Doctor Who_ The Zarbi - Bill Strutton [27]
‘It beats me why the Zarbi won’t go into the ship!’ he muttered.
Vicki pressed her temples. ‘They dare not,’ she said, and looked surprised at having said that. Ian turned to look at her.
‘Why not?’
Vicki waved her hand helplessly, trying to remember.
‘It was... rather like a dream. But I seem to remember that they tried. There was a flash. The two Zarbi were...
knocked backward. Or... did I just dream that...?’
Ian was looking at her intently. ‘But — Tardis has no defences! If what you say is true — they must have been repelled by something... of their own making...’
Ian broke off his guessing as a flashing from the control panel on the wall caught his eye. The Zarbi now remaining in the control room saw it too and stiffened attentively, their cruel heads turning towards the web-map on the wall
— where a cluster of lights on its outer perimeter glowed suddenly on and off. A speaker beneath the web-map issued a series of ‘pip’ sounds in time with their flashing.
‘Sounds like some sort of alert,’ Ian said, eyeing the alerted Zarbi.
‘Yes — radar of a kind. It’s not unlike the system we had on the Dido spaceship,’ Vicki said.
‘But – these venom grubs! The Zarbi use them as weapons! That means there must be other forms of life here, or they wouldn’t need them. Do they use these creatures to prey on others, or...’
Vicki finished the question Ian was asking himself. ‘– or to protect themselves?’ she said.
Immediately following the flashing lights and the ‘pip’
warnings, a loud burst of humming and chirruping broke out from the main speaker on the control wall. A huge light above it glared on.
The Zarbi reacted to that as to a command. They moved swiftly to surround Doctor Who – and propelled him roughly, urgently, towards the centre of the room. He resisted their violent handling, roaring, ‘Take your wretched claws off me, d’you hear? This minute!’
But the Zarbi ringed the Doctor and herded him into the centre of the room. There they held him. Doctor Who stared indignantly around him, ruffled and furious, until a sound from above made him look up, startled.
‘Bless my soul!’
A deep, saucer-shaped dome was descending towards him from the roof. Anxiously the Doctor tried to back away, but the Zarbi held him immovable. The huge Dome came lower, slowly now, until it closed over his head. It was transparent, but through it Doctor Who’s head and features were oddly distorted as though he stood in a fairground hall of mirrors.
The Doctor started and turned wonderingly as, seemingly out of nowhere, an alien voice boomed hollowly around him, inside the spiral of the Dome. The vowel sounds were distorted and echoing, and though the words were understandable, they did not issue from anything like a human throat.
The Voice boomed, ‘Very well – speak-eak!... Why have you come to this planet-et...?’
Doctor Who recovered from his surprise. He turned his head this way and that, mustered a defiance, and snapped back.
‘W-who are you? We come in peace...!’
‘Peace?’ the Voice echoed back at him. ‘Is that why you attack-ack? We require to know where your main force is-is..!’
Ian and Vicki, held at bay by the Zarbi and under the menace of a venom grub which remained pointing implacably at them, could see Doctor’s Who’s head, grotesquely distorted through the glassy side of the Dome, but they could hear nothing. They saw the Doctor’s head turn their way. The distortion magnified his lips into a huge rubbery duck’s bill.
Vicki exclaimed, ‘He’s speaking – to something! Why can’t we hear what he’s saying?’
Ian was shaking his head, bewildered. He didn’t answer because he had no answer. He remained staring at the strange Dome.
Inside it Doctor Who was answering vehemently, ‘I repeat – we are alone! We have strayed from our astral path!’
The Voice boomed angrily back. ‘You heard the alarm.
Your force is on its way-ay...!