Chapter Seven

The Doctor turned around, continuing to walk backwards without even slowing. Unlike Benny, he wasn't having any problem slipping through the throng. 'We are doing so out of scientific interest, and because we might prove invaluable as impartial negotiators in this little dispute.'

Benny squeezed past two of the fattest men she had ever seen and came up alongside him. 'How do you propose to start the negotiations, Doctor?' she asked sweetly. 'By shouting up at them?'

'I don't think my voice would be loud enough,' the Doctor said in all seriousness.

They could see the ship properly for the first time.

It took Benny a couple of seconds to realise that the reason the hull was strobing with bright blue light was that it was being photographed by thousands of people, all using flashbulbs. She hoped that the Martians, from a planet in perpetual twilight, didn't take the bright light as some sort of attack. The flickering glare of the flashbulbs made the Martian ship appear even more nightmarish than it already was. The ship was too large to take in at one attempt: it just left impressions of a surface like that of a seashell or a snail, fins like a deep-sea fish.

Despite that, Benny recognised the basic design of the spacecraft - Martian rockets had remained unchanged for a hundred thousand years. The Martians had followed the pattern of technological development familiar on ten thousand worlds throughout the galaxy, and they had evolved many millennia before the human race. The Martian Industrial Revolution had taken place at the same time as the Pliocene on Earth. On her expedition, Benny had discovered the remains of documents a million years old that were evidence of Martian space travel.

The Martians, the Ice Warriors as the Doctor insisted on calling them, would have conquered the solar system, even the galaxy, but for the lack of resources on their home world. Energy sources were scarce, few of the necessary metals were present in sufficient quantities. Martian astronomers knew that both the Earth and the asteroid belt were abundant with mineral wealth, but other planets remained tantalisingly just out of reach.