Doctor Who_ Planet Of Fire Part 11

'Logar is the friend of all people,' catechized their new Chosen One. 'He is only angry when the citizens fight among themselves.'

The old men shuffled closer to the scanner to marvel at the likeness on the screen. The Doctor, too, was wondering, as he gazed at the silver figure, whether the beast on the scanner was as mythical as he had previously supposed. 'Does that image remind you of anything?' he whispered to his companion.

Turlough examined the computer-generated picture for a moment. 'A man in a thermal suit?'

The Doctor nodded. 'Timanov,' he addressed the Chief Elder. Have you ever seen Logar?'

'Yes,' replied the old man, humbly. 'When I was a boy.'

'Where?'

Timanov was silent for a moment before he replied.

'Near the summit of the Fire Mountain.' There was angry murmuring from the other men and a surprised cry from Amyand. The Chief Elder had climbed the forbidden slopes!

Timanov smiled gravely at the Unbeliever. 'You see, I too was once young and hot-headed. But the Fire Lord appeared to me. He was merciful, and I was born again.'

The Doctor looked at Turlough. They both had a pretty good idea what lay behind the Chief Elder's Damascus Road conversion. 'A vulcanologist!' exclaimed the Doctor.

'We know the old Trion colonists used volcanic power in the city. They must have another control centre right inside the volcano.'

There was a bleeping from the console; the seismic scanner had been activated again. 'Not an earthquake.' said Turlough, peering at the unit.

'That's odd,' said the Doctor. 'Something must be happening inside the volcano itself.' He rushed to the door.

The smoke had cleared from the top of the volcano. A pale blue fire burned above the crater. 'It's an eruption!'

shouted 'Furlough.

'I don't think so,' said the Doctor.

The Elders, who had followed them out of the TARDIS, viewed the s.h.i.+mmering phosph.o.r.escence around the mountain top with wild enthusiasm. 'The blue fire has not been seen for many generations,' said Timanov, trembling.

'What does it mean?'

'It is a sign of great favour,' replied the Chief Elder.

'Logar shows his mercy to the sick and injured.'

The Doctor was thinking back to another blue flame, guarded by the Sisterhood of Karn, whose power had helped many a Time Lord to regenerate. If the same force was available in the mountain it might explain why the Master had lingered on Sarn.

'We must return to the Hall of Fire,' cried Timanov.

'There will be a great gathering.'

Amyand sighed. 'More superst.i.tious ritual.'

The Doctor didn't agree. There was nothing superst.i.tious about the Trion colonists who built the Hall of Fire and installed the gas control systempresumably to utilise some volcanic potency. 'Come on!' he yelled, starting to run after the Elders who were already hurrying back along the ridge path towards the city.

'Where are we going?'

'The Hall of Fire. I want to a.n.a.lyse the deposit on the wall of the cave.' He paused. 'Unless, of course, you can tell tell me what it is?' me what it is?'

'How should I know?' said Turlough. 'That cave's part of a colonial civilisation that ended ages ago.' He moved to follow Amyand along the path, but the Doctor chugged him back. The Time Lord wanted a few words in private with this young man who knew a great deal more about Sarn than he liked to let on.

'That volcanic control system has been used in living memory. Just what sort of interest have your people got in the stability of an abandoned planet?'

'I don't know.'

'I think you do. When you arrived you expected to find Trions here. And what about the s.h.i.+p? What was your father doing here? And your brother? And just what are you afraid of, Turlough?' The Doctor fired question after question at his evasive companion.

The boy blushed and stammered. 'Please, Doctor. Not now. I'll explain later.'

The Doctor wondered how far he could give him the benefit of the doubt. 'Just one thing, Turlough.' He turned the boy roughly towards him. 'If you're withholding any information that is going to help the Master, then our friends.h.i.+p is at an end!'

The Master was not a man used to making mistakes, and he had cursed himself repeatedly for the positively schoolboy error that had all but cost him his life. He had long wanted to improve the Tissue Compression Eliminator, and his inspired modifications would have increased its range and power a hundredfold, to make it the most sophisticated and deadly weapon of its kind in the whole universe. The first experiments had been entirely successful, and it was not until he powered the prototype on his laboratory work bench that the misphasing of the proton accelerator became apparent.

Although he had experienced a somewhat alarming sensationfatal to anyone but a Time Lordhe was not immediately aware of the scale of the disaster, as the laboratory itself was reduced proportionately. It was only as he tried to leave the workroom that he realised he was but a fraction of his former self, trapped and impotent in a giant TARDIS. But his mind was unimpaired, and, indeed, he had quite redeemed his carelessness with the ingenuity of his system for remote-controlling the time-machine, and the expertise with which he had constructed the metamorphosis projector.

Across time and s.p.a.ce he had called to his slave, and, from the very TARDIS of the unsuspecting Doctor, Kamelion had come to his rescue. His familiar had even brought him to this planet, and the undreamed of power of numismaton.

No machine would be needed to counter the disastrous effect of the Tissue Compression Eliminator. The blue flame would not only restore him to his former stature, but would infinitely extend his fourteenth incarnation. Out of failure had come success, from calamity he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the supreme triumph of his career... Until that wretched girl interfered!

The roof of his laboratory had been ripped off, blinding the Master with the arctic glare of the control room light.

He peered upwards as the ma.s.sive moonface of the girl rose over the grey, roundeled wall. She stared down into the tiny box, like a rich, spoiled child wondering which doll's house inhabitant to lift out and torment. The one helpless inmate of the workroom grabbed the fatal prototype of the Tissue Compression Eliminator and brandished it at the giant Peri.

'You will obey me or die!' he repeated at the top of his little voice.

Peri recoiled at the sight of the soft-suited homunculus in the box. She was sickened and revolted at the spectacle of a perfectly formed human reduced to the size of a half-grown hamster. She dropped the lid and pushed herself backwards from the cabinet. So sharp was the movement that the box toppled over onto the floor of the control room.

The unexpected reversal of his little house caught the diminutive Master unaware, and he was ejected from the container like a human cannon ball. He lay for a moment stunned on the hard, grey plain of the floor. As he recovered his senses, the midget Time Lord could see, to his right, a great, white horizon of wall that stretched upwards to infinity, and to his left an una.s.sailable, basalt cliff of console, while in the foreground loomed the mighty crag of one of Peri's shoes.

The Master got to his tiny feet and looked round for shelter. About a hundred yards away was the mouth of an enormous cave, where the lid of the box lay against the side of the console. The Master sprinted across the open ground and into the protecting darkness.

Peri looked down at the scuttling creature on the floor and began to feel her courage return. She took off her shoe; not the most sophisticated weapon, but against this little noddy-man it was the equal of the Tissue Compression Eliminator. She s.n.a.t.c.hed away the lid and the wretched Master was exposed like an earwig beneath a stone. He scurried once more across a floor the size of a football pitch to where, in grander days, he had piled some cable against the TARDIS wall. He reached the safety of the huge coils just as the hammer heel of Peri's shoe crashed to the floor inches behind him. He lay panting amidst the strands and hawsers which stretched round him like the chains of some nightmare suspension bridge. But there was no time to rest. He got up and raced along the narrow canyon between the cable and the TARDIS wall before Peri could expose him yet again.

Peri bided her time, the deadly shoe raised over her head. Her prey broke cover, but not where she had expected and the little man was halfway across the floor before she saw him. She hurled the.shoe, and missed. She ran forward, but the Master had reached the sanctuary of the console and had disappeared through a cable duct in the base of the pedestal. Peri knelt in front of the tiny aperture, like a cat beside ahole in the skirting board.

The Master stood quaking in the warm darkness. Above him, components shone like stars in a night sky, and, as his eyes adapted to the light, he could make out the shapes of a thousand gigantic chips and transputers. The air was full of strange sounds: the hum, the buzz, the rattle of the million secret parts used to control a time-machine.

An ominous shadow hung over the enhance. It was that terrible girl. 'Peri! Peri!' cried the Master. 'Listen to me!'

Peri lowered her head towards the faint but insistent voice inside the console. 'There is no way you can escape, either from my TARDIS or the control centre.'

'We'll see about that,' said Peri, picking up her shoe.

'Peri... Miss Brown. Help me, and I will spare your life.'

'Oh, sure. I know how much your promises are worth.

I'd rather wait for the Doctor.'

'The Doctor!' The Master cursed his old enemy, and looked around his hiding place. He recognised one of the outsize units above his head and hauled himself up onto a nearby block. From there he clambered, like a boy chimney-sweep, up the narrow shaft between two panels.

Panting, he reached a flat landing of printed circuit. All he needed was a conductor to short-circuit two of the strips and the way would be open for Kamelion to rescue him from that girl. He plucked a silver thread from his collar and pressed it to the board. There was a distant clunk from one of the servos. The Master laughed.

Peri was getting anxious. It was far too quiet inside the console. She jumped to her feet at the sudden whirring.

The double-doors had opened and the Kamelion-Master would be through in seconds. She rushed to the inner door.

'Kamelion!' screeched the impatient Master.

'Kamelion?' whispered Peri, from where she had paused in the corridor.

Neither of them could see the minuscule metamorphosis projector, on its side and out of control beside the fallen laboratory.

'Kamelion?' said Peri, more confidently, and tiptoed across the control room and out through the double doors.

Kamelion lay, a fizzing wraith of himself, on the rock floor outside the Corinthian column. Peri came to the entrance and smiled. 'Pleasant dreams,' she murmured, and stepped over the paralysed robot, out into the cavern.

She ran to the tunnel entrance she had spotted earlier, hoping it would lead to the open air and a path down the mountain, back to the Doctor.

The Doctor sc.r.a.ped with his spatula at the sticky rock wall of the sacrificial cave in the Hall of Fire and examined the slime in his pocket microscope. 'Just as I thought. Trace elements of numismaton.' He looked up at Turlough. 'Very useful to a Time Lord who can't regenerate!'

There was a shout from the Hall and Sorasta carne running from the portico as the Doctor and his companion emerged from the cave. 'Doctor, Malkon is much worse.'

The Doctor nodded. He had expected as much. Though Turlough's brother had escaped being killed outright, the Time Lord feared, as soon as he had examined him, that the boy who had prevented his own execution was dying.

'We must get him to the TARDIS,' pleaded Turlough.

'No.'

'Doctor, please!'

'Thanks to the Master, he's better off here,' said the Doctor das.h.i.+ng out of the Hall.

Malkon's racing pulse was weaker, his breathing more shallow and he had a fever. Roskal stood up from where he had been kneeling beside the bed as the Doctor clattered down the stairs of the bunker. To the surprise of the young Unbelievers, the visitor did not immediately examine his patient, but went to the controls of the machine.

'There is a healing power in one of the volcanic gases,'

he explained. 'That's why the old Trions constructed the Hall of Fire. Some sort of curative centre.' He began pressing b.u.t.tons on the panel. 'We need to release the gas flowstrictly for medicinal purposes.'

They came to the Hall of Fire from all over the city: the maimed, the diseased, the crippled, the blind. Amyand was appalled as he watched the sick people of Sarn carried up the steps into the Hall.

'Don't stop them,' said Turlough, as the invalids gathered round the cave.

The Elders now entered, following the injured to the mouth of the grotto. Timanov smiled at Turlough. The new Chosen One had indeed brought them the favour of Logar. 'The gift of the Fire Lord.' He bowed and handed the Doctor's companion one of the finest trinkets from his own secret treasure store. Turlough looked thoughtfully at the s.h.i.+ning objecthe had handled one of those many times before.

They were all distracted by a sudden roar from the cave.

The flame burned brightly once more.

'Excellent,' said the Doctor running up the steps.

'That flame will burn,' protested Amyand angrily.

'Just a residue of hot gas,' said the Doctor, hoping it wouldn't take too long for the discharge of numismaton to reach them from the volcano.

There was a murmur from the crowd and all eyes turned to the entrance. Amyand and Sorasta had appeared at the top of the steps carrying the lifeless body of their former Chosen One. Turlough ran to join them and helped move his dying brother to the group of sick and wounded around the cave entrance.

Everyone in the Hall now stared into the raging flames and the Doctor prayed that he had pressed the right switches back in the bunker. Without any warning, the roar in the grotto died away. There was a hush amongst the waiting wounded and their families. The heat haze in the cave cleared to reveal the dark, stained rock. There was a gentle hiss like summer rain on a pavement and the walls were shrouded in a luminous white vapour. An eerie singing echoed in the cave as the cloud turned blue.

'Pure numismaton,' said the Doctor, peering at the waving phosph.o.r.escence. He nodded to the Elders. 'It's quite safe.'

Timanov gave the sign for the gathered sick to enter the cave, but the sad little group lingered by the platform, nervous and overawed by the s.h.i.+mmering presence in the grotto.

'What are you waiting for?' cried Turlough, and, taking his brother in his arms, walked across the platform and into the electric radiance. Encouraged by his example, the sick and the wounded of Sam stumbed forward into the light.

Afterwards, Turlough could remember very little of those moments of rare unction in the rocky cell. There was no sense of time or s.p.a.ce, but only the certain knowledge that all things were well.

The Doctor's companion was the first to leave the brightnessalone. The crowd gasped as the boy was followed by his brother Malkon, pale and amazed, but walking upright. Behind them came the other Sarns, miraculously restored to health, to be embraced by their weeping families and friends.

'Praise be to Logar!' cried Timanov.

The Doctor was silent. He, too, was moved by the power from the mountain, yet dreaded how the healing force might be abused by the Master. The release of numismaton could have been no coincidence as there had not been a Gathering for two generations. This surge had been precipitated by the Master, and with scant regard for the stability of the planet. At least he now knew where to find him.

The ground trembled and the volcano rumbled angrily, a reminder of the terrible danger they all were in.

'a.s.semble the citizens in the Hall of Fire!' ordered Turlough, in a loud voice. For a moment Timanov hesitated. 'Logar demands it,' the boy cried.

The Chief Elder gave a small respectful bow. 'Of course, Chosen One,' he replied obsequiously.

The Doctor looked towards the volcano. Somewhere near the crater he would soon confront his old enemy. 'Can you guide me up the mountain?' he asked Amyand. 'The seismic control centre must be near where Timanov saw the vulcanologist.'

'Ready when you are, Doctor,' said the young Sarn, who had not expected a return journey to the peak quite so soon.

'Once I've got the TARDIS working we'll materialise here and take the Sarns on board.' the Doctor explained to Turlough, wondering how he was going to cope with so many pa.s.sengers.

'That won't be necessary,' said his companion, holding up the piece of engraved silicon given to him by the Chief Elder. 'This keys the transmitter on my father's s.h.i.+p and gives me direct access to Trion Communications Executive. They can send a transporter.'