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Mark’s anger burst. ‘You’ve cheated us! Why didn’t you tell us all the truth in the first place?’

‘He didn’t dare tell you,’ said Sarah heatedly. ‘Don’t you understand, Mark? Millions of people are going to be wiped out.’ She swung round to Grover. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’

He nodded slowly. ‘I’m afraid it is. But it will be quite painless. They will never have existed. You see, I had to tell a story that would be acceptable to good people like Adam and Ruth and Mark, the kind of people that I wanted to recruit.’

Sarah said, ‘You mean decent people who might object to the destruction of generations of other human beings?’

‘I am only deceiving them about the means, not the end. They will have their New Earth, but it will be this Earth returned to an earlier, happier time.’

‘The end can never justify the means,’ protested Mark. ‘You’ve implicated us all in a terrible crime against humanity!’

Grover appealed to Mark. ‘Will you, for the sake of the others, accept the situation?’

‘No. Never!’

‘Then my only hope,’ confessed Grover, as he moved back to the door, ‘is that once this great project is complete, you will adjust to life in the Golden Age. I’m deeply sorry about this. I hope that in time to come we will be friends again.’ He closed the door. Almost at once moving pictures of squalid over-crowded blocks of flats appeared on the screen.

‘ ... the brutalisation of millions of people extends from the factories to the buildings in which they live. To accommodate an ever increasing population vast tenement blocks are thrown up in our cities, providing no sense of community for the unfortunates who dwell in them. Gone is the concept of the village... ’

Sarah banged on the door. ‘Mark, we’ve got to get out of here! ‘

‘I don’t think there’s an escape route.’

Sarah looked around desperately: there was no airvent in here, nothing. ‘I think you’re right.’ She leant against the wall in exhaustion. ‘Do you know, I think I’m going to cry.’

‘If you do,’ he said, ‘try my shoulder. It’s broad enough.’

‘Thanks. I may take you up on that—’

The door opened and Adam slipped in quietly from the corridor. ‘Are you two all right?’

‘We’re O.K.,’ said Mark, thankful that the film and its running commentary had stopped when the door opened. ‘But you’ve got to help us.’

‘I know. You see, I listened at the door when Grover was talking to you. Do you realise the man is a raving lunatic?’

‘I don’t think he is,’ said Sarah. ‘He knows exactly what he’s doing.’

‘Maybe.’ Adam tugged thoughtfully at his beard. ‘The question is—what do we do?’

‘Stride into the flight deck,’ said Sarah, ‘open that hatch and show everybody the truth.’

Adam said, ‘Ruth won’t like that.’

‘People like Ruth never do like the truth, but this time she’s got to face up to it. Now let’s go and open that hatch.’

Adam and Mark followed Sarah out of the Reminder Room.

On the platform at Westminster Underground Station the Doctor and the Brigadier were poised to blast their way into the lift shaft that led to the control centre. Using a battery-driven drill, the Doctor bored holes into the floor of the broom cupboard.

‘You’re absolutely sure,’ asked the Brigadier, who was preparing the sticks of dynamite to go into the holes, ‘that this is the right broom cupboard?’

‘No doubt about it,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’ve concreted the floor. Once we blast that away, we shall be into the lift shaft.’

A sudden roar abruptly stopped their conversation. The Brigadier swung his torch round. Filling one end of the tubular platform area was a triceratops—nine tons of horned dinosaur with a mouth like a beak.

‘Good grief,’ exclaimed the Brigadier, ‘that must be the ugliest one of the lot!’

The Doctor turned round to look. ‘The neck-frilled variety,’ he commented. ‘They used to roam in great herds across North America, and could charge at up to thirty miles an hour, impaling their prey on those horns.’

‘Most interesting,’ said the Brigadier sarcastically. ‘But what’s it doing down here?’

‘They must