THE BELLS OF Cambridge struck six.
Skagra sat in the passenger seat of the brown Capri, considering his next move. The book was the antepenultimate part of his plan, a precisely detailed scheme to which he had devoted most of his life. So where was the book now? Where had the Professor hidden it?
He pressed the tips of his fingers around the cold metallic surface of the sphere and accessed the mind most recently added to it.
He flinched as he anticipated the full force of Chronotis’s mind, the mind of a Time Lord, bursting into his own. He blinked, for once taken by surprise.
This was it? What he felt now might once have been a powerful mind. Now it was nothing but greyness, mist and confusion.
A faintly unpleasant taste surged at Skagra from the melee of Chronotis’s thoughts. It was a weak, warm sensation with an aroma of scorched plant material, and for some reason it was accompanied by the letter T. Skagra cast it back, searching deeper.
Suddenly, from out of the greyness, a large shape began to form. This was more like it, thought Skagra. Whatever this thing was, it was at the heart of Chronotis’s deepest thoughts. It was roughly circular, a hoop of some kind, with a web of netting suspended from it, and a metallic strut at one end.
The object got larger and larger, and Skagra concentrated harder and harder, trying to divine its meaning.
Letters formed beneath the object.
S, I, E, V, E.
Skagra suppressed his irritation and rejected the object. It was irrelevant.
He pushed deeper, aiming to bypass the general disorder and access recent memory traces.
He saw himself in Chronotis’s rooms, from the Professor’s viewpoint.
No – he needed to go further back.
He pushed deeper still.
The mental image disintegrated in a haze of grey and then reformed in a different pattern. This time it showed a tall figure with a long scarf. The face of the man was hazy, unformed. The Professor had clearly attempted to hide the man’s identity. Futile. Skagra immediately recognised it as the Doctor. Did he have the book?
No – that was suddenly clear. The Doctor had gone to fetch the book from Young Parsons.
Skagra concentrated, trying to break through and bring up an image of this Young Parsons. The grey veil lifted for a moment and he was suddenly seeing through Chronotis’s eyes again. He was busying himself preparing the T liquid in an antechamber of his dwelling. Skagra was distantly aware of a twittering noise from the main room. The twittering noise asked something about borrowing some books about carbon dating and the Professor said something about creative disarray –
Skagra felt Chronotis’s mind slipping away from him. Again the metal loop appeared, the sieve.
For all his slippery forgetfulness and senility, Chronotis had still evidently retained some of the mental training and telepathic discipline of a Time Lord.
These efforts at concealment would almost certainly have proved fatal.
Skagra made one final attempt and demanded all Chronotis’s knowledge of the book.