shore, you see.’
    ‘But how?’ I gasped.
    ‘The sea water of course,’ snapped the Dr. ‘It’ll poison them. They’ll be walking through a fatal medium.’
    ‘I thought you said that only gold could kill them?’
    ‘That’s quite right. There’s a surprisingly large amount of gold dissolved in the ocean, you know. Approaching two milligrams per tonne. And if that doesn’t sound like a lot, then consider how many tonnes of seawater there are in the world . . . something like one and a third billion cubic kilometres of the stuff. The Cydermen will have to march through billions of tonnes of the stuff, and all that gold will accumulate in their chest-grills. They’re doomed.’
    ‘That’s good news,’ I said. Actually what I said was ththththats gg ggg ggood n-news attshOOO! . But I feel sure the Dr and Linn understood me.
    ‘What about the ship we hit?’ asked Linn.
    The swell carried us up, and we caught a glimpse of the mystery ship over the top of the still slowly tumbling right-side half of the Icetanic . It was sailing away, apparently unharmed. ‘Looks alright, don’t you think?’ said the Dr.
    ‘I suppose so. But what about us ?’
    ‘I think we need to find the . . . ah there we go - there she is: the TARDY!’
    ‘Can the TARDY float?’ I asked, shiveringly. I was thinking how very heavy it must be.
    ‘When you consider the relationship between the compact external shape of the thing, and the amount of air inside the structure,’ said the Dr, ‘the TARDY may well be the most buoyant object in the history of the universe.’
    ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ I said.
    ‘Come on.’
    We broke apart, and swam, our limbs aching with the ferocity of the cold, towards a rectangular shape. The Dr was right: it was so buoyant, in fact, that it was in effect standing on top of the water. We opened the door and crawled up onto the floor inside, shivering and soaking but alive.
    It was a relief beyond words to shut the door on that freezing environment.
    ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the Dr, pulling towels from the central console and passing them around. ‘I do believe we’ve done what we came to do . . . averted catastrophe once again.’

PROLOGUE
    Time.
    Have you ever really thought about