• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Brigadier sat up. ‘What negotiations?’

But the Secretary General, saying that she had said quite too much already, put the phone down on him.

‘Blast,’ said the Brigadier.

Sitting in the little yellow car, he reviewed the situation.

To his chagrin, he soon came to the conclusion that his pursuing of Freeth over the closing of the theme park was a displacement activity designed to stop himself facing a most disturbing fact: he had no idea what to do next.

If he hadn’t had the assistance of the Doctor at all, it would have been quite clear. Even if Freeth had claimed the protection of the Great Panjandrum of Outer Mongolia, he would have applied for a warrant to search the whole of Space World – a large task, but not impossible with the help of the Met.

‘But what would I be searching for, for Pete’s sake?’ be said to himself. ‘The creature that killed the fellow, presumably. Traces of blood. All that stuff.’

But the Doctor had said the monsters were all harmless.

He allowed himself the luxury of thinking about the Doctor, and found to his surprise that his prime emotion was anger. Not that he’d been left in the lurch; more that a long established friendship, a friendship of unacknowledged depth, had been so unmercifully cut short.

The wretched fellow had no need to risk himself. Help had been on its way. It was a foolish, sentimental, unnecessary way to die.

After all they’d been through together; the very real dangers they had faced. His mind went back to the early days: that brush with the Yetis in the London Underground; those uncanny Cybermen – living creatures or robots? Or both? And then... But as usual, his mind shied away from the thought of his next encounter with the Doctor; a Doctor utterly changed, with a different face, a different personality – but undeniably the same individual he’d known before. What had he called it? Regeneration, or some such poppycock! How could anybody believe such arrant nonsense? And yet.

In spite of himself, the Brigadier felt a faint stirring of hope. But it soon faded. There had been no sign of anything of the sort in the limp figure carried away by the ambulance men. The Doctor had been dead, dead, dead.

Hang on, though. What about that time at Devil’s End?

At first he’d been given up for dead, only to revive something like ten hours after having been frozen solid.

The Brigadier’s melancholy abruptly disappeared. If there were the slightest chance...!

But he’d been taken away a corpse. He’d be in the mortuary by now, and as the sergeant had said, there’d have to be an autopsy and in the very nature of things they didn’t hang around.

Regenerating might prove a little difficult with ones tripes taken out.

‘So what delights have they found for us today, Brian?’ said Mortimer Willow to his assistant, as he donned the green surgical robe the mortuary attendant had put out for him.

His voice bounced satisfactorily off the white tiled walls.

The Professor was famous for singing at his work. Better than the bathroom, he always said.

‘It’s the two chaps who fell, Professor.’ Brian Prebble switched on the big central light, dispelling the early evening gloom.

Of course. Took a swallow dive from the top board. Pity the pool was empty.’

Dr Prebble peered at him through his thick spectacles.

‘No, no,’ he said earnestly. ‘They fell from – ’

‘Manner of speaking. Manner of speaking.’ Glory be to Gladys! thought the Professor, none of these youngsters seemed to have a sense of humour any more.

‘There’s something very odd about one of them,’ said Prebble.

‘First things first.’ The Professor eased on a pair of surgeon’s gloves. ‘Where’ve you got to?’

His assistant picked up a piece of paper. ‘Apparently there’s no question of how they died, so there’s no need for a full forensic investigation. But the investigating officer would like to know if either of them..’ he squinted at the paper‘ “... had been ingesting or otherwise introducing into their systems any substance which might have impaired their bodily coordination or powers of judgement”’

‘In other