5: Adrift in the Sand
Once Lieutenant Llewellyn departed the stuffy, smelly tent, his involuntary guests followed. Sarah drew in a great lungful of dry air, grateful to escape the oppressive fug of the tent.
'Sorry,' apologised the young officer. 'I sit in my own reek so long I don't notice it. Not enough water for washing, you see. If we were on the coast like First Platoon then there'd be the Med, just the thing for a spot of sluicing yourself clean.'
'Oh, don't worry,' reassured Sarah. 'I'm used to roughing-it, believe you me.' True. She'd been to environments so hostile and deadly that the young officer would have considered them flights of raving fantasy.
'Stout gel!' he praised her. Then, stepping in closer. 'Is your chappy all right in the head? Sunstroke can take people funny ways, you know.'
The Doctor had stopped to stare at the sky, now a cloudless blue again, from where the sun hit them with a near-physical force. He produced a small electronic gadget from a pocket, extended an aerial and spun around to face all directions of the compass. A slow frown spread across his features and he pivoted back to face south-east, looking alternately at his device and the far distant dunes of the Saharan sand sea.
'He's always like this,' murmured Sarah. 'Except when he's worse.' She felt a little embarassed by her companion's behaviour, blatantly over the top as it was.
'Worse? Good grief, he seems like Tod Slaughter already. Just about to start chewing the carpet!' snorted the officer. Sarah nodded and smiled, not getting the reference to Tod Slaughter.
The Doctor, who had caught the unflattering reference to the ham silent actor, smiled to himself. Let the unwary underestimate the unrevealed.
'I take it your dig at Makan Al-Jinni is to the south-east? About ten miles?' he asked. Lieutenant Llewellyn did a double-take.
'Good Lord, absolutely correct, Doctor Smith! How did you know?'
'Significant energy drain.' There was no further explanation. 'I notice you also lack one of the essentials of desert life.'
Sarah turned to look around her. Water? Trees? Nice deep cool swimming pools? Roger merely scratched his dirty hair.
'Flies,' continued the Doctor.
'Oh, yes, that's true,' agreed the young officer. 'Not here, nor at the dig. Professor Templeman says we're too far from any breeding source for flies to reach us.'
The Professor was wrong, and badly so. The Doctor knew it, even if proving it would be harder.
'I wonder, could we prevail upon you to guide us around this garrison?' he asked, all bumbling charm.
Taken aback temporarily, the officer scratched sand out of his tousled hair and looked around in contemplation.
The tour lasted for fifteen minutes, and gave Sarah a slight headache in trying to cope with the sun, the light, the dust and the interminable piles of supplies. She felt simultaneously flattered and worried by the interest expressed in her by the soldiers they encountered, being the subject of a few wolf-whistles until Lieutenant Llewellyn glared at the offenders.
Mersa Martuba, it transpired, had been established in early January 1941 as a potential Forward Supply Depot, at a small oasis where a dozen abandoned mud huts stood. Huge amounts of logistics would have been dropped there to sustain the Western Desert Force as it over-ran the Italian colony of western Libya. Units of the RASC and the RE had already begun to salvage abandoned or captured Italian equipment and stockpile it at Mersa Martuba alongside supplies labouriously hauled up from the Nile Delta. Petrol, oil, diesel, lubricants, water, ammunition, spare parts, tinned food, signal wire and a thousand other things were sent to Mersa Martuba.
That was, until the Italian invasion of Greece, which had turned into a Greek invasion of Italian Albania, threatened to bring a German intervention in turn. Many units of the successful Western Desert Force were sent to Greece, which meant a weakening of the forces left in Cyrenaica. Mersa Martuba's garrison was split into three, with one platoon boarding ships bound for Greece, another remaining at Benghazi to try and make sense of the logistical muddle there, and the remainder sitting amidst the desert at Mersa Martuba, twiddling it's thumbs.
It's still a big site, acknowledged Sarah, looking impressed at piles of crates stacked high as houses, stencilled with strange military jargon, or even Italian. Pyramidal stacks of petrol drums were covered with camouflage netting, as were a dozen trucks, in case of air attack.
The various stacks of supplies were laid out in a checkerboard pattern, divided up into four quadrants of the compass and numbered within that area.
'I've no idea what some of this stuff actually is,' confessed their guide. 'The Italian kit especially. We captured and recovered their supplies all the way along the coast road and some ended up here. Plus, there's a small town on the coast called Mursa Murtaba, and some of their crates have ended up here by mistake and vice-versa.' He pointed to one collection of stout cardboard boxes piled a dozen high and four deep. 'Black berets, six thousand, nine hundred and twelve of them. Heaven knows who sent them out here and why!'
'No sign of a large blue crate, I suppose, one that happens to look like a police box?' enquired the Doctor hopefully. Roger looked puzzled.
'No, we certainly don't have anything like that here, Doctor Smith.'
'Oh, well. Just a pious hope.'
Once again Roger directed a searching look at Sarah, who rolled her eyes.
The Doctor appeared to be noseying at the contents of stacked crates containing hundreds of red tins full of petrol. In actuality he was plotting how to get out to that archaeological site, where a distinct energy anomaly existed. Judging by the telemetry, a significant drop in overall temperature happened to be taking place at the site's location, over an area – a bit of a guesstimate here – of three square miles. Not a natural phenomena, and too much a coincidence not to be connected to the dig. In fact, given the present date, he didn't think human technology could manage the heat-sink effect being generated.
Oh yes. That dig had to be the place the Time Lords aimed him at.
Sarah and Roger were chatting inconsequentially, Sarah trying to nod and laugh in the right places, which was difficult when she failed to understand Roger's army slang and discussion of popular culture.
'Seeing that sandstorm coming across the desert at us – ugh, that was horrid. Like a dirty brown wave,' she said, trying to change the subject.
Roger looked south-east, where the distant traces of the storm could still be seen.
'They're not pleasant, desert sandstorms, Sarah – I say, I can call you Sarah, can't I? – sorry for being a bit forward. Not pleasant but they don't kill you, unless you encounter them in an aeroplane. I heard some of the chaps saying that these storms are artificial ones, whipped up by all the military activity out here.'
'That's rather odd.'
Roger tapped the side of his nose.
'I've seen odder. At the old dig, for example. There used to be strange lights in the night sky over the buildings on occasion, and when it got really hot you'd see Saint Elmo's Fire on the top of the pylons. Quite eerie, I felt. The Prof – who has a stone for a soul – used it to read by. It scared the wits out of the Egyptians and the French chaps didn't like it much, either.'
'But you were made of stronger stuff!' joked Sarah. Roger gave a lop-sided grin.
'Hardly. I just didn't dare to act worried in front of the Prof – yes?' he replied shortly, to a panting and sweaty soldier wearing only shorts, boots and a helmet.
'Beg pardon, sir, but that Doctor Smith character's gone off in one of the trucks. I thought you ought to know.'
Both Roger and Sarah looked startled.
'What! He's gone off and left me!' exclaimed an aggrieved Sarah.
'Stolen a truck!' said Roger, wondering with a touch of horror what Captain Dobie would say. Doubling between the symmetrical maze of stores, he got to the nothern perimeter and looked out across the desert sands.
No sign of a vehicle's dust wake there. Roger ducked back into the supplies, found a robust stack of crates and climbed to the top, suffering several splinters in his haste.
There it was, a trail of dust thrown into the air by a speeding truck, heading – south-east. Towards the dig at Makan Al-Jinni.
'Hey – I found this stuck to the next truck,' panted Sarah, clambering up next to Roger. She handed him a small yellow square of paper.
"Didn't want to disturb, borrowed truck, gone to dig, back by dark" had been hastily scribbled in pencil on the paper.
'Great,' said Roger bitterly. 'Your "companion" holds my future in his hands, Miss Smith.'
Whatever happened to "Sarah"! wondered Sarah.
Whistling gaily, the Doctor sped across the flat rock surface, clutching the steering wheel of a "borrowed" Chevrolet 3 tonner and grinding the clutch ferociously when he shifted gears. Sarah and the young officer were getting on famously, and she'd doubtless pick up all sorts of useful information in passing. Hardly worth bothering them.
Besides, the mention of missing people, of "disappearances", bothered him. Why would labourers on a dig vanish into nowhere without being paid? Why would soldiers vanish in similar fashion? Out here there was nowhere to hide or run to. A soldier might desert to the fleshpots of Cairo or Alexandria if he were near. Out here there was no such reason.
Vanishing people. An unidentified energy drain. No flies. A place with the reputation of being haunted. What connected them? For the Time Lords to divert him here, it had to be significant and threatening.
After at least nine miles, the truck began to encounter drifts of soft sand, makiing progress at a slightly reduced rate. This would be the beginning of the Saharan sand sea, realised the Doctor. Easy to bog the vehicle down in conditions like that, and extricating it would be a long and difficult job for one man.
Deciding that caution surmounted speed, he brought the truck to a stop and climbed down, catching sight of a small dark shape in the heat haze to the south-east. The shape resolved into a crescent of a dozen pitched tents, which rippled in the heat as he approached.
'Hello! Hello there!' he called, without provoking a response. Tent flaps moved listlessly, whirls and eddies of dust moved between the fabrics, but nobody replied.
'The cupboard was bare,' muttered the Doctor to himself. He stood in front of the tents, noticing signs of recent activity; footprints in the sand, bread and a tube of liquid cheese lying on a table, boxes of photographic plates.
At the dig? wondered the Time Lord. He could see the well-worn track over the dunes and followed it.
His first impression on seeing the excavated site of Makan Al-Jinni was one of alien-ness. From his vantage point on the rim of the great sand bowl the complex sat in, he could see right to the other side, an uninterrupted vista of black, satiny, massive structures. The nearest was a variety of simplified Acropolis, standing around eighty feet tall. Beyond that lay a gigantic circular plinth, surmounted by two pylons that must have been a hundred feet in height, tapering to narrow points. Other structures lay at varying distances from the plinth: a curved and completely enclosed structure with a slab of the black substance blocking off each end; a row of cubic structures, each the size of a house at one of the cardinal points; the stub of another pylon, thinner than the two on the plinth, and the rest of the pylon, lying shattered on the ground for two hundred feet; curiously humped domes at the far edge of the complex.
The material looked pristine, as if hewn from polished basalt only yesterday.
These structures are not human! How can they not realise! wondered the Doctor, before answering his own question; these humans had no concept of, or contact with, intelligent extra-terrestrial life (barring himself).
Down amongst the buildings, a trio of figures moved. One caught sight of the new arrival and stopped, to point.
The Doctor jogged at an easy pace down the inner side of the sand basin, striding up to the three archaeologists standing bemused next to a canvas shelter.
'Hello! How do you do! I'm the Doctor! You must be Professor Templeman?' he guessed, of a large, bearded man clad in faded linens. A suspicious gleam sprang into the large man's eyes, and the Doctor's proffered hand was ignored.
'I am Professor Templeman. However, nobody here is sick. A doctor was not requested.'
The man in the middle, a gangling, freckled redhead, suddenly produced a revolver and pointed it directly at the Doctor's forehead.
'An Italian spy!' he said, sounding immensely pleased with himself. The third man, who resembled an amiable pudding, rolled his eyes in exasperation and hit the redhead on the foot with a spade.
'Idiot!' he spat, with a pronounced French accent. 'Put down the gun.' He bowed to the Doctor.
'Professor Borguebus. The hasty gentleman here is our idiot assistant, whom the Captain Dobbey saw fit to give a gun to. Albert, a spy does not walk up to those he spies upon.'
Gratified at encountering a civil face, the Doctor nodded enthusiastically.
'I happened to get diverted to Mersa Martuba – transport difficulties – and heard about your excavation from Lieutenant Llewellyn. He piqued my interest, and here I am.'
Professor Templeman's brows drew together, in much the same way a storm cloud gathered.
'Those wretches in the Army! They arrange to send the boy to the desert because of his experience, and fail to use him – stick him in a supply dump. Not only that, he is only ten miles away from the dig he helped with and yet cannot come here. Outrageous!'
The Professor seemed not to know or care that there was a war on in North West Africa, except where it inconvenienced him. "Not worldly" was a mild understatement.
Very well, play to the Professor's strengths, then.
'I am intrigued by your excavations, Professor. A huge site, hundreds of miles from civilisation, completely covered by sand, which you have managed to uncover – almost single-handed.'
'Oh! Oh, really! Thank you!' gushed the Professor immediately, leading the Doctor to condemn himself for exploiting such an obvious weakness. 'It wasn't easy. After being interned and getting back, I had to appeal to that repellent Dobie for site labour, and he only allowed soldiers to work here when they had nothing else to do.'
A sympathetic nod and tut emerged from the Doctor, who managed to simultaneously dart a knowing sideways look at Albert and Borguebus. Neither of them looked persuaded by his juggling the situation.
'And the architecture of your site – remarkable!' continued the Doctor. 'Refined. Utilitarian. Positively primordial. Truly a missing entry in the Mediterranean's library of cultures.'
Albert and Borguebus swapped glances. Professor Templeman looked around the site, nodding in silent agreement.
'How accurately you state the case. How accurately – oh, I beg my pardon, I didn't ask your name. "Doctor John Smith". Thank you.'
The Professor's bulk turned to face into the site, at the big pseudo-Acropolis.
'We call that "The Temple", for want of a better description. I take it you'd like to see it up close? Done. We'll go over straight away.'
He set off promptly, leading the Doctor, and the other two men, who brought up the rear whilst whispering together.
On nearing the awe-inspiring "Temple", the Doctor noticed that one face had been overlaid with a scaffold of wooden planking, creating steps and risers more suited to human physique. Templeman led the way, up to the central atrium of the huge building. He stood there like a king, arms stretched wide.
'Easily bigger than the Temple of Diana, and the dias is three times the size of the Baalbek Trilithon,' said the Professor. 'And completely intact!'
Yes, pondered the Doctor, not feeling happy about the intactness of the building, which bespoke continual care and repair.
'I don't see any decoration. No heiroglyphics, either. No adornment or embellishment of any kind, in fact,' he pointed out to Templeman. 'So – who did build this "Temple", and why?'
Templeman sagged a little.
'Thereby hangs a tale,' muttered Albert from behind them.
'Actually we know more about who didn't build it,' explained Professor Templeman. 'Not Roman, not Phoenecian not Greek, not Egyptian, not Arabic. The why I can explain more easily – this is a religious complex, dedicated to deities deemed to be larger than life, which is why it was constructed to a larger-than-human scale.'
'No ideas about when?'
Templeman harrumphed in annoyance.
'No, Doctor Smith. Our itinerant labourers made off with any artefacts on-site during my first expedition here. By the time of my return they had, naturally, looted the site. So we have no artefacts that can tell us the date of construction.'
Moving alongside a support pillar, the Doctor carefully placed his hand on the glossy black stone.
'Warm,' he said quietly to himself. Warm despite being permanently in shadow. Odd. No more odd than a site with no remnants of those who built it.
'I shall leave you with Albert,' declared the Professor. 'Professor Bourguebus and I are off to make sketch maps. Please come and see me before you leave, Doctor.'
The gangly red-head had the grace to blush when the Doctor turned to look at him with raised eyebrows.
'Er – sorry about the gun.'
The Doctor raised his eyebrows again, then broke into a disarming smile.
'There are bigger things to worry about than your Webley, Albert.' He slapped the pillar. 'This for one.'
Albert threw his head back to look at the ceiling above, wondering if the Doctor meant the pillar was going to fall over.
'This material. The whole site,' clarified the Doctor. 'Your good Professor is so close to it he cannot see the problem. Cannot or will not. Can you?'
Feeling under pressure, Albert merely nodded. The Doctor leaned closer. Feeling even more pressure, Albert opened his mouth to speak.
'It feels all wrong here, like hidden things are watching you all the time. All the time. And there are the strange lights at night,' he blurted.
The Doctor looked at the strange black material making up the building he stood within. Forensic geology wasn't his field, yet he knew this material wasn't of any terrestrial composition. How had thousands of tons of alien material made their way here?
How, and, more importantly, why?
6: Jackals of the Desert
Sarah moodily kicked a pebble around the corner of a mud hut, followed it, and came face-to-muzzle with a gun. A big gun, pointing right at her.
Roger, or Lieutenant Llewellyn, had decided to treat her with some circumspection when the Doctor's borrowed truck had vanished into the dust and distance. Fine, she told herself. An escort wasn't needed, she had two eyes and two ears and an enquiring disposition, she'd get by. For the past two hours she'd been alternately wandering around and sheltering from the sun.
The gun muzzle, large and unwavering, pointed directly at her. Sarah tracked the muzzle backwards, along the barrel, set in a turret, seeing that it belonged to a tank. A dusty, rusty, static, un-manned tank.
'Hello there, Miss!' said a cheerful Tam, banging about in the tank's innards with spanners and a screwdriver.
Recovering from her surprise, Sarah saw that the tank presented a pretty dismal prospect. The tracks had gone, and so had what she would learn to call bogey and drive wheels. A large black hole in the turret alongside the main gun showed where a machine-gun had once been. Great metal flaps over the engine deck were permanently propped upwards, and very little of the engine remained when she peered inside.
Tam reappeared from the depths of the vehicle, clutching a greasy piece of machinery. He gave her an irreverent salute and disappeared off to wherever his residence was.
' "Deucalion",' read Sarah aloud, seeing the tank's name painted in faded white lettering on the hull. Another of the rodent art-forms graced the front mudflaps, and a red-white-red square faded into near-obscurity was on the hull front.
'Ah, there you are,' said a voice behind her. The Doctor, returned from his little jaunt out in the desert. 'Wherever have you been hiding?'
'Doctor!' blurted Sarah gratefully . 'Where have I been hiding? You look to your own counsel, because after stealing that truck – what is it? What's wrong?'
The errant Time Lord beckoned her forward, pressing a finger to his lips.
'I think I've found the reason the Time Lords sent us here. An alien complex of buildings out in the depths of the desert.'
This news stopped Sarah's pending tirade before it began. "Alien buildings" to her always recalled the City of the Exilons, and the terrifying maze within. Or the Martian temple-prison of –
'There you are!' exclaimed Lieutenant Llewellyn, from behind them, equal amounts of anger and relief shading into his voice.
'Pretty obviously, Sarah, it's a cruiser tank, an A13 if I'm not mistaken, from the initial advance of Wavell's Thirty Thousand. Oh, hello Lieutenant! Must have been immobilised here on the cross-desert manouevre to get to Beda Fomm. Now, Lieutenant, I've just been out to your dig in the desert and have some bad news for you.'
Roger stopped, puzzled by the Doctor's background chat to Sarah – which was absolutely correct and surprisingly so for an Oxford don – and even more puzzled by the mention of Makan Al-Jinni.
'I've got some bad news for you, Doctor Smith. Captain Dobie would like to have a more detailed chat with you.'
He resisted any urge to ask what the peculiar academic meant by "bad news". For all of thirty seconds.
'What bad news?'
Being escorted past a pyramid of wooden crates labelled "WO 13d 40mm 2lb AP", the Doctor stopped and leant against the dirty, dusty timbers.
'Why, the so-called Temple complex is actually a collection of construction material that doesn't originate on Earth. It has a purpose as far removed from Professor Templeman's "religious observance" as it's possible to be.'
The young officer stared at the Doctor, shook his head, looked at Sarah and gestured for them to continue moving.
Whatever Captain Dobie might have wanted went by the board within ten seconds. From the west a moving column of dust could be seen, approaching Mersa Martuba across the desert flats. A watching sentry atop an angled ladder projecting from one of the mud huts set to working a hand-cranked siren, which sent a wheezy warning across the depot.
'Get to a trench!' shouted Roger. 'It might be the Eyeties!'
'Who are –' began the Doctor, until Sarah dragged him across a trackway and into a shallow trench, bordered with sandbags. Other soldiers could be heard running, shouting and arming weapons.
' – the Eyeties?' he finished plaintively, crouching down below the parapet.
Lieutenant Llewellyn cursed the fact that he'd left his helmet in his tent, fumbled his Webley revolver from it's holster and prepared to die valiantly.
'The Italians,' explained Sarah. Her uncles had instilled a sense of mocking scorn about "The Eyeties" of desert war lineage. Scorn was harder to come by if they were about to storm your pathetically shallow protection.
Overhead, the wheezy siren sounded again. The Doctor saw Lieutenant Llewellyn straighten up, looking westwards to see exactly who was approaching.
'That's the all-clear,' he explained. 'Must be ours. Who can – oh, no, it's that bloody shower!'
The Doctor's acute vision, and his pocket telescope, enabled him to view the oncoming column of vehicles at a distance of over two miles away.
'Interesting,' he commented. Sarah looked between him and the young officer, who wore a look of resigned exasperation.
'Vickers Mark Six light tank, Bren Carrier, Chevrolet, Sahariana, Ford CMP, Marmon-Harrington. Quite the mechanical menagerie, wouldn't you say?' said the Time Lord, as if reading the running order of a race-course.
Roger was climbing out of the shallow trench, tucking his revolver back into it's holster. Sarah edged closer to the Doctor.
'What on earth are you babbling about!' she hissed. 'It sounds like a list of aliens that UNIT ought to be fighting.'
Within seconds Sarah didn't need to ask questions about the vehicles. They drove into Mersa Martuba at full speed and skidded to gravel-spewing halts, throwing up clouds of dust. Raucous laughter sounded from the crews as they jumped down to stretch their legs. None of them wore standard uniforms, instead being clad in definitely non-military denims, cordurouys, silk scarves, RAF blouses, peaked caps and gas goggles. The only uniform item about them was a chequered scarf tied around the upper left bicep. Several men got down to empty their bladders against the vertical metalwork of the vehicles, only to suffer huge embarrassment when Sarah called out a cheery "Hello!".
'Bugger me! A woman!' called one man, pointing to Sarah.
'Never seen one before, Smalls?' commented a loud voice with a Northern Ireland accent. 'Get your disgusting selves to the latrines, quickly now.' There were no more comments about Sarah's gender. Instead a short, stocky, moustachioed man wearing the insignia of a sergeant emerged from the clouds of dust around the convoy.
'Sorry, Miss. Men a long time without members of the fairer sex,' he said, in a thick Irish brogue. 'Sergeant McSween. If any of the men - ' and he indicated the vehicles with a sweep of the hand ' - give you any trouble, any trouble at all, please tell me.'
'Oh!' replied Sarah. Oh indeed, she realised mentally. As a single woman out in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a war, she was indeed a rara avis. 'Right. That's alright, Sergeant. Thank you.'
'Miss,' he replied, saluting her and vanishing back into the hanging clouds of dust. A small gaggle of men could be seen gathering together amidst the vehicles, being covered in slowly-falling dust and pointing to various directions of the compass.
'Who are this lot?' asked Sarah. 'More of your Royal Army Service Corps chums?'
Roger shook his head.
'No, "this lot" are J Force. Variously known as either "Jolyon Force" or "Jackal Force". Whoops, there's Captain Dobie. And Captain Jolyon.'
A straight-faced and obviously unimpressed Captain Dobie came marching up to the group of officers, who were now smoking and swigging from canteens. An officer so covered in dust that he seemed to have been rolled in flour gave a nonchalant salute.
Feeling her journalistic instincts kick in, Sarah edged closer, the better to hear. She turned to nudge the Doctor, only to find that he'd disappeared again in the diversion caused by J Force arriving.
'Captain Jolyon,' said Captain Dobie, in a flat and unexpressive voice. 'What do you want?'
Captain Jolyon seemed not at all put-out by his fellow officer's less-than-friendly expression.
'Well, Captain Dobie, I'd like fuel for the vehicles, a check-over by our fitters, a few spare parts, a resupply of ammo, food and water for my men and our prisoners, ' he answered in a brisk and cheerful tone.
'Prisoners?' asked Captain Dobie, blinking in surprise.
'Thirty-eight of the rascals,' agreed the other officer. 'Caught 'em in one of their canteen roadhouses. We popped-off the officer and a sergeant and the rest were obliging enough to put their hands up.'
The words were said with a lightness of tone that belied their intent. Her flesh crept slightly as Sarah realised "popped-off" meant "killed".
In the middle of the collection of piratical vehicles, a dust-shrouded canvas-backed truck disgorged several dozen soldiers, men in uniforms different to the ones that Sarah was now used to seeing. British soldiers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets escorted the prisoners past Sarah. She looked at them, seeing Mediterranean complexions, neatly-trimmed moustaches, shabby uniforms, worn boots and tired eyes. Most of the prisoners exuded an air of resigned disappointment; most, but not all. Some, feeling that their nationality imposed a responsibility to flirt, winked or whistled at Sarah.
'Shut yer bleedin' cakeholes, you Italian shower!' snapped one of the escorts. 'Sorry, Miss. As you were, as you were, you flippin' Eyetie bleeders, or you'll be sorry.' To make his point, he kicked one of the prisoners in the pants, resulting in an angry tirade of Italian in reply.
The insults were carried out in a manner that said neither party really felt motivated enough to hate the other properly. Sarah rolled her eyes and strode forward.
Isolated, and splendidly so, atop a pyramid of petrol drums, the Doctor looked south-east and rubbed his chin. Passing soldiers looked at him with curiosity.
"The Place of Demons." Why call it so? Because people considered the site haunted. As an ultimately rational empiricist, the Doctor dismissed the supernatural as due cause for the site's reputation.
Disappearances. Mysterious vanishings without trace. Not predicable, nor regular, or there would have been nobody left at the dig. Yet sufficiently noticable for the site to gain a reputation over five thousand years ago, and retain it.
Why, then, would it have the – aha – yes, those twin pylons and their relative spacing.
They were a trans-mat system! A trans-mat system of exceptional size.
The Doctor stood up on the petrol-drum pyramid, feeling a moment of intellectual triumph. A whole series of observations and facts fell abruptly into place.
'Oi! You! Get off them drums – what d'you think you are, a parrot on a perch?' shouted a sergeant from below, having been told of the sun-stricken prof sitting on a stack of fuel drums.
'A very good idea. Do you know where I can find Captain Dobie?' said the Doctor, jumping down from his meditative platform.
'He's busy,' growled the sergeant. 'Go see Lieutenant Llewellyn.'
Which the Doctor did. The young officer with the perpetually awry hair was overseeing delivery of petrol tins to the J Force vehicles, dozens of petrol tins, and several tins of engine oil. Another young officer, wearing a keffiyeh, a uniform blouse and worn cord trousers, looked on in approval.
'Can I have a word?' asked the Doctor, edging up to Roger.
'How about several? "Taking Army property without permission" for a start,' replied Roger shortly, ticking off boxes on his noteboard. He called over the kheffiyeh-wearing officer. 'You need to sign for the boxes of ammo. Two hundred rounds of Vickers fifty-calibre armour-piercing; one thousand rounds of three-oh-three.'
'It's about the disappearances,' added the Doctor. The officer stopped to stare back at him, then returned to his work.
'Any chance of some Boyes rounds?' asked the other officer. 'Captain Jolyon goes through them like nobody's business.'
'I'll see,' replied Roger, then walked away after taking the Doctor's elbow in what he hoped was a painfully hard grip and dragging him along. 'What are you blathering on about, you bloody looney! You steal a truck and go haring off – why should I believe you?'
'I know what's been causing the disappearances,' stated the Doctor simply, his elbow somehow stealing free, and gaining Roger's unwavering attention.
'Line up, line up, you bludgers,' bawled one of the J force non-coms at the prisoners, in a fierce Australian accent. Sarah went down the line, issuing a mess tin and cup to each prisoner, giving them a nod and smile. Some smiled back. Then she stood at the head of the line, ladling out a serving of stew, a slice of bread and pouring a cup of water for each man.
Captain Dobie had been quite happy to let her help J Force, since it meant one less of his men involved with the new arrivals. Sarah could read the disdain on his face like a newspaper headline.
'Grazie,' muttered the battered Italian soldier in front of her, taking his stew and dropping his bread into it.
'Mille grazie, signora,' said the next one, bowing a little. None of them looked dangerous, or hostile, or anything except fed-up. When they had all been fed the fierce-sounding Australian, who sported a sinister scar on his left cheek, belied his appearance by passing round cigarettes amongst the prisoners.
'Keeps them happy,' he said to Sarah, leaning against one of the vehicles, tipping his helmet forward to keep the sun out of his eyes.
Her journalistic instinct kicked in and Sarah took the opportunity to offer stew and bread to the soldier.
'Boffo! Ta, miss.' Silence fell for several seconds whilst the man methodically devoured the food.
'So, what is this "J Force" you're part of?' she prompted, when he was lighting another cigarette.
'Bright idea Captain Jolyon had, miss, him being in the REME. Between him and Sergeant McSween they got hold of a ton of sha – er, disabled MT. "Motor Transport" - trucks, to you, miss. Then they scrounged all the kit they could muster and Captain Jolyon took the whole lot to General Wavell. Got approval for a light raiding force, which is what we are. Swan about behind Eyetie lines and cause them trouble, that's us.'
'What about the Germans?' asked Sarah, wondering where they had gotten to. Her uncles had been pretty insistent about "Jerries".
The Australian shrugged.
'They're only just ashore in Tripoli, miss. We'll give 'em one up the – er, we'll sort 'em out as well, if they get this far.'
'A "trans-mat"?' repeated Roger, his look of disbelief not fading.
'A generic term for the device,' explained the Doctor. 'From "Matter-transmitter". He felt he'd explained things rather well.
'You must be stark, raving mad,' commented Roger. 'And you must think I am, too, to believe that.'
Ah. Perhaps the explanation hadn't been entirely successful.
'Let me try again,' and the Doctor's tone carried something that stopped Roger from moving away in despair. 'The two pylons form the gateway, if you will. Any object placed between those pylons could be sent to the receiving station, instantly. There would be no trace left of the object – say in this case a person from your archaeological dig. Gone entirely, and so fast you wouldn't notice it happen.'
Roger squinted.
'Why didn't everyone disappear, then? We've all passed between those pylons, lots of times.'
The Doctor grinned.
'Because they aren't always active! That site is powered geothermally, you know. I took readings out there, and beneath each structure there will be a long thermostatic spike, drawing energy from the earth. That's why the buildings are never cold. It also explains the energy drain I detected.'
'Geothermal – like hot springs?' commented Roger, getting drawn in despite himself.
'A little. It's a source of energy that never runs out – or at least not while Planet Earth maintains a molten core. Geo-thermal power allows the complex to maintain itself indefinitely, staying in perfect condition. And the pylons, the whole matter-transmission system, requires vast energies to operate. It can't be constantly in commission, so the geo-thermal power is accumulated. Once it reaches peak storage capacity, any soul unlucky to move between the pylons will be transmitted.'
Roger looked at the Doctor in alarm. The mysterious and inexplicable vanishings, the ever-warm buildings, the scale of the site – this grinning lunatic had managed to explain it all away. What was that line from Conan Doyle? "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, remains the truth."
A dusty soldier, clutching his rifle frantically, rushed up to the lieutenant.
'Sir! Sentry says he's spotted three unidentified vehicles heading this way, from the south-west. Says there's something bloody weird about them, sir, begging your pardon.'
'Of course,' said the Doctor slowly. 'I could be mistaken.'