CHAPTER ELEVEN
Naturally, Martha made for the Hospital when she left the Doctor - professional interest.
This time the single receptionist was human, cheery and polite.
'Can I help?' she asked.
'Mm, perhaps,' began Martha, unsure how to phrase her request. She didn't have any official standing here, nor had she been responsible for helping stave off IMC all those centuries ago. After thinking of various approaches, she finally just went for the truth.
'I've come here from Netrosphere with The Doctor. We heard about The Breakdown and - '
'Yes! I heard he'd come back!' interrupted the receptionist excitedly. 'Sorry, do go on.'
'We're trying to investigate what causes the Breakdown Effect and I'm a medical student, about to take my finals, so I came here first because this is my specialism. Is there anyone I could talk to about it?'
The receptionist rolled her eyes.
'Only anyone living in Cormelle! You mean a surgeon?'
She checked her dull, scratched monitor, scrolling electronically down a list of names, times and duties.
'Nobody free at the moment. You could come back in a couple of hours, except the seniors don't like being disturbed at lunch. Oh! Silly me – we have a patient who's right up your street. Ian Brinklove. He's an archivist.'
Martha wrinkled her nose. Interview a patient? That didn't sit well with her training.
The receptionist winked.
'He's a man, you're young and pretty. Flutter your eyelashes, he'll chat to you. The Floor Matron might try and stop you, so don't let the old bag know what you're up to. Just visiting. Floor four.'
Ian Brinklove turned out to be a large, amiable man with a broken leg and wrist.
'Fell off a ladder in the library,' he explained to his new visitor. Martha looked at the gridded foil overlay that had been sealed onto his leg and wrist, with swathes of wiring plugged into mysterious electronic devices.
'Have you heard that The Doctor has returned?'
'Yes! It's most infuriating that I'm stuck in here, you know, because I'd be going over the old records from his first visit and seeing if they're all correct. A traveller in time, imagine that!' An expression of anguish passed over the patient's face. 'How sad he must feel, seeing what's happened here.'
A perfect opening. Martha plunged into an explanation of who she was, why she was here and how she wanted to help.
'You came to the right person,' said Ian proudly. 'Archivist, that's me. Ask me any question and if I don't know the answer, I'll find it out for you.'
Before he could say any more, a thin metallic wail began to sound from a point that must be directly overhead – the hospital's very roof. Within seconds other sirens joined in.
'What is it – an air raid?' asked Martha, feeling her flesh creep. She hated the sound of sirens!
'Nah. The wind must have shifted. Apparently the Norties let off a big nuke a couple of hours ago. The wind's shifted to the west and we're going to get the fall-out.'
For such serious news, the archivist didn't seem worried. He noticed Martha's unease.
'Don't worry, the hospital is specially sealed, permanently. There's shelters outside and every major building can seal itself in thirty seconds. Trust me, we had plenty of practice in this back at the start of the Breakdown.'
There was a rueful tone to his words that spoke of long, long practice.
'Attention staff and patients! The hospital is going to superdrive it's seal. Please stay away from the windows!' called a tall, thin, grey-haired woman that Martha instantly recognised as the Floor Matron. This hospital might be half a millenia advanced from the time she hailed from, but she recognised a matron when she saw one.
Superdriving, whatever that might be, caused the windows to darken.
Sinister, judged Martha: like the shades of night.
'Jelly baby?' offered the Doctor, picking a crumpled paper bag from one of his innumerable pockets and offering it to the policeman.
The officer looked at the striped black-and-white sweet in confusion
'Whoops! Sorry, Everton mint. You should try it, causes salivation, helps to combat oral dryness due to the body's stress response.'
Flicking a glance at his colleague, the officer gingerly accepted the boiled sweet and sucked it reluctantly, then with approval, then with gusto.
'Glucose, for energy,' added the Doctor. He fiddled with his sonic screwdriver and dropped a mint onto the ground, pointed his device at the sweet and pressed the "on" switch for half a second. A ghostly blue incandesence illuminated the dismal fall-out shelter as the boiled sweet surrendered up it's stored energy into visible light, hissing and spitting whilst menthol fumes picqued everyone's nostrils.
The surreal, dancing illumination showed a dozen people stuck in the shelter looking in awe at the Doctor, that legendary visitor from their past come back to sight-see in the present.
'There ought to be emergency lighting, but it's been so long since the last alert that I think it's stopped working,' explained one of the police officers. He pointed to a dingy metal grating visible at the apex of the shelter's ceiling.
This, of course, represented a challenge to the Doctor that he couldn't resist. Within a minute he had dismantled the light, stripped it, cleaned and removed corrosion and reassembled it. Anti-climactically, nothing happened when he tripped the switch over in a grimy corner.
'Patience!' he smiled, as the light gradually began to shine, brighter and brighter until it became almost uncomfortable to eyes adjusted to the gloom. 'There. Your ten-year service free of charge.'
The semi-cylindrical bunker that smelt dank and mouldy housed twelve people, not including himself, who had found cover when the warning sirens sounded. It had taken three of them a good minute to crank the shelter door closed thanks to rust and lack of lubrication. After half an hour of uncomfortable sitting in silence, a small green light set into the door changed to red, and a series of deep thuds could be felt and heard.
Which, reasoned the Doctor, must be sensor-tripped bolts locking the bunker door. They would only release when exterior fallout declined to safe levels. In other words, hours and hours spent locked inside a smelly concrete cylinder with a random collection of locals for company.
'Fancy a sing-song?' he asked, flippantly, to looks of incomprehension. 'Hmm. I'll take that as a "no", then.' Then, fishing for more information: 'Shame your force-field doesn't keep fall-out at bay.'
'Force-barrier. It only works on living things, mister,' piped up a young boy, huddled against a wall with his big sister. 'Flies or birds. Or people.'
One of the policemen, the one not sucking a mint, spoke up.
'We'd have been wiped out if we didn't have that barrier. Northcoping and Wardebeke and Unihampton all attacked us back in the early days. The barrier stopped them.'
This helped to fill in a little more background for the Time Lord. The nearest polities, more advanced than those established in later decades, would have access to higher technology and would have managed to destroy each other quite rapidly and effectively. So, after a few years of strife, they wouldn't have been able to sustain any attacks on each other or Cormelle. That explained why the shelter's door had been so difficult to close: disuse.
'Keeping any disease-bearing wildlife away has meant we don't get Breakdown effects here, too,' added another previously-silent bunker resident. A couple of others nodded sagely in agreement.
Interesting! mused the Doctor silently. More allusions to a disease agent. A disease-agent that the good Doctor Ross, back on Netrosphere, insisted could not exist.
'I thought that nobody's managed to find any germ that could create the Breakdown effect?' he asked, more to see people's physical reactions than to hear the details.
Several shrugs, a shake of the head, a weary smile or two.
'Simplest explanation that makes sense, for us,' said the first policeman. 'Maybe it really isn't a disease after all. Behaving as if it is keeps us safe.'
A distortion of Ockham's Razor, recognised the Doctor. A tool of logic, if one that didn't seem to sit properly here. The suspicion that – well, no, he'd do more digging around before concluding anything conspiratorial like that idea.
'What causes the Breakdown?' replied Ian, taking a bite from an apple held in his left hand. 'There's a question! It changes every few years. "New research paradigm" is how they phrase it. I bet the rest of the polity don't notice, but I do. Archivist, you see. Let's see – currently it's down to settlement in previously unexplored areas of the southern continental landmass, where the hideous alien micro-organisms that cause the Breakdown effect in humans were encountered. Alien disease, humans have no immunity to it for the most part, pandemic results, Hargreave's Fall falls apart.'
He looked directly at Martha, then took a big bite out of the apple.
'About five years ago the consensus was that it was actually a war-bug that lunatics in one polity developed. It got out into the environment, infected the population at large and everything else results from that pandemic. Why someone would create a hell-weapon like that has never been explained, mind.'
Another bite of the apple.
'Going back even further, it used to be population pressure.'
'What?' interrupted Martha. ' "Population pressure"? There were fewer people here than live in the UK in my time!'
Ian shrugged.
'Population pressure for my recent ancestors, I should say, not population pressure the way it is for you on Earth. They used to move out from one polity to establish a new one when they disagreed with the politics, the religion, the city-planning or if they felt crowded. The Fall went from a population of ten thousand to seventy five million, and that was crowded for folk. Now, I didn't say I believed it, and it's not the current theory, before you look amazed at my stupidity.'
Martha remembered to blink in flirtatious manner. She wanted Ian to keep talking or that officious-looking Floor Matron might kick her out.
Ian finished the apple and tried to speak with his mouth full, then stopped to chew before carrying on.
'Mind you, they may have been right. Wong, which is the last polity ever settled and therefore the least-populated is the only other one apart from Cormelle that didn't go mad and get brain-rot.'
This was news to Martha. Ian, almost bursting with pride at his archivist skills and memory, informed her that yes, the Wong polity was also free from Breakdown effects. The reason it wasn't as well known a polity as Cormelle was because, again, it was the last polity settled and only maintained an existence at the ox-and-plough level. Given normal circumstances it would have developed it's own technology, or bought it in from neighbours when trade developed. Now, such a thing was impossible.
The archivist looked at the young woman with an acute stare.
'No, you can't go and visit. It's on the other side of the world and a sixty hour round trip by high-speed shuttle. Lords above only know how the Initiates managed to find it.'
'No radios?' guessed Martha. Ian nodded.
'Well, not originally. The Initiates left one with them in case of emergencies. Not sure how it'll work, since we don't have any working comsats any more.'
Martha snapped her fingers.
'Of course! You must be one of them – the Initiates, I mean.'
Ian stared at her, this time with alarm.
'Lords above, not me! No, no. Well-informed I am, alive I wish to remain. No, I am not one of the Initiate.'
That took Martha back. What were the Initiate if they weren't the people who ran Cormelle?
'There's two lots of 'em,' added Ian. 'The ones who used to run the polity before the state of emergency, and another lot who joined since then, over time. Everyone knows the first lot. The others – well, they seem to know each other, but I don't know how.'
Before she could ask yet another question, the Floor Matron finally got round to checking the visitor at Patient Brinklove's bedside, a visitor unfamiliar to her and yet who seemed to be interested in a long conversation with a convalescing patient.
With a promise to visit again and bring more fruit, Martha abandoned the bedside and boldly strode up to the Matron.
'Hi! I'm Martha Jones, here with The Doctor,' she said, trying to put a discreet emphasis on "The Doctor" to gain importance by association.
'This is a hospital. We have many doctors, plural, rather than a doctor, singular,' replied the Matron, in a brisk manner.
'Ooh – just remembered - I left a pan on the hob, 'bye,' trilled Martha, disappearing before she got taken to task.
The all-clear klaxon could be heard distinctly inside the smelly concrete bunker, a high-decibel warbling that startled the Doctor in that it came only a couple of hours after they'd taken shelter. With muted thuds, the door bolts retracted and the dozen refugees emerged into an oppressively humid, moist city thoroughfare.
Ah! Forced irrigation! realised the Doctor. Water was pumped to the top of each structure and allowed to wash any radioactive residuum into the gutters via spray heads and sprinkler systems, and sensor-triggered valves would keep the contaminated water separate from normal supplies. Given the humidity so much water had been sprayed into the atmosphere that even airborne particles of fall-out would have been flushed into the sewers. There must be a settling pond – lake, really, for a city this size – out in the middle distance where the run-off would be allowed to settle until it could be processed. What an elegant way to clean out contamination!
The first sun - Alpha, sometimes known as "Alf", acording to those in the bunker - had long set by this time, so he hitched a ride on a passing electric tractor, whose sunny-complexioned teenaged girl was immensely proud to be giving a lift to the Doctor.
He needn't have worried or hurried – Martha had been delayed by the fallout alert just as he had. Once inside the timeship, he donned glasses and dug out a packet of biscuits, then sat on his favourite Louis Quinze chair. Martha, recognising the signs of wishing to be left to work things out, made sandwiches.
Ten minutes later, as if emerging from deep water, the Time Lord shook himself and sniffed appreciatively.
'Cheese and cucumber,' mumbled Martha between bites. 'Find anything out?'
'A little more. The so-called "force-barrier" supposedly used to protect Cormelle sounds peculiar. It's not a force-field, whatever the locals might call it. I need to get out and inspect it.'
He gulped down the rest of the sandwiches, then looked apologetically at Martha.
'Sorry! Anyway, cucumber and cheese sandwiches need to be eaten quickly or the cheese gets soggy. Any news from your discreet investigations?'
She explained about meeting Ian Brinklove, city archivist. When she glossed over his descriptions of the differing ideas about what caused the Breakdown, the Doctor insisted she go back and recall the conversation in detail.
'Interesting. Interesting. You can definitely see the pattern of rumour dispersal across this community.'
'You can?' asked Martha, surprised.
'Definitely. This multiplicity of different ideas about a cause – aHA!' and he jumped upright from the chair. 'A viral meme! Oh, Martha, this is even more suspicious!'
After the savoury came the sweet. He produced his bag of Everton mints and offered Martha one.
The young student caught herself before asking the question. An infectious idea?
'All these ideas, all different, all changing every few years, are deliberately orchestrated and spread to prevent people ever actually wondering about the real cause of the Breakdown. Something is really skanky in Denmark.' He stared at his companion, who had delicately reached into the bag of confectionery. Gingerly she removed a small piece of paper that contained a badly-scrawled message.
"DONT TRUST ANYONE THINGS ARENT WHAT THEY SEEM WATCH YOUR BACK AND CHECK THE TEN THOUSAND" it read.
The Doctor blinked in surprise. There was no knowing when the warning had appeared, nor who had left it. Yet another indication of things awry.
He smacked fist into palm.
'This means we have to get out to that snidey barrier, to have a look-see. I have a feeling that the explanation begins there, wherever else it ends.'
After that stirring declamation, he returned to an intensive study of his 900-year diary and nothing that Martha said could get another word from him, unless you counted monosyllabic grunts as talking.
The young woman fell to thinking herself. If the people who ran Cormelle were really a two-faced collection of lying scumbags, what dirty little secrets could they be hiding?
And why?
What did they have to hide, what sinister developments could have happened here in Cormelle, and what set them apart from other polities?
As her professor back at Bart's would have wanted, and been impressed with, Martha reasoned logically: Cormelle had been the first settlement on Hargreave's Fall. It had been developed the longest. It's technology had therefore been developed to the highest level on the planet. Whatever the pinnacle of human development had been on Hargreaves Fall before the Breakdown Effect, it had been present in and at Cormelle.
If she had only known it, the Doctor was thinking along similar lines. His emphasis was along technological development. Cormelle was the most developed polity on the planet, having been settled at Year Zero. The pinnacle of technology ought to have been found in the polity, yet they seemed to have deliberately reverted to an agricultural-heavy operandum. Contrarily, you had Netrosphere, with it's culture of bazaaris and information-processing; or Ellenika, with the fantastically profitable bloodline brokerage industry. By now even war-wracked Herwald and her Dragoman militants would be exporting trillions of tonnes of mineral ores from the denuded southern hemispheres.
Yet here was Cormelle, sitting in bucolic isolation, alone amongst the polities.
'Look!' shouted Misha, pointing ahead. The excitement in his voice was easy to detect, and the reason for that emotion were towers visible over the thinning jungle canopy: Cormelle.
'Oh – Lizabet, Lizabet! We've made it!' cried Krisa, her shoulders slumping and tears running down her cheeks.
Lizabet stood still and stared. Correct, up to a point. Fourteeen of them had made it.
'We're not there yet. Don't relax, don't drop your guard, and don't get sloppy. Not now!'
Checking the chem-stick and the bio-tab, she moved forward. Daylight, now that Beta, the second sun was up, felt warm and cheering on her skin.
Please, please, let us make it, she pleaded to any supernatural being that might be paying attention. After all this, to get so close –
Artur, scouting ahead as ever, held up a hand and stopped. She gestured to the others to halt and tiptoed up to the scout.
He pointed at the ground. Sure enough, there were heel-and-toe footprints of the beast Misha had dubbed the "Stinking Fishbelly". As big as a man, bipedal, foul-smelling and carnivorous, she had never heard such a creature existed on the Fall, but since she had never travelled far before she wasn't the best-informed person. A mutant, or an off-world exotic, or a mercenary's pet, all were academic; the creatures had killed six of their party in nocturnal attacks. In turn, the refugees had killed two of the beasts, with stones, slingshots, makeshift spears and torches. After that they were stalked by the monsters but left alone.
Artur poked the footprint with his index finger, then looked left and right.
'Old footprints. Look how they run, from north to south. I think our Fishbelly was startled enough by that nuke to panic and run. Look – over there. Broken branches.'
Lizabet stood and looked down the trail their erstwhile stalkers had left.
'Okay everyone, keep close together. All-round watch. That unholy nuclear explosion didn't destroy Cormelle, we can see it's towers from here, in fact it may have scared those stalking Fishbellies away.'
Tempers abruptly improved. A few people shook hands and slapped backs.
'Don't relax!' warned Artur. 'We're not out of here yet.'
The last few miles were an anti-climax after the trauma of the months so far. The greenery surrounding them bore little resemblance to the blighted lands left far to the south. Normal animals and flora abounded. Twin suns, undimmed by mist, smoke or gasses, shone down with a kindly light, and the small party rounded the arm of an un-named stream they walked beside, past a stand of enormous pine trees and into full view of the Cormelle perimeter.
A semi-circle of flowers? wondered Lizabet at the sight of distant orchid-like stems and blossoms. They were spaced at what looked exactly like fifty metres apart – which is when she realised that the strange plants were actually sensors on a stand, oriented to look outwards across the land the pilgrims had been crossing.
Slowly, everyone came to a halt. They were suspicious of the strange devices, to say the least, especially after enduring the trial-by-ambush of so many weapons on the way here. Minutes ticked by without anything happening.
'I think they're just sensors,' opined Artur uncertainly. 'Detectors. Not weapons.'
That was the consensus amongst the pilgrims. The more apt question was what they detected.
Looking for a ford, or bridge, they found a new plastic walkway laid over the stream at a narrow point and crossed over. And you could really call this a stream, fast-flowing water clear as crystal, where shoals of miniature fish darted into cover, utterly unlike the dead, turbid waters encountered so far.
'Look!' called one of the group, pointing at the towers. Then Lizabet realised they were pointing at a flying vehicle, a slow and bulky shuttle painted in white and blue livery, approaching slowly from the north-west and thus from Cormelle itself.
It didn't seem obviously armed. No guns, or weapon pods, nor bombs or missiles when she checked with the binoculars. In fact it seemed to be designed to be as unthreatening as possible.
'I think it's a – I don't know what to call it.'
'Welcoming committee?' said Artur.
Banking gently, the sluggish aircraft flew around them before settling on the ground in a huge flurry of dust and blown grasses. A door slid back, a ramp slid out and a group of men and women in braided uniforms marched down the ramp to cross the intervening ground. Worryingly, they carried weapons in holsters.
Their leader, wearing the distinctive flowing ankle-length uniform of a commander, marched up to the perimeter marked by the flower-like sensors whilst his fellow-soldiers struggled to keep up with him. He stopped suddenly, whipped out a pair of spectacles from a pocket, put them on and beamed at the pilgrims.
'Welcome!' he intoned heartily. 'Welcome to Cormelle! I'm The Doctor!'
After his greeting, the Time Lord winced, snapped his fingers, tutted loudly and turned back to the pilgrims.
'Ah! Stupid! Tactless! Didn't mean to imply that you're full of warbugs. Honorary title. These chaps here are the immigration service. Say hello, be polite, welcome your visitors why don't you?'
To begin with, the fourteen new arrivals goggled at the Doctor, all the more so after his introduction. The less ebullient immigration officials set up a portable table next to a crate containing white boilersuits, and erected a modesty-preserving windbreak.
Still the pilgrims didn't move. Feeling guilty and perhaps responsible for their reluctance to move, The Doctor eyed the perimeter of sensors curving away on either side of them in a gentle arc.
Hours earlier that morning after breakfast, he and Martha went to the nearest policeman, informing them that the travellers wished to visit the force-barrier, if that was okay, or did they need permission?
Not from the police. Immigration, on the other hand, were another matter. That same old humourless red-braided official from Air Traffic Control had informed the police that a new party of refugees were approaching the Cormelle perimeter and would arrive within hours. So, instead of having to walk all the countless kilometres to the force-barrier perimeter, both travellers got an airlift. Red-braid, still nameless, warned both of them not to cross the force-barrier under any circumstances.
'Certainly not,' the Doctor had replied, loftily and absently whilst looking out of a window. Martha recognised the tone – placating on the surface and meaning that the Time Lord would do exactly what he wanted regardless of warnings.
Now.
Extending a hand in the universal gesture for greeting, the Doctor stepped over the force-barrier perimeter and strode towards the refugees. He felt nothing when crossing over the barrier, apart from a certain guilty glee at the irate officials shouting at him from their seats at the portable table.
'Sorry if I scared you. I'm not a local myself, you see.'
'I'm Lizabet. Closest thing we have to a leader,' said a pale, worn, sharp-eyed young woman. She edged closer to the extended hand.
'Don't touch her! You don't know if she's infected!' called an official.
The Doctor leaned forward. He spoke so low that Lizabet strained to hear him.
'I'm going to shake your hand as an act of faith and also to annoy that little tinpot behind us.'
He shook the young woman's hand, then swung on his heel and indicated the waiting Cormellettes with a grand sweep of his arm.
'These people need to vet you and ensure you're not carrying any infections. Those worrying-looking "guns" are actually high-speed injectors with broad-spectrum vaccines and antibiotics. You'll need to surrender up your clothes for the sterile ones provided.'
Whispers of wonderment went around the little group. Acting as leader, the Doctor once more strode boldly back to the perimeter and crossed it, lifting his foot –
- or attempted to.
A foggy, nebulous horror welled up in his mind and chest, sending his stomach clenching, cramping his muscles and dizzying him nearly into imbalance. He tried to stay upright, reeling on the spot, shifting his balance around on his left foot as his right remained poised over the barrier, desperately trying not to collapse or fall backwards. Defying the shapeless panic and pressing on, he felt as if invisible waters were swirling all about him, pressing down with a dark and deadly weight: they crushed him with silent pressure, making his bones creak from either imagined terror or actual horror, choking the very breath out of him, chilling the life out of him, blinding him with their murky matter. Both suns paled whilst the sky darkened and the earth shook underfoot and tilted and rippled. The only way out was backwards, to flee in panic, retreat, it seemed – no! no, that wasn't true, he must press on -
- and his foot came down after the brief yet monumental struggle.
'Phew!' he breathed, in genuine relief. A warm, friendly pair of hands steadied him. 'Martha?'
'Doctor, are you okay? What happened?' asked the young woman. 'You stopped for a moment there.'
The customs officials laughed unsympathetically at him. Red braid indicated the shuttle with his thumb.
'They've turned it off now. Come on you lot, there's no risk now.'
Gingerly at first, then with increasing confidence, the pilgrims moved over the barrier and into the formal territory of Cormelle.
'Welcome to the independent polity of Cormelle. For reasons of health, we have to check your pathology and epidemiological record,' began Red Braid.
Recognising a pompous bore when she heard one, Martha tuned him out and gave the Doctor a quick, subtle series of checks that confirmed he was completely outside the parameters of human medicine, and hence healthy for a Time Lord.
'You were lucky, Doctor,' one of the official informed him in passing. 'That was the standard charge of two per cent. We keep it at that to prevent local wildlife from straying inside.'
Tilting his head back, the Doctor directed a searching look at his assistant.
'A moment? A split-second?'
'Mm-hm. You closed your eyes. Looked like you might fall.'
Two per cent! At that intensity his own senses told him he'd been straining to cross the barrier for maybe thirty seconds, at an intensity one-fiftieth of full strength. If that barrier were driven to full power it would most likely kill anyone trying to cross it, if they got within fifty metres without suffering a temporal lobe seizure or a classic Parkinsonian spasmodic collapse.
Yet for all the novel sensations suffered whilst crossing the barrier he had come across this type of technology before. A long, long time before, and a long way from here. The inventors of this technology couldn't have expected anyone with experience of it already to happen along and realise, with a sudden paradigm shift, part of the secret of Cormelle.
'Let's take a little stroll to look at orchids and butterflies,' he informed Martha.
Once they were out of earshot he took out his sonic screwdriver and set it to resonate at a particular infrasonic frequency, one that made Martha's fillings ache. Pointing across the stream at a straggling copse, he quietly warned her.
'At that setting it'll interfere with any eavesdropping equipment they put onto us from the shuttle.'
Martha raised an eyebrow.
'Being a bit paranoid now, aren't we!'
The Doctor didn't smile at her arch remark.
'Maybe not paranoid enough, since I know what that barrier is, and it's nothing to do with "force barrier" technology. Force barrier my eye and ninepence! As non-kosher as a roast suckling pig.'
Playing the pantomime, Martha pointed at the copse, too.
'I'm not up on Jewish cooking, Doctor – just tell me what you mean!'
'It's an empathic repulsor. I've encountered a similar large-scale one before.' He frowned in annoyance at his own erratic memory. 'Awfully large, awfully long time ago. With Victoria and Jamie, I think.'
Suddenly squatting, he pulled up strands of grass and inspected them closely. Martha sat carefully on the turf, checking for bugs first before settling down, craning her neck and watching the fourteen refugees being tested and re-dressed by the officials.
'An empathic repulsor. So – it repels people by acting on their emotions?' guessed Martha.
'Clever girl!' grinned her companion. 'Not quite. It broadcasts on specific wavelengths that affect the brain, usually the hypothalamus and the limbic system. The War Lords used it on their world to isolate and corrall about a hundred and fifty thousand human slaves, to keep them in a dozen different zones.'
Martha jerked her head round to look at the Doctor when he mentioned "hypothalamus".
'Oh my God!' she breathed. 'This could explain The Breakdown!'
Rolling his collected grasses into a frayed ball, the Doctor threw it overhand into the stream.
'Nowhere near enough power and reach. Sorry to spoil your theory. However, it can't be a simple coincidence and it explains another mysterious absence.'
Referring, of course, to the lack of manifest technology present in Cormelle. The polity's leaders had deliberately lied about the nature of the barrier that protected them, to their own citizens and to everyone else for the simple reason that suspicion about The Breakdown's cause would be laid at their feet. A device of this complexity and size didn't get assembled in a kitchen; it had been researched and tested and probably originated from a scale model. There had been a programme involving research into repulsors, which The Breakdown had managed to camouflage.
'D'you think you can do the Mata Hari bit again and pump your archivist boyfriend for more information?'