Doctor Who_ The Power of the Daleks Part 10

'Contact Earth,' he replied. 'Hensell will have to listen to them. I'll get Earth to back me up.'

'Will they believe you?' Ben asked. Ater all, he wasn't certain just how much of the man's story he believed himself.

'By the time I'm through with them,' the Doctor promised, 'they'll be too frightened to do anything else!'

He suddenly jumped for the door, jerking it open. The corridor was empty.

He frowned. 'I could have sworn...' he said softly. There was no guard posted to make certain they stayed in their rooms. Why not? Surely Bragen didn't trust them that much? 'Oh well. Wait here, I won't he long.'

Polly half-closed the door behind him as he hurried off.

She glanced at Ben and saw the puzzled look in her friend's eyes. 'You're beginning to believe that he is the Doctor, aren't you?'

The sailor shrugged. 'I dunno. But he's got to do a lot more to convince me.'

In Lesterson's laboratory, the scientist was finally ready to begin. He stood beside the generator, watching the read-outs on the computer. Resno was around the other side of the computer, his back to the wired Dalek, scanning his board. Janley was by herself, at the main testing bench. In her lap she had a small pad computer for taking notes.

'Ready to introduce power,' Lesterson announced. He was unable to keep the required scientific detachment in his voice: he was as excited as a child on Christmas morning.

'Noted.' Janley seemed to have absolutely no problems keeping her voice level. She jotted down the time as well.

'Connecting,' Lesterson announced. He powered up the generator, then switched on the buffer he'd placed on the line in case of problems. If there were an overload, he couldn't chance damage to the alien machine. The barest whisper of a reading registered.

'All connections responding,' Resno reported from his panel. He swivelled about and looked at the Dalek. It was still as lifeless as ever.

'Nothing at all?' Lesterson snapped.

'No.'

'Are you sure?' Lesterson had a momentary vision of this entire thing being a waste of time; of the Governor sending him back to Earth, scorn heaped on his head, tail between his legs. That even more than the thought of failure scared him silly.

'Of course I'm sure.' Resno sounded very irritated by the question. 'There's nothing wrong here and nothing registering.'

'Let's see.' Lesterson stalked around the computer.

Resno gave him an angry look. 'Really, if you don't trust me to read a dial '

'Shut up,' Lesterson said coldly. He could see that Resno was correct: there was absolutely no power absorption by the Dalek. It meant that the machine was either as dead as a lump of rock, or else the power levels were too low to bypa.s.s any corrosion or systems failure.

'We'll try again,' he decided. 'This time we'll increase the power by one fifth. Got that, Janley?'

'Yes,' she confirmed. 'One fifth.'

Lesterson returned to his station and tapped the bar controlling the power outflow. He watched the flicker of digital numbers until it achieved the precise level required and then gently let go of the bar.

'I'm getting a reading,' Resno reported. 'Slight, but definite. There's some loss of power.' He swivelled around again.

One of the appendages the one with what looked like a sink plunger on the end of it was twitching slightly. 'It's moving!' Resno exclaimed.

Lesterson looked across at the Dalek. He felt a wild surge of joy. 'Janley, note this,' he said quickly, as if afraid that the movements would vanish if they were too slow.

'Number one attachment with sucker responding to power.' As he spoke, the uppermost appendage began to rise slightly. 'Number two attachment not moving.

Number three attachment with lens responding.'

'Noted.'

Lesterson glared at his other a.s.sistant, who was still staring at the Dalek. 'Watch those meters, Resno!'

Resno whirled back around, scanning his panel. 'All connections still responding,' he reported.

Crossing to the Dalek, Lesterson examined it thoughtfully. Janley brought her pad and joined him. 'Of course we can't be sure,' Lesterson told her, lecturing, 'but it is reasonable to suppose that the sucker stick operates like some kind of hand.'

Even as he mentioned this, the appendage rose slightly.

Acting on some sort of internal piston, it extended a few inches towards Janley. Nervously she jumped back.

Lesterson smiled slightly. 'Don't be alarmed. We've merely introduced temporary power into it. There's no danger.' He tapped the dome. 'We'll have to open this up and do a lot more work inside here to know how to work the device permanently.' He bent to study the second, unmoving appendage. 'Can't imagine what this short, stubby arm is for.' He peered down the hollow tube, but couldn't see anything within.

Janley pointed her stylus at the upper appendage. 'Could this lens attachment be some sort of an eye?'

'Oh, undoubtedly,' Lesterson agreed. 'You know, I think this thing is some sort of a probe. The eye records the external world, the sucker-hand can collect samples.

The other one maybe it's some kind of a delivery system for chemicals! Yes, yes! The capsule delivers these devices to some alien world, where they can spread out and collect data for the people who built them!'

Janley noted the hypothesis on her panel. 'Could it be intelligent?'

'Intelligent?' Lesterson shrugged. 'Doubtful. Certainly not as we would recognize it. There may be some equipment within for it to transmit information back to the capsule. There's probably a computer in there geared for a.n.a.lysis and transmitting the data home. These remote units certainly have some kind of directing influence.

Perhaps a crude positronic brain, I suppose.' He tapped the dome. 'Can't wait to open this thing up and get to work!'

As he spoke, the two appendages dropped listlessly back to their rest positions. Frowning, he turned to face Resno.

'Now what?'

His a.s.sistant shrugged. 'Everything still reading the same over here.'

Lesterson thought for a moment. 'Maybe the power's leaking away somewhere,' he said. 'We'll try and raise the power level again.' He and Janley returned to their places for their next attempt.

As they did, the Dalek's eye-stick slowly moved to follow them Within the machine, the guiding intelligence concentrated on focus. It could make out images of three humans. It was vital to learn where the power was coming from...

'The eye-stick!' Resno called. Lesterson and Janley whirled around, but the appendage was in the same position as it had been when they had last looked flopped down. Resno frowned. 'It was watching us!' he said. 'The lens was changing shape.'

'Don't be absurd, man,' Lesterson said.

'It was, I tell you,' Resno insisted. 'I saw it.'

Lesterson glanced across at Janley and shook his head slightly to indicate that she should not record this conversation. 'You can't use the phrase "watching us",' he told Resno. 'Good heavens, you'll be trying to convince us that thing has intelligence next. Get a grip, man, and let's get on with the experiment if you don't mind'

Resno, obviously seeing that there was no point in arguing, gave a short nod and returned to monitoring.

The Dalek had no way of issuing a sigh of relief. But it had been greedy and had demonstrated a startling lack of caution. It had to be more careful from now on. The human named Resno was already suspicious of it, and that was not good.

Still, he was only one problem. One that could be removed. The Dalek had to discover the source of power that was all that mattered.

And then...

12.

It's Watching Me, Lesterson The Communications Room was close to the centre of the hub. It was by the Admin Offices, naturally. The Doctor paused at the door. If his memory served him correctly, the ground station would be linked to a series of satellites in synchronous...o...b..ts of the planet. Each one would have the power to punch holes through the sub-ether and allow the colony to comunicate directly with Earth. There would be some transmission delay, of course, but nowhere near as long as it would take a message at light-speed to travel back to Terra. In perhaps five or ten minutes, he might be speaking to someone with both authority and sense.

Gently, he pushed open the door.

There were no signs of life in the large room. Banks of computers lined the walls, and a screen at the far end showed the positioning of the satellites above Vulcan.

There were an awful lot of dots, far too many simply for communications. Maybe they represented the remains of the original probes that had discovered Vulcan, or even weather and research satellites. At any rate, unimportant.

In the centre of the room was a console. The chair in front of it was lying on its side and there was no sign of the technician. He'd hardly have knocked over his chair and left it like that. Fearing the worst, the Doctor hurried across.

The young man was under the console, a bad bruise on the back of his neck. The Doctor rubbed his own neck thoughtfully. It hurt in exactly the same place as the young man's bruise. It looked as if there were a rash of people getting banged on the head. At least the technician was still alive. The Doctor could see his chest expanding and contracting.

He could also see that there was going to be a rather more substantial transmission delay than he had feared.

The underside of the panel had been ripped open. Dozens of wires trailed out of the panel, many showing evidence of being sliced through. The Doctor examined the wreckage more closely. Several of the tubes had been brutally smashed, and someone had poked a heavy object inside the casing to break as much as possible.

His acute ears caught the faint sound of a man shifting his weight from one foot to another. He gazed around the room, but there were a lot of potential hiding places in the banks of computers.

'I know you're there,' he said gently.

Quinn stepped out from a gap between two of the instruments. In his left hand he was holding a pair of three-foot long pliers as a club. 'Examiner!' he said, sounding relieved. 'Thank goodness it's you. I've been trying to talk to you alone ever since you arrived.'

The Doctor wasn't at all certain that being alone with Quinn was a very good survival tactic. Those pliers were almost certainly the instruments that had done the damage to the console and, probably, to the back of the technician's head. The Doctor had suffered enough blows physically and emotionally for one day and was not at all eager to give Quinn a chance to add to his woes.

Luckily, he didn't have to take chances. The door opened and Bragen marched in, accompanied by one of the guards. His eyes quickly took in the scene. 'What's happened here?' he demanded.

Quinn sighed. 'What do you you want?' want?'

The Doctor gestured to the technician. 'I just found this man unconscious.' Both he and Bragen stared at the pliers in Quinn's hand.

'So did I,' the Deputy Governor explained. 'I was just examining him when I heard someone approaching, so I hid. It must have been you, Examiner.'

Bragen glowered at him. 'So you hid, eh?' He s.n.a.t.c.hed the pliers from Quinn's hands. 'And what about these?'

'I picked them up. They were beside the tech.' Quinn seemed finally to realize that everyone was looking at him in a very suspicious fashion. 'What is this all about?'

The Doctor pointed to the console. 'The cables have been cut.'

'The cables'?' Quinn frowned. 'Where?' He joined the Doctor and Bragen. The Doctor bent down and pulled at a handful of the severed wires. 'This is serious,' Quinn said.

'It's not just the internal communications system that's been disrupted. We're cut off from the Earth, too.'

As the Doctor straightened up, his eyes flickered over the torn patch on Quinn's jacket. Interesting...

Bragen scowled at the wires as if they were somehow responsible for their own predicament. 'The only people who'd want to do that are the rebels,' he growled.

Quinn jerked an angry thumb at the silent guard. 'If these muscle boys of yours had any brains, they'd stop things like this!'

Fishing in his pocket, the Doctor pulled out the b.u.t.ton he'd been carrying with him and offered it to Bragen. 'I was attacked just after I arrived here,' he said quietly. 'This was a souvenir I collected.'

The security head took the b.u.t.ton. Then he grabbed Quinn's sleeve and jerked it up. The b.u.t.ton and the ragged gap matched exactly. Bragen's eyes sparkled triumphantly.

'This b.u.t.ton belongs to you, doesn't it?'

Quinn shrugged. 'I expect so. I only recently noticed that I'd lost it.'

'I vaguely recall holding on to the man after he hit me,'

the Doctor explained. 'I may have pushed back his protective suit and pulled that off him.'

Obviously realizing that the way the conversation was going was hardly helping him, Quinn said, 'When you two are quite finished '

'Be quiet!' Bragen snapped.

Quinn flushed with anger and glared right back at the security head. 'Don't speak to me like that,' he said icily. 'I am the Deputy Governor.'

All I know,' Bragen retorted, 'is that you're a man the Examiner believes to have attacked him' He held up the b.u.t.ton. 'With some proof, I might add. And a man found sabotaging the communications equipment '

'That's a lie!'

' having attacked one of the engineers first,' Bragen finished, with some contempt. 'Still holding the pliers when the Examiner and I arrived' He smiled tightly. 'I'd detain the Governor himself on evidence like that'