Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [13]
CHAPTER 4
The air in Major Lazonby's office was a thoroughly military one. Everything neat, ordered and, on the whole, green.
Lazonby didn't like chaos. There was a place for everything and everything could be forced to conform. That had been the ideal that he lived his entire life by. Even as a small boy he had been impossibly ordered. No nagging needed from parents to keep his room dean, no teachers insisting that his handwriting had to improve. At school or at play he was always immaculately turned out, but, while his elders looked on him as a model pupil and son, children his own age shunned him, finding something sinister in the intense precision of the boy.
And so Lazonby's life had gone on; a solitary one. He played alone, he studied alone. He didn't seem to worry about the fact that he had no friends he just accepted it. It was almost as if friends would clutter the tidiness. As time went on even his parents began to be excluded from his life.
His college years were just a natural progression of his schooldays. He had grown into a handsome young man and was the subject of much speculation among female students.
After endless terms of rejected advances, they finally gave up on him, deciding that he wasn't interested in women, but even the men who tried to coax Lazonby out of his shell were met with firm, and sometimes violent, rebukes. The truth of the matter was that Lazonby just wasn't interested in forming any kind of relationship with the chaotic, disordered people who inhabited his world.
It was a natural progression for him to enter the armed services. His grades at university were superb, and the regimented lifestyle of the army allowed him to flower spectacularly. Without any outside distractions in his life, he swiftly climbed the ladder of rank, and became one of the youngest captains in the British army.
Shortly after the war had started he had been approached by Military Intelligence and promoted to the rank of major. No one was quite sure how far his duties extended, and very few wanted to know. Lazonby was a man to be avoided and feared. This new business with the sphere had given a maniacal edge to his precision, and he was driving his men hard. The truth was, Military Intelligence were worried. Over the past two months there had been a number of explosions in East London of devastating power. Power far in excess of anything the Luftwaffe ought to have been able to drop on them. Even amid the carnage of this protracted bombing blitz these things had stood out. There had been speculation that the Germans had made a breakthrough in the new atomic weapons the Americans were only now starting to whisper about. They needed a result. The sphere had to provide it.
He had had it brought to the military testing facility secreted within the Peddler factory his centre of operations for nearly a year now There he had commandeered nearly all of Peddler's men and had set them to work trying to identify every part of its makeup.
He had allowed himself and his team no rest since the sphere had been brought here. He had drawn up a roundtheclock rota. Scientists and technicians, their names picked out in different colours in Lazonby's mechanical handwriting, had protested at the inhuman hours he was expecting of them, but Lazonby had set his rota in motion and heaven help the man who disrupted it.
He himself had not left his office since the sphere had arrived here. Despite fortyeight hours without sleep, he still looked immaculate: his moustache neatly trimmed; his hair combed with military precision; every crease on his jacket perfectly straight.
The technician standing in front of him was a shambles.
His hair was unruly, the white lab coat he wore was covered in streaks of grease and burn marks. He slurped