Doctor Who (16 page)

The Doctor spoke softly, so as not to disturb his slumbering fellow traveller, but I could make out every word. ‘Your world is reaching a turning point here, Mr Peters.'

‘How do you mean?' I murmured.

‘At the moment, any electronics hobbyist worth their salt can hold everything there is to know about a computer in their head. They can know a program intimately, down to the individual lines of machine code – even know the system firmware which supports it just as intimately, and the hardware down to the individual circuit paths. One human being can still design an operating system, write a video game, follow all the actions of a microprocessor. They can take the same pride as a Victorian engineer does in oiling every piston and gear of his steam engine. Or a motor enthusiast, who can trace a problem from its largest-scale effects down to the finest detail of a sticking valve.'

I was pleased; not many people have seen past the geek surface. ‘I know the guys you mean. The ones with furnaces for brains.'

‘It won't last. In just a few years, even the circuit diagrams for an oven or a car will be vast and inscrutable. Huge chunks of logic will be locked inside little black boxes. Chip diagrams will become too huge to trace or grasp. The world becomes as formalised at the microcomputer end as in systems hundreds of times the size of Bob's Apple. Programmers will become teams, teams will become bureaucracies, the ribs of a lean harmonious
system will be lost under a layer of flabby toolkits and libraries and protocols. All proper and correct and fully functional, of course – but leaving no room for the elegant shortcut, the blinding efficiency of the intuitive leap straight from the large to the small. They can do so much . . . but nothing with the bare-metal directness of the one who understands. It's a dying art, Mr Peters, a dying art.'

I said, ‘That doesn't look like a computer you're designing back there.'

He gave me one of his small, knowing smiles. ‘It isn't.'

I switched the radio back on, in time to catch the swirling beginning of
Tom Sawyer
.

We stopped somewhere near Annapolis for our first call to Bob. We had just started to lose the DC radio stations in a haze of static. I twiddled the dial, trying to find something worth listening to, while the Doctor and Peri crammed into the phone booth. She fed it coins while the Doctor shouted down the crackling line at Bob.

‘I've found Cobb's account on a BBS
¹
,' Bob told the Doctor, his voice a mix of excitement and professional cool. ‘There was a message from him in those emails of Swan's you downloaded. The number was in his .sig file.'

‘Ah,' said the Doctor. ‘When you say “found”. . .'

‘Cobb was no hacker,' said Bob. ‘His password was “secret”! I've saved about half of his email onto diskettes. His account
hasn't been used for a while – Swan must not have reached Ocean City yet. In fact, she may end up not going there at all. She called her friend again to say she was going to meet someone at the Delaware State Fair.'

‘The what?' said the Doctor.

‘It's in Harrington. Lots closer than Ocean City. Get Chick to look it up on the map. Swan said she wanted lots of people around, for safety. Look up the State Fairgrounds, that's where she'll be. You guys must be an hour ahead of her – it was at least an hour between the two calls I taped, so she was still in DC. I'll bet she's still at the fair when you arrive.'

We stood around the van for a few minutes, stretching our legs and puzzling over his new development. ‘Who's she meeting?' Peri wanted to know. ‘I thought you said that guy was dead.'

‘That's right,' said the Doctor. ‘Cobb tried to arrange a meeting between one of the Eridani and one of his fellow technology enthusiasts, with appalling consequences. The Eridani still aren't clear on exactly what happened. Certainly someone tried to betray someone else . . . perhaps Swan is planning to meet the third party.'

‘But they couldn't have another one of the components. Could they?'

‘No. The Eridani retrieved it after the disastrous meeting, along with . . .' The Doctor saw me listening. ‘Swan is on a wild goose chase.'

‘Well why are
we
driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?'

‘For information,' said the Doctor.

‘But can't Bob just get that off Cobb's computer?'

‘Not if it isn't
on
Cobb's computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to
invade Bob's filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.' The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. ‘Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.'

‘Let me guess,' said Peri. ‘You figure that if you can talk to her in person, she'll come around to your point of view.'

‘It has been known,' said the Doctor, with dignity. ‘If nothing else, once we make contact with her, she'll find us very difficult to dislodge. And that will make it harder for her to do anything with us knowing about it – or stopping it, if it comes to that.'

I'd never driven over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge before. It's the strangest thing – two four-mile ribbons of road floating a couple of hundred feet above the water. It's actually two bridges side by side, so there's a lot of empty air between you and the cars going the other way. The feeling that there's nothing between you and the water is eerie.

‘You know,' I told the Doctor, ‘when I was a kid, we always spent our holidays driving around the outback, staying in caravan parks. We'd spend all day driving to get somewhere. But it wasn't much like this.'

Despite that, sitting behind the wheel on a trip across the US countryside was, surprisingly, not much different to sitting in the back on a trip across the Australian countryside (or more often, lying down with my bare feet pressed against the window, watching the gum trees rush by). You still ended up in those long, thoughtful silences – not quite highway hypnosis, but some relative of it.

I found myself imagining what if would be like if Mr Ghislain's extraterrestrials were real, trying to pursue the consequences of that. (I guess I was looking for a contradiction to catch the Doctor out with.)

Imagine if they were out there right now, circling the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Eridanus. Think of the time scale on which they'd have to operate: their civilisation would function over distances which make Columbus' voyage look like a trip to the soda machine. A better analogy: imagine if Columbus had no boats that could harness the speed of the wind – imagine if he had to swim to America.

So does that mean they're incredibly long lived – even immortal? Do they shoot one of their ‘slow packets' out into space the way we would post a letter – confident that it will be delivered and replied to quickly enough to make it worth the effort of licking the stamp? Or is it a monumental event, a moonshot?

Ghislain claimed they had to hire a faster boat from another bunch of aliens, ones who did know the secret of faster-than-light travel. Are the Eridani jealous of their neighbours? Can't they scrape up enough cash to buy their own starships? Or do they scoff at those hotrods, the way we might smirk as a teenager roars down our street in his first hoon-mobile? I can't imagine human beings carrying out a mission that spanned centuries – politicians can barely see past the next election.

I found myself trying to imagine the great, cold minds who could operate at that speed, and had to snap myself out of the reverie. ‘What is that thing you're building?'

‘You've heard of elegance in software design,' said the Doctor. ‘Programs which rely on cleverness to solve problems in the quickest, cleanest way possible.' He hefted the machine he had built. ‘This represents the opposite of that approach.'

‘Brute force,' I said.

‘Just in case we need it.'

When we got to Harrington, we drove around for half an hour
trying to find the State Fairgrounds. There were grounds, all right, but no Fair. We all looked at one another. ‘I guess we better ask someone,' said Peri.

A gas station attendant looked at us as though we'd asked for directions to the Martian Embassy. ‘The State Fair is only on in July,' he explained. ‘You're kind of late. Or maybe kind of early.'

Peri said, ‘Maybe she meant she was going to meet someone at the fairgrounds, not the Fair.'

‘We drove all over,' said Bob. ‘There was nobody there. Have we ever been had. What a bunch of hosers.'

‘Swan has discovered the tap on her phone,' said the Doctor. ‘We'll have to let Bob know – there's not much point in monitoring her calls if she's going to use them for disinformation. Blast. That's quite a useful resource, gone!'

Peri and I exchanged glances. I wonder if she was feeling a little relief that we wouldn't be using the tap again, the same as I was. Computer crime is too new to give you the creeps the same way that eavesdropping on someone's phone does.

‘So, after that little diversion, it's on to Ocean City,' said the Doctor.

‘We're on our way,' I said.

‘She knows we're going there,' said Peri. ‘If she found the tap on her phone, then she must know we heard her earlier calls.'

The Doctor didn't have a reply to that. ‘Do you want to take that turn behind the wheel?' I asked Peri. We pulled over and they both got into the front. I stretched out in the back seat. I wished I could take my shoes ott and press my feet against the window.

Ocean City is basically one long street, several miles running down the finger of a peninsula, with cross-streets travelling just two or three blocks from the oceanfront to the bay. In December it's almost but not quite a ghost town – there are still
cars, but far too few to justify eight lanes of road . . . closed miniature golf courses, boarded-up diners. The average age of the people in this town goes up twenty years in the off-season, and every one of those years seems to be added to the age of the town itself. The sky is grey, the houses are grey, the sea is a slab of slate.

Cobb's house was a faded clapboard relic of the '50s, off on the bay-side down near the Route 50 bridge – standalone, but not much elbow room between it and the neighbours: land is scarce and pricey on a glorified sandbar. More and more of the sand is being eaten away on the ocean side: eventually the big hotels are going to end up on stilts. Back in the '30s a hurricane actually carved a channel through the peninsula, the sea charging in to reach the bay, turning the lost bit into an island that's gradually fleeing south over the years.

Swan knew she was risking a wasted trip. It was likely that Cobb's house would have been picked clean by now, emptied and swept out ready for resale. She parked in the driveway and used her home remote to roll up the garage door. There were no cars parked inside, and she could see through the windows of the house that at least some of the furniture had been taken.

Swan put on her gloves, took a crowbar from the garage, went in the back of the house and jemmied open the kitchen door. Inside, she flicked the light switch just once, to make sure the power was still on. She put the crowbar down on the counter, then slipped a tight sportsband onto her left wrist and slid a small flashlight under it. She kept the light pointed at the floor as she moved around the dead man's house.

She picked up the phone in the living room. No dial tone; Cobb's relatives had done that much, at least, unless the phone company had cut him off for non-payment. The shelves in the living room and study were still packed with Cobb's
possessions. Swan wondered idly what percentage of the books – mostly chunky hardbacks – he had actually read. She hadn't even bothered to unpack most of the books she'd moved with in her house in McLean.

She had made a mental list of the most likely places to look for the device. If he wasn't worried about keeping it a secret, then it would probably be in his study – there was no workshop in the garage or basement. The filing cabinet was locked; she retrieved the crowbar and opened each of the drawers. Nothing but personal papers, the accumulated paperwork of life. If he was worried about keeping it a secret, then try under the bed, under a floorboard beneath a rug – no chance there, everything was carpeted except the kitchen and bathroom. Less likely were the boxes in the closets. A problem was that she didn't know precisely what she was looking for, even how large it would be, although she was guessing it would be around the same size as she and Luis's original purchases. Smaller than a breadbox, she thought. Around the size of her fist.

Swan worked patiently down her list. She didn't put the boxes back in the closet, but she didn't throw them around, either. Only people frustrated Swan. Even a clunky computer system or a badly written program couldn't faze her: she dropped into what she thought of as her work mode, and systematically tackled whatever tangled mess she had been presented with. Chip Cobb's house was merely another problem that required a systematic approach.

All right. Either the device wasn't here, or Cobb had hidden it too well for her to find it in a casual search; they were both possibilities. Cobb was no longer around to ask, but that didn't mean he hadn't left the information where she could find it.

The study was a veranda – what the Yanks call a porch. A brand new IBM PC adorned Cobb's tidy study desk, its Pastel
Denim Binders standing to attention on a miniature bookshelf. Swan glanced at the modem: there was a dial tone. The family hadn't thought to disconnect Cobb's second line.

She pushed the DOS disk into the A drive, and flipped the big red switch. She went to the kitchen to make herself some coffee while it booted up.

Cobb had written the password to his BBS account on the inside of the DOS manual. Swan systematically read through his email, including his sent-mail, which included messages to her. There were several messages which mentioned an item which had to be the third component. Swan sat forward, putting down the coffee cup.