The Revengers;Always the Third Doctor!;Jo Grant;Katy Manning;Jon Pertwee;UNIT;TARDIS;
The Revengers
Episode Two
Written by Jeri Massi
With the lithe deftness that Jo had seen before, Mike Yates stepped into the path of the bar, his eyes fixed on it as it came down. He wasted no motion as he caught the wrist of the attacker, pushed his other hand up into the man's belt as the attacker sailed down on him, and moved his arms like the spinning hands of a clock. He used the man's motion to somersault him over in the air. The bar clattered to the floor, and Jimmy's feet went through the plate glass window above Jo.
She scrambled out from under him as he fell, and Mike fell onto him and leveraged the thick, muscular arm into a judo lock to keep him in submission. But there was no need. The man had landed head first on the carpeted concrete floor. Len pulled himself up behind the desk, saw that Jo was all right and picked up the telephone.
"I need an ambulance, quick," he said. "There's a man with his skull fractured---likely dead or dying."
As he gave directions, Yates got up off the unconscious man and looked down at him. "No, he's not dead," the young Captain said. "But he's out of it." He glanced up at the owner of the gym as Len hung up. "Do you know him?"
Len came around the front desk. "He's my cousin. He was all right until a few weeks ago. He has these spells---worse and worse every time." The two men from the weight room came to the doorway and stopped, peering over the desk from a safe distance. Len knelt on one knee and looked down at Jo's former assailant. Blood trickled from the man's left ear, and his eyes were not entirely closed. "Maybe you did him a favor." He looked over at Jo. "You all right, Miss? He'd have never hurt you if he was in his right mind."
But Mike cut in, angry. "If he's had these fits of delusion before, why did you let him come here? He might have killed her."
"He's never attacked nobody," Len said. "Not before this. He's as good a lad as you or anybody you'd name when he's right. And it's not like he was under the influence all the time. Or that he could help it." He nodded at the prone body. "What can we do for him? Anything?"
Trembling in spite of herself, Jo came forward. "You ought not move him," she said. "Not with a head injury." Len looked from her to the face of his unconscious cousin and then nodded.
"I---I know he was insane," she said. "I could see he didn't really know who I was or---or what he was doing."
Len glanced at her, a look of surprise and sudden respect on his face. Suddenly lights spilled into the room through the shattered front window. Unable to get into the narrow lane in the front of the building, the ambulance was parking on the street. Two attendants rushed in. Their quick glances caught the sight of the smashed glass, but they instantly went to the fallen man. Mike and Len both got out of their way.
"Jo," Mike said. "I'll get you out of here as soon as we talk to the police."
But she looked at Len. "I'll come back if it's all right," she said. "If you don't mind."
It was Mike's turn to look surprised, but the weight trainer said, "No, I don't mind a bit. Thank you."
She let Mike lead her out. She knew she should feel more grateful to him. He had saved her life at considerable risk to his own. And yet her mind and heart were suddenly on the Doctor. She wanted to tell him what had happened.
* * * *
"Inspector Jake, the man from UNIT is here." With a roll of his eyes, the sergeant turned and then ushered the Doctor into the narrow, cramped office of Chief Inspector Jake.
"Come in, Doctor," Jake refrained from taking a second look at his visitor's outlandish clothes. "I understand from Dr. Breed that UNIT is taking an interest in the case." He threw himself back into his chair and nodded for the Doctor to sit down. "Tea?" he asked.
"No thank you. UNIT is acting on my advice on this, Inspector. I'd like to dismiss the case from our files. But the deterioration of the victim's brain is unique so far in diagnostic history. Earth's diagnostic history, that is."
"Er, yes." Jake shuffled some papers. He'd heard that these UNIT people were secretive and advocated the most outlandish ideas: ascribing meteor showers to Martian invasions and hunting through the sewers in search of robotic monsters. He frankly did not know what to make of them, and his personnel search on the history of Lethbridge Stewart had resulted in a folder full of information about a man with high administrative skills and a sound education and military record. But the Doctor was another matter. The unavailability of the man's complete name seemed to fit with UNIT's ultra secrecy and self importance.
He scratched his head at the temple. "Dr. Breed seemed to lean towards an explanation of a possible genetic deformation. Malformation of a protein crucial to the nervous system."
The Doctor shook his head. He threw his left foot over his right knee and brought his hands together at the fingertips in the figure of a man deep in thought. "Then why were there no symptoms? From what I understand, dementia set in only recently."
"Do you have a better theory?"
"A toxin," the Doctor said.
"Any toxin you can identify?"
Jake noted that the Doctor instantly shook his head without defense. "Frankly, I don't have any idea what it could be. I'll need to get a better look at those samples I took. But a sudden onset of the dementia would indicate acute poison rather than a chronic condition."
"Even Alzheimer's is often not recognized until it is in its later stages," Jake told him. "The onset would seem sudden."
"Alzheimer's onset can be prompted by toxins, Chief Inspector," the Doctor announced. "In some cases the onset of severe symptoms is quite sudden. Not because they were present but not previously observed, but because the condition suddenly advanced rapidly."
"I never knew that."
"I know. It is not commonly known. Many elderly people can actually develop Alzheimer's plaques and live quite a long time symptom free," he said. "If their vascularity is good and their nervous system is otherwise unimpaired, they can do very well."
Jake fell silent. For a moment he looked at his odd visitor and gradually realized that he liked the Doctor. Or at least believed him. "The younger brother has confessed to the shooting," he said. "No great mystery about it. The older brother was suffering dementia, inexplicable pain and seizures, and had gone blind. So he waited until the poor blighter was resting, and he came right up to him and shot him. Just walked out after that. Went to a pub and spent the day there until we found him and brought him in."
"Could I speak to him?" the Doctor asked.
Chief Inspector Jake nodded. He stood up. He was a tall man, thin and rangy, with a rather hawk like nose. Pouchy eyelids and a rather sagging, wrinkled face prevented him from seeming a commanding figure. "The case is still pending. We can see him in the interview room. It's this way."
David Wilson was a London laborer in his mid-twenties. The Doctor instantly appraised him as some sort of tradesman, probably low end: plumbing, electrician work, perhaps masonry. He was not overly educated, and yet there was an unexpected vulnerability about him when he spoke. He wore a snow white shirt, faultlessly pressed when he had first donned it after shooting his brother, as though sitting in a pub awaiting arrest were a sort of sacred thing, the sort of thing one should dress for.
"Good Day, sir," Wilson said to the Doctor as the Chief Inspector led the Doctor into the room and one of the uniformed men took his place by the door.
"This is not a formal questioning, Wilson," Jake told him. "The Doctor here is a scientist. He is interested in your late brother's condition."
"Nobody knew what was wrong with him," Wilson said instantly, with a touch of sadness and yet also an attitude of dismissiveness. "If anybody'd had any ideas, maybe we would have waited it out a bit longer."
"Was your brother complicit in your plans to kill him?" the Doctor asked. "Did he ask to die?"
Wilson, whose hair was blond and straw-like in the way it radiated down from the crown of his head, shrugged to say no. "He didn't know what was going on. Not at all. Not a bit. He knew when he had those pains of his, and he knew he was blind, I think." He hesitated and then repeated, "I think," as though he were not sure. Then he added, as though to hurry up and say it all and get back to his cell, "I waited until he was asleep so he wouldn't know. But he wouldn't likely have known anyway."
"You killed him from pity?" the Doctor asked.
"I reckon. Maybe---maybe for his dignity, like. And pity for my wife. She mostly took care of him, and she couldn't abide that screaming when he was in pain. Nothing killed the pain. I mean it. We pumped him full of stuff, but nothing deadened it." He didn't look at either of his inquisitors, and after a very long pause, he said, "I shot him because I couldn't take it, either. It was just about eight weeks all told. But I could have sworn it was all my life I was taking care of him and seeing him get worse, and hearing those screams. Years and years." He pushed his hair back with his hand, and the straw-like strands fell back exactly where they had been.
The Doctor suddenly became business-like. "You say the symptoms started about eight weeks ago?"
"Yeah. He had his own place. Little flat after his wife and him split up a few years ago. I was over and I saw him put a can of shaving cream on the stove, on a burner with the gas lit. When I asked him what he was doing, he didn't understand. Then he cleared up a bit, and I thought maybe he'd been drinking. But it kept happening." The young man hesitated. "Phone would ring; he'd pick it up, and then he'd dial, like it was him calling somebody else."
"You told him to consult a physician?" the Doctor asked.
Wilson shrugged, a curious mode of expression of his that meant no. "He went himself. First doctor said it was mental. Gave him sedatives. I didn't like that. I had him move in with us, but he was getting worse every day. Every single day. He would chatter on and on in a funny way, saying the worst stuff, talking trash---"
"That was not his habit?"
David Wilson was startled by the question. He considered for a moment before he answered. "Oh, John could curse like a sailor when he was mad---or drunk---but this was different. You'd say perverted except I don't think he ever knew what he was really saying. But it sounded right perverted. Awful."
Inspector Jake could not resist this carrot. "Well, what did he say then?"
Wilson had kept his eyes averted until that moment, but he looked at the Inspector and the Doctor---who were seated side by side across the table from him---with open wonder. "He'd talk about my parents having . . . marital relations with each other. I mean, really detailed. Not that he ever saw them about it, mind you. And they were proper enough people, keepin' private life in the bedroom. But all of a sudden he's standin' in the kitchen talking about my parents in bed." He waved a hand for emphasis. "Top of his lungs, too. Chattering a mile a minute."
Jake frowned in surprise.
"See," David Wilson added. "John and me never cared about that stuff. Not about our parents. When we were lads, we used to brag to each other about girls and tell each other wild stories, but---I mean, it never occurred to us---"
"Anything else?" the Doctor asked.
"Eh, he had a running, wild story about my grandmother cooking turtles on the stove and eating the neighbor's cats. Don't know where he got that, either. And about faces in the window. I think when he saw himself in the mirror he didn't know it was a reflection. It scared him."
"And you kept consulting doctors?"
Wilson nodded. "Aye. For a few weeks. Then they started talking about committing him. And then he went blind and the pain started. He was on a waiting list to get into a hospital, but there just came a day---well, two days ago---when I couldn't stand it. He wasn't going to get better. He didn't know anything. He just lay there, blind and moaning and terrified and not much knowing anything."
"Your brother was dying," the Doctor said quietly. Both Jake and Wilson started at this announcement. "In another day or two, he would have died anyway."
Wilson again ran his hand through his hair, in spite of the fact that it fell back into his eyes. "You know what was wrong with him?"
The Doctor hesitated. "I do know that his brain was deteriorating. Rapidly. The doctors you consulted could not have known that. There was no way to tell except through autopsy."
Wilson stopped, struggling with the realization that he had been driven to desperation by circumstances that would have ended shortly of their own accord. But he mastered himself. And then he asked, "What made his brain go bad then?"
The Doctor shook his head. "I don't know. When I find out, I'll tell you."
He glanced at Jake. "That's all for now."
"He took things," Wilson said suddenly, as the Doctor and Inspector Jake stood.
"What's that?" the Doctor asked.
"He took things a few years ago. Illegal stuff."
"You mean he stole items?"
Inspector Jake interrupted. "I think Mr. Wilson is saying that his brother used drugs." He glanced at the prisoner.
"Yeah," David said. "He said he wasn't hurtin' anybody."
"Do you know what he took?" the Doctor asked.
"No. It was nothing I ever heard of. He wouldn't talk about it much. I told him I didn't want no part of it, but he didn't do it for very long."
"Thank you," the Doctor said.
* * * *
"Doctor, I'm so glad to see you!"
The Doctor was slightly surprised, but by no means displeased, when Jo met him at the doorway to the tea room with a quick hug. "Where ever have you been?" she asked. "I tried to phone you at the lab."
"Down to the police station," he said. "Interviewing a man they have in lockup. Are you all right? What's happened?"
"I'm fine now," she told him. "Haven't you seen Mike?"
"Not since this morning. Heard he was taking you around to the gyms."
She nodded. "Let's eat," she said suddenly. "I'm starved." He was glad to hear it. He led her to a table. After they had ordered tea and sandwiches, she told him about the attack at the gym.
He sighed heavily. "Jo, Jo. Trouble follows you, I think!"
She fixed her large dark eyes on him, troubled. "Don't you think it was a random thing? I just happened to be there when he snapped?"
"Yes, yes. There's no question that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
"Well, I'm going back," she said.
"What?"
She was startled at his surprise. "Of course I am! You wanted me to try strength training, and I like that man, Len. He tried to stop the other fellow. He got between me and that man and let him swing the bar down towards him, twice. The doorway caught it."
"Jo, I don't think you understand. The man that attacked you may have been experiencing steroid rage." The Doctor leaned forward. "You say he was very muscular?"
"Yes!" she exclaimed. "He looked like a drawing of a Greek god or something. Huge shoulders, narrow waist. His legs were like tree trunks, Doctor!" She glanced around as though afraid of being overheard. "To be honest, I thought he might do Mike in. But Mike used that judo on him."
"It sounds like he was probably going through a steroid rage, Jo."
"A what?"
"Bodybuilders are often quite keen on boosting their metabolic functions. They take synthesized drugs called anabolic steroids that mimic testosterone or that increase its production. The result is bigger muscles, but also paranoia, mood swings, and violent attacks on others. It's called steroid rage." He leaned back in his chair as the tea lady set down their tray of tea and sandwiches. "You ought to stay away from that place."
"Why? It's not Len's fault if people decide to take anabolic steroids."
"He could be selling the steroids to his customers. I'm afraid that gym managers are a bit notorious for being part of the steroid underground."
She shook her head. "That's hardly fair. This man Len is old enough to be my father. I don't think he's the type to sell dangerous drugs."
"All right, then. I may look in on the place. Tell me if you see anything else of a similar nature. Maybe it was just a one-off."
* * * *
In spite of her brave words to the Doctor, when Jo approached the door of the gym the next morning she felt a certain fluttery feeling in her stomach. The plate glass window had a sheet of plywood tacked over it, and the broken glass had been swept away from the pavement. Inside, the front room was dim from the window being blocked. The weight room itself was also more crowded than it had been the previous afternoon, busy with people getting in their workouts before getting to their jobs.
She was aware of several glances in her direction, and noticed that there were no other women out on the floor. But Len, busy at one of the stations with giving advice to a small knot of men, saw her and instantly came over.
"First thing in the morning," he said approvingly. "Before the traffic of the city fills the air with fumes. Come on then."
In keeping with the style of the place, she had cut off a pair of gray sweat pants issued last year from the UNIT training program, and she wore a cotton T-shirt, similarly gray.
"You'll need better shoes," Len told her. "But those will do for now."
After a warm up of running in place and skipping rope, he took her back to the bench where she had done a chest press the previous day. Now armed with a clipboard and a pencil, he had her repeat the exercise. She raised the bar as many times as she could at the pace he set, and when she couldn't repeat the complete action, he helped her set it in its rack. He told her that made one set. She did a set two more times, and then he moved her to a different station.
Some of the benches were flat, and some were slanted like deck chairs. He called them incline benches. Others were slanted backwards, so that her head pointed to the floor. He called these decline benches. He showed her how to do a decline chest press, and she tried three sets of these, but now her arms were getting tired.
He next had her sit on a bench that had a straight back to it, warned her to keep herself pushed against it for support, and gave her two 12-lb pound dumbbells. She lifted them straight up over her head. He called this a shoulder press. It was far more difficult to do than the chest presses had been. Len had to set down the clipboard and help her. He kept his big hands just to the outside of her arms in case her arms should drop as she lifted.
"I'm not very strong, am I?" she asked as he took the weights after the second set and put them on the floor.
"You're better than some, not as strong as others," he replied, a slight smile on his lined face as he gave her what was obviously a rote response. "I haven't trained many girls. They have better form than men, and they have just about the same improvement curve over the first six weeks. Percentage wise, I mean. You'll double your strength on most exercises."
He made a notation on the clipboard. "Shoulders are hard for women. There's just not much there to work with. But after a few days, your body will figure out how to best get through the lift. You're doing a lot of the work with your arms right now. You'll learn to push up with the larger muscles. Let's try another set."
She struggled through the third set. The lightest dumb bells in the gym weighed five pounds, and when she used these to do lateral raises, she could not do more than three repetitions in a single set. The lateral raise forced her to lift her arms, bent slightly at the elbow, as far from her sides as possible, like a bird flapping its wings. At the height of the lift, she to tip her hands slightly as though she were pouring a pitcher of water from each hand.
"Do you feel it burning right here?" he asked her as she struggled through a repetition. He touched the front of her shoulder, exactly where the muscle burned in protest.
"Yes!" she gasped, and she brought the weights back down.
He grinned. "Everybody hates lateral raises when they first start out. Them and calves. But we won't do legs until tomorrow."
After another straining set of three lateral raises, she learned how to do a lat pulldown at one of the cable stations, and then a lat row at another station. Both exercises worked the muscles on her back, the place, Len said, "where angels have wings." He also showed her how to lie on a bench and do chest flies. Finally, he showed her two different exercises for her triceps. But by then she was warmed up and with the relief of the shoulder exercises being finished, she was able to three full sets of ten repetitions each on both tricep exercises. Her bruised arm barely twinged.
"That was a good job!" he told her as he made a final annotation on the clipboard. She realized that her entire upper body was somehow tight where the muscles had burned and yet loose at the joints, and trembling. She craved a hot shower and had a sudden yearning for coffee.
"Now," he said, and he smiled broadly at her. "We flex." The room was lined with frameless mirrors. He brought her before one and stood next to her. Then he lifted his bulging arm and flexed his bicep. "You try."
She giggled and pulled up her arm and flexed it. A tiny ridge popped up.
She laughed outright. Some of the men walking past to get to stations or go to the showers also laughed, but there was nothing unfriendly about it.
"It wasn't there before," Len told her. "Don't laugh. You should be proud. That's the hard work you've done!"
He showed her how to flex for shoulders, chest, and triceps. Laughing, she imitated him. But even flexing had a purpose. When they had finished, she did not feel as tight. She was amazed that an hour had passed since she had first walked in.
"That was a right good job," he told her. "Come back tomorrow, and we'll work on an entirely different group of muscles."
He was funny, and patient, and kind. Before he walked away, she spoke.
"Len," she said suddenly. "Have you ever taken anabolic steroids?"
His face had been smiling, but the question wiped the smile away as though she had hurt him. For a moment he looked at her, his eyes more and more sober, and then he said, with a very grieved voice. "Now why would a young and healthy lady like you be interested in steroids?"
"It's not that---"
"Jo," he said with a voice that sounded amazingly like her father's. "Steroids are bad. Dangerous. They can work changes that can't be undone. Especially in women."
She smiled. "I don't want to take steroids," she said gently. "I was wondering if that man Jimmy was taking them."
Understanding dawned on his lined face. "Because he went mad, you mean?"
She nodded. Len was pensive for a moment, and then he said, "Jimmy might have been taking them. I don't know. If that was steroid rage, it was the worst case I ever seen. It's usually not that wild. Not that unprovoked."
"But it might have been?"
He gave a short nod. "Might have been."
"Have you ever taken steroids?" she asked him.
He nodded. "Of course. But that was a long time ago. And I was a fool."
She wondered what he meant and was about to ask, when---to her great surprise---Mike Yates poked his head through the doorway from the front room. The young Captain was in uniform, and she knew he had to be on shift. So what was he doing here?
She had not felt odd in her cutoffs and T-shirt until now, but as she saw Mike she suddenly felt very uncomfortable.
"Thought I'd drop in and see if there was any news," Mike said as she and Len crossed the room to him.
"On Jimmy you mean?" Len asked. "No. He's still in hospital. Hasn't even come 'round." He glanced down at Jo. "I'd better go strip the weights off where the lads have left them." And he walked away. She turned to Mike. "Are you watching out for me?" she asked, somewhat out of patience.
He tried to look surprised. "Not at all. I was picking up some supplies for the Brig and thought I would drop by, that's all."
* * * *
"Well, what's it all about, Doctor?" the Brigadier asked as the Doctor strode from the TARDIS with a sealed polyurethane bag in his hands.
"I've dyed one of the samples and examined the plaques," he said.
"Dyed them? Whatever for? You aren't looking at them with the naked eye are you?"
"Hardly, Brigadier." The Doctor set down the sealed sample, leaned against the workbench, and folded his arms. "Alzheimer's disease, which is characterized by the formation of protein plaques in the cerebral cortex, is detectable by the way the plaques react to a dye called Congo Red. The amyloid plaques react to the dye as a starch would, making a nice bright stain."
"So did this fellow's sample make a stain?"
"Yes, but the protein plaques are not Alzheimer's plaques. We're dealing with a different disease. A different pathology."
"Are you sure?" the Brigadier's voice remained calm, but there was a new light of urgency in his eyes.
"The protein fibril structure of this fellow's amyloid plaques show that it was not Alzheimer's. It's a different protein malformation. Not the beta-A4 peptide of Alzheimer's. And Alzheimer's plaques are normally localized to the cerebral cortex. This poor fellow's entire brain had turned into a sponge."
"Well, what protein is it?"
The Doctor's temper blazed out. "How do you expect me to know? Do you think I have every possible configuration that makes a protein memorized?" he snapped. "Don't be stupid, man! I might as well memorize the Oxford English Dictionary!"
"Oh." But the Brigadier did not snap back in reply. He'd had no idea that there were that many proteins around, and he had the sense of getting out of his depth. "Well what do we do?" he asked. "What's the danger?"
"I want to go down to see Breed," the Doctor said. "Has Benton completed that search yet?"
"I'll check with him. You want autopsy reports?"
"Of course I want autopsy reports! And we may need to have the bodies exhumed!"
This made the Brigadier snap to attention. "Exhumed? Every person in London who has died with senile dementia for the last six months?"
"I can't find a toxic residue," the Doctor told him. "I need to check the body again, but there's no residue in the samples to show toxicity."
"Well what the blazes does that mean?"
"A disease, Brigadier, a real disease. If it's transmittable, we may very well have a plague on our hands! An infection that assaults the nervous system by deforming a protein that nobody has ever even noticed up until now. We could be standing on the edge of catastrophe! And every one of us could be infected!"
Episode Three is now online!
