Doctor Who_ Planet Of Fire Part 10

'We're too late!' cried Turlough, running into the ruin with the Doctor and Amyand, just in time to see the door of the Master's TARDIS slam shut.

The Doctor was already running towards the blue police box. 'I'm going to materialise around him,' he shouted as he ran. But he had reckoned without six angry, disillusioned Elders, who were less than mollified to see three prisoners from the cave at liberty, and were about to a.s.sault the great box. They rushed to the Doctor's TARDIS, laser guns at the ready.

Pus.h.i.+ng Amyand and the Doctor between himself and the police box, Turlough turned to face the old men. 'It is the will of Logar that you obey me,' he announced in a grave voice. 'Put up your staves, for I am your new Chosen One.' He raised his arm in a n.a.z.i-style salute to display, on his underarm, the brand of the Misos Triangle.

There was consternation amongst the Elders. Could the mantle of the dead Malkon really have fallen on this heretic? Timanov examined the embossed triangles. It was beyond doubt the authentic mark of Logar.

'What are you waiting for?' Turlough nudged the Doctor towards the TARDIS door.

'The box is sacred to Logar,' protested Timanov. 'It may not be profaned by his enemies.'

'The Doctor is no enemy,' replied their self-appointed leader. 'He is the rightful custodian of the box.'

The Elders continued to hold the Doctor and Amyand in their sights, though they dared not point the deadly lasers at Turlough, for no one dared kill a second Chosen One.

'Who is this Doctor?' asked Timanov, still suspicious of the young man by the box.

'He has been sent to help you. You have been cheated by the false Outsider.' Turlough stepped forward in front of the lasers and pushed Amyand and the Doctor into the TARDIS. 'Will you compound the murder of Malkon by defying your new leader!' he shouted, hoping no trembling finger would pull the trigger.

As Amyand stared in wonder at the interior of the TARDIS control room, the Doctor hastily replaced the comparator and set the co-ordinates that would reconfigure the TARDIS around the nearby column, while Amyand, via the scanner screen, watched Turlough haranguing the old men.

The Doctor glanced up and saw his worried look. 'We only need a few moments and the TARDIS will provide a spectacular diversion,' he explained as he activated the the dematerialisation control, whereupon the column shook and shuddered and corruscated with lights. Amyand was frightfully impressed, but not so the Doctor. 'We're stuck!'

he cried, diving under the console. 'Oh, no,' he wailed, his head inside the pedestal. 'The temporal limiter has been disconnected.' He got wearily to his feet. 'Another old trick of the Master!'

'Just like the Doctor's,' said Peri, looking round the Master's control room.

'But infinitely superior,' sneered the Kamelion-Master.

'As I am to that galactic philanthropist.'

'I have computed the source of the power,' came the voice from the laboratory. 'Set these co-ordinates.'

As the automaton began pressing b.u.t.tons on the console, Peri stared at the screen where she had seen the Doctor and Turlough arrive at their police box. Her heart sank, as the barrel in the centre of the room began to rise and fall and the image disappeared from the viewer.

Revelling in her dismay, the robot Master produced a round object from his pocket and, with a s.a.d.i.s.tic laugh, explained how the Doctor's machine was inoperable.

The column was still, and a new view appeared on the scanner. While Peri peered at the gloomy cavern on the screen, wondering to what infernal region the creature had transported her, the metal Master left the control room, to return staggering under the weight of a large box which he placed on the floor beside the console. Peri could just perceive a faint humming above the ambient noise of the TARDIS. 'It's your control box, isn't it?' she said disparagingly. 'Forward, reverse, stop, like a toy train.'

'Very perceptive, my dear,' the Kamelion-Master replied as he opened the double doors. 'But the real power of my control is well beyond your inadequate comprehension.'

The mocking smile left his face as he produced a sinister, black tube. 'No more childish heroics, if you please,' he advised as he directed her to the entrance.

They appeared to have arrived in the Hall of the Mountain Kingor at least, thought Peri, in his boiler room. Everywhere, in the ma.s.sive cathedral of a cavern, were ducts and conduits, cables and pipes of all sizes and shapes. Tubes and flues zigzagged across the walls and under gridded floors. At one side of the cave a column of fire rose from a vent, right up to a chimney in the high, rock roof. There was a continuous rumbling all around them and the floor vibrated like the deck of an ocean liner.

'Where are we?' said Peri nervously.

In the heart of the volcano.' The Master waved her towards a large control desk on a raised dais.

Peri stood her ground. 'Look, if I'm to help you I want to know what you're doing and what happens to me when...'

'You will obey me without question!' the Kamelion-Master interrupted angrily.

'You said that once before,' Peri answered smartly back.

hoping to regain mental superiority over the robot.

But the girl had more than the evil will power of the Master to contend with. 'Perhaps you doubt the efficacy of this device,' said the automaton, raising the black object.

He turned to the wall of the cave where Peri could see three silver suits and helmets suspended from supports in the rock. 'Allow me to demonstrate the Tissue Compression Eliminator'. There was a red glow. First one, then another of what Peri took to be s.p.a.ce suits, started to shrink, smaller and smaller, until each was a miniature of itself, fit only for a doll's wardrobe. 'The same will happen to you, my dear,' threatened the Master as Peri followed him obediently to the central control desk.

She looked at the views of the valley below the volcano that appeared on monitor screens set into the desk. At least the Master hadn't taken her very far. She could even see a speck of blue in the distant ruinthe Doctor's TARDIS!

The robot laughed when he realised what she was looking at. 'A modest thunderbolt. I think!' He pressed a lever and there was a distant rumble. The Kamelion-Master zoomed the picture in to give a closer view of the police box. Peri could hardly believe her eyes. The Doctor's machine was shaking, while debris rained down from the surrounding colonnade. The Master had precipitated an earthquake!

The man in the black suit smiled. 'The entire power of the mountain is under my command,' he announced casually, as he started to remove a panel from the desk.

'Enough of games.' He knelt beside the desk and indicated that Peri should help slide back the metal casing. 'I am here for more serious work.'

After a moment of appraisal the robot proceeded to connect and reconnect various units and modules, some of which he removed entirely and handed to his pressganged a.s.sistant, before replacing in a different configuration. Peri shuddered to think what fearful power he intended to unleash.

The Master grunted with satisfaction and crawled out of the desk, the Tissue Compression Eliminator still firmly in his hand. He began to programme a keyboard on the edge of the desk. There was a gentle singing sound from across the cavern. The corona of flame from the vent had turned blue.

'Excellent!' the Kamelion-Master watched the plume of phosph.o.r.escence with great satisfaction. 'We now have control of one of the greatest energy forces in the Universe.'

'A blue flame?' said Peri, unimpressed.

'Numismaton, my dear,' said the Master-figure excitedly. 'An immensely rare catalyctic reagent from deep inside the planet.' The singing died down and the flame burned bright and hot once more. 'A mere test burning,'

observed the robot. 'When the full surge comes, I shall be ready to absorb its infinite transforming power!'

'And I shall be transformed into a very dead Peri,'

thought Peri, suspecting that the Master would soon find his young a.s.sistant irresistibly dispensable. For a moment the metal Master had relaxed, and stood complacently admiring his handiwork. The Tissue Compression Eliminator had drooped in his grasp. It was now or never.

Peri decided she enjoyed being the size she was far too much to risk grabbing the weapon. Perhaps she could create a diversion... She leaned forward over the complex controls and ran her hand wildly over the k.n.o.bs and b.u.t.tons as haphazardly as a kitten dancing on the piano keys.

The Master snarled with rage and would have killed her instantly, but he needed to repair the sabotage. As the rumbling and roaring echoed through the cavern, Peri darted from the dais, across the cave and behind a large metal chimney.

For several seconds the Kamelion-Master was totally occupied calming the mighty giant that Peri had awoken.

As soon as the power was checked, he reached for the Tissue Compression Eliminator to put an end to the child's impudent pranks.

A red glow shrivelled a pipe beside Peri's hiding place the robot was after her. She could see, in the distance, an entrance to the cave, but she would never make it alive.

She dodged behind another rank of pipes. The Master fired, missing her by centimetres, then strode from the control desk to flush his quarry from cover.

Peri dropped to her knees and crawled behind a ventilator unit. She peered out. Directly opposite, the Master's TARDIS offered the only possible sanctuary. She leaped forward, expecting at any moment to feel the annihilating glow of the Master's vile device.

'Peri!' shouted the robot, unable to fire without hitting his own TARDIS.

Peri reached the door, and without so much as a glance back at her pursuer, ran into the control room. She had carefully memorised the switch for the doors and immediately pressed her hand to the lever, praying the Master hadn't operated any override. The whir of the servo-mechanism that closed the doors in the face of the enraged robot was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

It was several moments before she became aware of the angry buzzing from the entrance. Was the creature operating some cut-out that would open up the TARDIS to him? Or was he in the process of breaking in by sheer force? To her dismay, the noise grew louder.

Peri caught sight of the cabinet on the floor beside the consolethe robot's control box. If only there was a way of immobilising the metal Master... That would serve the creature right. A puny mind, indeed. Well, she didn't have to be Albert Einstein to find the off-switch. She grabbed the side of the cabinet and began to wrestle with the lid.

Nothing could have prepared Peri for the horror of the next few moments. The top of the box came off in her hands exposing the interior of a doll's house TARDIS and a Tom Thumb man, dressed in black velvet. The lilliputian peered up into the light that flooded clown into his diminutive compartment. And Peri gazed at the ratsized face of the real Master.

The miniaturised Time Lord stared at Peri from his shrunken laboratory. 'You escaped from my slave,' he squealed at the terrified girl. 'But you will obey me or die!'

10.

The Blue Flame The Doctor was in despair as he saw the Master's TARDIS dematerialise on his scanner screen. 'We've lost him! he shouted.

And your friend Peri,' said Amyand sadly.

'And my temporal limiter,' bemoaned the Doctor, in the certain knowledge that he could neither follow the American who had saved his life, nor, with the TARDIS immobilised, save himself and Turlough from the doomed planet.

'But where's he gone?' Amyand couldn't take his eyes off the empty corner of the screen from which the yellow column had inexplicably vanished.

'I don't know!'

A flas.h.i.+ng light in the corner of the console attracted the Time Lord to a little known control unit. 'Someone's been interfering with the TARDIS navigation system,' he exclaimed. He peered at the setting which Kamelion had selected. 'It's been remote paralleled with the Master's TARDIS!'

'I don't understand,' said Amyand in a fairly ma.s.sive understatement of the general culture shock he had experienced walking into the blue box.

'Perfectly simple,' said the Doctor, beginning to look more cheerful. 'The two TARDISes are programmed to follow each other. We could follow the Master if he hadn't removed my temporal limiter.'

'You know where he is?'

'Indeed I do.' The Doctor double-checked the unlikely reading. 'He's still on Sarn.'

'But why?'

'There's something the Master needs, here on this planet.'

The Doctor looked up at the screen where Turlough was arguing with the old men. It seemed as if his companion was going to need some help. He grinned as an idea came to him; with the help of the TARDIS, he could put the fear of G.o.d into these primitives. 'What does Logar look like?'

he asked Amyand.

Although an Unbeliever, Amyand had as clear an idea of the Fire Lord of Sam as an Earthchild of the mythical unicorn. He had lived with the images and inscriptions and old people's tales as long as he could remember.

'Large, silver, like a man...' he began.

The Doctor thought for a moment, then programmed the data bank. An awesome Greek bronze appeared on the screen. 'One of Logar's Earth equivalents,' explained the Doctor. 'Poseidon rising from the waves.'

Not quite right,' said Amyand. 'The Fire Lord of our legends is fatter, squarer-headed. Not so many features.'

The Doctor entered some corrections and the picture on the screen began to resemble the young Sarn's description.

'That's more like it.'

An alarm sounded in the seismic sensor and a deep vibration shook the TARDIS. 'Must be another earthquake,' said the Doctor, switching back the screen to a view of the ruin. As they watched the tumbling masonry, he breathed a sigh of relief that his police box had materialised at a safe distance from the toppling walls.

'Where's Turlough?' cried Arnyand, seeing no sign either of the boy or the six Elders.

The Doctor pointed towards the door. 'Prepare to receive visitors.'

One by one the old men filed in behind Turlough, peering round the control room in myopic amazement.

'Sorry, Doctor,' said Turlough. 'There was nowhere else I could bring them.'

He decided not to tell the Doctor how much he had enjoyed playing the little nabob. He had given the Elders a right castigation for shooting his brother, called them all the names in the book and threatened them with their own fire. Finally, the mere mention of creating rival Elders from among the common citizens had brought the quaking Timanov to his knees in a fulsome protestation of loyalty.

Turlough was rather disappointed when the earthquake made them seek shelter in the police box.

'Welcome, gentlemen,' said the Doctor, smiling.

His worthy guests looked curiously at their young host.

'This is the Doctor,' announced Turlough. 'He is not an enemy of Logar, but an Elder of the city of Gallifrey.'

'Do any of you recognise this?' asked the Doctor, casually pressing a key on the desk. There was a mighty roar, overlaid with a fanfare of synthesised trumpets and a dazzling icon of the Fire Lord appeared on the screen. All the Elders fell reverently to their knees. 'The image of Logar!' cried Timanov reverently.

'You see,' hectored Turlough. 'He appears at the Doctor's command.'

'Why does he not strike clown the heretic?' The Chief Elder pointed to Amyand.