‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
She laughed. ‘Well, good on you, Doctor. You’re in luck!
That’s exactly what I did notice. Nothing! Come on, what’s this all about?’
The Doctor was laughing too. ‘Well you see...’
Footsteps. The Brigadier appeared in the doorway.
The Doctor lifted his little silver case and pressed the button again.
‘Ah, there you are, Doctor...’ said the Brigadier.
And vanished.
‘Blimey!’ said Sarah.
Footsteps. The Brigadier appeared in the doorway.
‘Ah, there you are, Doctor...’ he said, and vanished once more.
‘I’ve got it!’ said Sarah. ‘It’s a time loop!’
The Brigadier appeared again. This time the Doctor didn’t press the button.
‘Ah, there you are, Doctor,’ he said.
‘Why, so I am,’ said the Doctor, putting away the sonic screwdriver. ‘Except that I would have called it a temporal recursion,’ he went onto Sarah, ‘but you’re quite right. A time loop. And you never noticed a thing when I aimed it at you?’
‘Not a sausage.’
‘The temporal recursion algorithm is the basic default setting for the relativity circuit. If you get that right, everything else falls into place.’
The Brigadier was waiting patiently. ‘It’s just been pointed out to me that the sun is over the yard arm,’ he said. ‘Our hosts have invited us for a snifter before lunch. You too, Sarah.’
‘Great! I’ll be right along.’
Sarah returned to her cabin. Having dumped the blanket and book on her bunk, she pulled a pair of - less provocative
- shorts over her bikini, and found a clean shirt (beautifully ironed by Wong Chang, who happily moonlighted as dhobi-man).
Funny that, she thought, the Brigadier calling her Sarah.
He didn’t often address her by her first name. Depended on the circs. When formality was appropriate it was ‘Miss Smith’.
Like the junior officers saying ‘sir’ to the Number One on the bridge, and calling him ‘Pete’ in the wardroom.
With the Doctor, anything could happen at any time. Time loops, for example. That’s what made him so exciting. On the other hand, you knew where you were with the Brigadier. It made you feel sort of safe.
Alex was pretty certain that the Smith girl would start her walkabout just after seven o’clock, as usual. Certainly she seemed to have established a routine for herself that hadn’t varied for the past three days. It had been tricky, keeping an eye on her without it being noticed. But, bit by bit, Alex had managed to build up a picture of her activities - or lack of them; she seemed to spend a lot of her time lying in the sun, or reading in the shade.
The trouble was, she was hardly ever out of sight of somebody or other. It was supposed to be a skeleton crew, but the number of seamen on board was surely excessive, far more than you’d get on a merchant ship. Even when she was sunbathing on the upper bridge, all by herself, there was no way up there that wasn’t in view of somebody most of the time.
On the other hand, before breakfast, people were either in their cabins or else had very specific jobs to do. And the upper bridge area was always deserted at that time of the morning, as it was most of the day. It must be used only when they were going into action, or entering harbour or something. If he got up there early enough on the fourth morning, nobody would know. He’d be able to slip up there -
and down again - quite safely. This would be his last chance.
According to the Navigating Officer, they would probably arrive at Stella Island the next day.
So, on the fourth morning, he slipped out just when it started to get light, and established himself in the after corner of the open bridge, where the starboard searchlight was rigged. He peeped over the edge. Just as he’d estimated from his quick recce the previous day, the overhang was immediately above where she came out of the door in her clockwise perambulation.
Keeping well down, just in case, he loosened even further the large butterfly fastening of the bracket that supported the heavy searchlight, unscrewing it until it was hanging by a thread.
This time he had to be certain.
Everybody on board knew better than to wake up the Skipper unless it was really necessary. If he didn’t turn up for his watch, it would be quietly covered by either Pete or Bob, who, although he was only a sub-lieutenant, already had his Watch-keeping Certificate and was fully qualified to be in charge.
It wasn’t that he woke with a hangover. His body was long habituated to a bloodstream that could have been used to make a passable cocktail without the addition of further alcohol. But until he’d knocked back the half-tumbler of gin that always stood by his bedside, he had such a filthy temper that whoever had woken him would be lucky to live to regret it.
Sarah’s first invasion of his territory had made no impression on him. His snoring didn’t falter for a second. Nor did he stir on the second day.
On the third day, however, she was becoming rather care-less. As there’d been no reaction from the cabin, her passage through the little corridor was getting faster and faster, and the click of the doors as they closed was becoming a small thump as she let them swing to. On each circuit he half woke up, blearily saw her going by with a sort of obscure irritation that subsided as soon as she disappeared, and fell back into the heavy torpor that now passed for sleep.
But on the fourth morning...
The footsteps were unmistakable. Quicker than ever, and much faster than anybody would normally walk on board, they alerted Alex Whitbread at once; and the sound of the door below, which had become almost a slam by now, told him when she’d passed beneath the corner of the bridge.
It was essential to get the timing right. He was in no hurry.
He would be able to hear the sound of the first door when she came into the corridor, and by watching a couple of times he would be able to judge exactly when she would be coming out the other side.
Here she came, on her second lap. Through the first door, one, two, three... and, yes, out of the second door. About three and a half seconds then, and as the door swung to, she was a couple of paces from where the searchlight would land.
Couldn’t be better.
Another check. Just the same. The only snag was that if he was peering over, he wasn’t in the right position to heave the thing over the edge.
Ah! He could go by the sound of the door. If he gave the thing the lift and the shove it needed as soon as he heard the second slam...
Right. Next time...
This particular morning, the CO was so far gone into his accustomed abyss (nearly two bottles deep), that the first couple of bangs hardly registered. It was the second pair that roused him, and when he caught a glimpse of Sarah - and what was happening filtered through - the fury started to boil up inside him.
By her third time round, he was heaving himself out of bed.
He had to stand for a while to get his bearings, and once he’d got to the door, she was back again. He staggered into the corridor, but he was too late - she was already at the second door. He was just in time to catch it as it swung behind her.
Out he went, incandescent with rage, and as the door slammed behind him, he stopped and shouted after her retreating back.
‘Hey! You!’
They were the last words that Lieutenant-Commander Hogben ever spoke.
* * *
The First Lieutenant closed the Bible that he’d borrowed (surprisingly) from Petty Officer Hardy. Queen’s Regs would certainly say that they should have had a Prayer Book with the right form of words for a burial at sea, but no doubt a reading of the Twenty-third Psalm would do just as well. If the Lord was a shepherd, his flock must surely include a blackish sheep like Hogben.
He nodded to the Cox’n, and at a murmured order the door of the galley, which had been pressed into service as a stretcher, was tilted up, and the weighted body slid from under the White Ensign that hid it from view. A small splash, and it disappeared into the depths of the Indian Ocean.
‘Make and mend this afternoon for everybody who’s not on watch, Cox’n.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
The least he could do for the poor sod they’d just sent down to Davey Jones was to give the crew the afternoon off. Maybe they’d treat it as a celebration, but it would perhaps make them remember him a bit more kindly.
As the crew dispersed, and Bob Simkins went back to the bridge to get the
Hallaton
under way again, he turned to the Brigadier. ‘Sir. I would be obliged if you and your party would have a word with me in the wardroom. In ten minutes?’
He didn’t wait for an answer. Although the sun was sinking towards the horizon, this was no invitation for a pre-dinner noggin. The authority in his voice made that quite clear.
Ever since Hogben’s death Sarah had been struggling with the irrational thought that it was her fault. The searchlight must have been loosened by the rolling of the ship. And she could have been underneath it when it fell. If she hadn’t kept going through the CO’s corridor, if she hadn’t disturbed him by letting the doors bang, he’d still be alive.
Pete Andrews didn’t ask them to sit down. He stood waiting for them in the traditional pose of the Royal Navy officer on semi-official duty, with his hands clasped behind his back, like Prince Philip. There had been some discussion as to whether Alex Whitbread should be counted as one of their party. The First Lieutenant didn’t seem to be bothered by his absence.
He got straight to the point, without any preamble. ‘I would trust Rogers with my life. In fact, there have been a couple of occasions... Well, never mind that. If he says that he’d made that searchlight secure, I believe him. This was no accident.’
‘I quite agree with you,’ said the Doctor.
The Brigadier looked doubtful. ‘I know that the Commanding Officer was hardly the most popular man on the ship, but how could anybody have known that he would be there?’
‘Ah. See what you mean,’ he went on after a moment, with a glance at Sarah.
Sarah suddenly got the point as well. ‘If it wasn’t an accident at all, then...’
‘Oh God!’ she said, and sat down. There was only one person on board who could want her dead.
‘I can’t conceive of any motive that would make any member of my crew wish to harm Sarah,’ went on Andrews.
‘So one of you must be responsible. The question is, which one? And why?’
The Doctor started to speak, but the First Lieutenant held up a hand to stop him and went straight on, in a grim, official way that made his anger very apparent. ‘I have of course made a signal to London, and they’ve confirmed my position as acting Commanding Officer. I reported my view of the matter, and I fully expected to be ordered to return forthwith for a full investigation. Instead, I was informed that the original orders would stand, and that we were to place the ship, and the ship’s company, entirely at your disposal, Brigadier.’
‘This is a warship. We have been on active service in the South China Seas. We have a full complement of gunnery, and four surface-to-surface missiles, which, thank God, we have never had to use. We’re ready for anything you can ask of us.’
‘But I have to tell you that I have no intention of putting my people at risk without knowing exactly what’s going on -’
The Brigadier started to speak, but Andrews held up his hand to stop him. He hadn’t finished.
‘And I wish to make it perfectly clear that I consider it not only discourteous but dangerous in the extreme that I have been kept in the dark up to this point.’
Sarah could hardly blame him for feeling cross. In spite of the fact that he’d been second-in-command, he’d had the responsibility of running the ship. From what she’d gathered, nobody else had been told because the Captain had insisted.
Typical of the sort of man he’d been. Basically incompetent, and frightened of giving away his authority in case he was found out.
Even after Pete had had a look at the photograph that started the whole thing, he took a lot of convincing. And why not? Even though Sarah knew the whole story already, she found it difficult to believe that it was not only the two hundred cult members who were in danger but the entire population of the world.
Even the Brigadier, it seemed, shared their doubts. ‘The bodies on Hampstead Heath are evidence that we’re dealing with something quite alien, certainly,’ he said to the Doctor,
‘and the photograph bears out your hypothesis that this Skang creature is probably responsible, and I suppose there must be a number of them, but...’
The Doctor, obviously irritated, interrupted him. ‘If this were a simple incursion onto this planet of a bunch of predatory aliens, using humans as food, the pattern of events would be quite different. To start with, there would be reports of many many more similar deaths.’
‘Even if they had managed to get control of a group of humans to protect them, as it seems this lot has, they would use them merely as a cover. Ask yourselves this question?
Given what we know, why should they go to all the trouble of transporting so many of their potential victims thousands of miles away from the prying eyes of the world?’