Doctor Who (18 page)

‘You're like a horseshoe crab, aren't you?' said Peri.

The Doctor glanced at me. ‘Peri –'

‘I meant, a living fossil,' she said cheekily.

‘Go to sleep, Peri,' he told her. A few minutes later he said, ‘Hmmph. A living fossil indeed. In ten years' time – in
five
years' time the computers that are far beyond Peri's comprehension will be fossils themselves. People these days chuckle at the tiny brain of ENIAC. Soon they'll have a new joke every few years. And a new computer to buy. Perhaps future archaeologists will discover a layer of discarded personal computers – all that's left of your young civilisation.'

‘America's not doing too badly,' I said. Sometimes you have to stick up for the Yanks. ‘Not if they're producing technology at a rate like that.'

‘Electronic digital computing is only one way of organising a civilisation,' said the Doctor. ‘There are many other ways to manage information at high speeds – much better ways. And besides, the human race has managed without any of them for most of its existence. Most human beings are still doing just that.'

I shrugged. ‘I read somewhere that most people on Earth haven't even made a phone call.'

‘That will remain true for a long time,' said the Doctor. ‘But computers have a habit of getting in everywhere. Like the vermin that follow human beings as they stride around the Earth.'

‘Computers are rats?'

‘Perhaps a little more useful.'

‘I can't work out whether you
like
them or not.'

‘As long as they're useful, I like them perfectly well. When
they start pretending to be people, that's another thing.' He paused to consider. ‘On the other hand, I've known some quite charming computers.'

I had to grin. ‘I'll bet you have.'

‘Oh, good heavens.'

‘What is it?'

‘That sandwich Peri gave me. I'd forgotten all about it.' The Doctor extracted the cold and sodden melt from his pocket, sniffed at it, and then stuffed it into the glovebox. I watched out of the corner of my eye as he struggled with the contents of his pocket – it seemed to be crammed with toys and coins and bits of junk, all of which needed wiping after their encounter with the sandwich. It was the equivalent of Mondy's bat-belt, an engineer's collection of tools and spare parts.

I was nodding to myself. The Doctor was obviously involved in the design of new computers which would make the current crop of high-tech gizmos look like junk – not just faster machines, but machines with a completely different basis.

The Doctor seemed to guess my thoughts. ‘Oh, I think the electronic digital computer has some life left in it yet,' he said. ‘Electricity is quite a fast way to move information around. Of course, there are faster ways.'

‘Like what?'

‘Light, for example. You can't get faster than that.' I suppose he meant fibre-optic cables. ‘Or if you must use physical things, then you keep making the components smaller and smaller – to speed up the movement of information, you see – until at last they are so small that quantum mechanics becomes a consideration.' He touched the back of my hand with a finger. ‘Something like that already operates in your DNA.'

I shifted uncomfortably. ‘That's enough about me. So where are you from?'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at me. ‘It's best not to know everything about a person. A little mystery is a good thing.' I couldn't interpret his smile.

We arrived in Ocean City not long afterwards. Peri sat up and peeked out through the venetians.

‘Grim,' commented the Doctor.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I kind of like it.' Which made me wonder what kind of places she usually visited. ‘It reminds me of being a kid. Do you think maybe when this is all over we could come back here?'

The Doctor hesitated. ‘Perhaps in summer.' It was hard to imagine him on the miniature golf course, that was for sure.

‘Maybe,' said Peri, in a small voice. I think they had both just remembered that they might not be together once this was all over. ‘It'd be nice to just look around and not have to rush off because the planet's going to blow up.'

We parked several blocks from Cobb's house. The Doctor packed a dufflebag with equipment from the back of the RV: I could see the weight of it as he hefted it onto his shoulder. The machine he had built on our trip was inside, obviously. But what else had he stuffed in there? We followed him, Peri breaking into short bursts of running to keep up with his long stride.

The phone rang.

Swan froze at the sound. Literally froze, every inch of her skin turning blue-cold. The dead phone in the living room had come to life.

Years ago, Swan had seen an episode of some black-and-white anthology show, in which a phone junction box came to life and started calling people. Her younger self had been equal parts fascinated and frightened – too scared to touch a phone
for weeks, but secretly jealous of the monster and its power to mock the human voice. She had played its role many times since: the unseen, threatening caller, the voice which could be coming from the next room or from thousands of miles away. Now, for a second, she was that kid again, jumping every time she heard the phone ring.

Swan got up from the desk and stomped into the living room, furious with herself, ready to tear the ears off whoever was on the other end of that line. If it was some blundering telco technician, she was going to wish 'em into the cornfield.

Swan snatched up the receiver and said nothing. After a moment, the Doctor said, ‘Ah, there you are. I'm afraid you beat us there after all.'

‘You freakin' idiot,' said Swan. ‘If you hadn't told me about Cobb, I'd never have come out here. What'd you think you were doing?'

The Doctor was silent for a long second. ‘I assumed you knew one another.'

‘Of course we knew one another. But he never mentioned anything about this.'

‘Oh, good grief,' said the Doctor.

While they were arguing, Peri and I were marching up the street to Cobb's house. I was carrying the duffle bag, which wasn't light.

We both saw the veranda, and the office equipment inside, at the same moment.

‘Stay back,' said Peri. She was tugging the Doctor's ramshackle device out of the bag. ‘I'm gonna torch the porch.'

‘You're going to do what?'

Peri hefted the long machine. ‘Like this,' she said.

Fire erupted from the end of the thing with a heavy kerosene smell.

‘Shit!' I scuttled sideways like a startled crab.

The window burst inwards. Peri let go of the trigger for a second, startled. Then she got a crazy smile going and stepped up to it, pushed the blunt nozzle through, and pulled the trigger again.

‘Jesus, girl, what are you doing?'

Peri started to turn towards me, making me jump back even further as the line of flame followed her motion. She realised and turned back to the window. ‘Well, what does it look like I'm doing?' A pile of papers on Cobb's desk erupted with a crackling roar.

This time she held the trigger in, holding the Doctor's improvised flamethrower with both hands, moving it back and forth in quick little jabs. The desk erupted like a warzone in puffs of orange and black. The box of diskettes issued a hideous chemical smell as it began to melt and char.

The screen of Cobb's PC burst inwards with a terrific crunch. Peri yelped, jumping back and letting go of the flamethrower's trigger.

Swan dropped the phone the instant she heard the window go, knowing instantly that she'd been had. She ran back towards the study.

She reacted just as quickly when she saw the flames: she ran like hell in the other direction, bursting out the front door of the house. We never even saw her, running like hell from the back of the house.

She ended up watching from a couple of streets away as the fire engines rolled in. The trip hadn't been wasted; she knew far more than she did before. The ruse with the phone tap had been worth it, although it meant she could never again use that method for disinformation. If the Doctor and co had arrived
only a little earlier, she would never have had the chance to learn so much. But Cobb had never had the component at all, whatever he may have hinted to his fellow collectors.

California, Canada, Salisbury. The components she and Luis had bought were the only two left. Correction: the component Luis had hatched in his bathtub was the only component left. The Doctor was obviously playing the same role as Cobb had, acting as the original owner's agent. And she had let him take away something that was worth scouring the continent for, something that was worth killing for.

There was only one thing to do now.

The Doctor had watched until he was satisfied with the level of destruction; then he pulled a pair of miniature fire extinguishers out of the duffle bag and set about dousing the conflagration before it could spread further.

‘As a matter of fact,' he assured me between cold bursts of white vapour, ‘I called the fire brigade to warn them of my intentions just before we set to work. They're taking longer to arrive than I had expected. Perhaps they thought it was a prank call.'

We had made a hasty exit, climbing over a fence and running through the concrete at the back of a garage to avoid the neighbours' eyes. (The Doctor has a surprisingly light stride.) We ran through the blackness to the Travco, still parked safely where we had left it.

None of us spoke until we had been on the road for several minutes. Peri sat on the bed right at the back, watching for police lights through the venetian blinds. Nothing. We had got away with it.

‘So,' said Peri. ‘The real point of all that was to get rid of anything Cobb had left behind about the Eridani.'

‘The other motives were real too,' said the Doctor. ‘That was quite well done.'

‘Gee thanks,' said Peri. How long had they been planning that little stunt? What else was going on that they weren't telling me?

‘Doctor,' I said, suddenly alarmed. ‘You didn't trash Cobb's house to prevent
me
from getting a look at the info – did you?'

‘Far from it,' he said. ‘The most sensitive information would have been dangerous only to those who believed in it.'

‘You know everything Cobb did – don't you?'

‘There's quite a lot I can still tell you. On the trip home. Let us absquatulate. In fact, why don't I take a turn behind the wheel?'

‘You comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road?'

‘You seem to have got used to it.'

‘Yeah, but I've had years of practice.'

‘Trust me,' he said.

‘Uh,' I said. ‘It's OK. I'll drive for a while.'

Route 50 begins two blocks from the Atlantic, and runs the whole way across the country. As we left town on the Route 50 bridge, passing under the “Sacramento CA 3073 miles” sign, I glanced in the rear vision mirror and got a glimpse of the ocean. It felt like the waves were gaining on us. And the rain started to fall, the first fat, dusty drops.

SWAN CONTEMPLATED HER
plan long and hard. It had to be flawless. There was no margin for error; if Luis realised her intentions towards his new toy, there would be no getting it away from him.

She considered setting up an automatic program that would email him at intervals, convincing him she was somewhere she was not. Maybe even an ELIZA program that could chat with him in real time over the wires, feigning a human conversation just well enough to hold his attention. She could build in a subroutine that imitated typographical errors to make it more convincing.

In the end she rang him up and asked him to meet with her right away. When he went out, she went in and stole the monster.

Luis had given her a duplicate key to his apartment when she had first arrived in DC; she had stayed with him for a few weeks while house-hunting. (As far as I've been able to find out, romance did not bloom as a result.) She had a heart-in-mouth moment when she pushed the key into the lock – had he changed it? But the innocent door opened up for her.

Swan stalked into the apartment and into the bathroom. The creature was sitting happily in the tub, playing with Lego and munching on breakfast cereal. She stuffed handfuls of Lego and half a box of cereal into her backpack, plucked Luis's dressing gown from the back of the door, and wrapped the monster in
it. It didn't react in any way when she touched it, stuffed it into the threadbare fabric, and hoisted it into her arms. It was too busy pushing two blocks together and pulling them apart again, over and over.

Swan locked the door behind her, walked down the back stairs to her station wagon, and drove off with the monster hidden under old clothes in the back. It was as simple as that.

Luis waited for her in a nearby coffee shop for fifteen minutes until he realised what was going on. He sprinted back to his apartment, faster than he had ever run anywhere, arriving on the stoop with lungs wheezing and legs trembling. He still loped up the stairs two at a time.

When he saw the empty tub, he actually screamed. The sound was forced out of him involuntarily, the way it had been just once before when, as a child, he had been riding his bicycle and turned to discover an immense dog trying to bite his leg.

He searched the apartment, knowing full well that Swan had come and taken the creature, hoping like a lost child that he would find it if he only kept looking for long enough. It was not under the bed or behind the sofa and it certainly wasn't in the fridge.

Luis sat down for a moment. He felt sick. Not just queasy at this betrayal by an old friend, nor shaken by his hyperventilating race home. His hands trembled, he couldn't focus on anything, and the floor felt as though it was falling out from under him.

After several long moments in this limbo, he realised why Swan had done it. The craving he felt for the monster had overcome her. She had not been acting out of her own will, any more than he was when the urge to find the child propelled him up from the sofa and made him pace the flat, forcing
himself not to just run outside and search and search at random until he found it. Swan didn't mean to deprive him of the child, she couldn't help herself. In fact, she needed help. And he was the only one who could help her.