Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [53]
‘Is it really that important?’ asked Greaves, but Control didn’t immediately answer. Instead he was looking at a screen full of scrolling three-dimensional DNA imagery.
‘I’d have definitely said so,’ he said finally as the information continued to flash across the screen at a frightening rate. ‘So that’s what those naughty aliens are up to,’ he said as the screen threw out its gigabytes of facts and figures. ‘They must be frankly ticked-off that they’ve lost this.’
Greaves didn’t see what that had to do with anything. ‘Not our concern, surely?’ he asked.
‘Not really, no. But an angry enemy is a dangerous enemy. Well-fed armies seldom win wars against starving men.’
‘Actually . . . ’ Greaves began. If his intention was to contradict his superior, he thought better of it.
‘Now, the question is what do we do with this information,’ Control mused.
‘ Do with it?’
Typically, Control answered the question with an enigmatic statement.
‘Sometimes games have more dimensions to them than even the players themselves realise,’ he noted. ‘This is a seminal example.’
‘How so?’
‘What we have here,’ Control said, removing the disk from the computer and filing it in his drawer, ‘is a turf war between parties in which there are three potential outcomes.’
‘Which is best for us?’
Control seemed almost amused as he pondered the answer. ‘None of them are wholly acceptable unfortunately,’ he reflected. ‘However, two are less unacceptable than the other, which is total annihilation of the human race –
and the planet Earth into the bargain.’
‘So, what do we do?’
‘We wait,’ said Control. ‘Until any one of the parties figures it all out. Then we deal with the consequences.’
102
Chapter Eleven
The Girl Looked at Johnny
The Doctor had asked Milligan to show Tegan a little of Los Angeles and help to take her mind off the Turlough situation, an act of thoughtfulness that Mel Tyrone found particularly impressive.
‘You really care about them, don’t you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your companions.’
‘But of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’re my friends, I’m duty-bound to look after them. It’s my raison d’être you might say.’
The answer, however, didn’t quite satisfy Tyrone. ‘But it goes beyond that,’
noted the UNIT man. ‘It’s almost parental. I realise that you must see humanity in the way that we would regard insects, but . . . ’
The Doctor continued to be evasive. ‘I think you’re reading a little too much into the information in the files,’ he replied drily. ‘Why do you think I keep coming back to this planet? It’s not for the weather, that’s for certain!’
‘Point taken,’ said Tyrone, but he still looked unsure. ‘It seems to me that part of your “mission”, if that’s what you want to call it, is to educate and inform.’
The Doctor had, truthfully, never thought of it in quite that way before. But he agreed, on reflection, that it was. ‘Yes. It’s very Lord Reithian, I know. I suppose that makes me rather old-fashioned?’
‘Nothing wrong with that,’ said the Brigadier striding into Tyrone’s office.
‘Melvyn, could you get that dizzy girl of yours to provide me with a cup of tea, if that’s not too much for her?’
‘Certainly,’ said Tyrone, leaving with a pained expression on his face.
‘That’s being a little unkind to Natalie,’ noted the Doctor.
‘Nonsense. The girl’s a flibbertigibbet. She’s get a nosebleed if she tried to walk in a straight line,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart frostily.
‘We both thought the same about Jo Grant once upon a time,’ replied the Doctor.
For a second there was a sad look in the Brigadier’s eyes. ‘Poor Miss Grant,’
he said at last.
‘Why?’ asked the Doctor.
103
The Brigadier shook his head. ‘You know the rules, Doctor. The future is an open book. As someone not a million miles away from here told me not so very long ago.’
The Doctor thought about pursuing the matter and then accepted that the tides of time wash everyone clean. Including himself. Perhaps especially him.
‘Do you ever see any of them?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Frequently,’ said the Brigadier seeming to come to the conclusion that this tiny