Doctor Who_ Enlightenment - Barbara Clegg [27]
Turlough crouched by the grid, staring down into space.
He had been frozen in the same position for minutes, as if mesmerised. The immensity of it had obliterated everything else; where he was and what he was doing there were totally forgotten. A sound brought him back to reality. It was the slam of a door. Turlough whirled round, panic-stricken, and flung himself towards it. But he was too late. He could hear the locking devices being clicked into position, but although he banged and shouted, whoever was activating them did not hear. In fact, it was one of the officers, who had spotted that the door was not properly secured and was now firmly fastening it.
Turlough would have been even more horrified if he had seen what the officer did next, before continuing his rounds. He turned off the vacuum shield. Had Turlough but known it, all he had left now was four minutes, the run-down time built into the mechanism as a safety precaution. After that, the energy barrier between himself and space would cease to exist.
The Doctor was out of breath, but he dared not stop.
Marriner’s words still rang in his ears. Turlough was in danger. Down another ladder – a race along a corridor –
then a junction. ‘Which way? Which way?’ he muttered to himself. A glimpse of another ladder to the left and he dashed in that direction. ‘How much further?’ he thought frantically.
With a last frenzied rattle at the handle, Turlough turned away from the door, almost in tears. Nobody knew where he was, nobody would come to find him, he was trapped!
In despair, he pulled the Cube from his pocket. Frightened as he was of the Black Guardian, he was even more frightened of being left alone here. For ever, perhaps!
‘Help me... please,’ he whimpered. And as though he had been waiting, the Black Guardian’s image swam faintly into view. ‘I warned you, boy!’ The deep voice had a threatening note. ‘You failed me. You will die.’
‘No... No, please...’ Even as the incoherent syllables tumbled from his lips, Turlough knew that they were useless. Prayers and entreaties would have no effect on the Black Guardian. Indeed, his cloaked image was already fading, leaving Turlough more alone than ever.
Marriner kept Tegan continually in view. As Wrack took her from group to group, he sauntered with them, a little distance away, but always within call. Wrack had been right – her guests did find Tegan intriguing. Admiring glances followed her wherever she went. What Marriner did not realise until too late was that, under Wrack’s guidance, her triumphal progress was taking her nearer and nearer to an exit. He saw Wrack put a hand on Tegan’s arm as they paused near the door and then, just as he was about to step forward, a servant with a tray of drinks got in his way; a group of guests came between him and the two women; and when he looked again, Tegan had gone.
Turlough’s hands were bruised from battering against the door, and he was exhausted. Despairingly, he stepped back
– and onto the edge of the grid. For a second his foot wavered over one of the openings. It was almost as though something were sucking it down into space, and the pull threw him momentarily off balance. He clutched at the door and pulled himself back. Almost immediately, a red warning light started flashing on and off on the wall by the door and blinking in and out with it were the words,
‘VACUUM SHIELD OFF.’ The yelps of an audio-alerting system sounded. Turlough looked at the grid beneath his feet with horror. There was a faint swirling motion between the bars, as the energy field started to close down.
The Doctor reached another crossroads. Then, very faintly from the left, he heard a distant siren, like a danger warning. ‘This has to be the way!’ he muttered, and plunged down the passage in the direction of the signal.
In the ion chamber the audio-alerting system now sounded one continuous wail, and ‘VACUUM SHIELD OFF’
glared a fixed red. Turlough was pressed against the wall, staring in horror at the floor.