BERNARD STRONG SETTLED himself down on his fold-out stool, adjusted his hat, settled the bait box by his feet, raised his rod and cast off.
He’d turned up early and got one of the best spots on this stretch of the Cam, along the water meadows a couple of miles outside the city. He had no real intention of landing anything good, he just wanted to clear out of the house before the missus woke up and gave him what-for after his late homecoming the night before.
Suddenly he saw a grey metal sphere, about the size of a football, hovering in mid-air some distance away down the curve of the river. He watched in astonishment as it zoomed forward with short, aggressive spurts of energy. What the heck was that thing? Some remote-control gizmo, a computer thing? Or perhaps a satellite, another bit of Skylab? If so, it might be worth a bob or two. If nothing else it was casting a shadow and would scare the fish.
Without really thinking about the logic of what he was doing, Bernard stood up and drew back his line from the water. He waited until the metal football-thing was within his reach and jabbed the end of his fishing rod at it.
The rod slipped off the side of the ball with a metallic scrape. Then the ball stopped in mid-air and turned on its axis, as if somehow it was adjusting itself to look at Bernard.
It made a loud buzzing noise, like an angry wasp trapped in a biscuit tin, and zoomed forward. Bernard felt its cold metal surface touch his forehead –
Then there was a pain in the back of his head, sharp and searing – and then nothing.
The mindless body of Bernard Strong pitched forward into the River Cam.
The sphere zizzed angrily past him, heading out into the empty water meadows.
It had been silent in the TARDIS control room for so long that Romana jumped when K-9’s high-pitched voice suddenly rasped out, ‘Master! Mistress!’
The Doctor, who had said not one word after settling down in the chair the night before, woke with a start and leapt for the console.
‘Have you got something, K-9?’
‘Affirmative, Master,’ said K-9. ‘The sphere is active: 5.7 miles distant at bearing 4.378. Velocity 15.3—’
‘Good dog!’ said Romana.
The Doctor punched new coordinates into the navigation panel with incredible speed, his fingers a blur. ‘We might still be in time,’ he told Romana. ‘Get Parsons up here!’
Chris was jolted from sleep by the insistent ring-ring of an ordinary-sounding telephone.
He looked around the guest suite. There was no telephone.
He leapt out of bed, feeling rested and refreshed. The ringing continued – but where was the phone?
He looked into the mirror – and suddenly he saw, instead of his own reflection, Romana. ‘Chris, we’ve picked up the sphere!’ she called urgently. ‘The control room, quick!’
Her image disappeared.
Chris reached for his clothes, which had somehow been pressed and cleaned and sat in a neat pile on the dresser. He was just getting into his trousers when a tremendous lurch sent the room spinning, as if the whole TARDIS had jerked to one side.
Clare evaded the porter of St Cedd’s with ease. She waited until the little bespectacled man had unlocked the big padlock on the gate at 8 a.m. sharp, gave him another minute to start making his rounds, then slipped into the courtyard and headed for the corner which she assumed was the P Block. She didn’t fancy any rigmarole with a porter on top of everything else.
She entered the long wooden-panelled corridor, the books on carbon dating clutched in one hand, and counted off the doors from P-1 down and around a corner. She was starting to feel more than a little ridiculous. There was probably going to be a perfectly reasonable, rational answer to yesterday’s events, after all.
As she neared room P-14, she heard an unearthly noise, like huge and ancient engines grinding into life. And all the strangeness flooded back, worse than ever.
What the hell was going on in there? She had a nightmare vision of Chris, the Doctor and the Professor standing around a machine that was about to explode – perhaps that was the explanation, they’d spent the night in there trying to scan that bloody book, and now it was going to kill them all…
She ran for the door of P-14. The noise was definitely coming from inside, though now thankfully it was starting to fade away.
She pounded on the door with her free hand, calling, ‘Professor Chronotis! Chris!’
There was no answer. The groaning machine-noise slipped away completely.
Clare tried the door and was surprised to find it open.
She burst in.
The room looked as if a bomb had hit it, with books pulled from their shelves littering the place. There were seven broken teacups. Chris’s denim jacket, the one that he never went anywhere without, lay abandoned on the floor. There was no sign of him or anybody else. In the far corner there was a large, square indentation over carpet and scattered books.
Her mind started racing. All the worry she’d been repressing behind her anger surged up. What if the book had exploded or something – she wouldn’t put anything past it – vaporising whatever scanning device had stood on the spot groaning like that, and taking everybody in the room with it?
She shook herself. Things like that just didn’t happen. But then she remembered the book and Chris’s disappearance.
The fear flooded back. She had to get help.
She dropped the books and pelted out of the room.
Wilkin had completed his first circuit of inspection on this fine Sunday morning. Apart from an inappropriately placed traffic cone and a pink-painted policeman’s helmet, there was nothing especially amiss in the grounds of St Cedd’s. The weather looked hopeful, with tinges of blue fighting through the cloud-covered sky. He stowed the cone and the helmet in his little office and was thinking of breakfast when he looked up suddenly. Through the little window of the office he saw a shape – a female shape, a young female shape – running pell-mell towards the gates. He recognised the signs at once. The mussed-up hair, yesterday’s creased clothes, the smudged make-up, the air of panic and shame. But this girl obviously had no real experience of the Sunday morning escape.
He stepped out into the courtyard and raised his bowler hat to her. ‘Good morning, miss,’ he said with all the severity he could muster on these occasions. He preferred to turn a blind eye, but she had made that impossible by clomping across the grass like a scalded gazelle.
To his surprise she altered her course, running right up to him. ‘I need your help,’ she gasped.
This was new, thought Wilkin. He hoped to God she wasn’t going to consult him on contraceptive advice.
‘I will help you all I can, miss, within college rules,’ said Wilkin.
‘Have you seen Professor Chronotis this morning?’
‘Now, now, calm down,’ said Wilkin, instantly dismissing the possibly of any hanky-panky in this scenario. Professor Chronotis was far too old for that sort of thing, certainly not a roué. He seemed such a nice old man, in fact. ‘Isn’t he in his room, P-14?’
‘No, I’ve just come from there,’ the girl said breathlessly.
Wilkin frowned. ‘You spent the night with Professor Chronotis?’
‘No,’ said the girl, ‘I’ve just arrived here, I slipped in, you must have been making your rounds. The Professor isn’t in his room, nobody is, that’s the point.’
‘Peculiar,’ said Wilkin. ‘The Professor certainly hasn’t left the college since he returned from a shopping trip yesterday morning.’
‘Could you have missed him as well?’ pointed out the girl.
Wilkin was rankled now. ‘Certainly not, miss. Professor Chronotis has, in my experience, always exited and re-entered this college in a civilised and entirely appropriate manner.’
‘What about Chris Parsons, he’s vanished too,’ the girl went on. ‘Tall, dark hair, denim jacket, looks a bit hopeless but sort of sweet with it…’
Wilkin nodded, back on familiar ground. ‘Mr Christopher Parsons, physics postgraduate of St John’s College, arrived here by bicycle at 6.20 p.m. to visit Professor Chronotis.’
‘And did you see him go?’
‘I’m rather afraid not, miss,’ said Wilkin. ‘I assumed he was joining the Professor and Miss Romana. Their friend the Doctor had gone out at 6.15 p.m.’
‘And when did the Doctor get back?’ asked the girl.
‘He did not return last night, miss,’ said Wilkin. ‘And I am quite, quite certain that I could not ever miss him.’
The girl seemed to be concentrating hard, trying to fit things together. ‘So – the Doctor never got back with the book. So – where are the Professor and Chris?’
Wilkin said reassuringly, ‘No need to worry. I’m sure they’ll be around somewhere. If you want to leave a message, I’ll see the Professor gets it.’
The girl shook her head. ‘No, you don’t understand. Three men are missing, and it has something to do with a book.’
‘A book, miss?’ Wilkin was beginning to wonder about this young lady’s state of mind.
‘Yes, a book!’ said Clare. ‘A book, and I think it’s a terribly dangerous book.’
Wilkin frowned. ‘Well, what I say is, people shouldn’t write things if they don’t want people to read them.’
The girl groaned. ‘No, you still don’t understand, it’s the book itself. It defies all analysis, it’s blown up a spectrograph, it seems to be minus twenty thousand years old and now, on top of all that, the three of them have vanished!’
Wilkin had maintained his blandest smile in this face of this onslaught of a sentence. ‘All right, miss,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we can sort this all out. I tell you what, you go back to his room, and I’ll ring around the College and see where he’s got to.’
‘His room!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘That’s another thing! It looks like a bomb’s hit it, there was a wheezing, groaning noise and books are just thrown around all over the place.’
Wilkin smiled. ‘Ah yes. That’s quite normal. Our Professor Chronotis has his own ideas about tidiness and order. He will not permit the cleaning staff to enter, and in a college with such ancient and venerable plumbing as St Cedd’s, one hears the most awful noises from the pipes. The wheezing and groaning you heard was probably Professor Gillespie in P-18 running his Sunday morning bath.’
The girl made one last protest, ‘But—’
‘Just wait in P-14, I’ll sort the whole thing out,’ said Wilkin. ‘Believe me, there’s nothing that can surprise me in this job.’
The girl stared at Wilkin for a moment longer, then turned on her heel and stalked back across the grass towards the Professor’s rooms.
Wilkin shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘All this fuss about a book. I don’t know, they’ll publish anything nowadays.’
He slipped back into the lodge. Those phone calls could wait until after breakfast.