Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [29]
There was a click of the snib on the lock and the door slammed. Sarah gave a deep sigh of relief.
‘He’s locked us in!’ Jeremy squeaked.
‘Oh, don’t be so silly, it’s a Yale lock. Come on, let’s have a look.’
Still being careful to keep fairly quiet, she picked her way to the little door and opened it a crack. At first she couldn’t see anything. The glare of the Aldebaran sun had gone, leaving the sort of nondescript twilight found in a cinema after the audience has left and the attendants are clearing up the mess.
She pushed the door wider. ‘Well, well, well,’ she said, stepping through.
‘It’s all gone,’ said Jeremy. ‘Desert and everything’
And so it had. There was nothing to be seen but a large hall with bare walls and a bare floor littered with sweet wrappings and soft-drink cans.
‘Switched off,’ she said. ‘They’ve just switched him off.
No wonder he didn’t come out on the film.’
The Brigadier had been content to listen as the Doctor told of the anomalous discoveries made by the forensic pathologist. He did not intervene even when Freeth apologetically interrupted to tell Tragan to put in hand the arrangements they had been discussing before the arrival of their guests.
He watched him go, wishing that he had enough hard evidence to tell him not to leave town, like a marshall in a Western.
Freeth, however, now turned to him. ‘I gather you’ve been having a little chat with an old friend of mine, Brigadier.’
‘Sir?’
‘In New York.’
‘Ah. Yes. That’s right.’
‘You’ll no doubt be gratified to hear that your attempt to go to the top of the tree had borne fruit. I am, so to speak, a peach ripe for plucking.’ He smiled archly at the Brigadier.
A bit overripe?’
‘Sir?’ he said again.
‘We have agreed that I should keep no more secrets from you. In her own words, that I should “come clean as the driven snow”. I’m sure you recognize the style.’
He turned back to the Doctor. ‘If I understand you aright, you are suggesting that one of our little “monsters from outer space” escaped from the park last night and did the naughties? Well, since we’re playing the truth game, let me tell you something – ’
The Doctor held up a hand. ‘I’ll save you the trouble,’
he said. The Brigadier listened hard as the Doctor launched into a highly technical explanation of how the creatures came to be there, ending with the words: ‘... by means of a radiated matrix of modulated psycho-magnetic beams.’
Was he saying they were mere hallucinations?
‘Indeed,’ he was going on to say, ‘the whole thing is really a more complex version of your Experienced Reality technology.’
He was!
‘My, my!’ said Freeth. ‘Aren’t we the clever-clogs? I hate to admit it, but you have it exactly right. It’s all an illusion.’
‘Good heavens above!’ exclaimed the Brigadier. ‘I could have sworn they were as real as my old basset hound.’
‘If you tried to pat one of our little family,’ said Freeth, your hand would go right through it. So how could one of them have harmed that poor fellow?’
But if those animals were a form of ER, thought the Brigadier, then the experience of them must have been recorded. Although they were only images, they must be the images of real creatures.
This apparently was the point the Doctor was making. ‘I recognized your so-called Crab-Clawed Kamelius as soon as I saw it,’ he was saying.
‘You recognized it?’ said Freeth. ‘Who are you, Doctor?’
‘Somebody who spent a long weekend on Aldebaran Two a few years ago. Too long a weekend – the food was disgusting.’
A fat chuckle of agreement. ‘Indeed. How many recipes are there for cactus pulp?’
So it was true. They weren’t from Earth at all.
‘You come from the other side of the Galaxy, don’t you?’
the Doctor said quietly.
‘It’s a fair cop,’ said Freeth.