It certainly didn’t seem likely.
The Doctor stood up. His face was grave. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? You’d better get a shot of it.’ But before she could even get the camera out, his head snapped round.
Voices. Somebody was coming.
As they crouched in the shadow of the nearest bush, hardly concealed, the words became clear. An Australian voice:
‘...round the entire perimeter. What about you?’
‘Niente.
Not a thing. I think Signor Cabot is maybe a little punch-drunk, eh?’
The voices were getting nearer. Sarah shrank back, as if to hide herself more. The Doctor pressed her arm to stop her moving.
Whoever they were, they were just around the corner.
There was no hope of getting away. Their only hope was to keep as still as possible.
‘The sooner the Limey ship gets going, the sooner I’ll...’
Two guards had come round the corner and stopped dead.
‘Holy cow!’ said the Australian.
Not exactly an appropriate reaction from a devotee, thought the Doctor. And as for the other crossing himself...
‘Madonna mia!
It’s... him...!’ he breathed.
They both knelt down and the Aussie reverently touched the Skang as if to make sure that it was real.
‘He is dead, isn’t he?’
‘You’d better believe it, Giovanni, me old cobber.’ As he spoke, he was digging out his walkie-talkie. ‘Brother Will, this is Brother Ed. Do you read me? Over?’
No reply.
‘Brother Will, come in please. Over.’
Giovanni looked up, startled. ‘Say that again!’
‘What?’
‘Say something, anything. Keep talking.’
‘What you on about?’
‘Do it.’
He shrugged and spoke into the handset. ‘Mary had a little lamb. One two three four five...’
As he spoke, Giovanni was feeling through the robe of the dead Skang, and soon pulled out another handset, which announced its presence with the piercing shriek of howl-round.
The counting stopped. In the silence, the two guards looked at each other, nonplussed.
‘We’d better get it up to the temple. Mother Hilda’ll go spare. If the Skang is dead, that fouls up the reward ceremony completely.’
As he spoke, the Doctor felt an involuntary movement from Sarah. He tightened his grip on her arm, and as soon as the guards disappeared round the corner carrying the body, he slipped back into the jungle.
‘What was it? What did they say?’ he hissed to Sarah as soon as she caught him up.
‘It was the word “reward”! The reward ceremony. That’s what Jeremy said they were coming here for, to get their reward!’
That settled it. It was all falling into place. ‘Right,’ said the Doctor. ‘One way or another, it’s got to be stopped. The guard was wrong. It’ll go ahead even if one of them is dead. There must be at least twenty other Skang to take part.’
She still looked bewildered.
‘You still don’t get it, do you? That was the significance of the walkie-talkie. They were calling Brother Will, weren’t they?’
‘You mean that the dead Skang...’
‘...wasn’t all that he seemed. Brother Will fell from the cliff, or was pushed maybe, and when he landed and was killed, he resumed his real shape.’
‘Every one of those teachers, from Mother Hilda down, is a Skang!’
Bob Simkins, staring unseeingly at his cup of black coffee, removed his head from his hands, and said, ‘Do you have to make such a bloody clatter with your knife and fork?’
Sorree!’ sang Chris, his mouth full of sausage and fried egg.
Funny, he thought, he seemed to be the only one who was finding life as jolly as they all had yesterday. Never mind about last night’s piss-up, they’d come back on board as happy as a crowd of soccer fans after they’d won the cup.
And now - well, the blue mist had long gone, but it was as if the whole ship was sitting in a black fog of gloom. When they were about to go home! But then he’d never been able to understand why people fluctuated up and down the way they did.
The CO had sent a message to say that he wasn’t to be disturbed until it was time to weigh anchor; the Brigadier, the Doctor and Sarah hadn’t surfaced at all; and if Bob, as the acting Number One, hadn’t had to get up to make the ship ready for sea, he’d still be crashed out, no question.
It had been a good party.
The Cox’n appeared in the doorway. Bob didn’t even open his eyes. ‘Excuse me, sir...’
Bob sat up with a jerk. ‘Ah yes, Cox’n. Everything in hand?’
‘I couldn’t say that, sir. The Doctor and Miss Smith have gone ashore, it seems.’
‘Oh no!’
‘The small launch has gone, and both their cabins are empty. I checked. Shall I send someone across to chase them up?’
Bob groaned. ‘The good Lord protect me from the clever clogs of this world. You’d think he’d know better... No. We’ll leave it as late as possible. He’s aware that we’re sailing on the tide.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
‘Better tell the Brigadier, though.’
‘Wake him up, sir?’
‘If necessary.’
Rather you than me, thought Chris, mopping up his egg yolk with a bit of toast.
It made a sort of sense, thought Sarah, as she hastily wound her uncomfortable way back through the jungle. That would be why Alex Whitbread was so keen to get back. He was cut off from his own kind. He must have been left in Bombay by mistake.
And the way he’d reacted when she’d tried to take his photograph in London - presumably it would have shown him as he really was.
But of course! That’s exactly what had happened! The Polaroid she’d managed to snatch through the curtain was a shot of Brother Alex without his disguise - if that’s what you’d call it.
‘You mean the Skang are shape-shifters?’ she’d said, after she’d recovered from the initial shock of the Doctor’s revelation.
In some of the tales with which the Doctor had whiled away their previous tedious trips through the Time Vortex, he had told her of his various encounters with those strange beings who could change their shape as readily as the chameleon its colour. For that matter, he’d told her, the TARDIS herself should have been an automated equivalent, if only one of her circuits hadn’t given up the ghost - just as the relativity circuit had.
‘Shape-shifters? Well... Like so many questions, the answer has to be yes and no.’ He’d spoken impatiently, urgently.
‘This is something different. But we haven’t got time to go into it now. You must get back to the ship as fast as you can and tell the Brigadier that things are about to come to a head. It’s time for action. He must remount his raiding party
- but double it in size - treble it. Every available man! It may be hopeless. After all, we have no idea what powers these aliens have. But we can’t wait to find out.’
‘Show him your photos and tell him what we’ve discovered.
Everything. Tell him that I was right. The future of the human race does lie in our hands... and not at some time in the future. Now!’
‘But... but I don’t know everything. I mean, what do you think is going to happen?’
It couldn’t be more clear. There’s going to be a mass ingurgitation.’
‘A what?’
‘The disciples are going to get their reward all right. By the end of today there’ll be nothing left inside their skins but their bones.’
Jeremy! And all of those poor kids!
‘But that’s not the worst of it. I’m convinced that this is only an advance party. If the Skang manage this successfully, there won’t be just twenty of them, there’ll be thousands; and by then it’ll be too late. They mustn’t even start this “reward ceremony”. You must make Lethbridge-Stewart understand that. He must do whatever is necessary to prevent it - whatever the cost. Now, go!’
‘But what are you going to do?’
‘Me? I’m going up to try to stop them myself.’
Of course he was.
Alex hadn’t expected to find Brother Dafydd exulting in their success to the same extent that he was. But he was a little surprised to find Dafydd lying curled up on his bed, hugging himself to still the shaking in his body. If he turned up at the council hearing in that state, it wouldn’t take long before the whole story came out.
‘Dafydd,’ he said quietly, so as not to startle him.
Nevertheless, he gave a convulsive jump, and a twist to see who’d come up on him so silently. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said with a gulp.
Alex sat down on the end of the bed. ‘I’ve come to say thank you. I felt in my bones that I could trust you, and you’ve proved me right.’
Brother Dafydd shuddered. ‘I was okay until I heard that scream.’
Alex nodded. ‘I was afraid it might catch somebody’s attention too. Evidently not.’
Dafydd sat up. ‘No, no, I mean that I...’
Alex’s voice hardened. ‘If you feel that you’ve soiled your lilywhite hands, then give them a scrub with carbolic soap.
That’s all in the past. We’ve other things to think about. I need your help. It’s going to be a busy day for both of us.’
‘No. No more. I should never have agreed to go along with your plan. I’ve always tried to keep the...’ He couldn’t go on.
His face was working and twisting as his emotions took charge.
‘I’d say you had no choice. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Alex let the threat in his voice be quite apparent.
Dafydd’s head dropped. His shoulders were heaving.
Great Heavens! The man was crying!
Alex changed his tone. ‘My dear fellow, you mustn’t think that I don’t know how you feel. I didn’t sleep at all last night.
To the end of my days I shall be grieving for dear Brother Will, who’s been our anchor and our rock throughout these long months...’ Was he going too far? No. The fool had stopped weeping. He was listening. ‘For the rest of my life I shall have to carry the weight of guilt for what had to be done, for what was absolutely necessary for the success of the project. Be it on my head. You have nothing to reproach yourself for.’
Dafydd looked up. Alex leaned forward and took him by the shoulders. He looked deep into his eyes. He was enjoying himself. Like a concert violinist who’d practised until the music itself played the instrument, he relaxed into the skill he’d acquired in the Oxford Union and at the hustings, and perfected at Westminster.
‘Oh, Dafydd, Dafydd. Haven’t you understood? I must have you - and nobody but you - at my side. Who else can I trust?
I shall be supreme on this planet, yes, but you... you will be the agent of my will. You will be my first minister, my chancellor, with total power over all, Skang and human alike.
But nothing comes without a price. We must bear the pain together. We must learn to love the anguish. We can’t escape our destiny.’
The old rule of three. It never failed. He could almost feel Conference rising to give him a standing ovation.
Don’t let him look away.
‘As I said, we have no choice. We must carry the burdens of leadership between us, you and I, for the greater good of the Skang.’
Now he must keep quiet; hold the eye and keep his trap shut.
Hold it—
Hold it...
Dafydd blinked. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he said.
* * *
The Doctor dismissed the thought, which kept popping up as an unspoken sub-text to his cogitations.
‘No, not shape-shifters...’ he was saying. ‘They’ve shown no signs of taking on anything other than the human form. But it’s not just that. In my conversation with Dame Hilda, there wasn’t an iota to make me suspicious. I would have sworn in a court of law that I was talking to the same woman as the one I’d met before.’
He was talking to himself. Like the voluble wife who said to her mocking husband, ‘How can I know what I think until I hear what I say?’, the Doctor, when faced with an intractable problem, had a secret habit of discussing things with himself out loud - or rather, sotto voce. Though on this occasion it wouldn’t have mattered if he had chattered away at full volume, as he was halfway up the five-hundred-foot cliff, clinging on by his fingertips and the toes of his boots.
The Gallifreyan duplication of physiological function was not confined to the heart, as the Doctor had told Sarah when they were precariously afloat together. One of its most useful aspects was the ability to separate the operation of the two hemispheres of the brain.
In the normal course of events, he would have tackled the mammoth task of scaling the very nearly vertical side of the volcano by letting the cack-handed rationality of the left brain be quiescent. The ‘I’ that was the Doctor would take a back seat and enjoy watching the expertise of the trained climber that resided in the spatial somatic genius of his right brain.
But if it was necessary, as now, he could leave his body-brain complex to its own devices and retreat into the logical common-sense processes of left brain thought.
He had decided that he had no hope of stopping the progress of the ingurgitation by tackling it head on. There were certainly as many Skang as there were national teachers and organisers. Every one was a Skang, an alien with unguessable powers; and as he’d said to Sarah, there were at least twenty of them, possibly more.
His best bet was to get through to whatever remained of the humanity of Dame Hilda - the Hilda Hutchens who was, after all, a Fellow of All Souls as well as a Nobel Laureate - and persuade her to abort the reward ceremony before it started.