Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [90]
The Doctor looked at her as if he understood everything she was feeling. ‘You were right; and I was wrong,’ he said.
She got up wearily and went out of the hut, past Onya and the Brigadier, past Jeremy; out into the moonlight.
On the bridge, with the sound of rushing water filling her ears, she stopped and looked up into the sky with its unfamiliar constellations of stars. Where was he now?
There was a numbness within her that seemed even more unbearable than pain. It was as if Waldo’s death had left a black hole in her heart: all the things of the world that had given her delight were crushed into a heaviness, contracted to a nothingness, from which no light could emerge.
What difference did it make where he was?
‘Be brief, Tragan,’ said Chairman Freeth. ‘I have an eager young soufflé lying in front of me, trembling in anticipation of ravishment by my fork.’ His voice was thick with desire.
Tragan’s expressionless voice, amplified and distorted, bounced off the polished surface of the panels of Blagranian fernwood. ‘It’s Rudley,’ he said. ‘We picked up a contact.’
‘Is that all?’ A large forkful slurped into the capacious mouth.
‘It was very short. But before he lost consciousness again, he spoke to the Earth girl, Sarah Jane Smith. And wherever the girl was, the Doctor and the others must have been nearby.’
Freeth put down his fork. ‘Ah. Now that is of considerably more interest. What did you use to destroy them? A missile, presumably.’
There was a pause before Tragan answered, his voice flatter than ever. ‘The contact was too short to establish the coordinates, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Then send a gunship on a search and destroy mission!
Do I always have to do your thinking for you?’
‘If we alert them too soon, they’ll just go to ground. The Lackan is a large area.’
Freeth’s soufflé was already losing its virgin nubility, sagging into a despairing middle age before his very eyes.
‘Running true to form, are we, Tragan? You ruin my dinner just to tell me that nothing can be done?’
The Vice-Chairman’s protest at this was ignored; Freeth went straight on: ‘These people must be eliminated! Get on with it!’
He picked up his fork, sighed, put it down again and waved petulantly for the soufflé to be removed.
If it had not been for the dream, Onya Farjen would have been content to live out her life as the mother of the Kinionyan tribe.
It had seemed quite natural that a forest beast should speak, and while speaking should metamorphose into a canjee, the small furry piglet which the Kimonyans kept as pets, and then into a sailbird, soaring with its companions high above the island which was the Lackan. Although she could not remember the words, the message was clear: personal liberation was not enough.
Appalled as she was at the enormity of the task – that she, Katyan Glessey as was, should seek to turn the world upside down, to open the gates for all in Parakon, even for those who had no idea that they were in prison – she nevertheless found herself exulting in the thought of it, dangerous though it was.
To seek out those who felt as she did, without exposing herself to Security; to help those who could bear no more to escape as she had done; to build a fellowship with the ones who dared to stay and work unseen (as she did herself as servant to the President); and ultimately to plan with the trusted few the steps which must be taken to destroy the evil that held Parakon in its grip; all this had been the manifestation in the world of her own freedom – a small return for the love that had set her free.
Was it all to be lost now, to be thrown away because of a stupid mistake on her part?
‘It’s my fault, Rance. Because the boy was unconscious, I quite forgot that the transmission needles should be deactivated.’
It was not until the next morning, going to Sarah in the hope of offering comfort, that she had learnt that Waldo had come back to consciousness, albeit