Doctor Who (20 page)

‘What are you willing to pay for that privilege?'

Swan responds, ‘Ha ha ha. I ALREADY HAVE IT. It's too late to demand payment.'

‘That's not my meaning,' retorts the Doctor.

‘???'

The Doctor says, ‘What will be the cost to yourself? Since no-one else in the world possesses what you possess, no-one can give you advice about it. No warnings, no rescue.'

A very long pause. Then, ‘You warn me.'

‘I can only warn you to give it up. You know you don't know what you're dealing with.'

‘Every human advance is dogged by nay-sayers and doom-sayers.'

‘This is not a HUMAN ADVANCE!' thunders the Doctor. ‘This is an intrusion from well outside the human sphere.'

‘Ha ha ha ha ha.'

‘If that's too extraordinary to squeeze into your mind, then consider this: you did not invent this thing. You have no way to understand its workings. Rather than an advance, this is a leap into a realm riddled with unknowns.'

‘The problem is not me,' argues Swan. ‘It's you. You have the knowledge and you won't give it to me. It's your fault if something goes wrong.'

‘Then let's meet in real life.' (In real life, the Doctor was ranting about Swan's cheap manipulation of ethics.) I can help you understand the component, assess the danger.'

‘Ha ha ha ha ha.'

Swan stands up from her imaginary chair and walks out of the room. The Doctor doesn't hesitate, but follows her through the exit:

The door opens into a large unlit cavern. You can hear the sound of running water. An unlit torch is here. Fionnuala is here.

The Doctor has nothing to light the torch with. He stands in mathematical darkness, aware of Swan's presence but unable to see her. It doesn't stop him from trying to get the message across.

‘Your petty greed will not only endanger yourself and those you come into contact with – think of the consequences if those with ambitions beyond your own take your toy away from you. Just for once, think of something larger than yourself.'

Swan doesn't reply. He talks about danger, but doesn't give her a shred of evidence. She's simply waiting for him to agree, confident he'll have to give in.

Luis enters the cave.

‘SWAN!' shouts the newcomer. ‘I KNOW THAT'S YOU. FOR GOD'S SAKE TALK TO ME.'

‘Get lost, Luis!'

The Doctor picks up the unlit torch, ducks back into the living room, and thrusts it into the fireplace. He hastens back to the cave, where Luis and Swan are arguing.

The door opens into a large cavern. A river runs through the east part of the cave. Fionnuala is here. Luis is here.

The Doctor types ‘Look Luis'. The computer responds:

Luis is just a grey figure, an outline without any details.

‘it's gone,' says Luis. ‘did you take it?? tell me!'

‘You should have been more careful,' says Swan. ‘Anyone could have got into your apartment and discovered it.'

‘u have to give it back!'

‘Luis, get out of here.'

‘give it back!!!!!!'

‘I'll talk to you later.'

‘GVIE IT BAK OR I'LL KILL U!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Everything stops, for an interminable moment, on that agonised, muddled threat. The Doctor thumps the keys. Nothing. It's as though the intensity of Luis's need and fury has brought the computer world to a halt.

Then Swan speaks again.

Sorry about that. I kicked him out.

The Doctor types furiously.

What's happened to your friend, Swan? Is he always like that?

A long pause. Then:

Maybe it gives you an idea how determined I am to hang onto what I've got. Goodbye.

The Doctor grunts in anger, bangs the counter, and pounds out:

Wait!

But she doesn't.

The Doctor and Bob tried to squeeze information out of the computer. Swan was gone, and just as both sides had planned, there was no way to trace one another. Luis, on the other hand,
didn't give a damn about covering his tracks. The Doctor and Bob were tracking him through the network, using the genie to poke around in the guts of the mud's software. When suddenly:

You are standing in a large cavern. A river runs through the east part of the cave. Luis is here. Luis is just a grey figure, an outline without any details.

‘Oh, good grief,' said the Doctor. A brief struggle ensued over who was going to use the keyboard, which the Doctor won.

Luis, we need to talk. I need your help.

The silhouette stood motionless on the other side of the cave. ‘Where's Swan?'

‘I don't know,' the Doctor said. ‘I have to find her.'

‘She needs help. That thing is affecting her mind. You're a doctor. You have to get it away from her.'

‘I intend to. But I need to know more.' There was a pause, as though Luis was trying to decide how much to tell us. ‘Where did you get it?' prompted the Doctor.

Ritchie . . . w MD . . . National Pike

Bob scribbled it down on his arm. The Doctor asked, ‘How did you find it?'

Swan and I © collector s meeting.

‘Can you put me in touch with whoever sold you the item?'

An address crept across the screen.

‘Luis: try to stay away from Swan.'

I have to find her. She needs help.

The Doctor scratched at his forehead with his thumbnail. ‘I wish I could tell him that the craving he's feeling will pass. But it's possible his brain has already been permanently restructured.'

‘You're not talking about brainwashing, are you,' said Peri. ‘You mean more like brain surgery.'

‘I'm afraid I do.'

There was something so fundamentally vile and butcher's-shop about that. For a moment, I could actually believe that aliens were behind the whole thing, monsters who were happy to play with the most private of human offal.

‘This guy should be in the hospital,' said Bob.

‘I doubt very much that they would be able to help him.' The Doctor typed, ‘Stay put. I give you my word we will track down Swan and take the stolen goods away from her.'

You have to give it back to me.

Before the Doctor could answer,

i need help.

Ritchie was a spot on the map somewhere near Frostburg, just outside the fog belt, surrounded by low and stony mountains carpeted with snowy trees. US 40 narrowed to two lanes as we drove past clapboard houses and brick boxes. We passed a red Amish barn. ‘Hex sign,' noted the Doctor, making Bob sink a little deeper into his seat.

We arrived that night, parked the Travco on a bit of disused gravel between the railway line and the old canal. B&O coal-hoppers clanked past, leaving dark lines where the rails cut through the Christmas snow. The next morning I stood outside the van, pulling hot smoke into my lungs, taking in the view. You could see from one side of the town clear to the other, the way I could see right across Canberra as a kid. It was just the place for an alien invasion.

You want to know how small Ritchie is? The local Mickey D's has only one arch out the front. I'm serious – it's tucked into an awkward bit of land between two intersecting narrow roads. The building is shaped like a slice of pie and there's only enough room for one of the golden humps.

We headed inside for camelburgers and hot coffee. The Doctor refused to sully his palate with the stuff, but he quizzed the server about anything interesting that had happened around town.

I summoned my courage and called Trina to apologise for missing her birthday. I tried to explain that I really had been incommunicado all this time, that I was following up the story she had given me, but it only made her madder. ‘You could have called me if you had just remembered to,' she said. There was no arguing back to that. She gave me quite an earful. I tried imagining her in her underwear, but that didn't really help.

The Doctor joined us at the cramped plastic table. ‘There's something the matter with that young woman,' he said.

I craned my neck. She was a redhead with a shape even the Scottish Restaurant's uniform couldn't ruin. ‘She looks just fine to me.'

For once, the Doctor said nothing. I strolled over to the counter, where the lady in question was waiting for her next customer. She didn't seem to see me coming, her eyes focussed on the blank plastic in front of her.

‘G'day,' I said. She blinked a little and looked up into my face. ‘I could use some more hot coffee. You know, in Australia, it's the middle of summer right now.'

Usually this led to some cute questions about koala bears. Instead, she spoke slowly, as if trying to remember each word: ‘Do you ever get that feeling, when you go into a room and you can't remember why you went in there? Maybe you're in the kitchen, and you sort of wake up, and find yourself staring into the fridge. Does that ever happen to you?'

‘Oh yeah, all the time,' I said.

‘Or do you ever get that feeling when you know you had an idea just a minute ago, and you feel something kind of speed up and crack inside your head, and you know you're going to forget what you just thought of, and then you do?'

‘I guess I know what you mean,' I lied.

‘Or do you ever feel like there's something missing from your life? Something really important, something that would make everything complete, but you just can't put your finger on what it is?'

‘Jesus, lady, are you all right?'

She blinked again, slowly, and turned to pick up the coffee pot from the burner. It made me nervous as hell to watch her handling the scalding liquid, but her autopilot saw her through. She even asked me if I wanted fries with that. I didn't.

The Doctor gave me a querying look as I squeezed back into my seat. ‘That's more than just too many hours flipping burgers,' I said. ‘It's not like she's a vegetable . . . but something's missing.'

‘Something is constantly claiming her attention,' said the Doctor quietly. ‘Something which is no longer here, and never will be again.'

We drove out to the farm at the address Luis had supplied. To
no-one's surprise, the place was abandoned, ‘for sale' signs dotted around. The barn had, after all, only been a staging post for the auction that had sold him a hunk o' furry brain damage. The Doctor spent upwards of an hour sniffing around for clues, but came up empty-handed and grumbling.

We meandered around the town a bit, taking in the sights, such as they were. The Doctor oohed and aahed a bit over a restored railway station. He had a surprising ability to strike up a conversation with anyone he bumped into – whether they liked it or not.

There were people with the faraway look everywhere we went. The owner of a Chevy dealership, his flock of used cars huddled under a white awning. His wife came out to talk to us, patting her distracted husband on the shoulder. He hadn't been himself for more than a month, she said. She mentioned the doctor he had been seeing.

We found a doctor's surgery, a brick building with a colourful flag of birds and flowers hung outside. The receptionist wouldn't let us talk to him unless it was an emergency. I asked to use the bathroom and caught a glimpse of him in his office, fiddling with the bits of paper on his desk, staring out the window as if trying to spot something in the distance.

There was no real pattern to it, no transmission from person to person, nothing they all had in common except that they lived here in Ritchie. If some poison, some bit of radioactive waste had fallen from one of the trains that clattered through the town, you might have seen something like it – people spattered by the invisible fallout all around.

We sat on the steps of the public library – closed – and breathed plumes of steam into the air. Bob shifted uncomfortably on the cold, dry stone, and said, ‘Can we get a medical team in here or
something?'

The Doctor just shook his head. The cold didn't seem to bother him at all. In fact, I don't think his breath was even misting. That English constitution. ‘To the Eridani's technology, the human brain is only another form of hardware. Something that can be tinkered with and modified as required. Human medicine cannot yet say the same.'

‘Well what about us?' said Peri. ‘We've been carrying it around all this time . . .'

‘It hasn't been switched oh,' he said – a little nervously, I thought. ‘Well, only briefly. None of us have suffered any ill effects.'

‘That we're aware of,' said Peri. The Doctor made an impatient gesture as though he was chasing away her needless worries. He was probably worrying about the pair of cops who'd pulled him over. ‘We know those components have been all over. You think somebody would have noticed by now . . . all those people . . .'

‘I suspect that the components only became dangerous around the time of the auction,' said the Doctor. ‘The auctioneers probably tampered with them before selling them. I doubt they realised what they had on their hands.'

We crammed back into the Travco (Bob had started to refer to it as the ‘white elephant'). I volunteered to drive again, knowing they'd speak more freely amongst themselves if they thought I had my mind on the traffic. But they weren't in a chatty mood. Peri announced she wanted something to take her mind off of things, so she sat cross-legged on the narrow bed, going through another pile of printouts with her highlighter pen.

‘Doctor,' she said, ‘Have a look at this.'

She passed it forward to the Doctor in the passenger scat. He
hunched over it, running a finger down the columns of figures to the data she had marked.

‘How very interesting,' he said. ‘Our Miss Swan seems to have developed a sudden interest in security equipment.'

‘Looks like she bought half a dozen security cameras and an alarm system,' said Peri.

‘Now, what does that tell us?'

For a moment they looked like teacher and pupil. Peri answered, ‘Swan is keeping the final component at her own house.'