He looked at the globe in front of him and smiled. That was the homing device all right – indicating the presence of the TARDIS. The alien could keep his transmat capsule.
This one was going home by police box.
Turlough returned reluctantly to the dormition chamber.
He had no reason to believe that the younger Brigadier would prove any less blisteringly choleric at his incarceration than would have been the older, and more familiar schoolmaster. But he needed to follow the Doctor’s instructions, if only to guarantee his escape from the ship. At least, with the 1983 Lethbridge-Stewart safely on his way back to Earth, the release of the prisoner behind the icon could hardly upset the Black Guardian. Not that he particularly cared; the owner of the TARDIS would appear to have got the better of the man in black.
As he approached the inner door he saw the open door.
An ominous red glow filled the chamber. Turlough began to shiver.
‘You have failed me!’ The voice of the Black Guardian reverberated angrily in the empty room.
‘No!’ Turlough trembled in the doorway.
‘The Brigadier is free.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘So near the annihilation of the Doctor, and you risk all with your negligence and stupidity.’
So the Doctor had not escaped from the ship at all. ‘I can still keep the two Lethbridge-Stewarts apart,’ pleaded the boy.
When the unseen voice sounded again, it was darker and more terrible than ever before. ‘If you fail me again, I shall destroy you, Turlough!’
The Doctor leaned despondently over the console. There was nothing he could do to clear the ship without hurting the two girls.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Nyssa.
The Doctor was silent.
‘We can’t stay in the TARDIS for ever.’
They all looked up at the scanner with its view of the reception committee outside.
‘Well, Doctor?’ said the Brigadier.
Still without saying a word, the Doctor opened the main doors and walked out of the control room.
The Time Lord stood aloof from the rest of them, his head slightly bowed. It was Nyssa who confronted Mawdryn.
‘You knew that would happen!’
‘Yes, Nyssa.’ Mawdryn spoke with unexpected tenderness. ‘But there was no conspiracy to harm you.’
‘What happens now?’ asked Tegan.
‘You will remain on the ship.’
Tegan was stunned. ‘For the rest of our lives?’
‘You are fortunate,’ said Mawdryn sadly. ‘Your journey will be short. Ours is without end.’
Nyssa and Tegan looked disbelievingly at each other, then turned to the Doctor.
The Doctor said nothing.
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart took a step towards the mutants. ‘We are not leaving those two girls on your ship.’
‘Take them with you in the TARDIS,’ replied Mawdryn, ‘and they will die.’
‘Are you telling me that with all those facilities you can’t come up with some sort of antidote?’
‘We have no restorative for Tegan and Nyssa.’ ‘Doctor, you must have some ideas?’
The Doctor said nothing.
Lethbridge-Stewart turned back to Mawdryn. ‘When we were in the laboratory you claimed the Doctor could help you through that machinery.’
‘Yes, but only of his own free will.’
‘Then he can do the same for Tegan and Nyssa?’
‘That is a question you must ask the Doctor.’
‘Well, Doctor?’ said the Brigadier.
The Doctor said nothing.
The eight mutants stared at the Time Lord.
‘Doctor!’ pleaded Tegan.
‘Doctor!’ begged Nyssa.
‘Take me to your laboratory,’ said the Doctor to Mawdryn.
The procession advanced slowly along the corridor.
First, seven mutants in their finery; then Mawdryn and the Brigadier – an odd partner in his hacking jacket and cavalry twills; then the girls; and finally the Doctor, proud and silent, like a condemned man determined to die with dignity.
Mawdryn spoke the Doctor’s epitaph as he walked with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. ‘The Doctor is a Time Lord, but he chose to involve himself; soon he will be a Time Lord no longer. That is his reward for compassion.’
Just as he had thought — the TARDIS had come back to the ship! The Brigadier from 1977 hurried into the control room. It was deserted. What were those two young women up to now!
Turlough had seen the procession enter the laboratory.
That was one Brigadier accounted for. Now he had only to track down the younger Lethbridge-Stewart.
‘Doctor!’
Turlough held his breath.
‘Doctor? Tegan? Nyssa?’
The voice came from a nearby corridor. Turlough crept towards his quarry.
All eight mutants were once more connected to the regenerator. So, too, were the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan.
‘
You
will activate the energy transfer, Brigadier,’
instructed Mawdryn. ‘It will take several seconds for the charge in the machine to build up. You will read off the countdown to the moment of exchange.’
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart nodded grimly. Tegan and Nyssa glanced nervously at each other.
‘Do not be afraid,’ said the mutant wired up beside them. ‘When the moment comes we will all share in the life-force of the Doctor.’
‘Our mutation will end,’ said another, his eyes shining with expectation.’
‘And you will no longer be contaminated.’
‘And the Doctor won’t be a Time Lord any more,’ said Nyssa guiltily.
The Doctor, electrodes festooned round his head, stared stoically ahead.
‘My brothers in exile.’ Mawdryn’s voice shook with emotion. ‘We approach the ending!’ He pointed to the master control. ‘Activate, Brigadier!’
There was a low whine as the power began to surge within the regenerator.
‘Twenty seconds,’ announced Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
‘Brigadier!’ shouted Turlough, running wildly down the corridor. Somehow he had missed the other man. He felt the fury of the Black Guardian possess him.
‘So near the supreme moment!’ The voice, thundering in his brain, seemed to vibrate the whole ship. ‘The Brigadiers must not converge. Find him! Find the Brigadier at once!’
The younger Brigadier was intrigued by the strange sound coming from the narrow side-passage. ‘Brigadier!’
Someone was racing towards him down the main corridor. Turlough again! He would deal with that young man later. For the moment, there was something very strange going on in the brightly lit room at the end of the passageway.
‘Ten, nine, eight...’
He could hear a voice, curiously familiar, but difficult to place.
‘Brigadier!’ Turlough had almost caught up.
‘Stop him!’ howled the Black Guardian, ‘or I shall destroy you all!’
‘Seven,, six...’
‘Brigadier, come back!’ Turlough grabbed the arm of the man in the blazer, but was pushed roughly aside.
The Brigadier from 1977 entered the laboratory.
‘Five, four...’ The Brigadier from 1983 read off the final countdown.
The intruder was momentarily hypnotised by the spectacle of eight mutants, conjoined in a ganglion of tubes and wires. Then he caught sight of a young man in a frock-coat, also connected to the apparatus. ‘What the devil...!’
‘Three...’
The newcomer took a step forward, and, to his disgust and horror, saw Tegan and Nyssa lashed to the same devilish torture machine.
‘Two...’
‘Brigadier, get out of here!’ yelled the young man. The Brigadier took no notice, but advanced towards the swine at the controls.
‘One second...’
‘What do you think you’re doing!’
The operator turned.
For a moment time stood still. Brigadier stared at Brigadier, then, as their hands touched, there was a blinding flash and a tremendous explosion.
8
Turlough ran and ran and ran, as if perpetual movement would keep the vengeance of the Black Guardian from him.
He finally stopped from sheer exhaustion, feeling strangely light-headed. He took out the cube; it was cracked. Was this all part of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect? Could he even be... free?
Turlough set off, purposefully, in the direction of the TARDIS.
Tegan and Nyssa regained consciousness as the smoke was clearing in the laboratory. They opened their eyes to see the Doctor unwiring them from the regenerator.
‘What happened?’ murmured Tegan.
‘An immense discharge of energy as the two Brigadiers came together, exactly synchronising with the moment of transfer.’ The Doctor walked over to examine the body of a man in a blue blazer, lying beside the regenerator.
‘Is the Brigadier dead?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor, in the certain knowledge that the unconscious Lethbridge-Stewart had at least another six years of life ahead of him.
‘Doctor!’ Nyssa had spotted the prone figure of another, older Brigadier, with a totally uncertain future, who lay in his singed sports jacket, on the far side of the laboratory.
The Doctor rushed across and knelt beside the old soldier, feeling anxiously for his pulse. For an agonising moment, he felt nothing. The Doctor groaned. That he should have caused the death of his oldest, most trusted ally on the planet Earth, was unendurable.
Then he felt the faint but steady beat as the Brigadier began to stir. ‘It’s all right, old friend.’
The Brigadier opened his eyes. ‘Sorry, Headmaster,’ he muttered deliriously, ‘touch of vertigo. Won’t happen again.’ He blinked, and was suddenly wide awake. ‘What the devil’s been going on here?’
The Doctor grinned. This was more like the Brigadier of old. ‘Quickly, Nyssa. Take the Brigadier to the TARDIS. Right into the centre and keep him there until I give the all-clear.’ With a few words of encouragement to the confused Lethbridge-Stewart, he bundled them both out through the door.
The Doctor walked back to the regenerator control panel. ‘Amazing – the Brigadier’s timing. A millisecond either way and...’
‘And what?’
‘At the moment of exchange, the power didn’t come from me, after all.’
‘From the Brigadier?’
‘From the TARDIS, really. Through the energy released by the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.’
‘Can Nyssa and I time-travel?’
‘You’re as good as new.’
The Doctor was smiling confidently, and Tegan realised that, most important of all, he was still a Time Lord, with all his powers of regeneration intact.
They looked at the eight mutants. All were lying peacefully, as if asleep, the terrible blemishes gone from their bodies, a look of sublime calm suffusing each face.
‘They’re all dead,’ said Tegan quietly.
‘They would have travelled for the rest of time,’
explained the Doctor. ‘Death was all they wanted.’ As he peered at Mawdryn’s unravaged face, the mutant leader opened his eyes; the life had not entirely drained from him.
‘It is finished, Doctor,’ he whispered. He smiled a smile of utter contentment. ‘Can this be... death?’ His eyes closed, as his unfettered spirit soared to join his comrades, beyond the realms of time and space. It was the ending.
It was an exhausting business carrying the unconscious body of the younger (and thankfully lighter) Lethbridge-Stewart to the TARDIS. Half-way, Tegan and the Doctor had to stop for a rest.
‘By the way,’ said Tegan, suddenly very self-conscious.
‘Thank you.’
‘What?’
‘You were prepared to give up everything for us.’
The Doctor just smiled and stood up. ‘Oh, come on!’
Hardly had they begun to move again when they both came to a sudden halt. All around them the ship was beginning to creak and groan.
‘The ship is dying with the mutants,’ whispered the Doctor. ‘Come on!’ he shouted more urgently. ‘It must be on auto-destruct.’
Jubilee Day, like the day of the Coronation itself, had been wet in the morning, but the clouds had rolled back by lunchtime, and the sun was shining brightly as Doctor Runciman climbed the hill to the obelisk. He wondered what on earth was the point of this mysterious rendezvous with Lethbridge-Stewart.
‘Brigadier!’ he shouted, as he reached the summit.
‘Brigadier!’
Doctor Runciman walked off into the surrounding trees, and subsequently failed to see the blue police box materialise on the other side of the hilltop. By the time he returned from scouting the woods, the Doctor and Tegan had placed the unconscious Lethbridge-Stewart on the grass, and had returned to the TARDIS.
‘Brigadier!’ shouted Doctor Runciman, running towards the recumbent maths master.
The Brigadier groaned.
‘Brigadier, what happened? I came as soon as I got your message.’ He helped his patient to a sitting position.
‘Brigadier, are you all right?’
Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart stared straight ahead over Doctor Runciman’s shoulder. He was still very dizzy, but could see the outline of what looked like a blue police box, which gradually... disappeared.
‘My word, Doctor, you’ve been making a few changes in here!’ The Brigadier, whom Nyssa had been keeping safe at the heart of the TARDIS, walked breezily into the control room.
‘We all have to move with the times.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Haven’t felt so well for...’ The Brigadier laughed. ‘For six years, Doctor!’ At last he understood the reason for his nervous breakdown. He breathed a sigh of relief.
Tegan was laughing too; this was more like the Brigadier she had met on her last visit to Brendon.
The Doctor indicated the flashing column. ‘On our way to 1983. Back to school, Brigadier.’
The Brigadier smiled politely, as if a friendly travel agent had just offered special rates for a round trip on the
Titanic
, or Benton given him first refusal (special favour for you, sir) on some old lady’s Morris Minor. If there had been a tram, a train or a Green Line bus, a dodgem car or a fairy cycle going in his direction, Lethbridge-Stewart would have taken it in preference to the Doctor’s police box. (And Scotsman or no, paid full fare).
The Brigadier knew the TARDIS of old and, as the column slowed and stopped, he wondered where on Earth
— or anywhere in the Universe — they were this time. The Doctor and the two girls escorted him to the door.