The Ghosts of N-Space - Barry Letts [101]
Not one was left. All had been wiped out, by Jeremy’s strategy and their habitual paranoid suspicion of each other, multiplied a hundredfold by the fiends in possession.
It had worked. Just like in the story. And he’d proved he was a good shot after all; and at last he heard the words from the Brigadier he’d dreamt of hearing for so long: ‘Well done, Jeremy!’
352
‘Who’d have thought that a classical education would come in so handy?’ said the Brigadier, as they traipsed back through the gatehouse, wheeling the barrow full of guns.
‘Oh, nothing to do with school, sir,’ said Jeremy, who was trying to explain the Greek myth his idea was based on.
‘I could never get the hang of all that alpha, beta, gamma, delta stuff; so they let me do woodwork instead, till I cut a bit of my thumb off. Look!’ and he waved it at them, with its curiously flat end.
‘No, it was in this book of your uncle’s. There was this chappie Cadmus, who sowed some teeth in the garden, dragon’s teeth they were.’
‘Seems logical,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Anybody would, wouldn’t they?’
‘Yes, sir. And they sort of took root and all that caper.
But they didn’t come up cabbages or carrots – or even dragons – they came up as a lot of fierce soldiers.’
‘Hotcha, baby,’ said Roberto, a trifle breathlessly as he was the one pushing the barrow.
‘It doesn’t seem very likely I know, sir. But that’s what it said. And Cadmus realized that if he was going to stop them killing everybody in the world he’d have to fight them all by himself; but then he had the same idea I did,
‘Great minds…’ said the Brigadier.
353
‘Yes, sir. I mean no, sir. I copied him. I mean, he thought of it first. He threw a stone into the middle of them, you see, and started them fighting each other and they all killed one another and all, and I thought, well, sauce for the goose, sir.’
‘And theirs was well and truly cooked.’ And then the Brigadier said it again: ‘Well done, Jeremy.’
In a way, he was glad Sarah wasn’t there, because he could feel himself blushing.
Mario met them in the great hall. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘I catch you. Doctor is awaking.’
‘Good, good,’ said the Brigadier, feeling that maybe the tide was beginning to turn.
‘And Max Vilmio come back too.’
‘What!’
‘Not to worry. Is dead as a doorknob. You see.’
Thank the Lord for that, thought the Brigadier; and he raised no objections when his uncle insisted on conscripting Roberto (on the strength of his sublime pasta of the previous night) to come to the kitchen to help Umberto in the preparation of a celebratory feast.
If doorknobs could be considered dead, then it was a good comparison, thought the Brigadier as he knelt by the body. It had been lying on the clifftop near the ruined wall 354
when Mario woke up from his nap, and was quite clearly as devoid of life as it was of its right arm.
The Doctor came bustling out of the TARDIS.
‘Ah, there you are, Doctor,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Am I? Now, are you quite sure about that, Lethbridge-Stewart?’ But the Brigadier didn’t react as he usually did to the Doctor’s teasing, for his attention had been caught by the largish object in the Doctor’s hands.
At first sight, it was a complex multiple helix; many spirals turned back on themselves. But it was like a drawing of an impossible object, with the perspective twisted to produce an inside-out which was at the same time downside-up. Whenever he thought he’d grasped its shape, he realized he was seeing it wrong, that it was really quite otherwise.
‘What’s that, for Pete’s sake?’ he said.
‘I just hope we don’t need the TARDIS in a hurry,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s the Space-Time Warping Template which she uses to get into the Time Vortex. The Dimensional Transducer is already lined up on the area surrounding the flaw in the barrier, so if I link the two together I can bend the N-Space boundary sufficiently to seal up the cracks.’
He switched off the Transducer. ‘That’s the theory at least,’ he said.
‘I say, Doctor,’ said Jeremy in a worried voice.