The Japanese man's mouth tightened as the unpleasant truth was acknowledged. There was another short, sharp bow of agreement, of subservience.
'Good,' replied the Mandarin, purring. 'You may tell your... board... that the last hurdle has been overcome and that I now have the final... personnel... requirements fulfilled. The blueprints will be in your factories within the month. Is that good enough for you?'
'You are kind as you are wise, Lord,' replied Toshiro, bowing once again, and now, the Mandarin noted with amusement, there was a definite irony in the movement.
'Goodbye, Toshiro.' Without further pleasantries, the Mandarin terminated the connection. The amused smile stayed on his lips as he considered the conversation. Toshiro was an excellent player, without doubt one of the finest he'd met on this planet, but the time was coming when that particular game would reach a conclusion, a conclusion which the Japanese magnate would most certainly not enjoy, but one from which the Mandarin would wring the last drop of satisfaction. The smile broadened...
The Doctor looked down at the pile of flotsam and jetsam from his pockets with a fixed, almost trance-like stare. The pile was quite generous, most of it covered with fluff, ranging from a very gummy jelly baby to the signet-ring of Rasillon. An unpleasant sweetmeat to the most powerful single object in the known Universes, he thought, glumly. Typical. He heaved a great sigh, for in the manner of everyone's ragtag and bobtail, every piece held a story, and there were suddenly too many memories... He broke off to look at Kevin's pitiful little collection, hardly able to believe his eyes.
'No transducers?' he stated, flatly. He looked up.
Kevin, seeing the look in those eyes, shook his head guiltily. Why were there no transducers in his pockets? What the hell were transducers?
'No elliptical resonators?' Again the headshake. Why oh why were there no elliptical resonators? What had he been doing with his life?
'Fuse wire?' asked the Doctor in an agony of desperation.
'It's just not the sort of stuff I carry round with me,' Kevin answered, very carefully, realising the importance of what he was saying, 'even if I knew what it was...'
'And look what you do carry with you!' The Doctor waved a hand in total dismissal at the little pile on the bed — a few coins; a bus ticket, a more than usually clean handkerchief. He was trying not to be too harsh, but really!
'When I was your age, I had enough "stuff" in my pockets to build a holo-field scrambler in five minutes flat, and often did!' The voice was nearing hysteria.
'Why haven't you got what you need now then?' asked Kevin in as neutral and provocative a tone as he could manage. The Doctor was about to come apart at the seams with sheer frustration, and caught himself only just in time.
'One matures...' he announced. He mused for a moment and then his eyes, with a sparkle, switched to the video machine in the corner. 'Can you get the back off that thing for me?'
'About thirty seconds,' nodded Kevin, matter of factly.
Stefan stood easily in front of the Mandarin's desk. The Mandarin was seated as usual, but he seemed hardly interested in the conversation, merely seeking confirmation of that which he already knew.
'When will production commence?' he asked.
'The new specification will make no difference, Lord,' replied Stefan, confidently. 'Within the month.'
'Have arrangements been made for the technicians to travel to America?'
'They leave tonight, Lord, with your permission,' he added, as a matter of course. The Mandarin nodded.
'Data correlation must be complete in two weeks, then.'
'Yes, Lord. We foresee no difficulties.'
'We could even incorporate the results from the Time Lord,' suggested the Mandarin, with an idle smile. Stefan smiled broadly.
'Then the game's appeal would be truly universal, Lord.' The Mandarin smiled again, and inclined his head in agreement. Stefan's dry unpleasant cackle filled the room.
The path Kevin had found had been winding through the ride for what seemed like miles to Peri. Sometimes it joined the layout of the mine proper, sometimes it moved back into other, disused tunnels. She supposed it must be some sort of service route, but she hoped for the maintenance crews' sakes they had a bunch of first-rate maps. They were walking on the opposite side of the railway track now, opposite a group of miners drinking what seemed to be whisky in what seemed to be a very determined fashion. Kevin paid them no attention whatsoever, whilst Peri still viewed them with the deepest suspicion. They came to a break in the path, as the ride-tracks swung away to the left to vanish into yet another tunnel, and where there was a two-step iron ladder set into the wall to take the path along a ledge and then into a tunnel of its own.
'Can't be much further now,' said Kevin as he offered her a helping hand to climb the ladder.
'How's your arm?' asked Peri casually as she took hold of his hand.
'Fine,' he replied. 'Why shouldn't it be?'
'I thought you sprained it.' He frowned briefly. 'When we escaped,' she added.
'Oh that!' He laughed quietly. 'No, it's fine now.'
'After you,' said Peri, calmly. She motioned for him to lead on, and then followed him, very carefully indeed...
Kevin had been true enough to his word, though perhaps a trifle optimistic, as the Doctor pointed out airily. It had taken him two minutes, not the claimed thirty seconds, but the back of the machine was now off and the Doctor was grubbing around the inside, happy as a sandboy. The business end of the machine, the long tubes designed to hold all the coins, occupied the top left quarter of the available space, and the cash boxes the bottom half. But what was left in the remaining space was a treasure chest of wiring, printed circuit boards and other electrical components, which the Doctor was busy reducing to its constituent elements.
'No, no, no,' the Doctor replied to an earlier question, 'the walls do not exist! Not that one anyway,' he modified, gesturing vaguely at the wall behind which the monster, presumably, still lurked. Kevin turned his head to look at it, and, perhaps, to make sure he had the right wall.
'So why does it hurt when I hit it?' he asked, reasonably enough.
'Because it's solid, of course! What d'you expect to feel when you thump a solid object? Warm all over?'
'Then if it's not real, how come I think it's there?'
'Because it is!' sighed the Doctor, exasperated, and beginning to wish he'd never embarked on this crash course in quasi-physical mechanics for beginners. 'Can't you trust the evidence of your own eyes? Or are you one of those fellows who has to go around hitting things all the time. Knew a chap like that once,' he remembered, 'in Paris...'
'It doesn't exist, but it's real,' Kevin recapitulated the lesson so far. 'It's not there but it's solid?'
'At last! I detect a glimmer of understanding!' Now that he seemed to have got to first base, he thought the wayward brain in front of him might stand the most basic explanation. 'It's a simple holo-field... like a hologram, which is just a picture made up of diffracted light, but with enough energy to give it the appearance and physical attributes of solid material — honestly, sometimes it's just like talking to primitives...' He poked his head out suddenly, hair awry, a sheepish look on his face. 'Sorry...' The head dipped back inside the machine. 'Right, that should —' Whatever he was going to say was stopped in its tracks by the sound of a key in the lock of the door. With amazing speed, and at some risk to life and limb, the Doctor was out from the back of the machine and leaning nonchalantly against it by the time the door opened and the ancient Shardlow came in, bearing a large tray. The two boiler suits accompanying him stayed outside, and made no attempt to help.
With a gentle bow to the Doctor, Shardlow bore the tray over to the rough table and started to lay out a fine service of plates, cutlery, thick damask napkins, then bowls of soup, bread rolls and pâté.
'My apologies for the victuals, masters,' he spoke softly, 'cook was expecting you much earlier and does not, alas, reside in the house.'
'My name is Shardlow, sir.'
'What do you do here, Shardlow?'
'I am a servant here, sir, as are we all in our own way...'
'Why do you stay here,' demanded Kevin, 'in this madhouse?'
'Is there a choice, young sir?' asked the old man, matter-of-factly.
The Doctor went up to him. 'Which game did you lose at, Shardlow?' he asked, as gently as he could.
'Why, backgammon, sir. At the Hellfire Club, it was. A losing hazard...' He smiled ruefully at the memory.
'And when was this?' the Doctor asked, even more gently.
'Why, a beautiful summer's evening, sir. The July of '78.'
'Ten years?' queried Kevin, horrified. 'In this dump!' The Doctor looked at him, sadly, then turned back to the old man.
'You mean 1778, don't you, old chap?'
'Why yes, sir,' replied Shardlow, obviously surprised there should be any confusion.
'That's over two hundred years ago!' exclaimed Kevin.
'Is it, master? Is it indeed? I must confess, it has sometimes seemed such a very long time...' The wistfulness in the old man's voice stopped even Kevin from further protest, and one of the boiler suits came towards the cell as if to see what all the chatter was about. Shardlow was the first to notice, and raised his voice immediately.
'I will return, good sirs, in a quarter of an hour, with the fish course. Sadly, we do not keep as fine a table these days as once we did.'
'Times change, Shardlow,' said the Doctor, softly.
'Do they, sir? Do they indeed?'
Slowly and sadly, the old man limped out and the sound of the key was heard in the door again.
'This place is nuthin' but a flamin' asylum,' insisted Kevin. 'I've never heard such a load of complete cods-wallop in all me born days!'
'What you've just heard is the plain, unvarnished truth, I should think,' replied the Doctor sombrely.
'Two-hundred-year-old geezers serving the grub?'
'More than two hundred,' the Doctor pointed out. 'That's just the time he's been here — he was his natural age before that -- say, what — sixty?'
'Oh, that makes a lot more sense that does,' snorted Kevin, 'him being two hundred and sixty instead of two hundred. That makes it a lot more credible!'
'That poor old man,' murmured the Doctor, turning to look after the way Shardlow had gone. 'The gift of immortality didn't seem to please him that much, did it?'
'Immortality?' asked Kevin, unused to such concepts as facts of life.
'When you can start counting your age in centuries, you can call that immortality, can't you? Of a sort?' The mood of melancholy seemed to change abruptly, as reaction set in to what he had just witnessed. 'Or like the rest of your race, are you going to quibble about definitions?'
Kevin was somewhat taken aback, sensing that the Doctor was not having a dig at the Anglo-Saxons, but rather the whole polyglot of Homo Sapiens in general.
'Yes, that would be typical,' continued the Doctor, working up a good head of steam now, 'to spend the rest of eternity defining immortality — that would really satisfy the human race's yearning for self-justification! That poor old man...' He stopped and shook his head again, compassion almost overwhelming him. 'Centuries of servitude, slavery for what? Losing at a board game! And the game would have been rigged as well! This time the Toymaker has gone too far.'
There was a grimness in his tone which Kevin had certainly never heard before, and he resolved for the foreseeable future to keep his smart remarks to himself, and pity anyone else who got in the way of his cell-mate while he was in this mood. And this mood didn't look as though it would go away until the old man, as well as themselves, was free and clear of the lunatic in charge of this particular asylum.
'This time the Toymaker has gone too far...'
As the words of the Doctor echoed through his consciousness, the Mandarin clapped his hands with glee, 'Excellent, excellent.'
He related the Time Lord's outburst to Stefan who advanced, his face, never the most reposed visage, now a mask of fury. 'I will have him impaled, Lord. His ending will be a terrible lesson to all, echoing down the ages.'
'Oh, you're very harsh, Stefan,' sighed the Mandarin with affected dismay. He hardened as he continued, 'I should then find it even more difficult engaging the interest of competitors, shouldn't I?' This seemed to present no decent argument to Stefan, who was quite used to his opponents playing at the point of a gun. 'The old man served his purpose very well,' continued the Mandarin. 'The Doctor's righteous indignation will raise the adrenalin level to a far more combative level.' He grinned hugely and turned the crystal ball until Peri and Kevin swam into view once more. Still grinning, he leaned forward slightly towards the screen and breathed, 'We must hurry.'
'We must hurry...' said Kevin, a note of urgency creeping into his voice.
'Why?' asked Peri.
'Why?' repeated Kevin, dumbly.
'I mean, why now, especially?' She had stopped to ask Kevin the question and, from the corner of her eye, watched another boiler suit duck behind some cover. They had been following them, she knew, for the last half-hour at least. And if she had seen them, Kevin must have seen them too. 'What was the deal?' she asked, off-handedly.
What?' repeated Kevin.
'When you sold out,' she continued. 'Your brother back, was that it?'
'I don't understand,' started Kevin, feebly.
Peri hefted the crowbar. 'Stay back,' she warned, as he moved towards her. But Kevin chose to ignore the warning and made a dive for her. With all the pent-up tension and plain anger of the last couple of hours, she brought it round in a terrific belt, half-expecting his head to fly off in the same way the miner's had done, back in the ride. Instead the crowbar simply whooshed through the head as if it wasn't there. The arm which came up to catch hers was real enough though, and it held her long enough for the boiler suits to come running up and hold her even more securely. Kevin stepped hack, and surveyed the girl with disdain.
'The start of the game was most amusing, and I wish I could say you were a worthy opponent,' he sneered, 'but in truth, you need to practise for a very long time. We shall have to see what we can do about that.'
'Who are you?' Peri whispered, but the figure of Kevin merely laughed, thinly and without humour. Then the figure started to shimmer and, with no sound at all, faded away. The two guards seemed not at all surprised by the effect, as they led Peri, unprotesting, away.
Chapter Seven
Tearing off another great lump of the delicious bread rolls, Kevin waved the remainder at the Doctor and pronounced, in his flat, atonal Liverpudlian voice, a thought that had been building in his brain for several minutes now. 'You could use that very nicely to strain broccoli, you know. Patent it and make a fortune. I'm very fond of a bit of broccoli, but it's the very devil to strain.'
'Unlike what passes for your brain,' muttered the Doctor. He gave a yank and another clump of wire came out of the back of the video game machine, and, industriously, he started plaiting that into the dish shape he had already fashioned, convex with an antennae device at the centre, concentric circles of wire held apart by radials, producing the effect of a circular spider's web, or, if you prefer, a perfect broccoli strainer.
'But I reckon you're goin' to use it for somethin' else,' Kevin added, sagaciously.
'Going to have to, old chap,' admitted the Doctor frankly. Kevin looked mildly surprised. 'No broccoli,' explained the Doctor, and disappeared into the innards of the machine again. Kevin looked thoughtful as he bit into his bread roll again. Where could he get some broccoli?
'The technicians await your pleasure, Lord,' announced Stefan, waiting at the door. The Mandarin turned from his thoughts, a broad smile still on his face.
'Stefan, I have just been busy enjoying myself, a feeling I haven't had for a very long time. A very long time indeed.'
'I am glad to hear it, Lord,' replied Stefan, unsurel
y. The Mandarin's idea of enjoyment was rarely Stefan'sor anyone else's for that matter — and Stefan was wisely reluctant to commit himself until he knew more about the nasty little pleasure the Mandarin had devised for himself now. Given the time the Mandarin seemed prepared to devote to even the simplest diversion, it had to be grotesque indeed.
'You don't understand, Stefan,' said the Mandarin, giving voice to a thought that had occurred to him a hundred times a day for longer than even he cared to remember. 'I have actually found a distraction... something I can even develop. Something with almost boundless possibilities — why, it could be good for centuries yet. I cannot become another person — that is beyond even my capabilities — but I can pretend to be another person, to the point where even his dearest friend or closest relative would never know the difference — the possibilities for sport are positively enormous.' The glee in his voice made even Stefan shudder. He had seen the Mandarin at work for long enough now to be passingly familiar with his caprices — was he not here now through just those caprices? 'I owe that young lady and her friend a great deal,' he finished, dreamily.
Stefan summoned up the courage to take advantage of what seemed to be the Mandarin's good humour. 'Lord, may I proceed with my game of backgammon — the old man...?' he prompted, as he saw the momentary puzzlement in the Mandarin's eyes.
As he placed the request in context, the Mandarin answered, testily, 'Yes, yes, after the trial run, if you wish...' and dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
Stefan grinned with anticipated satisfaction and turned to go, but was pulled up short as the Mandarin called after him, softly, 'But, Stefan, make sure you win, won't you?'
He grinned evilly at the discomfort on his henchman's face, and Stefan swallowed hard before he muttered his reply, 'Yes, Lord...'
In the Mandarin's realm, there was always an unpleasant price for failure, however small. Always unpleasant...
The Doctor stared broodily at the dish-shaped antennae. 'You sure you haven't got any transducers?'
DOCTOR WHO - THE NIGHTMARE FAIR Page 8
