Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [68]
Apart from the usual burbles and rumbles from within the walls, this area of the ship was silent. Groggily, Litefoot moved from one alcove to the next, endeavouring to ascertain whether any of his fellow captives had awoken as he had.
The answer was no, though Litefoot noted with an odd blend of hope and alarm that the Doctor's alcove was empty. Sam, however, was still held tight by her bonds, the pulsing cowl clamped tight to her head and the upper part of her face like an acorn's cap. Her mouth was open as if in a silent scream. Litefoot gave an experimental tug at the tentacles coiled around her, but they were immovable.
For a few moments he hovered there, wondering what to do next. Liberty was all very well, but where could he go? He no longer even had his revolver; somewhere along the way it had been taken from him. In the end he decided that his only option was to find either the Doctor or a way out. If he fell into the clutches of those hideous Zygon creatures again, then so be it. He tried not to think that there were worse things they could do than escort him back to what he thought of as the cell area.
He set off, moving on tiptoe even though there was no real reason for it.
The cell area narrowed to a crystalline door. As he approached it, it slid up and away from him. Litefoot reflected smugly that the Zygons' security arrangements were somewhat inadequate, but then he supposed they believed that they were so superior to the inhabitants of Earth that they could not be threatened.'Well, we'll see about that,'he muttered defiantly.'Get on the wrong side of George Litefoot and you'll soon find yourself with rather more than you bargained for.'
For a while he wandered aimlessly, with no real idea where he was going.
The Zygon ship seemed a mishmash of irregularly shaped chambers, control rooms and observation areas. Litefoot was not sure whether these were the same rooms he and his companions had passed through while being escorted to the cell area earlier. If they were, he did not recognise them, but then such was the nature of this place that he thought he could very likely wander for days with no inkling of whether or not he was retreading the same ground.
As he blundered along, he found himself thinking about the nature of the astonishing beings whose clutches he and his friends had fallen in to. Did they have such things as crew quarters? he mused. And if so, were they full of personal effects? Did they read books, create works of art, take photographs of family and friends? Did they require love and affection? Did they laugh with joy and grieve for their dead? Did they feel pain? Were they physically attracted to one another despite being genderless?
His reverie was interrupted by the sound of movement from somewhere up ahead. He was in a corridor like a gigantic pipe whose sides were the texture of gnarled and twisted tree bark encrusted with limpet-like crystals.
Though the crystals gave off a faint ochre luminescence, the way ahead was little more than a mass of brownish shadow. Litefoot halted and listened. The sounds were coming towards him. Hastily he retraced his steps, retreating back along the corridor and through a door into one of the Zygons' control rooms.
Here he concealed himself behind the largest control panel he could find, a strange construction from which sprouted a mass of trumpet-like growths.
His back and knees creaked with age as he pulled himself into a ball.
Moments later the door to the room slid open and two Zygon scientists entered. They busied themselves tweaking and adjusting various controls around the room, talking in their high, fluting voices about 'diastellic readings' and 'trilanic responses'. Finally, each reeled off a long list of numbers which the other verified, and then they moved on, heading in the direction of the cell area.
Litefoot rose from his hiding place and crossed