Bennelong Point (short story)

Bennelong Point was a short story published in Doctor Who Storybook 2010. It was written by Keith Temple.

Summary
Harvey wakes up feeling strange. He’s not in his bedroom, but instead is lying in the middle of a vibrating floor. The Doctor, who he does not recognise, is kneeling on his chest and examining him with his sonic screwdriver. Harvey asks the Doctor to get off him and the Doctor grins, helping him to his feet. Harvey sees that he’s on a train travelling through a desert, and has no memory of how he got there. The Doctor tells Harvey that they’re heading to Sydney, and assures him that his memory will return eventually. He asks Harvey if “Zalphon Mind Skippers” or “Esperance” mean anything to him, and Harvey recalls a few nights previously when he witnessed Skylab falling back to Earth. The sky had suddenly lit up, with red, orange and green glowing orbs raining down onto Harvey’s family’s farm. Harvey recalls the space station falling on his house, then asks the Doctor if Earth has been invaded by aliens. The Doctor confirms that it has.

Three days before finding himself on a train with the Doctor, Harvey is watching the sky with his telescope, hoping to see Skylab fall to Earth. When debris begins hitting his house, and sonic booms shatter the windows, Harvey’s dad rushes him outside. They get into his dad’s utility truck to chase and salvage some of the larger pieces of debris, which have landed out in the Bush.

They come across two pieces of debris, which have landed a few feet apart. When Harvey’s dad approaches one piece to pick it up, Harvey instinctively tells him to leave it. A kangaroo appears from the scrub, with bright light shining from its eye sockets. It snarls, revealing unusual sharp fangs. Harvey’s dad yells and the strange kangaroo retreats. He then chases after it, instructing Harvey to stay put. As Harvey waits in the dark, he hears a sound like a rusty old engine. The Doctor, who he’s never met before, walks over to him and begins chatting. The Doctor looks at the two cylinders which have landed in the Bush, and is unnerved to see that one of them appears to have opened.

Harvey’s dad then returns, and Harvey laughs when he sees him wearing sunglasses. Without speaking, Harvey’s dad picks up the unopened cylinder and places it in the utility truck. He then starts the engine, and Harvey rushes to jump in before his dad drives away. The Doctor tells Harvey that his dad hasn’t “been completely absorbed yet”, and warns Harvey to get away from him as soon as he can. Harvey doesn’t understand, and assumes the Doctor is trying to steal their salvage, so ignores his warning. Harvey and his dad then drive away. They return home and find the house damaged, but still standing.

The next morning, Harvey awakes to find his father sitting in the kitchen, listening to the news on a transistor radio. He isn’t acting as jovially as usual, and is still wearing his sunglasses. On the radio, the Sydney Morning Globe offers a $20,000 reward for the largest piece of Skylab debris. Harvey suggests selling the cylinders, but his Dad rudely shuts down the suggestion. Harvey then sees the Doctor through the window, poking around a barn on the edge of their farm. Harvey goes to the barn, but when he arrives there’s no sign of the Doctor. The cylinders are still on his dad’s workbench, and are warm to the touch. Suddenly Harvey is knocked to the ground – he looks up to see his dad standing over him, yelling at him to leave the cylinders alone. His dad’s sunglasses slip, and Harvey sees that his eyes are glowing white. His dad snarls, revealing sharp fangs.

Before he can pounce, Harvey’s dad is stopped by the Doctor. Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor causes a cloud of thick green gas to escape from Harvey’s dad’s head. He then uses the screwdriver to open the unopened cylinder, and the cloud of green gas is drawn inside it. Harvey rushes to his dad, who is now unconscious on the floor. The Doctor assures Harvey that his dad will be okay, and tells him that he’s sucked all of the “Zalphon” from him using a sonic blast. He then tells Harvey that the cylinders are escape pods from a Zalphon scout ship, and that the open cylinder was damaged when it crashed into the ground, allowing the Zalphon inside to escape and take over his dad. He explains that Zalphons are a parasitic species which feed on mental energy. Harvey doesn’t believe the story, but decides to humour the Doctor. He says that the Doctor can leave now, since the emergency is over. However, the Doctor tells Harvey that the scout ship which crashed into Skylab was leaving Earth, implying that the Zalphon had already reached the planet. The pair’s conversation ends abruptly when they hear a car door slamming outside the barn.

Peering outside, they see three men in suits walking towards the house. The Doctor believes them to be Zalphons, since they’re wearing sunglasses. The men then turn in unison, and begin walking towards the barn. Harvey jokes that they’ve detected his brain patterns, and the Doctor nods seriously. As the Doctor shuts the barn door and begins barricading it with hay bales, Harvey takes the unopened cylinder and climbs out of the barn through some loose clapboards at the back. The Doctor turns to see him climbing out with the Zalphon escape pod, and calls after him.

Days later, back on the train, the Doctor helps Harvey into a seat. He explains that, after subduing the three suited Zelphons with his sonic screwdriver, he assumed Harvey would be taking the escape pod to Sydney to try and sell it, and that without any money of his own his only option would be to stow away on a train. The Doctor then tells Harvey that the Zelphon in the sealed pod escaped and attempted to drain his mind, which is why his memory is now shaky. With this prompt, Harvey remembers boarding the train, and dodging ticket inspectors over the course of its three-day journey. He remembers stumbling across the Doctor on the train, the train stopping suddenly because of cattle on the track, the cylinder falling to the ground and breaking open, and finally he remembers the green ectoplasm escaping from it and taking him over.

Now believing the Doctor, and that the cylinder is a Zalphon escape pod, Harvey wonders if he should destroy it. Surprisingly, the Doctor tells Harvey he should still take it to Sydney and claim the reward money. Harvey then thinks the Doctor might be hiding his true intentions.

When the Doctor and Harvey step out of Sydney train station a van suddenly pulls up to them. Two men in suits and sunglasses grab the pair and bundle them into the van. The Doctor thanks one of the men for giving him a lift, and Harvey recognises this man as Wade Johnson, the editor of the Sydney Morning Globe. The Doctor tells Harvey that this man is now Zalphon Wade Johnson, and Zalphon Wade thanks Harvey for returning the escape pod to him.

The Doctor asks Zalphon Wade what happened with Skylab. Zalphon Wade explains that the Zalphons were using the defunct space station to map the co-ordinates of every human on Earth, and that their scout ship was extracting this information from Skylab when the station lost its orbit and collided with the ship. The Doctor suggests that the Zalphons wanted to know the co-ordinate locations of everyone on Earth in order to take over their minds simultaneously. Zalphon Wade nods proudly, and tells the Doctor a Zalphon mothership has been built in Sydney which is ready to circle the planet and begin the mass takeover.

The van stops, and the Doctor and Harvey are rushed into a building. They take a lift up to what appears to be a ship’s control room. Through a window Harvey sees thousands of containers, each glowing green due to the Zalphons inside. The Doctor sees them too, calling them “The Zalphon Army”. Zalphon Wade takes the cylinder and opens it, and the Zalphon inside disappears into the ship’s mechanism. One of Zalphon Wade’s bodyguards announces that the co-ordinates are in place, and the invasion can begin. The Doctor springs into action, using his sonic screwdriver to send sonic blasts all around the room. The Zalphons begin to stumble about, pouring out of their human hosts. As rocket engines rumble below them, the Doctor and Harvey herd the human bodies into the lift and race down to the ground floor. As the lift goes down, the Doctor tells Harvey he’s reset the co-ordinates for Antarctica. Because of their ectoplasmic structure, the Zalphons cannot survive in cold temperatures, and will turn to ice crystals upon arrival. The lift reaches the ground, and the Doctor, Harvey, and the newly-released human hosts rush outside. As he leaves the mothership, Harvey turns around to see the Sydney Opera House. The building rumbles and takes off into the sky.

A crowd gathers to watch the spectacle. The Doctor disappears into the crowd. Harvey then turns to Wade Johnson, who is staring at the flying opera house in disbelief, and offers to sell Wade his story for $20,000.

Characters

 * Tenth Doctor
 * Harvey
 * Harvey's father
 * Wade Johnson

Worldbuilding

 * Harvey has model planes hanging in his bedroom.
 * Bank employees wore suits to work.
 * Australians often wore sunglasses.
 * “Drongo” is Australian slang, meaning a foolish person.
 * The Australian Outback was sometimes called “the Bush”
 * The Indian Pacific railway travelled from Perth to Sydney.
 * Harvey compares the Doctor to Sherlock Holmes.

Continuity

 * The Doctor continues to travel alone, making temporary friends instead of being accompanied by a full-time companion. (PROSE: Scared Stiff, COMIC: Space Vikings!, et al.)