Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [72]
‘Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, eh Doctor?’
said the Brigadier.
‘You may mock, Lethbridge-Stewart,’ answered the Doctor. ‘I know as well as you do that the expression would sound like nonsense to a classical sub-atomic physicist.
Well, now I’m reversing the pseudo-polarity of the metaphorical synapses in Onya’s putative energy channels.
And that’s just as nonsensical – and just as effective.’
Sarah hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
‘I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,’ said the Brigadier.
Good, thought Sarah. She wasn’t the only simpleton around.
‘Oh, but I know exactly what he means,’ said Onya, with a laugh. ‘It might be my old teacher talking.’
‘Thank you. Doctor,’ she added, flexing her arm.
‘Look. It’s completely better.’
‘Well, bless my soul,’ said the Brigadier, as Jeremy wandered up, wearing the air of worried concentration of a small boy who had just added a hag of chips to a stomach already containing two ice-lollies, a hot dog, a portion of candyfloss and a mini-pizza.
Before they could set off, Onya produced a small black box with a couple of wires coming out of it. She told them that they all had to be deactivated, in case any of them had ER
transmission needles implanted in their brains.
‘The needles are made of a bio-compatible organic polymer which is disposed of by the body within a relatively short time,’ she said. ‘This merely speeds up the process.’
‘But we know quite well that we haven’t been, ah, tampered with,’ said the Brigadier.
‘You wouldn’t necessarily remember having an implantation,’ replied Onya. ‘But if you had, you could lead them straight to Skyland. We daren’t take the risk.
Have any of you been alone with Vice-Chairman Tragan or any of his people?’
‘I’d rather not think about it,’ said Sarah.
‘Just hold these electrodes to your temples.’
‘Will it hurt?’
‘Not a bit.’
Sarah followed instructions. There was a faint hum from the box. She didn’t feel a thing.
‘Who’s next?’
The Doctor moved forward, as Jeremy, with a polite
‘Excuse me,’ retired behind a handy bush.
The silence of the desert (only made more intense by the distant calling of the jungle birds) was marred by two alien noises: the repeated hum of the deactivator; and the sound of Jeremy throwing up.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Vice-Chairman Tragan usually visited his superior’s house only on social occasions, such as one of their ‘special’
parties. For him to be summoned in the middle of the working day and required to make a report was unprecedented.
‘Good of you to spare the time from your busy schedule,’
said Freeth, who was sitting at his massive dining table, with a large napkin tied round his neck, well on the way to finishing a heaped plate of Whitstable oysters.
‘No, no, don’t sit down,’ he went on. ‘I know you’ll be dying to get back to – to whatever it is you find to fill your time.’ He chose the largest of the oysters that was left and gulped it down. ‘You can’t imagine the glee with which I learned – I was a mere stripling at the time – that these little beasts are still alive when we swallow them. I used to imagine them crying out for help as they slid down my throat – and landing with a plop in the acids of my stomach.’
He picked up a fork and stabbed it into the body of one of the oysters before him. ‘Eek!’ he said in a tiny voice, and giggled. He swallowed another. ‘You will forgive me if I finish my lunch?’
‘Of course.’ Tragan’s mouth was a tight slit in the midst of his tumultuous face.
‘So,’ the Chairman continued, ‘young Waldo Rudley is e’en now winging his way to his fated destiny. Or is that a tautology – “fated destiny”? Well, never mind. Let us hope he meets his pleonastic doom.
‘Unlike your recent candidates. A little hobby of yours, is it? Letting people escape?’ He dispatched another bivalve on its last journey.
Tragan was standing as stiffly as one of his own statues.
Only the darkening face betrayed the fact that he was alive.
‘Captain Rudley is on his way to the Lackan, yes,’ he said.
Freeth took a noisy slurp