Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [50]
But he wasn’t pretending at all. He was screaming; screaming the bubbling wordless scream of a man who has had half his back blown away.
The worst of it wasn’t the fact that Sarah found herself lifting the gun, aiming it carefully at the base of his skull.
where it joined the neck, and pulling the trigger. The worst of it was that, even while the rest of her was fighting to get away, to escape, to wrench the helmet from her head and regain her hold on the real world, a part of her was relishing the task of finishing him off – embracing with fierce satisfaction the joy of the hunter at the final slaughter of his prey.
Chapter Seventeen
‘I’ve been trying to tell her that it wasn’t real,’ Jeremy said to Captain Rudley. ‘It was just a sort of film thingy, wasn’t it? Special effects and all. Tomato ketchup and stuff.’
Waldo Rudley had arrived to find a shaking Sarah and a flustered Jeremy desperately doing his best to comfort her in her distress.
‘It was real, I tell you – and I killed him. I deliberately lifted the gun and...’ The sound of the man’s screams was still with her; the sight of his terminal panic, so cruelly cut short; her glee as she pulled the trigger... She shuddered violently. ‘It was real all right,’ she said.
‘I’m afraid it was,’ said the Captain. ‘Oh, you didn’t kill him. But he was killed when the recording was made.’
‘That’s sick. It’s really sick.’
‘I’m sorry, I should have warned you. You don’t have public executions on Earth?’
‘Where we come from we don’t have the death penalty at all,’ she said. She was hugging her arms close to herself, trying to control the shaking of her body. Or was it from a longing to be held: to be comforted like a child waking from a nightmare?
There was a knock on the door, and a servant, carrying clean bed-linen over her arm, came in and, with a deferential murmur, disappeared into Sarah’s bedroom.
‘Was he a murderer?’ said Sarah. ‘What had he done?’
‘He would have been plotting against the Government –
or the Corporation. If he’d been an active terrorist, he wouldn’t even have been given that chance.’
‘What chance did he have?’ said Sarah bitterly.
‘Oh, they have been known to get away,’ he replied. ‘But those aren’t the hunts which are put onto the public networks. There must be a kill.’
‘And people switch on for that?’ said Jeremy, appalled.
‘More than any other channel,’ said Rudley.
‘Then they should jolly well be ashamed of themselves.
Don’t you think so, Captain Rudley?’ said Jeremy.
Sarah said nothing. How could she judge them without being a plain hypocrite? Even with her guts still twisting with the horror of her experience, she could feel the guilty buzz of satisfaction lingering yet.
‘Don’t you think it’s rotten too?’ persisted Jeremy, when Waldo didn’t answer. But he still had no direct reply.
Instead, Waldo glanced at the bedroom door, held a finger to his lips and gave a little shake of his head.
‘I hope you still feel like going to the party,’ he said.
‘I think it’s just what we need,’ Sarah said.
Though the Brigadier had been pleased to fill the empty spaces with something more substantial than the Doctor’s food pills, he hadn’t really appreciated the cornucopia of choice they had been offered at lunch time. Always suspicious of the way those unlucky enough not to be British mucked about with their food, he had avoided most of the exotic dishes and sought out the Parakonian equivalent of a ham sandwich, or steak and chips: simple meat and vegetables, backed up with some hefty hunks of bread.
So he was looking forward to the President’s dinner with a certain gloom. Bound to be a lot of foreign fol-de-riddle, he thought; hidden under a lot of sticky sauces, probably. He remembered the unfortunate incident of the sheeps’ eyes at the last Middle East peace