"'Skaro' is Dalek for 'home'," the Doctor explained to Liz as the
Daleks escorted them through the corridor. "Their planet of origin is
called Skaro by everyone else in the universe, but to the Daleks
themselves 'Skaro' is whatever planet the Emperor Dalek currently lives
on. We're not on the original Skaro!"
"Are you saying ...?" Liz started.
"Yes, I'm afraid so," said the Doctor. "We're still on twentieth
century Earth!"
The Brigadier climbed out of his car even before the driver had
pulled to a stop at the barricade of jeeps and trucks Benton's men had
set up around the monkey house.
"No news of the Doctor and Miss Shaw, sir," said Benton, "not since
I radioed you."
"Right," said the Brigadier.
"No other new developments, either."
"Right," said the Brigadier.
"Except ..." said Benton. "I don't know if it means anything,
but ..." The Brigadier gave him a sharp look. "Yes sir. The monkeys have
all gone quiet. Surely that can't be significant?"
"Right," said the Brigadier.
"Liz, listen," said the Doctor while they and their honor guard
waited at a lift.
Liz cocked her head. "I don't hear anything. What am I listening
for?"
"Don't you remember what the Azure Dalek said? Well, the monkeys
have all gone quiet!"
"Oh no!" said Liz. "Are we too late, then?"
"There's still one last chance," said the Doctor.
The Azure Dalek rolled into the command center of the secret Dalek
base two miles beneath the London Zoo. "THE-EXPERIMENT-WAS-SUCCESSFUL,"
it reported to the Orange Dalek. "THE-LOWER-PRIMATES-ARE-IN-SUSPENDED-
ANIMATION."
"EXCELLENT," said the Orange Dalek. "PROCEED-TO-THE-PENULTIMATE-
STAGE-OF-THE-OPERATION." It turned to a squad captain. "ASSIST-THE-
AZURE-DALEK-WITH-SPECIMEN-GATHERING."
The Azure Dalek rolled back out of the command center, the squad
of Dull Grey Daleks following him, screeching, "PENULTIMATE!
PENULTIMATE!"
Benton's radio buzzed and he raised it to his ear. "Something,
sir," he said as he listened. "Round back there's some movement among
the garbage cans."
"Right," said the Brigadier, motioning Benton to follow him around
the building.
By the time they arrived there was a pitched battle going on between
the UNIT soldiers and about half a dozen dull grey Daleks. "Those aren't
their usual ray blasts," Benton observed, as he and the Brigadier ducked
for cover behind a litter can with a lid shaped like a cartoon lion with
its mouth open.
"Right," said the Brigadier. He and Benton were trying to shoot
back, but all it amounted to was taking potshots at the Daleks, as they
persisted in not being at all affected by bullets.
"TWO-MORE-HUMANS-ON-THE-PATH," one of the Daleks warned its fellows.
"SEDATE! SEDATE!"
"They're trying to take us alive, sir!" said Benton.
"Right," said the Brigadier. He pulled on Benton's arm and they both
ran. Benton went over the stone wall surrounding the zoo, the Brigadier
bringing up the rear.
"Thanks for the boost, sir," said Benton.
"Right," said the Brigadier.
"What are we doing?" Liz asked as the Daleks ushered them out of
the lift into a large chamber, in the center of which was a huge machine
with power cables and communication lines radiating outward from it like
bicycle spokes, high over their heads, and disappearing into outlets in
the walls.
"We'll have to wait for the right moment," said the Doctor.
"I meant," said Liz, "what are we doing here?"
"I imagine," said the Doctor, rubbing his neck, "we're here to meet
the Emperor Dalek."
"When does it get here?"
"YOUR-HUMOR-IS-NOT-APPRECIATED," said the machine in the center of
the room.
"APPRECIATE! APPRECIATE!" cried one of the escort Daleks. The others
vaporised it.
"Well well well," said the Doctor to the Emperor Dalek. "You lot've
been clever this time, I must say."
"YOU-ARE-THE-DOCTOR," said the Emperor Dalek. "YOU-ARE-AN-ENEMY-OF-
THE-DALEK-RACE. YOU-WILL-BE-EXTERMINATED."
"Ready when you are," said the Doctor.
"BUT-FIRST," said the Emperor Dalek, occasioning a small nod to
himself by the Doctor, "YOU-WILL-BE-SHOWN-OUR-TRUE-PLANS-FOR-THIS-PLANET.
YOU-WILL-SEE-FOR-YOURSELF-THAT-DALEK-INTELLIGENCE-IS-THE-SUPERIOR-
INTELLIGENCE-IN-THE-UNIVERSE."
"COGITATE! COGITATE!" chorused the other Daleks in the room as they
herded the Doctor and Liz back out of the chamber and into the lift again,
whence they disembarked on a glassed-in balcony over a huge room.
"Aren't those UNIT soliders in there?" Liz asked.
"Yes, they are," said the Doctor. "If we could signal them in some
way ..."
"THERE-IS-NO-WAY-TO-SIGNAL-THEM," said one of the Daleks, showing a
unprecedented interest in their conversation. "THE-WINDOW-IS-TRANSPARENT-
ONLY-ONE-WAY-AND-IS-TWELVE-INCHES-THICK."
While noting for future reference that the Daleks were not on the
decimal system, the Doctor said, "Well, I trust then that this display is
going to be instructive."
"EDUCATE! EDUCATE!" chorused the Daleks.
"Doctor, what's happening?" Liz asked.
The Doctor looked back at the UNIT men from the Daleks. First singly
and then in groups they were falling asleep where they stood.
"SEE,-DOCTOR," said the Dalek, "HOW-OUR-FREON-STABILISER-AFFECTS-THE-
OXYGEN-IN-THE-SPECIMEN-CHAMBER."
"Freon stabiliser?" said the Doctor. "Of course, I should have
realized! The hyperspectrographic readings of the cloaked Dalek satellites
indicated freon in mass quantities!"
"But what does it mean?" Liz asked.
"It means," said the Doctor, "that the Daleks are going to put the
whole of Earth into cold storage!"
"NOT-THE-WHOLE-PLANET," said the Dalek. "ONLY-THE-HUMANS-AND-THE-
OTHER-PRIMATES. THE-NATURAL-RESOURCES-OF-THE-PLANET-CAN-BE-UTILIZED-FOR-
THE-DALEK-CONQUEST-OF-THE-UNIVERSE-AND-THE-HUMANS-CAN-BE-THAWED-OUT-AND-
ROBOTICISED-AS-NEEDED."
Each UNIT soldier now had a light frost about him.
"AND-NOW-YOU-WILL-BE-EXTERMINATED," said the Dalek. "WE-WILL-RETURN-
TO-THE-EMPEROR'S-CHAMBER-SO-THAT-THE-EMPEROR-MAY-WITNESS-THE-HISTORIC-
OCCASION."
Before the Daleks herded them back into the lift, without anyone
noticing, the Doctor placed a small boxy device against the one-way
glass.
"I don't think they followed us, sir," said Benton.
"Right," said the Brigadier. He led Benton around the zoo's outside
wall toward the entrance.
"If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, sir," said Benton,
"I don't fancy leaving the men to the mercies of those Daleks either."
"Right," said the Brigadier.
"AND-NOW,-DOCTOR," said the Emperor Dalek, "YOU-WILL-BE-
EXTERMINATED."
"Duck, Liz!" the Doctor shouted. Liz ducked, then looked to see what
the Doctor was doing. He had leapt for one of the Emperor Dalek's cables
and grabbed it. His weight pulled it from the wall. Sparks flew from both
severed connections. Meanwhile the Daleks had opened fire on the Doctor
and Liz - but since they had jumped and ducked respectively, the Dalek
fire plowed into the Emperor Dalek.
"EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!" screeched the Emperor Dalek. "FRIENDLY FIRE
HAS DAMAGED CEREBRAL SUPPORT SYSTEMS! MY JUDGMENT IS IMPAIRED!" The
Daleks gathered around it, shouting, "RESUSCITATE! RESUSCITATE!"
The Doctor noted as he and Liz dashed from the room, "No hyphens. I
must've hurt the Emperor Dalek worse than I thought."
The escapees ducked into a storage room. "What next, Doctor?" Liz
asked. "How are we going to rescue the soldiers?"
"I've a notion they'll manage on their own," said the Doctor. "I left
a phi wave emitter on the window. Filtered through the quazonide in the
Daleks' one-way glass, it'll act as a decryogen. They'll wake up in a few
minutes."
"What about us?"
"We have to sabotage the Daleks' satellite network," said the
Doctor, "and that means we have to sneak into their command center ..."
"Funny the Daleks don't seem to have noticed we broke in," said
Benton, as he and the Brigadier crept through the Dalek base. The
corridors of the base were dull grey stone; they didn't look much
different than those of the monkey house above, except the cartoons on
them weren't as clever. "The Doctor and Miss Shaw must have distracted
them."
"Right," said the Brigadier. He passed a door with a window at
eyestalk level, peered inside, and waved Benton over. Inside were all
the men who had been taken by the Daleks in the battle behind the monkey
house. They had frost in their hair and their eyebrows, and were standing
very still.
"Something's wrong with'em, sir," Benton said.
"Right," said the Brigadier. He operated the door control with the
plumber's helper with which the Doctor had insisted all UNIT personnel
be equipped for this operation. He and Benton entered the room.
"Whatever happened to them probably was caused by those radar-dish
looking things on the ceiling," said Benton, pointing to the radar-dish
looking things on the ceiling. After a moment's consideration he added,
"We probably should have thought of that before we walked underneath
them, shouldn't we, sir?"
"Right," said the Brigadier.
Despite their belated concern they felt no effects from the freon
stabiliser. In fact, the men were beginning to blink and start moving,
in response to the decryogen reaction caused by the phi wave emitter.
"Whatever happened to them must just ... wear off after awhile,"
said Benton.
"Right," said the Brigadier. He had on his smug got-through-THAT-
without-the-Doctor look.
The Doctor and Liz crept through the Dalek base on their way to the
command center. At least that's where the Doctor said they were headed;
the corridors and their path through them were so twisted that Liz
wasn't certain they weren't lost.
"Are we lost?" she whispered, as the Doctor peered around yet
another corner at yet another intersection.
"Depends on your definition of 'lost'," said the Doctor, rubbing
the back of his neck. "To me, the use of 'lost' would imply that I knew
in the first place exactly where on the base the command center is. So I
say we're not lost because the concept is inapplicable."
"So you're saying, 'lost' only applies when you had the even
vaguest idea where you were going in the first place?"
The Doctor grinned at her. "Why, yes." He peered around the corner
again. "Even assuming a looser definition for 'lost' than that, though,
I'd have to answer your original question 'no'. I believe we've found our
destination."
In the specimen chamber, all the UNIT soldiers had thawed out.
"What next, sir?" Benton asked the Brigadier, just as the Azure
Dalek entered the room.
"EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!" cried the Azure Dalek. "THE-SPECIMENS-HAVE-
BEEN-RELEASED! WE-HAVE-BEEN-BETRAYED! HOW-TREACHEROUS-HUMANOIDS-ARE," it
added to itself.
The Brigadier and most of the UNIT soldiers opened fire on the
Dalek. Benton and some of the cleverer soldiers pulled out their
plumber's helpers and started trying to work out the freon stabilizer
controls. The Dull Grey Daleks were the first reinforcements to arrive,
but were inhibited in their efforts to exterminate the UNIT men by the
Azure Dalek's insistence that the machinery must not be damaged.
"HESITATE! HESTITATE!" it cautioned them.
The Doctor and Liz snuck around in the Dalek command center looking
for the controls for the satellite network, avoiding discovery by the
attendant Daleks through the expedient of crawling on their hands and
knees below the Daleks' line of vision.
"MAUVE-SQUAD-REPORT-THAT-THE-DULL-GREY-SQUAD-HAVE-BEEN-FROZEN-BY-
THE-FREON-STABILISER-AT-THE-HANDS-OF-THE-HUMANS," one of them reported
to the Orange Dalek. "ARGENT-SQUAD-AND-CHARTREUSE-SQUAD-ARE-MOBILIZING-
TO-ASSIST."
"WHAT-OF-THE-ROSE-RED-SQUAD?" said the Orange Dalek.
"THEY-ARE-STILL-ASSISTING-IN-REPAIRS-TO-THE-EMPEROR'S-UNIT."
"THEN-WHO-IS-PURSUING-THE-DOCTOR-AND-THE-GIRL?"
"Why it is always 'the Doctor and the girl'?" muttered the Doctor
quietly to Liz. "Don't megalomaniacs know a woman when they see one?"
"NO-ONE-IS-PURSUING-THE-DOCTOR-AND-THE-GIRL. THERE-IS-NO-ONE-LEFT."
"THEN-WE-MUST-DO-IT-OURSELVES. LAST-ONE-OUT-LOCK-THE-DOOR." The
Orange Dalek led the others single file out of the command center with
cries of, "LOCATE! LOCATE!" The door shut, and there was a clicking sound.
"Huh! It's never this easy." The Doctor stood, Liz following suit.
"Now, let's see. The satellite network controls must be ..." He spun
slowly where he stood, near the middle of the room, scanning the consoles.
"-there." Spotting the console he wanted, he crossed to it. Liz followed
him, entirely unable to distinguish what differed about this one from any
of the others.
The Doctor pressed a series of buttons in what for all Liz could
tell was random order. After half a minute of this he stopped and smiled
at Liz. "There, that's done it."
"You've destroyed the freon stabiliser satellites?"
"Better than that. You see, I discovered that they weren't being
cloaked so much as kept in a time zone half a second after the present.
I managed to use their rudimentary time travel technology to create a
non-recursive single-circuit unraveled time loop, and erased this Dalek
incursion from Earth's history entirely."
"Erased it? You mean, as if it never happened?"
"And never will. Wiped from the face of the timeline. No one will
even remember any of these events."
"Which events?" Liz asked, bringing two steaming mugs to the table
in the UNIT lab.
The Doctor looked up from the TARDIS console, standing free in the
middle of the floor of the lab. "I'm sorry, what was I saying?"
"I didn't hear what you were saying. That would be why I asked,
wouldn't it?"
The Doctor stopped still for a moment, considering. "I don't know
what I'm talking about," he said.
Liz suppressed a sarcastic remark, in hopes of getting out of
Purgatory the sooner; instead asking, "Have you been working too hard?"
"You know, perhaps that's it," grinned the Doctor, setting down
the tools in his hands. "Fancy a trip to the zoo?"
ROLL CREDITS