Chapter 5: The Silent Earth
The TARDIS completed its landing and hummed quietly. The Doctor walked around the console, tweaking settings here and there, until he was satisfied. He pulled off the bolo tie and was putting on his regular bow tie when Amy and Rory walked back into the console room. They had changed back into their regular clothes.
"Here we are," said the Doctor, "back safe and sound. Your house is just across the street, and I've even adjusted the landing time to match the hours we were gone. So, no apparent aging problems."
The Doctor bounced slightly, pleased. "A brilliant landing if I do say so myself."
Amy walked up to the Doctor and straightened his bow tie. "Overall Doctor, that wasn't a bad trip at all. Just the one hitch with that Russian sub, and I did get a reminder of where beef comes from – but I'd call it a success."
The Doctor beamed, and together they walked down the steps from the central console to the TARDIS doors.
"Feel free to call me anytime," he said. "I'm always up for a good adventure."
Amy stopped to talk to the Doctor while Rory continued outside. She put on a more serious tone.
"Now remember what I said about traveling alone. You really do need to have companions with you to keep you grounded."
"Uh, Amy?" said Rory with a worried tone.
"Just a minute hon – I'm talking to the Doctor."
"Amy?" Rory persisted. "You've really got to see this. The Doctor too."
In spite of the worry in Rory's voice, Amy was feeling a bit irritated at the interruption.
"What now?" she said. She turned around and stepped up to the open TARDIS doors.
Amy was stunned. "What the hell? WHERE'S OUR HOUSE!"
"More to the point," replied Rory while looking around. "Where's London?"
The scene was one of complete and total devastation. The sky was tinged yellow with thick dark clouds. Rubble lay strewn in all directions – coarse chunks of bricks, mortar, cobblestone, and savagely twisted pieces of rusted steel. There were occasional low brick walls with ragged, uneven, tops – the scorched remains of collapsed buildings – all lined up in the same direction. It was strangely silent in the absence of the usual city noises one learns to ignore: no traffic, no aircraft in flight, no people, no pets, and no birds. Only the wind made its presence known.
As Amy, Rory and the Doctor circled around the TARDIS in silence, they spotted an old church still standing. It appeared to be relatively intact. Apart from the TARDIS, it was the only recognizable object in sight.
The three of them began to carefully pick their way through the rubble towards the church.
The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver, buzzed it in several directions and held it up.
"The background radiation level is elevated, but tolerable for the time being. I wouldn't recommend being out here longer than a few days, but the less time spent here, the better."
Amy's foot slipped on loose rubble, but Rory caught her and held her steady. Amy was too numb to register Rory's rescue as she looked around in shock.
"We should stick to walking where the streets used to be – if we can tell the difference," the Doctor suggested quietly. "Less likely to fall into an old cellar that way."
It took about thirty minutes of careful footwork to walk less than two hundred yards from the TARDIS to the old church. Up close, the church was in much worse condition than it seemed from a distance. Along one side, shadows of playing children were permanently flash-burned into the wall. Of the children themselves, there was no sign.
As they walked around the church, they came to a collapsed wall exposing the interior. Inside the church, an old Routemaster double decker bus was strangely perched at an angle about thirty feet up in the air, resting precariously on crumbling support arches, twisted and badly rusted, as though a giant child had carelessly tossed aside a toy. As they moved closer to the bizarre sight, it suddenly struck them the bus was full of skeletons and loose bones. More bones were scattered beneath the bus.
Amy turned and buried her face in Rory's shoulder. Rory was grim-faced as he worked to maintain his composure.
The Doctor scanned the bus and the bones beneath it.
"This has been here for decades," he said. "Those bones are in poor condition. Touch one, and it will likely collapse into powder. More than a few already have."
He put away his sonic screwdriver.
"We need to find out what happened. We can't do that here. Come on – let's head back."
They began to carefully work their way back to the TARDIS.
"Could this be a different Earth, Doctor?" asked Rory. "Maybe the TARDIS jumped tracks into a parallel universe?"
The Doctor shook his head. "No, this is definitely our universe. Yes, there have been a few exceptions, but the TARDIS isn't really meant to cross boundaries from one universe to another. It's simply too risky. It tears at the very fabric of reality."
Amy glared at the Doctor.
"If this is our twenty-first century Earth, then I'd say the fabric of reality has been torn to shreds!" she said furiously. "Look around you!"
"Yes," replied the Doctor. "But the damage is at least stable, which means the universe is not in danger of collapsing." He spoke with improving optimism. "It means we have a chance to find out what happened and put things right."
Amy waved back at the church with its suspended bus. "How can you call this stable? It hardly looks stable to me."
She was still upset, but was beginning to calm down.
"Because an unstable change creates a paradox," said the Doctor.
He stepped up to the TARDIS and began fishing in his pocket for the key.
"Or one could just as easily say a paradox creates an unstable change – it's all relative. Imagine a chicken and a banana popping into existence along side Schrödinger's cat… no wait, forget all that. Here's a simple test. A time paradox attracts a type of nasty bat-winged four-armed creature that feeds on it—and I'm speaking from experience. We are not being attacked by bat-winged four-armed time paradox creatures, ergo the present reality, however unpleasant, is stable."
The Doctor unlocked the TARDIS doors and pushed them open. Much to his relief, the interior of the TARDIS was intact. As they walked in, he continued his explanation.
"Time paradoxes can cause very strange things to happen. The fact that nothing bad has happened to the TARDIS is more evidence of stability. That's how I know we have a fighting chance."
The Doctor circled the console and pulled a lever. "This will be a short hop."
The TARDIS thrummed for a few seconds and quickly reverted back to its usual background hum.
"Everybody grab a torch!" the Doctor announced as he went to the TARDIS doors and flung them open.
Outside was pitch black. The Doctor pulled a rather large, old-fashioned looking flashlight out of his coat pocket.
Rory reached into a pocket and pulled out two small, sleek LED flashlights. He handed one to Amy. Amy looked at Rory with a raised eyebrow.
"With the Doctor, you never know when you need a torch," he said with a shrug.
The TARDIS had landed in an institutional looking hallway. The walls were concrete, stained with peeling paint. The floor had overlapping water stains, but was dry at the moment. Overhead were bulging water-stained ceiling tiles and dangling fluorescent light fixtures. More than a few tiles had fallen out of the ceiling and lay on the floor half crumbed.
"Where are we?" said Amy.
"Deep underground, in the vicinity of 10 Downing Street," replied the Doctor. "There's a whole rat's nest of tunnels like this one under most government buildings, some dating back prior to World War II. I'm rather hoping we might find some answers here."
They began to walk down the hallway, their steps echoing loudly in the quiet.
"Speaking of rats," said Rory as he looked around. "Have you noticed there aren't any? This place is perfect for them, and yet I see no rats."
Amy jumped as several startled cockroaches suddenly scurried away.
"Enough bugs though," she replied.
Something caught Amy's eye, and she aimed her flashlight up ahead. "What's that lump on the floor?"
"A body," replied Rory as they walked up. He bent over for a closer look.
"Not much left of it – mostly bones inside of clothes. This was a woman, and the clothes, from what I can tell, look pretty dated. That must have been a wool or cotton dress, because there's not much left of it, but her nylons are mostly intact."
They moved on, and soon came to a doorway on the right.
"Looks like a store room," commented the Doctor as they went in.
There were several rows of rusted steel shelving. Most of the shelves were empty, a few had collapsed, but a few were still stocked with canned goods.
"Care for some beans?" Rory asked with a smile as he reached out for one of the cans.
It had rusted to the metal shelf and took some effort to break it loose. He turned the can around.
"No barcode. When did barcodes first appear on tins? Sometime in the 1970's? These have be at least forty years old."
They left the store room and tried the next door a few feet farther down the hallway. This room had several gunmetal gray steel desks set up. A few had electric typewriters.
Amy smiled. "My aunt has one of these up in her attic. I used to play with it. Hers has a little ball that does the typing, but these I think are older. This resembles a curved row of teeth."
Rory looked around. "Yeah, and no computers anywhere in here."
"Not necessarily," said the Doctor. "Look over there."
He pointed to what looked like two freestanding typewriters inside large, bulky cases.
Amy frowned. "Aren't those more typewriters?"
"No, those are teletypes," replied the Doctor. "They could have been used for outside communications, or be connected to a mainframe computer. Assuming a computer, that also dates this place to the 1970's at the latest, but I suspect this is older."
The next room had a gruesome inventory: corpses. There was a putrid odor clinging to the room – faint but unmistakable. The bodies in the back of the room and along the left wall were neatly arranged, but the other side was less organized, and on the far right bodies had simply been dumped into an irregular pile.
Rory was surprised. As a nurse he knew how cadavers should be handled and had dealt with transporting the occasional former patient to the hospital morgue, but this was something else. He looked around.
"No refrigeration. The smell must have been terrible in here," he said quietly. "I wonder why they didn't dispose of these bodies properly?"
Amy looked pale, her hand covering her mouth. "Perhaps they couldn't. Excuse me."
She turned and ran out of the room.
Rory and the Doctor found Amy leaned over, retching, hand against the wall to steady herself. She wiped away a bit of spittle with her fingers and looked up, miserable.
"Sorry," she said as she straightened up. "The smell got to me."
Rory put his arms around Amy and gave her a hug. He reached up and gently pushed back a stray lock of hair.
"No need to apologize," he said quietly. "I have been there and done that."
He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small tin of mints.
"Have one. It helps."
"Thanks," Amy said as she took a mint. Rory held Amy close as she collected herself.
"Hmm," said the Doctor. "Perhaps I should start carrying jelly babies again."
He quietly closed the door to the makeshift morgue and locked it with his sonic screwdriver.
Rory gave Amy a quick squeeze. "How are you feeling?"
"Better, thanks," Amy replied with a tentative smile. "I think I'm ready to move on."
The next few rooms were set up as sleeping quarters, with bunk beds jammed as close together as possible. They quickly passed those by.
After skipping an empty room, the one after that was a bit of an oddity. It was very large, and there was no need to enter. There were large, sealed windows set into the wall, each about three feet wide and five feet tall. Anyone walking past could easily look inside. Proudly on display was a large electronic box, easily the size of six or more large refrigerators put together, and other boxy pieces of equipment scattered around. As they shone their flashlights on the big box, they could make out a label at the top: IBM 1401
"That," said the Doctor "is an early mainframe computer. A typical 1401 computer had fourteen kilobytes of core memory—sixteen kilobytes if fully equipped. Powerful in its day, but useless to us. Your microwave at home has more memory and computing power."
They moved on to the next room. This one looked like an administrator's office. A large wooden desk dominated the center, a credenza behind it. Off to one side was a secretary's desk and filing cabinets. An electric typewriter sat on the floor beside the secretary's desk, as if pushed aside and forgotten. In its place on the desk sat an old manual typewriter, a stack of typed pages beside it.
"This looks more promising," said the Doctor as he walked over to the secretary's desk. He picked up a fragile yellowing piece of paper and began to read out loud.
4 November 1962
I am not sure what is prompting me to write this down. Realistically, it is unlikely anyone from outside will ever read these words. Still, I have an urge to record for posterity, in the hope there will be a posterity.
I expect I should begin at the beginning. Properly speaking, "The Business," as everyone is calling it, really began on Monday, 22 October 1962. That was the real start of the war, even if most people speak of The Business as beginning on 27 October, the day the shooting started.
22 October was when President Kennedy announced to the world the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba pointed at the United States. The US response was to "quarantine" Cuba, which is another way of saying blockade, and a blockade is, technically speaking, an act of war.
The Soviet Union did not take kindly to this. Khrushchev called it a "pirate action" and warned it would lead to war, saying, "The Soviet Union cannot fail to reject the arbitrary demands of the United States." Nor did they.
We don't know the particulars, but we do know Soviet forces were sent to challenge the quarantine. One thing lead to another, and on Saturday, 27 October, a nuclear weapon was used against US ships in international waters near Cuba. The USS Randolph, USS Cony, USS Beale and other ships sank that day with all hands lost–-over 5,000 men. As the newspapers pointed out, more lives were lost that day than in the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on 7 December 1941.
The next day, on Sunday, 28 October 1962, an emergency session of the US Congress formally declared war against the Soviet Union and by extension, Cuba. The US began by bombing missile sites in Cuba, followed by an invasion of Cuba itself. The Soviet Union retaliated by invading West Berlin and West Germany. We believe Finland was invaded as well, though we have no confirmation. This brought NATO forces into the fight.
Communist China, as an ally of the Soviet Union, began a proxy invasion of South Korea, and direct attacks against Hong Kong, Taiwan and US bases in Japan.
Someone–-we don't know who–-simply couldn't resist the nuclear option. It hardly matters now. All we do know is that the nuclear exchange beganon All Hallows' Eve, Wednesday, 31 October 1962.
We are cut off from the outside world, and Geiger counter readings prove it's not safe to try digging our way out, assuming we even can. We have food and water for the time being, but given the number of people down here, I cannot imagine our supplies lasting much longer than four to six weeks, even with rationing. Dr. Blake, in a none too subtle fashion, has informed me his medical supplies include enough cyanide pills to kill everyone here three times over. I hope to God it doesn't come to that.
Please God. Let there be survivors out there.
Rory raised a finger in objection. "Okay, none of that happened – not in our reality, anyway."
"Not so," said the Doctor, looking up. "It was called the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. President Kennedy did publicly call out the Russians on it, and the US did impose a blockade. And there was a confrontation between US and Soviet naval forces on the same date right here on this page: 27 October 1962. The difference is it didn't escalate to a shooting war – only just. It was a very close thing."
The Doctor leafed through a few more pages. "This journal goes on about daily life in this facility, deteriorating conditions, loss of hope, but this!" The Doctor held up the first page. "This is the important bit. This is pure gold."
He marched out of the room and turned to face Amy and Rory from the hallway.
"Come along Ponds! Back to the TARDIS."
Amy frowned as they walked along. "I don't understand, Doctor. We visited the 4th of July 1961. The events here happened over a year later in October 1962. Is there really a connection?"
"Oh yes!" replied the Doctor. "There has to be, and my guess is it has to do with that submarine, K-19."
Amy waved her hands. "But what about our visit to the barbecue? We spent a lot more time there than we did on that sub."
Her eyes widened as an idea occurred to her. "The astronauts! Oh my God! That must have been it! Somehow that must have triggered a change in history!"
Amy was upset, on the verge of tears.
The Doctor shook his head. "No, no, no! That isn't it. It's not your fault, Amy."
The Doctor sighed. "Simply put, the barbecue is one of those easy-to-visit events with little influence on history. The danger points are fixed points in time. Some are greater, some smaller, but generally they are to be avoided. K-19 is one of those points."
"But Doctor!" Amy said, a hint of frustration in her voice. "We didn't do anything! We came, and then we left as quickly as possible. Not unless you think that guy, Boris, flirting with me somehow changed the course of history!"
Rory gave Amy a look of concern. "Actually, you haven't really said much about that. Just what happened, Amy?"
Amy rolled her eyes. "There isn't anything to tell, Rory. You saw Boris. He was full of himself and wanted to show off his equipment."
She held up a finger. "And before you say it, by 'equipment' I mean that reactor." Amy paused and smiled. "Though he clearly had other equipment in mind as well."
They were now in sight of the TARDIS. Rory looked at Amy speculatively.
"And that was it?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Well yeah, that was it," replied Amy. "I mean, he showed me the reactor and started talking about the future. I think he expected us to have flying atomic cars by the twenty-first century. Then there was that weird bluish flash of light, and then I went back to where you two were."
The Doctor came to a dead stop in front of the TARDIS. Amy and Rory nearly ran into him. The Doctor spun around, TARDIS key in hand and a look of concern on his face.
"Did you say a flash of blue light?"
Amy was nonplussed. "Uh… yeah. I mentioned this before. Why?"
The Doctor closed his eyes for a second, thinking back. His eyes snapped open.
"So you did. I should have paid more attention." He turned to unlock the TARDIS.
As they walked in, the Doctor casually said, "And after that you walked forward to meet us? Unescorted?"
Amy did not understand the Doctor's concern.
"That's right," she said, and folded her arms defensively.
The Doctor went to the console and began to adjust settings.
As he worked, he said, "And it didn't occur to you to wonder about that? We were not crewmembers, and we were on board a military boat with classified equipment. That lieutenant should not have taken you to see the reactor in the first place – that was bad enough – but at least in him you had an officer as escort. By no means should you have been allowed to wander freely about that submarine, even if they did think you were KGB."
Rory stood with his own arms crossed, looking back and forth between Amy and the Doctor.
"He's right you know," Rory said quietly. "That should not have happened."
"Oh, and by the way," the Doctor said as the TARDIS started up. His expression was grim.
"Reactors don't flash. We are returning to K-19."
History Trivia
The USS Randolph, USS Cony, and USS Beale were actual ships participating in the Cuban quarantine. On 27 October 1962, those ships confronted a Soviet submarine trying to slip past the blockade. What they did not know is that the sub was carrying a nuclear torpedo. It would have been suicidal for the submarine to launch that nuclear torpedo, but they were prepared to use it.