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  He heard raised voices ahead and ran faster towards them.

  ‘But Doctor,’ he heard Romana saying, ‘where is Salyavin? Someone with his power loose in the universe, it’s a terrifying thought.’

  Chris rounded a corner and burst through an open doorway into a scene of utter confusion. There were three zombies in orange tunics milling about. There was a Kraag which somehow looked as if it was questioning its purpose in life. And there was Romana, standing with K-9 and the Professor, all three looking over at the Doctor, who for some incredible reason had Skagra cradled in his arms like a frightened toddler. Above their heads, the sphere was drifting disconsolately around.

  ‘Don’t you worry about Salyavin, Romana,’ the Doctor was saying, ‘probably long dead by now.’

  Chris ran towards the Doctor, waving his arms as if in warning. All eyes turned to him. ‘Salyavin,’ he cried, almost out of breath.

  The Doctor, face suddenly grave, put up a warning hand. ‘Bristol, no!’ he bellowed.

  At exactly the same time Chris jabbed his finger manically at Professor Chronotis and shouted, ‘It’s him! The Professor! He’s not the Professor! He’s Salyavin!’

  There was a shocked silence.

  Then Skagra slowly raised his head from the Doctor’s shoulder. His eyes, now glittering not with tears, but with renewed purpose and devilish intent, fixed on Professor Chronotis.

  ‘Oh, said the Doctor.

  1 Though remarkably flexible in its usage, this word is unfortunately untranslatable from Old High Gallifreyan into Earth English. Very roughly speaking it conveys disdain, contempt and extreme annoyance, all wrapped up in a generally obscene etymological parcel that is far ruder than any reader of this book can possibly imagine. For this reason it has also been deleted from the Matrix.

  Part Six

  Brought to Book

  Chapter 63

  THERE WAS A moment of silence. It was followed by a moment of utter confusion, as everything seemed to happen at once.

  Skagra pulled himself free of the Doctor and gestured exultantly to the sphere.

  Professor Chronotis ripped off his glasses and stared meaningfully at Skagra.

  The Doctor shouted, ‘K-9, the sphere! Blast it!’

  The Kraag Commander straightened up manfully.

  The sphere zoomed towards Professor Chronotis.

  K-9’s nose laser loosed a sizzling, bright red beam at the sphere.

  The sphere shattered – but not into fragments. It divided. There were now ten spheres, smaller, but identical in every other way to the original.

  One of the small spheres attached itself to the forehead of Professor Chronotis. The Professor dropped to his knees in agony, his glasses flying from his hand.

  The Doctor raced towards his old friend. His path was blocked instantly by the remaining spheres.

  ‘Salyavin!’ cried Skagra. ‘At last! It is my destiny!’ He pointed to the sphere on the Professor’s forehead and barked, ‘Total extraction! Break through his barriers! Remove the mind of Salyavin!’

  At about this point, Chris Parsons began to wonder if he had done something wrong.

  The Professor gave a final agonised cry.

  Then, suddenly, he straightened, got to his feet with remarkable agility and turned to face Skagra. His face was totally blank, the sphere still attached to his forehead.

  Professor Chronotis’s eyes were now jet-black orbs.

  Then Skagra did something none of them had ever seen before. He threw back his head and laughed. It was as extreme an emotional reaction as the tears he had dried only moments before. Romana stepped back in revulsion from this appalling sight.

  The laughter ended as abruptly as it had begun. ‘Now, Doctor,’ said Skagra, seemingly as composed as ever, ‘you shall see the beginning of the Universal Mind!’

  He swept a hand in a grand gesture. Nine of the spheres broke formation and scattered around the chamber.

  Three of them settled on the foreheads of Subjatric, Rundgar and Scintilla, the Ancient Outlaws. Immediately they snapped to attention, faces blank, eyes black.

  Another sphere zoomed down, attaching itself to the metallic head of K-9. His red eye-screen flickered and turned black.

  Chris was too busy looking at this in utter horror to see another sphere heading straight for him. Immediately it touched his forehead he straightened to attention, his face blank, his eyes black.

  And Skagra’s laugh began anew. But now the chamber rang with laughter, many different voices joining to form a cacophony of almost childish cruelty and derision. Everyone affixed by a sphere was now part of the ghastly chorus. The little Professor, the Ancient Outlaws, Chris, even K-9. Laughing and laughing in exactly the same rhythm as Skagra. Laughing at the Doctor and Romana.

  Romana huddled closer to the Doctor as they were surrounded by the laughing mind-slaves, their black eyes shining.

  Skagra stopped laughing.

  The mind-slaves stopped laughing, their expressions mirroring the triumph on Skagra’s face. Even K-9 somehow exuded an air of vicious smugness and superiority.

  Skagra stepped smoothly and slowly away from the empty cabinet. ‘Now, Doctor, Romana,’ said Skagra. ‘I have the power of Salyavin. You have been privileged to witness the birth of the Universal Mind. My mission is not to bring death, but life.’

  The Doctor couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice. ‘You call that life?’ he sneered, indicating the slaves.

  Skagra held up a gloved finger. ‘But you didn’t let me finish, Doctor. Yes, I bring life. But in your case, I intend to make an exception!’

  The Doctor and Romana huddled together as the mind-slaves of Skagra moved as one around them, arms outstretched. Chris, the Professor and K-9 moved closer still, K-9 extending his nose laser.

  Their own friends were going to kill them.

  Chapter 64

  AND THEN, JUST as Romana closed her eyes and tried to summon all the dignity befitting a Time Lord facing death, something quite extraordinary happened.

  She heard the sound of a relative dimensional stabiliser – an old one by the sound of it, chuffing and groaning, almost coughing its guts out.

  And suddenly she and the Doctor were falling.

  Forgetting all thoughts of dignity, Romana screamed. She was extremely relieved to hear the Doctor doing much the same thing alongside her.

  She only had a moment to feel that relief as the fall was suddenly ended by a muffled whoomf as she and the Doctor made an incredibly soft landing.

  She opened her eyes and found herself totally speechless. She was sitting on a sofa. Next to her on the sofa sat the Doctor. The sofa itself sat facing the just-slammed door of Professor Chronotis’s rooms.

  A rather pretty young girl, human by the look of it, was standing in front of a rather battered old control console, Gallifreyan by the look of it, her hands adjusting its switches and levers, expertly by the look of it. On a bracket hung a faded, blinking scanner screen showing a view of the prison chamber, Skagra and all his ghastly company.

  ‘Thank you, Clare,’ said the Doctor.

  The girl said nothing. She was staring in horror at the image on the screen.

  Skagra pushed angrily through his crowd of mind-slaves. ‘What is this?’ he demanded, pointing at the wooden door that had suddenly materialised in the floor of the chamber. It had swung open, swallowing up the Doctor and Romana like a trapdoor, and then slammed itself very firmly shut again.

  The Kraag Commander, as the only other being present left with a mind of its own, such as it was, replied, ‘The Doctor is in there, my lord.’

  Skagra smiled. He realised he already knew the answer. Through the matrix of the spheres he had access to the mind of Salyavin, aka the kindly old Professor Chronotis, and that told him everything he needed to know about the no-longer-mysterious door.

  The Kraag Commander pointed to the door, its arm glowing red. ‘Shall I blast it, my lord?’

  Skagra shook his head. ‘You will not
be able to penetrate the outer plasmic shell of a TARDIS, even a TARDIS as ancient and obsolete as this one.’

  A wave of anger and disappointment at the Doctor’s escape threatened to overwhelm him. But new thoughts, from within the spheres’ matrix, calmed him at once.

  He never even bothers to have a plan, came a thought from the human Parsons. Doctor-Master’s chances of success in defeating the Universal Mind less than 0.000000000000013 per cent, came a thought from the computer mind of K-9. The Time Lord would pose no threat.

  ‘The Doctor,’ Skagra mused aloud to the Kraag Commander. ‘A poor little man. A pinprick of an irrelevancy. Let him amuse himself with his tricks. They are merely the tiny antics of an insect threatened with inevitable extinction. We will return to the command station!’

  He led the way from the chamber and back towards the Doctor’s TARDIS. His words of command were for the Kraag only. His mind-slaves followed calmly and automatically, K-9 bringing up the rear.

  Clare still stared intently at the scanner screen in the corner of the Professor’s study. ‘They’re leaving,’ she told the Doctor and Romana as she watched Skagra and his slaves, including the black-eyed Chris Parsons, depart.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Clare,’ the Doctor called from the sofa. ‘We’ll get Chris and the others back safely.’

  Clare caught Romana shooting the Doctor a warning look, as if to say Don’t make rash promises. Then Romana caught Clare catching sight of that look and converted it into a reassuring smile. Clare wasn’t sure what to make of Romana. She had the manner of a person who thinks they are cleverer than you, and that you don’t realise they think they’re cleverer than you. But it was a minor concern. At the moment, Clare couldn’t stop thinking of Chris.

  The Doctor had brought Romana quickly up to speed with all the incredible events she had missed out on while a prisoner of Skagra.

  Clare wanted to join in the discussion, and after the Professor – or Salyavin, or whoever he was – had implanted the science of time mechanics into her head, she felt she was perfectly capable of it. But the human part of her was shaking inside at the thought of Chris’s kindly, silly face made blank and his soft brown eyes turned pitch black. So instead she dematerialised the Professor’s TARDIS away from Shada, and kept a close watch on the time-path indicator for any sign of Skagra and the Doctor’s TARDIS on its way back to the command station.

  Romana shook her head and took another sip of tea. ‘Professor Chronotis was Salyavin all along,’ she said. ‘Of all the things you’ve told me, why do I find that one so hard to believe?’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ said the Doctor. ‘He’s a nice old man. You like him, I like him. He’s certainly not the villain the Time Lords painted him.’

  ‘And there’s another thing,’ said Romana. ‘Skagra was trying to get Salyavin’s mind. But he’d already drained the Professor’s mind, so if Salyavin was the Professor…’

  ‘Extraordinary mental control,’ said the Doctor. ‘He let the sphere take the Chronotis part of his mind, but held back the Salyavin part. The effort was what killed him.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I think the Professor himself forgot, or chose to forget, that he was Salyavin. All that forgetfulness and bluster and senility, the perfect cover, for himself as well as everybody else. The clues were all there.’

  ‘When did you realise, Doctor?’ asked Clare.

  ‘The moment I stepped into this TARDIS and realised it was a TARDIS, after Bristol and I escaped from the asteroid,’ said the Doctor breezily. ‘I pretended I hadn’t, of course, but it was obvious from that point, if not before.’

  ‘It wasn’t obvious to me,’ said Romana.

  ‘Or me,’ said Clare.

  ‘Think about it,’ said the Doctor. He nodded to Romana. ‘First of all, the message the Professor sent to us in the TARDIS. He seemed to have forgotten all about it – he even suggested that somebody else must have sent it.’

  Romana nodded back. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Somebody else had sent it. Salyavin!’

  ‘And then the clues kept stacking up,’ continued the Doctor. ‘First of all, he had a secret TARDIS, this one. Second of all, it has an emergency program – a very naughty program, not to mention criminal – that brings him back to life. Then somehow, this charming young lady –’ he smiled at Clare – ‘becomes an expert in time mechanics in less time than you can say Wafer-wave Feedback Field Frame. He left Clare behind with all that knowledge in her head, just in case we needed rescuing. I pretended not to notice any of that, very well, I thought. Let sleeping Salyavins lie, I thought. And don’t forget I know the Professor, whoever he may have been once. I was quite prepared to keep his big secret.’

  ‘And then Chris marches right in and blows the whole gaffe in front of Skagra,’ said Clare. ‘The idiot! The ruddy idiot! I could kill him!’

  ‘No you couldn’t, Clare, you love him,’ said the Doctor casually.

  ‘Does she?’ said Romana, sounding surprised. ‘Why on earth would she want to do that?’

  Clare blinked through forming tears. ‘How did you know?’ she asked the Doctor.

  The Doctor coughed and lifted a finger. ‘The clues were all there, it was obvious. First, you may not realise it but whenever you mention his name your voice raises one tenth of an octave and your eyes go all gooey—’

  Romana coughed. ‘I’m sure this is all very fascinating, but what about Skagra?’

  Clare was glad of the subject being changed. ‘Well, what are we going to do about him, then?’ she challenged Romana.

  Romana shrugged. ‘He’s beaten us on every point.’

  The Doctor nodded gloomily. ‘I was quite enjoying clearing all the other stuff up,’ he protested. ‘Can we get some other less pressing details straightened out, it helps to distract me from the imminent threat to the universe?’

  ‘No,’ said Romana and Clare at the same time. This time, Clare felt that Romana’s smile to her was warm and genuine.

  ‘Oh, very well then,’ said the Doctor heavily. He slumped back in the sofa. ‘Let’s sum up. All the minds that Skagra’s stolen are now in the melting pot of the sphere matrix along with his own, all operating as one under his control. And with Salyavin’s mind in there too, Skagra can potentially drain and control anyone else. Everyone else in the entire universe!’

  ‘The universe is a pretty big place,’ pointed out Clare.

  ‘And the spheres are infinitely divisible, courtesy of the genius of the late Professor Akrotiri,’ said the Doctor. ‘From that asteroid, Skagra can launch them against the universe en masse, like a virulent, all-powerful disease. His mind will be universal, and invincible.’

  There was a terrible silence.

  Then Romana said quietly, ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor perfunctorily. ‘I do so hope you’re going to say something wonderful and uplifting, it’s what I keep you girls for.’

  ‘May I just remind you of something?’ said Romana.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor cautiously, his eyes slowly turning to meet hers, as if hoping against hope.

  ‘All the minds that Skagra’s stolen are in the melting pot, the spheres’ matrix,’ said Romana.

  The Doctor snorted and flared up. ‘Yes, Romana, I think we’ve established that, in fact I just said it, I don’t need reminding about things that I’ve just said—’

  ‘That means there’s a copy of your mind in there too,’ said Romana quickly and sweetly, as if laying down a trump card.

  ‘Well, yes, of course, we’ve established that—’ began the Doctor impatiently.

  Then suddenly he went very quiet. Clare watched as a number of expressions passed over his face in less than a second.

  He stood up. ‘Romana?’ he said casually.

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’ said Romana, equally casually.

  The Doctor reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a golden medal with a long, multicoloured ribbon. Carefully, almost formally, he pinned it to the front of her dress.

&
nbsp; The medal read in big red letters:

  I

  AM A

  GENIUS

  Chapter 65

  SKAGRA BASKED IN the Universal Mind. His gloved hands flicked almost without thinking over one facet of the control console in the Doctor’s TARDIS. The other facets were attended to in turn by Chronotis, Chris, Subjatric, Rundgar and Scintilla, small spheres still attached to their foreheads, all now sharing in the knowledge of its operation, every quirk and whim of the old machine. The black-screened K-9, small sphere on the top of his head, circuited the control room, nose laser extruded aggressively. The Kraag Commander looked on, as stonily impassive as ever.

  This, thought Skagra, is only the beginning. From the command station he would launch a mighty fleet of small craft, ten thousand of them, crewed by the Kraags, each containing a portion of the infinitely divisible sphere. They were now ready for launch at a moment’s notice. He had not chosen that particular asteroid by chance. Location was everything. The asteroid was situated close to the central space lanes of the great civilisations of this galaxy. And the Kraags would crush any resistance – they felt no pain, they were virtually indestructible and, most cleverly, they would act as a distraction while the tiny spheres did their work.

  Firstly, and with the very greatest of pleasure, the Universal Mind would take Gallifrey. Any resistance from the Time Lords (or anybody else in the universe, for that matter) would be futile. The sphere was indestructible. It would simply divide and multiply, scattering itself like the seed pods of a dandelion throughout the planet of the Time Lords. All of the ancient powers of Gallifrey, all the secret knowledge of that indolent race, would be his.

  And then the Universal Mind would spread through all time and all space. The spheres, now tinier than the smallest nanite would do their work unseen and unchallenged. Skaro, Telos, Sontar, all the so-called mighty empires would bend to his unquestionably supreme will.