Doctor Who_ Blue Box Part 26

'Guys?' said Peri.

They looked up again. Now she was holding the modem cord, which she had unplugged from the phone jack. They both looked back down at the screen. 'That's done it,' said Bob.

The Doctor shuffled through the papers and wires and takeout containers on Swan's table until he found a printout of the program. 'Bring a soft copy as well,' he told Bob.

'Already on it,' said the hacker, brandishing a floppy disk.

'You want me to trash Swan's hard drive? She'll have hidden copies all over.'

'If she's hidden copies in her computer, she'll have hidden them elsewhere as well. We'll never find them all.'

'Point,' said Bob. He stashed the floppy disk in his jacket.

'Now we've got a copy it won't take long to work out how it ticks.'

'The program should tell us something about the Savant as well,' said the Doctor. 'How it thinks, what its ultimate purpose is.'

'Isn't it obvious?' said Bob, as they took off. 'It's the ultimate hacker.'

I was surprised to see Luis sitting next to Swan, squeezed, side by side into one of the diner's red vinyl booths. He didn't look up as I slid into the opposite seat, he just went on staring at the tabletop. 'What've you done to him?' I said.

'The Doctor did this,' snapped Swan. 'When he set off the device which fried the Savant's brain. It almost fried mine as well.'

I looked at Luis. His face was slack, his eyes, unfocussed.

To me he looked as though he ought to be slumped and drooling. But to the other folks in the diner, he just looked bored or tired.

'No,' said Swan. 'You can salve your conscience: the Doctor hasn't destroyed Luis's brain. Instead, he has transformed it.'

I had seen how badly screwed up this Perez had been by his contact with the Savant. It wasn't hard to believe he could be screwed up even worse.

A waitress ambled over. Swan put a hand on Luis's shoulder. 'Look at her,' she murmured. Luis stared at the girl's face while Swan said, 'We'll each have a black coffee and we'll each have a hundred dollars from the till. And I'll have a slice of Dutch apple pie. No ice cream with that.'

'Yes ma'am,' said the waitress. She drifted away again without writing our order down.

I was about to tell Swan that not everyone shared her sense of humour when the waitress returned, carrying a pot of coffee and a stack of small bills. She filled our cups and laid the money neatly out in front of us. 'I'll be back in a moment with your pie, ma'am.'

My mouth was hanging open, my cigarette dangling from my bottom lip. Swan and I sc.r.a.ped the money off the table into our laps. She neatly tucked hers into her handbag. I didn't know what to do with it, I just wanted to get it out of sight. In the end I stuffed it into my coat pocket.

'I can convince anyone to do anything,' Swan told me blissfully 'I've tested it at the supermarket, and at the gas station, and at a toll booth.'

'It's a set-up,' I said weekly. But I had seen the people in Ritchie.

'I could make make you tell me everything you know. Like, where are your t.i.ts, girl? What do you do, bind them?' you tell me everything you know. Like, where are your t.i.ts, girl? What do you do, bind them?'

If you have ever felt totally helpless in your life maybe if you've ever been mugged you know how I felt at that moment. It was like the seat fell out from under me and nothing was holding me up any more. I was more scared than when Swan had the shotgun on me. I would rather have holes blasted in my gizzard than have something reach inside my skull and scramble my eggs. The smell of frying food made my stomach lurch and my bladder felt like a stone.

'Don't faint.' Swan was having way too much fun. 'I'm going to give you a chance to tell me of your own accord.'

'Yeah,' I mumbled.

'Yeah what?'

The back of my neck was burning. 'I bind them.'

Swan slapped her hand on the table. 'Not about that. Tell me about the little yellow guy.'

I took a deep breath. 'I'm gonna tell you what the Doctor told me. Don't blame me for it.'

'Go on,' said Swan. Sweat trickled down the back of my collar.

'He says the Savant, the original creature, was from outer s.p.a.ce. I'm only telling you what they told me, I don't believe it myself. It was supposed to go to another planet, but it came here by mistake. It's part of a computer. So was the other device you found.'

Swan was nodding. 'What do you believe, Mr Peters?'

'There's been talk about biological computers for a long time,' I said quickly. 'I think it was stolen from a lab. Maybe in the States, maybe somewhere else.'

'You know what I think happened?' said Swan. 'I think the Doctor was just too late. I think the Savant was programming Luis's mind all along. To control a human brain, you need another human brain. You need the right hardware to run your program.'

I was trying not to look at Luis. Would that make any difference? 'What are you going to do?' I said.

Swan smiled. 'Anything I like.'

'Take over the Capitol?'

She looked at me blankly 'I'm going to get myself some supercomputers,' she said. 'I've installed the Savant program across the network, so I'll always have access to whatever machines I choose. Access and power, that's what I'm all about.'

'But not political power?'

'I never read even the politics in the paper,' she said. 'I can't remember the last time I voted. Why are you so interested in politics?'

'I can't help it,' I said, in a voice like chalk 'I'm a Washington reporter.'

'Oh... you mean, why don't Luis and I take over the world.'

'Uh, I didn't mean to give you ideas.'

'I will have to push the authorities around a little. I'm going to need total access to the phone system, for example.'

She gave a loopy grin. A smile didn't belong on that face.

'Luis is a blue box,' she said. 'A blue box for the human mind.

All you have to do is press the b.u.t.tons, and you get access to the system. Open wide. And I've got it.'

My heart had just about jumped across the diner a moment ago. But Swan really couldn't see the potential of her mind-control device. Or, more likely; she really wasn't interested in world domination. Not the real world, anyway: her megalomania was confined to the world inside the computer.

The waitress returned with Swan's apple pie. Her eyes brushed over us, but her mind was far, far away. It was the look of Ritchie.

Swan was never going to stomp the world like G.o.dzilla.

Instead, she was going to leave a slow trail of collateral damage, like a man walking around with a radioactive rod in his pocket.

'You know,' I said, 'I miss summer in Sydney. I miss Avoca Beach. Maybe I'll put this hundred dollars towards a ticket home.'

'You do that,' said Swan. 'Go on home to your family, little lady. Buy yourself some pretty dresses and go for a walk on the beach.'

'Like you say,' I told her, standing up, waiting for her to make Luis stop me from going. But she didn't. She was enjoying the apple pie too much.

This would have been the moment to run. I had already crossed the line from observer to partic.i.p.ant. Doing that had made me a target for the thing sitting in the diner.

I should have got on the road that instant. There was nothing left for me in Washington, not now the cat was out of the bag. There wasn't anything I could do to help the Doctor.

It was time to do another of Charles Peters' vanishing acts, get on the road, drive until I couldn't stand the flash of the highway past my eyes any more.

I walked through the parking lot, crossed the road, and went into a phone booth. The traffic would hide me, and I was pretty sure Luis couldn't somehow detect me at a distance.

One last call before I left. Luckily, by then the Doctor had returned from burglarising Swan's house.

I related her theory that the Savant had been programming Luis as some sort of hypnotist, all along. 'No, no, no,' said the Doctor. 'It hadn't done anything to him except to create that intense bond. OF COURSE. When the interrupt pulse hit the Savant, it reacted by making a backup of itself. Right into poor Luis's mind' His voice sagged. 'If he was aware of what was happening, he may even have welcomed it. The ultimate protection for the Savant inside his own skull. It might have been better if I had simply let the Eridani kill the Savant. A sudden and painless death instead of this infection infection.'

'There's nothing we can do to make him normal again, is there?'

'It might be possible for the Eridani, but I doubt it. What is now inside Luis's head may not be human in any real sense.'

'Doctor, that's gross,' said Peri, in the background.

'Gross?' he said. 'Grotesque. But this is the Savant's whole purpose find a network and copy itself throughout it.

Was that the Eridani's real intent all along? Or is this just an unexpected branching of the program?'

'Are you saying it could happen again?' I said.

'If anything should happen to Luis,' said the Doctor, 'there's no reason the Savant couldn't repeat its little trick.

Copy itself into a fresh brain.'

'Doctor; I said. 'Could it happen even if something didn't didn't happen to Luis?' happen to Luis?'

The Doctor froze. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I think it could. If Swan realises that.. ' He wasn't talking to any of us, his eyes focussed on an awful vision: Swan and an army of Savants, increasing geometrically.

Jesus!' I hissed. 'They're coming out of the diner!'

I started to scrunch down in the booth, then realised how much more conspicuous that would make, me look, then realised that if I was scrunched down Swan wouldn't be able to see me through the traffic. The phone cord pulled tight as I crumpled into a hunched heap on the floor of the booth.

'Chick!' the Doctor yelled in my ear. 'What's going on!'

I caught a glimpse of Swan and Luis. Instead of going to Swan's car, they were heading across the parking lot.

'You'll love this,' I told the Doctor. 'Guess what's next door to the diner.'

And what could be simpler than walking into the bank together, filling out a withdrawal slip, walking together to the cashier's window, waiting while she fills a suitcase for you with hundred dollar bills, walking out of the bank, and driving off into the sunset? Why drive home, when you can go anywhere, have anything, do anything if only you can think of it?

110.

One.

I didn't dare go back to my car in the diner's parking lot, not now. I didn't want to be there when Swan came out of that bank. She might have noticed that my car was still there that would have made her suspicious for sure. Even if she hadn't she might just decide to do something to me, just because she could.

I called a taxi not an easy thing to do when you're hunched down in a phone booth, trying to look inconspicuous (and failing mightily, judging by the stares of pa.s.sers-by). I lurked in a shop doorway until my tide arrived. I hadn't seen Swan again, which hopefully meant she hadn't seen me.

Happily, the taxi driver wasn't a talkative one. I sat In the back with my eyes closed, leaning on the window, my face cupped in my hand. I felt as though I had run a marathon. It wasn't the c.u.mulative sleeplessness and stress of the last few days; that was nothing new. It wasn't the abrupt end to my career in Washington. All of that fell away in comparison with that single encounter with Swan. I could not get the texture of the plastic tablecloth out of my mind. Its glossy red and white checks loomed in my vision for the whole journey back to my flat.

I had hoped for an undisturbed half an hour so I could pack my essentials. But the kids were there, fretting on the couch.

'You look terrible,' said Peri.

'Thanks,' I said. 'Where's the Doctor?'

'He's gone to stop her,' said Bob. 'He ordered us to stay here. He said he could resist the Savant's effects on the brain, at least for a few moments. Long enough to use the Eridani device to switch this off. He said he could.'

I couldn't see why the Doctor would think his brain was any less vulnerable than any other human being's. It was probably just a bit of bulls.h.i.t to keep his young friends out of harm's way.

'I had kind of hoped he had hooked up with you,' said Peri. Her arms were folded tight. 'He shouldn't be out there by himself.'

'He can handle himself,' I said.

'He does stupid things!' Peri almost shouted. 'He gets into the most terrible trouble. He always acts like he's invulnerable. He thinks he can shout his way out of anything.'

She was miserable, scalp and stomach tight as nooses, looking like she was waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery.