Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [44]
‘Don’t you think that’s a potentially dangerous situation?’
And that was another one.
‘Not for InterCom,’ said Joyce with a cunning smile. ‘Or our sharehold-ers for that matter. They approve totally. Would you prefer that we left the exploration of space to the Chinese?’
‘Typical middle management,’ the Doctor whispered to Milligan. ‘Always thinking about this year’s profits, never about next year’s losses.’ The Doctor put the mouse down and moved past Joyce towards the nervous figure waiting beside the laboratory door. ‘Dr Lewis I presume,’ said the Doctor, shaking hands. ‘We haven’t been introduced, but your reputation precedes you.’
‘You must be Dr Smith,’ said Lewis, with the faintest trace of the Welsh valleys in his accent. ‘I’m afraid to say I’m not familiar with your work.’
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s a bit obscure. A predecessor of mine did meet you in the early Seventies at MIT. Tried to recruit you to UNIT, I understand.’
Lewis’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know about that?’ he asked, barely concealing his annoyance.
‘I wasn’t aware your failure to pass the selection board was a state secret,’
said the Doctor with deliberate emphasis on the ‘f’ word. ‘Lewis the physicist isn’t it, hmm?’ he continued, mocking Lewis’s dreadfully fake America-via-Cardiff accent. ‘So, you joined the brain drain and started working for the Yankee dollar. Well that was patriotic!’
‘The money being offered was –’
‘Half what you were getting on the Apollo programme, yes?’ interrupted the Doctor. ‘Still, I dare say you may get to Mars one day. We’ve been as far as Neptune, don’t you know?’
Lewis could seethe quietly no longer. ‘ We’re going a lot further than that,’
he began angrily but was silenced by the intervention of Joyce.
‘I’m sure,’ said the InterCom man, ‘that there will be plenty of time for reminiscences later. Doctor, you expressed a specific interest in viewing our electronics department.’
‘Yes,’ noted the Doctor, then dropped into cod-Welsh again. ‘Perhaps old Lewis “to the power of infinity” here would like to show me around, isn’t it?’
86
‘That won’t be possible I’m afraid,’ Joyce answered with seemingly sincere regret, as Lewis’s face turned an angry beetrootred. ‘Richard has to get back to his own work, don’t you Richard?’
‘I can stay if . . . ’
‘Don’t you Richard?’ repeated Joyce, with more than a hint of menace.
Lewis was humiliated and defeated. ‘Yes,’ he said, crushed by the weight of Joyce’s authority.
‘Oh what a pity,’ said the Doctor with a sigh of disappointment. ‘And I was so looking forward to asking Dick how he had managed to alleviate the problems of thargon differentials in the orange spectrum of upper atmospheric disturbance.’
Lewis looked baffled. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, his accent slipping to the floor and shattering into a million pieces.
‘A sense of humour? I like that,’ noted the Doctor. ‘But, in all seriousness, I’d be fascinated to know how you achieved it. No one on this planet has ever found a way to create a stable energy field of the kind you’re using on your latest satellites. It’s a science I didn’t think we’d see for another twenty or thirty years.’ He turned to Joyce. ‘On this planet anyway.’
‘Well Doctor,’ began Joyce, and for the first time the Doctor could see a real and obvious discomfort in the company man’s face. ‘What you have to realise is . . . ’
‘Mr Joyce,’ said a breathless technician at the door, shattering the tension of the moment. Joyce, visibly relieved, excused himself and headed out of the room. The Doctor cast an ominous glance at Lewis who was also retreating backwards towards the door.
‘Not sneaking out are you, Dick?’ Lewis didn’t reply. ‘We know,’ the Doctor told him at last.
‘You might think you do,’ Lewis replied.
The Doctor chuckled. ‘Chung Sen’s a genius and even he couldn’t have been responsible for some of the advances this company is alleged to have made,’
he said simply. ‘You can leave now,’ he told Lewis. ‘And you can tell your twilight demimonde, whatever they’re called