Island of Death (5 page)

I’m just not going to ask. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, thought Sarah, as the TARDIS started trumpeting again.

Jeremy had often been abroad. Even before his father died (when he was only six), they used to go to his flat in Cannes every summer; and Mama had kept up the custom, even though, as she said, it was more like Margate these days.

But this time a flight of over fifteen hours was followed by a jolting, sticky coach ride from the airport, which took them through acres and acres of shanty town. The ‘houses’ seemed to be custom-built out of cardboard and scraps of corrugated iron, and the atmosphere stank of fresh poo! He longed for Hampstead. He’d been so happy there! Well mostly.

Especially after the daily celebration and the love-in. Why did they have to leave?

‘Pretty idle lot, the natives,’ he said to Paul, the long-time Skangite with hair down to his shoulders and a thin straggly beard, who sat next to him on the coach. ‘You’d think they’d want to smarten the place up a bit, wouldn’t you?’ he went on.

His remarks were met with a slight frown. ‘They do their best, chum,’ said Paul. ‘And if that’s your idea of loving kindness for our brothers and sisters, strikes me you’ve missed the point.’

‘What did I say?’ thought Jeremy glumly, as Paul turned away and looked out of the window again. They were all the same, this lot. Self-righteous bunch. He never seemed to do anything right.

He slumped down in his seat, and tried to comfort himself with the thought that Paul, who had a strong Brummy accent, probably only went to a secondary-modern... or at best a grammar school. No wonder he was a bit of an oik, in spite of having oodles of cash.

Even arriving at the ashram didn’t cheer Jeremy up. A high wall protected a complex of white stone buildings - offices, living quarters, conference buildings and an expansive open-sided celebration hall in the shade of an ancient tree. A bubbling stream, which ran alongside the main path, and the occasional cry of a foreign-sounding bird completed the scene.

Certainly, the turmoil of hooting and shouting that had accompanied the latter part of their journey from the airport was a strong contrast to the low murmur of the crowds of white-clad disciples in the ashram. But it all seemed to Jeremy as cold and functional as a newly built car park; and the people, glancing at him with ill-concealed hostility, as alien as a bunch of Martians.

He was given some sort of chopped up veggies for his dinner - no potatoes, no meat - and then, to top it all...

‘Here’s where you London lot will be sleeping. Yours is number nine,’ said Brother Dafydd, who wore the long robe of a teacher’ like Brother Alex.

Horror! It was worse than the dormitory at Holbrook. He’d thought all that was behind him when he left school. Twelve people crammed into one small room - and to be expected to climb a ladder to the top of a tower of three bunk-beds, squashed in the middle of the others...!

Once, on a February holiday at a five-star hotel in Tenerife, he’d seen Mama go into full
grande dame
mode when she wasn’t satisfied with her room. ‘You expect me to pay your preposterous rates for this garret?’ she’d said to the quaking manager. My husband used to be Master of the Ferney. His hounds lived in a better kennel than this!’ And so on and so on. She and Jeremy had ended up in the owner’s suite.

Jeremy wasn’t quite so successful.

‘You’re lucky you’re not sleeping under the kitchen sink, boyo,’ said Brother Dafydd. ‘We’ve got to find room for nearly two hundred of you.’ He ticked off Jeremy’s name on his clipboard and turned to the next on his list.

Well really! Twenty thou for an iron bedstead and his nose touching the ceiling? He’d see about that! A word to Brother Alex...

‘If that’s a railway station, they must have had a power cut,’

said the Brigadier, staring at the monitor, which was totally dark.

‘Really, Lethbridge-Stewart, is it necessary to be so negative?’ said the Doctor as he set the controls to ‘stand by’.

‘I programmed the TARDIS to arrive in an inconspicuous corner. I expected the screen to show us exactly what it is showing us now.’

The Brigadier was unconvinced. ‘One way to find out,’ he said,

‘Indeed,’ said the Doctor coldly, putting out his hand to the door control.

‘Stop!’

The two men turned in surprise at Sarah’s yell.

‘I don’t think it would be a very good idea to open the door, she said. ‘Look!’

They both looked up. Filling the monitor screen was the face of a curious and very large shark.

The TARDIS was at the bottom of the sea.

Jeremy had a pretty good idea where Brother Alex would be found. He’d gone on at length about the purpose of their flight from Hampstead. They were going to get their reward -

and that meant first joining Mother Hilda in Bombay.

Mother Hilda! Next to the Great Skang himself, the very centre of their devotion. Brother Alex would have gone straight to her.

But it wouldn’t be so easy for somebody like Jeremy. Her bungalow had a fence round it even taller than the massive helpers (known as guards, he’d learnt on the introductory tour) who stood glowering either side of the gateway.

For a moment he was tempted to forget about it and accept that he would have to be crammed in with all the others, no matter how
common
- as Mama would have said... though he’d learned by bitter experience not to use the word himself.

The thought of his mother stiffened his resolve. She wouldn’t give up so easily. On the other hand,
she
would have put the fear of God into the guards and talked her way in.

She wouldn’t have found a convenient tree and scrambled up it, crawling along a projecting branch, only to slip off and fall heavily into the bushes on the other side of the fence.

It just wasn’t fair, he thought, as he pushed his way through the shrubbery into the open. Somebody like him ought to have been given a good room automatically - not the best, necessarily, he wasn’t unreasonable - but a decent sort of room, with a proper bed and stuff. What was the point of paying out all that lolly otherwise?

His internal grumbling was interrupted by voices. There was the bungalow, different from the rest of the ashram buildings, a remnant perhaps of the prosperous days of the Raj. Sitting on the extensive open veranda, under a lazily turning fan, were three people: a thick-set man who looked too tough to be a Skangite (where had Jeremy seen him before?); next to him, Brother Alex; and on the other side of the bamboo table, a small woman with white hair.

Mother Hilda.

‘There’s only one possible answer,’ said the Doctor. ‘The relativity circuit has overcompensated. We’re on the reciprocal arc of the meridian great circle...’ He dived back under the control column.

‘So where exactly are we? In English.’

‘I just told you. The latitude is Bombay’s - round about twenty degrees north, but the longitude is one hundred and eighty degrees - exactly opposite the longitude of London.’

The Brigadier dug deep into his memory. He’d managed to scrape a pass in Geography, but he hadn’t had occasion to consider such matters for years. ‘In the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Right?’

‘Well done,’ said the Doctor, coming into view and setting the TARDIS on its travels once more. ‘And because there was no land in sight the TARDIS naturally made the assumption that we wanted to be on the ocean bed.’

‘It doesn’t seem to want to take us to Bombay,’ said the Brigadier, ‘that’s for sure.’

‘Nearly there,’ said the Doctor, unruffled. He leaned forward to inspect the dials. ‘Good grief!’ he exclaimed, and seizing the signal-red handle of a large lever, he yanked it down to its full extent.

After a short pause, the TARDIS started her song of arrival.

‘What’s up? Are we there?’ asked the Brigadier.

The Doctor turned from the control console. He didn’t speak. His face was ashen.

‘Are you all right, Doctor?’ said Sarah, putting a tentative hand on his arm. She’d never seen him like this before.

The Doctor shuddered. He took a deep breath.

‘We’re safe now,’ he said.

‘What on earth...?’ said the Brigadier.

The Doctor turned back to the control panel and restored the emergency lever to its normal position. ‘The temporal governor had cut out completely; and the back-up circuit hadn’t kicked in. Our acceleration into the past was increasing exponentially. If our speed had reached six and a half googol years per metasecond - and we weren’t far off it -

it would have been irreversible. We’d have shot straight through the singularity of the Big Bang and out the other side!’

The Brigadier cleared his throat. ‘Before... before Creation, you mean?’

‘Before time itself, if there’s any meaning in that. No time, no space, no change. We’d have been stuck in the TARDIS

with nowhere to go for... for eternity? For an infinite number of years? And with no possibility of death... There are no words to express it.’

Sarah found she was holding her breath.

The Brigadier frowned. ‘Mm. Beyond me,’ he said. ‘So I take it that we’re not in Bombay?’

The door of the TARDIS opened. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart came out, and strode across to the phone on the laboratory desk.

‘Switchboard?’ he said. His voice was tight, controlled. Get me British Airways...’

Now what?

Jeremy’s plan, if that’s what it could be called, had been to march straight up to Brother Alex and demand to be given what was clearly his due. He’d made his way across the billiard-table lawn, which looked as if it had been clipped with nail-scissors, pretending to himself that he was walking round the edge to avoid the spray, but really trying to keep out of sight for as long as possible. By the time he had reached the other side, his courage, never very great, had all but vanished.

Mama would have had no qualms at all in interrupting a private conversation. But even she might have drawn back when she realised that there was a row going on. Brother Alex was getting really ratty.

‘But I tell you, she thought she’d seen an idol of the Skang!’

‘And how, may I ask, do you know that?’

‘I found out where she lived and...’

‘That was most imprudent!’ Mother Hilda’s voice was stern, like Nanny’s when Jeremy had forgotten to wash his hands before tea.

‘It was bloody stupid!’

At the big man’s intervention, Mother Hilda raised a hand.

Thank you, Brother Will. Leave this to me.’

Of course! That’s who the other man was. Will Cabot, the boxer, who’d won a gold medal in the Munich Olympics and then turned professional. What was he doing here?

Alex changed to a more placatory tone. ‘Do you think I didn’t take precautions, Mother? I promise you, she couldn’t have had any idea that I’d been there. But I found the photo graph, and I read her notes. It was quite clear.’

‘Mm. Well, if you’re sure...’ Her voice was a little gentler.

Why didn’t he say sorry?

‘I do see now that it was foolish of me. Please forgive me.’

That was the way. It always worked with Nanny.

But the big man wasn’t going to let him off so easily. ‘And have you nothing more to tell Mother Hilda?’

A long pause.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Alex replied at last.

‘It’s no good denying it,’ said Cabot. ‘See for yourself. It’s even made the headlines in
The Times of India.’

As Alex picked up the paper, Jeremy shrank into the shadows, creeping under the floor of the veranda. What did he think he was doing? The boxer fellow looked dangerous -

and what about the guards? What if he were to be handed over to them? Nobody knew where he was. He could just disappear...

His paranoid musings were interrupted by Brother Alex speaking in a very different tone to the one he’d used to address Hilda. It was the way Mama would speak to an impertinent servant. ‘And why do you think that I’m responsible, Cabot?’

Will Cabot laughed. But he didn’t sound amused. ‘Come off it, Alex!’ he said. Three of them - on Hampstead Heath? The next nearest centre is in Cardiff, for God’s sake.’

But Alex was not going to give in easily. ‘Even if you could lay these incidents at my door, it would be irrelevant. You know very well that I have never agreed with Mother Hilda’s basic strategy. From the very first...’

The boxer’s voice was harsh. ‘And you know very well that she has the authority to overrule your stupid suggestions!’

‘And, what’s more,’ broke in Hilda, my way forward has the consensus of the group.’ Her gentle voice couldn’t have been more different from that of the boxer.

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Alex. ‘Things can change.’

There was some sort of creepy-crawly climbing up Jeremy’s leg. He could feel it under his trousers. What was that thing... like a sort of prawn that had a curly tail with a nasty sting at the end of it? He tried to roll up his trouser leg without making a noise, but found he couldn’t stop himself from letting out a tiny whimper of fear.

He became aware that none of them had spoken for quite a long time. Now he was for it! Then Cabot spoke again.