Island of Death (29 page)

The Brigadier glanced at him. ‘Can’t we get a move on?’ he said.

‘But you don’t have to have a reason, a purpose, for showing mercy. There is a natural moral law that demands it.’

Knowing that time was running out, the Doctor was making one last effort.

‘Well tried, Doctor. But you’re forgetting that I’m a Skang.

To fulfil our purpose is not just a categorical imperative. It’s the essence of our survival. Everything gives way to that.’

Mother Hilda glanced at her watch and stood up; and then she tilted her head on one side and gave a little laugh. ‘There you are, you see, Doctor,’ she said. ‘A perfect example of our dual existence. Hilda Hutchens has to run her life to a strict timetable; she has done for years, so why should she stop now? But I don’t need a mechanical gadget to tell me that we have to bring this discussion to an end. I can feel in my real body that it won’t be long now before the sun and the moon will have aligned themselves with the Earth. The gravity waves are as palpable to me as a breeze on the cheek is to you.’

So. All that was left was the hope that Sarah had managed to warn Lethbridge-Stewart.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ he asked.

‘You’ll be confined in here until after the ceremony. I can’t make the decision on my own. It may be that the Great Skang will decide to seed you whether you want it or not. I hope so, Doctor. I’ve enjoyed our talk. It would be pleasant to think that we might be able to continue it at some time in the future.’

A voice came from the doorway. ‘There you are, you see. I told you she wasn’t to be trusted!’

They both turned. Alex Whitbread was standing in the opening, flanked by half a dozen or more of the teachers and a couple of brawny guards.

‘Here’s clear evidence of her treachery,’ he went on.

Dame Hilda’s years of authority came to the fore. ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, Alex Whitbread?’

She might have been talking to a bolshie undergraduate.

‘You’ve been deposed,
Sister
Hilda. You are no longer the leader. I have been asked to take over.’

She looked at him over her glasses. ‘Leader? What sort of talk is that? When have I ever called myself a “leader”?’

‘Silence! You’ve had your say for too long. Guards!’

The two men stepped forward. Unlike any other of the protectors of the Skang the Doctor had so far seen, they were carrying what appeared to be primitive but deadly spears of thick bamboo, with wickedly sharpened points.

‘You will be kept in protective custody until the New Council decides your fate. I have no doubt that they will agree with me that mere dissolution would be too good for you.’

‘Meaning?’

‘You showed me no mercy. Why should I show you any?

You called yourself Mother. Very fitting. You sentenced me to excision as casually as Mummy used to force her children to swallow tablespoonfuls of castor oil...’

‘In the hope that it might do them some good, yes! I can see that in this case the medicine has failed to do its job.’

‘Well, Daddy Alex has your best welfare at heart. We’ll see how you like the taste.’ He turned to the Doctor. ‘As for you,’

he said, ‘it’s merely a matter of deciding the most satisfying way to rid our world of you. It was plain to me all along that it was you who was really the one in charge of the feeble attempt to hunt us down, not that fool of a soldier.’

‘You’d be well advised not to underestimate the Brigadier, Mr Whitbread.’

‘Is that so, Doctor? Maybe you’re right. The point is academic. HMS
Hallaton
has sailed out of the lagoon. Your friends have gone home and left you. What a pity you’ll have no opportunity to say goodbye.’ He turned to the guards.

‘Helmut, stay at the door - and Hank at the window. Come along, the rest of you. We have some mopping up to do before the ceremony.’

He stalked away, followed by his little retinue. As they disappeared, his voice floated back. ‘If they try to escape, kill them.’

There were different sorts of fear, thought Sarah, as she kept watching the path up to the top of the mountain. This wasn’t the old butterflies in the tummy bit. This was more the solid lump rising into the throat that you got when you were ludicrously late for work, and you’d been warned, and you might get the sack, and you were so out of breath it hurt, and there wasn’t a hope in hell of making it.

What would happen if they were too late to stop the Skang?

At last! The rattle of feet up the metal steps, and Bob Simkins’ head popped up. ‘The landing parties are embarking now, sir.’ He disappeared.

‘About time,’ muttered the Brig as he turned to go. ‘Come along Miss Smith. But remember, keep your head down, and don’t get in the way.’

Cheek! You’d think he’d know her better by now.

Her choking apprehension had vanished in a moment. She started to put down the borrowed binoculars. But she couldn’t resist a last check.

A flash of white.

Oh no! A stream of long-robed figures nearing the top of the path! The teachers were going into the temple... and, yes, at the bottom there was a less orderly line of figures in the mixed bag of white clothing that showed them to be the queue of disciples, marshalled by the recognisable tall figures of the guards.

‘Brig! I mean, Brigadier! Come back, it’s too late!’

‘What?’ He was back beside her in no time, almost snatching the binoculars from her hand.

After a quick look and a muffled exclamation (a Gaelic oath?), he turned and ran, literally ran, to the side of the bridge and leaned over.

‘Andrews! Up here! At the double!’

This was clearly not the way to address the Commanding Officer of one of Her Britannic Majesty’s warships. Pete Andrews arrived as fast as the Brigadier wanted, but with the obvious intention of making this quite clear. ‘Who the devil do you think you’re...?’

‘Yes, yes. Sorry and all that, but the landing’s off!’

‘What?’

‘Take a look for yourself.’

Andrews seized the glasses and raised them to his eyes.

There was a short pause, while he realised the implication of what he was seeing.

‘Shit!’ said the Commanding Officer of Her Majesty’s Ship
Hallaton.

‘Exactly. There’s only one thing for it. Bombardment.’

Pete stared at him. ‘We’re not a bloody battleship, man.

What sort of damage do you think we could do with a forty-millimetre Bofors?’

The Brigadier was in full fighting mode, unstoppable. He had a job to do and he was going to do it no matter what, thought Sarah.

‘With one of your missiles you could blast a hole in the Great Wall of China,’ he said.

What? But they were just for show. Pete had said so himself.

‘But we’ve never even...’

‘I presume they’ve been kept in good order? Do you know how to fire them?’

‘Are you suggesting that...?’

‘Good. These things might possibly be impervious to bullets, but half a hundredweight of high explosive... They’ll wish they’d stayed in outer space. We’ll lob one into the crater and get rid of the lot of them in one go. Right?’

‘But... but that must be where the Doctor had gone. And she’d told the Brigadier as much. Brig...!’

‘Not now, Miss Smith.’

‘But the Doctor!’

He turned on her angrily, fiercely. ‘Whatever the cost! Isn’t that what he said? What choice do we have?’

He’d already thought of it. And was still going ahead.

Dame Hilda’s philosophical selfless equanimity seemed to have been severely dented by the current turn of events.

‘Brother Alex has no idea what he’s getting into, with this ridiculous coup,’ she said to the Doctor, as agitated as any mother whose family was being led astray. ‘It was no accident that I became the “leader”. Horrid word. He might as well call himself “der Fuhrer”. It was to avoid anything of the sort that I set up the Skang cult - so that I could be the “Mother”.’

‘It’s not just a job, a position to be handed over, or snatched. Once the web of interconnection has been established, it’s sacrosanct.’

This didn’t make sense. Hadn’t she said that the Skang had only one consciousness? Presumably they were all part of it...

‘Surely he must be aware of that? If you share a consciousness...’

‘No. Unfortunately. Our connection with the Great Skang is limited. As I told you, our existence on Earth is mediated through our human neurological structure. His being highly intelligent doesn’t mean that the original Alex Whitbread wasn’t stupid. If he hadn’t been totally lacking in common-or-garden nous, he would never have let himself run into the trouble he did when he was in the government. He’d have been prime minister by now.’ She lowered her voice, checking to see that the guards outside the gaps in the rocks that did service as door and window weren’t listening. ‘Please help me, Doctor. I have to get out before the Prime Assimilation brings the Great Skang to Earth. If this is still the position when that happens, it may very well mean the aborting of the project on this planet.’

He looked at her in amazement. ‘You seem to have forgotten that this is precisely why I came to Stella Island.’

‘You don’t understand. If the Skang makes the decision to terminate, it will be the end for everyone - and I do mean everyone. Giving my people... my children... granting them fulfilment - the fulfilment that every sentient being hungers for without knowing it - is one thing. A pointless massacre is quite another.’

‘But why should there be anything of the kind? Just from mere pique? I don’t understand.’

‘Oh it’ll be quite impersonal. The logic of the situation demands it. No trace must be left of the Skang’s visit to this planet. There’ll be nobody on the island left alive. Nobody at all.’

In spite of his private doubts that the firing of at least one missile was necessary in order to save
Homo sapiens
from a humiliating and ultimately terminal fate, Pete Andrews had soon been convinced that it was his duty.

This the Brigadier had accomplished with a good deal of biting comments about military efficiency compared with naval casualness, albeit sotto voce (which had the quality of shouting without the volume).

Pete could feel his face turning red as he listened to the Brigadier’s remarks, but once he took on board the necessity of going along with his demands, he wasted no time. He’d show this arrogant brown job what efficiency was.

He picked up the microphone of the Tannoy. ‘First Lieutenant to the bridge. First Lieutenant to the bridge. Chop chop!’

He glanced at the Brigadier, who had gone back to surveying the shore, to see if he’d noticed this lapse into decidedly unofficial slang.

It was over five years since the
Hallaton
had been equipped to defend Hong Kong from the might of Communist China.

He just hoped to God they’d all remember the drill.

‘Excuse me.’ The Doctor was speaking to the sentry outside who was blocking the gap in the rocks that formed a window.

‘Yeah?’

‘Do you think it would be possible for you to stand a little to your left? A couple of feet would do nicely. If it wouldn’t inconvenience you, of course.’

The giant guard grasped his home-made spear a bit more firmly. ‘You trying to be funny, bub?’

Ah, a New Yorker. ‘You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?’

He loosened his grip a little. What’s it to you?’

‘Used to be a haunt of mine, Brooklyn.’

In a sense, the Doctor thought. It was 1925, at the height of the disastrous experiment of Prohibition. He’d been there at least a fortnight - the time it had taken to ferret out Studs Maloney (an alias of course), who’d set up a lucrative business importing rot-gut hooch from the twenty-fifth century.

‘Ma Goldoni’s deli still going strong, Hank? Best apple pie in the US of A, Ma Goldoni’s,’ he said.

The big man beamed. You knew ‘Ma Goldoni? She only croaked coupla years ago. Ninety-three, she was.’

Well, she would be.

‘Madge took over. You know Madge? Her pie’s even better!’

This was surreal, thought the Doctor. What a time to chat about apple pie. And what was he doing, colluding with Dame Hilda? She was the enemy, for Pete’s sake! One step at a time.

The guard frowned. He’d remembered his duty. ‘Don’t try to get clever, sir.’

The Doctor held up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I just want to see what’s going on. Okay?’

He grunted. ‘Mm. Okay.’

He moved out of the way, and the Doctor was able to see out. The first thing to catch his eye was the man who had been placed to guard the ‘door’, watching suspiciously. So there was no chance of any further action at the moment.

He looked down into the arena below. There was no sign of any of the disciples yet. But it did seem that all the teachers were assembled. Not bunched together at the front as they had been before, instead they’d spread themselves out amongst the extra seats, giving each a generous space, though there were several groups who had not yet settled down. There was a quiet hum of conversation, not unlike the sound of a concert hall or a theatre just before the house lights dim.