400

Once safely away from the Time Machine you cut in the Ion Drive and accelerate gradually to Mach 6 with a loud bang as you break the sound barrier. The journey takes just overhalf an hour and you hurtle towards the night sky ahead of you and catch it up. The night is cloudy and dark by the time you have located the city. It is lit by torches and appears to be a strange mixture of golden-roofed palaces, wooden dwellings and magnificent tents, called yurts. You land the flyer at the mouth of a cave near the city, don the disguise of a Mongol warrior (prepared in the Molecular Converter), and take the flyer's Homing Beacon with you. As you slip into the city there are sounds of revelry everywhere. You overhear the whispered conversation between the city gate guards. Through your Translator you make out that the celebrations are due to the miraculous recovery of Ogedai Khan, who had been given up for dead.

Suddenly your Psychic Awareness alerts you. The black disc- like flyer, which you saw earlier, hisses overhead, invisible in the dark night. The Time Lord is returning to Vienna and the Time Machine. In the city, there is a sudden clashing of cymbals and a row of torches is brought out onto a balcony high up on the largest palace. A figure appears, flanked by guards, and you hear the cry, 'Ogedai, Ogedai Khan!', go up from the huge crowd gathered before the palace. If you do not kill Ogedai, Europe will be ravaged by the mongols and civilisation as you know it will never have been. As you draw nearer to the palace you see two guards outside its gate. At close quarters you see that they are short and well-built. Dark, slanted eyes stare out from flat, yellow faces, marked by high cheekbones and small noses with flaring nostrils. The greasy black plaits of one of them are crawling with lice. From their smell you guess they do not wash. Do you: