-
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
‘Doctor!’ The Brigadier, who had been watching the two
girls for several moments, cried out in horror. The Doctor
spun round. Nothing could have prepared him for the
appalling sight of his two companions.
Tegan’s auburn hair had turned white. Wrinkles raced
across her face like cracks in thin ice, and her teeth were
beginning to leer from shrunken gums; she was suddenly
as old as the hills.
Nyssa’s skin, too, was a network of puckering pleats and
lines, her mouth gaunt and twisted as a crone’s.
‘What’s happening!’ shouted the Brigadier.
The Doctor just stared, amazed beyond belief, at the
time-worn faces of the girls.
‘Doctor, do something!’ cackled the senile Nyssa.
‘Please... Doctor!’ Hardly more than a death rattle came
from Tegan’s throat.
‘Tegan... Nyssa...’ stammered the Doctor helplessly.
The young girls’s clothes hung limply round the bodies
of the shrinking hags. Older and older grew the two
companions as the TARDIS travelled through time and
space. Soon their flesh would be dust.
‘Like Mawdryn in the lab,’ whispered the Brigadier,
peering aghast at Tegan and Nyssa’s withering bodies.
‘Mawdryn!’
cried
the
Doctor.
‘They’ve
been
contaminated...’ He had only the merest intuition of the
terrible syndrome from which, within minutes, both girls
would surely be dead. He wracked his brains for some
quick antidote. ‘The transfiguration can be contained,’ he
muttered, desperately near panic.
‘Stop!’ Nyssa’s strangled cry was barely audible, but the
Doctor immediately leaped to the console.
‘Stop! That’s it!’ He instantly reversed the co-ordinates.
‘Travelling through time has accelerated the degeneration.’
The Brigadier looked over the Doctor’s shoulder at the
flashing lights on the console. ‘You’ve stopped the
TARDIS?’
‘More than that.’ The Doctor stared anxiously at the
mummified faces of Tegan and Nyssa. ‘We’re going back to
where we started. I just hope it induces a proportional
remission.’
The younger Brigadier’s knuckles were raw with banging
against the walls of his prison. He had explored every inch
of the sealed chamber and attacked the surround of the
door with penknife, pipe-cleaners and ballpoint pen, but to
no avail. If ever he caught up with that impudent
whippersnapper, Turlough...
He found himself staring at the ornamentation around
the door. Part of the frieze seemed to be loose. He ran his
hand gently over the entablature; there was a click, and the
door swung back. He was free.
Weak with relief the Doctor knelt over the two exhausted
girls.
‘It worked!’ observed the Brigadier gruffly, equally
gratified to see Tegan and Nyssa returned to their normal
selves.
‘Doctor, what went wrong?’
The Doctor tried to describe the infection they must
have picked up when they carried Mawdryn into the
TARDIS; a viral side-effect of the mutants’ constant
experimentation. The Brigadier wondered, ominously,
whether he too would succumb to his brief contact with
the creature in the laboratory.
‘So we can’t travel through time?’ said Nyssa, as she
realised the implications of what the Doctor had just told
them.
‘We don’t need to time-travel,’ interrupted Tegan, who
only wanted to get back to Earth.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘I have to programme a
temporal deviation to escape the warp ellipse.’
‘Look!’ The Brigadier pointed at the scanner. Standing,
like a guard of honour, outside the TARDIS, dressed in
their finest robes, were Mawdryn and his brothers in exile.
‘They knew this was going to happen.’
‘That’s why they let us go so easily,’ said the Doctor
bitterly.
‘You mean we’re stuck on this ship?’
‘I wonder!’ The Doctor returned defiantly to the
console. ‘If I reversed the trajectory...’
‘The Doctor will not give up so easily,’ said Mawdryn to
his comrades, as the TARDIS dematerialised a second [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- zambezia2013.opx.pl