Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [78]
The dark had been momentary, like a brief loss of consciousness, except that there was no way to tell how brief it actually was. The Doctor stood in the bright centre of the perfectly circular domed chamber, which was perhaps a quarter of the size of the one he had just come from. It was huge even so, and he seemed to be standing at the lowest place in a shallow bowl-shaped pit. This time there was no central transparent dome, and instead of the band of moving images and sensations, a continuous series of semicircular alcoves stretched around the outer wall. In these alcoves, the Doctor could see what appeared to he separate subjects from the other chamber steadily unfolding, elaborating themselves and intensifying but with none of the dreamlike parallel drift and intermixing.
He turned slowly, straining to catch a glimpse of what individual alcoves were displaying. In some there were vistas of jungle and forest and desert, lifeless and unmoving as though frozen in time. In some there was nothing, and it was clear from their blankness that the alcoves themselves were shaped from the ubiquitous waxy material, flecked with its intricate patterns of minutely sparkling crystals. Isolated monstrous creatures, some in frozen motion and others twitching and flexing, apparently in the process of being created, featured in many of the dark booths. The Doctor was sure that, somewhere in this array of focus points, Leela was still being used as the basis of a development programme. It seemed likely, too, that among all these alcoves there were the control links that allowed for the manipulation of captives and which must drive the duplication processes. If he could find the right alcove or perhaps activate one of the blank ones he might be able to release what remained of the team of investigators. That was not why he had been brought here, of course. He was here because he and Leela had found a way to insult this maniac and force him into making a mistake. Was this a mistake? And where was Leela? Maybe she had resisted stepping into the void. He wouldn’t have blamed her. She had shown remarkable resilience up to now but there must come a time when there would be too much pressure on her sense of reality for her to remain rational.
‘Where is Leela?’ he asked aloud. When there was no reply, he said, ‘So you’re still skulking in the shadows then.
Typical firster behaviour in my experience.
‘Don’t insult my intelligence, The,’ Monly said from one of the alcoves the Doctor had not yet reached in his slow turn. ‘I hate people to do that. It depresses me.’
‘It wasn’t deliberate, I assure you,’ the Doctor said, peering at where he thought the voice was coming from.
‘There you go again. Of course it was deliberate. You wanted me to react so you could see where I was.’
The Doctor finally located him. He was standing on the edge of an alcove that seemed to be active but was filled with thick darkness. ‘There you are,’ the Doctor said smiling.
‘No,’ said Monly, ‘there you were, and there Leela still is.’
‘May I come and see?’ the Doctor asked politely.
‘Why do you ask me?’
‘Now you’re insulting my intelligence.’
‘Yes,’ Monly said. ‘You may come and see.’
The Doctor waited unmoving, partly because trusting Monly would be absurd and partly because flattering him might be a useful stratagem. ‘Now?’ he asked after a little while.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘I’m a little unsure of myself,’ the Doctor said, trying to sound suitably timid. ‘You might have it in mind to punish me.
To teach me a lesson...’ He hesitated, wondering how far to take the grovelling but then added, ‘For being disrespectful.’
Monly had come away from the alcove. He gestured