Doctor Who_ Island of Death - Barry Letts [85]
With a smile, and a light touch to Manoel‟s upper arm (a reassuring technique he‟d learned as a junior whip), he moved away.
The time for the Prime Assimilation was fast approaching.
He shut his eyes as the craving swept through him once more, and he remembered its clandestine gratification on Hampstead Heath.
Just a few more steps, and there‟d be nothing between him and a future of endless bliss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
„Why hasn‟t the colony been noticed? Is it hiding behind the moon?‟
„No, no. There‟s no need. It‟s far too tenuous for it to be detected from the surface.‟
The confrontation between them had lapsed. The Doctor was too interested.
Well, at least I know now how the Skang arrived on the Earth. It has been a puzzle, I must admit, as there was no record of any landing.‟
„Nothing so simplistic, Doctor. The colony - the Great Skang - releases a small cloud of... of spawn, I suppose you could call it, which floats down through the atmosphere and automatically gravitates towards the most vital of the dominant species.‟
„I see. And each... each “egg”...? Each one hatches out in a brain, I suppose, and takes control of it. But...‟ He stopped. It still didn‟t make sense. The dead Will Cabot was visibly a creature unlike any human, not an ex-champion boxer who‟d been the puppet of an alien master. And the woman sitting in front of him... „But you‟re still Hilda Hutchens, the Hilda Hutchens I met in Oxford, and it‟s quite plain that you‟re in absolute control of what you‟re doing. And yet... I saw for myself... What are you? A Skang who can fool me by taking on the shape of an old friend? Or a human being called Hilda, who willingly becomes something else?‟
„Neither. Both,‟ she answered. Getting up, she started to pace up and down as she must have done when she was lecturing her students, trying to get across to them the concepts that were so clear to her. „I told you earlier that I can‟t read your mind. That‟s true. It wasn‟t necessary for survival, so it never evolved. But that‟s not to say that my mind can‟t impose a thought, a perception, onto yours.
Natural selection has made sure of that. But it happens without any volition from me. What you‟re looking at is a telepathic illusion of the original Hilda Hutchens. And yet, in a sense, it‟s still me.‟
The Doctor frowned. „I think you must be mistaken...‟
Hilda laughed. „Recognised code for “You‟re talking balderdash!” Right, Doctor?‟
„When I met you in Bombay, I shook hands with you...‟ He stood up and took hold of her arm. „You‟re as solid as the floor we‟re standing on.‟
„I‟ve seen many a deep hypnotic subject who would have said the same about an induced hallucination,‟ she replied.
And this is a thousand times more powerful than hypnosis. If I were to scratch your face with these fingernails - these fingernails that exist only as an idea in my mind and yours -
believe me, you would bleed real blood.‟
„I‟ll take your word for it,‟ said the Doctor. „You were saying...?‟
„You could take the total process as the physical analogue of a spiritual conversion,‟ she said. „But I‟m not just metaphorically born again. I‟ve been remade. Literally.‟
If a professor of philosophy uses the word, she means it.
Literally.
„Each “egg”, as you call it, is breathed in by an individual and enters the bloodstream, and settles in the brain - to be exact, in the hypothalamus. As it grows, it takes over the host body cell by cell, starting with the brain itself. So, although the body gradually takes on the form of a Skang, it automatically uses this massive telepathic power to fool any observer that the original human still exists. And perhaps it does.‟
Not balderdash. But surely illogical... „But you‟ve just described a physiological takeover that would destroy the very structure of the human being, cell by cell,‟ the Doctor said.
„Not destroy. Transmute, change. Where does your identity lie? What makes you the Doctor, rather than Joe Bloggs the dustman, or the next president of the United States?‟
„I