Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [65]
“The end is nigh”! You wanna form an alliance with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’d love you. Did we complain when MI6 took over the operation of International Electromatics and kept all that groovy alien technology for themselves. And for you guys?’
‘Actually you did,’ said Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘Quite vociferously as I remember.’
Control’s righteous indignation finally bubbled, unwittingly to the surface and he laughed sarcastically at the Englishman. ‘And now you have the nerve to hold conferences because other people are getting their hands on it!’
The Brigadier smiled and stared back at the CIA chief, unblinking.
‘Surely it’s in everyone’s interests to make sure that the Earth doesn’t fall, yes? Even the CIA’s?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Yes, technically I suppose. In theory.’
The Brigadier was appalled. The Doctor merely intrigued. ‘We know that InterCom is a front organisation for an alien conglomerate,’ he said with the merest trace of a smile.
Control ignored the clear implication in the Doctor’s statement that this was not something that only applied to InterCom. ‘We figured that out a long time ago,’ he said in a clear example of one-upmanship. ‘Did you know that they have a spacecraft in their complex in Los Angeles?’
‘Yes,’ said the Brigadier dismissively. ‘Old news.’
‘And did you know they’re running DNA experiments looking for humans who can withstand increased heat, sonic attack and air pressure? I’ll bet you didn’t!’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘You are correct.’
‘Now why do you think they’d be doing that?’
125
The Doctor sat in silence, a river of information being processed within his mind at the speed of light. Connections were made. It was all starting to fall into place.
‘It’s about changing the world, isn’t it? Climate, the atmosphere. The very air that you breathe.’
Control simply stared back at the Doctor, his face like that of a poker player at the height of a game.
‘But it is, isn’t it?’ argued the Doctor. ‘They want to make the Earth habitable for themselves, but they’re going to need slave labour to extract whatever it is that this planet has in abundance that they need.’
‘An absurd suggestion,’ said Control. But there was genuine puzzlement in his next question. ‘Such as . . . ?’ he asked. The Doctor nodded approvingly.
That was what the CIA hadn’t managed to work out yet either.
‘Oh, I don’t know, say . . . Uranium?’
Control looked genuinely disappointed.
‘Plutonium?’
‘Too linear, Doctor. Too obvious.’
‘All right, so they want a massive slave labour force, because . . . Because they do,’ said the Doctor, as though the final piece in a 20,000-piece jigsaw had just been handed to him and the picture on the box was suddenly making sense.
‘Enlightenment,’ said Control. ‘It’s a wonderful thing, so it is!’ The Doctor was delighted by this revelation. ‘And the terrorists?’ he asked quickly.
‘Don’t be led astray by anorakphobia,’ Control noted. ‘External forces are also at work in that field of operation,’ he added euphemistically.
Finally, the Brigadier understood something from the conversation. ‘Sanity at last. Are you saying that these terrorists as well as Sanger’s organisation are backed by the aliens?’
Control simply smiled.
‘But that’s preposterous. They’re trying to kill each other.’
‘Nobody said, Brigadier,’ noted the Doctor, ‘that they are the same aliens.’
In his luxury Tokyo apartment, Chung Sen sat in the semidarkness watching mind-numbing manga-cartoon violence on his forty-two-inch television screen.
It helped to shut out the pain.
‘Total armageddon mayhem,’ screamed a cartoon cyborg as its arm transformed into a chain saw and it sliced some sort of green-skinned alien creature in two. Normally Chung Sen would have been amused by the absurdity of it all, but right now he was burying himself up to his neck in the misery.
The pain of betrayal.
126
Distantly he was aware of a knocking on his door and, after a few moments while this information played around the periphery of his consciousness, he slowly stood up from the sofa and crossed to the