Doctor Who_ The Zarbi - Bill Strutton [2]
Barbara turned.
‘You should be in bed,’ she said. ‘You’ve had hardly any sleep.’
‘Where are we?’ Vicki asked.
The others looked at Doctor Who for an answer. After a moment he wagged his head and muttered, ‘I wish I knew.’
‘What are you all looking at the screen for? Is there...
something out there?’ Vicki asked.
No one answered for a moment. Then the searchlight beam sweeping round in a circle from the ship, lit on a craggy shape. Doctor Who straightened, still staring at the screen.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is.’
The light on this planet was pale and cold, like moonlight, and peopled with harsh shadows. Strange, pointed crags like large stalagmites rose here and there from its surface.
Several satellites glowed faintly in the twilit sky. Beyond them glimmered a few distant stars.
It was near one of the crags that the police-box shape of the ship Tardis slowly materialized, appearing as if from nowhere. Its searchlight beam circled, exploring the place, swept over a crag, hovered, and held it in its light.
The beam passed on, inspecting the planet slowly, and slowly flooded over a pool. A faint mist rose from the pool. The searchlight continued to turn, lighting up a glassy surface scattered with small rocks, creating eerie moving fingers of shadow as the ray revolved.
It was as quiet and as ghostly as a cemetery. There was no sound, not even a wind.
Then a slithering, scraping noise broke the stillness. It came from a crag whose shape reared steeply out of the ground some fifty yards away, just beyond the wash of the searchlight, silhouetted blackly against the orb of a satellite.
Something high on this crag moved.
A long thin foreleg came into sight, gripping the rock.
The moving leg shone in the faint light like gun-metal.
Then a sleek, shiny head appeared, and with it, two eyes which shone like large torch bulbs. These eyes turned in the direction of the ship and fixed steadily on it.
Then the creature gave a harsh chirruping sound, like a cricket. It echoed and re-echoed in the uncanny stillness.
The sound was answered from another direction.
There, too, the eyes of another shone from the shadowy side of a crag.
The local inspection screen inside Tardis was now picking out the features of this strange landscape more clearly as the searchlight turned further.
‘Do you recognize it?’ Ian asked Doctor Who.
But Doctor Who seemed too busy checking his instruments and watching the inspection window to reply.
He transferred his stare to the scanner as it started to speckle again with small spots of light.
‘This interference!’ he muttered. ‘Most extraordinary –
in a place like this...’
‘There can’t be anything out there, surely?’ Ian said. ‘It looks as dead as a dodo.’
‘Really?’ Doctor Who muttered.
‘Just crags and pools,’ Barbara said. ‘No movement...
nothing growing. Not a living thing in sight.’
A gasp came from Vicki. She clapped her hands to her ears. The others turned and stared at her.
‘What’s the matter?’ Barbara asked.
‘My ears! There is something! Listen!’
The others listened a moment, and looked blank.
‘Can’t you hear it?’ Vicki cried. She screwed up her face, pressed harder on her ears. ‘Oh! It’s so... piercing, it hurts!’
‘It’s probably your ears singing,’ Ian said. ‘Try swallowing.’
Doctor Who was looking keenly at Vicki.
‘—or something extra-sonic,’ he murmered. ‘Something so high-pitched that only children or animals pick it up.
What kind of sound, my dear?
‘A sort of... humming, very high! You must be able to hear it! Please, make it stop! It’s going right through me!’
‘Shall I switch off our detectors? Ian asked.
Doctor Who nodded. But suddenly Vicki took her hands away from her ears. Her face cleared. The relief seemed so great that she smiled, puzzled.
‘It’s gone!’ she said. ‘It’s stopped!’
Ian’s hand was poised over the switches on the control table. He looked at the dials and called abruptly.