Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus Read Free

and ammonia ice, with a bit of metal at its core. It doesn’t have feelings. And if it had a heart it’d have frozen by now. No one lives there. No one has lived there. No ever will live there.”
    “The helium-3 miners did.”
    “No they didn’t . They lived on the bit of space-debris.” The Doctor was becoming agitated.
    “You’re trying to take away its rights by calling it space-debris. Call it what it is, Doc. Call it a moon.”
    “For the love of God, Kevin, it is not a moon! It really is a piece of space-debris. It’s an old hulk of a mining ship a few millennia old, left abandoned and adrift between two moons, and causing an anachronism in your human historical record by its continued existence. Do. You. Understand?”
    “Alright,” said Kevin. “Just sayin’. But, like, a ship’s got feelings too, innit?”
    The Doctor groaned.
    “Well it has,” insisted Kevin. “People always refer to ships as having characters.”
    “You people even refer to those lifeless death-traps you call cars as having feelings,” said the Doctor. “But they’re just bits of metal pausing on their way to the ir inevitable demise in a scrapyard. A ship does not have feelings.”
    “Your Spectrel has feelings. So do all the others.”
    “Kevin, Spectrels are not ships. This is a helium-3 mining ship. The closest thing you can probably relate it to in your experience is a ruddy great big oil refinery without the flares. Does an oil refinery look like it has feelings to you, Kevin?”
    “Well –”
    “ Please don’t tell me you think oil refineries have feelings, laddie.”
    Kevin locked eyes with the Doctor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’re right.”
    “Fine. Now, can we please just get on with the job?”
    “So the job is to blow up the oil refinery?”
    “The helium-3 mining plant, yes.”
    “Oh, okay. If you’d put it like that I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. You’re rubbish at selling ideas, innit?”
    “So you’re ‘ready to roll’, are you?”
    “Doc, you know I is always ready to roll. Like, is Trini coming with us?”
    “Where is she?”
    “Last time I saw her she was in her room, asleep. There was the remains of something quite big. And it was all very bloody. The house-bots daren’t go in.”
    “ Binge-eating again. I let her out in a forest world last night, a bit like her old home world. When she wakes up she’ll morph back to her feline form and take great pleasure in licking the place clean. I see no need to disturb her peaceful repose. All we have to do is have a quick look around and then trigger the autodestruct. Should be quite a show, because there’s a special force-field to scatter it into an actual ring, rather than have it sending pieces into neighbouring moons, or Uranus itself. Don’t often get to see one of those. We might wake her up for that. I’ve checked the integrity of the atmosphere in the mining ship and it’s fine, so let’s go.”
    The Doctor walked out of the Spectrel. Kevin stepped confidently through the door and stopped, just in case he bumped into the Doctor.
    The Spectrel’s glass and red iron telephone box door closed behind him and he found himself in something that looked very much like the bridge of an ocean-going ship from Earth, but without the windows. Indeed, it reminded him exactly of the bridge of the starship Enterprise , from the original Sixties series of Star Trek . He had a nagging realisation that all cultures throughout the universe must go through the same cycles of discovery and then ultimate disappointment. It wasn’t that the creators of science fiction were capable only of mimicking what they saw from the world around them; it was that engineering inevitably did what engineering does – which was to be wholly practical, and normally on a tight budget.
    “You’re looking disappointed, Kevin,” said the Doctor, who was already fiddling with the controls.
    “To be honest, yes.”
    “Nothing new there. Your