Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [22]
An actual Mars Probe hung suspended in mid-air twenty feet above their heads. The hal was vast, but gleaming and white, packed with artefacts from the international space programmes of the nineteen-seventies. They walked past the scale models, the photographs and the display case featuring the 'Astronaut's Survival Kit'. Benny paused at the full-sized mock-up of the inside of an old space capsule. It was cramped, of course, but the thing that struck her was how old-fashioned it was: the displays were mechanical, not LED or even digital, the controls were clunky switches, the computer that took up half the room wouldn't have been powerful enough to run the average washing machine even now, a couple of decades later. It was an object that belonged to the era of the eight-track cartridge, nylon slacks and the Ford Capri. This wasn't the retro-futurism of the TARDIS, with its incomprehensible forces hiding behind a Jules Verne veneer: this was the real thing.
The sound of the sonic screwdriver interrupted her train of thought.
The Doctor was bent over a display case, prising off the glass cover. The alarms hadn't gone off, but neither of them were exactly inconspicuous in their outfits. Benny strode across the room, and saw the Doctor scraping up some red dust into an empty test tube.
'Martian soil,' he announced by way of explanation.
'Yes, I know.'
The Doctor closed the case, sealing it up again. The test tube had already disappeared into the depths of his frock coat. 'Caldwel was concerned about the soil, remember?'
'Yes.'
'Look at this case, though. There's pounds of the stuff, on public display.'
'It's still in limited supply. It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds to get any more.'
'Bernice, ordinary Martian soil can't be of much scientific interest nowadays - once you've found out the exact composition, what else is there to know? That man was critically injured, but that soil was one of the only two things on his mind at that moment. No, I suspect that when we compare this soil with the sample we acquired this morning we'll find a big clue to this mystery.'
'Fine,' Benny conceded. She hesitated. 'Didn't Caldwell also say something about someone escaping?'
The Doctor grabbed Benny's arm and led her to a display board. Ranged in front of her were photographs of all the Mars crews, every one of them happy, smiling clean-cut folk in neat uniforms or shiny spacesuits. The Doctor pointed to the very last picture. Three people, two men and a woman.
'Alexander Christian,' the Doctor declared. As Benny read, her jaw slowly began dropping.
***
'Some of you may need reminding about Alexander Christian,' Hal iwell began. 'Those of you old enough will remember him very well indeed, but you won't know the whole truth. The full facts were never released by the government for reasons that will become apparent.'
She had been driven down the M2 at high speed, with full police motorcycle escort. When the traffic parted and you didn't have to stick to the speed limit it was amazing how fast you could get around the country. She'd got from Whitehall to Canterbury in three quarters of an hour. Now she stood in front of a couple of dozen senior Kent policemen, the people who would be co-ordinating the manhunt on the ground.
23
She paused and put the first slide up on the screen. Alexander Christian at twenty-nine, resplendent in his Space Defence Division uniform. He had a movie-star face, not a bland Aryan look, but an odd and angular with eyebrows that looked like a symbol in shorthand. A memorable face.
'This is how "Lex" Christian looked just before Mars Probe 13 was launched.' She pressed the control and the picture changed. Now Christian had been joined by two others: a plump, white-haired man in his forties and a beautiful