Doctor Who_ Island of Death - Barry Letts [74]
That‟s all in the past. We‟ve other things to think about. I need your help. It‟s going to be a busy day for both of us.‟
„No. No more. I should never have agreed to go along with your plan. I‟ve always tried to keep the...‟ He couldn‟t go on.
His face was working and twisting as his emotions took charge.
„I‟d say you had no choice. Wouldn‟t you agree?‟ Alex let the threat in his voice be quite apparent.
Dafydd‟s head dropped. His shoulders were heaving.
Great Heavens! The man was crying!
Alex changed his tone. „My dear fellow, you mustn‟t think that I don‟t know how you feel. I didn‟t sleep at all last night.
To the end of my days I shall be grieving for dear Brother Will, who‟s been our anchor and our rock throughout these long months...‟ Was he going too far? No. The fool had stopped weeping. He was listening. „For the rest of my life I shall have to carry the weight of guilt for what had to be done, for what was absolutely necessary for the success of the project. Be it on my head. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.‟
Dafydd looked up. Alex leaned forward and took him by the shoulders. He looked deep into his eyes. He was enjoying himself. Like a concert violinist who‟d practised until the music itself played the instrument, he relaxed into the skill he‟d acquired in the Oxford Union and at the hustings, and perfected at Westminster.
„Oh, Dafydd, Dafydd. Haven‟t you understood? I must have you - and nobody but you - at my side. Who else can I trust?
I shall be supreme on this planet, yes, but you... you will be the agent of my will. You will be my first minister, my chancellor, with total power over all, Skang and human alike.
But nothing comes without a price. We must bear the pain together. We must learn to love the anguish. We can‟t escape our destiny.‟
The old rule of three. It never failed. He could almost feel Conference rising to give him a standing ovation.
Don‟t let him look away.
„As I said, we have no choice. We must carry the burdens of leadership between us, you and I, for the greater good of the Skang.‟
Now he must keep quiet; hold the eye and keep his trap shut.
Hold it—
Hold it...
Dafydd blinked. „What do you want me to do?‟ he said.
* * *
Would he be in time?
The Doctor dismissed the thought, which kept popping up as an unspoken sub-text to his cogitations.
„No, not shape-shifters...‟ he was saying. „They‟ve shown no signs of taking on anything other than the human form. But it‟s not just that. In my conversation with Dame Hilda, there wasn‟t an iota to make me suspicious. I would have sworn in a court of law that I was talking to the same woman as the one I‟d met before.‟
He was talking to himself. Like the voluble wife who said to her mocking husband, „How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?‟, the Doctor, when faced with an intractable problem, had a secret habit of discussing things with himself out loud - or rather, sotto voce. Though on this occasion it wouldn‟t have mattered if he had chattered away at full volume, as he was halfway up the five-hundred-foot cliff, clinging on by his fingertips and the toes of his boots.
The Gallifreyan duplication of physiological function was not confined to the heart, as the Doctor had told Sarah when they were precariously afloat together. One of its most useful aspects was the ability to separate the operation of the two hemispheres of the brain.
In the normal course of events, he would have tackled the mammoth task of scaling the very nearly vertical side of the volcano by letting the cack-handed rationality of the left brain be quiescent. The „I‟ that was the Doctor would take a back seat and enjoy watching the expertise of the trained climber that resided in the spatial somatic genius of his right brain.
But if it was necessary, as now, he could leave his body-brain complex to its own devices and retreat into the logical common-sense processes of left brain thought.
He had decided that he had no hope of stopping the progress of the ingurgitation