Doctor Who BBCN17 - Sick Building Read Online Free PDF

felt as if she had indeed been pampered from top to toe and, what was more, she was looking forward to a civilised dinner.
    ‘I’m just a bit wound up,’ he sighed.
    ‘By Tiermann?’
    ‘I hate people putting on airs like that,’ the Doctor said. ‘I don’t like his pomposity and his hubris and his. . . cockiness. Even when he knows everything here in this valley. . . the Dreamhome, the woods and everything, it’s all going to be sucked up and stripped away, right into the waiting maw of the Voracious Craw. Hey, that rhymes.’
    ‘He’s a strange one, all right,’ Martha said. ‘But I think, underneath all the showing off, he’s pretty conflicted.’
    ‘I should cocoa,’ said the Doctor, coming to examine his own tousled reflection in the mirror.
    ‘It’ll be hard for him, leaving here,’ said Martha. ‘Supposedly he’s put his whole life into creating this environment. Surely he won’t give all that up, without a fight?’
    ‘Oh, there’s no fighting when it comes to the Voracious Craw,’ the Doctor told her. ‘It’s a case of run away very quickly indeed, or be sucked up into the sky with everything else animal, vegetable and mineral, and be turned into the biggest and nastiest smoothie in the world. Tiermann’s not daft. He knows he has to go. We all have to go.’
    The Doctor grinned at her and turned to lead the way out of their sumptuous suite of rooms. His words had sent a chill through Martha, however, as he brought home the danger that they were all in, just by staying here till the last moment. She thought that the Doctor was putting them both at risk, just as Tiermann was his family. The TARDIS
    was still back there, somewhere, in the dark heart of the frozen wilderness. Shouldn’t they be setting about retrieving it?
    But Martha took a deep, calming breath and decided that the Doctor probably knew best. She tested out walking in her new, exquisite shoes, and turned to follow her friend in to dinner.
    25

    Tiermann’s wife was called Amanda, and the first impression that the Doctor and Martha had of her was that she was very beautiful, but very quiet and demure.
    ‘Small wonder,’ the Doctor whispered, ‘the way her old man keeps rabbiting on.’
    Martha shushed him, as the canapé robot slid by, delectable nibbles arranged on his flattened head.
    But it was quite true about Tiermann. He kept pacing up and down, spouting off about the wonders of the Dreamhome and his ubiquitous Servo-furnishings. As he stood by the fireplace, holding forth about everything he had invented, Martha could sense the Doctor’s hackles rising as his irritation mounted.
    Now Tiermann was bragging about the ship that had brought them to this world, and that would bear them safely away. ‘I designed it myself, so many years ago. And its design still has never been surpassed.
    Here we are a few parsecs from Station Antelope Slash Nitelite, and that is where we will make our way to. They’ll be very glad to see us and our miraculous craft, I am sure.’
    Amanda Tiermann sat in a high-necked dress with flowing sleeves, cradling a tall glass filled to the brim with a foaming blue concoction.
    27

    She smiled gently at Tiermann’s braggardly statements and occasional jokes, but she volunteered few comments of her own. On being intro-duced to the Doctor and Martha she had simply said that she was delighted, and that they had had very few guests at Dreamhome over the years. Her eyes were a brilliant emerald, Martha noted, and there was a glint in them of. . . what? She wondered. Apology? Fear?
    Pleading? Something, at any rate, that Amanda could not express in front of her swaggering husband.
    Solin, too, was quiet this evening. He was in a dark green suit and he seemed wary and watchful of his father.
    ‘I’m just not convinced that you’ve made adequate plans for your escape, y’know,’ said the Doctor airily. Martha saw Solin flinch at the way the Doctor interrupted his father’s flow.
    ‘Oh, really,