Strange Darkness;Always the Third Doctor!;Jo Grant;Katy Manning;Jon Pertwee;UNIT;TARDIS;
Strange Darkness
Episode Five
Written by Jeri Massi
The silence in the Chief Inspector's car was awkward and heavy. Jo at least had the refuge of knowing that the Brig believed it was not her place to speak first. She was driving, obeying the Doctor's directive to give the Brigadier a lift back to UNIT before continuing her end of the investigation.
"No, no," the Brigadier said at last as she would have taken a shortcut to UNIT. "We've got to go see that boy, the one I missed."
She realized that he meant to go with her to pursue the questioning, but all she said was, "Yes sir," and she straightened the car.
"Give me the address," he told her. "I'll navigate us there."
"It's on that paper on the dash."
He took the slip of paper from the dashboard. He remained silent except to issue directions as she needed them.
The route took them to an aged, slightly shabby section of crowded and ugly brick two-stories, all built in rows. Each had a tiny postage-stamp sized patch of grass by the front door. Some were tidily kept, and some were not. But the street was quiet in the early afternoon.
"Well if the clinic's been closed, the stock clerk ought to be at home," the Brigadier said.
Unless he's out roaming, Jo thought. A young man with no job to go to for a few days was unlikely to lie about on a warm, early summer day. But when they knocked on the correct door, it was answered almost immediately by a short, round, gray woman. "What's that then?" she asked them. "Are you police?"
"Military, madam," the Brigadier told her. "We are trying to track down some medical supplies at the establishment where, er, a Mr. Geoffrey Banner works."
"Oh." She turned away. "Geoffrey, it's for you. About the clinic."
She stepped away without inviting them inside, and a younger man, obviously her son, bounded up to the doorway. He froze at sight of them. Jo gasped and even the Brigadier stopped for a moment and then sprang forward as the boy would have fled back into the house. The tall, slender, wraithlike form was unmistakable. He was a dead ringer for the masked assailant who had slashed Inspector Jules.
Jo had an impression of lamps being flung over as the boy flew through the front room and into a kitchen with the Brigadier right behind him and her hard on the Brigadier's heels. The boy crashed through a rickety back door and leaped off a step. He was marvelously long legged, and on the straightaway of running in the street he quickly outdistanced them.
There was much to admire in Lethbridge-Stewart's sheer determination, and it paid off. As fast as the boy was, he was not long winded. They pounded past row after row of the ugly and cheap housing: first the tall and slender Geoffrey Banner, then the dogged Brigadier, and then Jo. Dogs barked, and for the longest time Jo thought she still heard the surprised and fearful cries of the boy's mother. Their quarry actually got so far ahead of them that when he turned a corner, she was sure they would have lost him by the time the Brig got back onto his path.
But it was then that the boy's wind started to betray him, and it became obvious that he had run onto unfamiliar streets. The Brig rounded the corner, and then Jo came around and saw Banner not so far ahead. He had to pause, confused, as he realized he was at a dead end, and then he pelted through the wider, grassier yards. But now the Brig was closing the distance, and Jo was catching up as well.
They ran him up to a high fence of wide boards that protected a rambling, modern sort of house. Banner leaped and grabbed, came down with bloody hands and wrists, and then leaped again. This time he made it. He got a good grip around the tops of the boards and then got an elbow over. The Brigadier tackled him as he started to shin over. The Brigadier got hold of the boy's legs and pulled, dragged him halfway back down, and was kicked in the face for his efforts.
"Help me!" the Brigadier shouted. He didn't have to say it twice. Jo leaped up and grabbed at the long, spindly legs. They nearly got him down. He was crying and cursing at them.
"Give it up, lad!" the Brigadier shouted. "We know who you are anyway! You can't get away from us!"
There was a metal snapping sound, and suddenly the trousers came away as smoothly as though the boy had been greased. With their fists curled up in the fabric of the trousers, both Jo and the Brigadier fell over as the garment came away, and the boy slipped over the top of the high fence in his shirt and underwear.
They didn't hesitate but tried to go around and catch up with him, but it was no use. He was gone.
"This is police work," the Brigadier said. "Let's get back to Jules and let his people take care of this."
* * * *
"You can't stay in here forever, you know," the Doctor told Rocelyn Mayes as he obediently pulled off his jacket and vest and then sat down in a straight backed chair. She had moved him to a tiny consulting room.
"Put this on." Still holding the gun, she handed him a set of handcuffs. His eyebrows went up.
"Nice tool to have in a doctor's office," he observed, but he obeyed her and locked a bracelet onto his left wrist.
"It has its uses, Doctor; put your hands behind your back."
He did, and he felt the tug as she expertly slipped the chain inside one of the rungs of the ladder-back chair and then back out again to handcuff his other wrist. He could not stand up without taking the chair with him. She took the jacket and vest from the counter where he had laid them and threw them into a corner.
"I can stay in here for as long as I need to," she told him.
"With the police surrounding the place?" he asked.
"They are not surrounding the place, Doctor. They are watching the front to make sure that nobody goes inside. About once every half hour somebody walks the perimeter of the place. Right now their main concern is keeping onlookers away from their own barricade. I can come and go as I like through the back way."
"Oh? And what about me?"
"Well now let's see." She went over to the cabinet top and examined the items she had taken from his pockets. "That's a hospital phone number," she said, picking up a chit of paper. "I recognize it." She glanced at him. "Shall I call the desk and see who is occupying that room, or will you tell me?"
"It's no difference to me that you know," he said. "It's the room of Inspector Jules."
"But a woman wrote this down for you." Her eyes met his. "That's a woman's penmanship."
He realized that she was still scenting out man-woman victim pairs. "You can't know that," he told her. "I may very well have written it myself."
"Of course I can. There are differences in handwriting between men and women."
He shrugged as much as the handcuffs would allow. "All right. It's a woman's hand writing. Most of the nurses on that floor are women, after all."
She smiled. "Oh no, Doctor. A nurse is busy. She would tell you the number and expect you to write it down. No, no." She set down the bit of paper very carefully and extracted Jo's UNIT pass card from the small assortment of items. "Some eager little hand wrote that for you and slipped it dutifully in your pocket, so you would have it in case you need it later. Why, look at this." She examined the fine print of the ID and glanced back at him. "She's attached to the science lab--access to chemical stores and hazardous materials."
"Yes? We are an intelligence task force, madam. I told you that."
"You also told me that you are the scientific advisor. It was she, wasn't it, who spotted the decanters? She was in here that day with the Inspector. And then she told you." Rocelyn Mayes looked at him sharply. "She works for you, doesn't she?"
"We all work for Lethbridge Stewart. Miss Grant is part of British Intelligence, as her pass will tell you. That was why she was investigating with Inspector Jules. She and I have worked together occasionally."
She laughed. She looked at him and laughed a second laugh and said, "You're sweating."
He nearly retorted and then said nothing. She came closer to him, brushed back his hair, and then pressed her hand against his forehead. "Yes, you are sweating. Because you're lying and you don't like it, and because you're worried for her."
"I am worried for all women," he told her. "You obviously had a hand in the deaths of five women at the very least. That gives me great cause for worry."
"There's no such thing as being worried for all women, Doctor, not enough to sweat over it. Fear is an acute thing, and it is directed towards preserving the self and those closest to the self. Let's see how frightened you are--" She rested her fingers on the pulse in his throat, and then showed surprise in her turn. "Why is your pulse so strange?"
He calmed down and offered a slight shrug. "Luck, I suppose," he said blandly.
She went out of the room and came back with a stethoscope. She pulled his shirt open and applied the stethoscope to his chest. For a long time she listened intently, and then she stepped back. "What's wrong with you?" she asked.
"Nothing," he told her. "Look, how did you stumble upon this neural irritant?"
"I didn't stumble upon it, Doctor. It was abandoned years ago after being sent to market prematurely."
"What?"
Overtaken by genuine scientific curiosity, she framed his face in her hands, then checked the glands at his throat, his skin temperature, his pulse again. "Yes, it was originally designed for women, a birth control formula meant to suppress the production of estrogen. It didn't work. The whole thing was badly thought out and inadequately tested, but rushed to market and then quickly removed from the shelves because of its side effects."
Amused by his stoic revulsion at being touched by her, she looked deeply at his eyes, as though to kiss him again in the mocking way she had used at first. But as he fixed his gaze steadily on her, she quickly turned away and went out again.
When she returned, she was equipped with a couple of syringes and glass tubes. "I think I'm going to want a sample or two of you, Doctor," she told. "And then we'll figure out what to do with you." She rummaged in a drawer, found a pair of surgical scissors, and cut open the sleeve of his white shirt at the shoulder. "I happened upon an article written by one of the NHS safety reviewers," she told him. "The drug had never been administered to men, of course, but this researcher warned that such a product, incorrectly administered, presented a tremendous danger. Taken out of design limits, given in a high dosage, administered to men, it could produce monsters."
She pushed the tip of the first empty syringe into his arm with unnecessary force. He winced and remained silent. His dark blood fountained into the glass capsule. She continued: "It took me years to find the correct dosage. Too much actually makes them drop dead, as you witnessed with the late, lamented Mr. Harding. His was an unusual case." She withdrew the first syringe and held the glass capsule of his blood up to the light. "I think yours will be an unusual case, Doctor."
* * * *
Jules was not supposed to laugh hard after his surgery, but he afforded himself several moments of heartfelt merriment when the Brigadier and Jo handed him the trousers of their suspect. One of the detectives was standing by in the small private room, which by now had been converted to an informal headquarters for Jules. Several stacks of folders and papers had been brought up and were arranged around the room in cozy and familiar disarray and disorder.
"Here, sergeant," Jules said, passing the trousers over. "See what you can make of these, and get the word out on Geoffrey Banner. I'll be bound that no eighteen year old stripling took it on himself to attempt the theft of Mr. Harding's head."
The Brigadier, not minding Jules' laughter, spoke thoughtfully. "The question is, did he do the tampering with the medical supplies? Or was the incident in the morgue just a one-off for whoever is really doing this?"
"Well, he's certainly somebody's errand boy. How much he knows about what is going on is what we shall have to determine in questioning." Jules shrugged and his smile faded. "He surely cannot understand the chemistry of what is being done. But he's old enough--and smart enough--to know that tampering with medications is illegal. If he had a hand in it, even knew about it, then he's an accomplice."
"Well I've no doubt he can put the finger on the person or persons responsible." The Brig paced for a moment. Jo spoke up.
"Look, it would have to be somebody at that Nutrition Clinic," she said. "Somebody he answers to, somebody who picks up the materials from him and passes them back to him to stock."
The attending sergeant spoke up. "We've checked into that, Miss," he said. "Each one of them comes out smelling like a rose. There are four, er, what they call nutritional consultants--"
"Doctors?" the Brigadier asked.
The Sergeant shook his head. "No, sir."
Jules agreed. "Places like that are run by a board of supervisors made up of medical doctors. All of the actual work with the patients is done by people trained in nutrition. This lot checks out. None of them have a strong enough background in chemistry to concoct any type of pseudo hormone."
The Sergeant put in his final word: "They were questioned separately, and their accounts of each other and the way the place is run all check out. It maybe wasn't the best organized place in the world, but they all seem to be what they profess, and they all seem to have a genuine care and concern for their patients. They gave us full reign over the place when we went in to investigate."
Jo was puzzled. "Well, if the actual clinic work is done by the nutritional counselors, what does the supervisory board do?"
"Nothin' at all," the Sergeant muttered.
"Aye, nice work if you can get it." Jules nodded. "We'll check them, but I don't suppose they spend more than one hour a year at the clinic. Just long enough to assure that finances are in order and take their shares."
"But they might have access to it," the Brigadier said.
The telephone rang. Jules picked it up, listened, and handed it to Jo. She smiled, took it, and tried to walk out of earshot so that she would not disturb the conversation.
"Yes, Jo Grant," she said. She instantly recognized the voice of Rocelyn Mayes.
"Hello Miss Grant. The Doctor asked me to call you. I hope you're not too busy."
"Not at the moment. Does he need something?"
"Well--" The voice hesitated as though the woman were distracted. "Yes," she said away from the telephone, as though she were speaking to somebody else. "I don't know where it leads, but I can find those specifications if you'll give me a moment." Her voice came on more clearly. "He's trying to get some materials sampled for testing. Do you think you could run them down to a testing lab that we use?"
"Certainly," Jo said. "Are you both at the clinic?"
"Yes. He's a bit put out with me. We do have a lot of double-checking to do."
"So it may be more than the air system decanters?"
The voice laughed at the irony. "It's likely that everything is all right and safe, but we must check every single substance, and I'm afraid I don't move fast enough."
Jo made her voice sympathetic. "Well, he can be like that, Dr. Mayes, but he's really very good hearted. I can be down there in a few minutes."
"All right. Look, just pull round to the back. There's a service alley that comes up from one street over. You don't even need to get out, Miss Grant. I'll bring the sample case to you in the back lot."
"Right then. I'll see you in a few minutes."
She set down the phone, and Jules glanced at her sharply. "That was Dr. Mayes?"
"Yes, they want me to go down and pick up some samples for testing."
"The Doctor is there?" the Brigadier asked.
Jo nodded and looked a little sheepish on behalf of her mentor. "I think he's being a bit difficult with her."
* * * *
Rocelyn Mayes cradled the receiver and strolled back to the room where her prisoner still sat.
"Well," she said. "I've spun your blood, taken a good look at it, run some basic tests on it." She folded her arms and regarded him with some satisfaction.
"And?" he asked.
"What are you?" she asked. "Who changed you?" She regarded him more intently. "Or were you made this way? Who made you, then?"
As he did not reply, she spoke again. "You have a remarkably high blood pressure, Doctor, but a lower rate of circulation than most people do. And your blood--" She looked away in thought and then turned to him again. "You obviously process oxygen very efficiently."
"Thank you. One can only try." He forced a smile at her.
"But, you are decidedly male," she told him. She produced a pair of leather gloves from her jacket pocket and pulled them on. And then she drew out a syringe. "And that is all that this requires."
"You must realize that your drug will have very little effect on me," he told her.
"We'll see." She moved behind him.
"Would you mind telling me what your motive was in killing those women?"
"I didn't kill anybody Doctor. Those men killed those women."
She was behind him, but she leaned forward so that he could see her face alongside his.
"Why did you do this to them?" he asked.
"You should be a women's doctor for a while--no, you should be a woman women's doctor," she said.
"That might be difficult," he snapped.
"They get them pregnant--sometimes as young as 12 or 13. Or they infect them. And then they beat them, kill them, tranquilize them. It's even in the medical profession, Doctor. But you must know that. Women are tranquilized three or four times more often than men; their physical symptoms blindly attributed to depression."
"Are you really doing this to get back at men?" he asked her.
"And women keep following blindly after men--doing what they are told, keeping the home fires burning, making peace, covering over what goes on half the time, excusing it."
"So you're getting your revenge on women," he said. "Why? Because some of them dare to be happy with the way things are?"
She put her arms around his neck from behind and held the capped syringe, it's point upright, before his eyes. With her thumb she popped the cap off and let a few drops of the drug inside spurt up. She laughed in his ear and kissed his cheek. "I am showing the world what we get when manhood is allowed to go unchecked and unbridled, Doctor." She released him and stepped behind him, then grasped his hair at the top of his head to hold him steady. "Miss Grant is on her way over here now."
"Why?" he asked.
"Because she believes you are being difficult to handle, so she's going to come in and calm you down. That's her role, isn't it?"
"No!" he snapped. She jabbed the syringe into the top of his neck, to the left of center, under base of his skull. He exclaimed with pain as she forced the contents of the syringe into him.
"This is three times the dosage," she said as she pushed the contents through the syringe. "It will kill you, or you will kill her."
He cried out from the pain as she finished the injection and removed the needle tip. Deftly, she whipped a wide cotton gag into his mouth and gagged him, and then she took a sharp wire and bound it around him over the gag. His vision had darkened over from the pain, but he heard her walk out.
* * * *
"Hello, look at this!" the Brigadier exclaimed, passing a file folder over to Jules.
Jules, who had the contents of several file folders spread out all around him, was eating a lunch of fish and chips with great enjoyment. He looked up. "What's that?"
"Board of Supervisors for the Nutrition Clinic," the Brigadier said. "But somebody's whited it out partway down."
Jules looked up, interested. "I've been reading their files all morning," he said. "Nothing else has been whited out. They just cross things through--you know, type over them and go on."
The Brigadier squinted and held the sheet of paper up to the light. He let out a sound of exasperation. "Give it here," the Sergeant said. He took the list from the Brigadier and held it up to the better light at the window. "Aye, the correction fluid isn't cracked, so it's been applied in the last week or so. We should have caught this sooner."
"Never mind that!" Jules snapped. "Can you make anything of it now?"
The Sergeant was a young man with good eyes. He peered closely at the sheet and then turned to them. "I'm not sure about the rest, but Rocelyn Mayes is on the list."
A light went on in Jules eyes. For a moment it was as though lightning had struck. He hopped out of bed, upsetting the cardboard tray of chips. "Jiminy! Where's my own pants! Sergeant! Get them for me!"
"Now see here!" the Brigadier began. "Your throat-"
"She's got access to both places. It was her that called Jo; said the Doc wanted samples tested." Jules stopped hopping around long enough to slap his forehead. "What were we thinking?"
"What do you mean?" the Brigadier asked. "The Centre is crawling with police. What danger could there be? And the Doctor's there."
"It was you that told me!" Jules snapped. "Why would the Doctor want anything sent out to be tested? We already know he's got crackerjack equipment that the police don't have. He'd never send it out!"
"Get on that radio then!" the Brigadier exclaimed. "And let's get down there!"
* * * *
Down in the rear car park of the Women's Centre, Jo pulled in and smiled as she saw the flustered Dr. Mayes come hurrying out to her.
"How is it coming, Dr. Mayes?" she asked as she rolled down the window of the Inspector's car.
"I have the samples, Miss Grant, but do you think you might have a word with him?" And she jerked her head towards the building.
"Certainly."
She set the brake, switched off the ignition and followed Rocelyn Mayes through the back entrance.
Dr. Mayes led her through the quiet, dim clinic and then stepped aside for her and gave a wry jerk of her head towards the inside of an office. Jo entered ahead of her and then gasped as she saw the Doctor, bent forward in a chair, bound and gagged. She shot a look back in time to see the heavy office door slam closed behind her.
"Doctor!"
She ran to him and knelt by him, saw profuse sweat on his forehead and face. He opened his eyes and tried to speak, but he was gagged too well. She tried to loosen the thick cloth, but the wire that bound the gag cut her fingers.
"I'll get you loose," she told him.
She saw that he was bound with handcuffs, and then she noticed that a tiny handcuff key lay by the leg of the chair as though it had been dropped.
"Oh, here's luck!" she exclaimed. He gasped and jerked his head as though to tell her something. He shook his head. He was perspiring so heavily that even the shake of his head flung drops of sweat onto her.
She got the key into one of the bracelets and turned, opening one bracelet. Suddenly, the chair seemed to explode as he leaped up and threw the back of the chair off in flinders. The handcuffs dangled from his left hand as he snapped the wire and the gag free with one strong pull. He drew in his breath with a raging sob, panting.
Jo staggered back, confused and suddenly afraid.
The Doctor saw her, his face fixed in a grimace of either pain or fear, covered with his perspiration.
"Jo, Jo," he managed to say, and then he grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her in. "Don't move."
"Doctor, please."
He suddenly he changed his grip, and with the same hand he seized her by the arm. His fingers found the indentation between her bicep and tricep and gripped her there like steel pins being driven into her arm. The hard fingers struck nerves there with surgical precision. An electric shock of pain shot from her arm into her heart. Her knees gave way and she fell against him.
"Please--"
It took her breath away. He bent closer as she fell, his face contorted by pain, and a new rage, and the streams of perspiration. He was trembling, trying to control himself. "To still you--and hate her--" he stammered. "Now!" Like the sharp smack of a hammer on a gun, his right fist cracked a single, staccato blow to her sternum.
The electric constriction he had sent into her heart through her arm suddenly exploded with numbness and breathlessness. Paralyzed, she dropped to the floor as he released her. He charged the door.
The Doctor let out a yelling shriek like she had never heard from anybody. There was nothing she could do. She couldn't move and couldn't even feel herself breathe. She thought she might be dying. But she heard the shrieking.
He flung himself into the door twice, and then it shuddered. He was attacking it against the hinges, but this did not seem to daunt him. In a moment, she heard a tremendous crash as he broke it down.
Out in the hallway, Rocelyn Mayes was in the act of letting herself out the back way when the demon she had created flung himself through the ruined door and saw her. She screamed. For a moment, she actually froze as he fixed his eyes on her. With her own death so close, she couldn't get proper hold of the gun as she drew it out of her purse with a fumbling hand. He charged her, and she nearly dropped the gun as she tried to steady it at him. His mouth open, his eyes on fire, his hands out like talons towards her, he let out another horrible shriek. The gun failed to fire, and with her fingers twitching from fear, she got the safety off. She fired twice, wildly, saw blood hit the opposite wall, and then he was nearly on her, his hammer fist knocking the gun aside. She barely avoided his grasp and then ran. With him grabbing at her, she ducked into the dark waiting room and closed and locked the door.
With his right hand he struck the door just as it closed and cracked it through, close to the edge. The impact knocked her away from the other side and dazed her. On the second blow he broke it apart. She was already running through the other door.
The front doors were padlocked closed, barring her escape, and so she ran behind the receptionist's desk and back again to the rear offices. He nearly had her, but what saved her was the wall telephone ringing right at his ear as he passed it. He stopped and swiped it off the wall with a single outraged blow and then took up the chase again.
New pounding sounded from the front doors, and there was a furious scrabbling and jingling as men tried to get in.
She ducked into an examination room that included x-ray equipment. The door was shielded with lead, and she closed it and locked it just in time. He charged into it, and it shuddered in the door frame but held. Quickly, she pulled and pushed a cabinet in front of it.
For a moment there was sudden silence, and Dr. Rocelyn Mayes leaned against the cabinet, panting and sweating. She took another moment to collect her thoughts, and tried to calculate if he might have collapsed yet. Behind her, the window of the room that looked out onto the back parking lot suddenly exploded into shards of glass fragments.
His face still frozen into a mask of fury, the Doctor launched himself headfirst up through the opening. She swung up one of the chairs and hit him across the face as hard as she could, driving him back through the window, but the blow did not make him lose his grip on the window frame. He sprang through again, and this time as she swung, he grabbed at the chair, tore it from her grasp, and hurled it back at her.
It was just then that something fastened onto his right leg.
For the second time that day, the Brigadier found himself up against a wall, trying to pull somebody back by the legs. The Doctor was not nearly so high up on the window sill as the Banner boy had been in getting over the fence. But the Doctor was normally much stronger than a typical human, and now he was possessed of a wild fury. And his legs were slippery with blood.
"Jules, stay back!" the Brigadier shouted. "We don't need your throat popping open!"
He and the police sergeant heaved back on the Doctor's legs. Three uniformed men came around from the front of the building. "Two of you!" Jules shouted. "Give those men a hand. And the third one, come with me to detain Rocelyn Mayes."
He and one of the uniformed men rushed inside. At last the policemen and the Brigadier pried the Doctor free of the window sill. He came down in a fresh fury and turned his attention to them. But by this time more uniformed officers were appearing. They wrestled the Doctor down to the ground and pinned him there. The Brigadier left them to it.
"Don't hurt him if you can help it!" he shouted. "He's been drugged." He ran after Jules.
Inside, a few officers had finally gotten in through the front doors. Lethbridge-Stewart met Jules at the top of the back steps. Jules pointed to a discarded purse on the floor. "That belongs to Rocelyn Mayes," he said with a nod at it. An airline ticket had spilled out of it.
"So she was getting ready to flee," the Brigadier said.
Jules turned away and scanned the halls. "I checked the second waiting room. It's empty. Come on." He led the way to the examining and consulting rooms and added, "Once Harding died, that must have been her own death knell. She tried to interfere with the autopsy by having the head stolen, but failed."
Jo, meanwhile, had heard the furious chase, the gunshots, and the doors and paneling breaking. But only after everything was dying down could she even turn her head. The tight paralysis was loosening on her chest and lungs only very slowly. She heard more footsteps, and the Brigadier's outcry. "It's Jo! Good heavens! This is what we feared from the start!"
Jules' face, calm with a fixed calmness that was a mask for worry, appeared in her line of vision. He paused and then blew a short puff of air on her face. "Hang on a bit," he said as he saw her blink. "She's alive." He paused. "Yeah, she's breathing." He checked the pulse at her throat. "Can you hear me, Jo?"
"Call an ambulance!" the Brigadier ordered, and Jules' face whisked from her vision. She was startled as the Brigadier instantly appeared, his eyes nearly as big and Jules'. "Jo," he said softly. "Jo, we're here. Can you hear me?" He found the pulse at her throat. "I have your hand. Can you feel the pressure of my hand?"
She could, but what she could not do was speak. Two big tears trickled from her eyes, not because she was afraid, but because she realized that in his own way, the Brigadier had been right about the danger to her. And that to him, it would have been a tragedy greater than any other to lose her to the murderer. He had been protecting himself and protecting the Doctor in protecting her, as though she made up some part of both of them that he could not bring himself to risk. Even now he was afraid for her. With his free hand he felt her forehead, watched her eyes react. She tried to say something to calm him, but speech was still impossible.
"Everybody's all right," he told her. "You'll be all right, too. We'll get you to hospital."
But as he held her hand with a firm pressure and waited for the ambulance, she realized that--arbitrary as his protectiveness towards her was--she could not be angry with him for having those instincts.
She at last took in a deep breath and lifted her head.
"Don't," the Brigadier said gently. But lifting her head seemed to diminish the paralysis further. Still, there was a terrible pain where the Doctor's single knuckle had struck like a stone in the tiny niche alongside her sternum. She let her head drop back.
She forced out a single word: "Doctor?"
"He's alive," the Brigadier told her. "Still not himself. Be still, Jo," he pleaded. "Are you in pain?"
"Not bad," she gasped.
Jules returned. "There's blood every where," he said. "She got him at least once with that gun, but it still hasn't slowed him down."
Jo made to rise at this proclamation, but the Brigadier and Jules both caught her, and then she gave it up anyway. Now that her senses were returning to her, the pain from the blow was getting worse.
"He's alive, dear," Jules told her as they settled her back.
"The Doctor will pull through," the Brigadier assured her. "He always does."
* * * *
At the hospital, after being checked by a medical doctor and finding out that she had a crack in the bone where one rib connected to her breastbone, Jo was made to lie down and be still. She was given the assurance that the Doctor was recovering, and the Brigadier had ordered him into the care of UNIT's medical personnel, who had at least some idea of his metabolic differences.
The constriction of her heart and breath were not easy to recover from. All that she could do was sleep, and sleep finally relaxed the tightness and paralysis. She woke up the next morning, able to breathe easily and move her arms and legs. But the cracked join of rib to sternum prevented her from rising or lying down or reaching for anything with ease. And even on awaking, she was still not allowed to see the Doctor until she had briefed the Inspector and the Brigadier on her own experience at the Women's Health Centre. One of the nurses helped make her look presentable, and then the Brigadier and Inspector were allowed into her room.
"I think," she told them. "I think the Doctor did what he did to me to make me stop moving. We know that all those men were infuriated at seeing their wives or women move. Remember that? Each one said he had to make her be still."
"As movement triggered a dominance response in them," Jules added.
"Predators are cued by the motion of prey," the Brigadier said. "Good grief! When it comes right down to it, is that what we really are?"
Jules grunted. "Only when we're doped up on some neural irritant. You might as well look at the silliness of a drunken man and ask if that's what we really are."
"Well." Jo said. "I think by the time I got him free, he still had enough sense to know that he had to make me be still or he would kill me. So he used that Venusian Aikido of his on me." Her voice was rueful.
Jules raised an eyebrow. "Venusian Aikido?"
"Yes well," the Brigadier waved it away. "The medical doctor here told me that if he had hit you only slightly harder, Miss Grant, he surely would have killed you."
"But he didn't hit me slightly harder, Brigadier," she told him. "Only that hard, and then he bashed apart a solid door. So he could have killed me easily if that was what he had wanted."
Jules lifted an eyebrow. "I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Rocelyn Mayes saw him burst apart that door. Talk about your sins coming back to haunt you."
"He was out of control by then," she said. "Like we learned from Mr. Harding. The reaction to the drug was delayed but not overcome. He burst apart that door like it was nothing, and that shrieking--" She caught herself. "Look, could I see him?" she asked. "It's been over twelve hours, now."
The Brigadier shook his head. "He's gone all cold, Miss Grant. He's here in the hospital--just up the hall. They dug a bullet out of his leg above the knee, stitched him up, and have just left him in his own cold storage. There's not much else you can do with the Doctor when he's wounded or sick." He glanced at her. Her eyes were unhappy and worried, and he relented. "After we've finished here, you can go sit by him if you like."
Jules frowned. "What do you mean, he's gone all cold?"
The Brigadier opened his hands to show helplessness in the face of mystery. "That's how he recovers. He goes into a coma, half freezes over, and comes out of it again in a few hours or a few days. And when he does come back, he's well. Or nearly so."
"Well what sort of bloke is he then?" Jules asked.
The Brigadier paused, and then said thoughtfully, "Well, he's not from Yorkshire."
They wrapped up the briefing, and he and the Inspector excused themselves. Jo gingerly got up, changed from her hospital gown back to her clothes, and went to find the Doctor. She had to move with care to sit up, lie down, or use her left arm to reach, but otherwise she was all right.
The Brigadier had reported on the Doctor as being in the type of coma she had seen before, both at Stangmoor and Devil's End. But when she entered the dim room, she saw the glimmer of moisture on his face and a flush on his cheeks, and she realized that he was coming back to normal. She hunted around the tiny private room, found a soft hand towel, and patted his face dry.
He opened his eyes as she worked and let out a sigh of relief as he saw her. He was exhausted and sleepy, but he spoke to her.
"You? Did I, did I--" he whispered.
She shook her head. "You didn't hurt me. Not much." She smoothed back his hair. For a moment his eyes, dizzy with sleep, followed the lines of her face, looking for some indication of distress or injury.
"Her? The woman?" he asked.
"You didn't hurt her either," Jo said. "Just frightened her. She shot you, you know. How's the leg?"
Relieved, he nodded slightly, closed his eyes wearily, and waggled his feet under the covers. With his recuperative powers, she knew that what would take a human weeks and weeks to recover from might only affect him for a few days.
"So everything's all right," Jo told him, stroking back his hair from his forehead. "I'm right here." He did not open his eyes, and she thought that he might have gone back into his deep sleep, but then he opened his eyes and looked up at her again. His voice was drained to a whisper. "I didn't want to hurt you. Or frighten you. I don't want you to be afraid of me."
She smiled and pretended to polish his nose with the cloth as though it were some sort of hood ornament. "I'm not afraid of you, Doctor. Even when you're annoyed with me for bashing into things or ruining your experiments, I'm never really properly afraid of you. I just let you think so sometimes to cheer you up." She smiled at him naughtily, as though letting it slip that all his rebukes, reprimands, and directives were actually just a joke to her.
He smiled a brief, happy smile at her teasing and suddenly touched her cheek and looked up at her, glad and satisfied that she was safe. For a moment they were both satisfied just to look at each other. "Thank you," he whispered, "Thank you, Jo." And then his tired eyes closed. His hand tightened on hers for a long moment, and then relaxed as he fell asleep. With her free hand, she set down the towel, smoothed back his hair again, and rested her hand on his forehead. It was rare to see him weak, or tired, or even asleep; rarer still for him to communicate to her that he needed her, but she knew that he did. She understood him better now, and better understood the grim weight of his exile and his loneliness on Earth. And she understood, especially since Devil's End, that she had a unique ability to cheer him up, to keep him going, to ward off the bitterness of his bitter punishment.
It would have made him indignant and embarrassed had he been awake, but as he was not awake, she leaned down and kissed his forehead. She looked up to see Inspector Jules in the doorway.
Surprise and a certain realization were evident on Jules' face. She came out into the hall to confer with him.
"We've, eh, we've think we've got it about sewn up Miss Grant," he said. "If she tries to plead off on charges of murder, we'll have to call you as a witness. The lad, Geoffrey Banner, has been brought in. We expect him to turn on her. She was manipulating him rather badly."
Jo nodded.
"So I guess the case is over," he said. "And you're back on duty at UNIT."
"Yes, but thank you for what you did," she told him. ""Thank you for everything." She hesitated. "I hope we'll continue to be friends."
His wide dark eyes met hers and he said suddenly, but very quietly, "Do you love him, then?"
She hesitated again, took a breath, and answered him with the best answer she could give: "Whatever a person feels for the Doctor is rather wholehearted, whether it's what you're thinking or not. There's no middle ground with him, I suppose."
He nodded, offered a half smile, and took her hand in farewell. "Right. I'll be seeing you around. I certainly enjoyed working with you. Certainly enjoyed your company."
"I do hope to see you again," she said earnestly.
He smiled at her kindness. "Of course," he said. "This may be the start of a beautiful friendship. But I'd better go." He released her hand.
