Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [43]
Hanstrum shook his head contemptuously. ‘We found out about it at the palace,’ he told the woman. ‘There have been. . . complications. We think you should shut down all the automatons.’
‘Oh, really,’ she said. ‘I’d never have thought of that. Thank you so much.
Would you care to tell me exactly how I’m supposed to do it, given that none of the controls are responding?’
Hanstrum snorted. ‘You’re the curator. Think of something.’
She glared at him. ‘You’re the President’s chief technician. You think of something.’
‘Children, children!’ cried the Doctor. ‘Let’s talk about this like rational beings. Now, Miss. . . Durwell, was it? Miss Durwell, are there any people, in the centre?’
‘Some. Not many. Advance passes, competition winners, that sort of thing.’
‘Do you know where these people are?’
‘No! How can I keep track? Especially with these monitors behaving so errat-ically.’ She gestured to the viewing screens, several of which showed nothing but static.
‘Ah. That could be helpful. It’s extremely likely that the girls carry some sort of blocking device to prevent you seeing where they go and who they kill. If you can tell us exactly which locations those disrupted monitors represent. . . ’
Durwell turned away from the Doctor. ‘Mr Hanstrum, why exactly have you brought this lunatic here? What is he talking about?’
‘There’s no time to explain! If the controls in here don’t work, we have to find a way of adapting them!’ cried the Doctor. ‘And to give us time to do that, we need to evacuate the centre. You must have a. . . a loudspeaker system or something.’
‘No. It would hardly be an authentic part of the experience for most of these zones.’
‘But you have cameras set up. . . ’
‘Which aren’t intrusive – and don’t carry sound.’
‘Don’t, or can’t? Mr Hanstrum here, being the chief technician, can undoubtedly wire them for sound. I’m just slightly worried, having seen your general level of historical accuracy, that most of your visitors won’t realise they’re not meant to meet a charging rhino in the streets of renaissance Italy or a tyrannosaurus in twentieth-century England unless someone tells them. So, Powerplay
79
Mr Hanstrum, please set up a sound system for the centre and tell the patrons to evacuate. Miss Durwell, work out which areas have disrupted monitors and locate the homicidal triplets. They may be able to shut the place down. And now I’m going in there to fetch Fitz and Anji.’
‘Are you mad?’ asked Durwell.
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve met a great number of people who were clinically mad, and I can honestly say there’s little resemblance. Now, could you show me the way in, please? Oh – and I should probably take a guidebook.’
Anji and the boys, after getting their breath back, had examined their new surrounding – made possible by yet another bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Zequathon was all in favour of twisting it straight away to see if anything happened, but Anji reasoned that surely they wouldn’t use the same trick twice in a row, and there wasn’t a diagram this time. It all turned out to be much simpler than that, anyway – Xernic found an actual door. What it revealed wasn’t that promising, though – a dark corridor (with no light bulbs).
‘I suppose we have to go down there,’ Anji said, unenthusiastically. ‘Would a few EXIT signs really have been too much to ask for?’
‘I’ll go first, see if it leads anywhere,’ said Xernic, bravely. Anji was getting very proud of him. A real little trooper. Just needed a few brushes with death to bring him out of his shell, obviously. And she really wasn’t that keen on the dark, so she agreed.
He hadn’t been gone very long when they heard him call back, ‘I’m just going round a corner.’ Then a bit later, and, ‘I’ve come to a fork. I’m turning left.’ And a few seconds after that, ‘It’s a dead end.’
‘Come back, Xernic,’ called Anji. ‘You don’t want to get lost.’
The redheaded boy returned to them, looking shyly pleased with himself.
‘Your eyes adjust to the dark really quickly,’ he said. ‘But there