Doctor Who_ Time Flight Part 7

'That thing is bonding itself into something far more dangerous than a Plasmaton!'

The writhing intumescence grew larger and larger. It bifurcated. At the end of each trunk a serpent's head appeared: a head with eyes, mouth, fangs and forked tongue. Each mouth hissed like a whole pit full of vipers.

'Well, Doctor?'

'The answer is still no, Kalid.'

'The TARDIS key, Doctor!'

The hissing expanded to a roar. Bilton, Scobie, Stapley and the Professor cowered in the corner as the beast lunged.

'Do you really want to see your friends die!' shouted Kalid, above the bellowing of the creature and the cries of the terrified men.

Only a gentle moaning disturbed the calm of the Sanctum. Tegan and Nyssa trod softly as if on holy ground. They looked round, awed and curious.

They had penetrated a small circular chamber, in the centre of which was a large open sarcophagus.

Nyssa knew what was required of her. Placed against the side of the room was an array of unearthly minerals. She prised off a huge chunk of the alien rock. 'Help me,' she called to Tegan, surprised at its unreasonable weight. 'We must act. The Doctor ...' She staggered towards the sarcophagus.

'What are you doing?' shouted Tegan.

With a vigour that belied her frail body, Nyssa swung back the rock and hurled it into the centre of the sarcophagus.

There was a ma.s.sive explosion which threw both Tegan and Nyssa senseless to the ground.

The monster twisted its torso upwards for the kill. But even as its fetid jaws parted, the reverberation reached them from the Sanctum.

A rus.h.i.+ng wind surged through the chamber. The beast gave an agonising roar. Kalid recoiled against the wall, screaming with pain and tearing at his body.

The creature that had terrorised them crumpled like a paper dragon.

Within seconds it was gone without trace.

'Look at Kalid!'

They turned to where the magician was lying in the corner, his flesh draining to liquefaction.

The Doctor was amazed. Kalid must have been a Plasmaton all the time.

'There's got to be a perfectly simple, orthodox explanation.' The Professor was tired of this masquerade. He delved into the pedestal beneath the crystal ball. 'Bioenergetic powers indeed ...' he muttered to himself. 'Intellectual garbage!'

'You won't find anything,' said the Doctor wearily.

'Won't I!' the Professor positively squawked with triumph.

As the others gathered round he pulled out modules and circuit boards.

'Psychotronics was it?' He turned maliciously to the Doctor. 'I call this electronicsV He dropped an armful of components on the floor.

'I don't understand.' The Doctor stared, nonplussed.

Across the room something stirred.

'No, Doctor. You never do understand.' A voice came from the shadows.

There was something alive inside Kalid's diaphanous robe. Like a pupating beetle it tore itself free from the cloth.

A dark and ominously familiar figure stood up. 'You never do!'

It was the Master.

8.

The Power in the Sanctum

'As gullible as ever, my dear Doctor.' The Master's eyes gleamed with exultation. The incursion into the Sanctum had been a setback which cost him his disguise, but he had humiliated his rival. Very shortly, using the Doctor's TARDIS, he would penetrate the power centre himself.

'So you did escape from Castrovalva.' The Doctor confronted his old enemy. 'I should have guessed.'

But there was never a moment when the Doctor suspected the prosthetic persona of Kalid concealed the evil Time Lord. Nor could he imagine how the Master had gained control of the unseen power that maintained his disguise in the same way as it controlled the Plasmatons. 'How you love the company of fools.' The Master was watching Hayter dismember the apparatus beneath the crystal ball. Neither the Professor nor the crew had any great interest in the meeting of the two arch adversaries. For a brief moment Professor Hayter held the stage.

'Magic, as in lantern,' he lectured. 'Sophisticated and terrifying, I do not dispute ...' 'Hang on a moment, Professor!' Flight Engineer Scobie, who knew a great deal more about electronics than Professor Hayter, had been examining the centrepiece of the chamber. He turned to the Professor like a recalcitrant student. 'This crystal,' he objected. 'There's no connection, no radio link ...'

The Doctor joined them. 'That crystal is just a point of focus. The communication is purely telepathic'

"Then what's all this equipment for?' snapped the indomitably sceptical old man.

'What indeed!' said the Doctor, examining with mounting excitement the bits and pieces Hayter had removed. He turned back to the Master.

'These components are from your TARDIS!'

The Master was looking less pleased with himself. The Doctor felt his self-confidence returning as he realised the Master's predicament.

'You're stranded here,' he went on. 'That time contour was a desperate lifeline to the future.'

The Master did not deny it. His eyes narrowed. He spoke softly; he was chillingly polite. 'I need your TARDIS to penetrate the Sanctum.'

Another piece of the jigsaw fell into place. The Master needed the power in the Sanctum as a new energy source for his own time machine. The Doctor wondered again what kind of power it could be.

Perhaps the Master would reveal the information. 'I think you might be too late,' he said provocatively. 'The power seems to have expended itself.'

The Master quickly put him right. "The recuperation will be swift. Your companions have disturbed the neuronic nucleus ...' His face twisted with pleasure. 'But they will have paid for that incursion with their lives.'

There was consternation amongst the young crew members. The Doctor fought back a feeling of panic with the ruthless logic of his own observations.

'Tegan and Nyssa are as likely to have been protected as destroyed,' he a.s.sured the others. 'The power works against you as well as for you,' he reminded the Master.

The Master knew this only too well. It was the reason for his anxiety and haste. He needed the force under his total control. 'The key, Doctor.' He raised the Tissue Compression Eliminator.

The black, twig-like thing with its bulbous end didn't frighten Bilton and Scobie. They stepped forward to defend the Doctor.

The Doctor knew better. 'No heroics, gentlemen,' he interposed. 'The Master will eliminate you without a second thought.' He placed the TARDIS key in the black-gloved hand of the Master.

'Very wise, Doctor.' The Master went straight to the TARDIS.

No one, except the Doctor, had spotted the old police box in the corner of the chamber.

'Good heavens!' exclaimed Professor Hayter. 'That's never the TARDIS.'

'Unfortunately, it is,' the Master deplored as he opened the door. 'So typical of the Doctor's predilection for the third rate.'

It was beyond the Professor's comprehension that grown men should play out an hysterical charade, such as they had just witnessed, for the possession of a telephone booth. He appealed to the Doctor. 'What does the man want with an obsolete Metropolitan ...'

A whirring and a groaning sound filled the air, unfamiliar to all present save the Doctor.

Professor Hayter froze.

The TARDIS dematerialised.

The Professor's lips moved silently like an elderly goldfish that has just been fed. He finally articulated: 'We're hallucinating.'

Captain Stapley was equally surprised, but he knew when to believe the evidence of his own eyes. 'Is that how you travel, Doctor!'

The Doctor smiled. 'Not exactly the first-cla.s.s end of the market, but a serviceable vehicle, Captain Stapley.'

Professor Hayter was still in shock. 'Some kind of miasma,' he stammered weakly.

The Doctor had had enough of this sour-faced Doubting Thomas. 'I do not wish to believe, therefore I hallucinate,' He rounded on the Professor. 'Is that your philosophy of Darlington Man?'

'What we've just seen isn't possible,' Hayter protested.

'Try explaining that when the Master materialises in the Sanctum.'

'Have you any idea where this Sanctum is?' asked Captain Stapley.

The Doctor wished he had. He might even be able to get there first.

Then Bilton remembered the wall that he and the pa.s.sengers had been trying to demolish.

'Could be it,' said the Doctor.

But, as the Captain pointed out, it was odd that the Master should need brute force to unseal the hidden room. Why couldn't he walk in like Tegan and Nyssa?

The Doctor thought he understood. 'The power source is unstable,' he explained. 'One moment it works for the Master, the next against.'

It was time for the Doctor to take up the work started by the Master, and force his way into the rotunda in the great hall. He rejected the a.s.sistance of the Concorde crew since he doubted whether they would be able to resist the hallucinogenic radiation so near the power source. Captain Stapley was a little put out, however, when the Doctor decided to ask Professor Hayter to accompany him.

'The Profesor has shown formidable resistance,' he explained. 'Are you game?' he asked the old man.

Hayter had said nothing since the Doctor had attacked his academic integrity. His mind was in a turmoil. If this amazing young man was not, after all, a charlatan, then a lifetime's research had just been stood on its head. But suppose there was an entirely unknown dimension? He would publish a paper. There would be honorary degrees, lecture tours ...

'Professor?'

They were all looking at him. He smiled. 'Certainly, Doctor. Glad to be of help.'

'By the way.' A thought occurred to the Doctor as they were leaving. 'If the Master turns up again, don't be surprised. It may take him a little time to discover I left the coordinate overdrive switched in.'

The Doctor and Professor Hayter hurried down the corridor towards the great hall. The Professor chuckled. He had been thinking of his fellow pa.s.sengers, toiling at the wall like Egyptian slaves. 'I'll say one thing, Doctor. For some of them it'll be the first honest day's work they've done in their lives ... Even if they do think they're bent wood hatstands,' he added spitefully. The great hall, when the Doctor and the Professor arrived, looked more like an airport during a strike of baggage handlers.

Confused and angry pa.s.sengers wandered helplessly around, the more militant amongst them demanding to know what was going on from anyone in uniform.

'Doctor, they've stopped hallucinating!' cried Hayter.

'That's not necessarily a good thing,' muttered the Doctor, as they heard the angry buzz of protest from Concorde's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers.'Are you good at explanations, Professor?'

Angela Clifford, the young stewardess, saw the Professor arrive with the stranger. She extricated herself from an overweight Milwaukee computer salesman who was telling her what he thought of British Airways In-Transit arrangements, and hurried across.

'This is the Doctor,' said Professor Hayter, neatly pa.s.sing the buck. 'He's come to help us.'

Quickly establis.h.i.+ng that the pa.s.sengers were in good shape, the Doctor moved on to address the motley a.s.sembly, now close to mutiny, that were gathered around the rotunda. Keeping his account of the unlikely situation as simple as possible, the Doctor did his best to convince the stranded travellers that their only hope of a return to civilisation lay in a determined a.s.sault on the already half-demolished wall of the inner room.

The ladies and gentlemen of flight 192 were not an easy lot to convince, but through Professor Hayter's authority - developed from years of bullying on departmental committees - and the Doctor's charismatic charm, they were finally persuaded that a desperate situation required a desperate remedy.

They started work.

'It's incredible,' said Angela to Professor Hayter, as she watched the pa.s.sengers, who so recently had been enjoying the luxury of Concorde, labour at the stonework like navvies. 'How could we do all this without realising it!'

Hayter did his best to explain the hallucinatory power, the source of which they would soon discover on the other side of the wall.

'Won't that be dangerous? What if the force returns?' 'Fight it!'

'How?'

'Focus your mind on something you're very sure of. Your family. Fish and chips ...'

Professor Hayter was thoroughly enjoying himself as he explained his own techniques of contra-suggestive resistance. Never, in the laboratory at Darlington, would he be able to conduct an experiment on this scale. 'Come on everybody!' he said turning his attention to the workforce. 'We haven't much time.'

The unlikely stonemasons were making good progress. 'Nearly there, Doctor! Doctor?' The Doctor, as usual, had wandered off. A Corinthian pillar at the far end of the hall had drawn his attention.

'The Master's TARDIS!' he exclaimed as the Professor joined him.