'Their predictability makes for a dull game, I fear.' He smiled broadly, suddenly. 'But then, they still don't know they're playing, do they?'
'What instructions shall I give for the girl, Lord?'
'We must wait, mustn't we? She will make her way to us soon enough, with that tiresome young man in attendance.'
He continued watching, idly, as Peri, after some hesitation, made her way towards the attendant and started talking to him urgently. The attendant shook his head and shrugged. Peri continued, obviously more agitated. The young man's shrugs became more pronounced, and the Mandarin smiled.
The tunnels the Doctor was walking through had the same lighting as others in the complex, but the feel of the exposed brickwork was decidedly Victorian. He'd been walking now for what he thought was about half a mile and had seen several variations on the same theme. He had concluded, correctly, that new tunnels had been added to old, bypassing others and generally developing an anthill-like feel to the whole construction. He did not award it high marks for aesthetic value, but then considered that aesthetics were low on the list of the builders' priorities. Certainly aesthetics were a long way from the minds of the gentlemen who accompanied him — one in front, one behind — if their utilitarian cover-alls and snub-nosed semi-automatic rifles were anything to go by. Comforting at least to note that the accoutrements were very twentieth-century Earth technology... He carried on with such idle thoughts as he took in all the other observations, and had opted for a critical stand-point, as this came easiest to him, especialy in moments of stress.
'... and, efficient though any service area might be, I do think you should consider improving your braking system once you've branched the line. I very nearly flew over the handlebars, you know...' said the Doctor aloud. The mild admonishment seemed not to hurt or wound either of the guards and the Doctor stopped to try and emphasise the gravity of his complaint.
'And that's another thing — those safety bars. Did you know they've got nasty little bumps and grooves on the top? And the ones on that wonderful rollercoaster thing too. Now they might well enhance the design features...'
Whether they did or not seemed not to interest the guards. They were probably weak on design theory and probably always had been, for the one behind simply prodded the Doctor with his automatic until the Doctor took the hint and started walking again. The Doctor was not so easily distracted from his self-appointed mission to inform and educate, for he continued in the same patient vein.
'Did I ever tell you about my design theory?' There was no response from the guards, but the Doctor suspected that he had indeed not let them in on it. He decided that in the interest of the pangalactic dissemination of knowledge through culture, now was as good a time as any. 'It mainly concerns the fluid lines provoked by the ergonomic imperatives...'
On the station platform, a now-harassed ride boss had joined the harassed attendant. Peri, when she put her mind to it, could make quite a fuss. Truth to tell, she could make quite a fuss without any mental effort at all, but now she had pulled all the stops out and the business of the ride was slowly grinding to a halt.
'People do not just disappear!' she said, loudly, as if trying to educate the ride boss to a little known fact with which he had been, until now, unfamiliar.
The boss replied with a fervour of righteous indignation befitting a Senior Fellow witnessing his latest theory being hijacked for the very first time. 'That's what I've been telling you, lass!' he spluttered, waving his arms in an alarming fashion. 'There is no way anyone can get off this ride between there —' he pointed both his arms in dramatic fashion at the doors through which the Doctor had disappeared — 'and there.' Now he pointed at the opposite doors, through which the Doctor should have appeared, just Iike the rest of the world taking the ride. Now is there?' he finished, challenging her to dispute her own theory.
'I think we'd better go to the Police,' said Kevin.
'And who the hell are you?' yelped the boss, which was just as well, because Peri had been about to yelp exactly the same thing, which wouldn't have helped matters at all.
'A friend, that's all,' replied Kevin with all the modesty the claim deserved. 'If you won't take this seriously,' he continued airily, 'we'll just have to find someone who will.'
'All right, all right.' The boss admitted defeat, though to what or whom he couldn't have said. 'Look, I'm up to my ears in it 'ere,' and the ever gathering crowd bore testimony to that. 'You go and talk to the Security Department. They've got the authority. Through that door there and second on the right.' Peri contrived to look both defiant and victorious and ended up looking very suspicious indeed. Kevin took her by the arm and propelled her towards the door the boss had pointed to, the one with the Staff Only sign on it. The moment the door had closed behind them, she turned on Kevin.
'Well, who are you, my "friend"?'
Before Kevin could frame a suitable answer, which might have taken some time anyway, the 'second on the right' the boss had mentioned swung open and another living boiler suit appeared, automatic in hand.
'A right pain in the neck, that's who,' volunteered the boiler suit. His identically dressed companion behind him grinned in agreement. 'We'd better take you somewhere and have your complaint dealt with, hadn't we?' He made an abrupt gesture with the automatic down the corridor. With a sigh of resignation, Peri, who was well used to this sort of situation, moved off without further comment. Kevin, to whom this sort of thing was, to say the least, novel, was about to try an opening conversational gambit when he was actively discouraged by a harsh poke in the ribs from the second man's gun. So he also moved off behind Peri, down the sloping corridor and deeper into the complex beneath the funfair...
The tunnel door in the Data Room swung open and the security guard entered, closely followed by the Doctor and the other security guard. The Doctor took one look at the computers and analysers and whooped with glee.
'Oh, I say! How much is it to go on one of these?' He started forward towards the closest terminal and was pounced on by the two guards. Stefan took a couple of steps closer, apparently not at all pleased that the machines were being equated with the games upstairs. His opinion of the wild-eyed multi-coloured freak in front of him evidently dropped below zero, for he fixed him with his most disdainful look as he ordered the guards.
'Take him to his quarters. Our Lord is not yet ready to receive him.'
'Your Lord!' exclaimed the Doctor. 'That's either very religious or very subservient, and you don't look the religious type...' Which wasn't, strictly speaking, true, as the Doctor would have been forced to agree under different circumstances. Stefan looked definitely religious, in a cold-eyed, fanatic way, much the same as perhaps Rasputin might have done. Signalling both his disagreement and his impatience, Stefan snapped his fingers at the guards who proceeded to bear the Doctor away.
'Oh, I say, steady on, no offence and all that —' the Doctor wailed to no effect as he was carted off. Stefan's lip curled in a classic gesture of contempt. Clearly this clown was no match for the impeccable skill of his Lord.
The trudge from Space Mountain to wherever they were being taken was longer than either Peri or Kevin had expected. They had slowed gradually to a dawdle, and the guards seemed content to let them go at their own pace. Some way back they had passed a branch which was obviously close to the real world outside — they could hear the noise of the fair and the chatter of the crowds quite clearly, and the guard in front had stood very determinedly at the junction and waited for them both to pass. He had stayed back with his friend, whether from sloppiness or design it was difficult to tell.
Kevin had taken the opportunity to bring Peri up to date on his story so far, and for so long had had no one to discuss his theories with that he quite forgot to ask her what she was doing in the middle of all this.
'... and this mob are obviously behind the whole thing,' he concluded, a fact which Peri thought so blindingly obvious that she forbore even to agree with him. 'If it's t
his well organised,' he continued, 'no wonder the police didn't find anything.'
'Looks like we're doing better than that,' replied Peri, for once in a positive frame of mind, 'but what we're going to do with whatever we do find...' The strain of positive thought proved too much; the guard immediately behind seemed to think positive was bad as well, and out of boredom as much as anything he drawled:
'Cut the cackle and get a move on!'
They both grimaced and speeded up, but only a little.
The Doctor looked down at the flap at the bottom of the door, and the little shelf below it and pondered for a moment as to what purpose it might serve. Before he could come to any useful conclusion, the guard shoved him rudely further down the corridor: three doors further down, to be exact. There was a flap but no shelf on his door, he noticed, as the other guard opened it up with an enormous and intricate key. Definitely neo-Gothic, decided the Doctor with a measure of satisfaction. He had no further time for reflection before he was pushed into the room.
'Can't you just say please?' he snarled at the guard, who simply slammed the door from the outside. The Doctor looked around his cell with a familiarity bordering on contempt. Flagstone floor, damp brick walls, truckle bed against one wall and a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.
'Prison cells,' he snorted. 'Seen one, you've seen them all.' He turned to shout at the ever-so-firmly-shut door: 'You want to know my theory about the design of prison cells? They're all made just to keep little minds out!' The only reply to this somewhat egotistical observation was the sound of two pairs of boots receding down the corridor. The Doctor looked briefly around the cell again, noting the efficiency and reliability of the Victorian construction, and then remarked, with a note of resignation, 'And big minds quite definitely in...'
Peri noticed, with some apprehension, that the tunnel was changing. The wide, modern construction had given away to more and more brick and bare rock, with makeshift supports and sections to hold up the whole edifice. They went through a solid, old iron flood or fire door, rusted open, and beyond that was evidence of how far the modern reconstruction had reached — twentieth-century electrical conduit boxes ran the whole length of the section, and, as they rounded a corner, they came across a site which had been abandoned, by the look of it, only for the night. A section of the conduit was hanging off the wall, the spaghetti of the wires dangling from it, part attached to junction boxes, part just hanging free. A service trolley stood, half full of tools and spare parts, the top clad in sheet metal with a small vice mounted, the whole acting as a workbench as well as supply vehicle. Peri suddenly collapsed against the trolley, rolling it half a foot with her weight.
It's no good,' she gasped, 'I can't breathe —'
Kevin dropped to her side quickly, and the security guard hurried forward.
'What's up? Get back, you —' His further instructions to Kevin ended in a sharp yelp as Peri swung the big adjustable spanner she had grabbed from the trolley full-crack against the guard's wrist. He dropped his gun with no choice in the matter at all, and was about to launch into a series of hair-curling expletives when Kevin scooped up the weapon and opened fire.
The closest Kevin had ever got to firearms prior to this had been a copy of Rambo, hired from the local video shop, and the film had left a lasting impression. As with so many imitators, he had carefully ignored the fact that Mr Stallone had been surrounded not so much by enemy forces as a very talented and professional bunch of special effects men. As his finger hit the trigger of the very modern and very sophisticated weapon, several things became instantly clear to him and everyone else in the tunnel.
First, automatic means pretty well that. The gun in his hand was a variation on the Ingersoll favoured by the British Special Forces once upon a time, and this model was chucking bullets down the spout at the rate of half a dozen every second.
Second, bullets chucked down the spout tended to carry on travelling until they hit something, and, depending on what that something was, they either kept on travelling or stopped. As Kevin was spraying the thing round like a garden hose, he mercifully missed everything but the tunnel walls, which even he couldn't miss, and then he started learning about ricochets. By the time he had taken his finger off the trigger, each bullet had bounced a couple of dozen times off different parts of the walls and the air was alive with very hot and very hard metal.
Third, the noise made by a large number of exploding cartridges and ricocheting bullets in the confines of a tunnel only seven or eight feet in diameter is dreadful and not conducive to careful or considered actions.
Which probably explained the frantic way in which Peri, the two guards and, eventually, Kevin himself, hurled themselves behind anything that offered the slightest protection from the swarm of hornets buzzing around the place. The moment the firing stopped, which was only a moment after it had started, Peri was scooting off down the corridor and round the next bend, and Kevin was scooting after her. The second boiler suit passed his partner, nursing his injured hand and moaning, and, taking careful aim, loosed off two shots after the fleeing couple. Ironically, the true professional had no more success than the rank amateur, although the two ricocheting bullets were at least this time whiz-zing round the targets rather than the marksman. The man on the floor reached up and dragged the gun arm down.
'No, you fool,' he spat out. 'They're not supposed to die! Not yet!'
The Doctor bent to his task with renewed effort. Every scrap of his extra-terrestrial power had been brought to bear on the problem in hand, and if this didn't work, then nothing would. Even the highest intellect and deftest hand could do only so much, and there were the Universal Laws of Time and Space which gave way to no being, great or small.
He looked again at the massive lock and looked again at the bent hairpin in his hand. Facing up to reality, for once, he adopted a far more constructive course of action by crossing over to the bed, lying down on it, and trying for forty winks.
Peri and Kevin crept round the next corner with a great deal more circumspection than when they had raced round the last. Here as well there was evidence of reconstruction, though in this instance of a heavier, more basic nature. The tunnel wall was being bricked up — what looked like an old spur was blocked off — and the new bricks stopped short of the roof by a foot and a half. At the foot of the new wall was a pile of bricks, bags of mortar mix and a wheelbarrow. Using this as cover, they gratefully sank down for a moment's rest, Kevin keeping a careful eye on the tunnel behind them, his acquired gun at the ready, much to Peri's concern.
'You all right?' she asked.
'Yeah, it just nicked me. I never been shot at before,' he announced with something approaching satisfaction. The lesson on ricochets had been pressed home at first hand, so to speak.
'Have you ever shot at anyone else before?' asked Peri, getting to the heart of the matter in one.
'No,' replied Kevin, making absolutely no bones about it.
'I didn't think so,' muttered Peri.
'I thought I did pretty well, first time out,' Kevin said, defensively.
'You nearly shot everyone in sight, first time out,' Peri pointed out. 'You and me included.'
'Don't knock it,' he muttered. 'It worked.'
'It did that,' agreed Peri, cheerfully. 'You want me to look at that?' She gestured at the torn sleeve of his jacket.
'No, it's all right, really,' he reassured her. 'Where are they?'
'Thinking twice about coming round that bend, I should think,' suggested Peri. 'So would I with Wild Bill Hickock waiting for me...' She managed a weak smile. 'More to the point, where's everyone else?' She gestured at the pile of workmen's tools and materials behind which they were sheltering. There was just enough light for Kevin to consult his wristwatch.
'Half past knocking-off time,' he offered. 'Doesn't anyone do overtime any more?'
'Maybe just as well,' replied Peri, 'We don't know whose side they'd be on anyway.'
'True enough,' agreed Kevi
n. 'You can bet that lot —' he gestured down the tunnel the way they'd come — 'won't be on their own next time. We'd better be getting on.'
'Down there?' asked Peri, looking down the tunnel, which ran into damp and forbidding gloom further along.
'Not much choice, is there?' Kevin pointed out. 'Come on.' Keeping a careful eye still behind them, he gently pushed her on ahead of him.
The Doctor's face appeared out of nowhere, upside down. From a mouse's point of view, it must have been one of the great heart-stopping moments of all time. However, nothing was there, not even, at this point, a friendly mouse. He hauled himself back up again and, standing now on the bed, reached up to the old cast-iron pipe which ran through the cell just below the ceiling, and tried to rattle it. The movement was only slight, and he had no plan in mind for a rattling pipe anyway, especially one that seemed as fixed and as substantial as the rest of the construction. With a sigh, he threw himself down on the bed again, fingers locked behind his head. He stared with distaste at the remote-control monitoring camera, mounted high in the corner, which was pointing directly at him. It looked back, unwaveringly, without embarrassment.
'Don't hurry on my account,' muttered the Doctor, unable now to stop his teeth clenching. In a louder and clearer voice he continued, 'You just let me know when you're ready. If I expire of boredom before that, I hope you take it very personally.' Thus miffed, he turned himself violently onto his side and seemed to go to sleep.
Kevin and Peri were hurrying down the corridor now, caution sacrificed to speed. They had both heard men's voices behind them a few moments ago, and knew their pursuers were not far behind, emboldened perhaps by the lack of the hosepipe firing from the fleeing couple. Suddenly Kevin, who was leading now, stopped. Peri lifted her head wearily and saw why. In front of them the tunnel branched into a Y.
DOCTOR WHO - THE NIGHTMARE FAIR Page 4
