Part 10 (1/2)

The Doctor frowned. 'I know that. I was there, too. That's why we're phoning him.'

'So don't you think there's a good chance that his line will be tapped?'

The Doctor's shoulders had slumped, like a child who'd just been told he couldn't have an ice cream. 'Yes,' he conceded.

'I'm sorry, but we can't get in touch with him. They've seen both of us. We can't risk implicating him. They could kill him.'

Suddenly the Doctor's sad eyes were wide open. 'The other number, what a stroke of luck!'

He dashed across the room and flopped in front of an unused terminal, straightening out the parchment. He began tapping out the number.

'Yes, Prime Minister. No, everything is running very smoothly in your absence. Everything is going to plan. How are our American cousins? Excellent. Talk to you tomorrow. Goodbye.'

Staines pa.s.sed the handset to his PPS, who replaced it. 'That was the Prime Minister.'

'Yes, Home Secretary,' the civil servant replied understandingly.

'Just checking up to make sure you were running his country properly?' the gruff-voiced man in the trench coat asked. He and his colleague had arrived halfway through the conversation. He was holding the samples case.

Staines grimaced. 'Something like that, yes. As you heard, I told him that everything was going to plan.'

All four men in the room laughed.

'Won't NASA be monitoring the transmissions from Mars?' the PPS asked. 'They'll know about the Lander.'

The gruff-voiced man chuckled. 'Over the years, we've got the hang of jamming the lads at Cape Canaveral.

They'll be getting signals that they think are from Mars.'

'Frightfully advanced technology, Simon,' Staines a.s.sured him.

'Actually, Home Secretary, the technology's been around since the seventies. We developed it at the time of the Viking missions and it's stood us in good stead since then. Remember the Mars Observer a couple of years ago?'

Staines didn't. 'The upshot is that the Americans don't know about what happened to either the Lander or the Orbiter.'

'The Orbiter?' the gruff-voiced man said.

'Yes, there was a terrible accident with the airlocks. The whole crew was killed.'

41.The other man s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. 'But the plan was to - '

'It was an accident,' the Home Secretary snapped. 'I regret losing any more astronauts than we had to, and I appreciate that it makes things more complicated. I also regret having Alexander Christian running around the country terrorising people. The plan will still go ahead.'

'But without the Martian artefacts - '

'But we have come too far to stop now. The alien technology would have been nice, it would have cut some corners, but we can still achieve our objectives without them.'

The Home Secretary took the sample case from the big man and checked it.

'Good work.' He took a couple of the test tubes and put them in his breast pocket.

'Is there any sign of Christian?' the other man asked.

'Not yet, no,' the Home Secretary replied, more than a hint of irritation in his voice. 'He could be a problem. And after all that trouble we've gone to prevent any leaks from the s.p.a.ce Centre.'

'He's too late to do anything now,' the gruff-voiced man grunted. 'Who can stop us now?'

Bambera slit open the seal on file CCC and began to read. The sensitivity of the doc.u.ment meant that she was sitting in the 'reading room' of the UNIT HQ records department and that she had been searched to make sure she wasn't carrying a pen or a camera. She was the only person in the building, perhaps in the country, with the security clearance to read it, so she couldn't get some eager young corporal to do this d.a.m.n research job for her.

The windowless room was little bigger than a cupboard, and was bare apart from a desk and wooden chair that sc.r.a.ped the floor whenever it moved.

The file was quite a fat one compared with the few others that Bambera had read from the seventies. UNIT had been in joint charge of security at the old s.p.a.ce Centre with the s.p.a.ce Security Department at the time of some flap. It took her an hour to establish that one of the early Mars Probes had made contact with an intelligent species on the surface of Mars. Initially, there was something of a misunderstanding, and the BEMs had kidnapped three human astronauts, but after that there had been peaceful contact with them. The business had Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor's fingers al over it.

”The aliens returned to their own star system.”

They weren't from Mars, then? Bambera found the 'Know Your Enemy' summary.

Subject: Name Unknown.

Planet of Origin: Unknown Social Structure: Unknown History: Unknown There wasn't a photograph or even an artist's impression.

Bambera eventual y found the threat a.s.sessment.

”The Amba.s.sadors are thousands of years more advanced than us. It was clear at our last meeting that they are quite capable of destroying al life on this planet, but they chose not to on that occasion. A small team of academics and scientists have made some cultural exchanges with the Amba.s.sadors. One of the few things the team has determined is that the Amba.s.sadors feel that our race is not ready to share the secrets of their advanced science. Further contact is limited by the fact that the Amba.s.sadors are a plutonium-based lifeform. Any direct physical contact with them is lethal to human life. The team's opinion is that we can offer no effective defence against the Amba.s.sadors if they turn hostile. Their s.h.i.+ps are several miles long and capable of projecting immeasurably powerful beams of energy.”

Something was appended to the doc.u.ment.

”3/6/80. Transmission received from the Amba.s.sadors. 'Our survey is complete. We are leaving this solar system.'

Astronomers report a large object leaving Martian orbit for interstellar s.p.a.ce at great speed.”

There had been no contact with them since then.

Brigadier Bambera realised that she had wasted the last three hours of her life.

Eve had just phoned Mission Control, and apparently they had not demonstrated any of that British politeness. As she told Alan, it was a complete change of policy since this morning, when the Brits had bent over backwards for the news crews - helping to arrange interviews, issuing all the journos with a glossy press pack.

42.Alan had got hold of mugs, T-s.h.i.+rts and even a couple of model kits for his kids. When it had come to interviews and the press conference, they'd answered every question with a handy soundbite.

But when Eve had phoned them to ask for a mission update, the woman at the other end simply read out a curt pre-prepared statement that said nothing except about the landing itself. When Eve had tried to press the point, the woman at the National s.p.a.ce Museum had put the phone down on her.

Alan wasn't too worried: it had saved him a job - their report was now complete, without the need to tape an update. It would be ready for the satellite uplink in five minutes.