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The other five members of the team nodded solemnly.

‘We don’t have to vow eternal comradeship or mingle blood or anything do we?’ Rinandor said drily.

Pertanor smiled. ‘I thought we did that already,’ he whispered to her and was foolishly pleased at her blush.

‘Now that we’ve settled that,’ Belay said, ‘the pressing question becomes: how do we find him?’

‘He’s run rings round us so far,’ Sozerdor agreed.

‘Thedoctor has some theories, don’t you, The?’ Pertanor said.

‘Leela does the work, The does the theorising,’ Rinandor said.

Kley shed her pack and the others followed her lead.

Everyone flopped down and sat in various states of weariness. ‘We’re open to suggestions, Thedoctor,’ Kley said.

The Doctor sat down cross-legged on the ground. ‘First tell me, how much do you know about this runner of yours?’ he asked.

‘He’s a weapons technologist,’ Kley said.

‘That’s not normally illegal, is it?’ the Doctor said.

‘Not in itself.’

‘So what has he done to annoy the authorities?’

Kley frowned. ‘It’s a little more serious than that.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘Obviously.’

‘He’s wanted for unauthorised experimentation,’ Kley said, picking her words carefully.

‘And that means, exactly?’

‘It means exactly what it says.’

‘It doesn’t exactly say anything.’

‘It means he developed a series of weapons which were strictly forbidden by arms-limitation treaty.’

No one noticed Leela step into the dense cover of the surrounding jungle and slip stealthily away to check on the sounds only she had heard.

This conversation was like pulling teeth, the Doctor thought.

‘By himself?’ he said.

Kley looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Was he a one-man research facility or was he part of a team?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘And what kinds of weapons did he develop?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die?’ the Doctor murmured and then asked more loudly, ‘Shouldn’t you know these things?’

‘We were all badly briefed,’ she said. ‘My team didn’t know it was a toody we were chasing.’

Pertanor sat up. ‘He’s a toody?’

‘Doesn’t that make you proud,’ Sozerdor said. ‘We’re being crapped on by one of our own.’

‘He’s a psychotic pervert,’ Fermindor said, ‘but at least he’s our psychotic pervert.’

‘Maybe if we’d known,’ Rinandor said to Kley, ‘there might have been something we could have told you about him.’

‘That thought had occurred to me too,’ Kley agreed.

The Doctor was watching the two women now and comparing them. The leader, Kley – the shorter name was clearly important – was slightly taller and had slightly thinner features. But then everything else, it seemed – her hair, her uniform fatigues, even her boots – was deliberately styled to make her look thinner and taller. Objectively there was very little physical difference between her and Rinandor. The inflexions of their speech, their accents, might have been different, but inevitably his ear was imperfectly tuned to such subtleties. He would like to have asked what ‘firster’ and

‘toody’ really meant and whether his theory that it referred to the time when their system was originally colonised was reasonable. But there was other information that he needed to glean, and while these people might co-operate with a civilian who knew nothing of the work of professional investigators, an alien who was totally ignorant of the underlying culture might have a more difficult time. No, on balance this was probably not the occasion to indulge his general curiosity.

‘I forgot to ask you,’ the Doctor said to Rinandor. ‘When you were attacked, were you examining the ground where the ship disappeared? When the snake attacked, I mean.’

‘They were hunting us before that.’

‘Well, they were following us more than hunting us,’

Pertanor said.

Rinandor smiled. ‘I felt hunted. I still do.’

‘But when we were actually attacked,’ Pertanor said, ‘I was looking at the ground, yes. I had the weirdest feeling that the ship had been...’ He hesitated as if at a loss for the appropriate word.