Dancing the Code Part 23

Could he have shot to wound? No, there hadn't been time to think, to risk it.

There was time for the Doctor. He wasn't attacking you when you shot him. shot him.

But once I'd shot Jo I had to go through with it. Had to finish it.

Dammit the Doctor's alien anyway -

So you don't trust him? You want him to be dead?

Suddenly the Brigadier couldn't stand any more of it. He bunched his fists, set off at a run for the airport building.

Yates was standing in the doorway, looking tired.

'Yates!' snapped the Brigadier. 'Take charge of the loading. I need to make a phone call.'

The Captain blinked. 'A phone call, sir?'

'The morgue. I need to find out - well, you know what I need to find out.'

Yates stared at him for a moment, then nodded. 'Of course, sir.' He stepped aside to let the Brigadier pa.s.s.

The Brigadier saw a phone on the desk, picked it up, began to dial.

He wondered how significant it was that he knew the number of the UNIT morgue off by heart.

'What do you mean, you couldn't get their clothes off?' Dr Richard Moore stared fiercely at the mortuary a.s.sistant. He'd heard some lousy excuses in his time but this one beat them all. 'Look, I've just been woken up in the middle of the night and asked to do twenty autopsies in two hours; I've got Lethbridge-Stewart on the phone doing his nut because we haven't done his two civvies yet; and you're telling me you've put them on the slabs fully dressed? You'd better have a good reason -' he glared at the name tag on the man's white lab coat '- Timothy Witch.e.l.l, or you'll be going on report.'

The a.s.sistant shook his head miserably. 'Try it for yourself, sir. It's impossible.'

Moore strode across the rubber-tiled floor of the morgue, pulled out the two drawers indicated by the bewildered man. A wave of cold air hit him in the face, scented with some kind of perfume. There lay the person that Lethbridge-Stewart called the Doctor, resplendent in his cape, pale green frilled s.h.i.+rt, trousers and boots; and in the drawer next to him Miss Grant, in her blue T-s.h.i.+rt and brown trousers.

Moore shook his head, bent down over the Doctor, pulled at the b.u.t.tons of the s.h.i.+rt.

They wouldn't undo.

In fact, there was nothing for them to undo from; the b.u.t.tons and the s.h.i.+rt seemed to be part of the same piece of material. And when he pulled at the collar of the s.h.i.+rt, the flesh of the Doctor's neck came with it.

Moore asked Witch.e.l.l for a magnifying lens and took a closer look.

He could see fibres running from the s.h.i.+rt into the skin, changing colour as they went. He shook his head.

'If they ever were human, something very strange has happened to them - something that didn't happen to the others.' He made a fist, tapped at the Doctor's forehead, shook his head again.

It didn't feel feel right. right.

He looked up at Witch.e.l.l. 'Look, the Brigadier's still on the line out there. I'm going to tell him what I've found so far - you get this one on to a table for autopsy. Never mind about the clothes. Right?'

Witch.e.l.l nodded. Moore strode out of the room, set off for the phone at a run.

When Moore had left the room, Tim Witch.e.l.l went to the autopsy room, opened the door, switched the light on over the bare slab. Then he went back, rolled a stretcher trolley up to the Doctor's body and prepared to lift it.

He noticed that the Doctor's eyes were open.

He didn't like to think of a corpse being sawn apart with its eyes staring like that: it didn't seem right somehow. So he leaned over the Doctor's body, pushed the eyes closed again.

A hand reached up and grabbed his arm.

'I wouldn't do that if I were you, old chap. I need them to see with.'

Witch.e.l.l started back, shouted, 'Dr Moore - '

But the Doctor's other hand shot up and blocked his mouth.

Witch.e.l.l tried to pull his head away, found that it was held tight by the hand that had been holding his arm. He punched at the 'corpse'

with his arms, but it sat upright, pushed him back against the hard metal of the cold store.

Witch.e.l.l felt a rich, cloying smell enter his nose and his throat.

A somehow soothing smell.

A smell to dream about.

He dreamed.

Nineteen.

When Jo woke up she was walking. Or, more accurately, her feet were making walking motions but she was actually being dragged along, each arm clamped tightly by the china-hard hands of one of the alien copies. Ahead of her, two similar figures were holding the Doctor. Beyond him was one of the hippo-sized defenders, mandibles raised as if to strike.

Jo opened her mouth to shout a warning, then realized that the creature was walking backwards, keeping pace with them. Jo looked away, uneasily.

'Doctor?' she called.

Jo! Are you all right?'

'I think so. How long have we been -' She abruptly remembered her dream, the other Jo winking and walking away, leaving her to die.

Or had it been only a dream?

She shuddered.

'About twelve hours, I should think,' the Doctor was saying.

'Doctor, I remember someone who looked like me. She said I was dead.'

The Doctor looked over his shoulder, smiled. 'Well, you're not dead, I can a.s.sure you of that.'

Jo grinned, relaxed a little. If the Doctor was smiling, things couldn't be too bad. She looked around her. The pa.s.sageway they were moving through was featureless, with walls of what looked like baked mud lined with slightly luminous fungi. More light came from somewhere ahead. Jo hoped it was daylight, but knew that it wasn't very likely.

'Where are we going?' she asked the Doctor.

'Well, we're moving in a south-westerly direction, at a slope of about ten degrees downwards. We have to be about four hundred feet below the surface of the desert by now. Apart from that -' he lowered his voice slightly '- I haven't the faintest idea.'

Jo turned her head slightly, looked into the perfect, expressionless face of one of her captors. 'Do you know where we're going?' she asked.

There was no response.

'They're not likely to be very talkative, I'm afraid,' called the Doctor. 'I think you'll find that they communicate largely by gesture and scent.'

'Like insects?' asked Jo, remembering her discussion with Akram.

'Yes, but also like fish, some reptiles, and quite a lot of mammals,'

the Doctor said. 'Sophisticated aural communication is quite rare, evolutionarily speaking. The Venusians, I seem to remember, had a system of hand-signals which many of their cultures used almost exclusively for intimate conversation. The clan Dhallenidhall in particular thought it quite rude to speak aloud. Except in an emergency, of course. And then there are the Delphons, who communicate by means of eyebrow movements. If you think about it, sound isn't really a necessary part of intelligent communication, merely a convenient one.'

Jo wondered if being frog-marched down a dark corridor by unfriendly aliens to an uncertain destination was really the best time to engage in abstruse cultural and evolutionary speculations; but she knew the Doctor, and kept quiet. If they survived, and she managed to remember what he was saying, she might even find it interesting.

But before the Doctor could say anything more, the light ahead of them brightened and the pa.s.sageway opened out into a s.p.a.ce even larger than the brood chamber. Jo saw distant walls of what appeared to be concrete, hundreds of 'men' in Kebirian Army uniforms, and several of the defenders, stationed against the walls with their mandibles raised.

Straight ahead of her was a sausage-shaped object the size of a small cathedral, faced in something that looked like white plaster. As the defender walking ahead of the Doctor clumped off to one side, she saw that there was an entrance in the nearest wall of the cathedral-sized object. She saw a crude wooden door, roughly oval in shape; a flight of metal steps of the type used to board aircraft led up to it. The copies holding the Doctor pulled him towards the bottom of the steps, and Jo was forced to follow.

The Doctor looked over his shoulder, muttered, 'I think some of those Kebirians are originals.'

Jo frowned. 'Real people?'

The Doctor nodded.

'What does that mean?'

The Doctor grinned. 'I wish I knew. With luck it might mean we have some allies.'

They were marched up the steps. The door had swung open ahead of them, apparently of its own accord; the copies pushed and pulled them through. Beyond was a narrow pa.s.sageway which sloped downwards. Jo's captors had to release her arms and let her walk by herself; but they stayed on guard, one ahead of her, one behind, as they followed the twists and turns of the pa.s.sageway.

At last they came to another doorway, in which stood the figure of a little man with a round face and round spectacles, wearing a white lab coat.

When he spoke, Jo jumped, startled to realize that he was human.

'I am Sadeq Zalloua,' he said. 'Welcome to the control centre.'

He stood aside, gestured them through into a large room - or at least, Jo supposed it was a room. A ma.s.s of multicoloured tubing covered the walls and ceiling. Here and there knots of tubes bulged from the walls. In the middle of the room, looking totally out of place, was a large wooden desk. Behind the desk, his deeply lined face impa.s.sive, was Khalil Benari, Prime Minister of Kebiria.

'Well find out for certain, man, and report to me as soon as you can. I need to know.' Lethbridge-Stewart was practically shouting over the phone: Dr Moore opened his mouth to reply, was interrupted by a further barked instruction. 'And you'll have to contact me through Rabat control, the flight's ready to leave. Is that clear?'

'Yes, sir,' said Moore quickly.

'Very well.' The phone clicked and went dead.

Moore hurried back to the mortuary, the Brigadier's voice still ringing in his ears.

'Witch.e.l.l?' he called.

There was no reply. Moore shrugged, strode into the room, ready to give the man an ear-bas.h.i.+ng. If he hadn't done what he'd been told to do - The two drawers had been closed, the light was on in the autopsy room. Dr Moore saw a figure in there. Witch.e.l.l?' repeated Moore.

A figure stepped forward into the morgue: the Doctor. The Doctor whom he'd last seen as a corpse. Who still had red blood staining his s.h.i.+rt.

'What -?' began Moore.

He never finished the question. True to the pattern of her original, the copy of Jo brought the corner of a heavy steel instrument tray down on his skull.