Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [35]
‘If you don’t know the width of your car, you shouldn’t be driving it!’ he shouted at the elderly driver of an old sit-up-and-beg limousine, as he swung out of Platt’s Lane into the main road.
‘For Pete’s sake, slow down! You nearly clipped that one,’ said the Brigadier.
‘You heard what Jeremy said. Sarah is in the hands of a ruthless sadist. We have to get after her.’
‘What? How?’
‘In the TARDIS, of course,’ the Doctor said, speeding up even more in an attempt to beat the lights. In this he was unsuccessful. Through the resulting disharmony of protesting car horns, the Brigadier heard a siren obligato: the inevitable police car was after them.
‘Now you’ve done it,’ he said.
‘Leave the talking to me,’ the Doctor said as he pulled into the side, after a brief attempt to escape was frustrated by the usual Swiss Cottage traffic jam.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said the large policeman. ‘Would you be so good as to explain why you are driving down the Finchley Road at one hundred and forty miles an hour?’
The Doctor was calm and reasonable. ‘I can understand your concern, Officer,’ he said, ‘indeed I would commend it. It’s perfectly safe, however. Bessie is fitted with – ’
‘Bessie?’
‘The car. She’s contained in an inertial stasis field.’
‘A what?’
‘It’s a primitive form of anti-gravity, operating in the horizontal plane,’ the Doctor explained helpfully. ‘As you know, gravity and acceleration are fundamentally indistinguishable. Einstein showed conclusively that – ’
The policeman seemed willing to lose the opportunity to increase his knowledge of Einstein’s General Theory.
‘Out!’ he said, in a most impolite manner.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Out! Get out of the car!’
The Brigadier felt that it was past time for him to intervene. He leant forward. ‘Excuse me, Officer. May I have a quiet word?’ he said.
The Doctor was still grumbling when he pulled up in the UNIT car park, having completed the journey at a demure thirty miles an hour. Policemen were all the same: illogical; rigid; domineering. Didn’t he realize, thought the Brigadier, that he could have spent the night in the local nick instead of merely receiving a reluctant caution? As the Officer had said, he was lucky in his choice of friends.
Ignoring Captain Yates’s attempts to report a couple of irate phone calls from Professor Willow, he marched into the laboratory, saying that they had more important things to think about than self-important jacks-in-office; they had to repair the psycho-telemetric circuit of the TARDIS, for a start.
‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘we’ll never get to Parakon.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ he said, peering into the slightly sooty tangle of wires on the bench, ‘we know whereabouts the planet is in the Galaxy, within a few light years, don’t we?’
‘Do we?’ said the Brigadier.
‘I do,’ replied the Doctor, ‘Plug in the soldering iron will you, Jeremy old chap?’
Jeremy, who had been staring round the room with his mouth agape, came to with a start and hurried to obey.
‘We could spend an eternity searching, though,’ went on the Doctor, carefully taking a tiny component out of the circuit. ‘The TARDIS will take us to the right neck of the woods and then home in on Parakon using this in her psycho-telemeter.’
He produced a roughly folded envelope from his breast pocket. ‘What is it?’ asked the Brigadier.
‘The hair of the dog, to coin a phrase,’ said the Doctor, carefully unwrapping a microscope slide, and examining it closely. ‘Or rather the non-dog. I told you it would come in useful.’
The Brigadier was beginning to experience his usual feelings when dealing with the Doctor; that the ground he stood on was not as firm as usual; that the whole world might decide to operate upside down for a while. He clung on to the facts of the case. The immediate thing, the urgent thing, was to try to stop any harm coming to Sarah Jane Smith.
‘Freeth must be in touch with his man,’ he said. ‘If T
put the fear of God into him... How long are you going to be,