Doctor Who_ Island of Death - Barry Letts [95]
Until now he had never had the experience. To be one with the intention of the whole terrestrial group - to be, as leader, its very propagator - was to experience the ecstasy the word itself implied. He was standing outside himself, yet at the same time was more himself than ever before.
Once the intention was set, the process ceased to be voluntary. The hallucination to be generated by the enzyme grew organically from the combined background of the whole group.
He‟d missed the creation of the island village and the temple, which had been settled as soon as Skang had anchored in the lagoon. If he hadn‟t been so obsessed with his own predicament when he arrived himself, he surely would have laughed when he saw the result. He‟d always prided himself on his good taste and his appreciation of the finer points of modern art and architecture. What had emerged from the collective unconscious of the almost totally middle-class assembly of teachers was more like a Disneyland version of a classical temple - straight out of Fantasia - crossed with an ancient Greek theatre; a proper mongrel. And as for the village...!
Still, it had done the job. The disciples had thought they were in a paradise. Evidently the Zeitgeist of Western civilisation was irredeemably bourgeois.
As they arrived above the ship, he was seized by an additional glee that owed nothing to his new-found integration with his fellow Skang.
Nanny Hilda had insisted on a phony compassion for their victims when utilising the power of illusion, instead of admitting to herself that the whole Skang process was nothing but a cosmic con. Now he was going to use it very differently.
A short sharp burst of a high-strength dose of the hallucinogenic mist would have an immediate effect. It would last for only a short time, but it would be quite long enough for his purpose.
His treatment on the ship during the journey from Bombay had been beyond belief, culminating with his imprisonment.
It had emanated from the Doctor and the Brigadier, of course, but the entire crew, from the Captain to the cook, had happily joined in.
If only he‟d had the powers then that he had now! But the excision that the group had inflicted on him had put an end to them. To be cut off, not only from the others in the group but from one‟s own fundamental being, leaving only the dry husk of human persona, was to find oneself in an impotent hell. He‟d just had to accept every humiliation they‟d heaped on him.
But now it was his turn.
It was a pity that the enzyme would only produce euphoria as well as hallucination. If only he could have directly manipulated their minds. It would have done them all good to experience even a modicum of the mental torture that he‟d gone through after his excision. Still, the illusion that he had planned for them, in spite of its only affecting the five senses, would be quite enough. The human mind would always believe what was before its eyes, and be only too eager to provide a rationalisation that would make sense of it.
He was going to take great pleasure in employing a Skang hallucination to destroy the Hallaton; and, with a bit of luck, everybody on board as well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The arena was empty; now was their best chance to get out.
It was easy to have the thought, but harder to put it into practice.
The doorway was utterly blocked by a pile of boulders. They hadn’t a hope of getting out that way. Moving the loose stone in the window gap had revealed a number of other rocks of somewhat smaller sizes, and though they each proved to move slightly under pressure, they were locked together in an inextricable jigsaw that defied all their efforts to solve it.
They found a niche in which to put the end of the chairleg at the bottom of the mound, but it only shifted a few inches.
‘If we get hold of the very end of the lever, and put all our weight on it, maybe it’ll do the trick,’ said the Doctor.
But even when they both hung onto it with their feet off the ground, it was still stuck. Hilda sank back into the remaining chair, out of breath. It