Sarah clambered to her feet, unthinkingly brushing the leaves from her skirt, the nondescript blue skirt she’d thought a Daisy Peabody might wear. ‘No point,’ she said,
‘thanks all the same. He’ll be miles away by now, whoever it was.’
Whoever it was. Or whatever it was.
‘Very gratifying, Doctor,’ said Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Taking notice of me at last! Rather overscrupulous, in fact. I can’t see that security would have been breached by your contacting UNIT earlier.’
‘Nothing to do with your precious security, Brigadier. If we’d had Detective Sergeant Plod and his friends trampling all over something as sensitive as this...! I needed the information, but the situation called for the utmost tact.’
The Doctor found it hard enough to admit even to himself that things had actually gone from bad to worse at Hampstead Heath police station.
It was when the sergeant had utterly misunderstood him to be claiming acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes that his credibility sank to absolute zero. In spite of his irritable attempts to explain that he’d actually been referring to Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle - ‘He latched onto a few little tricks of observation and deduction I showed him, you see. Said that I’d given him an idea for a short story for the
Strand Magazine.’
- he was still escorted firmly to a cell.
And when he caught the words ‘Colney Hatch’ as the detective sergeant’s voice receded down the corridor, he’d decided that enough was enough and persuaded the police to let him make a phone call. He had no intention of letting them cart him off to the local ‘loony bin’, as Sergeant Benton would no doubt have called it.
‘Sorry I couldn’t come myself,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Previous engagement. I’m sure Benton handled it very well.’
The Doctor grunted, trying to put out of his mind the image of the barely concealed grin with which Benton had greeted him as they’d unlocked his cell the night before.
‘So... what’s it all about?’
Sarah arrived at UNIT HQ as hot and bothered as a sunny but sharp September day would allow.
When she’d eventually got away from her typewriter with a scant fifteen hundred words under her belt - she couldn’t even
start
on the fish story until she’d had a really good look at the Skang Polaroid and written up her notes about the cult
- she’d fallen straight into an exhausted sleep, only to wake up half an hour later, shivering, her heart pumping, convinced she was being attacked by the fearsome creature she’d seen at the commune. She’d pulled the bed-clothes over her head and curled up small, just as she used to as a six-year-old plagued by nightmares, so long ago.
And then, like Alice finding that she wasn’t in the sheep’s shop but in a rowing boat, Sarah had found herself in a Technicolour paradise, surrounded by a full complement of Indian dancing girls. An all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood dream - with the image of a golden Skang looking on benignly and oh-so-lovingly - that had lulled her into a deep slumber that more or less wiped away the horror of her encounter on the Heath.
After all, she thought as she closed the window the next morning - why had she left it open to that cold north wind? -
the old man would have said if he’d seen some sort of monster, wouldn’t he? It must have been her obsession with the Skang that made her think... oh God, she hadn’t set the alarm! It was gone half past nine!
Her usual morning routine: the jog around the Heath, the leisurely breakfast of wholemeal toast and banana - or a real fry-up, if she was feeling bolshie - and the skim through the
Guardian
and the
Mail
(to get a balanced view); all had to go by the wayside. There was barely time for the essential cup of coffee.
What did come back ‘in the morning’ mean? About ten o’clock, probably. But by the time she’d finished tidying up the cobbled-together fish article (inspired by Gary the goldfish:
Would You Eat Your Best Friend?
- a plea for stricter vegetarianism) and delivered it to the office, it was getting on for eleven-thirty when she walked into the Doctor’s lab... to be greeted by what seemed to be some sort of row.
‘I’m sorry, Doctor,’ the Brigadier was saying, I’ve just spent the best part of a month trying to prevent Geneva from cutting my budget by twenty-five per cent. I just can’t afford a wild-goose chase. If we went after every wacky cult in the country, UNIT UK would be broke in a fortnight.’
Here we go again, thought Sarah. They seemed to respect each other - almost to be friends - but they could never agree on the best thing to do.
The Doctor held up the little screw-top aspirin bottle. ‘This tastes like fruit juice, mixed fruit juice - exactly what it is, no doubt. Nevertheless, it contains some three per cent of an extremely powerful drug. One that I don’t recognise, but judging by its structure it’s probably psychotropic.’
‘Drugs? LSD and all that caper? Just what the police are for, I should have thought.’
‘And how well did the police cope with the Yeti? Or the Autons? Or the Cybermen for that matter?’
‘Are you saying...?’
‘Show him your photograph, Sarah.’
The Brigadier, giving her a suspicious look, took the Polaroid print and inspected it. ‘Ah... See what you mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Wouldn’t do any harm to take a look, I suppose...’
But they were too late. Frustrated by the unanswered bell, the Brigadier resorted to thumping on the door.
‘No good making that racket,’ said a hoarse voice from beneath their feet. ‘They’ve gawn.’ A craggy little man had emerged from a door in the basement area.
‘Gone? Gone where?’ said the Doctor.
‘Don’ ask me. Piled into a coach just after seven o’clock this morning. The whole shooting match, including the high and mighty Brother Alex. Good riddance. Rahnd the bend, the lot of them.’
With a little persuasion, aided by a discreetly folded note, the caretaker let them in to have a look round.
Mary Celeste
time, thought Sarah. Well, not quite. There were no half-eaten meals, or abandoned, unmade beds. On the contrary, everything was clean and neat and ordered. The food in the kitchen was tidily put away - but there were seven loaves of sliced bread, one of them three-quarters eaten; four and a half dozen eggs in the larder; several pints of milk in the fridge...
It looked as if they’d just gone off for a day trip to the seaside.
‘If you ask me, they’ve gone for a picnic,’ said the Brigadier, coming down the stairs to rejoin the Doctor and Sarah in the hall. ‘They’re obviously coming back.’
‘Handed me the keys, didn’t he?’ said the caretaker. ‘To give back to the estate office. Nah, they’ve gawn for good.’
‘You’re eating a ham sandwich!’
A startled Sarah looked up from her desk drawer, where she had been searching for her passport.
Clorinda, a tiny woman whose dyed hair (tending towards the pillar-box end of the spectrum), bright make-up and primary-coloured garments normally gave the impression of an escaped parakeet, now had the air of an angry macaw.
‘Er, yes... I didn’t get any breakfast,’ said Sarah, puzzled.
‘I knew I was right. My office! Now!’
‘Oh Lor’, thought Sarah, as she followed her irate boss, it must be that wretched fish...
It was, too. Clorinda tossed the manuscript towards her as if she’d like to toss it into the nearest dustbin. ‘Research?
Don’t make me laugh. Every word tells me that you know zilch about being a vegetarian. If I wanted candy-floss I’d go to Southend pier!’
‘I must admit...’
‘It’s an angle, certainly. But it reads like a filler for a teenager’s weekly. What do you think you’re up to?’
‘Well, you see...’
But it was a rhetorical question. Clorinda was on a roll. ‘If you want to convince me to be a vegetarian, I want to know all that jazz about one cow versus ten fields of corn... And how a nice juicy steak
au poivre
fills my arteries with axle grease... and so on and so on... Yes, and I want it backed up with the latest facts and figures. And I want it now! We go to press tomorrow, as you very well know.’
Sarah took a deep breath. ‘Yes well, I was going to come in and see you anyway. I’m going to take my holiday, you see, and...’
‘You what?’
‘I’m due four weeks, what with missing last year’s because of the Space World thing and...’ Her voice trailed away.
Hardly the most tactful way to approach the subject, Sarah suddenly realised. The Space World story, having had a D-notice slapped on it by the Brigadier, had had to be spiked.
Clorinda looked at her for a long moment. ‘You’ve had a holiday. You went to Sicily.’
‘That was due from the year before. Oh please, Clorinda! I promise to tell everyone how kind you are, how generous, how unutterably lovely you are in every possible way...’
‘And completely ruin my reputation?’ said Clorinda. Then she sighed. ‘Oh Sarah, Sarah, what are we going to do with you? Once you get a bee in your bonnet...’
Cliché! thought Sarah automatically.
‘It is this Skang affair, I suppose?’ Clorinda went on.
Sarah nodded eagerly. ‘Yes. Apparently the centres all over the world have closed down. And the devotees are all going to Bombay!’ The UNIT network had quickly supplied the Brigadier with the information - and much to his disgust, Geneva had given him the responsibility of finding out exactly what was going on.
‘Well, I suppose I can’t stop you.’
‘Clorinda, you’re a doll!’
‘Just as long as you don’t try to swing it on your expenses.’
‘That I can promise you. It won’t cost you a penny!’
It wouldn’t cost anybody a brass rupee. They were going in the TARDIS.
It seemed a little strange to be lugging her backpack through the door of the old police box, for all the world as if she were catching the so-called Magic Bus to Kathmandu with the rest of the hippy throng. Though the Brigadier’s own luggage was a smart hide suitcase, he evidently had similar feelings.
‘I’m not sure if this is a good idea, Doctor,’ he said.
Wouldn’t we be better off with British Airways?’
‘Time is of the essence,’ replied the muffled voice of the Doctor, whose top half was deep inside the central pedestal of the TARDIS control column. ‘If we don’t stop this thing before it really takes root, the world could be facing one of the biggest disasters in the history of
Homo sapiens.’
The Brigadier sighed. ‘I seem to have heard that before.’
‘You have indeed,’ said the Doctor, emerging. ‘And was I ever wrong?’
‘So what is “this thing”,’ said Sarah. ‘What
is
going on?’
The Doctor was peering with a slight frown at a dial on the console, where a needle flickered to and fro. ‘Mm...’ he said,
‘The relativity circuit of the temporal balancing governor has been playing up a bit... Oh well! In for a penny...’
The doors closed, the centre of the control column started to move up and down (albeit a little shakily), and the TARDIS
started to sing the song with which it always started and finished its journeys, like the desperate cry of some alien elephant in agony.
It stopped.
‘Bombay!’ said the Doctor, tuning in the monitor that would show them what awaited them outside. ‘That’s odd,’ he said, as a wide landscape of dried-up grass appeared, punctuated by a twisted tree. ‘I programmed in the co-ordinates of VT, as they call it.’
‘VT?’ asked the Brigadier.
‘Victoria Terminus Station. Think of St Pancras filled with a Wembley football crowd. Some people live their whole lives there. Nobody’ll notice us tucked away in the corner.’
‘Come on then,’ he added, striding towards the opening door. ‘No sense in hanging about.’
Sarah waited for the Brigadier to go out in front of her. Let
them
find out where the TARDIS had landed! But before she’d gone two steps, she heard a shout of alarm and the pair of them erupted back through the door, the Doctor making a dive for the controls.
The door slammed shut, and the entire TARDIS lurched as something - what, for Pete’s sake! - hurled itself at this intruder into its domain.
Sarah, thrown to the floor by the shock, cast a look at the monitor. ‘That’s a lion!’ she said.
‘A very large lion,’ said the Brigadier, grimly picking himself up.
‘But there aren’t any lions in India.’
‘Of course there are,’ said the Doctor impatiently. ‘We must be in Bombay Zoo.’
‘Rubbish!’ said the Brigadier.
‘Aha! Got it! The temporal governor’s stuck again. We’re still on the Greenwich Meridian!’
Sarah’s mind did a quick flick through her admittedly small stock of geographical facts. ‘So we’re in Africa?’
‘Well of course we are!’ said the Doctor, busy checking the relevant sections of the errant circuit. ‘As far as the time dimension was concerned we haven’t moved at all. Didn’t they teach you anything at school?’
And there she was thinking she’d been so clever!
‘Just let me know when we get there,’ said the Brigadier, parking himself in the only chair in the control room, stretching out his legs and closing his eyes.
‘No need to be sarcastic, Lethbridge-Stewart. We’ll be at VT
Station in two shakes of a sluggerlug’s tail.’