Doctor Who (25 page)

Swan called him back the moment he logged out. ‘Well?'

‘You're right about the assault charges,' he said. ‘But there is no way that man is a fag.'

‘You saw what the paper said.'

‘I don't
care
what the paper said. I've met three of Chick's girlfriends.'

‘Camouflage,' she spat.

‘Bullshit. Maybe one lady, sure, but three? Now if someone in San Fran called the man a pussy, I can understand why he might take a swing at them.'

‘Better make sure he doesn't take a swing at your ass.'

‘You've got a dirty mouth, ma'am. What'd Chick ever do to you?'

‘I'd be more worried about what he might do to you,' said Swan, and slammed down her phone.

Swan ground her fists into her temples. Nothing was working. Nothing was helping. The Doctor seemed unmoved by her threat to destroy his young protégé's life. Her threat to wreck mine had hit a dead end. There wasn't the slightest hint of a shred of information on the network about her precious windfall, and even it was out there somewhere, the Doctor would pester and plague her every step.

She ought to be on top of the world, and instead she was boxed in on every side.

Bob could be crushed simply by pressing charges. There must be more to my story than she had been able to find, something she could use to turn my editor's stomach the way it had done in Los Angeles. And the Doctor, what could she find out about this Doctor, what was there about him that he would never want the authorities to know? She would dig and scrape and claw until she ruined us.

* * *

It didn't take the Doctor long to find Luis Perez. He traced the MUD connection back to a forged university account, had a word with the sysadmin and got help tracing the connection back to a second forged account on another machine, and left a message in that account with a request for Luis to email him at Bob's account.

Luis asked for a meeting in a cafeteria in one of the Smithsonian buildings. It had a sort of conveyor belt on which the food went round and round, and you snatched what you wanted. Kids stood next to it, watching all those desserts cruising past, just out of their reach.

The Doctor had insisted we all stay behind; he didn't want to intimidate the man and he wasn't sure if he was dangerous. Bob and Peri protested a little, but it was obvious they were going to do as they were told. Not so me. I wasn't going to miss a thing.

‘You got to remember,' said Luis, raking at a bit of hair over his ear. ‘You got to remember what Swan has is a
reputation
. She's supposed to be able to do anything. If word gets out that some other guy can beat her, that she can't even do her thing without you peeking over her shoulder, then she's got nothing.'

‘Good,' said the Doctor. ‘Then she must realise that the only way to get rid of me is to hand over the Savant.'

‘She can't do that, man.' Luis's fingers tightened around that lock of hair. ‘She can never let anybody beat her. If it happens once, it could happen again. If anybody even gets close to winning a bout with her, she crushes them down so hard they can't get up again.' He looked up at the Doctor. ‘That's what she's gonna do to you.'

The Doctor said dryly, ‘She is welcome to try.'

‘If she can't hit you, she'll hit the people around you. I've watched it happen. I've seen the lights go out.'

‘That's not the only reason Swan can't hand over the Savant,' said the Doctor. ‘Is it?'

Luis shook his head. He went back to spooning his chocolate pudding around and around in its glass. I opened my mouth to ask a question, but the Doctor held up a hand to silence me. Luis muttered, ‘What hatched out of that egg? What did it do to me?' He traced a circle in the air with his spoon, in front of his breastbone. ‘Is this feeling going to stop?'

‘Mr Perez,' said the Doctor, ‘I promise you I'll do everything I can to help you –'

‘That's not enough, man!' Luis slapped the spoon down on the table, knocking over the pudding. ‘I have to get that thing back from her.'

‘But that's exactly what we want you to do,' said the Doctor.

Luis stared at him. We both did.

‘Mr Perez, your contact with the Savant puts you in a unique position. You have already established a rapport with the creature. You should be able to approach and handle it safely. None of us could do that without risking a devastating psychological attack.'

‘You mean it can't do anything worse to me,' said Luis dryly.

‘That's one way of looking at it.'

‘What if I can't let it go?' mumbled Luis. ‘I feel like . . . if you tried to take it away from me again, I would kill you. I'd use it to kill you.'

‘I think he could do that,' I muttered.

‘We'll deal with that if and when the problem arises,' said the Doctor.

‘You got to understand,' said Luis. ‘I don't want that thing. I mean, I want it more than anything else in the world. I am not eating and I'm not sleeping because I can't think about anything except getting it back. I'm like a mother whose baby
was kidnapped.' A few people were looking at us now. ‘Except sometimes it's like I'm its baby. Like I'm a kitten mewing and mewing for its mama. This is worse than being in love.'

The Doctor brought Luis back to my flat. He made the man take a nap on the sofa while he explained the plan to us in the kitchen.

‘In Luis's hands, the creature will be harmless.'

‘Harmless to everyone except him,' said Peri. ‘Won't it go on changing the structure of his brain?'

‘I'm afraid he's already badly affected,' said the Doctor quietly. ‘He can barely function as it is. If the Savant can re-establish contact with his central nervous system, there is a chance we can use it to return his brain patterns to their original state. We'll need the Eridani's help, of course, but I think I can convince them to do their bit.'

Peri said, ‘Are you sure we can fix him?'

‘No. I'm not,' said the Doctor flatly. ‘I'm gambling what's left of Mr Perez's sanity that he can help us retrieve the Savant before anyone else can be harmed by it. If he can be cured, so can Swan and the people of Ritchie.'

‘He's like a guinea pig,' said Peri, but she didn't protest further.

The Doctor made my bed. This was a strange thing to behold, especially when he plucked a sock from the sheets and flung it over his shoulder without a backward glance.

‘Couldn't we just use the kitchen table?' I said.

‘I want something with a little give,' said the Doctor, making a perfect hospital corner.

I sat down on the laundry hamper and watched as he smoothed out the covers. We had already lugged my TV into the
bedroom – an ancient set donated to me by a fellow journalist who said it had been used to watch the Watergate scandal. My joke is that I prefer my television in black and white, like my newspapers. It was set up on the dresser, an inch or two sticking out perilously over the edge of the wood.

The Doctor placed the device in the exact centre of the bed, patting down the covers around the plastic ball. Then he fished in his jacket pocket and drew out an old-fashioned watch on a chain. He snapped it open. ‘Just a moment now,' he said.

He switched the TV on and started twiddling the tuning dial up and down the channels. We stood, watching the dance of the static, the rise and fall of the ocean hiss. He flicked past the local TV channels without stopping, brief squirts of people and speech; then up and up into the higher frequencies.

‘Ah,' he said at last. ‘There we are.'

The roar and flicker resolved itself, and Mr Ghislain appeared on the screen. For someone supposedly transmitting from outer space, he looked remarkably crisp. He was still wearing his black suit and his hat – no sign of a spacesuit.

‘– transmit to you,' he said. ‘The Interrupt will neutralise the Savant's mental process. This will allow you to detach all undesirable connections. We are pursuing a reversal method for affected neurologies.'

‘Hang on,' I said. ‘Isn't everyone in the District also watching this show?'

‘Not at all,' murmured the Doctor. ‘The Eridani's' transmission is targeted to our co-ordinates.'

I wondered why they didn't just use the speakerphone again. Fear of phreaks eavesdropping on the conversation? Or did it just depend on which satellites they could hijack at any given time? I shook my head. I was starting to buy into the Doctor's cover story, imagining Ghislain and his exotic parrot lurking
about somewhere between the moon and the sun. They were probably in a TV studio in downtown DC, and this transmission was being ‘leaked' to eager Russian eyes.

‘– affected neurologies,' said Ghislain, repeating his message. ‘We will do all possible things to comply with your request to “leave the planet as we found it”.' The message must have been recorded; the screen went blank for a few seconds, and then it started over. ‘Within the prearranged time parameters we will transmit to you. The Interrupt will neutralise the Savant's mental process.'

‘I don't think Peri will approve of that,' murmured the Doctor. ‘A little adjustment may be in order.'

‘What's the Interrupt he's talking about? A program? Something that will kill the Savant?'

‘That's their plan. Simply destroy the component that happens to be running haywire. I'm sure we can do a little better than that. Shut it down and repair the damage it's done. All I need is a few moments with the Eridani's Interrupt device.'

There was a soft thump. We both turned. I swear the device had moved across the bedspread by several inches. The Doctor gave me an enigmatic smile and picked the thing up.

As good as his word, the Doctor sat down at the kitchen table and pried open the device with a set of jeweller's screwdrivers. He peered at its guts with an enormous Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass, ‘hmming' and ‘ah yesing' to himself. Half an hour later he announced that it would do what it was told now, and we could get going.

Swan had, all unknowing, emailed several pictures from each of her security cameras to Bob's computer. Bob set up the Apple to email those pictures to her at regular intervals – the same intervals as her minicomputer. Then he crawled across her
kitchen floor, pulled the keyboard from the Eclipse down to a chair, and typed in commands to stop the real pictures being sent to her office. As far as Swan would be able to tell, her house was quiet and empty.

It would never have worked it Swan didn't have the willpower to leave the Savant behind. She was determined to stay at her office until she cracked the secrets of its program: she wanted to be able to take advantage of the Savant without it taking advantage of her. My bungled burglary must have convinced her that it really was safe to leave the Savant on its own.

The moment Bob gave us the all-clear, Luis was up the stairs like a raped ape. When the Doctor reached the bathroom doorway, he was already holding the Savant in his arms.

It was a kill or cure moment. If the Savant had lashed out at Luis the way it had lashed out at me, it might have been more than his already affected brain could handle.

But it snuggled comfortably into Luis's arms, playing with a TV remote which it had partly disassembled. There were individual buttons spread all over its sticky fur.

Luis didn't say anything. He just stepped out into the hallway, brushing past us, and sat down on the carpet with his back to the stair railing.

It took us a while to get Luis down the stairs. He wasn't interested in anything except the Savant. In the end Bob and I marched him out to the Travco while he cradled the thing against his chest, inside his sweater. It was hard to believe we were doing him any favours.

We sat him down on the bunk bed. Bob and I perched on the double bed in the back. Once again, Peri handled the maps and the Doctor did the driving.

‘That thing freaks me out,' confessed Bob in a low voice.

I was sitting cross-legged on the bed, peeking out through the venetian blinds into the twilight. ‘The Doctor reckons it's harmless.'

‘I can't work out what it is,' he murmured. ‘Is it a mammal? It's got fur. But it doesn't have a
body
. Just those three cylinders. Where are its eyes? How does Luis know which one is its head?'

‘The one with the beak?'

‘Yeah, but he doesn't hold it that way up.'

‘Uh-oh. Doctor,' I called out. ‘I think we're being followed.'

Bob peeked out through the blinds. A small, dark blue car was sitting right on our tail. ‘Is that Swan back there?'

I staggered forward up the length of the Travco. ‘Pull over,' I told the Doctor. ‘I'll jump out and talk to her. As soon as she stops, you take off.'

‘You're sure?' He was already slowing.

The car pulled over to the shoulder behind us. I jumped down from the Travco as it was still rolling to a stop, and then strode back down the gravel.

A moment later I was running back towards the departing campervan, waving my arms. ‘Hold on! It's Mondy!'

The Doctor leaned out of the window. ‘Find out what he wants.'

The phreak didn't get out of his car; he wound down the window. ‘Hi Chick,' he said. He was doing odd things with his face, rolling his eyes and twitching his cheek, as if trying to point with his eyebrows.

‘What's up? Are you following us?'

He grinned weakly, in between twitching. ‘I guess I am. I guess I just want to see how all of this comes out.'

‘How'd you find us, anyway?'

‘Police radio,' said Mondy brightly. ‘You just ask if anyone's
seen the vehicle you want. They do all the work for you.' He quit twitching and gave me a ‘you idiot' look. ‘Wait, I have to blow my nose.' Mondy reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of tissues. He extracted one of them and handed it to me. I uncrumpled it reluctantly to find three words written in thick black marker pen.