Moment Twenty-six
Peri was beginning to wonder if things could get any worse. She and the Doctor were imprisoned and facing execution on charges of gun-running, a crime which neither of them had committed. All they had done was find someone's stash of weapons and now they were going to be put to death - without trial. Clearly, concepts like "due process" and "innocent until proved guilty" meant nothing on Androzani Minor. What was more, the rash on her legs (which had developed after she stepped in some unknown substance) was irritating her more and more.
She turned to the Doctor, who had an identical rash on his hands from trying to brush the substance off her legs. "Doctor, I'm scared," she said, trying in vain to avoid thinking about Chellak's men, who were currently preparing for the execution.
For a moment, the Doctor considered saying: "Brave heart, Peri." But he stopped himself, recalling how he used to use the words "brave heart" to reassure Tegan. And thinking of Tegan reminded him of how she had left him because she was tired of watching people die. Which, in turn, reminded him of Adric, a subject which still pained him. He had let the boy down in the worst way possible.
And now he had let another companion down - the fact that, this time, he would not live to feel the kind of guilt he had suffered over Adric was little consolation. His hearts sank as he turned to look at Peri; thanks to his curiosity, the two of them were going to die. As he'd said earlier, curiosity had always been his downfall. Why, he asked himself, did he have to go and follow the tracks which he and Peri had found in the sand?
He thought of Chellak, who had said he believed the Doctor and Peri were innocent, but that he was powerless to overrule Morgus, the man who had ordered the execution. Normally, the Doctor would have put this down to the hidebound military mindset, but Morgus, though an important man in the Androzani system, was a civilian. Since when did army officers, especially generals like Chellak, take orders from civilians? But one thing seemed certain; the Doctor and Peri had landed in the middle of a war over something called spectrox.
The Doctor did not know what spectrox was, but it seemed it was valuable enough to start a war over, valuable enough for two people to be sentenced to death without trial. He was no stranger to this kind of situation; several times throughout his travels, members of the TARDIS crew (including himself) had been condemned for crimes they had not committed. Fortunately, they had always managed to escape before, but this time there seemed to be no way out.
Just when all seemed lost, just when Chellak's men had finished preparing for the execution, the wall suddenly slid open behind the Doctor and Peri and four figures entered the cell. Two were obviously androids, but the other two looked exactly like the prisoners. Except it soon turned out that they were androids too, created by the mysterious Sheraz Jek; their function was to be "executed" while the real Doctor and Peri were taken to Jek's hideout.
"Can we trust them?" asked Peri, feeling slightly unnerved at the sight of her android duplicate. Except for the lack of a rash on her legs, the robot "Peri" was identical in every detail to the real thing.
Unlike Peri, the Doctor had prior experience of being duplicated in android form, but he still had mixed feelings about being faced with a machine which looked exactly like him. There was no denying that Jek was highly skilled, but why would he go to so much trouble to save two people he had never even met? "Probably not," the Doctor said at last. "But I don't think we've got much choice."
But, as the Doctor and Peri were taken to Jek's hideout, they were unaware that they had been exposed to one of the deadliest substances in the Universe - raw spectrox.