Doctor Who (13 page)

Two months previously, Swan and Luis had driven together in his little red van to a farm in Allegany County. The family was auctioning their equipment, their land already sold. Luis and Swan walked past a small crowd examining the tractors and trucks that would be up on the block later that afternoon. The genuine auction was a cover for a rather less ordinary sale taking place in one of the farm's big sheds.

There were a dozen people there, sitting on folding chairs they had brought with them. Luis spread his big jacket on a bale of hay and he and Swan sat down side by side.

She recognised some of the faces. Swan had only a rough idea of who the other buyers were, a mix of collectors, incognito scientists, conspiracy theorists, and spies. These little auctions were held on an irregular schedule, always masked by some other big sale: last time it had been an office building selling off its desks and filing cabinets. Swan and Luis had sold one or two items over the years, but usually, they were here to buy.

The lots were presented by a soft-voiced young man in a dark suit who mostly looked at the ground; he always made her think of attendants at a funeral, their insistent solemnity. The resemblance would have been better if it hadn't been for his punk hair, a wave of metallic red that sparkled with golden highlights. Despite her not inconsiderable efforts, Swan had never managed to find out exactly who he was.

Today's selection was fairly typical. Plenty of circuit boards with suspicious pedigrees. A box of floppy disks that bore the label of a major researcher – bidding was fierce for that lot. More disks and some printouts of stuff downloaded from milnet. Part of what looked like the controls of a helicopter, labelled in Cyrillic script. Some of it had been brought by the bidders, but mostly it had filtered down through a grapevine of
thieves and collectors. The auctioneer set a starting price for each. He had a reputation for scrupulous fairness when it came to estimating the values of his wares.

The young man always saved the most eccentric items until last, like a sort of dessert course. They often included odd little inventions, specially modified computers, and things the auctioneer admitted he could not identify. People ventured the last of their mad money on cheap gewgaws which might turn out to be anything from an amusing toy to a genuine innovation.

Swan rarely bought anything at the auctions; she and Luis joked that she was waiting for the pearl of great price. He was mostly interested in antique technology; the little gems of early computing that sometimes surfaced at these sales made it well worth his while to attend. That day he bought a RAMAC 305, gloating over the primordial hard drive while the spies battled for the military stuff.

‘Our last item, ladies and gentlemen,' announced the auctioneer. He wore contact lenses that made his eyes appear an unnaturally bright blue. ‘Two objects of extraterrestrial origin.'

A little polite laughter as he displayed the two gadgets. They looked nothing like the serious machinery he had been selling all afternoon. They looked like gift shop baubles, or kid's toys.

‘I would like to start the bidding at five thousand dollars,' said the soft-voiced man.

That stopped the chuckling. The bidders glanced shyly at one another. What did the auctioneer know about those gizmos that they didn't?

Swan put up her hand for the first time that day. ‘Five thou,' she said loudly. The other bidders looked everywhere but at her.

‘Five five,' said someone, half-heartedly.

‘Six thou,' said Swan. Luis was grinning and nodding at her. There was nothing he loved better than a surprise, some mystery machine he could pull apart at home and decipher.

‘Um, six one?' said the other buyer, but Swan knew she had it.

‘Six five,' she said firmly.

Silence. ‘Going, going, gone,' murmured the auctioneer.

‘Dutch?' said Luis.

‘Of course,' said Swan.

They were each wearing a money belt tucked under their jackets. Luis had a thirty-eight special in his pocket as well, ‘Just to balance the weight of the money,' he always said. They counted hundred dollar bills into a manila envelope and handed it over to the auctioneer, who passed back a box containing their purchases without ever looking them in the eye.

That night, they flipped for who got what in the parking lot of a Denny's.

Luis's apartment always smelled of cinnamon, coffee, ozone, and dustbunnies. The spare bedroom where he kept his collection was tidy and clean to the point of sterility, but the rest of the flat was always in need of vacuuming and polishing. Swan found the smell comforting, the smell of a place that's lived in. Her own house smelled of paint and empty rooms.

They hung up their coats and Luis went to the kitchen to boil up some strong Mexican coffee to warm them. The cardboard box they had brought home from the auction all those months ago was sitting on the living room table.

Swan opened the box, gingerly. The device Luis had chosen was still inside, nestled in layers of blue crepe paper. Its dark
green-blue surface was covered in lighter tracings that looked like a cross between printed circuits and Tolkien's Elvish writing. It was bigger than her fist, maybe six inches long, a round shape pointed a little at one end.

And it was broken. When Swan had last seen it, it was a heavy handful. She had assumed it was nothing more than a decoration, like one of those polished crystals you could get, with some artist's idea of circuits etched into the surface: an artsy gift for the computer lover. She had been more than happy to leave it in Luis's hands and take the much more intriguing multicoloured device for herself.

Now the object had cracked into three large pieces. Instead of a single weighty lump, all that was left were those three chunks, maybe a quarter of an inch thick; the centre was hollow. Swan picked up one of the pieces. It was tough, smooth on the outside except for the lines of etching, crinkled and wrinkled inside. The inner texture made her think of the whorls and soft complexities of a brain.

Luis grinned at her from the kitchen doorway as she looked up at him. ‘Your Easter egg hatched,' she said.

He raised his eyebrows, enjoying her surprise. ‘More about that later,' he said, putting down a cup of rich coffee in front of her. ‘Tell me about these smartasses who are making your life difficult.'

‘They read my email. They read my frigging
email
, man,' she said. Swan took a long drag on the coffee, seemingly not bothered that it was seething hot. ‘They broke into my work machine and they kicked me out while they were doing it.'

Luis was the only person in the world she would ever admit something like that to. He listened quietly as she outlined the Doctor's antics, how he had taken away the device from under her nose, how she had followed Bob. ‘They know stuff about western Maryland that we don't,' she said. ‘I have worked and
worked on the device, and I've got no idea of how it works or what it's supposed to do. I've pestered collectors all over the country. All I've found out is that there are supposed to be three more of those devices. Five components making up a single machine.' She pushed the heels of her palms against her eyes. ‘I think the Doctor is working for the original owners. They want their crap back.' Luis shrugged with his face. ‘Don't gimme that!' said Swan. ‘We paid good money for those items. It's us against them. And we're gonna be the ones who win.' She slammed both palms down on the table. In the dim light her pupils looked like a pair of black marbles.

‘
¡Cálmate!
' said Luis. ‘Think it over. They have given themselves away to you. You'll be able to learn from them where the other parts of this strange machine are. And in the meantime, we still have one of its components. A good one.'

‘Luis,' she said, looking down into the box, ‘what the hell was inside this thing?'

With a conspiratorial wink, he got up and crooked a finger to her. Swan put the box down on the table and followed him.

Luis put his finger to his lips. Very carefully, he turned the knob of the bathroom door. Swan craned her neck, trying to see around him. Luis trod softly into the cramped bathroom and, very slowly and gently, began to pull back the shower curtain.

The first thing Swan saw were the gadgets lined up on the rim of the tub. There was one of those plastic trays across the tub, piled with half-disassembled radios, Walkmen, circuit boards, Tandy hobby kits. There was more stuff in the dry tub.

It took her a long moment to see, really see, what was sitting in the bath along with all that junk. Her first thought was that Luis had fished a mermaid out of the half-frozen Potomac.

The thing in the tub was shaped roughly like the letter ‘Y'. It had long, raised scales, or perhaps short, stiff feathers. What
Swan had taken for its tail seemed to actually be its head: a long cylinder rearing up above the other two limbs. Each of those held several pieces of an autopsied television set, as well as a couple of screwdrivers and some lengths of wire. Swan couldn't see how it was hanging onto so many things at once – she couldn't see hands, or fingers. Perhaps the scale-feathers did the gripping?

It didn't have a face. There was a truncated beak the colour of mahogany that looked as if it had been pushed into the flesh behind the dirty yellow feather-scales. She couldn't see eyes, ears, a nose, anything but the dull beak.

‘Jesus, Luis,' she said. ‘What do you feed that thing?'

Luis put the toilet lid down and sat on it. ‘The only thing it seems to like is Kosher Pareve fruit loops.'

‘You can't give it human food.'

‘It wouldn't eat anything else. Anyway, think of how little the egg was. It's thriving.'

Swan stared at the animal. It didn't stare back, turning a piece of circuitry over and over at the end of a cylindrical limb. ‘Do you think it knows we're talking about it?'

‘I don't think it cares. All that interests it is mechanical things, electronic things. I gave it an alarm clock and a child's toy telephone and it plucked them apart.'

Swan leaned against the wall, the towelrack pressing into her back. ‘OK,' she admitted. ‘You got me. I'm impressed.'

‘We should leave it alone,' said Luis, but he didn't get up. ‘That coffee must be done.'

‘I don't want to go out,' said Swan. ‘I want to watch it.' She gave a little shudder, as though waking up out of a daydream. ‘I guess I want to convince myself it's real.'

‘It's a fascinating little thing, isn't it?' said Luis. ‘Sometimes I find myself watching it for hours. I watch it take some
appliance apart and put it back together again, over and over.'

‘Just like its daddy,' said Swan. Neither of them moved, and in the kitchen, boiling coffee sludge escaped its saucepan and spread across the stovetop.

Bob called the number for the Eridani's bolthole again and again, but each time all he heard was ringing, a click, and a sort of screeching that got louder and softer.

‘Do we have to move again?' said a weary Peri, stuffing her few possessions into a shoulderbag.

‘We've gotta get off the grid,' said Bob. ‘Isolate ourselves. Swan's all over the phone system like a rash.'

We went through the whole routine one more time: checkout, sneak out the back way leaving the rent-a-car in the parking lot, taxi to yet another car place. Bob paid cash for the remains of a '71 Travco (‘designed and appointed to assure the finest in plush living for two people') and loaded it up with what remained of his nuclear survival kit. The RV looked like the unnatural offspring of a caravan trailer and a school bus. ‘We got one heavily armoured recreational vehicle here, man!' enthused Bob.

‘How are we going to find the Doctor?' said Peri.

Bob said, ‘We're gonna mail him a letter.'

Meanwhile, the man in question was sitting in his rented Mercedes, looking up at a cop.

He had got out of the Eridani's apartment building with seconds to spare: just as he was about to knock on their door, he heard the elevator doors ping across the hallway and saw the blue of uniforms inside. He hoofed it down the concrete stairs of the emergency exit two at a time and slid back into his car in the basement garage.

He was sure there was no way the police could have spotted him. But he was pulled over not five minutes after leaving the building. The police car and his car were sitting on the shoulder of the Beltway, the rest of the traffic shooting past in Dopplered spurts.

‘Can I see your licence? Please? Sir?' said the cop. He and his partner, sitting back in the patrol car, were a pair of grim blond body-builders who looked like they'd been stamped out of the same mould, like Smurfs.

‘Of course, officer.' The Doctor fished around in his jacket pockets, pulling out all sorts of identity cards, spare change, and junk, until he found a wallet containing four American dollars, ten Scottish pounds, an autographed picture of Grace Murray Hopper and a current Maryland driver's licence. The policeman wordlessly wandered back to his car and handed the piece of plastic to his clone.

In that moment when their eyes were off him, the Doctor reached over and opened the glovebox. He knew it was a dangerous thing to do; if they noticed the movement, they would assume he was reaching for a weapon, getting it ready to use.

He was.

The cop was back. ‘You don't mind if we search the vehicle, sir?' he said.

‘Of course not, officer. Always more than happy to co-operate with the authorities in pursuit of their duty.' The Doctor got out of the car and stood near the bonnet while the pair of patrolmen sniffed around the trunk and then the glovebox.

The cop straightened up and showed his partner the Eridani device over the roof of the car. ‘What do we have here?' he said.

‘Seems like we found what we were looking for,' said the other cop. ‘I'm going to ask you to come for a ride with us, sir.'