Red for Danger (short story) was the first prose story in The Dalek Book and the second overall. It followed directly from the events in the comic strip Invasion of the Daleks. It showed the Stone siblings' first victory, however minor, against the Daleks.
Summary
Months after the capture of his two siblings, Andy Stone is still hiding out from the Daleks on Venus. He's managed to follow a few Dalek press gangs around and glean some information about the whereabouts of his brother and sister. Finally, an elderly man the Daleks left to die on the side of a road-building project gives him the clue he needs to find Jeff. The man's final words lead Andy to one of the few smelting plants on the planet. The Daleks, he discovers, are mining lead. In a hurry.
He works out that Jeff must've been taken to the plant because he's a mineralogist. When he sneaks into the mine, he manages to find his brother after a bit of a search. Jeff appears to be in control of a new painting process that will help the Daleks combat the rust that the moist planet of Venus engenders. By enriching paint with Venus' red lead, the Daleks will become effectively immune to rust. Jeff communicates with his brother, still hiding in the shadows, to give him a container filled with sodium azide. Andy doesn't understand why his brother is making the request, but he complies. Jeff mixes it with something else and dumps it into the paint. He talks to the lead Dalek, and convinces him that they should repaint all the Daleks at once. The head Dalek agrees, and everyone gets a new paint job.
A few short minutes later, the Daleks are incapacitated, allowing Jeff and Andy to sneak out of the mine to freedom. When Andy asks Jeff to explain, the mineralogists says that he combined the sodium azide with lead salt to make the micro-explosive lead azide. Once the paint job hardened in the hot Venusian sun, the lead azide crystals fractured, causing thousands of tiny explosions, which proved quite disorienting to the Daleks.
The brothers have a good laugh over this before setting off to find their sister.
Characters
References
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Notes
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Continuity
- The Daleks are seen to be building metal roads all over Venus. This implies they needed electrically conductive surfaces on which to travel — something confirmed in a later story in the book.
Timeline
This story happens immediately after DAN: Invasion of the Daleks and before The Oil Well.