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.‘It was for us,’ Vural shrieked, sweat pouring down his face.Styr, who had been observing the scene with scornful amusement, silenced the three crewmen with a raucous hiss.He listened intently to the rapid series of bleeps—like morse code—which had suddenly issued from the communicator at his side.When the transmission ceased, he hurriedly began tapping a coded programme into the control unit built into his belt.Chattering quietly, the Scavenger rose up and tightened its grip on the three captives.‘You can resolve your pathetic dispute together in the next experiment,’ Styr gasped.‘I advise you to conserve all your energies until then.’With that, Styr turned abruptly away and lurched towards one of the ravines radiating from the hollow, his gimlet eyes blazing and his nostrils roaring with streams of vapour.The Scavenger glided smoothly towards an area covered with massive flat rocks on the other side of the landing area, the three crewmen stumbling painfully behind.It then began to prepare them for the most fiendish experiment of all.The Doctor felt as if he had been falling for hours.Although he knew that his hands had only freed themselves from the Terullian discs a split-second previously, it seemed to be taking an eternity for him to thrust his way through the almost non-existent remains of the geon field.Suspended half way through the gap between the buttresses, he felt as though he were falling forward and yet not moving at all.The Doctor knew that without enough forward velocity he could be caught for ever, as long as the geon field persisted.There was absolutely nothing that even a Time Lord could do once he was caught up in it.To his delight, he suddenly began to feel the slightest sensation of progress.Gradually at first, and then with increasing speed he felt himself toppling forward.At last he staggered on to all fours inside the alcove where Sarah lay.For a few minutes he knelt there, fighting the nausea in his stomach and the agonising pains shooting through his whole body.Then he dragged himself across to Sarah.‘Sarah.Sarah Jane?’ he whispered, grasping her stiff, cold hands.There was no response.The Doctor glanced around at the walls of the crevasse, and then brushed at the ground with his blistered hands.Suddenly his eyes lit up with renewed hope.‘Neuro-Manipulation Chamber,’ he breathed.Gently he shook Sarah by the shoulders.‘Sarah.nothing has happened to you,’ he murmured.‘Not really.Do you understand me, my dear? It was all an illusion.it was all in your mind.’Something about Sarah’s unblinking stare made the Doctor pause.He leaned forward and listened for her heartbeat.Then his face went white as marble.‘Oh, Sarah,’he murmured.‘Poor Sarah Jane.’‘Very touching,’ sneered a gasping voice behind him.The Doctor spun round to confront the pulsating figure of Styr in the entrance.‘You unspeakable abomination,’ the Doctor murmured, rising slowly to his feet.‘Why have you done this?’Styr snorted, his hoggish nostrils dilating and his curved teeth grinding shrilly against each other.‘I did nothing,’ he retorted.‘I merely stimulated and revived the fears which lay buried in the female’s sub-conscious.She was her own victim.’‘You senselessly destroyed an innocent girl,’ the Doctor shouted.‘What possible harm could she have done to you and your kind?’Styr ignored the accusation and lumbered forward several paces, his pincers opening and shutting impatiently.‘You would appear to have exceptional powers,’ he panted, ‘and will be a most interesting subject, much more worthy of investigation.’The Doctor sprang forward.Grabbing one arm, he swung it with all his strength and sent Styr’s massively unwieldy frame trundling round and round like a run-down spinning top.With a shattering roar of fury, Styr struggled to regain his balance, triggering the lethal weapon concealed in the sleeve of his suit as he lurched around.The Doctor frantically dodged the deadly bolts of radiation as they swept crazily round the alcove, blasting whole sections of the circuitry embedded in the rockface into flaring, molten fragments.Rapidly weakening, he dived underneath Styr’s flailing arms and out into the ravine.The Sontaran lumbered a few metres in pursuit, but the Doctor had disappeared.‘You will be found, wherever you are.’ Styr bellowed, and tramped back towards the crevasse where Sarah still lay among the smouldering circuits.The Doctor ran blindly through the ravine, his lungs bursting and his two hearts swelling as if to choke him.The strength in his legs began to dissolve and he fell down a steep slope into a thick bed of brittle ferns, their stems shattering like machine gun fire into a cloud of fine blackish dust which hung in the air before settling in a thin layer over his crumpled body.Harry moved cautiously through the rocks, calling out in the eerie silence and all the time trying to banish from his mind the terrible images Sarah’s agonised scream had created.The Doctor had far outstripped him, leaping through the gullies with the agility of a cat, and now he seemed to be completely lost again.He soon came across the dead body of the young crewman, dangling from its manacles in the hidden cleft, the lolling tongue black and hideously swollen, the eyes turned up in their sockets.‘Murderer,’ Harry muttered through teeth clenched in frustration and fury.He hurried on, even more apprehensive of what would await him when he found Sarah—assuming that he ever did find her.As he battled his way through dense undergrowth, Harry suddenly caught sight of the Doctor’s hat, snared on some huge thorns.He freed it and began to search around with mingled feelings of foreboding and relief.He soon found the Doctor’s body hunched among the ferns, and listened anxiously to his chest for some sign of life.The Doctor’s hearts were fluttering weakly, and his breathing was spasmodic and shallow.Harry quickly loosened the Doctor’s scarf and jacket, rolled him on to his back, and began to apply artificial respiration.After a time, he paused and listened for any signs of improvement; but the Doctor appeared to be steadily fading.‘Come on, Doctor.Come on,’ he gasped, pushing down on the Doctor’s chest with strong, rhythmic presses.‘You’ve got an extra heart.you ought to be able.to do better than this.’ Again Harry stopped and listened, shaking his head in despair.‘Please, Doctor.Please.’ he entreated, resuming the treatment.Harry carried on until he was exhausted, and was close to tears as he bowed his head in defeat, puzzled at the absence of any evident injury to the Doctor’s body, apart from blistered palms.‘Fat lot of use I turned out to be as an M.O.on this expedition,’ he muttered [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]