"Zorg," said the Doctor, "meet Major Butcher and Ray."
"Greetings Zajor Zutcher, Zay," said Zorg politely, bobbing before the two astonished men.
Butcher turned his head and threw up. The vomit hit the floor and was almost instantly absorbed, disappearing into the fabric of the ship in a minia-108ture storm of coloured light. It was a good thing too, because an instant later Ray also threw up. He watched sheepishly as the floor of the chamber cleaned itself again. "Sorry about that, cats. It was just Butcher barfing like that. It set me off, man."
"What is is that thing?" said Butcher in a high shrill voice made ragged by hysteria. that thing?" said Butcher in a high shrill voice made ragged by hysteria.
"Hey come on Butcher, baby. It"s obviously an alien. A thing from another world, man." Ray spoke casually, dismissively. But for all his sang-froid, his hand trembled as he lifted the mescal bottle to his lips and drank with gurgling haste, as though to soften the impact of what he was seeing.
"A thing from outer s.p.a.ce?" Butcher"s voice still rang with a ripple of incipient hysteria. "You mean we"re being invaded? By monsters?"
"Don"t forget the peyote, Major," said the Doctor in a calm, rea.s.suring, singsong voice. "The peyote, the peyote, the peyote. You were forced to eat that sandwich full of that nasty peyote."
Butcher"s eyes shut, as if with profound grat.i.tude. The note of panic evapo-rated from his voice, but there was a tremble suggestive of tearful relief. "The peyote! Of course!"
"That"s right Major, there"s no need to be afraid of what you"re witnessing at this moment. Because. . . "
"Because it"s all just an hallucination. A fever dream brought on by that stinking Indian poison you fed me."
"Stinking Indian poison, precisely Major." The Doctor"s calm voice was now becoming bored. "The best thing for you to do is sleep it off, don"t you think?
Why waste time with any more of these absurd visions. This fever dream, as you so aptly put it, doesn"t merit your attention."
"I"m not going to waste any more time," said the Major. "I"m going to sleep this off." He lay down on the warm glowing floor of the chamber, curled up in a foetal bundle and promptly went to sleep.
"That was very dapperly done, Doctor."
"The power of suggestion, Ace, the power of suggestion."
"Well we just lost another one," said Ace, prodding with her toe the p.r.o.ne, snoring body of Ray. "But in this case it was the power of mescal." The bottle was cradled in Ray"s arms, the last of its contents flowing steadily out to supplement the other stains on his shirt.
"I fear my appearance was a little too much for your friends, Zoctor," said Zorg.
"Please don"t be offended," said the Doctor. "Even though Ray had a twenty-first-century acceptance of the concept of an alien life form he couldn"t come to terms with its reality. And poor Butcher, who didn"t have the benefit of half a century of media acclimatisation to soften him up to the notion of creatures 109from outer s.p.a.ce visiting Earth. . . Well let"s just say that I thought I"d better intervene with that peyote nonsense. Before his mind snapped."
"Neat call, Doctor," said Ace.
"Indeed it was neat," agreed Zorg, throbbing across the room on his pearly chitinous claws. "The Zoctor is a resourceful individual."
"But try asking him to give you the big picture. He"s definitely a need-to-know type. Only tells you what it"s convenient for you to know at any given moment. Convenient for him, that is."
The Doctor kneeled by Major Butcher, taking the man"s pulse with his thumb and consulting his wrist.w.a.tch. "Come now, Ace. That"s not entirely fair. I"ve explained everything to you "
"You never told me we were going to be wafted off in a s.p.a.ceship with these two stooges in tow." She nodded at the rec.u.mbent Butcher and Ray.
"The stooges will not be in tow, Ace". The Doctor moved to check Ray"s pulse. "Indeed they will have to be taken back to the arrivals area and sent back down in tentacles."
"I"ll take care of it, Zoctor," said Zorg.
"Thank you, Zorg. Once they"ve reached the ground safely our Mescalero friends will know what to do with them." He turned to Ace. "To continue. . .
We are not taking our friends with us. Nor are we going to be wafted off in this s.p.a.ceship, as you put it."
"But we"re not going back to the Hill?"
"Not right away, no."
"Good. I didn"t like all that military chicanery. And there was a vibe there.
Because they"re all working to build that horrible thing. The gizmo or the gadget as they call it. Its not a very nice vibe."
"Well you"re about to escape it for a brief respite."
"On that subject," said Zorg. "I shall show you where the device is being kept."
He waved a thick claw. Bright shards of colour pulsed through it like silent fireworks. A hole opened up in the wall, leading down a curving corridor.
"Thank you very much," said the Doctor.
"Oh and by the way, Zoctor," said Zorg in his smooth, inhuman voice. "Would you and Zace like to hear some of my poems?"
"We"d love to," said the Doctor. "But not just at the moment."
Of course," said Zorg politely. "You must have much to do. And I will help by seeing that your friends are returned safely to the ground below." Zorg scooped up the sleeping forms of Major Butcher and Ray, slinging them across his giant translucent claws as if they weighed nothing. He scuttled out of the chamber carrying them. The Doctor moved to the wall where the hole had appeared. Ace hurried after him as he disappeared into the glowing curvature of the new corridor.
110."He said something about a device, Doctor. What device?" Ace hurried around the curve after the Doctor and found that he was standing still. The corridor had ended abruptly in another opalescent chamber. She caught up with the Doctor and saw the chamber contained a rea.s.suring tall blue shape.
"Oh, that device. You brought it here."
"Zorg did. I told you I had a plan for retrieving the TARDIS. I believe you called it back-up."
"So Zorg was our back-up."
"Yes, an extremely nice, very helpful fellow. But if he ever offers to read you his poetry, do not under any circ.u.mstances allow him to do so."
"Because his poetry has a strange alien beauty that my mind wouldn"t be able to stand?"
"No," said the Doctor, "because his poetry is terrible."
Ace looked fondly at the TARDIS. "Does this mean our work here is finished?"
The Doctor"s smile disappeared. "Absolutely not. I"m sorry if I gave that impression. In fact, the most dangerous part of our mission is yet to come."
"And what part of the mission is that?"
"We"re going to carry the fight to the enemy," said the Doctor.
"About time." Ace smiled and walked towards the door of the TARDIS. Then she paused. "Are Ray and the Major going to be all right?"
"Of course. Black Eyes and his nephew and grandson will see to that. They will put our friends in their respective jeeps and drive them back up onto the mesa as far as it"s safe to go. Then they"ll leave them there to be found by the authorities, dead drunk but otherwise unharmed. With a little luck, they"ll both be back at work first thing in the morning. No one will have a chance to miss them."
"But what about us? Won"t anybody miss us?"
"Unfortunately they will, and we can"t allow that to happen. We need to retain a presence there and yet we must also do this. We are caught in a dilemma. There is only one solution."
"Build perfect robot replicas of ourselves and leave them on the Hill while we go off?"
"All right. So there are two two solutions." solutions."
"Time loop?" said Ace.
"Yes, exactly. We are going to have to pursue our mission, no matter how long it takes and what traumas it may deliver. And then we must return to Los Alamos, tomorrow morning, so that our presence there won"t be missed."
"All right, I"ll leave the logic of that to you. But I"m game. So what is this mission?"
"As I said, we shall pursue our enemies and take action against them. In short, we are going in search of Lady Silk."
111.
Chapter Nine.
Breakfast with the Duke Butcher woke up to see two MPs staring down at him. He was lying in the driver"s seat of his jeep, cold and uncomfortable and disorientated. The jeep was parked on the side of the road that wound up the mesa towards the MP checkpoint, about two miles distant from it. The Military Policemen must have had its presence reported to them by vehicles rumbling past in the dawn.
They"d spotted the jeep and the figure slumped in it and notified the white tops, who"d come down here to investigate.
The MPs found Butcher curled up in the jeep asleep and, he realised now with some embarra.s.sment, apparently drunk. There was an almost empty bottle of mescal on the seat beside him and another entirely empty one on the floor. His clothes stank of the liquor as if somebody had poured it all over him.
Somebody had. Those d.a.m.ned Apaches. But there was no sign of the Mescaleros now and no evidence to suggest that they had ever been there.
Butcher suddenly checked his holster. They"d even returned his side arm. For a moment he felt a vertiginous doubt open under him, like the ground giving away in an earthquake. Had the Indians ever really existed? Had he dreamed the whole thing?
He forced himself to calm down. Of course they"d existed. It had been no dream. They had just covered their tracks carefully, that was all. They must have driven him here late last night, poured the mescal on him and left the incriminating bottles with him so that when Butcher was found he"d apparently be dead drunk, sleeping off a binge. When in fact he"d been unconscious, ever since, ever since. . .
Butcher shuddered, his mind shying away from the memory of that strange translucent room where the thing thing had come slithering down from the ceiling. had come slithering down from the ceiling.
The two MPs registered the shudder and exchanged a look. They apparently thought the Major had the shakes after a heavy night"s boozing. Butcher ignored them and forced himself to calm down. He told himself that the horrible thing, the transparent giant crab thing, with that face. . . it had all been a pipe dream. Brought on by that peyote stuff.
He still had the bitter aftertaste of it in his mouth. Butcher leaned out of 113the jeep and spat, while the MPs watched him with barely concealed distaste.
He wished he could rinse his mouth out with the last of the mescal, anything to get rid of the foul residue of the peyote. They"d doped him. He"d had no choice. He"d been forced to eat the stuff at gunpoint. The Doctor had forced him. That little limey weasel. Well, he"d deal with him. And the girl.
Of course, Butcher had the good sense not to mention any of this to the MPs. He simply grunted a thank you for the wake-up call and started to turn on the jeep"s engine. One of the MPs reached in and switched it off. "Might be a good idea if you let us drive, Major. You look a little. . . tired." Butcher resisted the temptation to scream abuse at the man. His head was pulsing painfully, with a terrible aching hangover. Maybe those Indian devils had also poured mescal down his throat while he was asleep. Maybe he was too drunk to drive.
He stood up to get out of the jeep and only then noticed, to his horror, the dark stain at the crotch of his trousers. The MPs had seen it too, and though they didn"t give anything away, Butcher could clearly sense their disgust as he sat humbly in the rear of the vehicle and let them drive him back up the Hill.
He"d wet himself. Last night. When he"d seen that thing.
Only there hadn"t been a thing. It hadn"t been real. It had been the peyote.
It was all the Doctor"s fault. He would deal with the Doctor.
Butcher made it his first order of business to enquire about the Doctor, Ace and Ray Morita. He learned that Morita had driven the other jeep back to the compound in the early hours of the morning and while no one remembered seeing the Doctor and Ace come back with him, they must have done so because they had been observed at breakfast that morning and had then apparently gone to work in the school as usual.
Only when he"d learned where all the miscreants were did Butcher allow himself to clean up. He showered, scrubbing vigorously with harsh pink soap as if he could scrub away the ignominy of what had happened to him the previous night. Then he dressed in a clean uniform and marched down towards the ranch school to confront the Doctor. He found him in the cla.s.sroom with Ace, sitting disconsolately in front of a blackboard full of figures. The Doctor looked haggard and Ace was wearing sungla.s.ses. Neither of them seemed to acknowledge Butcher"s presence as he stalked into the room. In fact, they seemed to stare right through him.
For an eerie instant Butcher felt as if he didn"t exist, as if he was a ghost haunting this old schoolroom. He cleared his throat, and finally they looked at him. "How may we help you, Major?"
"I don"t know how the h.e.l.l you pulled what you pulled on me last night "
114."Kindly lower your voice, Major Butcher. Both Ace and I have had rather a trying time."
"Not as trying as what"s about to happen to the two of you."
The Doctor sighed. "And please Major, no threats. It"s much too early in the day."
"I just wanted you to know that you"re not going to get away with it."
"Get away with what, Major? I went on a nocturnal picnic with some friends. You insisted on joining us and we politely shared our food and drink with you."
"Food and drink? You little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. They had their guns on me."
The Doctor shook his head sadly. "You rather startled my friends. Appearing out of the night like that, brandishing a weapon. They thought you were some kind of brigand. So naturally they gallantly leapt to our defence. They disarmed you. Nonetheless, we straightened everything out in no time and, if you recall, you were soon sitting beside the campfire with us, enjoying a snack and a drink. Indeed you enjoyed your drink so much that I understand you were found sleeping in your jeep this morning, rather the worse for wear."
"You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I"m going to get even with you for this." He started towards the door, then thought of something. He came back and went over to the girl and took off her sungla.s.ses. She didn"t try and stop him. She had a black eye, a livid purple swelling high over her right cheek. He gave her the sungla.s.ses back and she put them on again.
"Ace b.u.mped into a door," said the Doctor.
Butcher said nothing. He went out. His feet thundered down the corridor as he left the building. He was going to nail that little b.a.s.t.a.r.d good. As he stepped out into the daylight he almost ran into the lanky figure of Oppy hurrying in. "Major. I need to talk to you."
"I"m busy."
"This is important. Ray Morita has disappeared."
Butcher stopped in his tracks. "I thought he came back this morning?
"He did. He returned the jeep to the motor pool and then went back to his quarters. But no one has seen him since."
Butcher paused and considered. "Someone must have seen him," he said grimly. "And I"ll find out who. But first I need to deal with the Doctor."
"Why? What has the Doctor done?"
Butcher turned to Oppy, opened his mouth to reply, and only then realised the impossibility of any explanation. What could he say? That he"d followed the Doctor into the foot hills, tracking him like an animal in the desert night?