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‘Professor,’ Ace called warily, ‘something is activating the transmat.’

‘Yes, very likely,’ mused the Doctor as he easily located the control node. ‘It has a remote activator.’ He turned sharply to Ace. ‘What?’

Ace nodded at the dais. The jelly mould shape had begun to fill up with shapes, and for a moment she saw something moving weakly among a cradle of translucent filaments.

‘You’re right!’ cried the Doctor. ‘Something is beginning to come through.’ He plunged back into the transmat circuits.

Ace hefted her baseball uneasily, watching as the shape solidified one layer at a time. In a moment the outer shell flowed together like coalescing globules of mercury.

‘It’s another Dalek,’ said Ace.

‘Excellent,’ said the Doctor.

The casing was almost fully formed. It was pale cream with gold trimmings, different from the one the Doctor had blown up earlier. Different wondered Ace, how different? ‘Will this one be friendly?’ she asked.

The Doctor looked surprised. ‘I sincerely doubt that.’

He quickly rigged two cables together. ‘Now if I can just cause the receiver to dephase at the critical point...’

The hum oscillated out of the range of human hearing.

Ace realized that the climax was approaching – the Dalek was slowly becoming solid – so she raised her baseball bat.

‘Doctor!’ Ace cried.

The Doctor twisted something inside the machine. ‘Get down,’ he shouted and pulled Ace away and on to the ground. The transmat howled as splinters of light arced from the dais. There was a vast grinding sound and the air filled with a blizzard of Dalek fragments.

Ace looked up to find herself staring at the twisted end of an eyestick. It was coloured gold and stared blindly back. She quickly got up and bent to examine the transmat.

Whisps of dust whirled around in the decaying transmission field before they too settled on the surface of the dais.

‘The controls have gone dead,’ she told the Doctor.

‘The misphase must have caused an overload.’

‘What did you do to it?’

‘I persuaded one half of the Dalek to materialize where the other half was materializing. They both tried to coexist at the same points and the resultant reaction destroyed them.’ He made an expansive gesture with his arms and then patted the top of one of the cabinets. ‘Dangerous things, transmats.’

‘So no more Daleks can be transported through here.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor said cautiously, ‘we seem to have slowed them down a bit, at least until the operator can repair the system.’

The word operator bounced about at the back of Ace’s mind for a moment. Hold on she thought ‘The operator?’

‘The Daleks usually leave an operator on station to deal with any malfunction.’

A very bad scenario started to occur to Ace. ‘And that would be another Dalek?’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor.

There was a wrenching crash from behind the supporting wall.

I have a bad feeling about this, thought Ace as she and the Doctor turned towards the sound. A cream and gold Dalek was pulling away from the heating system’s pipes. It must have been there all the time – I looked right at it and ignored it, Ace berated herself. She had a sick certainty that it wasn’t going to be easy to ignore in about ten seconds. Ace shifted her grip on the bat and wondered if the Dalek had any weaknesses. She wasn’t too upset when the Doctor yelled at her to run for it.

‘Stay where you are,’ shrieked the Dalek. ‘Do not move.’

Ace made the stairs marginally ahead of the Doctor, but only because she vaulted the handrail. Bouncing off the rail as she turned the corner, Ace saw a rectangle of light above – the doorway.

Behind her there was a crash: the Dalek screamed orders, and somebody – the Doctor? – cursed in a language that had more vowel sounds than consonants. She virtually dived through the doorway, and collided with somebody on the other side.

‘Sorry,’ she said stupidly as she recognized the headmaster. She was about to warn him about the Dalek when his knee hit her midriff and sent her winded