The Doctor laid a restraining hand on her arm. 'Good Morning ... or is it afternoon ... or even evening?' he said amiably, stepping forward with hand outstretched.
Scott waved his laser. 'Stay just where you are!' he snapped.
'I am the Doctor and these are my two young friends Nyssa and Tegan,' the Doctor persisted. But he was silenced by the sudden whirr of Scott's laser charging up.
'Do you recognise any of them, Professor?' Scott inquired as Kyle emerged from her hiding place behind the rocks.
She shook her head, obviously very relieved.
'Indeed no. We haven't had the pleasure...' the Doctor couldn't help gallantly remarking, doffing his hat with a friendly smile.
At that moment, Scott's communicator bleeped urgently. In a faint, toneless voice Walters reported that Sergeant Mitchell and the two troopers had been killed. A murmur of outrage and horror ran through the squad.
'Order!' Scott barked. There was immediate silence. 'Did you pick anything up,' he asked Walters.
'Just the same flaring, sir, but Sergeant Mitchell reported encountering two hostiles.'
Lieutenant Scott eyed the three strangers in front of him. 'Human?' he asked.
'She didn't say, sir. She just said they weren't armed.'
At a sign from Scott, a couple of troopers gave the three suspects a quick but thorough search. 'Nothing, sir,' they reported.
Scott looked baffled. For a moment he was silent. 'Have you still got that flaring?' he asked at last.
'No, it disappeared, sir, but I'm still getting that freak signal - the ectopic blip.'
'Oh yes, the freak signal. I think I know where
that's
coming from,' Scott muttered dangerously, staring hard at the self-possessed young man dressed in carnival clothes who had introduced himself as 'the Doctor'.
The young man took a few steps towards the Lieutenant. 'I assure you that we know nothing about the deaths of your men,' he said earnestly, 'but can we do anything to help?'
Scott grabbed the Doctor by his lapels and flung him brutally against the rocks. Nyssa and Tegan attempted to rush the Lieutenant, but they were instantly restrained.
'Seven innocent people were murdered in this chamber,' Scott snarled, yanking the Doctor back to his feet. 'Where are their bodies?'
Nyssa and Tegan started to protest, but Scott turned on them savagely. 'Don't waste my time,' he cried. Then he thrust his laser roughly against the Doctor's throat.
'Where have you hidden the bodies?' he repeated.
Professor Kyle had been looking on with mounting distress. Much as she wanted the murderers of her colleagues brought to justice, she found the Lieutenant's methods distasteful. 'The rockfall... The bodies could be under there!' she exclaimed hopefully.
Scott's eyes gleamed with victory. He jabbed the laser into the Doctor's ribs and began forcing him over towards the huge mass of jagged boulders and scree.
'Under the rockfall?' he said quietly. 'Shall we take a look, "Doctor"?'
With a semicircle of laser tubes covering them at point-blank range, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa were compelled to struggle with the heavy stones. They had been toiling away for some time when the big flat rock Nyssa was throwing all her modest weight behind suddenly slid aside with a harsh grating noise. It revealed what looked like the corner of a heavy metallic hatch set into the base of the cavern wall.
'What's that?' Scott demanded, hurrying over.
Nyssa tapped it. It rang with a dulled echoing sound. 'I don't know,' she answered.
Scott glanced at the Doctor. He was staring at the metal corner suspiciously.
The Lieutenant ordered his squad to help clear the remaining rocks away from the strange object. Somewhat confused, the troopers shouldered their lasers and set to work.
Professor Kyle had been watching the operation apprehensively. Suddenly something caught her eye among the boulders and she jumped onto the rockpile and started frantically tugging at them. After a few minutes she straightened up with something in her hand. 'Lieutenant Scott!' she cried in a shocked voice. 'Look!'
Scott and the Doctor clambered over to her. She was holding between two fingers the tattered remnants of an overall similar to the one she herself was wearing.
'This... this belonged to my assistant . . . Doctor Kahn,' she informed them quietly, her voice tremulous with emotion.
Adric had become so engrossed in solving the complex equations that would enable him to calculate a course for his journey through E-Space that he had quite forgotten about his friends outside. When eventually he did look up at the viewer it was blank.
The trio had vanished. '
Now
where have you got to?' he muttered exasperatedly.
Suddenly a piercing, high-pitched whine filled the TARDIS control chamber.
Adric winced and clapped his hands tightly over his ears. The sound seemed to slice right through his body. In desperation he sprang up and darted round and round the main control console, peering at display panels and jabbing his fingers at touch buttons and switches. But it was no use. The unbearable noise persisted and soon Adric began to feel very very sick. 'Where ... Where is it coming from?' he moaned.
The noise transformed itself into a penetrating throbbing which shook Adric so violently he began to fear that his flesh would be literally shaken from his bones...
Not far away, the two ghostly silhouettes were twisting effortlessly through the tunnels, unhindered by the darkness and with the air fizzing around them. Their secret
was in danger and they must protect it. That was their sole function, their whole existence. Their systems were perfectly attuned. As they swiftly approached the cavern in the furthest depths of the mountain the interference in the TARDIS's mechanisms relentlessly increased.
The troopers and their three prisoners had soon cleared enough of the rockfall to reveal a heavy metallic plate, about a metre square, set into the foot of the cavern wall. Scott examined it carefully for a moment and then went over to the Doctor.
'So this is your secret,' he said challengingly. 'For this you are prepared to kill innocent people in cold blood.'
The Doctor gestured helplessly. 'I have already explained - we know nothing about it,' he protested wearily.
'Listen, we're telling you the truth,' Tegan yelled into the Lieutenant's face.
Scott shoved her roughly aside and thrust his laser against the Doctor's neck.
'Open the hatch, Doctor!' he ordered.
'I can't!' shouted the Doctor.
The charging circuits inside the tube whirred menacingly and the Doctor froze and kept silent.
Nyssa stepped forward. 'I could try,' she offered.
'Stay where you are!' Scott rapped harshly. 'I want the Doctor to open it.'
At that moment there was a shout of panic from the other side of the chamber, followed by a fierce burst of laser fire. The group by the hatch spun round to see a trooper firing frantically into the mouth of the tunnel leading to the surface and backing away from something with a look of terrified disbelief, distorting his young face like a stocking mask. The working lights in the cavern roof dimmed and the air began to sizzle like hot fat. There was a brilliant explosive flash from the tunnel mouth, the trooper's weapon flew out of his hands and his uniform crumpled like an empty sack amid billows of rubbery smoke.
For an instant, the horrified onlookers were paralysed. Then Scott yelled an order and everyone took cover behind the rocks and abandoned equipment. Professor Kyle desperately squeezed herself into a niche near Scott, the Doctor and his two friends. She was visibly shaking as she stared at the two black figures which suddenly came stalking into the cavern from the tunnel. They stopped and raised their left arms in front of them. A rapid staccato burst of searing flashes shot out of their hands and sent sharp splinters of rock showering over the hidden troopers.
'It's them . . . I remember now . . . the flash and the tingling... they came up behind us...' Kyle had begun to mutter.
'It was those things that attacked you?' Scott murmured.
The Professor nodded. 'It all happened so very quickly...'
'Do you know why they attacked you?' the Doctor asked, watching the two figures move very slowly, with sinister gracefulness, into the centre of the huge cavern, then pause, their egglike heads swaying from side to side as if seeking out their prey.
Kyle shook her head. 'What in heaven's name
are
they?' she whispered incredulously.
'Androids,' the Doctor replied without hesitation. 'That's why they didn't register on your cardioneurological detector, Lieutenant.'
'Are they yours?' Scott asked, his voice a mixture of awe and suspicion.
The Doctor smiled ruefully. 'Certainly not, Lieutenant. You'll find that they will eliminate me just as readily as you or anyone else here.' The Doctor snatched off his hat and then straightened up very carefully in order to peer through a gap in the rocks that gave a better view of the creatures.
'But why attack us?' the Professor shrugged. 'There's no reason.'
'Oh yes, there's a reason all right,' the Doctor murmured with a frown, 'and whoever or whatever is controlling those creatures knows exactly what it is.'
The heads of the androids had tilted slightly back and they were now scanning slowly back and forth behind their outstretched arms.
Tegan shivered. 'It's just as if they were sniffing us out,' she breathed.
'I wonder whose bloodhounds they are?' the Doctor muttered grimly, chewing the brim of his hat as he watched the macabre ballet in the middle of the cavern.
Somewhere just beyond the outer edges of the solar system, deep in the innermost recesses of a gigantic spacecraft, two silver figures were staring intently at a hazy three-dimensional image resembling a hologram. The image was being created at the focus of three telescopic projectors set at an angle to one another and all aligned towards the centre of a large disc suspended beneath them. The ghostly scene hovering above the disc was panning slowly to and fro and it showed the interior of a cavern strewn with rocks and scattered equipment.
One of the two silver figures was considerably larger than the other, but both resembled humans in having heads, torsos and limbs. The rigid mask-like faces had eyeless sockets and immobile mouth-like apertures, but no noses. They had no ears, but a network of wires and pipes connecting a bulging section on each side of their heads to a similar bulge on the top. The limbs were jointed like human ones, but were much thicker and more powerfully tubular, and the arms terminated in enormous hands like steel gauntlets. Tubes ran snaking over the hard metallic surfaces of their bodies from flat, box-like units protected by gratings which were fitted onto their chests. From these units there issued a continuous rhythmic hissing noise, almost like human breathing. Similar tubes led into a large cylindrical powerpack set across the back of their shoulders. A kind of control terminal was attached to their abdomens and heavy, blunt-nosed guns were clipped to the figures' belts.
In the darkness surrounding them, an array of weird oscillating humming sounds accompanied a dancing tracery of indicator lights which flashed and pulsed over the walls.
The larger of the two figures reached out a bunched metal hand and made a small adjustment to the control module beneath the softly glowing disc. At once the reddish image under the projectors came to rest. The figure's rhythmic breathing paused momentarily and with a faint leathery creak it leaned forward to examine the outline of the mass of rocks. After a slight stirring of inner mechanisms, the figures spoke in a rasping, hollow, mechanical voice.
'They are there. They must be destroyed. Destroyed at once.' The huge hand hovered above a series of triggering buttons and then descended...
Once again the air in the cavern crackled and the lights dimmed as a fusillade of incandescent flashes burst from the outstretched hands of the two androids. The rocks sheltering the Doctor and the others shattered and flew apart and vicious razor-sharp
fragments whipped in all directions. The troopers returned fire as best they could, but the laser pulses sank harmlessly into the creatures' seemingly indestructible bodies.
'Tell them to concentrate their fire!' the Doctor shouted into the Lieutenant's ear. 'Go for the male first – the centre of the chest.'
Scott yelled instructions and all the troopers aimed and fired simultaneously at the male. The creature raised its right arm to shield its body from the clustered rays.
After a few seconds the arm glowed and then exploded in a shower of sparks. A triumphant cheer rippled among the hidden troopers as the female android seized the male's remaining arm and dragged the creature out of range behind a natural buttress, sending flash after flash ripping into the rocks to cover their retreat.
'How very touching,' the Doctor murmured grimly, 'they seem almost human, don't they?'
As soon as the androids had reached the safety of the buttress, near the mouth of the tunnel lending to the cave where the TARDIS had materialised, the uproar ceased abruptly. Nothing stirred. There was an eerie silence.
'We're trapped,' Scott muttered with a grimace. 'Those things can cover all the exits from there.' He flicked on his radio and tried to contact Walters, but no reply broke through the thick static buzzing from the receiver.
'Surely your friends will realise something's wrong down here?' Tegan said hopefully.
'Sooner or later,' Scott replied tersely.
Tegan glanced at Nyssa. 'Let's hope it's sooner!' she said, trying to sound casual, but feeling very frightened.
The Doctor peered through his spyhole again. 'They're just waiting for us to make a silly move,' he warned. 'I am sure they will attack again.' He crouched down and turned to Kyle. 'Professor, were you and your colleagues working near the rockfall when you were attacked?'