Part 4 (1/2)

Chapter Three

Return To Mars

Mrs f.u.kuyama and her husband had arrived in London the afternoon before, but until now their only contact with the city had been the view of the suburban streets from the window of the coach that had whisked them from the airport to their eight-storey hotel in Kensington. The view from their window was of a flat expanse of converted mews and modern hotels, broken only by a large building cal ed Earls Court. The hotel room was clean and air-conditioned, but could have been anywhere in the world from Boston to Beirut.

After breakfast, they had ventured out of the hotel to explore the City. The Tube station was just around the corner.

They'd bought their tickets and descended into the world beneath the city.

They had emerged at Big Ben, walked around it, taken their photos and walked a little way up the banks of the Thames. The city was busy, the roads full of traffic, but few of the shops were open yet. It had been a short walk from there to Trafalgar Square, or so it had appeared on the map. In actuality it had taken half an hour to get there, punctuated by a couple of stops at tea shops that had struggled open. It was a public holiday, apparently, something to do with the Mars Landing.

Now they were here, her husband's attention had been caught by a blue box sitting at the foot of Nelson's Column.

He was running his fingers along it.

'It's humming,' he concluded.

The door opened and a young man bounded out, almost cras.h.i.+ng into them. His clothes suggested he was a tour guide, or a street entertainer. The woman who trailed after him reinforced this impression: although it was not yet nine-thirty in the morning, she wore a strapless peach sequin dress, elbow-length lace gloves and pil -box hat. The two couples stared at each other for a second before her husband plucked up his courage and asked the strange man what the box was.

The reply came in perfect j.a.panese, 'This is a police box. They were more common before the advent of the walkie-talkie, but they're beginning to reappear now. You can call a policeman from here if you need help.'

'It is very striking. Would you mind taking a photograph of us in front of it?'

'I'll do it.' The Englishwoman took the camera, examined it for a moment and then pointed it towards the trio, who had posed themselves in front of the door. 'Say ”cheese”,' she ordered them, again in perfect j.a.panese.

There was a flash and the woman stepped back over.

'Thank you,' Mr f.u.kuyama said, checking his list, 'Now, how do my wife and myself get to the Tower of London?'

The strange man thought about the question. 'You could try committing treason,' he suggested gently.

The other three laughed, leaving him a little bewildered.

'Circle and District Line, the nearest stop is Tower Hil ,' the woman supplied.

The two tourists thanked them and set off to the nearest tube station.

'It is a very good job that my daughter is too young to know who you are.'

He kept his distance, standing at the other end of the churchyard. Despite the familiar voice, underneath that overcoat he'd grown fat. His hair had thinned, and that moustache of his was grey. Despite that, he'd managed to arrive without Christian seeing him. Crows were cawing in the next field.

'It's a very good job that she's old enough by now to have her own phone. Good morning, Alistair.'

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart moved a little closer, became a little warier. 'Good morning, Lex,' he replied finally, when they were ten feet apart.

'You didn't call the police?'

The Brigadier straightened. 'When you telephoned I gave you my word that I wouldn't. Not until I came to hear what you have to say. You used to be one of my men. I owe a fel ow Guardsman that much.' His hands were deep in his coat pockets.

'Are you carrying a gun?'

'Wouldn't you be?'

Christian laughed, holding his hands away from his body. 'I'm not,' he answered.

Lethbridge-Stewart couldn't see the humour of the situation. 'Why did you call me?'

22.Alexander Christian bit his lip. 'Because you are the only person in the world that I can trust. Something's going to happen, Alistair. On Mars and here in Britain. Something you have to help me stop.'

At the main entrance of the National s.p.a.ce Museum, the doors were being opened. The VIPs invited to attend at Mission Control itself were going through an adjacent door, where their invitations were being careful y checked.

They'd pa.s.s through a couple of other security points before going below ground level to their social gathering.

Without invitations, the Doctor and Benny weren't going to be able to get in. At least not through the front door. So, they joined a coach party and were herded through the public entrance, past the lobby and into the first of the public galleries. The hal was filled with display cases full of bulky s.p.a.ce suits. The tour guide hadn't noticed them join the edge of the group, she was too busy fielding questions about how astronauts went to the toilet and whether the boy astronauts ever had s.e.x with the girl astronauts. Benny found it rea.s.suring that amidst state-of-the-art technology and on the brink of interplanetary conquest, the human race still had its priorities right.

The Doctor and Benny mingled with the group, careful to remember their objective. Casually, the Doctor glanced at a map of the building hanging from one wall. Disguising it as a yawn, he managed to indicate to his companion where they needed to head next. As soon as possible, they extricated themselves and stepped through into the Main Hall.

An actual Mars Probe hung suspended in mid-air twenty feet above their heads. The hal was vast, but gleaming and white, packed with artefacts from the international s.p.a.ce programmes of the nineteen-seventies. They walked past the scale models, the photographs and the display case featuring the 'Astronaut's Survival Kit'. Benny paused at the full-sized mock-up of the inside of an old s.p.a.ce capsule. It was cramped, of course, but the thing that struck her was how old-fas.h.i.+oned it was: the displays were mechanical, not LED or even digital, the controls were clunky switches, the computer that took up half the room wouldn't have been powerful enough to run the average was.h.i.+ng machine even now, a couple of decades later. It was an object that belonged to the era of the eight-track cartridge, nylon slacks and the Ford Capri. This wasn't the retro-futurism of the TARDIS, with its incomprehensible forces hiding behind a Jules Verne veneer: this was the real thing.

The sound of the sonic screwdriver interrupted her train of thought.

The Doctor was bent over a display case, prising off the gla.s.s cover. The alarms hadn't gone off, but neither of them were exactly inconspicuous in their outfits. Benny strode across the room, and saw the Doctor sc.r.a.ping up some red dust into an empty test tube.

'Martian soil,' he announced by way of explanation.

'Yes, I know.'

The Doctor closed the case, sealing it up again. The test tube had already disappeared into the depths of his frock coat. 'Caldwel was concerned about the soil, remember?'

'Yes.'

'Look at this case, though. There's pounds of the stuff, on public display.'

'It's still in limited supply. It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds to get any more.'

'Bernice, ordinary Martian soil can't be of much scientific interest nowadays - once you've found out the exact composition, what else is there to know? That man was critically injured, but that soil was one of the only two things on his mind at that moment. No, I suspect that when we compare this soil with the sample we acquired this morning we'll find a big clue to this mystery.'

'Fine,' Benny conceded. She hesitated. 'Didn't Caldwell also say something about someone escaping?'

The Doctor grabbed Benny's arm and led her to a display board. Ranged in front of her were photographs of all the Mars crews, every one of them happy, smiling clean-cut folk in neat uniforms or s.h.i.+ny s.p.a.cesuits. The Doctor pointed to the very last picture. Three people, two men and a woman.

'Alexander Christian,' the Doctor declared. As Benny read, her jaw slowly began dropping.