Doctor Who_ The Forgotten Army - Brian Minchin [48]
The Doctor finished examining the tusks, and moved on to the eyes.
"They did beautiful work here. A real cornea, plus technology. It's not surprising you didn't spot it was a fake.
Now, Sam, as much as I love your approach, it's time to get brutal. We need to make a bit of room in this thing. Can you smash all of that out?' He was pointing to the gracefully constructed central section of the mammoth.
Sam started carefully dismantling the Vykoid living quarters that took up most of the beast.
'Er, Sam, tick-tock, tick-tock, time is the one thing we don't have a lot of.'
Amy stepped in to help. 'I think what he means is do it more like this...'
Kicking with her boots, Amy smashed a delicate level of the Vykoid ship, sending the hand-crafted 180
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construction skittering to the floor in tiny pieces.
Taking care to leave the controls in the head of the mammoth untouched, Sam set about his work with a vengeance. This was the mammoth that had ruined his career, and he'd suddenly realised he was going to enjoy taking it to pieces.
'Does he do this a lot?' he asked Amy.
'Well, I've never seen him with a mammoth before,' Amy answered.
Sam loved that Amy had such spirit. Before he'd met th e Doctor, Sam had been ready to hide from the world for ever, content never to show his face in public again. But now he was gleefully breaking into the City Zoo and dismantling an alien spaceship. 'I meant, does he just not tell you what he's planning to do,' he clarified.
'I know,' said Amy with a quiet smile.
'I guess he's doing this so the Vykoids can't leave,' Sam suggested.
'Maybe. But it's more likely he doesn't know what he's doing yet. Just has a kind of feeling for something...'
Sam wasn't entirely reassured by this.
His doubts grew even stronger when the Doctor stood back from the mammoth, and asked, 'Enough room for a man inside there yet?'
Sam told him there was, and the Doctor nodded. 'Go on then.'
'Excuse me?'
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'In you get, Sam Horwitz.’
Amy watched Sam carefully. She could see him struggling with his instincts. There was something so compelling about the Doctor, she was fascinated to see the effect he had on people.
'You want to shut me in there, don't you?' Sam guessed.
'No, that would be silly. I just want to see what happens when you get inside.' The Doctor smiled at Sam. 'Of course, now you say it, shutting you in for a bit could help us learn a lot.'
Amy nudged Sam towards the door. 'Come on, in you go, no time like the present.'
'You'll be out soon,' the Doctor assured him. 'In fact, th e sooner you're in, the sooner you'll be out again.'
Unable to resist the lunatic logic, Sam found himself doing something he'd never imagined. Putting his head up into the chest of the mammoth, he hauled his body up on the metal innards, nicking his legs up inside the space he'd smashed out.
Below him, the Doctor and Amy took one side of the mammoth's belly and lifted it high into position. Sam heard a quiet click as it shucked into position. From the outside, he guessed, the Polar Woolly Mammoth once again looked very, very real.
But inside the dark of the mammoth, Sam was growing increasingly angry. The Doctor had promised he'd be out soon, but minutes were
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crawling past. He was hot, he was suffocating, and he was furious that they had tricked him like this. Sam banged on the metal belly, determined to smash his way out.
But nothing would budge. He shouted for them to release him from his curious prison, but he heard no sounds outside.
For all Sam knew, they had left him there at the mercy of the Vykoids. His mind raced at a hundred miles an hour, and his anxiety spun out of control - what if the Vykoids came back and found him in their ship? What would they do when they saw what he'd done to it?
Finally after ten nervous minutes, Sam heard another