Doctor Who_ Mawdryn Undead Part 10

'We girls,' bristled Tegan, 'are perfectly capable of...'

'You will both remain in the TARDIS! And that is an order, Miss Jovanka,' he added as he left the control room, in case Tegan had forgotten that both Brigadiers and schoolmasters should be obeyed without question.

'Chauvinist pig!' muttered Tegan under her breath.

'Good Heavens!' muttered the Brigadier as he stepped out of the TARDIS; he had never seen such luxury in a ship before.

'Good heavens!' exclaimed an older Lethbridge-Stewart as he walked with the Doctor and Turlough along the corridor from the control centre. 'Such luxury!'

'It's not an ordinary ship, Brigadier.'

The old soldier snorted. Ostentation of this sort did not meet with his approval.

As they continued into the body of the vessel, the Brigadier felt a p.r.i.c.kling sensation on his wrists and the back of his neck. Static electricity, he concluded, without inquiring whether the other two had also experienced the phenomenon.

He was not to know that his younger self was, at that same moment, exploring a parallel corridor. As the younger Brigadier moved away into a side pa.s.sage, the Doctor's gruff companion from 1983 noticed that the tingling had stopped.

So had the Doctor. He looked round as if admiring the decor.

'Doctor, we're supposed to be looking for the TARDIS.

Your friends could be in danger.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'The creature will have left the TARDIS. He'll need his own life-support systems.' He continued to examine the walls. 'Somewhere there must be...' He caught sight of a small companionway leading off the main corridor. 'I don't remember that!' He turned back to Turlough. 'Find the TARDIS and stay with Tegan and Nyssa. Brigadier, I want you to come with me.' He hurried the older man into the narrow side-pa.s.sage, leaving Turlough alone again on the alien ship.

Turlough hoped that the Doctor was not walking into a trap... But that was ridiculous. The Doctor must be destroyed The Doctor must be destroyed.

Yet without the Doctor's help, how could he ever free the ship from the warp ellipse? He felt very confused.

He reached for the cube. Since his purpose was now evil, his guide must be the Black Guardian. As he held the crystal he cringed at his own weakness and inadequacy in the service of his new master. 'It's not my fault the Doctor was able to home in on the TARDIS,' he pleaded.

The crystal was lifeless in his hand.

'Can you hear me?'

There was no stinging rebuke or diabolical resa.s.surance.

'There's not much I can do with the Brigadier around...

Answer me!' he cried.

But there was no answer. Rejected and afraid, Turlough moved into the darkness.

A bulkhead sealed the end of the side pa.s.sage. 'A dead end,' thought the Brigadier. But the Doctor was already fingering the ornamentation around the edge of the door.

There was a click and the door slid sideways.

The room they entered was unlike anywhere else in the ship; functional, unembellished, cold as a mortuary.

'Some kind of a laboratory,' muttered the Brigadier. 'Or could it be an operating theatre?' He could make nothing of the sinister machinery.

Not so the Doctor. 'A metamorphic symbiosis regenerator!' He moved excitedly to a large piece of apparatus in the centre of the room.

The Brigadier thought longingly of the safe, comfortable technology of his old Humber; but he was far from the world of vintage cars and A-level maths.

'Used by the Time Lords in cases of acute regenerative crisis,' continued the Doctor after a cursory examination of the machine.

'Then what's it doing there?'

The same question was worrying the Doctor. 'It must have been stolen from Gallifrey!' He turned, grim-faced, to the Brigadier. 'Someone on this ship has been trying to regenerate.'

'The injured creature that Tegan thought was you?'

The Doctor leaned over the regenerator. 'This would explain the mutation.'

'Where is he now?' The Brigadier looked anxiously out into the empty pa.s.sage. 'Perhaps he didn't make it in time.

Collapsed somewhere. Even dead?'

'Or undead undead, Brigadier!'

In the course of his military career the Brigadier had faced danger many times, but as he pictured that deformed creature at large on the ship a potential enemy that could never be killed his blood ran cold. He thought once again of the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

'Look at this, Brigadier!' The Doctor indicated several pieces of trunking, each terminating in a frame mounted with a complicated set of electrodes, that connected with the metamorphosis machine. 'Eight of them!' he whispered ominously.

The old soldier was none the wiser.

'Somewhere on this ship, Brigadier, there are seven more creatures!'

Turlough could never explain what had prompted him to linger in the Hall of the Likenesses. He stood in the side gallery, mesmerised by the bland faces. As he moved a step forward, he could have sworn the eyes of the central icon blinked. He gazed at the portrait... And back at Turlough stared the Black Guardian. Turlough gasped at the sudden transformation.

'While the Doctor is alive, I am never far from you, Turlough.'

'I'm sorry. I wasn't to know the Doctor had a homing device.' He began to tremble.

'Whimpering boy! Do you not understand! Everything now works towards the total humiliation of the Time Lord.' The Black Guardian smiled. 'You have done well.'

Turlough tried to stop himself shaking.

'Give me your hand.'

The boy would as willingly have offered his arm to a hooded cobra.

'Give me your hand. There is nothing to fear.'

The Black Guardian vanished the moment his fingers touched the likeness, and the whole frame swung back to reveal a hidden room. Turlough stepped into the chamber.

It felt as though he had entered a charnel-house. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light he became aware of seven shadowy figures, like corpses in their winding sheets, laid out against the walls. He peered at the sepulchral shapes; each shroud he saw to be a set of rich clothes, as sumptuous as the fabric of the ship itself. Each of the robes, he supposed, must enclose a dead man. But why had the Black Guardian sent him to open up a tomb?

There was a soft wheezing, as if an old man had began to snore. It came again; and again. Turlough realised that each cadaverous occupant of the chamber was struggling to draw air into his lungs; somehow the opening of the door had brought the creatures to life. He was paralysed with fear.

The hooded things began to stir. Bodies flexed under velvet cloaks; twisted arms started to tear off their sheaths and flail in the empty air around the terrified boy. The creature nearest Turlough lifted a claw-like hand and tore the cloth from his face. For a full five seconds, Turlough faced the hideous, gasping mutant, then screamed, and fled.

The resurrected corpse that had sent Turlough scuttling away down the corridor focused its sunken eyes on the open door. 'Mawdryn has returned,' it announced to its fellow sleepers.

'Does he bring hope of our ending?' came the reply.

The Brigadier couldn't wait to get out of the laboratory.

There was something very disturbing about all those sterile, white panels with their inset dials and switches, and those tortuous electrodes.

But the Doctor was still examining the regenerator.

'There've been some very cunning modifications.. A vicious buzzing emanated from the centre of the machine as the Doctor moved one of the switches.

'That all looks highly dangerous,' warned the Brigadier.

'Quite right,' agreed the Doctor. 'It could do very nasty things to a genuine Time Lord.'

'Listen!' The Brigadier had heard the sound of a voice in the corridor. Or was it only the echo of the machinery the Doctor had set in motion? He moved quietly into the connecting pa.s.sage to investigate, leaving the Doctor alone with the regenerator.

'Doctor? Doctor?' A younger, sprucer Lethbridge-Stewart advanced slowly along the main companionway. He was fairly confident, now, that the wounded man he was searching for was an imposter, but it would do no harm to give him the benefit of a little more doubt. 'Doctor!' he called again, pausing beside the small pa.s.sage to the laboratory.

It was odd for someone as observant as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart not to notice the narrow entrance, but he was distracted by the increase in static electricity; the tingling on the back of his neck had returned.

Mawdryn moved silently as he writhed and wriggled towards the laboratory. As soon as he regained consciousness he had sensed the presence of more outsiders. Perhaps the Time Lord had come in search of his TARDIS.

Without the help of his fellow mutants, his progress was desperately slow, but he was not far now from the regenerator.

Had Mawdryn arrived a moment sooner at the approach to the laboratory, he would have been amazed to see two two Brigadiers: one dressed in military blazer and tie who stood ma.s.saging his neck; the other a fatter, older man in a tweed jacket who appeared from the direction of the lab, a split second too late to catch sight of his other self at the junction, as the younger Lethbridge-Stewart moved off along the main corridor. Brigadiers: one dressed in military blazer and tie who stood ma.s.saging his neck; the other a fatter, older man in a tweed jacket who appeared from the direction of the lab, a split second too late to catch sight of his other self at the junction, as the younger Lethbridge-Stewart moved off along the main corridor.

The senior Brigadier scratched his wrists which had begun to tingle again. He stepped forward and looked up and down the main companionway. The old soldier was sure someone was calling, further along the corridor. He followed the sound.

'Are you there, Brigadier?' The Doctor hurried from the narrow side-pa.s.sage and peered into the corridor. How annoying of old Lethbridge-Stewart to wander off. He must have gone ahead to look for the TARDIS. The Doctor checked his bearings; the police box must be somewhere down there...

As Mawdryn squirmed forward he sensed the aura of the Time Lord whom he could dimly see hurrying away down the corridor. He dragged himself, like a slug, into the side pa.s.sage and towards the laboratory.

One of the memories that had come flooding back to the old Brigadier was that UNIT's former scientific advisor should not be trusted on his own. Lethbridge-Stewart was therefore reluctant to leave the Doctor tinkering with that diabolical machine, and since there was no way he could follow the mystery voice without getting hopelessly lost, he retraced his steps to the laboratory.

'Doctor, we must move on!'

The regenerator was humming even more ferociously than before, but there was no sign of the Doctor. 'Now where's he gone?'

'Brigadier!'

The Brigadier was on the point of leaving when he heard the guttural whisper from the floor behind the machine. He took a step forward. There was another croak, and he looked down.

'Help me, Brigadier!'

The Brigadier's stomach heaved. He had never seen so mutilated and deformed a face that was part of a living creature. But he had seen the coat before, stained though it was with gore and suppuration. It belonged to the Doctor.

6.

Rising of the Undead Tegan and Nyssa were bored with waiting in the TARDIS.

'I'm going after the Brigadier,' decided Tegan. 'But he told us to stay here.'

'We're not in the Army!'

'You could get lost.'

'Stay here if you want to. I want to find the Doctor. The real Doctor.'

'Does this one qualify?'

The two girls spun round, amazed and delighted at the familiar figure in the doorway.

'Where's Turlough?' asked the Doctor, who had expected to find him already in the TARDIS.

'You brought that boy with you?'

'And the Brigadier, but it seems I've lost both of them.'

'How could the Brigadier have been with you. He came with us?'

The Doctor looked at Tegan, unable to believe what he had just heard. 'How could you be so stupid!' he shouted.

The worst had happened. Two Lethbridge-Stewarts, the same man but drawn concurrently from 1977 and 1983, were both at large on the ship. At any moment they risked the appalling and unpredictable consequences of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.