Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (9 page)

‘There’s no beam.’ If he felt any guilt about the damage to the cylinder, he concealed it from the Doctor.

‘You’re forgetting this.’ The Doctor held up his homing device. ‘The TARDIS is on board the ship, and this will home in on the TARDIS.’

The Brigadier groaned. Back to the obelisk again!

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart was the last to reach the top of the hill. Helped by Turlough, the Doctor was already installing the homing device in the navigational unit of the transmat capsule as his exhausted friend stumbled breathlessly through the door of the silver sphere. ‘This is the third time today I have yomped up this wretched hill!’

he grumbled.

The Doctor finished his work. ‘Good of you to see me off, Brigadier.’

But Lethbridge-Stewart had no intention of letting the Doctor out of his sight. Heaven knows what trouble the man would get into, left to his own devices.

For reasons far more devious than those of the Brigadier, Turlough was determined to stick with the Doctor as well.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ protested the Brigadier, who had had quite enough of the precocious young man for one day.

‘The Doctor needs my help.’

The Brigadier grunted. There was no denying it, the boy had remarkable skills. He wondered what Mr Sellick was going to say about it all.

The Doctor closed the capsule door.

‘How long will the journey take?’ The Brigadier braced himself, expecting at any moment to be blasted off the hill like a cannon ball.

The Doctor opened the door again.

The old soldier blinked as he looked out into the control centre of Mawdryn’s ship.

As Mawdryn left the unique atmosphere of the TARDIS he felt the strength go out of him. He clawed at the hard, smooth walls of his ship, but there was no resilience to his limbs. He grasped at a pillar, but on contact with the faceted marble his flesh crumbled like fly-blown fungus.

He collapsed slowly to the floor. The Doctor’s red coat was already sodden with pus and liquified flesh. Mawdryn moaned at the pain of his dissolution and longed for oblivion. But now he needed the laboratory. He must reach the apparatus. He must go on.

He undulated what remained of his body, and his viscous torso slid slowly forward along the corridor. Every inch of the way was the most appalling agony. He began to fear that time was running out. The girl, Tegan, might take the TARDIS back to Earth, to be reunited with the genuine Time Lord. Never again would there be the chance of an ending. Mawdryn needed help. He turned off the main companionway,.

The unearthly faces gazed haughtily down as Mawdryn slithered into the hall of likenesses. He stopped below the central icon that had so disturbed the Doctor on his first exploration of the ship. With a supreme effort of will he raised himself up towards the frame. ‘Mawdryn has returned!’ he cried. ‘It is time for the awakening. Help me!’

But neither help nor answer came.

Fearing that his frail voice had not reached his comrades in the dormition chamber, Mawdryn called more loudly. ‘My brothers, awake. Mawdryn has returned. I have brought to our ship a TARDIS...’

He felt himself weakening. Hope alone gave him the strength to continue. ‘The time of our ending is near!’ he called.

But the news fell upon deaf ears.

‘Help me!’ Mawdryn strained again to reach the chamber release, but the effort was beyond him, and with a cry of despair he fell back to the floor.

In the TARDIS control room, the Brigadier, Tegan and Nyssa stared at the screen. There was no sign of any activity in the ship. The Brigadier began to suspect that Tegan had been right about the ‘Doctor’. But he could never have imagined that the greatest danger, out there in the ship, was himself; for it would have been beyond the comprehension of the common-sense military man in the control room that he could ever meet up with his own person — some six years older.

‘Right!’ The Brigadier turned to the doors. ‘Time for a recce. I think we should keep an eye on this character.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘You girls are staying here.’

‘We girls,’ bristled Tegan, ‘are perfectly capable of...’

‘You will both remain in the TARDIS! And that is an order, Miss Jovanka,’ he added as he left the control room, in case Tegan had forgotten that both Brigadiers and schoolmasters should be obeyed without question.

‘Chauvinist pig!’ muttered Tegan under her breath.

‘Good Heavens!’ muttered the Brigadier as he stepped out of the TARDIS; he had never seen such luxury in a ship before.

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed an older Lethbridge-Stewart as he walked with the Doctor and Turlough along the corridor from the control centre. ‘Such luxury!’

‘It’s not an ordinary ship, Brigadier.’

The old soldier snorted. Ostentation of this sort did not meet with his approval.

As they continued into the body of the vessel, the Brigadier felt a prickling sensation on his wrists and the back of his neck. Static electricity, he concluded, without inquiring whether the other two had also experienced the phenomenon.

He was not to know that his younger self was, at that same moment, exploring a parallel corridor. As the younger Brigadier moved away into a side passage, the Doctor’s gruff companion from 1983 noticed that the tingling had stopped.

So had the Doctor. He looked round as if admiring the décor.

‘Doctor, we’re supposed to be looking for the TARDIS.

Your friends could be in danger.’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘The creature will have left the TARDIS. He’ll need his own life-support systems.’ He continued to examine the walls. ‘Somewhere there must be...’ He caught sight of a small companionway leading off the main corridor. ‘I don’t remember that!’ He turned back to Turlough. ‘Find the TARDIS and stay with Tegan and Nyssa. Brigadier, I want you to come with me.’ He hurried the older man into the narrow side-passage, leaving Turlough alone again on the alien ship.

Turlough hoped that the Doctor was not walking into a trap... But that was ridiculous.
The Doctor must be destroyed
.

Yet without the Doctor’s help, how could he ever free the ship from the warp ellipse? He felt very confused.

He reached for the cube. Since his purpose was now evil, his guide must be the Black Guardian. As he held the crystal he cringed at his own weakness and inadequacy in the service of his new master. ‘It’s not my fault the Doctor was able to home in on the TARDIS,’ he pleaded.

The crystal was lifeless in his hand.

‘Can you hear me?’

There was no stinging rebuke or diabolical resassurance.

‘There’s not much I can do with the Brigadier around...

Answer me!’ he cried.

But there was no answer. Rejected and afraid, Turlough moved into the darkness.

A bulkhead sealed the end of the side passage. ‘A dead end,’ thought the Brigadier. But the Doctor was already fingering the ornamentation around the edge of the door.

There was a click and the door slid sideways.

The room they entered was unlike anywhere else in the ship; functional, unembellished, cold as a mortuary.

‘Some kind of a laboratory,’ muttered the Brigadier. ‘Or could it be an operating theatre?’ He could make nothing of the sinister machinery.

Not so the Doctor. ‘A metamorphic symbiosis regenerator!’ He moved excitedly to a large piece of apparatus in the centre of the room.

The Brigadier thought longingly of the safe, comfortable technology of his old Humber; but he was far from the world of vintage cars and A-level maths.

‘Used by the Time Lords in cases of acute regenerative crisis,’ continued the Doctor after a cursory examination of the machine.

‘Then what’s it doing there?’

The same question was worrying the Doctor. ‘It must have been stolen from Gallifrey!’ He turned, grim-faced, to the Brigadier. ‘Someone on this ship has been trying to regenerate.’

‘The injured creature that Tegan thought was you?’

The Doctor leaned over the regenerator. ‘This would explain the mutation.’

‘Where is he now?’ The Brigadier looked anxiously out into the empty passage. ‘Perhaps he didn’t make it in time.

Collapsed somewhere. Even dead?’

‘Or
undead
, Brigadier!’

In the course of his military career the Brigadier had faced danger many times, but as he pictured that deformed creature at large on the ship – a potential enemy that could never be killed – his blood ran cold. He thought once again of the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

‘Look at this, Brigadier!’ The Doctor indicated several pieces of trunking, each terminating in a frame mounted with a complicated set of electrodes, that connected with the metamorphosis machine. ‘Eight of them!’ he whispered ominously.

The old soldier was none the wiser.

‘Somewhere on this ship, Brigadier, there are seven more creatures!’

Turlough could never explain what had prompted him to linger in the Hall of the Likenesses. He stood in the side gallery, mesmerised by the bland faces. As he moved a step forward, he could have sworn the eyes of the central icon blinked. He gazed at the portrait... And back at Turlough stared the Black Guardian. Turlough gasped at the sudden transformation.

‘While the Doctor is alive, I am never far from you, Turlough.’

‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t to know the Doctor had a homing device.’ He began to tremble.

‘Whimpering boy! Do you not understand! Everything now works towards the total humiliation of the Time Lord.’ The Black Guardian smiled. ‘You have done well.’

Turlough tried to stop himself shaking.

‘Give me your hand.’

The boy would as willingly have offered his arm to a hooded cobra.

‘Give me your hand. There is nothing to fear.’

The Black Guardian vanished the moment his fingers touched the likeness, and the whole frame swung back to reveal a hidden room. Turlough stepped into the chamber.

It felt as though he had entered a charnel-house. As his eyes grew accustomed to the light he became aware of seven shadowy figures, like corpses in their winding sheets, laid out against the walls. He peered at the sepulchral shapes; each shroud he saw to be a set of rich clothes, as sumptuous as the fabric of the ship itself. Each of the robes, he supposed, must enclose a dead man. But why had the Black Guardian sent him to open up a tomb?

There was a soft wheezing, as if an old man had began to snore. It came again; and again. Turlough realised that each cadaverous occupant of the chamber was struggling to draw air into his lungs; somehow the opening of the door had brought the creatures to life. He was paralysed with fear.

The hooded things began to stir. Bodies flexed under velvet cloaks; twisted arms started to tear off their sheaths and flail in the empty air around the terrified boy. The creature nearest Turlough lifted a claw-like hand and tore the cloth from his face. For a full five seconds, Turlough faced the hideous, gasping mutant, then screamed, and fled.

The resurrected corpse that had sent Turlough scuttling away down the corridor focused its sunken eyes on the open door. ‘Mawdryn has returned,’ it announced to its fellow sleepers.

‘Does he bring hope of our ending?’ came the reply.

The Brigadier couldn’t wait to get out of the laboratory.

There was something very disturbing about all those sterile, white panels with their inset dials and switches, and those tortuous electrodes.

But the Doctor was still examining the regenerator.

‘There’ve been some very cunning modifications.. A vicious buzzing emanated from the centre of the machine as the Doctor moved one of the switches.

‘That all looks highly dangerous,’ warned the Brigadier.

‘Quite right,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘It could do very nasty things to a genuine Time Lord.’

‘Listen!’ The Brigadier had heard the sound of a voice in the corridor. Or was it only the echo of the machinery the Doctor had set in motion? He moved quietly into the connecting passage to investigate, leaving the Doctor alone with the regenerator.

‘Doctor? Doctor?’ A younger, sprucer Lethbridge-Stewart advanced slowly along the main companionway. He was fairly confident, now, that the wounded man he was searching for was an imposter, but it would do no harm to give him the benefit of a little more doubt. ‘Doctor!’ he called again, pausing beside the small passage to the laboratory.

It was odd for someone as observant as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart not to notice the narrow entrance, but he was distracted by the increase in static electricity; the tingling on the back of his neck had returned.

Mawdryn moved silently as he writhed and wriggled towards the laboratory. As soon as he regained consciousness he had sensed the presence of more outsiders. Perhaps the Time Lord had come in search of his TARDIS.

Without the help of his fellow mutants, his progress was desperately slow, but he was not far now from the regenerator.

Had Mawdryn arrived a moment sooner at the approach to the laboratory, he would have been amazed to see
two
Brigadiers: one dressed in military blazer and tie who stood massaging his neck; the other a fatter, older man in a tweed jacket who appeared from the direction of the lab, a split second too late to catch sight of his other self at the junction, as the younger Lethbridge-Stewart moved off along the main corridor.

The senior Brigadier scratched his wrists which had begun to tingle again. He stepped forward and looked up and down the main companionway. The old soldier was sure someone was calling, further along the corridor. He followed the sound.

‘Are you there, Brigadier?’ The Doctor hurried from the narrow side-passage and peered into the corridor. How annoying of old Lethbridge-Stewart to wander off. He must have gone ahead to look for the TARDIS. The Doctor checked his bearings; the police box must be somewhere down there...

As Mawdryn squirmed forward he sensed the aura of the Time Lord whom he could dimly see hurrying away down the corridor. He dragged himself, like a slug, into the side passage and towards the laboratory.

One of the memories that had come flooding back to the old Brigadier was that UNIT’s former scientific advisor should not be trusted on his own. Lethbridge-Stewart was therefore reluctant to leave the Doctor tinkering with that diabolical machine, and since there was no way he could follow the mystery voice without getting hopelessly lost, he retraced his steps to the laboratory.