Read Online Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment by Ian Marter - Free Book Online

bent over by the brim.
    For a moment Harry just lay there, struck dumb by an uncanny resemblance, and all he could manage was a series of frantic nods.
    ‘The Sont... Sontaran...’ he cried at last.
    The Doctor’s eyes widened. He leaned down and helped Harry to his feet. ‘Sontaran?’ he murmured. ‘Here?’
    Harry nodded again, desperately trying to remember what the dying prisoner had said. ‘Thing like... like some kind of Golem...’ he frowned.
    The Doctor took Harry’s arm and began to walk quickly along the gully. ‘The Sontarans are all identical clone-creatures,’ he explained, ‘composed of complex hypercatalysed polymers in conjunction with molecular...’
    ‘Complex whats ?’ Harry gasped. The Doctor threw him a reproachful glance. ‘Sorry, Doctor,’ he muttered. ‘Afraid my chemistry didn’t get that far...’
     
    The Doctor resumed his explanation, waving his arms in the air and speaking so rapidly that Harry soon gave up trying to understand him. As he strode along, the Doctor held forth for several minutes, so absorbed in his subject that he was quite oblivious of Harry’s attempts to interrupt.
    ‘... and so their brains are rather like seaweed and their lungs are made from a kind of spongy steel-wool,’ he at last concluded, suddenly stopping to look up at the sky.
    ‘But where do they come from?’ asked Harry.
    ‘No one quite knows,’ the Doctor replied, taking from one of his pockets the piece of Terullian he had picked up at the edge of the pit, and gently rubbing it with his thumb. ‘They have not been reported in this galaxy since the Middle Ages.’ Suddenly, the small metallic fragment began to vibrate with a sound like that made by a glass tumbler when its rim is stroked with a moistened finger.
    ‘I wonder what mischief they can be up to now, Harry,’
    the Doctor murmured, glancing round at the barren landscape.
    Harry had been mesmerised by the eerie, ringing sound coming from the Doctor’s hand. Suddenly he pulled himself together. ‘One of them has got Sarah trapped in some kind of...’
    The Doctor swung round on him sharply. ‘Sarah Jane...
    ?’ he cried. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ Harry shrugged in confusion. The Doctor thrust the Terullian fragment into his pocket and gathered up his scarf-ends. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded.
    Just as Harry opened his mouth to reply, an unearthly, piercing shriek rang out and echoed through the ravines.
    ‘Sarah!’ the Doctor gasped. Instantly he started off up the side of the ravine, slipping and sliding as he disappeared over the top of the ridge.
    ‘Doctor, she’s trapped: you can’t reach her,’ Harry called, but the Doctor had gone. Wearily, Harry set off in pursuit.
     
    The Doctor stared in dismay through the impenetrable barrier stretched between the rocky buttresses. ‘My poor Sarah Jane,’ he murmured. ‘Whatever have they done to you...’
    Sarah’s body lay motionless in the centre of the alcove, her limbs contorted and rigid, her face streaked with tears and dust, and her eyes wide open but unseeing, without a flicker of life. The Doctor soon located the two small discs of Terullian mounted one on each side of the narrow entrance to Sarah’s prison. He began to pace furiously up and down.
    ‘A fluctuating geon field!’ he cried, pounding the invisible barrier with his fist as he passed. ‘I had no idea that Sontaran technology had progressed so far.’
    Flushed with anger, he stopped and peered in at the inert figure of his young friend. ‘A great pity that their morals have not kept pace with their science,’ he muttered.
    He drew the battered ear-trumpet from his pocket and held it against one of the buttresses. As he listened, his brow furrowed with concentration, he began to solve a dazzling series of equations in his head. Eventually, he stuffed the ear-trumpet away and using the coloured divisions of his scarf, measured the distance between the two Terullian discs, taking great