Doctor Who (17 page)

There was mention of meetings and money. Cobb had been helping someone calling themselves The River find the missing item for a hefty fee. Had he delivered the item before he had died? Had he put it in safekeeping somewhere? There was no mention of an agreed drop, but the device might be in a safety deposit box.

Swan paged through a box of five and a quarter inch diskettes on Cobb's desk. Each was labelled with a range of dates. She slid one into the PC, and confirmed her guess: this was a record of Cobb's correspondence, downloaded from the Internet where it would be safe from hacking eyes. He had never been able to download the last week or so's worth of mail.

Swan smiled wryly to herself. Only recently had she learned what it was like to have someone else rummaging through your private email and files: a lot of people had tried, but only the Doctor and his friends had succeeded. It seemed as though there was no safe place for communications, not the network, certainly not the phone system. With no laws to stop hackers, you had to assume everything was an open book. From now on,
she would keep all her messages and files encrypted. One day those laws might come into existence, and she no more wanted the Feds reading her disks than the Doctor. But in any case, reading Cobb's email couldn't do him any harm now.

Still . . . the little hairs on the back of Swan's neck were bristling. She had the deep and instinctive feeling of being watched. She found a blank diskette, slapped it into the drive, and waited impatiently while the last of Cobb's mail came down the modem.

When she had it all, she made a backup, swapping diskettes back and forth in the single drive. Then she deleted all of the remaining email, including all of the copies of messages Cobb had sent. She could have gone on to disconnect the machine from the ARPANet, to make absolutely sure no-one else could get at the goodies; but that would have been enormously conspicuous, at least to the local users of the machine and its sysop. No, she had what she wanted, and now she could read it at her leisure.

When we next called Bob, he had the exciting and unexpected news that Swan had discovered the tap on her phone (she had called herself and left a filthy message on his answering machine). ‘Where have you been?' he demanded. ‘I've been dying for you guys to call! God, we should have got a phone for that car!'

‘We couldn't find a public telephone before now,' said the Doctor. ‘We've been driving all over the Delaware countryside trying to find one.'

‘Well why didn't you just knock on some farmer's door?'

‘We were just about ready to try that,' admitted the Doctor. ‘Then we came across this life-saving petrol station. But when we did call, your number was engaged!'

‘Well, I'd given up and logged back in, hadn't I! It's not like I have more than one phone line to choose from.'

Peri had arrived bearing melts. I knew what a mess the sandwiches made and didn't want to start mine until we were back on the road, but she was already tucking into hers, getting onions and grease all over her face and hands. The Doctor put his into the pocket of his jacket and smacked the receiver against his forehead. ‘How frustrating it is to have the laws of physics dictate how you can move and communicate!' he sighed.

¹
A Bulletin Board System is a meeting place for computer users. It's not a network, but a single machine: the users can connect via modem, leave public messages and send and read private email and swap files. Bob showed me the BBS in question, a private bulletin board for a clique of technology collectors, with an unlisted number. Since Cobb had inadvertently made it so easy for Bob to break in, I don't think they ever realised he had visited. There must be hundreds of accounts on BBSes and the ARPAnet where the owners never see the footprints of intruders.

PIECE BY PIECE,
diskette by diskette, Swan put together the story of the supercomputer and its components.

The computer's owners had lost their grip on it somewhere in West Virginia, close to the border with Maryland. (Cobb had no information on where it might have been before that.) Somewhere in the countryside, apparently; although the emails were vague on this point, Swan guessed that a vehicle carrying the device had run off the road, and a local – possibly a farmer – had got hold of the pieces of the machine. There were five parts. Swan guessed input, storage, CPU, memory, output – although if this really was a new kind of computer, the old architecture might have been irrelevant. Which parts had she and Luis bought?

The hypothetical farmer had looked to make a quick buck from his find. It hadn't been quick after all. Swan had long been familiar with the underground of collectors, spies, and suspicious types who traded in esoteric and forbidden technology, but of course the farmer had never heard of them. His initial efforts to sell the components had got him nowhere. It was almost two years before news of their existence trickled out to the grapevine.

Over the following months, a gaggle of collectors and suspicious types turned up, looking to beg, borrow, or steal the components. The farmer quickly realised that what he had given up on as junk had a real value. He played coy, pretending
he had already sold some of the items, making sure that each customer only got one piece of the puzzle.

Swan was surprised when she put these events onto a timeline. The computer had fallen off the back of the truck, or what have you, in 1970! All this time, its bits had been out there, becoming more and more separated. Why had its owners waited so long to retrieve their property? The only explanation was that they simply hadn't known it was there. When it fell off that truck, to them, it became invisible. That was a bit of luck for her imagined farmer. One of Cobb's pals hinted darkly that the owners had visited the original finder and they hadn't exactly brought him candy and flowers.

1970. Swan spun the chair back and forth, thinking. One hell of a lot had happened in computer technology since then. Could the components really still be valuable after all this time? The auctioneer had certainly thought so, and she had learned to trust his judgement. An awful lot of freaks and hobbyists thought so too – they had pursued the components from one end of the country to the other.

That clinched it. If the technology was outdated and worthless, they'd never have bothered to come after it eleven years later. Perhaps losing it had stalled a research project, something truly revolutionary which could now continue. More likely, the research had continued, and now there was a risk that the secrets of a new computer might be revealed if the early prototype was reassembled.

Swan closed her eyes for a few moments, massaging her eyelids. The picture of the thing in Luis's bathtub kept drifting into her mind.

Who were the original owners? It was a toss-up between a big corporation and a spy agency. Swan guessed the latter – more likely to have the resources and the drive to find and
recover the components, more likely to need to keep its technology dark.

They had already got three. One from California, where it had been undergoing testing in a Silicon Valley lab. As far as Swan could tell, the owners – represented by ‘River' – had broken in and taken it. One had got as far as Arctic Canada; it had been bought back at an exorbitant price.

And then there was the component Chip Cobb had been hired to retrieve. Swan had met him once, and they had swapped a few emails; he was a hub in the collectors' grapevine, best known for his ability to get hold of information about prototype computers (and very occasionally, the prototypes themselves). The components would have been right up his alley. River had been talking to him in email, promising cash and circuit boards if he could locate the device. (Cobb had spent a lot of time trying to trace River's email connection. Only once had he been able to track his employer back to a pirated account at a defence contractor – only to have River shut down that account and turn up again from a different direction. ‘He seems to be everywhere and nowhere,' a frustrated Cobb had told a friend.)

River was certain that the remaining three components had stayed on the east coast – in fact, had probably not gone far from what he once called the ‘crash site' (confirming Swan's theory that a secret transport had been involved). Although collectors were keen to get their hands on the devices, they eventually realised that they simply couldn't do anything with them. Swan recalled her own frustration with the loopy plastic ball. So they had moved slowly through the grapevine, sold at auction or in private transactions. But one of the three, discovered Cobb, had been sold only once – from the original finder to an obsessive collector in Salisbury. The guy was
famous for never playing with the toys he bought – just shrinkwrapping them in plastic and locking them away in a vast array of filing cabinets in his basement. Even if Cobb hadn't been able to trace the sale of the component to Salisbury, he might have guessed it had ended up in the black hole of the guy's collection.

Cobb's job was to wrest that component away from the guy in Salisbury. River provided a slush fund in four figures to help persuade the collector to give up the goods. Cobb had dealt with the man before; he knew the chances of prying the item away from his bosom were pretty low, especially once the collector realised it was valuable.

Over a period of six months – always begging more funds from River – he tried everything he could to win the component. He offered the collector all sorts of bribes and trades. He paid him a ‘consultation fee' (large enough to make Swan whistle) just to whet his appetite. When his patience started to run out, he switched his tactics. Small hints became minor harassment became outright threats. The collector found his phone disconnected and phone books for exotic countries delivered to his door, COD. His home number mutated daily, making it impossible to call him. Finally, Cobb hired a thug to break into the collector's basement. The thug didn't even get close; the place was wired and armoured like the vault of a bank.

Cobb was astonished when River decided the best idea was to talk to the collector in person. His employer had somehow got it into his head that where greed and fear hadn't worked, simple honesty would. River would sit down with the man, explain everything, and the collector would be only too happy to hand over River's property.

Cobb had never seen River in the flesh. He turned out to be
a bland-faced man in his thirties, wearing a dark suit and hat. He had a pet parrot which went with him everywhere. It was the only strange thing about him; everything else was entirely forgettable. In an email to a friend, just before it all went wrong, Cobb admitted he had trouble remembering what the man looked like.

River arrived early in the morning and knocked on the door until Cobb tumbled out of bed. The man was happy to sit in the living room, in the dark, while Cobb got a final couple of hours of sleep. When the sun had come up, they set out for Salisbury.

That was where Cobb's emails ended. The rest of the story Swan was able to piece together by breaking into the accounts of the people he had shared his secrets with, and reading their emails. One quoted an entire news article, which told her everything worth knowing about what happened next. The collector was dead. Cobb was dead. Even the parrot was dead. Of the component and River, there was no sign.

On the long drive, the Doctor and I swapped travel stories, while he tinkered with whatever it was he was making.

When I was small, my family would stay in a caravan park in the country town of Parkes. Or was it Forbes? Or perhaps it was the small city of Dubbo, and my childhood memories are even vaguer than I thought. I must try to find an atlas with enough detail of the New South Welsh countryside to work it out.

Anyway, the point was that we would drive from Parkes to Forbes (or was it the other way around?). My father said that the two towns were exactly eleven miles apart; he would get the three of us to watch the odometer, counting down the miles.

But the biggest thrill was always the visit to the thirty-one flavours ice cream shop in the town of Orange. One flavour for each day of the month, a sign said. ‘I remember we arrived in
Orange late one night after a long day's drive. I bawled my eyes out because the shop was closed. I've been to Baskin Robbins, sure. But it's not the same thing.'

Peri said sleepily from the back seat, ‘Did you ever see a horseshoe crab?'

‘Ah, we don't have 'em Down Under.' As if on cue, that bloody song came on the radio. I flipped the dial impatiently. ‘I did see a lot of jellyfish at Bateman's Bay, though. I could never understand the point of going on a beach holiday where it's too dangerous to swim. I saw a dogfish and a manta ray there, too. And a spider with orange legs that lowered itself in the back of the car and made my little brother scream.'

‘We used to turn them over,' said Peri.

‘What? Spiders?' I said.

‘Horseshoe crabs. It was a game. You got fifteen points every time you found one on its back and turned it the right way up again. Maybe they're from space.'

‘Nonsense, Peri,' said the Doctor.

‘They look like they're from space.'

‘The Cambrian Epoch may have been another world, but it wasn't another world. They're no more extraterrestrial than you are.'

‘The ocean is just like outer space.' She was murmuring now, half-asleep. I was suddenly reminded that she was only around half my age. Just a kid. ‘One day all the weird creatures in there will come and invade us.'

‘There are some people who believe this has already happened,' said the Doctor.

There was something about this silly conversation that was making the small hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Maybe it was the image of the Earth as a little beach on the edge of an impossibly huge sea full of monsters. And these two travellers,
the sorcerer and his apprentice, floating about on that cold sea in their little ship.