Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [88]
On impulse he left the Brigadier standing like an angel of vengeance beside his violated jeep, and headed for a Land Rover parked further away from the stones. A group of reserve soldiers sat inside the vehicle, awaiting their turn to be sent out to relieve some of the Stonehenge cordon. He barked an order at the driver as he eased himself into the passenger seat.
‘Sir?’ the trooper asked in bewilderment.
‘That’s an order, private. Do it!’
The Brigadier didn’t even see them leave as the Land Rover lurched over the field towards the main road.
Yates was thinking hard. Why wasn’t he as caught up in all this mania as everyone else seemed to be? He had been in both camps
- hippie and UNIT - over the last few days, so he had been exposed to two fields of influence. Yet he remained calm and Unaffected by the - what could he call it? - mesmericbloodlust 209
that seemed to have blanketed his colleagues and friends. What made him so special? He’d hardly excelled himself over the last few days, had he? Got sussed at the cemetery and smashed over the head as a consequence
He frowned. He’d been unconscious for the better part of a day as a result of that blow, and ever since he’d been subdued and sheepish. In a low mental state. And of course that could be the answer: he hadn’t been in a very receptive condition. So how did that help him?
It meant, as Kipling once mentioned (although Yates was sure the writer could never have imagined his wit being linked to such a wild occasion), that he could keep his head while everyone else around him was losing theirs...
But could he sort out this mess alone? And where the hell was the Doctor when he was needed most? Yates hadn’t seen him since the incident at Amos Vale. He could have slipped away to Cirbury ahead of the convoy, of course, but nobody had even thought to ask. Maybe Yates was affected by this malign influence to some degree. Maybe it was making him forget important things.
Well, he’d just have to concentrate a bit harder, that was all.
And right now he had to concentrate on getting to Cirbury.
The Doctor was trudging dazedly through the reality-wound of the cattle truck. The tidal wave of delusions that had ripped through his mind seemed to be receding at last, but this didn’t seem to be helping him find an exit. He had to focus his mind deliberately on one goal - locating the back doors of the truck. If he visualised them perfectly, if he concentrated on every rusting fleck, every rib of corrugated metal - even the hole through which he’d peeped when the truck was on Dartmoor - then surely it would help him to break through this perceptual warp.
He had no idea how long he’d been trudging through the black cricklegrass. It could have been merely a handful of hours, and yet it could have been whole days, whole days while Jo remained at
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risk, while the planet remained at risk.
And what could he do if - when - he found an exit? It wasn’t like him to succumb to self-doubt, but in this case he really did feel helpless. It wasn’t a question of rigging up some last-minute contraption to defeat the aliens - he couldn’t simply reverse the polarity on the Ragman. The entity would simply laugh at such arrant nonsense. And yet...
The ley lines obviously held the secret to the monster’s power.
After all, the rock inside which the entity had travelled through space had been imbued with ancient forces analogous to ley energies - along with other, more cosmic potencies - that much the boastful being had already revealed. But the Doctor could only guess at what those forces were, so how could he hope to find an antidote to them? The morphic power to transmute organic materials - to resurrect them from death and infuse them with life-simulating energies - that was truly awe-inspiring; and that, coupled with the ability to create mass mesmeric effects, made the Ragman a daunting adversary to say the least.
And the Doctor couldn’t even begin to think about