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He strode across the room, grabbed the hippie by his scrawny neck and slapped him viciously across the face. 'You have something to tell me?' said Rose, releasing his grip.

'They've been killed!' blurted Arlo, slumping down to his knees. 'They're dead. All of them.' On and on he raved until Rose brought him to a halt with a swift kick in the ribs.

'Who has killed whom?' Rose asked.

'The goblins, dad. They ripped us to pieces.'

'You seem unhurt,' said Rose.

Jesus, man, I just got in the van and I drove like it was the end of the world, you dig?'

Rose paused for a moment. This was, he was forced to admit, an unexpected development. 'You cannot expect an alien intelligence to conform to your patterns of reasonable behaviour,' he reasoned.

'But they went ape, man. They slaughtered all my friends.'

'I believe the Venus People were looking for a new life beyond this awful planet. Maybe they've found it.' Rose seemed satisfied with this, moving away from Arlo and towards the French windows.

Arlo stood, anger surging through him. 'They call us freaks, man, but you're evil.'

'I beg your pardon?' Rose turned calmly, a slim revolver drawn just as Arlo threw himself at the viscount. A single shot hurled the young man backward. He found himself clutching his shoulder, eyes screwed up in pain as Rose towered over him.

If you want the animals to perform tricks for you, you must be prepared to feed them.' said Rose. 'Get up!'

Arlo struggled to his feet. He felt sick, his body racked with pain.

'Now, get out.' said Rose, pushing Arlo through the French windows.

'I'll tell them, man. I'll tell them it was all your idea!'

'No you won't.' said Rose, returning to his seat and his newspaper. He rang the bell for Miller. 'Where was his blasted tea?

Arlo ran blindly from the Earl of Norton's stately home towards the woods a hundred yards from the house, still clutching his injured arm. He glanced behind him, expecting to see Rose following him.

Instead, through eyes stinging with tears, Arlo saw what appeared to be one of the carved gargoyles on the building flap gently into the air. He screamed as it swooped down towards him.

CHAPTER 18

The Doctor picked his way through the corpses, his face ashen. A patch of mist stretched from the monoliths of Stonehenge, just visible over the rise, towards the Venus People's camp site. Had the situation been different the Doctor would have pondered aloud mankind's eternal yearning for the stars, progressing from megaliths to gaudy caravans. But whatever the Venus People were searching for, it shouldn't have ended here, like this.

He watched as Shuskin and some UNIT troops turned over the bodies, searching for signs of life. They worked slowly and methodically, their faces masks of concentration and emotional detachment. 'This one's got a pulse.'

exclaimed one soldier, waving for the medic.

The Doctor turned away in disgust. A massacre, then, as he'd feared. Benton's screams were still fresh in his mind. It had taken them some minutes to calm him down, his words coming in sobbing bursts through the background interference. Apparently he'd travelled to Stonehenge in search of the Venus People, but could only remember the subsequent attack in nightmarish flashes. He'd survived the night, but the carnage revealed by the morning sun had scared him out of his wits. Without thinking, he had used his UNIT radio to call for help, and somehow they had picked up the signal at Brize Norton.

Yates stood at the Doctor's side. 'We've found a couple of survivors.' he said. 'The rest have been torn to ribbons and... ' His words trailed away.

'Eaten?' queried the Doctor. It's easy to forget that humans can be part of the food chain.'

'Why did the aliens attack these people?' asked Yates.

'Physical hunger, in part.' The Doctor paused, suppressing a shudder at the memory of the soul-catching.

'But that's not the whole story. It's rare in nature for a creature to attack another when it is not hungry. But many of these poor people were killed