Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment (8 page)

‘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. Without drugs and equipment there seemed to be little more he could do. He could not save the Doctor.

Pulling himself together, he decided to continue his search for Sarah: at least he might be able to help her. As he turned reluctantly away, he heard something which made his blood run cold: the muffled, hollow gasping of the Sontaran. Instantly, Harry was fired with the desire for revenge. Losing all his fear, he ran along the ravine towards the sound. As he approached the opening to the crevasse, the Sontaran’s breathy speech grew more intelligible.

‘The reactions of the female subject remain unpredictable...’ Styr was saying, ‘...therefore the exact function of this organism cannot yet be evaluated...’

Harry crept up and peered round the buttress. Styr was standing over Sarah’s twisted body, dictating into his micro-recorder unit. Licking his lips, Harry eyed the Sontaran’s colossal back and thick limbs. Then, very carefully, he armed himself with a large, knobbly flint from the foot of the buttress and waited, watching Styr’s every move as the Sontaran began to examine the damaged circuits around the sides of the alcove.

‘Further evaluation must be postponed while necessary adjustments are made,’ Styr concluded into the micro-recorder as he completed his inspection.

Harry stepped into the entrance and aimed the flint at the back of Styr’s head. Bending his body backwards like a bow, he flung the stone, but at the instant it left his hands it seemed to be snatched out of the air, and simultaneously his face was covered by something large and soft. He was pulled swiftly and silently backwards out of the crevasse and propelled along the ravine and into a crevice concealed in the undergrowth. For several seconds he was held struggling in a vice-like clasp.

‘Ssssssssssssh,’ hissed a voice into his ear. Harry stopped struggling, and his face was uncovered. The flint was thrust in front of his eyes. ‘I’m quite ashamed of you, Harry,’ whispered the Doctor’s voice, ‘attacking a chap from behind like that...’

6

Harry gulped in amazement. ‘Doctor... I thought you were...’ he stammered.

‘It wouldn’t have worked, Harry,’ the Doctor whispered,

‘not unless you had hit him exactly in the right spot.’ He gave Harry a sharp tap on the back of his neck. ‘There.

That’s a Sontaran’s Achilles Heel.’

‘Thanks for the tip,’ Harry murmured, still recovering from his fright. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

The Doctor released Harry and began to rummage about in his overflowing pockets, muttering quietly away to himself.

‘But I thought you were a goner,’ Harry exclaimed, filled with shame at having abandoned the Doctor. ‘I was quite sure there was nothing I...’

The Doctor put his finger to his lips. ‘I was merely relaxing, Harry,’ he grinned. ‘An old Tibetan trick at times of unusual stress : it helps to clear the mind.’

‘Well, I must get you to teach me sometime,’ Harry said, shaking his head in disbelief.

The Doctor was busily turning out an extraordinary assortment of objects into his upturned hat: marbles, pieces of twisted wire, shrivelled jelly babies, weird keys, a pirate’s eye-patch, strange coins, sea shells, a dead beetle...

all manner of things were added to the swelling jumble.

‘Now where, where did I put it?’ the Doctor muttered irritably, delving into his bulging inside pockets and producing even more bizarre items of bric-a-brac.

‘What are you looking for, Doctor?’ Harry asked.

‘My Liquid Crystal Instant Recall Diary,’ the Doc-tor sighed. ‘I’m sure that I made some useful notes about the Sontarans a few centuries ago... It’s absolutely vital that we find out what they are doing here on Earth.’

‘Mostly torturing and killing innocent humans, as far as I can see,’ Harry murmured gloomily.

The Doctor began stuffing the varied contents of his hat back into his many pockets. ‘I really cannot be expected to keep everything in my head,’ he complained, bending the ear-trumpet in half so it would take up less room. ‘Never hoard unnecessary junk, Harry. It’s fatal to clutter oneself up.’

Dipping into the hat Harry idly picked out the scrap of unfamiliar metal which he had seen the Doctor fiddling with earlier.

‘What
is
this stuff?’ he asked.

The Doctor glanced up from his laborious task. ‘An alloy of Terullian,’ he replied.

Harry looked blank. ‘Terullian?’ he queried.

‘A very rare substance, much sought after by many of the civilisations in the Universe,’ the Doctor explained. ‘It has literally thousands of uses... under certain conditions it can even behave like a living organism.’

Harry shuddered at the idea of a live metal. ‘Where does it come from?’ he murmured, hastily putting the fragment back in the pile of jumble.

‘It is formed inside the crusts of planetary bodies by the action of stellar radiation,’ the Doctor answered.

‘By neutrinos and things...’ Harry suggested.

‘Exactly, Harry,’ the Doctor said warmly. ‘But it is not found in this galaxy...’ The Doctor broke off, staring at Harry with piercing eyes. He snatched the scrap of Terullian out of the hat. ‘Of course...’ he cried, ‘the Solar Flares. It’s just possible that the Sontarans are prospecting for Terullian here on Earth.’

Harry told the Doctor about his encounter with Styr in the subterranean cavern. The Doctor listened eagerly, nodding as the details began to fit into place in his mind.

‘The Sontarans have made many enemies by monopolising the exploitation of Terullian deposits in several galaxies,’ he murmured when Harry had finished.

He put the fragment carefully away.

‘A most useful clue, Harry,’ the Doctor continued cheerfully. ‘Never throw anything away... you never know when such bits and pieces are going to come in handy.’

At that moment, Styr’s heavy tread and laboured breath were heard nearby. The Doctor and Harry remained utterly still. Gradually the sounds died away as the Sontaran strode into the distance. The Doctor jammed on his emptied hat and darted out of the crevice, where he and Harry had been hiding, into the gully.

‘I’m going to follow our cumbersome friend and see what else I can discover,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘Harry, you’d better do whatever you can for poor Sarah Jane,’ and before Harry could reply, he had set off along the ravine, zig-zagging from crevice to crevice in pursuit of the Sontaran.

When Harry eventually located the crevasse where he had discovered Sarah, he approached the entrance extremely cautiously. To his surprise he found that he was able to enter quite easily: the invisible force-field had gone. He was even more surprised to find the alcove deserted: Sarah was nowhere to be seen.

‘Humpty Dumpty must have taken her,’ he muttered disconsolately, going over to search the deep shadows around the base of the towering granite walls. All of a sudden he felt very dizzy.

‘What on earth... ?’ he began, clutching his reeling head as he caught sight of the molten bunches of coloured filaments festooning the sides of the dungeon. Everything around him began to spin faster and faster and he flung himself backwards as something flew hissing and spitting out of the shadows like an angry wildcat. He rubbed his eyes and found himself staring down at the crouched figure of Sarah, a metre in front of him.

‘It’s... it’s only me... old thing...’ Harry stuttered, managing a faint smile of greeting. But the smile instantly faded and Harry went white as chalk. Sarah’s teeth were bared like fangs, and her eyes were glaring crazily. She tensed her body as if preparing to spring at him.

Slowly Harry backed away, shaking his head in confusion. ‘Sarah... it’s me... Harry...’ he protested. Sarah’s only response was to raise her arms threateningly. In each hand she wielded an ugly flint, roughly shaped like a blade with sharp serrated edges. Unearthly, guttural snarls issued from her foaming mouth as she began to edge towards him.