The Revengers;Always the Third Doctor!;Jo Grant;Katy Manning;Jon Pertwee;UNIT;TARDIS;The Revengers Episode Four
The Revengers
Episode Four
Written by Jeri Massi
Straining with all her strength, Jo was just able to keep the bar from crushing her chest or rolling into her throat, but she could not lift it. To her surprise, she heard the man who had just addressed her give a sudden yell of anguish. There was a sound of blows, of fist on flesh and of a quick, fierce, grunting. Then, further away, Len shouted, and she heard him come running onto the floor. But whoever had hit her attackers was already there, fighting furiously on her behalf.
"Get that off her!" Len shouted, and then yelled again as somebody apparently hit him. He bellowed, and Jo knew that he was also fighting in her defense. "Go on, Sonny, that one's down!" he shouted to somebody. But there was more grunting, yelling, and struggling. It seemed a long time before two strong hands grasped the bar and lifted it back to the rack.
Blood was pounding in her ears, and for a moment she couldn't see. Then she heard a familiar voice, though she could not immediately place it, say, "Jo, Jo, can you hear me? We've chased them out. You're quite safe."
She opened her eyes and saw the thick spectacles close to her own face, and Mark Lowry's eyes peering at her. He helped her to sit up. There was more shouting as Len chased away the other men from the leg press station and told them to leave. One or two protested, as they had merely watched, but after a moment they gave it up and cleared off.
Holding one hand in the other as though he had hurt it, Len hurried back to her, obviously concerned and in anguish over what had happened.
"Is she all right?" he asked, and Mark Lowry nodded. Jo forced herself to nod, though she felt very bruised, and her upper arms were raging with both icy numbness and burning pain.
"I will call the police on that, Miss Grant," Len said. He turned to go to the telephone. "You might have been terribly hurt."
"No!" Lowry exclaimed. He had been the one to plow into Jo's attackers, and so Len stopped and stared at him in open mouthed astonishment. "They're all to be arrested Monday," Lowry told him. "We don't want anybody tipped off at the police station."
"Who's to be arrested?" Len asked. "For what?"
Mark Lowry hesitated, realizing that he may have already betrayed the plan. But Jo spoke. "The police have found a dangerous compound being sold to the weight lifters," she said. "They have to track down who is distributing it."
"Something like that," Mark added. "We don't know how dangerous, really. More of a guess."
She remembered that he believed the dementia to be infectious in nature rather than toxic. But he was looking warily at Len, not wanting the gym owner to warn away the steroid sellers.
"All right then," Len said. "But assault is serious. And come Monday, if these blokes think she's the one that got the whole lot of them arrested, there could be more trouble."
Mark assisted Jo to her feet. She was trembling, but he suddenly smiled at her. "Well," he said. "I've wanted an excuse to introduce her to my circle of friends. The university training facilities will be quite safe for her. What about it Jo? You can work out over there until things cool off here."
She nodded mutely. She was slightly surprised when he quickly put an arm around her shoulders. "I'm sorry," he said. "You're shaken up, as well you should be. I'll see you home." He turned to Len. "Are you hurt?"
Len was still gripping his right hand in his left. "Busted my knuckles. That was some fighting you did, young man. Against three of them."
Mark shrugged. "Not hard. They weren't expecting it. Too much brawn and not enough brains and all that. I've been boxing several years now. Gave me a chance to try it out."
He looked down at Jo, and suddenly she felt safe and assured with him. "I came looking for you, Jo. It was just about pure luck I walked in when I did. They tried to get in my way, and that was when I started hitting them. But I didn't mean to keep you pinned for that long."
"It's all right," she said. "And thank you." She looked at Len. "Thank you, Len. You did warn me."
"I didn't want you to get hurt, Miss," he told her. "I'll bar them from the gym. But the young man is right. You should stay away for a few weeks until things cool down." He squinted at Lowry. "Don't I know you, young man?"
"I trained here for a few weeks years and years ago," Mark told him. "And I've been to some of the shows and competitions. You used to be a corner man for some of the boxers in the amateur nights, right?"
Len gave a brief nod. "Right you are. You're a fair boxer yourself. Ever compete?"
Mark had his arm protectively across Jo's shoulders and moved to leave with her. "No, no, nothing serious. I'm not keen on getting my brains knocked out after investing this much money in them. Only for a good cause." And he smiled at her.
She went out with him. He drove a rather expensive car for being such a young man, and she remembered that somebody had mentioned he was a consultant for agricultural firms.
He opened her door for her and then climbed in on his side. As he switched on the ignition and the big engine purred into life, he spoke gently. "Are you all right, Jo?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, thank you."
"I hope you don't think I'm a nuisance," he told her. "But I am glad I came in when I did."
"So am I!" she exclaimed.
"All the same." He afforded her a glance and then looked to check traffic as he pulled out. "You ought to feel free to send me packing. For all I know you've got a jealous boyfriend, or you don't like the nearsighted type, or you don't have time for a new friend. But I am going to see you home."
She hesitated, but his promptness in tackling three enormous weightlifters, and his gentleness with her had won her over even more since she had last considered him. "Do you want the truth?" she asked.
"Of course I want the truth!" He seemed surprised.
"It's just that I don't really have time to develop much of a conventional relationship with anybody," she said. "I mean, I pack up and go quite a bit with the Doctor when we have to get places, and sometimes we go quite far away indeed. I don't want to disappoint anybody."
He suddenly smiled as he effortlessly guided the car with both hands on the bottom of the steering wheel. He had come dressed for the gym in cut-offs and a t-shirt. Sitting at the wheel of his huge car, dressed for weightlifting, his glasses banded securely in place, he suddenly seemed vulnerable, strong, affluent, and yet boyish. He grinned ear to ear, heightening the effect.
"Jo Grant, I'm the most unconventional person in the world," he told her. "I promise not to ask you to marry me or fall into any rot like that. But if you want a decent place to lift weights, and a decent chap who can let you be yourself, and a good time when you can spare me a moment or two to go 'round to the theatre, then you've found yourself a---a chum!"
"Fair enough!" she exclaimed.
"Look here! The weight room at the school is closed to the students from five tonight until seven. If you feel up to it, you can come up then and pick up your workout where it was interrupted."
She nodded. "All right. Thank you. I'll do that."
* * * *
At the lab at UNIT, the Doctor emerged from the TARDIS and threw down a pencil with unnecessary force. It hit the work bench and then bounced on its own eraser and fell to the floor. Lethbridge Stewart entered in time to see it fall. He cocked an eyebrow. "Anti-gravity tests, Doctor?"
The Scientific Advisor let out his breath and narrowed his eyes for a moment. Then he decided not to enter a jousting match of words with the Brigadier. When Jo was there to laugh or reproach him it was more of a worthwhile past time. But in her absence he got down to facts.
"Hughes' blood thickening agent," he said. "Erythropoietin. Don't know where he got it from, but it's not toxic."
"What about an overdose? Maybe he took too much."
The Doctor shook his head. "Overdosing would have made his liver fall apart, and I'm not saying he wasn't on the fast track to just such a fate. But the substance does not cause amyloid plaques to form. I cannot link it with dementia."
"Maybe that Professor Lowry fellow is right. Maybe we are looking at an infectious disease."
The Doctor shook his head. "This is not a virus, and it is not a bacteria."
"Yes, but how can you be so sure?" the Brigadier asked.
"Because there are no viruses or bacteria or their residues in the brain samples," the Doctor snapped. "Your equipment on earth might miss something, but my equipment in the TARDIS does not!" He retrieved the pencil and slammed it to the workbench. "Somebody is really having us on." He let out a huge sigh. "I'm going to get to the cadavers again," he said. "I want to take a look at everything that was going on in their brains and nervous systems."
"Well, Benton's turned up this list." The Brigadier passed a list over to him. "Fifty three known cases in the last six months. Forty-eight of them over the age of 70, all diagnosed with senile dementia. No autopsies."
"And the other five?"
"Three diagnosed with Alzheimer's in their mid-forties; two were autopsied and the diagnosis was born out in both of them. One was not autopsied. But the disease had been progressing for six years."
"So it doesn't fit this model," the Doctor said. "Our poor fellows went down in a matter of months."
The Brigadier nodded, relieved that the Doctor was not going to demand exhumation. "The final two were youngish but had a history of hard drug use. The dementia was attributed to brain damage caused by a mixture of potent drugs."
"Autopsies?" the Doctor asked.
"No." His voice was suddenly patient.
"Well then, we'll need them exhumed."
The Brigadier became bland. "Sorry. They've been cremated."
"Cremated?" It was rare for the Doctor to be stunned, but he was.
"Yes, Doctor. Demented vagrants are usually not claimed when they pass on. The most economical way of disposing of them is to cremate them and put the remains in a pauper's grave."
"Well, we're right back where we started. I'm off to the forensics lab again. If Jo rings me, would you see to it that she's told I'll see her back here on Monday?"
"All right. I'll pass the message on to the switchboard."
* * * *
Jo did not invite Mark in, but promised to meet him at the college weight room that evening. She had felt almost back to normal while driving with him, but once she was back in her small flat, the danger in which she'd placed herself came home to her. She had caught the attention of steroid dealers and users and had raised their ire. From what she had heard, the overuse of steroids made men less able than normal to handle stress and far more prone to resort to violence.
She was not nervous about being alone during the day, but night would be another matter. She wondered if the men who had threatened her in the gym would track her down. After the sweep on Monday, they would almost certainly be released. Would they find her and silence her?
She decided that she would be safest at UNIT. It was not unusual for Jo to live on site for days at a time, especially when emergency situations made it impossible to be spared from round the clock shifts. She could pretty much come and go as she pleased.
One of the Doctor's best remedies for shock was sweet tea, but his next best remedy to calm nerves was whiskey in hot water with a spoonful of sugar added. She opted for this second choice. She wanted to sleep while it was day, for it may very well be a late night, and there was no predicting when she would get decent rest again. She already had the sense that she was caught up in something, and her training had instilled in her the habit of stockpiling her sleep in advance.
She drank the hot whiskey and water from a teacup, and then stretched out on the sofa and was asleep within seconds.
The ringing of the telephone called her up from deep waves of dreamless unconsciousness. She peddled her legs and whimpered to herself, wanting somebody to turn off the ringing. She groped for the alarm of the clock and nearly fell off the sofa. Catching herself from falling brought her around, and she woke up. It was not early morning, and she was not in her bed. Her arms burned at the shoulders, and she remembered straining against the weight in the gym.
The phone was still ringing. She staggered to it and snatched it up, her eyes roving the walls in search of a clock. She had no idea of the time.
"Jo?" a man's voice asked.
"Yes," she gasped.
"Did I wake you up? You all right?"
"Len, is that you?"
"I have to meet with you. I need your Doctor friend's help."
Did Len know the Doctor? Had he met the Doctor? Her mind scrambled to get its thoughts in order. Failing to find a clock, she remembered that she was wearing her watch, and she glanced at it. It was twenty minutes until five. She nearly jumped out of her skin. She had twenty minutes to pack her gym bag and meet Mark.
"Len, I don't know where the Doctor is today," she said. Now she remembered that she had told Len about working for the Doctor. And in the course of Jimmy's death Len had met Dr. Breed as well. She wanted to get off the phone. She could hardly believe she had slept away the whole day, and she did not want to be late for her date with Mark.
"Look, then I've got to see you," he told her. "You can get a message to him. You can get on base at that UNIT place. "Or take me to that Breed fellow."
"I can't." She told him. "I mean, not right now. I've got to go meet somebody, and I'm already late"
"I'll meet you. I need to see the people working on Jimmy's case," he said. "The medical people, I mean."
She gathered her wits together. "Look, I should be back to my flat by about eight. Meet me here if you like." She gave him the address. She had no intention of meeting him anywhere near the gym, not after what had happened.
She hung up without remembering to say goodbye and spent the next five minutes dashing about the flat, assembling clothes, shoes, hairbrush, other necessities, and stuffing them into her bag. Then she hurried out the door.
She was only ten minutes late when she pulled in to the car park of the building that housed the weight room. Shouldering the gym bag, she raced up the aged concrete steps, which had been painted over with a thick, brown layer of paint. She followed the signs to the weight room and training center and burst through the heavy, reinforced door.
Inside a large square room that was furnished with a few benches and cable machines but lined with racks of free weights and dumb bells, three men were examining the broken collar of one of the bar bells.
"Sorry I'm late!" she exclaimed. "I do apologise!"
Mark detached from the group. "Not at all. Did you have trouble finding us?" He took the bag from her and escorted her over to his friends. "Jo Grant, this is Ralph Braithewight, a research assistant in statistics," and he indicated a round stomached young man with very thick glasses and curly, unkempt hair. Braithewight inclined his head and smiled faintly and condescendingly at her. He had a certain pomposity that was out of place in one so young. "And this is Neil Sparrowe. Neil has abandoned the rigors of college life for the decadence of a real job with a research firm." Sparrowe was tall and slender, not so well proportioned as Mark, with enormous white teeth in a long face. He grinned from ear to ear, and the effect was hideous but likeable.
"A motley assortment," Mark said. "But we do our best."
She smiled, but the two other men seemed awkward and ill at ease.
"Come on, then!" Mark exclaimed. "Miss Grant here is an avid newcomer to the sport, so let's do our best."
Jo had learned that she should skip rope to warm up, but Mark instructed her otherwise. He put her on a non-motorized treadmill and timed for her ten minutes. "Skipping rope is bad for the knees on a floor like this," he told her. "In fact, you should be choosy about where you skip rope. Go for a real gym floor: hardwood with some spring in it. Or wear very good shoes and skip rope on dirt outside. You can do a slow warm up for weights. You don't want to expend all your energy at the start."
While she warmed up, she watched Ralph and Neil spot each other on squats. It was amazing to watch the tall, slender Neil go all the way down in the classic squat position, his form absolutely perfect. He was only balancing 132 pounds across his traps. This was a warm up set for both of them. Ralph Braithewight took his turn. In spite of a round stomach and arms that did not look as defined as those of his friends, the shorter man went down well into the squat and appeared less winded than his partner at the end of the first set. Instead of doing more sets of squats, they went on to a warm up set on the bench press.
"We've dispensed with the two day split," Mark told her. "There's plenty of evidence that a good hard circuit training schedule of three times a week can add mass if it's followed rigorously. I want to do a study on synergism in lifting, so we're following this routine for the next six weeks."
Finally, he led her to the squat station. He started her off with weights lighter than she had yet used: thirty-five pounds. But he made her slow down the cadence of her lift.
"Len makes the mistake of letting novices get by so long as they're eighty percent correct," he told her. "Then he adds in instruction if they progress. But I'd rather you get it right from the start. Don't bounce when you get low. It's bad for your back and it cheats your glutes of the benefit of the lift."
Her glutes were the muscles of her backside. Under Len's tutelage, Jo had felt the burn of squats in the backs of her legs, her hamstrings, and only slightly in her backside. But with Mark coaching her and making her lower herself slowly into the squat, pause at the lowest point, and then come up with good form, she felt the burn in hamstrings, glutes, and even the quadricep muscles in the fronts of her legs.
"Truly excellent," he said as she came up the second time. He was behind her, ready to catch the weight. "You need to drop about an inch lower, Jo."
"I thought my legs were at ninety degrees," she told him, not turning. She kept her head and eyes pointed forward, the barbell resting across her shoulders.
"Yes, the common teaching is that you should squat just low enough so that your upper legs are perfectly parallel to the floor," he agreed. "But research indicates that if you just go a tiny bit past that, you'll get a better burn. We'll watch for pain in your knees. But if you keep it to just an inch, there should be no trouble."
"Burn" and "pump" were words with special meaning to weightlifters. The streaking burn down her muscles when she lifted was her means of detecting if the stress was in the right place on the muscle, and it was a sign that the muscle was challenged. A muscle that reacted to stress by filling with blood was called pumped.
She came down again into the squat and followed his advice. "Good, now come up with a smooth motion," he said. At this slower rate, the sticking point was almost unbearable, but as she rose up past it, she could feel the blood coursing into her muscles. She had thought that she could not do ten of these slower paced squats, but she did.
He lifted the bar and returned it to its rack. Her legs were trembling.
He used a heavier bar for himself and squatted ten times with excellent form.
They had started off as two pairs of two, but eventually Neil and Ralph finished their warm-up circuit and joined them as Mark led Jo through the last of her warm up sets.
"Right!" Mark exclaimed. "Now for the real work!"
"You do have very good form, Miss Grant," Neil said.
"Please, do call me Jo," she said. "And I am very grateful to you for letting me work with you. I feel like I've tripled my knowledge."
Mark beamed at her, and the two other men thawed more. They went through the next circuit of sets, using heavier weights on everything. It became much more of a challenge, and Jo found herself much less able to talk as she struggled to do ten repetitions on each set. But her three coaches encouraged her and added advice as she worked with them. At the end of the second circuit they rested and passed around Gatorade from an ice chest that Mark had brought.
Even the condescending Ralph Braithewight praised her as she took a long and appreciative swig of the Gatorade.
"You do very well. It's a very mental game, Miss Grant--uh, Jo," he told her. "I've been quite amazed at how my ability to lift has changed as I have learned not to limit myself mentally."
"Limit yourself?" she asked.
"Yes, you know, by assuming that I have a limit on how much is too much. I mean, there is a limit, but even the bravest human mind tends to set that limit too low."
"Ralph is quite right," Mark added. "The human mind is constantly setting its own limits and setting them too low most of the time."
"That's a safety feature," Jo said. "I mean, what if you set it too high? You could kill yourself. You remember the chest press today." And she looked at Mark.
He nodded, and his two friends looked puzzled.
"A couple of men at Jo's gym decided to torment her," he said. "Because she's been vocal in her opposition to steroids. They put her under a 132 pound barbell, and she couldn't lift it off."
"I say! The rotten pikers!" Neil exclaimed. "And doing that to a young woman, too!"
"How did you get away?" Ralph asked.
"Mark came in just then," Jo told them. "He sent them flying."
"And yet," Mark said. "You actually could lift 132 pounds, Jo."
His two friends nodded. She shook her head. "I can't. I tried. You saw me try. I was terrified and was determined to get it off me, but I couldn't."
The condescending look returned to Ralph's expression. "It was only your own fear telling you that you could not," he said.
She felt a spike of resentment. It was obvious that they knew more about physiology and lifting than she did, but she did not like to be talked down to, and she had done her best to get the weight off.
"Look, I was there," she told him.
Mark lifted a hand, and Braithewight subsided. "Jo," Mark said gently. "Have you ever done anything at all that normally you thought you could not do?"
She hesitated. Since being with the Doctor, she had done many things she had never foreseen. But the most amazing thing she had ever done was stepping in front of the energy bolt that Azal had fired at the Doctor.
"Yes," she said. They looked at her expectantly. She did not want to sound like she was bragging. It had been a very personal thing for her to do, and it was a cornerstone of her relationship with the Doctor. She edited the story a bit. "Once, about a year ago--well, just short of a year, I was on a case with my supervisor, the Doctor. A---a person pointed a weapon at him. And just as he fired, I stepped into its path."
This arrested their attention. "Deliberately?" Mark asked.
"Yes," she said. "The only thing I knew was that I had to save him."
"I say!" Neil said softly. "You're full of surprises!" His voice was filled with admiration.
"But why weren't you killed?" Ralph asked.
"I don't know," she said, and then she caught herself. "The weapon failed. Misfired, I suppose."
Mark hesitated and then spoke, but she had the idea that all three of them respected her a good deal more. "You see, Jo, when there is no fear, you actually can exceed limitations. Let me put it this way. If it had been a little child trapped under that weight, could you have lifted it off of her then?"
She was ready to say no, but then she hesitated. In the light of this new question, she could see that maybe her fear of the bar had actually made her confused and unable to focus herself on lifting.
"I don't know," she said at last.
"Then let me show you," he said. "We can take away your fear and help you focus on the single task of lifting the bar."
She felt a bit foolish, but she agreed. She went to the bench, and Ralph and Neil affixed 20 K plates on either end of the bar. She lay down under it, and Mark stood at her head while the others stood on either side.
"Go ahead and grip it," he told her. She did.
"Push up," he said. She obeyed, and nothing happened.
"Relax." She complied. "Push," he said. "Now keep this up, and listen to me."
"All right."
"It's not you under the bar. (push) It's not you at all. (relax) It's somebody else. Somebody in trouble. (push) It's an innocent person, and she's trying to help a very good man. (relax) She's trying to help the Doctor. (push) She wants to save innocent lives. (relax) Bullies are trying to frighten her. (push) They want to hurt her. (relax) They're full of ego and they want money. (push) They sell steroids to young men in high school. (relax) They've loaded her bar with plates. (push) But you can save her. (relax) You can help the Doctor. (push) Save her Jo. (relax) Lift it up. Now!"
They were ready to catch the bar in case it came down, but she didn't think about that. She pushed up and lifted the bar off the rack.
"Come down slowly. Come down slowly!" Mark exclaimed, his eyes wide through the thick lenses of his glasses. He had his face close to hers, though they were reversed to each other. "Bring it down."
The others were bending at the knees, lowering themselves with the bar in case she needed rescue. But she brought it down steadily.
"Lift it off her. It's not you! It's that other girl! The one who can help the Doctor! Lift it off her!" he shouted. The others were shouting, too, encouraging her. Blood forced its way through her burning muscles. Her vision became red, and she had a roaring in her ears. But she saw again the faces of the men as they turned to walk away from her, their satisfaction that they had defeated her. But not her, this other person who loved the Doctor and wanted to help him.
She shouted and pushed it off herself this time, an inch at a time, defeating them, opposing them, refusing to allow herself to be pinned down under the weight of the bar. She slowly and smoothly pushed it up to the full height. Mark grabbed it and racked it.
Her arms collapsed and for a moment she could not see. But there was something like singing deep inside her. A sudden exultation that made up for the searing pain in her chest and arms. She burst out crying for a moment.
Mark and the others helped her up. "You did it, Jo!" he exclaimed softly. "Wasn't that super? You burst the boundaries, didn't you?"
"It was beautiful to watch!" Neil exclaimed.
Even Ralph was congratulatory. "Lovely! Brave hearted."
Her vision cleared. Mark was sitting next to her on the bench. "How could I go from bench pressing fifty pounds to doing 132?" she asked.
"Well, you didn't do ten reps," he said with a short laugh. "But for a momentary, anaerobic spike of power, you have the capability. Take a rest for a few minutes. We'll get started on the next circuit. Come in when you're ready."
She had thought at first that two hours in the weight room would be plenty, but it was quarter past seven when they completed the fourth and last circuit. Over more Gatorade, Mark said, "Look here, Jo, we have a fellow who comes up twice a week to instruct us on Japanese martial arts. Would you care to stay?"
"I thought you boxed," she said.
He grinned. "I do it all. Now that I've discovered the means to break the boundaries, I keep looking for other disciplines that teach the same ideas."
She nodded. He glanced around at his friends. "We're all avid martial artists," he said. "But we don't like to be aggressive or compete with others, so we keep it rather hush-hush."
"But how did you get into all of this?" she asked. "I mean, maybe it's a stereotype, but when I think of college professors and mathematicians, I never think of weight lifters and boxers and things like that."
"No, we do break the mold," Ralph agreed. "We have decided that surpassing our fellow man mentally is not enough."
She saw the warning look that Neil shot to him, and Ralph stopped. But Mark saw her and knew that the comment had caught her attention.
He spoke quietly. "You must have seen the proverbial ninety-pound weaklings when you were at school, Jo."
"Yes," she admitted. "I did."
"Bookish, odd, eccentric, picked on," he added.
"Yes."
Ralph cut in. "How did a pretty girl like you treat them?" The chubby statistician's voice was acid. "Turn your nose up at them?"
She bristled. "No! On the contrary, I admired them. They went their own way, and I liked that."
He said nothing, but a look of greater disdain came into his spectacled eyes.
"And how did you treat the pretty girls?" she demanded. "Did you look down on them because they hadn't your brains?"
"Steady on," Mark said gently, but Neil spoke quietly, his dark eyes somber in his long, homely face. "Well answered, Jo."
"Nobody's got the market cornered on snobbery," she snapped.
"I apologise," Ralph told her. "I am sincerely sorry."
Mark was uneasy. "We're not exactly used to the company of pretty young girls like yourself," he told her. "I mean, I may as well be honest. I'm sorry, too."
She turned to him. "I thought you befriended me because I like lifting weights," she asked.
He nodded. "Yes." And then he added, "But you can't blame a fellow if he does think you're quite pretty. I mean, it is something of an honor to be in your company."
She said nothing, but her feelings were hurt. It bothered her that they had led her through something as personal as the triumph of exceeding her own fears and then backed away from her because she wasn't one of their set.
"Anyway," Mark said. "We all three became friends at university. We decided that we might as well start looking into things like this. Like fitness training and such. That evolved into studying out the means of exceeding the limits of our own fears. We're quite keen on weight training, martial arts, anything that presents a physical challenge. We've got a visiting professor over here from Japan this year, and he's fifth dan in Judo and a first dan in karate. He's been training us twice a week."
Neil spoke up. "We would be honored to have you train with us," he said. "Professor Nisheyama will be here by seven thirty."
"Please," Ralph added, now contrite. "Do stay."
The idea did fascinate her. Jo had undergone various courses in self defense at UNIT, but these had always been taught to her with the attitude that she likely wasn't going to do very well. The thrill and amazement of having lifted a weight that some men could not lift on their first week of training was still with her, and she wanted to try a new challenge.
"I've got to meet Len," she said. She was disappointed, and it showed in her voice.
Mark was puzzled. "Len? Len from the gym?"
She nodded. "He called earlier. Insisted he had to see me. He's supposed to meet me at eight at my place."
Mark threw a glance at his watch. "Oh, by the way, I'd better get down to the front doors and unlock them. The students will be coming up to use the weight room. We meet with Master Nishiyama in a separate room. Neil, Ralph, will you see Miss Grant to her car?"
He said goodbye to Jo and hurried away.
"I'll go get the mats for our class," Ralph said, sensing that he was not in Jo's good graces at the moment. "It was a pleasure to work out with you, Jo. I hope that we'll see you again."
"Come on then," Neil told her. "I'll have just enough time to show you the different ways into the building for next time. Sometimes the back door is locked."
He led her through the many hallways of the top floor, pointing out the women's dressing room as they passed, and then they went downstairs, and he took her around the outside of the building, showing her the different doors and even adding a pointer to a window that could easily be pried open if the doors should all be locked.
"That's my little secret," he told her. "Mark and Ralph are college faculty and have keys, but sometimes I have to get in by hook or by crook."
Time was fleeing. She knew she had to get away or be late in meeting Len. Neil noticed that she glanced at her watch, and he lifted a finger to indicate that he remembered. "Come on. It's this way to the car park."
* * * *
The Brigadier burst into the lab. "This had better be good," he told the Doctor. "I gave up a really magnificent supper to rush down here."
"Time for supper later," the Doctor said. "I've found something."
"Yes?"
The Doctor nodded to several charts that he had spread across the work bench. None of them made any sense to the Brigadier, but the Doctor pointed to different sections of the charts. "Look there. And there, and there."
"What?" the Brigadier asked.
"These charts are representations of the state of brain enzyme levels for both men just after their decease," he said. "Everything is just about normal, except for this one: cholinesterase."
"Eh?" The Brigadier cicked an eyebrow. "What about it? Just another spike on the chart."
"The levels are low. Very low in both subjects. The enzyme was inhibited or repressed."
"What does that mean? What inhibits cholinesterase?"
"I don't know. But I do know that cholinesterase will bind to selenium" the Doctor said.
The Brigadier looked up from the unintelligible charts. "You mentioned selenium right at the start of this business," he said. "Are we looking at selenium toxicity?"
The Doctor shook his head. "Not acutely. Not as a direct cause. I think---" the Doctor hesitated. "I think that something interfered with selenium metabolism. Something suppressed or misguided the immune systems of these men." He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. "It's hard to be sure. I must look at the protein plaques themselves and take a much deeper look at the nerve ganglia of both victims. But I think something attacked their nervous systems."
"So it is an infectious agent," the Brigadier said.
"It most certainly is not an infectious agent," the Doctor retorted. "But it may very well be something very long acting. A very slow, very long-term poison."
The Brigadier already knew that he was not going to get any clearer of an explanation on the cause of the dementia. "Well, what do we need to do?" he asked.
"Get those steroid dealers in custody and start analyzing their products. UNIT will have to liaison with the police."
The telephone trilled at him. He scooped it up. "Hallo?"
"Doctor, this is Breed. We've got a live one. St. Anne's Fifth floor. Dementia, blindness, inexplicable pain. Still alive but sinking fast. Male in his late twenties or early thirties. I haven't seen the file yet. Can you come?"
"Yes, I'm right there," the Doctor said. "Weight lifter?"
"No. Never. Never touched steroids."
"All right, I'm coming."
He cradled the receiver. "A new lead," he told the Brigadier. "Come on, if you want."
* * * *
One thing that Jo liked about weight lifting was the relaxed and trembly feeling it put into her muscles after a session. It really felt as though she had done something. But it was a nuisance when she drove to feel her quadricep cramp up each time she used the foot brake.
And though bench pressing twenty pounds more than her own body weight had thrilled her, her weary arms were uncomfortable with having to prop her hands on the steering wheel. She welcomed the idea of an extremely hot bath and bed.
She was late pulling in. It was 8:05 when she parked in front of her building. A few cars up, she could see Len's car, the tail lights glowing red. He was waiting for her. She hoped that this would be fast. She was physically exhausted.
She shouldered her gym bag over the protest of her muscles and strode up to the car. For a moment her eyes suddenly stung in the faint breeze, and her throat burned for an instant and made her cough. Perhaps it was the exhaust from his car. She came up to the driver's side and knocked on the window.
Hunched over inside, Len did not respond. The light was bad, but she realized that he was hunched forward. "Len?" she asked. That was silly.
She pulled on the door handle, expecting it to be locked, but it was not. She opened it, and the weightlifter spilled out of the car, eyes staring, mouth frozen open in a soundless scream.
Click here for Episode Five.
