Doctor Who_ The Sleep of Reason - Martin Day [95]
‘Oh bollocks!’ he exclaimed, immediately trying to work his way back out of the room.
Trix and Liz clustered around him, trying to see what was going on.
Fitz put himself between Liz and the interior, half pushing her back into the corridor. ‘You don’t need to see this,’ he said.
‘What the hell. . . ?’ Liz shoved him aside impatiently.
In a moment what was left of her world flipped upside down.
On the floor, next to her desk, lay Joe. His trousers were down around his knees and he was endeavouring to pull them over his arse. Beneath him –
beneath him – lay Susannah, struggling with her knickers under her skirt.
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‘Look, Liz, I’m sorry, this isn’t. . . ’ Joe was mumbling furiously, though just as steadfastly avoiding eye contact.
At least Susannah was doing the decent thing. She looked genuinely embarrassed by what had happened.
Joe just sounded irritated – pissed off that he’d been caught in the act.
‘You bastard!’ shouted Liz. All thoughts of self-control, all Dr Smith’s warn-ings – all were utterly lost. She shrugged off Fitz’s attempts to keep her away.
And she kicked Joe, hard, between the legs.
‘Dr Smith,’ said Laska as they approached the mausoleum. ‘Doctor. All this talk of Sholem-Luz seeds, of life cycles and reproduction. . . Where do the adult creatures fit into all this?’
‘A very pertinent question,’ observed Smith. ‘You remember in the diary account all the bodies ended up in one confined space, and that room was set ablaze?’
Laska nodded. ‘Like I said, it was when Liz ordered the moving of the body to the chapel. . . ’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘You don’t think Liz has been infected?’
‘For whatever reason,’ said Smith, ‘history is recurring. But, no, I do not think Liz is blindly obeying the Sholem-Luz. Do you?’
‘No – but you made sure that Fitz and Trix stayed with her.’
‘An insurance policy,’ said Smith with a grin. ‘Just in case.’
He paused. The mausoleum was only yards away now. Laska could see the graffiti-covered boards over the doorway.
‘Anyway, back in 1903,’ continued Smith, ‘It’s obvious that the Sholem-Luz seed needed two things: an energy source and raw material. The fire and the mental anguish was the energy source. . . ’
‘And the corpses were raw material.’ Laska paused, her stomach churning.
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘To the Sholem-Luz,’ said Smith, ‘we’re not living creatures at all. We’re good sources of energy. And we’re good sources of carbon-based cells, which they can remodel with Sholem-Luz material and use for their own ends.’
‘So the people trapped in the chapel, the bodies already there. . . They were all about to be. . . ’
‘Melted down,’ said Smith firmly. ‘From that mass of cells – alien and human – and with all that energy Sholem-Luz seeds are born. As are adult Sholem-Luz themselves.’
‘That’s just so weird,’ said Laska.
‘There is nothing quite like it in nature as you know it on Earth,’ said Smith.
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Laska considered all this for some time. ‘But why oppose it? If the Sholem-Luz are just blindly obeying their instincts, if what happens is just a natural thing. . . ’
‘If I might say,’ observed Smith, ‘that sounds like fatalism of the worst kind.
I’m in the business of opposing pain and destruction. You might as well ask a doctor why he strives night and day to research cancer, leprosy, malaria. . .
All these are “natural” things. It does not make them right.’ He smiled. ‘I am the Doctor – in the very broadest sense of the word!’
He bent down to examine the doorway.
‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘their tunnels make a tremendous mess of the space-time continuum. I’m afraid I feel rather protective towards it.’
Laska stared at the folly. ‘What are you expecting to find here?’
‘Do you know, I’m really not quite sure.’ Smith looked about him, as if expecting something to have already happened. Perhaps that was the way Dr Smith sorted things out – he moved from place to place, trying to provoke a response from something.
He stood up, running a hand over the boards across the mausoleum door.
He tugged at them experimentally. ‘It looks like these have