Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [17]
‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again,’ the Doctor chanted. The creature quivered just a little at the sound of his voice.
A third attempt to spear the soft tissue failed.
‘Then give up,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in making a fool of yourself. Confucius.
Leela threw away the spear. She took a pair of soft leather patches from her belt and laced them to her knees and began to climb up the tree.
‘What are you doing?’ the Doctor demanded.
‘Killing it on the ground would have been easier,’ she said,
‘but it is not going to move so I will have to do it up there.’
‘Leela, stop that, you stupid girl!’ the Doctor shouted. ‘Get away from that thing. You haven’t seen what it can do!’ He started to scramble down from his safe position at the top of the tree.
The creature, sensing that its prey was finally coming back into reach, raised itself slightly on four firmly anchored legs and stretched its two forelegs upward, probing and scratching and wrenching chunks of wood from the tree trunk.
The Doctor kept on descending. He had nothing that resembled a plan now other than to keep the louse’s attention.
Leela kept on climbing. She calculated that if she could get on to its back the animal would be vulnerable to a close-range attack. The two front legs were mobile enough to pivot back to where she would be, but they would lack full strength working in that direction. She would prefer it not to go through its death throes halfway up a tall tree, but she had no choice about that. She did not have much time, either, for although she had planned that the Doctor should keep it occupied she had not planned that he hurl himself into its jaws.
Close up she found the monstrous louse was covered in tufts of strong wiry hair like tiny scrubland thickets. She had an idea that anything that might lurk in these would be larger and more troublesome than average lice. She must remember when the time came that such parasites were often at their most dangerous when the host died.
‘Leela, I forbid you to do that!’ the Doctor was shouting. He had reached the gap in the branches that had given him so much trouble on the way up and was finding the same difficulties coming down. ‘We need to think what we’re doing!’
Leela grasped the ends of a patch of hairs, put a foot on one of the rear legs and hauled herself on to the animal’s back. The rough surface of the chitin-shelled abdomen provided plenty of grip and she crawled up towards its head.
The Doctor had sat down on what remained of the broken branch and was working his way round into a position where he could hang from it by his hands and drop on to the creature. He was already perilously close to being within the grasp of the agitatedly scrabbling forelegs.
In its frantic eagerness to feed on the Doctor the animal was oblivious to Leela and she got to the end of the abdomen without much problem. There was a narrow cleft here which seemed to divide the main part of the body from a shorter but more powerful front part, which in its turn was separated from a small broad head by a series of much narrower clefts, little more than cracks. Leela pulled her hunting knife and looked for a place she could cut into with one stroke and destroy a vital centre; the brain would be best, but the cord of the spine would do almost as well. But the problem was not just to get at them – she had to decide where they were. She expected there would be eyes around this area too, a multiple set of them, which it would be sensible to avoid. Normal eyes were access holes through the protective bone to reliable kill spots, but on an animal like this the arrangement was more complex. With