Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [70]
‘That’s true,’ the Doctor said.
‘And what makes you think there is a way in?’
‘Because there has to be a way out.’
Leela skipped ahead of him and turned and stood in his path. ‘That is more like a hope than a reason. If there is no way in, there is no way out, so there has to be a way in.’
The Doctor had already noticed that Leela was showing signs of a more focused physical aggression and now he wondered if the sharpening of her fighting instincts was being matched by an increased intellectual aggression. Was it simply that he had never noticed how formidable she was?
Or was it really possible that she was being refined and fashioned into a weapon. Training by any other name...
Training taken to its logical conclusion.
‘The runner,’ he said, ‘didn’t make any of this. Nobody like him had any hand in this. It’s a higher order of technology altogether. The people we’ve met come from a society that has interstellar space travel but hasn’t got an efficient rechargeable power cell. Somebody found this place and it’s as alien to them as it is to us.’
‘So the runner is like us and he has to be able to come and go,’ Leela said nodding. ‘A way out, so there is a way in.’
‘Exactly.’
The Doctor began walking again and Leela fell in beside him. They had gone only a short distance before Leela shook her head and said, ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘He does not have to come and go through this passageway. If, as you say, everything is in there –’ she pointed at what the Doctor hoped was the inner of the two walls – ‘The way in and the way out be there as well.’
‘Then what is this passageway for?’ the Doctor asked, smiling reasonably.
‘I was right,’ Leela said triumphantly. ‘It is more of a hope than a reason.’
They walked on in silence. Ahead of them, the inner wall had begun to change. The opaque, waxy yellow substance was becoming flecked with more and more of the tiny particles of sparkling crystal. Eventually they reached a point where the wall was made up entirely of tiny opalescent crystals and, as s they walked on, these gradually coalesced into larger and larger forms until finally there was what appeared to be a single sheet of milky crystal. Then this too changed and became a grey membrane, which seemed to be pulsing and quivering rhythmically like a living thing.
The Doctor reached out to touch it and without the slightest sensation his hand went straight through it up to the wrist. He pulled it out again quickly and was relieved to find that he still had a hand, and that it was undamaged and unmarked in any way. The membrane was similarly unaffected.
Leela watched as the Doctor examined his hand and then looked closely at the quivering skin through which he had pushed it. It was typical of his carelessness, she thought, that he had no idea of the risk until after he had taken it. ‘We were both right,’ he said. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Go? Go where?’
He offered Leela his arm and, when she hesitated and frowned her puzzlement, he shrugged and smiled and stepped through the membrane and out of sight.
‘Doctor?’ Leela shouted at the gently throbbing grey skin.
‘Doctor?’ When there was no response, she drew her knife and ran the blade down the skin trying to see what was behind it. The greyness closed round the knife and the cut vanished as she made it, leaving no sign of itself and nothing on the blade. She tried again, cutting horizontally, cutting more quickly, cutting more deeply but there was no practical way to make a hole through which to see anything. Leela gave up and, keeping the knife ready, she took a step back and leapt through the membrane.
OIG search-and-retrieval asked for notarised confirmation of the unprecedented ‘triple-A’ Ops had given the rescue of the pursuit patrol led by Serian Kley. One wag suggested they should have it in triplicate but no one really had the nerve to go that far.
Nothing like it had been authorised since the third asteroid mining disaster had stranded a full shift of forty-three ore-seekers, with only emergency air and power and no way to get back to link up with their base supply ship.