by Barry Letts
‘Is that so? What’s the password then?’
Oh, thank you, Jeremy! ‘Open your heart!’
A grunt. She didn’t seem to be taking the advice.
‘Very well. What is it you want?’
Sarah’s mind was working so fast that she could almost feel the wheels going round. ‘Oh... I’ve got a message.’
‘Give it to me, then.’
‘No, I mean, Brother Alex said I was to talk to the Mate...’
Did she believe it? Didn’t look like it, judging by the tight lips.
‘So if you’d just tell me where I can find him...’Sarah went on desperately.
‘The First Officer?’ She looked over Sarah’s shoulder and a gleam of spite appeared in her cold eyes. ‘You’re in luck... Mr Gorridge!’ she called out. ‘There’s someone here who wants to speak to you. A message from... Brother Alex, was it?’
Oh Lor’!
Mr Gorridge came in from the upper deck. ‘What is it?’ His face twitched. ‘Please be quick. We’re behind schedule already. Who is Brother Alex?’
A wild hope. This could be the chance she’d been looking for. ‘Oh... Mother Hilda has put Brother Alex in charge of getting everybody on board...’ What was the word? Oh, yes.
‘Embarkation. You know? And he would like you to give him an idea of... well... when he can get going.’
A snort of disgust from the prison warder; and the First Officer wasn’t any more pleased.
‘You’d never believe it!’ he said. ‘I’ve made it perfectly clear from the start. I cannot accept any passengers earlier than two hours before we slip. And that means 1500, and not a second before. Okay?’ He screwed up his face and pulled at his nose as if he was trying to stop himself sneezing. ‘Now, what was I doing? Oh yes...’ He looked at his watch. ‘Oh, God!’ he said and turned to go.
Well, that wasn’t much use.
‘At this rate,’ said Mr Gorridge as he disappeared, ‘we’ll be lucky to be ready by a week tomorrow!’
Thank you, Mr Gorridge! Thank you very much!
‘Don’t you see? It must mean that they’re going to sail away tomorrow afternoon. The whole batch. At five o’clock!’
‘Very good, Sarah. Very good indeed,’ said the Brigadier.
‘And that means, Doctor, that your softly, softly, catch monkey approach is kaput.’
The Doctor took another mouthful of chicken curry.
‘Curious flavour,’ he said. ‘I haven’t tasted anything like it since a sneg stew I had in a little bistro on Sirius Two.’
‘What’s a sneg?’ asked Sarah, despite herself, her mouth full of buffburger.
‘A type of hairy newt,’ said the Doctor.
‘Do you like the taste?’ said Ron (who doubled as chef and waiter), as he passed by with a tray of dirty dishes from another table. He turned back at the kitchen door. ‘If you promise not to tell anybody... A large dollop of chocolate powder, that’s my secret ingredient. Takes the edge off the heat of the curry.
Of course, some like it hot!’ he added, and with a cheeky toss of his head and a giggle, he disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Hmm. So that’s what’s wrong with it,’ said the Brigadier, sprinkling his curry with a generous spoonful of chopped green chillies from the dish in the centre of the table. ‘You’re changing the subject again, Doctor,’ he went on. ‘You’ll no doubt be delighted to know that, thanks to the intervention of the British High Commissioner, Major Chatterjee and I will be paying this Mother Hilda a visit first thing tomorrow morning. She has some serious questions to answer.’
‘Indeed? You have no more direct evidence to link the deaths with the Skang cult now than you had in London.’
‘I don’t need it. There’s sufficient circumstantial evidence for a proper investigation. And that would be impossible if they were to take to the high seas. Until this whole thing is cleared up, they won’t be going anywhere.’
‘And how do you think you’re going to stop them?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Not by having a bit of a chit-chat about philosophy,’ replied the Brigadier, who had received the Doctor’s report with some impatience. ‘I have here...’ he produced from his inside pocket an official-looking envelope, ‘...something which will stop them in their tracks!’
‘Bully for you. It must be a very powerful bit of paper.’
‘It is indeed. An injunction from a High Court judge.’
‘And if they defy you?’
‘They’ll be arrested. All the organisers. I gather from Chatterjee that those in charge come from some twenty different countries. We’ll bag the lot of them.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said the Doctor.
Here they go again, thought Sarah, and then she was struck by an appalling notion. What was so special about London? If there was a Skang creature hidden away in South Hill Park Square, why not in every country where the cult had a base? They could be looking at twenty of them, not just the one! ‘Hang on!’ she said urgently, interrupting an irritable exchange concerning the efficiency of the Indian police -
indeed of any police, anywhere.
She told them her thought.
‘Well of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’d taken it for granted that we’d all understood that. Why do you think I’ve been treading so carefully? As far as Earth is concerned, these are alien beings, and clearly inimical. The leaders of the cult are either in league with them or being controlled by them. With so much at stake, these people will stop at nothing.’
It was apparently as new a thought to the Brigadier as it had been to Sarah.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘it makes it all the more imperative that we take the strongest action possible. The Major is picking me up at nine o’clock. This has got to be settled once and for all!’
‘Sorry Sarah,’ he went on, ‘on an occasion like this, three’s a crowd. Er... that is to say...’ He’d caught the lift of the Doctor’s eyebrow.
So they were going off without her. Right. She hadn’t told them the whole of her idea. She’d remembered the gut-clenching thought she’d had when she first saw the Skang. If there were twenty of the things, where were they hidden?
There could be only one answer.
She’d got onto the ship once. What was to stop her getting on board again?
CHAPTER NINE
Major Chatterjee arrived to pick the Doctor and the Brigadier up in a battered old Land Rover - not with a squad of police-men in tow, but with a large army sergeant with a fierce Kitchener moustache and a UNIT flash on his shoulder.
So the UNIT presence in Bombay wasn’t confined to one individual after all, thought the Brigadier. Including the driver, there were at least two more members. Hardly enough to take twenty people in charge. Twenty at least.
For a moment, he felt a pang of nostalgia for the UNIT team back home; for the most part ex-SAS professionals, who had helped him solve so many problems in the past. He stole a glance at the sergeant. That moustache would put the fear of God into anyone. At least his presence would show they meant business.
Not that you would have known it, from the Major’s conversation.
‘From what city are you coming, Doctor?’ said the Major, as they bumped over the potholes. ‘I have had a training secondment in your beautiful country some years ago, and went swanning the length and breadth of it.’
‘Oh, I’ve lived in so many different places,’ replied the Doctor, ‘I’ve lost count.’
‘Indeed? I gather that Brigadier-General Lethbridge-Stewart is Scotch born - oh, pardon me, Scottish!’
The man was just showing off his English! the Brigadier thought. ‘Just plain Brigadier, Chatterjee. Not a general...’
‘Yet...’ he added under his breath.
Swerving to avoid a skinny cow, they swung round the corner and arrived outside the main entrance to the ashram.
‘Gracious me!’ said the Major.
The gate was wide open, and nobody was there to greet them or, for that matter, t
o hinder them. They drove straight in.
Not a soul.
They pulled up in the square outside the main block, which housed the offices, the canteen and so on. There was no sign of life save the sound of a bird that sounded like a half-hearted curlew. Even the fountain in the middle of the square was silenced.
‘This is absurd,’ said the Brigadier, climbing out.
‘I should have foreseen this,’ said the Doctor behind him.
‘Maybe you were right, Lethbridge-Stewart. I would appear to have frightened them off myself.’
Major Chatterjee joined them. ‘We must make all haste to the docks. These naughty people must not be evading our grasp.’
‘One moment,’ said the Brigadier, walking over to the open door. ‘Is anybody there?’ he called into the building.
No response.
‘Let’s go,’ he said with abrupt decision, striding over to the Land Rover.
‘Wait!’ The Doctor held up his hand. ‘What’s that?’
They all froze.
No wonder they’d missed it, thought Lethbridge-Stewart.
The faintest possible knocking - somebody hammering on a distant door, perhaps - and, yes, the ghost of a voice...
‘He-e-elp! Help me! Let me out...!’
Sarah couldn’t make up her mind. As she rode through the racket of the city centre and out to the comparative peace of the dockside (in a three-wheeler this time, like a motor bike inside a mini-taxi), she was contemplating her possible future with the adrenalin rush she always felt when she was about to dive into the deep end.
These people would stop at nothing, the Doctor had said; so if she were caught searching for the Skang creatures...
And the alternative possibility, to stow away and get the entire story as it unfolded, was even more dicey. Let’s face it, she needed the Doctor. Together they made a great team, whereas on her own...
‘Come off it, Sarah Jane Smith,’ she said to herself. ‘Why not be honest? You’re just plain scared!’
She soon forgot her dilemma when they arrived at the docks. Having paid off the driver, she was riffling through a bundle of notes from her bag in search of one hundred rupees - her unofficial ticket into the dockyard - when she became aware that she could see through the gate right across the harbour to the Royal Navy ship and the others at anchor. The Skang wasn’t alongside the quay where she’d been yesterday.
Of course! If she were sailing this afternoon, she’d have to refuel, and get water and all that stuff.
She hurried across to the gate. Good. It was the same security man as the day before. His grinning face was alight with anticipation of favours yet to come, and his hand was hovering ready to receive his bribe.
‘Where can I find her? The Skang?’
His face and his hand both fell. ‘Go to the Harbour Master’s office. They will be telling you to where she travels.’
‘Yes, but where is she now? I need to go on board.’
He shrugged. She was no longer his friend. ‘You have missed the boat, miss.’
‘What? What do you mean? You mean she’s gone?’
He gave the little sideways wobble of his head that signifies assent in India, together with a little smirk of pleasure at the bad news. ‘They did not tell you? Your friends all came on board just after the middle of the night. She left Bombay at two o’clock this morning!’
‘My name? Whitbread, Alex Whitbread. What does that matter? Have they gone? Have they sailed yet?’
Whitbread! The man they were after in London! Now they might get some answers, thought the Brigadier.
Brother Alex could hardly stand. His usual, carefully tanned complexion was now a jaundiced yellow-white, and his eyes were sunken in deep pits of shadow.
The man was obviously on his last legs. The questions would have to wait. ‘You’re ill, man. We must get you to a doctor,’ the Brigadier said. ‘Sorry,’ he grunted to the Doctor, who, with a look, took hold of Alex’s wrist to feel his pulse.
‘Who was it that has locked you in the office, sir?’ asked Major Chatterjee. ‘That in itself, you know, is a criminal offence, no doubt.’
‘For God’s sake!’ Alex was almost screaming. ‘It can’t go without me! I must be on that ship!’
‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s out of the question. Until you’ve answered our...’
But Alex wasn’t listening. Wrenching himself free from the Doctor, he pushed violently past the others, in a rush to escape.
‘Stop him!’ barked the Brigadier.
‘Sah!’ barked back the enormous sergeant, who was standing by the broken door.
But Alex wasn’t giving up easily. With an animal howl of desperation, struggling with a fanatical strength that was quite at odds with his apparent state of near-collapse, he beat at the sergeant’s chest with his free hand as he fought to get away from the great hand clamped around his arm. For a moment, it almost looked as if he might manage it.
But the Doctor was beside them in an instant. He touched the frantic man at the base of his skull, finding some esoteric pressure point. The Brigadier had seen him do the same in the past, and was now equally taken aback at the result. For Alex Whitbread, with joints suddenly resembling those of a rag-doll, sank to the floor and lay still. His arm fell lifelessly as the sergeant let it go.
‘Well!’ said Major Chatterjee. ‘You could knock me down with a feather, you know!’
The Brigadier pulled himself together. We’d better get him to the hospital.’
‘That’s the last thing we must do, Lethbridge-Stewart,’ said the Doctor. ‘Once in the grip of officialdom, he’ll be lost to us.’
The Brigadier grunted. The Doctor was right, for once. If the rest of the cult had given them the slip, Whitbread was their only contact. And as for the others...
The telephone in the office was still connected. A quick call to the Harbour Master’s office confirmed their fears. The
Skang had sailed. But at least they now knew where she was going. She’d filed her sailing plans, as the regulations demanded.
The Skang was going to Sri Lanka.
Ron had been only too pleased to let them have another room, his normal business being passing trade, with more emphasis on the passing than the trade.
Habeas corpus: you may have the body... thought the Brigadier gloomily, as he watched the sergeant tenderly laying the limp figure on the bed. We’ve got the body - and much good may it do us. ‘When shall we be able to interrogate him?’ he said aloud.
‘He’ll be out for an hour or so,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’s difficult to say precisely. You have to be careful, you see. It’s a useful technique to sedate any vertebrate, but a few micrograms too much pressure, and the central nervous system would come to a dead stop.’
Having dispatched the sergeant to wait in the car, the two UNIT officers and the Doctor repaired to the hotel hallway, which doubled as a lounge, to have a council of war.
All the delays of the last two days churned through the Brigadier’s mind. If only they had flown out straight away, instead of wasting so much time with the TARDIS! They’d missed their chance; and now they were in an impossible position, as he pointed out to the Doctor with scarcely concealed fury. To chase after the Skang in a helicopter, for instance, would certainly be counter-productive. What were they to do once they’d landed on the deck?
Their only hope of stopping the ship on the high seas would be to enlist the help of the Indian Navy. A destroyer, or even a frigate, could metaphorically (or even literally) fire a shot across the bows of the runaway vessel. But the chances of persuading those with the power to grant permission, purely on the strength of the Doctor’s surmises...
‘Surmises?’ said the Doctor indignantly. ‘These are the conclusions I have reached after due consideration of all the evidence. These alien beings could pose a threat to the very survival of Homo sapiens. They must be destroyed! Surmises indeed! When have you ever known me to be wrong?’
The Brigadier made a n
oble effort and managed to stop himself from pointing out the many times they’d run into trouble on the basis of the Doctor’s assumptions. ‘You agree that the evidence is circumstantial,’ he said, tight-lipped.
‘We’d have no hope of convincing them.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Major Chatterjee. ‘It is maybe hoping for a miracle to persuade even the police to be taking the matter seriously.’
‘The Yanks have a word for it,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Snafu.
Situation normal, all -’
‘So you’ve noticed. Situation normal indeed,’ said the Doctor. ‘Things aren’t going the way we want? When has life ever been different?’
‘We have no option. It is vital that we intercept them in Sri Lanka. If we catch a plane...’
He was interrupted by a tumult and a shouting in the street.
‘What the devil...?’ said the Brigadier, rising to his feet. A moment later, the burly sergeant appeared at the main door, with Brother Alex held firmly in his grasp, as if he’d caught a naughty schoolboy.
‘Absconding through the window, the miscreant was,’ he said, his moustache twitching. ‘I am seeing him, so I am taking initiative to apprehend him. Sah!’
‘Quite right, Sergeant,’ said the Major.
‘Must get to the ship...’ gasped Alex, with a sort of sob.
‘You’re too late, Mr Whitbread,’ said the Doctor. ‘The Skang will be over a hundred miles away by now.’
The effect on Alex was almost as dramatic as that resulting from the Doctor’s earlier intervention. He sagged in the sergeant’s massive hands. All the strength had gone from his legs, and his head drooped. Only the moan coming from his bloodless lips with every breath, like a child exhausted by too much weeping, told them that he was still conscious.
The sergeant picked him up and carried him like a baby over to the Victorian chaise longue near the reception desk.
He laid him on its faded velvet.
‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ said the Brigadier. ‘You’ve done well.’
