Ace went and stood over the hole in the floor.

Looking down into it she could see the struggling shape of Butcher, about twenty metres below, writhing and squirming in the pliant embrace of the soft transparent tube. At least he'd stopped screaming, though she could still hear frantic breathing, choking gasps of air that sounded like an exhausted dog panting after a long run.

102.'Poor bloke,' she said. 'This really must be mind-blowing for him. And I bet the drug isn't helping.'

'What drug?' said the Doctor, his face a picture of polite puzzlement.

'The hallucinogenic drug you gave him. The peyote.'

'I didn't give him any peyote. I merely told him that.'

'It wasn't true?'

'No, I just wanted it as a kind of get-out clause. In case he couldn't deal with the experience of visiting this alien s.p.a.cecraft. If he thinks it's all a peyote vision it will allow him to rationalise it afterwards, if necessary, and preserve his world view intact.'

'What was in his sandwich, then?' said Ace.

'Guacamole.'

There was an inarticulate cry from the open hole in the floor, followed by a rush of air, and Butcher came sailing up into the chamber like a champagne cork from a bottle. The tentacle mechanism had presumably finally lost patience with his stubborn resistance and simply shot him into the craft at high speed. Butcher hovered, scrambling and twisting in mid-air for an instant, struggling frantically, with an expression of loathing and lost horror on his face that Ace couldn't help feeling was rather comical.

The hole in the floor sealed itself before gravity brought Butcher crashing down again, onto a smooth, solid, surface that shone with a mother of pearl iridescence. The man sat there for a moment, his eyes squeezed shut, cursing savagely in the most profane language imaginable. Ace turned to the Doctor and whispered, 'Gordon Bennett. And I thought he was such a nice boy.'

'I think it's a very positive sign,' said the Doctor. He didn't return Ace's whisper but spoke instead in a normal voice. 'It's certainly a lot more encouraging than that pitiful screaming and moaning.'

Butcher heard what the Doctor was saying of course and he opened his eyes. He stared at the Doctor and anger suddenly replaced the look of despair on his face. And this was, thought Ace, exactly what the Doctor wanted.

'Who's pitiful?' said Butcher hoa.r.s.ely.

'Well you must admit it was rather shameful behaviour for a grown man.'

Butcher stared around himself, like a trapped animal looking for a way out.

It was clear that he wasn't going to find one. 'Aren't you going to ask where you are?' said the Doctor. Butcher stopped twisting his head around and fixed his gaze on the Doctor.

'All right,' he rasped, 'where am I?'

'You're on board a ship,' said Ace.

'A ship? Nonsense.' Butcher wiped his hand across his face and studied the thick coating of sweat that came off on it. 'We're in the middle of the 103New Mexico desert.' He uttered this last sentence like a child repeating its catechism.

'When Ace says ship, what she actually means is an aircraft.'

'Aircraft?' Butcher staggered to his feet. 'Nonsense.' He weaved around like a man who was drunk, or who had spent months at sea and was having trouble adjusting to dry land. 'This is no aircraft.'

'Not of the sort you're accustomed to, true,' said the Doctor. 'But perhaps you've heard of Foo Fighters?'

'What if I have?' Butcher made a visible effort to pull himself together. He stood still, trying to bring his weaving under control, and stared fixedly at the Doctor. Ace suspected that he was doing this because he didn't dare look around and acknowledge the reality of his surroundings.

She tried to catch Butcher's eye and give him a rea.s.suring smile; she had begun to feel sorry for the poor bloke, who was obviously well out of his depth. But Butcher refused to look her way, and Ace got fed up with trying.

Instead she turned to the Doctor and said, 'I thought the Foo Fighters were a band? Sort of a Nirvana spin-off.'

'Quite possibly, quite possibly. But before that they were the earliest precur-sors of the flying-saucer craze, first spotted by American aircraft during this war. In August 1944, for example, over the Indian Ocean, by the crew of a US bomber, and in December of that year over Hagenau in Alsace-Lorraine, Germany, by the crew of a fighter.'

'How did you know about that?' demanded Butcher. 'That's cla.s.sified information.'

There now,' said the Doctor delightedly, 'that's more like it, Major. Just cling to that sense of bureaucratic outrage and inst.i.tutionalised paranoia. It will make what is about to happen so much easier for you to process.'

'Why,' said Ace. 'What's about to happen?'

'We're going to meet the pilot of the ship,' said the Doctor.

At first Butcher refused to follow them. Ace and the Doctor started down the pearly curve of the corridor that led from the arrival chamber away into the depths of the ship. Butcher just sat down on the floor and wouldn't budge.

'What are you doing?' said Ace.

'I know my rights as a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention.'

'You are not a prisoner and the Geneva Convention isn't really relevant. As far as we are concerned, the war has ceased,' explained the Doctor patiently.

'That's treason,' said Butcher.

'Oh please, Major. All I am saying is that we are on neutral territory, as if we were standing on Swiss soil.'

'We're not standing on soil and this isn't Switzerland.'

104.'Don't be so literal-minded Bulldog Bozo,' said Ace.

The Doctor took her gently by the elbow. 'Now, Ace. If the Major really doesn't feel up to exploring the rest of this craft just yet then I suggest we honour his wishes.'

'All right, we'll leave the little baby in here to hide.'

'Now, Ace.' The Doctor led her out of the arrival chamber. The corridor spiralled through the nacreous ma.s.s of the ship, clouds of moving colours pulsing and changing in the transparent walls around them. The corridor was egg-shaped in section, broad at the bottom and tapered at the top. Ace reached out to touch the wall and it felt warm and sleek, but not smooth. She could feel a detailed roughness to the texture of it, almost like patting the sleek hide of some lithe marine creature, a seal perhaps.

They eventually arrived, after a long spiralling course, in a chamber sunk deep in the glowing pearly depths of the ship.

This chamber was lit by a strangely elegant-looking chandelier, a glowing light fixture that looked to Ace like some kind of curious alien jellyfish. The chandelier had long glowing tubes that radiated out across the flat ceiling, illuminating the dish-shaped chamber. The walls of the room curved down to a flat floor with a dimpled hemisphere in it. This concave hemisphere differed from the rest of the vessel in that it was more sharply transparent and no colours danced through it. 'That's the c.o.c.kpit, is it?' said Ace.

'Very perceptive,' murmured the Doctor. 'Well done.'

'Well obviously we were headed for the control room, so this must be it, eh?'

'It must be,' said the Doctor. He was looking up at the chandelier. The light from it was so bright he had to squint. The Doctor took off his hat and shaded his eyes with it. His shadowed eyes regarded Ace fondly. 'Would you like to take a look through it?'

'Good idea.' Ace wandered over to the hole in the floor and stared down through the transparent dimple at the ground below. She could make out the dark slope of the hill, thick with the darker shapes of pine trees, and the bright flicker of the campfire with the shadows of the three Apaches sitting beside it.

She also saw something else. 'Doctor. . . '

'What?' The Doctor came over to join her. 'Did you see something?'

'That.' Ace pointed at the tentacle jutting from the ship, waving gracefully high above the pine-clad slopes. It moved with the sinuous strength of a giant snake, an eerie rainbow of colours pulsating through it. 'It's like seeing the Northern Lights inside a jelly.'

'Highly poetic, Ace. In fact, it's the same kind of tentacle as those that brought us aboard.'

'You, me and the cowardly Major.'

105.'You shouldn't be so hard on poor Rex.'

'Rex? Is that his name? He is a bulldog.'

'The poor man is in a situation which is utterly beyond anything in his experience.'

'He's a wimp.'

'Really, Ace. You should feel sorry for him.'

'I did, but he's so suspicious and hostile. He doesn't want to trust us. He doesn't like us.'

'That's his job. Not to like us or trust us.'

Ace watched the tentacle, as thick in section as an industrial chimney, snaking below them, a glowing shape streaming above the dark pine slopes, retracting its opalescent length back into the ship to the stern of them. 'Maybe, but he doesn't have to always behave like we're spies and he's the great detective whose going to find us out.'

'But in a sense we are spies. And he is if not a great then at least a very good detective.'

The tentacle was shrinking rapidly as it retracted. While Ace and the Doctor watched, the last few metres of its length disappeared silently back into the hull somewhere behind them.

'But, hang on a minute,' said Ace. 'If those tentacles bring people on board, and that one just arrived. . . ' She turned and looked at the Doctor. 'Are we expecting company?'

'We're certainly not,' he said. 'Or at least I'm not. How about you?'

'No way. So then who just came up inside that tentacle?'

Ace received the answer almost immediately, as Major Butcher came scoot-ing into the control room. 'Ah, welcome Major,' said the Doctor. 'I'm glad you could join us at last.'

'Anything to get away from that drunken fool,' snapped Butcher.

Despite her dislike of the Major, Ace felt relieved that he was back to his perpetually angry self. The helpless creature they'd left in the arrivals chamber had alarmed her more than she cared to admit.

'What drunken fool?'

'Major Butcher's talking about me, baby,' said Cosmic Ray Morita as he came loping down the corridor that led into the glowing chamber. 'Hey, man, this is really quite some place. A really cool pad, daddy-o.' Ray looked a little dishevelled, his lurid shirt stained here and there and his beret askew. He was clutching a sloshing and foamy bottle of mescal.

'So you woke up, Ray,' said the Doctor. 'What a pleasant surprise. I suppose you decided you couldn't just simply stay in that nice comfortable cave and sleep.'

106.'How could I, with this thing hovering overhead, daddy-o? I had to take a look. I saw those things come down to pick you up. I was watching from the cave, baby. I'd been sleeping off the mescal. But the lights woke me up. Those groovy lights, man. I looked out of the cave and I saw you do this.' He lifted his beret off his head. 'And that thing came down and picked you up. So after I worked up my nerve, man, I came out and tried it.' He lifted his beret again and grinned. 'And it worked, man! And here I am.'

'But where are?' said Butcher. 'That's the question.'

'We've already told you the answer Major,' said the Doctor.

'Some twaddle about little green men from outer s.p.a.ce.'

Ray chuckled drunkenly. 'But obviously it's some kind of a ship, man.'

'A ship?' Butcher laughed. 'That's the same kind of nonsense they were trying to get me to swallow.'

'It is. Look around you. A s.p.a.ceship. Extraterrestrial craft, daddy-o.'

'c.r.a.p,' said Butcher.

'Look at the floor,' said the Doctor. 'You see that large dimple in it. Go and peer out, or rather down. Go ahead Major. You can see the ground below. The hillside where you were standing just a little while ago.'

Butcher peered down through the clear dome in the belly of the ship. He stared down at the Apaches on the hillside. All he said was, 'There are those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who got the drop on me. They wouldn't have been so c.o.c.ky without their rifles.'

'I might have to disagree with you there, Major. But that's not the issue at hand. Look at that structure you're peering through. What does it remind you of?'

Butcher stared into the transparent hemisphere. He said, 'Gun turret in the belly of a bomber?'

'Precisely.'

Butcher grinned. Colour was returning to his face after a prolonged absence. His confidence seemed to grow with every word. 'So, it's like a B29 bomber for little green men?'

'If you like, yes. Although less warlike a.n.a.logies would be more appropriate.

Luckily for us all, this craft is not dedicated to killing.'

'Then where are the little green men?'

'Zorg,' said the Doctor. And for a moment Ace had no idea what this mono-syllable might mean. Then the lights in the room started to flicker and everyone looked up at the ceiling where the chandelier glowed. The chandelier was twitching and curling, the long tube-lamps that spread across the ceiling were retreating and shooting back into the glowing centre of it. As they retreated, the uniform light in the room shrank to a glow on the ceiling, centred on the sphere at the heart of the 'chandelier'. The tentacles were absorbed back into 107it in a fashion that reminded Ace of something. Then she realised what it was.

Like the transport tentacles that had brought them onto the ship.

The glowing ball in the middle of the ceiling flashed with coloured lightning and suddenly began to swell downwards. 'What's happening?' said Butcher in a worried voice. 'What's happening to the light in here?'

A blob of opalescent jelly was bulging down from the ceiling, shot through with scarlet and azure and piercing green. It was like wax melting, a flood of glowing gel that reached the floor and formed a large mound that stratified and solidified and took on a new shape utterly different from, yet strangely reminiscent of, the jellyfish chandelier that had been clinging to the ceiling.

Finally the thing took on the form of a huge crablike creature, with soft, giant limbs that hinged in odd ways. It had a face, of sorts, in the middle of its stomach, and the face made a horrible attempt to smile.

'Greetings, Zoctor,' said the thing.

'Ace, allow me to introduce Zostrathnia Otocr Regus Gelb. Zorg to his friends.'

'Greetings Zace,' said the thing, shuffling its numerous limbs so its pearly, bulbous obscenity of a body was facing her. The thought of a crab that big, even a dazzlingly beautiful one with flashes of radiant colour, made Ace feel queasy. The disgusting pliancy of its limbs, the fatness of its torso. Ace had seen plenty of aliens, but if she wasn't careful this one would give her the heebie-jeebies. Maybe it was that horrid approximation of a face where no face should be. She decided that thinking of it as a kind of giant crab was at least better than the other thought that came to mind a huge soft jelly of a giant tarantula, wobbling around full of venom. Ace very firmly put the giant tarantula thought away and concentrated on thinking of Zorg as the intelligent alien life form he it? so clearly was. It sounded like a he.

Indeed when the creature spoke, its voice had a perfect command of English, in a pleasantly low-pitched masculine voice. It was a smooth and clear voice, yet there was something disturbingly unmodulated about it. Ace wondered if this alien blandness of expression came from the creature itself, or was a consequence of some kind of device it was using as a translator.

'And who are my other guests?' said Zorg. As it spoke, the thing scuttled around like a giant crab. It glowed with inner light, as though it had radiant bodily fluids circulating in its transparent sh.e.l.l. Colours flashed through the creature as they did in its ship, violet and green flashes of miniature lightning.