Part 9 (1/2)

'Not as such, no. I was talking metaphorically,' he told her, 'although now you come to mention it, maybe it is some kind of disease.'108.

He stopped and frowned, running through the possibilities. There was something else, something he wasn't getting. Then, with a quick shake of his head, he left the problem to tick over at the back of his mind and returned to the present.

'First things first,' he announced. 'We need to get a whole lot of this jinnera stuff made up. Trouble is, there don't seem to be that many bushes in this area of the forest,' he added.

Rez, who had been standing over at Brother Hugan's bedside, watching the old man sleep, cleared his throat. 'I might be able to help you there,' he told them. 'We use jinnen for so many things, we've huge stockpiles of it in the village.'

On the bridge of the Humphrey Bogart Humphrey Bogart, Kendle was checking the progress of the s.h.i.+p's auto-repair systems. Everything seemed to be coming along nicely. The doors at the rear of the bridge opened and Professor Shulough appeared.

'Another twelve hours and we should be able to take off. But without some trisilicate we won't get very far,' he told her. This didn't seem to be what the professor wanted to hear. 'Then we'd better confirm now one way or another whether this is Guillan's paradise. If it is Laylora, trisilicate shouldn't be a problem,' she reminded him. She then said that she was intending to visit the village with the Doctor, Rose and the human boy, Rez.

Kendle, as conscious of security as ever, didn't think this was a good idea. 'It might be dangerous. I think I should come with you.'

The professor shook her head. 'There's no need. The Doctor's made up some more jinnen solution enough to deal with those creatures if we should run into any.'

'OK, but be careful,' he insisted.

Sadly, he watched her leave the bridge. What had happened to the bright-eyed young woman he remembered so vividly on her graduation day? He shook his head slowly. It was no good thinking about the past; that Petra Shulough was long gone. And in his heart he knew why.

Trying to put his concerns about the professor out of his mind, he 109 turned back to the job in hand. He just hoped she would find what she was really looking for. Whatever that was.

Rez had been left alone in the MedLab, to keep an eye on the recovering shaman. The old Layloran was sleeping more peacefully now and some colour had returned to his cheeks. Rez hoped he was going to be all right. The tribe needed him more than ever in the present crisis, even if his ideas were a little oldfas.h.i.+oned.

Across the room was the bed that had, until recently, been occupied by the other patient, the female crew member called Baker. Thinking about what had happened to her, he now felt a terrible guilt. It had been one of the Witiku that had nearly killed her and that meant one of his tribe. How could a Layloran be turned into a creature like that? It seemed like magic, the sort of mystical event that Brother Hugan was always talking about, but Rez couldn't believe in stuff like that. Especially here in this s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, surrounded by high technology. And yet. . . he had witnessed it with his own eyes: one moment it had been a Witiku, one of Laylora's legendary guardians, the next it had been Brother Hugan. Had this kind of transformation happened before in the distant past? Was that the source of the legends? Brother Hugan coughed and opened his eyes.

Rez turned to give him his full attention. 'How are you?' he asked anxiously.

The old man's eyes flickered around the room, panicky.

'It's all right,' Rez a.s.sured him. 'You're safe now.' He gripped the old man's hand and was shocked at how frail it felt. How could it have been a ma.s.sive taloned paw before?

The old man's lips were moving but no sound was coming out. Rez leaned closer to the old man's mouth. 'Water,' he croaked in a parched whisper.

Rez looked around the room there was no sign of a jug of any kind. But he remembered seeing Rose get water from somewhere one of the machines, but which one? He crossed the room to where Rose had been standing. It must have been on this side of the room, 110 he thought. And then, without warning, something exploded on the back of his head and he fell to the ground.

Professor Shulough found the door to her quarters open and frowned. She was sure she'd left it locked, as she always did. Moving cautiously into the room, she discovered the reason for her confusion. It was the Doctor. He and the girl Rose were looking through her paradise collection all the artefacts and bits of evidence that she had acc.u.mulated during her search.

'Don't you understand the concept of privacy?' she asked, but if she was hoping to surprise the stranger she was sorely disappointed. He glanced up, as if he'd been waiting for her, and then looked back at the flight report he'd found. 'Ah, there you are. Ready to go, are we?'

The professor grabbed the sketchbook that Rose was looking at and dropped it back into its folder. 'Do you mind? This is private,' she insisted.

'Sorry,' said Rose. 'We were only looking.'

'Clues,' explained the Doctor, rather obliquely. 'Is this all the stuff you have on the so-called Paradise Planet?'

'Yes, and it's taken me years and a small fortune to bring it all together. I'm not about to start sharing it now.' Angrily, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the flight records from the Doctor's grasp.

He looked up and smiled innocently. 'But you think you've solved the mystery, don't you? You think this is the Paradise planet that Guillan found?'

The professor swallowed hard as the Doctor's intense brown eyes seemed to bore deep inside her. He was a hard man to argue with.

'I think so, yes.'

'So what does all this matter now? It's academic if this is the place you have been looking for.'

She couldn't fault the logic of that.

'But if this stuff does relate to this planet,' continued the Doctor, pausing to flash a grin at her, 'then it might just tell us something about what's going on with the shape-s.h.i.+fting locals and all that.'111.

Rose frowned. 'They're shape-s.h.i.+fters?'

'Well, no, not as such. Not in the cla.s.sic sense,' admitted the Doctor.

'Not like your Axon or your Zygon, or any other gon come to that. . . '

Rose gave the professor a sympathetic look he was off again, blithering.

'But they did change shape, or transform,' continued the Doctor, getting back to the point, 'and I for one would like to know why.'

'And have you found anything?' asked the professor levelly. The Doctor's face fell. 'No,' he admitted. 'So let's try plan B.'

Rose smiled. 'There's a plan B?' she teased him, sounding surprised.

'That makes a change.'

'There's a plan C too,' he murmured in a slightly menacing way, 'which involves taking you home and leaving you with your mother for a couple of weeks, so don't push it!' And then he was off, his long legs propelling him to the door at most people's jogging speed. 'Come on, then. Let's go and see the natives. I hear they're friendly.'

And at that point, as if to throw doubt on his a.s.sertion, Rez appeared staggering down the corridor, clutching the back of his head.

'What happened to you?' asked Rose, worried.

'Brother Hugan,' he replied simply.

The Doctor was concerned. 'He hit you?'

Rez nodded and then instantly winced, the sudden movement doing nothing for the state of his head, which was throbbing with pain. 'Hit me and then ran off.'

'Right,' said the Doctor commandingly. 'Let's get you something for that headache and then we'd better go after him, before he does anything stupid.'

'This might sting a bit,' warned the professor as she dabbed at the back of his head with a medicated cleansing wipe. Rez winced. She wasn't wrong.

'I'll put a dressing on it,' she told him. 'It'll speed up the healing.'

Rez looked at the professor as she searched through the cabinet for a bandage. For the first time since he had met her he was seeing 112 something akin to a caring side. Perhaps his initial evaluation had been too harsh.

'Thank you,' he said with genuine grat.i.tude as she gently fixed the dressing in place with a spray of instant plaster.

'You're young, fit. You'll recover from this in no time.' She smiled and looked suddenly much younger. 'You must have been through much worse, living alone among aliens.'

Rez shrugged. 'I never really thought about it,' he said. The professor raised a quizzical eyebrow. 'Never?' she asked, not really believing him. 'Are you telling me you never stop and think about where you came from? You realise you must have family somewhere. . . '