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system.’
Mawdryn smiled sadly. ‘It does not matter.’
‘I imagine it matters to you if you die!’ The Brigadier
moved his hand to the controls of the regenerator.
Mawdryn stared at the Brigadier with such a look of
pain and longing. For a moment the old soldier’s mind
went back thirty-five years to his first taste of action as a
young lieutenant in Palestine, with his platoon badly shot
up by terrorists, and he remembered the mangled conscript
who screamed at the officer to take his rifle and kill him.
Mawdryn groaned. ‘Without the energy only our shape
will change.’ He gave a deep sigh. ‘Our endless voyage will
never cease. We cannot die.’
The younger Brigadier moved cautiously through the ship.
As he paused at the junction of two corridors, there was a
distant rustling which sent him darting into the shadows.
Round the corner came seven figures in wide flowing
cloaks, which glided past within inches of where
Lethbridge-Stewart was pressed up against the wall. He
recoiled in horror as he glimpsed their terrible cowled
faces.
‘Stay here,’ said the Doctor to Tegan as they reached the
narrow turning to the laboratory. ‘If your Brigadier comes
past, stop him.’ Followed by Nyssa, he made his way up the
passage and into the laboratory.
Both the Doctor and the Brigadier were delighted to see
each other. ‘Thank goodness you’re all right!’ cried the
Doctor, who had never expected to track down the older
Lethbridge-Stewart so easily. With one half of the duo
under control they could avoid the Blinovitch Limitation
Effect.
‘Doctor! Over there!’ screamed Nyssa, pointing at
Mawdryn, who was still drawing energy from the
regenerator. ‘That’s him!’
With a sense of deep foreboding the Doctor walked over
to the master of the ghostly vessel. The alien smiled coldly.
‘I am Mawdryn. Welcome to my ship, Time Lord.’
‘So it was you who stole the regenerator from Gallifrey.’
‘Yes, Doctor. But time itself has punished us for the
crime.’
‘You modified that machine?’ The Doctor looked at
Mawdryn in awe. ‘You created endless life for yourselves?’
‘Endless torment!’ Mawdryn’s face twisted with physical
and mental distress. ‘Our bodies eternally renewed in a vile
travesty of our former selves.’
The Doctor was appalled. ‘You induced a perpetual
mutation?’ he whispered.
‘So horrible,’ replied Mawdryn bitterly, ‘that we were
exiled in this ship.’
‘How were you able to come to Earth?’
‘It is decreed; every seventy years, the beacons guide the
ship to within transmat distance of a planet. While seven of
our company sleep, one of us may leave the ship to seek
help.’
But the Doctor knew, as well as Mawdryn, that there
was no help; the red ship was destined to orbit eternally
with its crew of mutants, their bodies spared from
inexorable degeneration only by the power of the
regenerator. But whether they continued to live in the
luxurious and stabilising confines of the ship, or floated
amoeba-like in the void of space, they would never die.
‘It is the Time Lords’ curse!’
‘The curse of your own criminal ambition,’ answered
the Doctor, sternly.
‘The Time Lords could have helped us, but we were
abandoned.’
‘Time Lords cannot become involved.’ The Doctor
spoke as if the law was inviolate, yet it was a rule he had
broken many times.
Mawdryn said nothing.
The Doctor turned away, unable to meet the mutant’s
gaze. He was trembling. Was this, he wondered, the
ultimate coincidence? Had he been hounded, through time
and space, in despite of infinite improbability, to this
fateful confrontation?
‘Doctor!’ There was a shriek from the corridor and
Tegan came running in. She had spotted the seven mutants
from the dormition chamber making their way to the
laboratory.
‘My brothers in exile,’ explained Mawdryn, scornful of
the Earthchild’s fear. ‘They need the regenerator.’
Tegan turned spitefully to Mawdryn. ‘I always knew you
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