by Barry Letts
‘Are you all right, miss?’
She recognised him then. She’d seen him often, the old codger with the ancient bull terrier. She sat up, trying to find herself in the turmoil of feeling that came flooding back.
‘Yes... yes. I’ll be all right. Thank you...’
‘Just happened to catch sight of him in time. Best to stay in the light, you know. Shall I call the police?’
Sarah clambered to her feet, unthinkingly brushing the leaves from her skirt, the nondescript blue skirt she’d thought a Daisy Peabody might wear. ‘No point,’ she said,
‘thanks all the same. He’ll be miles away by now, whoever it was.’
Whoever it was. Or whatever it was.
‘Very gratifying, Doctor,’ said Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Taking notice of me at last! Rather overscrupulous, in fact. I can’t see that security would have been breached by your contacting UNIT earlier.’
‘Nothing to do with your precious security, Brigadier. If we’d had Detective Sergeant Plod and his friends trampling all over something as sensitive as this...! I needed the information, but the situation called for the utmost tact.’
The Doctor found it hard enough to admit even to himself that things had actually gone from bad to worse at Hampstead Heath police station.
It was when the sergeant had utterly misunderstood him to be claiming acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes that his credibility sank to absolute zero. In spite of his irritable attempts to explain that he’d actually been referring to Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle - ‘He latched onto a few little tricks of observation and deduction I showed him, you see. Said that I’d given him an idea for a short story for the Strand Magazine.’ - he was still escorted firmly to a cell.
And when he caught the words ‘Colney Hatch’ as the detective sergeant’s voice receded down the corridor, he’d decided that enough was enough and persuaded the police to let him make a phone call. He had no intention of letting them cart him off to the local ‘loony bin’, as Sergeant Benton would no doubt have called it.
‘Sorry I couldn’t come myself,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Previous engagement. I’m sure Benton handled it very well.’
The Doctor grunted, trying to put out of his mind the image of the barely concealed grin with which Benton had greeted him as they’d unlocked his cell the night before.
‘So... what’s it all about?’
Sarah arrived at UNIT HQ as hot and bothered as a sunny but sharp September day would allow.
When she’d eventually got away from her typewriter with a scant fifteen hundred words under her belt - she couldn’t even start on the fish story until she’d had a really good look at the Skang Polaroid and written up her notes about the cult
- she’d fallen straight into an exhausted sleep, only to wake up half an hour later, shivering, her heart pumping, convinced she was being attacked by the fearsome creature she’d seen at the commune. She’d pulled the bed-clothes over her head and curled up small, just as she used to as a six-year-old plagued by nightmares, so long ago.
And then, like Alice finding that she wasn’t in the sheep’s shop but in a rowing boat, Sarah had found herself in a Technicolour paradise, surrounded by a full complement of Indian dancing girls. An all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood dream - with the image of a golden Skang looking on benignly and oh-so-lovingly - that had lulled her into a deep slumber that more or less wiped away the horror of her encounter on the Heath.
After all, she thought as she closed the window the next morning - why had she left it open to that cold north wind? -
the old man would have said if he’d seen some sort of monster, wouldn’t he? It must have been her obsession with the Skang that made her think... oh God, she hadn’t set the alarm! It was gone half past nine!
Her usual morning routine: the jog around the Heath, the leisurely breakfast of wholemeal toast and banana - or a real fry-up, if she was feeling bolshie - and the skim through the Guardian and the Mail (to get a balanced view); all had to go by the wayside. There was barely time for the essential cup of coffee.
What did come back ‘in the morning’ mean? About ten o’clock, probably. But by the time she’d finished tidying up the cobbled-together fish article (inspired by Gary the goldfish: Would You Eat Your Best Friend? - a plea for stricter vegetarianism) and delivered it to the office, it was getting on for eleven-thirty when she walked into the Doctor’s lab... to be greeted by what seemed to be some sort of row.
‘I’m sorry, Doctor,’ the Brigadier was saying, I’ve just spent the best part of a month trying to prevent Geneva from cutting my budget by twenty-five per cent. I just can’t afford a wild-goose chase. If we went after every wacky cult in the country, UNIT UK would be broke in a fortnight.’
Here we go again, thought Sarah. They seemed to respect each other - almost to be friends - but they could never agree on the best thing to do.
The Doctor held up the little screw-top aspirin bottle. ‘This tastes like fruit juice, mixed fruit juice - exactly what it is, no doubt. Nevertheless, it contains some three per cent of an extremely powerful drug. One that I don’t recognise, but judging by its structure it’s probably psychotropic.’
‘Drugs? LSD and all that caper? Just what the police are for, I should have thought.’
‘And how well did the police cope with the Yeti? Or the Autons? Or the Cybermen for that matter?’
‘Are you saying...?’
‘Show him your photograph, Sarah.’
The Brigadier, giving her a suspicious look, took the Polaroid print and inspected it. ‘Ah... See what you mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Wouldn’t do any harm to take a look, I suppose...’
But they were too late. Frustrated by the unanswered bell, the Brigadier resorted to thumping on the door.
‘No good making that racket,’ said a hoarse voice from beneath their feet. ‘They’ve gawn.’ A craggy little man had emerged from a door in the basement area.
‘Gone? Gone where?’ said the Doctor.
‘Don’ ask me. Piled into a coach just after seven o’clock this morning. The whole shooting match, including the high and mighty Brother Alex. Good riddance. Rahnd the bend, the lot of them.’
With a little persuasion, aided by a discreetly folded note, the caretaker let them in to have a look round.
Mary Celeste time, thought Sarah. Well, not quite. There were no half-eaten meals, or abandoned, unmade beds. On the contrary, everything was clean and neat and ordered. The food in the kitchen was tidily put away - but there were seven loaves of sliced bread, one of them three-quarters eaten; four and a half dozen eggs in the larder; several pints of milk in the fridge...
It looked as if they’d just gone off for a day trip to the seaside.
‘If you ask me, they’ve gone for a picnic,’ said the Brigadier, coming down the stairs to rejoin the Doctor and Sarah in the hall. ‘They’re obviously coming back.’
‘Handed me the keys, didn’t he?’ said the caretaker. ‘To give back to the estate office. Nah, they’ve gawn for good.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘You’re eating a ham sandwich!’
A startled Sarah looked up from her desk drawer, where she had been searching for her passport.
Clorinda, a tiny woman whose dyed hair (tending towards the pillar-box end of the spectrum), bright make-up and primary-coloured garments normally gave the impression of an escaped parakeet, now had the air of an angry macaw.
‘Er, yes... I didn’t get any breakfast,’ said Sarah, puzzled.
‘I knew I was right. My office! Now!’
‘Oh Lor’, thought Sarah, as she followed her irate boss, it must be that wretched fish...
It was, too. Clorinda tossed the manuscript towards her as if she’d like to toss it into the nearest dustbin. ‘Research?
Don’t make me laugh. Every word tells me that you know zilch about being a vegetarian. If I wanted candy-floss I’d go to Southend pier!’
‘I must admit...�
��
‘It’s an angle, certainly. But it reads like a filler for a teenager’s weekly. What do you think you’re up to?’
‘Well, you see...’
But it was a rhetorical question. Clorinda was on a roll. ‘If you want to convince me to be a vegetarian, I want to know all that jazz about one cow versus ten fields of corn... And how a nice juicy steak au poivre fills my arteries with axle grease... and so on and so on... Yes, and I want it backed up with the latest facts and figures. And I want it now! We go to press tomorrow, as you very well know.’
Sarah took a deep breath. ‘Yes well, I was going to come in and see you anyway. I’m going to take my holiday, you see, and...’
‘You what?’
‘I’m due four weeks, what with missing last year’s because of the Space World thing and...’ Her voice trailed away.
Hardly the most tactful way to approach the subject, Sarah suddenly realised. The Space World story, having had a D-notice slapped on it by the Brigadier, had had to be spiked.
Clorinda looked at her for a long moment. ‘You’ve had a holiday. You went to Sicily.’
‘That was due from the year before. Oh please, Clorinda! I promise to tell everyone how kind you are, how generous, how unutterably lovely you are in every possible way...’
‘And completely ruin my reputation?’ said Clorinda. Then she sighed. ‘Oh Sarah, Sarah, what are we going to do with you? Once you get a bee in your bonnet...’
Cliché! thought Sarah automatically.
‘It is this Skang affair, I suppose?’ Clorinda went on.
Sarah nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. Apparently the centres all over the world have closed down. And the devotees are all going to Bombay!’ The UNIT network had quickly supplied the Brigadier with the information - and much to his disgust, Geneva had given him the responsibility of finding out exactly what was going on.
‘Well, I suppose I can’t stop you.’
‘Clorinda, you’re a doll!’
‘Just as long as you don’t try to swing it on your expenses.’
‘That I can promise you. It won’t cost you a penny!’
It wouldn’t cost anybody a brass rupee. They were going in the TARDIS.
It seemed a little strange to be lugging her backpack through the door of the old police box, for all the world as if she were catching the so-called Magic Bus to Kathmandu with the rest of the hippy throng. Though the Brigadier’s own luggage was a smart hide suitcase, he evidently had similar feelings.
‘I’m not sure if this is a good idea, Doctor,’ he said.
Wouldn’t we be better off with British Airways?’
‘Time is of the essence,’ replied the muffled voice of the Doctor, whose top half was deep inside the central pedestal of the TARDIS control column. ‘If we don’t stop this thing before it really takes root, the world could be facing one of the biggest disasters in the history of Homo sapiens.’
The Brigadier sighed. ‘I seem to have heard that before.’
‘You have indeed,’ said the Doctor, emerging. ‘And was I ever wrong?’
‘So what is “this thing”,’ said Sarah. ‘What is going on?’
The Doctor was peering with a slight frown at a dial on the console, where a needle flickered to and fro. ‘Mm...’ he said,
‘The relativity circuit of the temporal balancing governor has been playing up a bit... Oh well! In for a penny...’
The doors closed, the centre of the control column started to move up and down (albeit a little shakily), and the TARDIS
started to sing the song with which it always started and finished its journeys, like the desperate cry of some alien elephant in agony.
It stopped.
‘Bombay!’ said the Doctor, tuning in the monitor that would show them what awaited them outside. ‘That’s odd,’ he said, as a wide landscape of dried-up grass appeared, punctuated by a twisted tree. ‘I programmed in the co-ordinates of VT, as they call it.’
‘VT?’ asked the Brigadier.
‘Victoria Terminus Station. Think of St Pancras filled with a Wembley football crowd. Some people live their whole lives there. Nobody’ll notice us tucked away in the corner.’
‘Come on then,’ he added, striding towards the opening door. ‘No sense in hanging about.’
Sarah waited for the Brigadier to go out in front of her. Let them find out where the TARDIS had landed! But before she’d gone two steps, she heard a shout of alarm and the pair of them erupted back through the door, the Doctor making a dive for the controls.
The door slammed shut, and the entire TARDIS lurched as something - what, for Pete’s sake! - hurled itself at this intruder into its domain.
Sarah, thrown to the floor by the shock, cast a look at the monitor. ‘That’s a lion!’ she said.
‘A very large lion,’ said the Brigadier, grimly picking himself up.
‘But there aren’t any lions in India.’
‘Of course there are,’ said the Doctor impatiently. ‘We must be in Bombay Zoo.’
‘Rubbish!’ said the Brigadier.
‘Aha! Got it! The temporal governor’s stuck again. We’re still on the Greenwich Meridian!’
Sarah’s mind did a quick flick through her admittedly small stock of geographical facts. ‘So we’re in Africa?’
‘Well of course we are!’ said the Doctor, busy checking the relevant sections of the errant circuit. ‘As far as the time dimension was concerned we haven’t moved at all. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’
And there she was thinking she’d been so clever!
‘Just let me know when we get there,’ said the Brigadier, parking himself in the only chair in the control room, stretching out his legs and closing his eyes.
‘No need to be sarcastic, Lethbridge-Stewart. We’ll be at VT
Station in two shakes of a sluggerlug’s tail.’
I’m just not going to ask. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, thought Sarah, as the TARDIS started trumpeting again.
Jeremy had often been abroad. Even before his father died (when he was only six), they used to go to his flat in Cannes every summer; and Mama had kept up the custom, even though, as she said, it was more like Margate these days.
But this time a flight of over fifteen hours was followed by a jolting, sticky coach ride from the airport, which took them through acres and acres of shanty town. The ‘houses’ seemed to be custom-built out of cardboard and scraps of corrugated iron, and the atmosphere stank of fresh poo! He longed for Hampstead. He’d been so happy there! Well mostly.
Especially after the daily celebration and the love-in. Why did they have to leave?
‘Pretty idle lot, the natives,’ he said to Paul, the long-time Skangite with hair down to his shoulders and a thin straggly beard, who sat next to him on the coach. ‘You’d think they’d want to smarten the place up a bit, wouldn’t you?’ he went on.
His remarks were met with a slight frown. ‘They do their best, chum,’ said Paul. ‘And if that’s your idea of loving kindness for our brothers and sisters, strikes me you’ve missed the point.’
‘What did I say?’ thought Jeremy glumly, as Paul turned away and looked out of the window again. They were all the same, this lot. Self-righteous bunch. He never seemed to do anything right.
He slumped down in his seat, and tried to comfort himself with the thought that Paul, who had a strong Brummy accent, probably only went to a secondary-modern... or at best a grammar school. No wonder he was a bit of an oik, in spite of having oodles of cash.
Even arriving at the ashram didn’t cheer Jeremy up. A high wall protected a complex of white stone buildings - offices, living quarters, conference buildings and an expansive open-sided celebration hall in the shade of an ancient tree. A bubbling stream, which ran alongside the main path, and the occasional cry of a foreign-sounding bird completed the scene.
Certainly, the turmoil of hooting and shouting that had accompanied the latter part of their journey from the airport was a
strong contrast to the low murmur of the crowds of white-clad disciples in the ashram. But it all seemed to Jeremy as cold and functional as a newly built car park; and the people, glancing at him with ill-concealed hostility, as alien as a bunch of Martians.
He was given some sort of chopped up veggies for his dinner - no potatoes, no meat - and then, to top it all...
‘Here’s where you London lot will be sleeping. Yours is number nine,’ said Brother Dafydd, who wore the long robe of a teacher’ like Brother Alex.
Horror! It was worse than the dormitory at Holbrook. He’d thought all that was behind him when he left school. Twelve people crammed into one small room - and to be expected to climb a ladder to the top of a tower of three bunk-beds, squashed in the middle of the others...!
Once, on a February holiday at a five-star hotel in Tenerife, he’d seen Mama go into full grande dame mode when she wasn’t satisfied with her room. ‘You expect me to pay your preposterous rates for this garret?’ she’d said to the quaking manager. My husband used to be Master of the Ferney. His hounds lived in a better kennel than this!’ And so on and so on. She and Jeremy had ended up in the owner’s suite.
Jeremy wasn’t quite so successful.
‘You’re lucky you’re not sleeping under the kitchen sink, boyo,’ said Brother Dafydd. ‘We’ve got to find room for nearly two hundred of you.’ He ticked off Jeremy’s name on his clipboard and turned to the next on his list.
Well really! Twenty thou for an iron bedstead and his nose touching the ceiling? He’d see about that! A word to Brother Alex...
‘If that’s a railway station, they must have had a power cut,’
said the Brigadier, staring at the monitor, which was totally dark.
‘Really, Lethbridge-Stewart, is it necessary to be so negative?’ said the Doctor as he set the controls to ‘stand by’.