Doctor Who (14 page)

The kids were so raddled that I offered to drive. Bob dozed in the passenger seat, occasionally emitting directions, until we arrived at a post office. ‘Pull over, pull over.' His slurred speech sounded like backmasking.

Bob jumped out of the campervan while I kept the motor running, dashed up to the post office boxes, fumbled with the keys, and pushed a postcard into one of the boxes. He looked up and down the street once, startled, as if suddenly remembering we were supposed to be on the run. Then he collapsed back into the passenger seat and erupted into mighty snores.

Somewhere around here, I realised I'd forgotten all about Trina's birthday. I slapped my hand against the car door and cussed. I'd promised to take her out for surf ‘n' turf. There was nothing I could do about it now – I couldn't even phone her.

We headed out along 270, past the tatty yellow ribbons still tied to telephone poles, until the strip malls tapered out into houses and then into nothing, just the highway.

BY MIDNIGHT WE
felt safe enough to stop and sleep.

Peri and Bob had got so used to my quiet presence that they talked as if I wasn't there. I sat in the passenger seat of the Travco, trying to make myself comfortable, while they lay in the sleeping bags in the back, muttering about whether the Doctor was OK and if he could find us. Centre of their world.

Boy, it was brown back there in the Travco. Brown brown brown. The national colour of the Seventies. Bob had chivalrously taken the sofa under the mangled venetians, while Peri got the ‘bedroom'. They had the heater on full, running off the generator. I suppose I could have stretched out on the floor, but I didn't fancy being trodden on.

We were pulled over in a scenic lookout. Other than their murmuring, it was deadly quiet. I had a view of pine trees standing like dark giants, rearing up from the hillside and staring down at the gravel arc of the lookout. There was no moon. If I ducked my head a little, I could see a skyful of burning stars.

Oh yeah. I stretched out my legs on the driver's side, my jacket pillowed under my head. The dark is good. It's always good. I remember burning out of Los Angeles in a little Citröen I later crashed in a ditch and left for dead. The California emptiness looked like a video game, looked like Night Driver, just lights in the sky and lights marking the edges of the road, a big black screen. I was invisible then. And the three of us were
invisible now. Even Swan couldn't see through the thick black muffler we were wrapped in. I nodded off in my diagonal position, warm and toasty in the blast from the van's heater.

I woke up as the sound of another car carried through the night air. A moment later we heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I ducked down, peeking through the passenger window. The other car was parking in the lookout, a little distance from us.

‘It's OK,' I said. ‘It's the Doctor.'

Peri and Bob wriggled loose from their sleeping bags and opened the side door of the campervan. The Doctor got inside and closed the door. They scrunched up to make room for him, banging on the back of my seat.

‘Thank you for the postcard, Bob,' he said.

‘Are you OK?' said Peri, sleepily.

‘Manifestly,' said the Doctor.

‘Well, how did everything go?'

‘Almost without a hitch. I did have a little run-in with some officers of the law.' Peri and Bob's eyes grew huge. ‘Fortunately, with the device at hand, it wasn't difficult to persuade them to sit quietly in their patrol car until I had made good my escape.'

‘You did what?' I said.

He said grimly, ‘I was not exaggerating when I said that, in the wrong hands, the device could be used for mischievous ends. In any case, it's out of the picture now. The device has been safely returned to its owners, and they have retreated to a safer location. I suggest you all get a good night's rest, and tomorrow we'll begin our search for its twin.'

Some time later I opened my eyes and saw that the Doctor was standing in the lookout, uh, looking out. His hands were clasped behind his back. Standing so still, in his black suit, he looked like one of the mountains out there in the night, solid
and ramrod still. I slipped out of the car, pulling on my jacket, and went to stand beside him.

The air was crisp and clean as though it had just been washed. American forests
smell
different, they have a rich, dirty, wet smell you could cut with a knife. Australian forests have their own delicate, dry smell. It's like comparing coffee to tea. And the sky . . . instead of the sparkling cross, there's the huge, empty shape of the plough, cranking its way around the northern pole of the sky like a giant handle.

I lit up. In the freezing air, the cigarette felt like it was burning my fingers. The Doctor glanced back towards the car. ‘How do you think they're managing?' he asked quietly.

I took a deep, deep drag of that tasty smoke. ‘They're knackered,' I said bluntly. ‘I think the excitement is wearing off, even for Bob. Peri's just coasting. It's like she's used to things sucking, she expects it.'

The corner of the Doctor's mouth scrunched into an angry look. ‘That young lady has seen me through some very troubled times. And that young man has a great deal of courage and determination. They both deserve better than running from place to place in a constant lather.'

I shrugged. ‘If either of them really can't take it, they'll just step out for a packet of peanuts and never come back.' He looked down at me. ‘They'll survive,' I said. ‘They both believe this is incredibly important.'

‘It's more important than I can tell you, Mr Peters.'

‘Chick. Please.'

Chick,' he said. He looked out across the valley again, breathed in that cold clean air. ‘May I?' the Doctor reached for my ciggie. I handed it over. He flicked his hand in the air, and suddenly it was gone. He went on as though nothing had happened. ‘It's so hard to believe this little world is balancing
on the edge of a knife. Every day, any day, at a moment's notice, the sky could fill with deadly lights.'

‘I know. Now this thing with Poland. You know, my neighbour's kid plays Missile Command. That home video game. He's still too young to get the joke.'

But the Doctor was shaking his head. ‘It's not your petty wars I'm worried about,' he said. That startled the hell out of me: one of the facts of life, living in Washington DC, was knowing you were standing in one of the world's biggest nuclear targets.

‘Oh, I get it,' I said. ‘The aliens. The UFOs are going to come and get us if we don't return their toys.'

‘A distinct possibility,' he said. ‘Though I'm far more worried about what human beings might do with Eridani technology.' He raised a hand to stop me before I could ask again what the devices were supposed to do. ‘A cageful of mischievous and belligerent monkeys. And someone throws in a hand grenade for them to play with. There's one more component out there. One more. I'm convinced Miss Swan knows where it is. She will be more determined than ever to keep it out of our hands, to discover its secrets.'

‘How much harm can Swan do?' Where the hell had he put the lit cigarette? ‘Even if she finds the last pieces, won't it be useless on its own?'

‘It may actually be
more
dangerous without the other components to control it.'

‘Doctor,' I said, ‘did you invent it? Is that what this is all about?'

He give me one of his piercing blue looks, and suddenly that safe lambswool feeling of the darkness just flew away, and I had the same feeling I had had with Swan: this was a person who could look right through you and see all your secrets. He lived on another plane, rich with information, with a million data
points you had no way of accessing. Like a four-dimensional monster that can see you when you can't see it.

‘Still trying to come up with an explanation you can put into print,' he said.

‘Well, I've already decided you can't be a Ruskie, or you'd have found some way of getting rid of me.' I had a sudden flash of being chucked down the side of the mountain in the dark. ‘Before now,' I added.

‘I see,' said the Doctor. ‘And what are your other theories about my identity?'

I ticked them off on my fingers. ‘Corporate agent. Industrial spy. UFOlogist. Undercover military investigator. Pseudologue. A major unknown hacker – that goes without saying. Art thief.'

‘Art thief?'

‘Well, the “devices” really could be stolen artworks for all I know. So, am I getting warm?'

He just smiled, and went back to stargazing.

‘Which of those is Epsilon Eridani?'

The Doctor's finger swept up to point instantly at the star. ‘That one,' he said. ‘The “Eridani's” jumping off point for your volume of space.'

I suddenly seemed to see the lines between the stars, the paths taken by all those imaginary starships, hopping from one to the next to the next to the next. ‘So how come they haven't taken over the world?'

‘Without faster-than-light travel? Very uneconomical. Besides, the ecology is all wrong. Mars would be more their cup of tea, if it wasn't already taken.' He spoke not with the feverish excitement of a true believer, but casually, like a lecturer sketching in the basic details for a student.

‘So I suppose they're the source of all the UFO sightings.'

‘Certainly not. The Eridani have been slingshotting craft
through your solar system for centuries, studiously avoiding drawing attention to themselves. It's only now that the human race has developed radio that this mighty bungle has occurred.'

I was getting interested despite myself. His story was so straightforward – no ancient civilisations, no higher planes of consciousness. ‘So why did they screw up?'

‘They simply didn't notice that anyone was here. It only takes eleven years for radio signals to reach Eridani from Earth, but by the time they get there, distance has watered them down to a billionth of their original strength. Put simply, they didn't care and they weren't looking. To them, the Earth is just the equivalent of an interplanetary traffic cone.' I had to laugh at that, but he looked deadly serious. ‘And just about as disposable. There must be a world for Peri to come home to,' he breathed.

The back door of the campervan creaked. I saw Bob climbing out, stretching his gangly limbs in the freezing morning air.

The Doctor reached behind my ear and extracted the cigarette, still lit, with a flourish.

‘Doctor,' said Bob. ‘There's something I need you to take a look at.'

He took a roughly folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and uncrumpled it. The Doctor snapped on a flashlight as Bob laid the sheet flat on the bonnet of the campervan. ‘And what have we here?' he asked.

‘I found this on my fridge. Not actually this. I found this diagram taped to my fridge. This is just a copy.'

‘When was this?'

‘Yesterday afternoon,' admitted Bob.

The Doctor ran a finger over the diagram, tracing its geometry, its symbols. ‘Quite a professional job,' he murmured. Bob was shivering. It was weird to watch the Doctor shift frames like this – science fiction one moment, fantasy the next.
‘Someone meant to give you a good scare.'

Bob relaxed a little. ‘So you don't think it's for real,' he said. ‘It's just meant to spook us out.'

‘When it comes to the occult,' said the Doctor, ‘there's real, and then there's real. Your intruder, and I think we can safely assume it was Miss Swan, may have had one of three intentions. One, she noticed your interest in things arcane and thought she would use superstition against you. Two, she is a believer herself and hoped to harm you in some paranormal way. In either case, you have nothing to worry about.'

‘What's three?' said Bob.

‘She actually has a command of paranormal powers, and this symbol has some genuine and measurable purpose,' pronounced the Doctor. ‘You know, it's amusing – in the theatre, the term
machinery
is sometimes used to mean the supernatural elements in the play. Gods and goblins produced from the stage machinery.'

‘I don't get it,' Bob said. ‘Do you believe in this stuff, or don't you?'

The Doctor leaned against the desk, holding Bob's scribbled impression of the seal in his hands. ‘The world is full of real and strange powers. It is also full of cheap and shallow imitations of those powers. Half-remembered keys to the energy of the universe. Half-invented rituals. Mental practices that have become detached from the cultures that made sense of them.' He looked up at Bob. ‘Your
Key of Solomon
and
Goetia
are the equivalent of watching a television with the plug pulled out. The form is there, but not the content.'

Bob had a death-grip on his personal talisman. ‘What about the device? What if it gave her some kind of power?'

‘I think we'd know about it already,' said the Doctor simply.

Cold rain started to fall, carrying the fresh promise of snow
to follow. The Doctor went back to his rental and turned on the radio, catching a little distant opera between the crackling of static. I don't think he slept – he was just waiting for the rest of us to wake up. I crawled back into the passenger seat of the RV.

Bob stayed looking up at the sky for a while, pulling on a beanie against the fat, chilly drops of rain. We were miles from the nearest electrical power, the nearest phone. But Bob was surrounded by energies he couldn't see or touch. Like the rain, falling everywhere, those energies connected everyone. He wasn't safe in the dark, but vibrating in a network of power like a bug fished out of the air by a spider's web. He would never be invisible.

The Doctor had brought about a million chocolate bars for breakfast. He kept finding more and more of them in the pockets of his suit, along with a bottle of chocolate milk for Bob. We sat in the campervan, shivering our socks off. ‘I'll never be mean about a hotel room again,' said Peri.