Doctor Who: Planet of Fire (14 page)

But while Sam might have been too hot for the wealthy colonists, it was an ideal dumping ground for undesirables from the home planet. The Doctor described to Amyand how his forbears had been brainwashed Trion dissidents, abandoned to fend for themselves amongst the territorial leavings of the Clans; how new arrivals were dumped, mindless in the forbidden lands, and left to wander into the city where they were received as gods by the superstitious tribal community that had sprung up. ‘You see only prisoners fresh from Trion would have the Misos Triangle,’ he explained.

They began to climb again. ‘The entrance to the control centre should be somewhere near here,’ said the Doctor.

‘This must be where Timanov saw the vulcanologist.’

Amyand imagined the effect of the silver engineer on the young Sarn. And he was beginning to understand the passionate faith of the old men. Outsiders
had
come at the Time of Fire–to control the volcano when it became critical. The technicians would have brought gifts–food, tools, supplies of all kind for the prisoners and their descendants. ‘But why did they stop?’ he asked puzzled.

‘Cuts, I expect,’ said the Doctor. ‘They needed to pay for a war or two in their other colonies.’

‘Will they want us back on Trion?’

The Doctor laughed. ‘I expect the new regime will treat you like heroes.’

There was another loud rumble from the mountain, this time deeper and more sustained. The black smoke grew thicker and the crater above them glowed red. ‘We’re too late,’ cried the Doctor.

A thin, crimson tongue of lava gently licked over the volcano’s peak. Slowly, but inexorably the flaming stream oozed down the mountainside. The ground throbbed.

Smoke and steam and asphyxiating gases burst from the earth all about them. The noise was ear-splitting. The Doctor and Amyand staggered to a halt, retching in the poisonous air. The way ahead was blocked by the flaring cataract. Already the heat was unbearable.

‘We’ll have to go back,’ yelled Amyand.

They turned to retrace their steps. But as they retreated it seemed to get hotter. The reason was soon only too horrifyingly obvious; another all-consuming, incandescent cascade of molten rock poured from the crater, trapping them between two widening streams. The Doctor looked round for a way of escape. Directly below them the two lava flows were about to join together. They would have to go up and hope to find the entrance in the mountain before it was too late.

The ground immediately above the path was almost sheer, but there was a small ledge about ten feet above them. Amyand climbed onto the Doctor’s shoulders and tried to haul himself up. But the porous rock crumbled in his grasp. He tried again, setting off an avalanche of pumice which poured on top of them. The little island between the two lava flows grew smaller. The heat was now almost unbearable. The Doctor tried to push Amyand further up...

‘It’s no good, Doctor,’ cried Amyand, sliding back yet again.

‘Doctor! Doctor!’ There was another voice somewhere, in the smoke above them. The Doctor peered up and saw Peri’s grimy face looking over the ledge. She leaned down and grabbed Amyand’s hand. The young Sarn scrambled up, and taking off his tunic, used it as a rope to haul up the Doctor.

‘Quick,’ shouted Peri. ‘Over here.’ She led the way along the ledge and into a narrow opening in the side of the rock.

They lay on the floor of the tunnel, exhausted, while smoke and fire blotted out the entrance behind them. It was the second time the American had saved the Doctor’s life, and it was lucky for all of them she had been unable to find her way off the ledge and down the mountain before the eruption.

Peri herself was delighted to be reunited with her friend from the police box. The Doctor would be able to deal with the Master and his Tin Man; then they would all escape in the other travelling machine. She quickly recounted her adventure with the lilliputian Master. ‘He’s still inside the TARDIS,’ she explained as they got to their feet and hurried along the tunnel. ‘Running about like a rat in a hayloft.’

‘He must have had an accident with the Tissue Compression Eliminator,’ exclaimed the Doctor, glad at last to know the nature of the Master’s incapacitation. He grinned mischieviously. There was a delightful irony in his old enemy being so perfectly hoist with his own petard.

‘Why wasn’t he killed?’ asked Peri, who had seen for herself the devastating effect of the little black twig.

‘Must have escaped the full impact. Besides, he’s a Time Lord.’

‘A Time Lord?’ Peri was wondering just what race of supermen she was dealing with.

The rocky corridor led them straight to the seismic control centre. ‘A masterpiece of Trion engineering!’

whispered the Doctor as he surveyed the machinery in the cavern. He spotted the only too familiar yellow column and ran to it. In the doorway lay Kamelion in an unrecognisable heap, fizzing peacefully. `Keep an eye on him.’ said the Doctor to Amyand and raced to the control panel in the centre of the huge cave.

‘Where are you going?’ cried Peri, who had expected the Doctor to hunt the Master in the TARDIS.

‘I must slow down the eruption!’ shouted the Doctor.

‘The Master’s interference has unstabilised the seismic machinery.’ He began, tentatively, to adjust the position of some of the levers. ‘If I override the automatic controls I might be able to delay the worst of it.’

‘Can’t you stop it?’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘The Master has already triggered a massive surge of numismaton from the planet’s core. When that hits the surface it will disrupt the inhibition system altogether.’ He glanced at one of the monitor screens with its view of the city in the valley below. ‘There will be devastation.’

Gradually, the Doctor learned how to generate a counterforce of the volcano’s own energy that could check the discharge from the magma chamber. The fragile equilibrium established, the rumbling grew less aggressive.

The Doctor checked the readings and scanned the monitor screens. He breathed a sigh of relief: the lava flow had petered out. ‘That should hold back the eruption for a while. Long enough, at least, for the Sarns to escape.’ He followed Peri towards the yellow TARDIS. ‘Now for the Master.’

Amyand looked up from his vigil over Kamelion’s shimmering body. ‘No change, Doctor.’ The Doctor nodded. It seemed the Master had lost control of his only friend. He led the way into the Corinthian column.

The cabinet was still lying exactly where it had fallen, but the Doctor went straight to the console and began to strip out one of the components. ‘Exchange is no robbery,’

he murmured as he removed the temporal limiter with which he could repair his own machine. ‘Now for the laboratory,’ he whispered, and tiptoed towards the cabinet, keeping clear of the open side. As soon as he reached the miniaturised compartment he seized it and turned it upright, as if it was a snare containing some wild animal.

The Doctor gasped as he peered over the little wall. He had not prepared himself for the shock of seeing his old enemy so cut down to size. Could that really be the supreme adversary, whose evil purposes he had thwarted across the centuries: that little doll in the velvet suit?

The minuscule Master got, once more, to his feet and scowled up at the giant Doctor, who loomed over his laboratory, flanked by an equally massive Peri and Amyand. ‘So what does it feel like to have a taste of your own medicine?’ boomed the Doctor.

‘I live, Doctor!’ piped the pygmy Gallifreyan in shrill defiance.

The Doctor felt an unworthy thrill of pure vindictiveness. Àlbeit in somewhat reduced circumstances,’ he jeered at his humiliated rival.

‘I shall soon be restored,’ boasted the little man. ‘To profit from my research.’ Without turning his head from the Doctor’s gaze, he swivelled his pin-head eyes towards the metamorphosis projector he had finished repairing the second before his laboratory had been righted. ‘Come, my Karelion,’ he whispered under his breath. ‘Revive! Revive!’

The Doctor squinted at the matchbox workbench. ‘You were experimenting with the Tissue Compression Eliminator.’

‘To increase its power a hundredfold.’

‘You made it too powerful for your own good.’

‘A small design problem.’

‘And a very small Master!’

The elfin figure clenched his little fists, wishing he had annihilated the Doctor in the Hall of Fire.

‘That’s why you needed Kamelion, isn’t it?’

The Master sneered at the Doctor who had so naively trusted the silver factotum. ‘I have lodged in the mind of that slave since our fateful meeting on Xeriphas.’

The Doctor remembered Karnelion’s extraordinary seizure back on Earth. ‘The scream in the TARDIS. He even
felt
your pain.’

‘And came instantly to my help!’ The Master began to laugh. ‘Now with the next surge of numismaton, all is prepared for my supreme renewal.’

`Kill him!’ cried Amyand, amazed at the arrogance of the evil pixie. But the Doctor did not move. ‘What are you waiting for?’

The Master knew the Doctor better than the militant Sarn. ‘Just as he has waited for centuries,’ he mocked.

‘Second rank genius crippled by moral scruple. How could the Doctor ever destroy
me
!’

Amyand did not appreciate the nicety of a rhetorical question and gave an immediate answer. ‘By wringing your neck as if it were a rat or a snake. And if he won’t do it,
I
will!’

‘No!’ screeched the Master.

‘Out of the way, Doctor.’ Amyand pushed the impotent Time Lord aside. ‘I owe you a favour.’

The Master screamed like a gin-trapped rabbit as the huge, red, calloused hands came down on him. He recoiled from the unnatural body heat, gagging at the stench of the enlarged sweat glands. He wriggled furiously as the young man’s fingers curled around him like the coils of an enormous boa constrictor.

‘Away from the box!’ A familiar voice sounded from across the control room.

The Doctor, Amyand and Peri swung round. Standing in the doorway, Tissue Compression Eliminator in his hand, was a full-sized Master.

11

As Turlough hurried back towards the city, he was relieved to see the eruption had stopped. The Doctor must have reached the seismic control centre and would soon have his TARDIS working. The boy was tempted to escape in the police box from his appointment with the Captain of the Trion personnel carrier that would soon be landing. But he decided he had been a fugitive long enough. Ex-Ensign Commander Turlough would obey the orders he had just received from Executive Control.

‘You saved our lives.’ Roskal tried to reassure his sad companion. ‘They can’t punish you after that.’

‘Just so long as they don’t send me back to Brendon,’

replied Turlough, smiling bravely.

‘Is that a prison?’

‘Far worse!’ he groaned, thinking back to the cold showers and compulsory games of his
alma mater
. ‘It’s an English Public School.’

Kamelion, once more the Master’s familiar, laughed at the dismay of the Doctor. ‘For a fleeting moment I was in your power,’ he jeered. The robot’s human hand tightened on the Tissue Compression Eliminator.

‘I hardly need to remind you what will happen if you use that thing in here.’ The Doctor gave a meaningful look around the TARDIS control room to the Master’s diminished laboratory.

‘That will not be necessary.’ The robot waved the Doctor, together with Peri and Amyand, out through the double doors.

‘He’s let us go!’ exclaimed the American as they emerged from the Corinthian column.

But the Doctor knew the cruel Time Lord had intended no mercy. ‘He needs to take the TARDIS into that circle of flame.’ He pointed to the corona on the other side of the control centre, where the fire rose through the cavern from a grid in the floor. ‘When the next surge comes he’ll be surrounded by the restorative gas.’

‘But you’ve removed that limiter thing. His TARDIS is stuck.’

The Doctor explained how the Master could replace the missing component with the same part he had previously stolen from the police box. But at least there would be a few moments before the yellow machine was operational–

time to organise their own escape. The Doctor took the newly acquired temporal limiter from his pocket.

‘Amyand, go back with Peri and give this to Turlough.’

‘Look!’ Peri pointed to the flames now burning in the entrance tunnel.

The Doctor groaned. ‘Gas roust have seeped in and ignited.’

‘We’re trapped!’

A flash of silver beside some wall lockers caught the Doctor’s eye. ‘Thermal suits! Those Trion vulcanologists have just saved our lives.’

‘One of our lives,’ corrected Peri. ‘Two of these things are for midgets.’

But the Doctor, running across the cavern, had already spotted the single intact kit beside the miniaturised clothes. ‘Don’t worry. So long as one of us can get the limiter back to Turlough, my TARDIS will do the rest.’

‘
You
must go,’ said Peri, picking up the silver suit.

‘No,’ said the Doctor, opening out the protective fabric.

‘I’ve got some modifications to do to that control unit.’ He turned to the Unbeliever. ‘Your turn to play Logar, Amyand.’

The young Sam was soon transformed into the same god-like silver figure that the Doctor had conjured up for the benefit of the Elders in his TARDIS.

‘Good luck!’ shouted Peri, as the Doctor closed the helmet.

Amyand smiled bravely and began to plod across the cavern in the direction of the tunnel. He paused for only a moment before plunging into the flickering fire.

The Doctor was already kneeling by an open panel in the side of the control desk with several components in his hand.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Trying to raise some local radiation.’ He pulled one of the units apart. ‘If I can induce a sympathetic reaction in Kamelion’s psycho-circuits he’ll have an electronic heart attack.’

There was a grinding sound from across the cavern. Peri stared in disbelief. Though she had now travelled inside two TARDISes, she had never yet seen a solid object disappear into thin air. One moment the flitted Corinthian column was in the corner of the cave, the next it had vanished... To appear, she noted with alarm, in the centre of the corona.