The Dark Planet (short story)

The Dark Planet was a short story published in Doctor Who Annual 1971. It featured the Third Doctor, Liz Shaw and the Brigadier.

Summary
The Doctor is driving at speed down a country road with Liz at his side. He swerves into a field to avoid a car being driven erratically in the opposite direction. When the other car crashes, Liz dashes off to call for help while the Doctor investigates the scene. He sees a young man lying unconscious in the car. When he opens the door a sheath of papers is blown out by the wind. He sees a wet patch in the man's pocket and reaches in. He withdraws a broken bottle containing something that vaguely resembles a slug. When Liz returns with the news that police and ambulance are on their way, she finds him looking at one of the pieces of paper that blew from the car. Neither she nor the Doctor can understand what they are looking at and wonder if it is a new kind of maths.

The ambulance arrives to take the man to the local hospital. A policeman in attendance notices that the Doctor has cut his hand on the broken bottle and suggests that he goes to the hospital, too. The Doctor declines and asks where the man may have come from. The policeman says that he looks like a student from Sayle College nearby. The Doctor then asks Liz if there is a biologist nearby. She remembers that Professor Meechley lives at Potter's End.

Liz directs the Doctor to the professor's house. It is obvious that Meechley was expecting a visitor and is genuinely upset when he is told of the car crash. However, it is soon apparent that he had asked the student to bring along a specimen and he is most interested in the thing that the Doctor shows him, though he expects the Doctor to merely hand it over and drive away. Liz persuades the professor to attend to the Doctor's injured hand but, as he does so, the Doctor slumps into unconsciousness. By the time he has revived they find that the biologist and his new specimen have vanished.

They make their way to an appointment with the Brigadier who seems less than concerned with this affair and more interested in the return of the Yeti. He suggests that the whole thing is a prank being played on the professor by the student, Philip Larrent. Neither can UNIT's scientists shed any light on the piece of paper that the Doctor found. However, when a telephone call informs them that Meechley, too, has had a car crash, the Brigadier grows more interested. Further prompting informs them that the professor drove into a river and one of his rescuers kicked a slug-like thing into the river. In a leap of logic, Liz guesses that the Doctor didn't have a car crash because he isn't from Earth and therefore immune to the specimen's influence.

Some research shows that Sayle College has only been open for two years. The Doctor drives there and arrives in darkness. He parks outside the walls and then climbs over. With apparent clumsiness he tumbles off the wall into a ditch and pretends to be unconscious. He is found almost immediately and carried into the college by two figures that seem to have no difficulty bearing his weight. He is placed on a couch and overhears a phone call from the Brigadier arranging to meet the principal the next day. He discerns that the appointment is about the student, Larrent, and that the Doctor is expected to accompany the Brigadier.

He waits until he is alone and then creeps through the corridors to a laboratory. There, he finds more specimens in jars. They are similar to the one that Larrent was carrying. Moving on, he enters an art room where he finds a man who introduces himself as Clifford Leane. He is a one-armed painter and his only hand is bandaged yet he seems to be completing the latest in a series of alien landscapes. He tells the Doctor that, at first, he fought back, but now he acknowledges that the aliens are superior to man in every way.

He tells the Doctor that the aliens are from a dark, cold world and are dying out. They have come to Earth in their spaceships and are teaching humans their knowledge so that they can replace the aliens when they are dead. The only thing they need to do to pass on their knowledge is to be nearby. He adds that the population of an Alpine village was transported to their planet in 1777 but all of the villagers died so this new way of teaching was thought of.

The Doctor decides he needs to do something about this and stumbles back to the laboratory through the dark corridors. His mind seems to be freezing up. He reaches for one of the specimen jars but has to sit down. Someone enters and tells him that the aliens cannot communicate with the Doctor and so he has to be eradicated. This assailant starts to strangle the Doctor but he is saved by Leane. The Doctor watches in a daze as two men fight in the dark and then a fire breaks out. Leane throws the Doctor to safety from a window.

The next morning, there is nothing left of the college but a blackened shell. The professors and students of the college are all in a strange state of shock. When the Brigadier and Liz arrive at the hospital to visit the Doctor, he tells them that the college inhabitants were to be taken to an alien planet and are conditioned to be there. They need to be reconditioned to Earth life. The Brigadier is upset that the chance to learn so much from the aliens has gone but the Doctor speculates that there will be further contact for the aliens are not likely to give up their search for successors.

Characters

 * Third Doctor
 * Liz Shaw
 * Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
 * Philip Larrent
 * Professor Meechley
 * Herbert Bainbridge
 * Clifford Leane
 * inhabitants of a dark planet

Continuity
to be added