Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [69]
It was the running which very nearly betrayed her. Only the guilty ran on Parakon. Stopped by a security man as she left the building, thrusting her pass at him, gasping out an excuse: ‘...
late for a meeting, a meeting with my Controller; please, please, please! I shall be late!’
She had then forced herself to walk, albeit with a little skipping run every few yards, until she fell into the seat of her flycar, sobbing for her breath, and took off – flying high, high, high to distance herself from the vileness she had left behind.
Flying in a desperate automatism for a time out of time, she at last calmed down enough to be able to look about her. She had left the city far behind. The circling horizon contained nothing but the dull yellow-brown of desert.
An empty sky; an empty land. But still her mind wasn’t empty. The insistent images, the nagging voices that she was trying so hard to escape were still there. She increased her speed to the maximum. The low hum rose to a panic-stricken shriek.
But still it wasn’t fast enough; and she had no idea where she was.
She was flying south; at least she knew that. Her memory told her that the ravished earth extended to the faraway coast without a break. But now, almost dead ahead, she could see a large patch of green. The Lackan; what else could it be?
She swung the craft towards it, yearning for it as if she were lost in a desert and thirsting for water; as if in its greenness might lie the quietness she craved. As the flycar hurtled down, she fought with the controls, trying to hold it back as fiercely as she had tried to contain the turmoil of her thoughts, and with as little success.
The screaming of the drive in full reverse thrust, the screaming in her mind, the sound of her own voice screaming; the compassionate greenness of the Lackan opening to her view; and at last, the benison of peace as the screaming stopped.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘there it is. That’s where we’re going.’
The Doctor moved to the controls and altered course towards it. The green was growing visibly as they approached it.
‘I have come to love the Lackan, Onya continued.
‘Whenever I come back to it, it feels as if I were going out of a dark room filled with choking smoke into the fresh air, into the sunlight. Oh, I know the forest is dangerous, full of horrible creatures – after all, the Lackan is where they hold the hunts for ER.’
‘The place of no hope,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Exactly. But at least it’s real and – and as it was meant to be.’
Now they could distinguish the individual trees and the clearings at the edge like little beaches.
‘It looks like an island,’ said Jeremy.
‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘A green island in a dead sea.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘You say that this is your real home?’ the Brigadier said as they flew towards the Lackan. ‘A jungle full of wild beasts?’
Onya laughed. ‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘In the middle, with rocky hills all round – it would be too much to call them mountains – there’s a high valley which is just as Parakon used to be long ago – oh, long before rapine; before there was any such thing as industry. And the only one of the original tribes never to have been conquered are living their lives there as they have done from the beginning.
They call it “Kimonya” – Skyland. That’s my home.’
‘So,’ said the Doctor, ‘I make for the centre.’
‘No, we can’t take the chance of leading the Corporation there. You see, I’m not the only one to run away. There’s well over three hundred of us by now. I’m afraid we have to hide the car and go in on foot.’
‘I’ll take her down to the periphery, then.’
Onya nodded. ‘If you keep on this course, you’ll see a slightly bigger clearing, surrounded by fruit trees.’
Sarah said, ‘Breakfast at last. Eh, Jeremy?’
Jeremy said, ‘My stomach’s forgotten the meaning of the word.’
The voices were different now: hushed and gentle, coming near and going far, to be