Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment Read Online Free PDF Page B

hole. He thrust the shorter end into Roth’s trembling hands and motioned Sarah to take hold as well. Before she could protest, he had flung the longer end of the scarf into the pit and was preparing to climb down.
    ‘Hang on,’ he cried, ‘I shan’t be long.’
    Sarah looked at him in horror. ‘Doctor,’ she shouted, ‘if you fall, we’ll never get you out.’
    The Doctor gave a swashbuckling wave of his hat. ‘I’m sure you won’t let me down,’ he cried, and slid abruptly out of sight.
    Sarah watched the thick, woollen stitching stretch into a taut, narrow rope as it took the Doctor’s considerable weight. The turns about the spike of rock held, and Roth and Sarah felt the vibrations of the scarf as the Doctor lowered himself down, hand over hand.
    ‘I hope it’s long enough,’ Sarah murmured. She turned to Roth. His swarthy face had gone deathly pale. Suddenly he began to gibber, his whole body shaking.
    ‘Na... na... na...’ he muttered.
    Then Sarah heard it: the undulating hum of the Scavenger approaching over the boulders behind them.
    She clung tightly to the vibrating scarf. ‘Doctor,’ she screamed, ‘it’s here... it’s here...’ There was a sudden hissing through the air and a segmented strand of wire lashed itself around her wrist, gripping it so fiercely that in a few seconds her hand was completely numbed. With another whiplike sound, Roth was similarly caught. The scarf slipped from their grasp and started to unwind from its anchorage around the stump. There came a muffled cry from the pit and the scarf went slack.
    Sick with fright, Sarah glanced round. The robot was hovering a few metres away, at the head of the ravine, its baleful, electronic eye fixed on her and Roth. It swivelled its scanner and all but wrenched them off their feet as it rose and began to glide away out of the ravine, drawing the defenceless humans screaming and stumbling in its wake.
    The Doctor lay among the tangled reeds and boulders, the end of the scarf loose in his limp hands. Blood welled up from a deep gash in his ashen forehead. The breath gurgled in his throat, and he lay utterly still.
    Harry felt his way along a tortuously narrow fissure which led first upwards and then downwards; to the right and then to the left, and which sometimes twisted round and round in a spiral. The heat was rapidly becoming unbearable, and he could scarcely touch the sides of the shaft. The strange rhythmic pulses surging through the rocky labyrinth were beating in his head like a monstrous drum, and the suffocating fumes grew thicker at every step.
    As he stumbled through the choking fog, Harry felt the tunnel begin to open out. The drumming gradually reached a climax, and he suddenly found himself in a kind of chamber which was dimly lit by a natural phosphorescence of the rock walls and roof. In the centre of the chamber floor, huge, murky bubbles were forming in a pool of hot, viscous mud and bursting in clouds of dense gas whose detonations echoed around the network of tunnels.
    Clasping his handkerchief tightly over his nose and mouth, Harry began to skirt round the sides of the molten cauldron, seeking a way out of the chamber. Suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks, pressing himself back as close as he dared to the scorching rock, and straining to see through the acrid gloom.
    Something was splashing heavily about in the middle of the bubbling lava. The hair prickled on Harry’s neck as he detected a slow, ponderous breathing sound above the noise of the exploding bubbles. He could see nothing. His head was reeling with the intense heat, and for a moment Harry feared he might collapse into the boiling mud. The splashing stopped. His heart hammering against his ribs, Harry listened to the monstrous, laboured breathing only a few metres away from him. He fought desperately against the choking cough trying to rise in his throat.
    Suddenly, the ground shook under his feet as something began to move away with a stamping