The Mind of The Daleks

Chapter 4: Background

Five minutes passed. Then with a sudden jerk the van growled into life and began to move, bumping and bouncing over the unpaved earth.

"I don't get it," someone grumbled near the front. "Why didn't they just take us while we were in the bus instead of going to the trouble of making us walk here?"

"Because a bus is traceable," explained the stranger's voice, very near to where Isabel crouched. "Anyone will notice if it's in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if the bus was to crash, and then maybe go up in flames, then no one will know quite what happened to the passengers; they can disappear so much more easily, you know."

"What's going to happen to us?" someone groaned.

"I'm scared!" someone else confessed in a whisper, and it did not sound foolish or childish in the circumstances.

Suddenly a little glimmer of white light shone from the other side of the van. Isabel blinked.

"I can keep it on for a few minutes, but the battery's low, so maybe we can take turns." The light shone for an instant onto the face of the teenager who had insisted on keeping his IPod, and Isabel could now understand why he had; that little light made all the difference.

"Oh, I shouldn't think that they'll take us very far," said the man in the long jacket reflectively. "They wouldn't have bothered to set up that interesting little trap at a great distance from wherever it is they want us."

"So it was a trap?" asked Isabel. "I wondered. I mean, these were the construction vehicles that were at that detour when things started to go wrong."

"Yes, exactly." The stranger gave her an absent smile. "And how else would they know where to find you so quickly? But are you sure that that was when things started to go wrong?"

"I don't get it," a woman said. "I mean, they just – just killed that poor man without a second thought. It wasn't even self-defense; they were big enough to overpower him without killing him. And they didn't even regret it at all."

"Yeah," said the teen with the IPod. "What are they? Robots programmed to kill on sight or something?"

"That's what I was wondering," put in the man who had led the exit from the bus with the quietness of someone who doesn't in the least underestimate his enemy. "Where did they come from? Who programmed them?"

Everyone craned around to look at the stranger – the only one who seemed to know anything – but he sat silent, deep in thought. The van jolted again and then they were travelling on paved road instead of sand. The light that gleamed from the teen's IPod went out and without a word someone else switched on the yellower and dimmer beam of a flashlight.

"Frankly, I don't care where they came from," sighed the young nurse from the University Hospital. "What I want to know is; how can we get away? I mean, things like this just don't happen, not in the middle of a city. Twenty-eight people can't disappear off the face of the earth without an explanation; don't they get that someone's got to start looking for us before long?"

"Oh, I shouldn't think that they intend to keep us alive long enough for anyone to find us," the stranger contributed discouragingly.

"But before that," she continued, an edge of fear in her voice. "How are we going to get away? We've got to be able to communicate with the authorities somehow."

"Ahem." The little man gave a diffident cough. "Well, I shall try to think of something, but I'm afraid that there are a good many other, more important things on my mind at the moment, such as-"