Doctor Who: The Enemy of the World (9 page)

Benik smiled blandly. ‘Then I suggest you get back to your ‘territory’ and find out what’s happening, before Kent and his gang make a complete fool of you, in your absence,’

he retorted and walked quickly out.

When the capsule came to rest sixty metres beneath the Sanctum, Salamander stepped out into the quietly humming underground Control Suite.

‘The return of the hero to his grateful people,’ he breathed, staring through a one-way window into a large cavernous laboratory hewn out of the rock. Gigantic machines resembling electromagnetic coils were positioned around the walls, interconnected by translucent coiled tubes along which pulses of strange phosphorescent light travelled in rhythmic bursts. Dozens of people in white overalls were stationed at the scattered panels, observing banks of instruments and making adjustments to their controls with zombie-like concentration.

In the centre of the chamber two men and a girl were deep in conversation. Salamander watched them carefully for a few moments as they pored over technical data sheets, totally engrossed in their work. Then he switched on the intercom on the console beside him.

Everyone down in the laboratory looked up expectantly as Salamander’s voice suddenly boomed over the loudspeakers. ‘Salamander to Mr Swann. Report to Control Suite. Observe radiation precautions.’

‘He’s done it. He’s got back!’ said the girl in a hushed, almost reverent, voice.

‘Let’s hope he brings better news this time, Mary,’ the young man said bleakly. ‘Our stocks are almost exhausted.’

The elder man, Swann, nodded gravely. ‘We can’t go on much longer like this,’ he murmured, fingering his thin gray moustache as he walked briskly away towards the steel staircase leading up into the Control Suite.

Mary moved closer to the young man. ‘Are you going to ask Salamander, Colin?’ she whispered.

‘You bet I am. And he’ll take me next time.’

Mary glanced furtively round to make sure they were not being overhead. ‘I’ve had so many nightmares about you going up there, to the surface, Colin. None of the others he took ever came back.’

Colin Redmayne held Mary’s arm. ‘Don’t try to stop me now,’ he said fiercely. ‘I’ve just got to get up there. I’ve got to walk on the earth again, see the sun again, no matter how dangerous it is.’

When Swann was let into the Control Suite, he found Salamander leaning weakly against the console, enclosed in the protective suit.

He hurried forward, forgetting all precautions. ‘Are you all right, Leader?’ he asked anxiously.

Salamander put up a warning hand. ‘Do not approach, my friend. I have not yet decontaminated.’ His voice was slurred and faint behind the mask and his eyes were rolling drunkenly. ‘Too tired... too...’

‘You must be more careful, you overexert yourself,’

Swann murmured, his eyes full of concern. ‘This repeated exposure is slowly destroying you.’

Salamander shrugged and forced a ghostly smile as he took off the helmet. ‘But my people must eat. I am responsible for you all. What would you all do without me, Swann?’

He broke off dramatically and dragged himself across to a glass booth built into a corner of the chamber. As he entered it, he was bathed in a weird pinkish light. A series of red numbers flickered onto the liquid crystal display set into the wall. Gradually the numbers decreased, changed to green and then finally reached a steady value. The pinkish light faded and disappeared.

Swann stared apprehensively at the final reading as it blinked up on the indicator panel. ‘Exposure level increases a little more each time, Leader,’ he reported in a hushed voice.

Colin Redmayne had slipped into the Control Suite and was hovering diffidently by the door leading to the laboratory.

‘One day I shall return from up there and the reading will remain in the red,’ Salamander murmured, with a smile of resignation at the glimmering green digits. As he struggled painfully out of the decontamination booth, he caught sight of Colin’s shocked face. ‘Oh, I joke, just to frighten you a little,’ he added with a tired laugh. ‘But I have such news for you all...’

‘We can go back! We can return to the surface!’ Colin cried, eagerly coming forward. Behind him Mary Smith had appeared in the doorway too.

‘Not so fast my children, not so fast,’ Salamander said, speaking with difficulty again. ‘It is not yet safe for you.

But I want you to know that I have discovered more food supplies. They are not contaminated. They will give us more time.’ Salamander almost stumbled and he clutched hold of Swann’s arm for support.

Swann gestured angrily to the two young technicians to leave the Control Suite at once.

As they quietly obeyed, Salamander called bravely after them, ‘Celebrate this great discovery among yourselves.

Open some wine and drink to the future.’

Swann operated the electronic door from the console and it slid shut behind them. Then he watched as Salamander began to struggle feebly out of the protective suit, fumbling like a child. ‘Leader, you should rest,’

Swann urged him.

Salamander shook his head. ‘But there is so much to be done first.’ Nevertheless, he allowed Swann to help him over to a comfortable couch in an alcove, where he lay down and immediately closed his eyes. Swann lingered a moment, wondering whether to finish removing the radiation suit, or to creep quietly away. Then he dimmed the lights and crept back to the laboratory. When he had gone, Salamander opened his eyes and lay there in the eerie glow from the console instruments, his body shaking with silent laughter.

The rare sound of laughter and of eager chatter filled the laboratory some time later. Colin and Mary had opened a flagon of wine and were handing out plastic beakers half-filled with an oily, yellowish liquid. Nobody seemed to mind the coarse sulphury taste, as the technicians gathered in small groups where they could still keep an eye on their instruments, and gratefully sipped the crude but highly alcoholic concoction.

A sudden cheer went up as Salamander appeared unexpectedly at the top of the stairs to the Control Suite.

He had taken off the radiation suit and he spread his arms in greeting to the throng below.

Swann hurried up to the Leader and handed him a full beaker of wine before raising his own almost empty one high in the air. ‘To a great and humane man!’ he cried.

The toast was heartily echoed around the chamber and everyone drank.

Salamander raised his brimming beaker, shaking his head modestly. ‘Please, please, my friends, it is joy and honour enough to have returned safely among you,’ he cried. ‘In a few weeks it will be five long years that we have all survived here in this shelter together, survived and worked together towards a new future.’ He paused impressively for several seconds.

In the sudden silence all eyes were fixed on the Leader as he handed his untasted drink to Swann. Salamander swept his audience with a triumphant smile. ‘You are the brave guardians of true freedom,’ he told them. ‘Your tireless work down here creates natural disasters wherever the enemies of freedom and truth persist in their insane and poisonous wars up there on the surface. And so we enable our beloved planet to fight her enemies in her own way, by the laws of Nature and not those of the sword and the missile. Our most recent attack, in the Eperjest Tokyar region, has been a complete success. All missile silos have been destroyed and the forces of tyranny there are defeated for ever.’

Enthusuastic applause burst out as the Leader turned to re-enter the Control Suite, but a lone voice suddenly rose above the appreciative clamour. It was Colin Redmayne’s.

‘When, Leader? When?’ he cried, his pale face now flushed and his eyes bright. ‘Tell us when we can return to the sun and the daylight again.’

There was a sudden silence as Salamander stared out over the sea of shocked faces and studied the young man who had dared to challenge him. ‘When the poisoned atmosphere is clean, when the senseless war is over and the hate is all destroyed,’ he declared, gesturing wearily up at the roof of the cavern. ‘Until then you must have patience.’

Colin ran to the bottom of the staircase. ‘Always the same speech,’ he cried recklessly, ‘but we have to live this nightmare every day, until none of us can remember what a day is any more.’ Colin’s eyes were filled with a wild and passionate fire as he gazed up at the Leader. ‘I want to escape. I want to go up there and see for myself,’ he cried.

‘You will, you will, Colin,’ Salamander promised. ‘You must all have faith. You must all trust me. I cannot allow you to leave here until I know it is safe. We must all fight on.’

Then he disappeared into the Control Suite and the heavy door slid shut. Salamander lounged back in the luxurious chair facing his console, a fat cigar clamped in his mouth and a large lavishly illustrated book on butterflies spread open across his knees. He studied the book with intense interest, occasionally glancing at the scene through the one-way window and muttering an encouraging acknowledgement to Swann’s communications on the intercom. ‘Excellent, Swann, excellent. Keep them on their toes.’

7

After a hair-raising journey along dusty, pot-holed tracks avoiding the main highways, Giles Kent had driven his caravan into a deep wooded ravine only three kilometres from the Kanowa Research Centre perimeter. It was parked among trees and dense undergrowth just off a tortuous dirt road which ran between steep scrub-covered slopes.

Inside, the Doctor was sitting with a towel round his shoulders while Astrid was busy styling his hair and eyebrows with frequent glances at a photograph of Salamander which Giles held up for her. The Doctor looked miserable and he kept fidgeting irritably so that Astrid had to ask him repeatedly to sit still and concentrate. He had been brooding over Fariah’s disappearance ever since their escape from Melville.

‘I just cannot understand how we lost her. She was right behind me,’ he murmured, carefully watching Kent’s reflection.

Kent had witnessed Fariah’s fate but he had kept quiet, fearing that the Doctor would have insisted on trying to rescue her. ‘I told you. She must have got stuck in the ducts,’ he said. ‘Stop worrying, Doctor. She’ll turn up.

She’s a clever girl’

To Astrid’s dismay the Doctor shook his head angrily.

‘You don’t seem to appreciate how vital she is,’ he cried.

‘She has Fedorin’s file, she has been one of Salamander’s closest associates and she is herself one of his blackmail victims. For what it’s worth, that young lady is our evidence at the moment.’ As he spoke, the Doctor again looked hard at the wiry Australian reflected in the mirror.

There seemed to be something odd about the man, but still the Doctor could not fathom it. Suddenly the door flew open and a WZO policeman armed with a machine pistol leaped into the caravan. Behind him came Donald Bruce.

‘And you, sir, are my evidence!’ he boomed, pointing to the startled Doctor with a satisfied smile. Kent stared at Bruce in sullen disbelief. ‘How did you know we were here?’ he demanded.

The Security Commissioner took a small metallic disc from his pocket. ‘Your last visitor took the sensible precaution of attaching this to your chassis,’ he explained.

The Doctor cast his eyes to the roof. ‘Mr Benik,’ he muttered. ‘A neat little micropulse transmitter.’ He was furious with himself for not having suspected such a trick earlier. ‘So you’ve been following us.’

But Donald Bruce was not listening. He was gazing down at the Doctor in fascination. ‘It’s quite incredible,’ he exclaimed. ‘If you were to stand face to face, Salamander would think he was looking in a mirror. No wonder you fooled me last time we met. Who are you?’

The Doctor smiled wearily. ‘If you had two or three years to spare I could tell you. Just think of me as the Doctor.’

‘So. How much are they paying you, Doctor?’ Bruce demanded with a contemptuous nod at the others.

The Doctor rose to his feet indignantly. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he cried.

‘To impersonate Salamander, so that they can destroy him and put you in his place.’

‘I could not possibly be a party to any such plan,’ the Doctor protested. ‘The fact is that Salamander is quite illegally holding prisoner two young friends of mine. I am merely attempting to arrange for their release.’

Astrid stepped forward defiantly. ‘And also to gather evidence which will expose Salamander for what he really is: a blackmailer, a murderer and a tyrant,’ she said vehemently.

Bruce stared at her as if she were mad. ‘An ambitious little scheme, Miss Ferrier. How do you know such evidence exists?’

Giles Kent moved in sharply. ‘It’s all there in the Research Centre,’ he said, ‘in Salamander’s Sanctum. No doubt someone like you can get in there any time he wants.’ Kent knew that this last remark would touch a sore spot.

Bruce said nothing for a while, but stood there frowning at Kent and running over in his mind the curious facts he had discovered about security arrangements at Kanowa.

The Doctor broke the silence. ‘We do possess a piece of undeniable evidence suggesting that Salamander is not quite so pure and white as he might like us to believe.

Bruce glanced sharply at him. ‘What is that?’ he asked almost eagerly.

The Doctor told Bruce about the Fedorin file and the coincidence of Fedorin’s recent death.

‘Show me this file!’ Bruce said excitedly when the Doctor had finished.

‘Fariah Neguib has it,’ Astrid informed him.

‘But she’s dead. Shot while resisting arrest,’ Bruce told them.

Kent shook his head. ‘Gunned down illegally by Benik’s mob because she was a threat to Salamander,’ he shouted angrily.

Bruce blinked uncertainly behind his spectacles.

The Doctor looked appalled. ‘This is terrible news... an innocent girl...’ He glanced agitatedly around at the others.

‘No doubt Benik has found the file and will return it to Salamander.’

Astrid moved for the door, but was stopped by the police officer. ‘If he does, we have no hope of pressing our case against Salamander. We’ve got to stop him!’ she cried.