by Dave Stone
He looked at her again with steady, perfectly clear eyes, and something in his expression sent a shudder through her. It wasn’t a threat - because a threat, whatever else it does, limits the possibilities of what might happen. Continue to impede me much longer, Smith’s eyes said, and anything - literally anything - could happen.
‘Now if we can just organise the release of my lovely young assistant,’ he said, lightly. ‘We can make a start at finding out what’s really going on.’
Two hours later, the workroom of Dr John Smith - or just the Doctor, as he insisted on being called, since that was the name his friends used and they were all going to be such good friends - was entirely more recognisable. As opposed to unrecognisable. That was because it looked even more like itself than before: a confusing, otherworldly mess.
After his release and that of his so-called assistant the Doctor had caused several more bulky items of old junk to be taken out of storage and had appropriated several of Delbane’s prized computer units, with the Special Branch men doing the heavy lifting for the most part. It was amazing, really. With his credentials accepted it was suddenly as if he owned the place, getting others to perform his bidding by the simple act of asking them with the air of one to whom a refusal was unthinkable.
The computers and other items of an arcane electrical nature had now been wired together with a tangle of serial leads, telephone flex and even in cases a chain of paper clips. A number of thick tubes ran from this insane cluster to disappear inside the police box, the Doctor’s so-called ‘magic cabinet’, which he had forbidden anyone to so much as touch on pain of being drummed out of the Magic Circle. ‘And I mean,’
the Doctor had said, ‘an entirely different concern than the likes of Ali Bongo.’
Classified equipment, so he said, of such a nature that it would take a rewriting of various unnamed but apparently fundamental laws to divulge it, was kept in there. The tubes themselves varied from vulcanised rubber in which something seemed to pulse, to what might or might not have been the fleshy tendrils of an alien tentacle-monster from some old American pulp science-fiction magazine. Delbane had tried to trace where these tubes actually led, and how they connected to whatever it was they were connected to, but she had lost them in the tangle.
Other leads were hooked to modem-cradles for phone handsets, one linking via British Telecom to a bulletin-board server, one apparently to a timeshare on a NORAD satellite and one to the field telephone Delbane had tried to use earlier.
There were banks of oscilloscopes, each set to a different and apparently random waveform; there was a collection of police and military walkie-talkies, each babbling away and blasting with static; there was a wide-band radio, connected to the barracks’
high-powered amplified mast, with a complicated clockwork device over the tuning knob to cycle it through the range of every available waveband and back again.
There was a collection of television sets, four of them set to the main channels and the rest to the local variations that made it some way through the static to the Greater London area. A Sanyo VHS video recorder had been scrounged from the officers’ mess and hooked up to another set - although, instead of a video cassette, the Doctor had inserted an item that appeared to be a heavy, densely packed and almost infinitely complex multiple sandwich of electronics. The output from the video recorder looked like nothing on Earth.
The cacophony of voices and white noise, the flickering images, faces and erratically scrolling blocks of text were like some scene from a chamber in one of the more technologically advanced circles of utter screaming hell. And within it stood the Doctor - if ‘standing’ can be stretched to mean puttering around it with a kind of amiable abstraction, suddenly pausing stock-still with a look of absolute and frantic concentration, bounding into frenetic action and typing so frantically on a keyboard that it broke, muttering half-heard gibberish all the while, looking raptly at the result on one of the myriad cathode-ray tubes, running over to intently check another display, cursing and running back to hit some item of equipment with what looked like a spanner but one with wires and quartz crystals sprouting from it, standing stock-still again, then scribbling excitedly on a notepad, reading the result, scowling and tearing the sheet out to crumple it violently into a little ball and then throw it negligently over his shoulder...
Katharine Delbane, with her technical experience, had been one of the people who had helped the Doctor throw this demented mess together - in the sense that she had been one of the people whom the Doctor had asked to do something, had done it and had only later started wondering why. Now, she stood on the periphery of this preposterous display with Romana, and the adverb for enquiring about cause, reason or purpose was occurring to her seriously.
‘What the hell is this supposed to achieve?’ she asked. ‘It doesn’t really do anything, does it?’
Romana looked down her nose at Delbane. ‘Don’t ask me. I have little to no experience at all with this so-called technology of yours.’
In the short time since she had met her, Delbane had conceived a dislike for Romana - the Lady Romana, as the woman had said, correcting her - that bordered upon active hatred.
Delbane came from an army family, a number of whom were quite senior in its various branches, and throughout her life this had led her into contact with what might be called the British upper crust - the families who still provided most of the country’s generals and admirals, as they had since the time of the Norman Conquest. The families who had, in the Crimean and Napoleonic wars, bought their sons commissions which had them playing an inept and lethal game of soldiers with real men.
The difference between these families and Delbane’s was that their primary function was to fill the House of Lords; they sent those members who were surplus to requirements into the military, in much the same way that third sons of the nobility were once sent into the Church. And such people regarded the likes of Delbane and her family as little more than jumped-up middle-class tradesmen.
Discrimination, basically, works in bands: those occupying one become nearly invisible to those more than a couple of bandwidths away - in either direction. In objective terms, Katharine Delbane might not come from people who lived six-to-a-room in a council flat, dependent on a giro after being made redundant from a canning factory, but in the class-structure terms of the world in which she actually lived she was the lowest point on the totem pole, the target for contempt, and she knew it. She remembered meeting the grandfather of a captain she had once been dating, and he... just what had his name been? She couldn’t recall. In any case, her treatment by him had been just another of the incidents that had left her thoroughly disillusioned with regular army life.
Now, she was getting that contempt in spades from the Lady Romana. The woman might look like a superannuated hippie chick, but her manner was straight out of the features pages of Horse and Hound. As she stood there, half a head taller than Delbane, she seemed to broadcast a sense of flat disdain as though she had seen what Katharine Delbane’s world had to offer and was, frankly, not impressed. Delbane couldn’t think of anything she’d done to engender this rudeness from Romana -
other than being one of the people who had shut her up in a cell for a while, of course.
If the Brigadier still had the little, ah, transmitter unit he used to contact me on him, finding him would be simplicity itself. As it is, we’re having to improvise.’
Lost in bad-tempered musing on the class struggle, Delbane realised that she had forgotten about the Doctor and his insane activities. Now he was standing before her, grinning with pride and eager to talk. Delbane wondered if this was intended as a direct compensation for the stony aloofness of Romana.
‘The enemy will have covered their overt tracks,’ explained the Doctor, ‘so any clues we have as such are worthless. We have to take more of an holistic approach to our detective work.’
He gestured grandly at the flashing screens, the stuttering and roaring speakers. ‘A
ny event, no matter how small, impacts upon the world and changes it - and a sequence of events changes the world in a particular way. If you accumulate enough data, enough to produce a conceptual... well a conceptual data field, you can step back and watch the patterns occurring within it. If you can pull out the particular pattern you’re interested in and identify it, you can extrapolate from the known variables and...’
He caught sight of Delbane’s expression and his enthusiasm collapsed slightly.
‘It’s not a particularly difficult thing, you know, any more than the mental processes that allow you to identify both Great Danes and whippets as species of dog. It’s simply a knack. The systems that control London’s traffic work on the same basic principle, factoring anomalies through the known variables of people getting up in the morning and going to work, going out to lunch and so forth. And speaking of which... I’m not sure I added the factor of lunchtime into my calculations...’
The phrase out to lunch, Delbane thought, was having some decidedly apposite connotations at this point. The Doctor, meanwhile, had bounded over to an Apple keyboard and was typing frantically. He hit the Enter key, stared at the resulting display on the monitor and then bounded back triumphantly.
‘Do you want the long answer or the short answer?’ he said.
‘How long is the long answer, precisely?’ asked Romana. It was the first time she’d spoken save to snub Delbane.
‘Well, if I detail all the factors and the basis for the fuzzy-logic processes that allow a reasonably corroborative gestalt,’
said the Doctor, ‘fifteen years, give or take a couple of weeks.’
‘I’m game,’ said Romana. Then she turned to Delbane and sniffed. ‘Though I suppose, under the circumstances, it might be better to go for the short answer.’
‘You can’t be taking this seriously!’ Delbane exclaimed to Crowley. They were in the Brigadier’s office, poring over a London street map which was spread over the desk and so large that several sections flopped over the side. The Doctor was tracing the route he had in his head as the one that the kidnappers had taken, marking points of interest with a big Magic Marker, while the Lady Romana stood off to one side watching with cool uninvolvement.
‘Would it help if I said satellite-surveillance tracking was involved?’ the Doctor asked. ‘I used data from several orbital satellites in my calculations.’
‘I have to admit,’ Crowley said to Delbane, ‘from what you say, it sounds a little preposterous. However...’ He frowned, thoughtfully. ‘From what I gather about the Doctor, from the records you transcribed, it seems that he’s well known for his unorthodox methods - and those methods, from the documentary evidence, seem to work. You’re absolutely positive that this is where the trail leads?’
This last was to the Doctor. Crowley was pointing at a spot on the map where the scientific advisor had drawn a quite definitive-looking cross.
‘Within the limits of an imperfect world, yes.’ The Doctor tapped the map. ‘At least, that’s where the trail stops with no indication of where it might lead on. The forces that were here are there, or were there until very recently. It’s a point of transitional importance if nothing else.’
Delbane snorted. ‘There are police APAs out, there are Special Branch units combing the city and the railway stations, ports and airports are being watched. Do you really want to waste resources on a wild-goose chase like this?’
‘All the same,’ said Crowley, ‘it can’t hurt to have a look.’
‘Well, I’m not doing it,’ said Delbane.
Crowley smiled slightly, and a little nastily. ‘I was thinking of perhaps Slater and McCrae?’
‘Those chaps who seemed so disconcerted to see us when we arrived?’ the Doctor said. ‘Marvellous. It’ll give them a spot of occupational therapy and bring them out of themselves. I trust that they have all the skills your, ah, Provisional Department expects of its men?’
‘You could say that, yes,’ said Delbane, avoiding Crowley’s eye.
‘Splendid.’ The Doctor turned to the Lady Romana. ‘I’d like you to go with them. Let me know what you find.’
‘A little outing with the aboriginals,’ said Romana, sourly.
‘How perfectly lovely.’
Chapter Thirteen
A Sunny Afternoon in Central Park
As the sun through the alders dappled the well-kept grass of Lychburg Central Park, turning the flow from the ornamental fountain to a rainbow spray and the bronze statue of the city’s founder, Zebedia Lynchall (with a silent ‘n’) golden in its light, Artie Bunson set his big, heavy holdall down on the ground and himself down on a bench.
His brown paper bag of lunch was on his knees - though as he was coming off his shift as an orderly in Mercy Hill it was more the equivalent of his main meal of the day. Peanut butter and jelly in Wonder bread, which his mother seemed to think was enough for anyone.
Gang-markers and obscenities had been cut into and spraybombed over the vinylised steel of the bench but Artie remained oblivious to them, not being able to understand the one and his mind automatically shying away from contemplating the other. His mother, when he was a child, had rapped his hands with an old steel-edged ruler which she kept for that special purpose, if he had even so much as looked like he was thinking a Bad Word. Or, pretty much, for any other reason.
There was a rummy asleep on the bench beside him, head thrown back and snoring, relatively clean but sloppy and smelling like he had been drinking something stronger than beer even this early in the day Artie looked at the sleeping form with distaste... and found himself wondering, without thinking or caring about it either way, what would happen if he took his finger and shoved it deep and hard into the man’s eye.
It wasn’t just as if he could see it happening in front of him, it was as though he could feel himself doing it, his hand moving and the slippery sensation on his finger, the sounds and jerking as the body went into spasm...
And then, quite without feeling anything either way, Artie didn’t do anything at all. There was no conscious decision involved; it was like someone else was doing his thinking for him. He simply sat there, nothing in particular in his mind, his eyes resting on the little man and his two companions who had spread a checked cloth on the ground some yards away and were eating a picnic lunch from a wicker hamper, and listening to what they were saying.
‘I’d already intimated something of the kind,’ said the Doctor around a Cajun-fried chicken leg, into which he was tucking with relish. ‘My people have a... well, we’re rather sensitive to the shape the world makes, if you see what I mean. I’d hoped my feelings were just the result of whatever it was that was affecting the TARDIS itself, but it seems they were not. I do beg your pardon. I shouldn’t be speaking with my mouth full. Here, let me dab that off with a napkin. It seems,’ he continued, rather less messily, ‘that we’re trapped here in more senses than one. We can only hope that the next murder we see won’t be our own...’
‘Murder?’ said Jamie, pausing with a devilled egg halfway to his mouth. ‘What’s this about murder?’
‘Oh, I’m sure I mentioned the murders,’ said the Doctor.
‘Didn’t I mention the murders?’
‘No,’ said Victoria, who was suddenly feeling that no matter how bad she might have thought things were, they were suddenly going to get a lot worse. ‘You didn’t mention any murders at all.’
‘I’m sure I must have,’ said the Doctor. can’t imagine me not mentioning something as important as murders.’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Jamie.
‘Well, surely I must have said something about murders when I...’
‘Doctor,’ said Victoria, with a sense of huge but slightly worn patience. ‘Possibly it would be simpler if we all pretended that you had told us, but we’ve forgotten, so you’ll have to tell us all over again.’
‘Oh. Yes. Right-oh.’ The Doctor waggled his eyebrows seriously, preparing to tell a tale that would make mere mortal men
shake in their boots with crawling terror. ‘Are those mushy peas?’ he said suddenly, spoiling the effect and dipping a finger in a little pot to have a taste. ‘Oh.’ His face fell.
It appears to be some kind of avocado dip. ‘Anyway, according to Police Chief Tilson there have been a number of suspicious and rather gruesome deaths. The methods and circumstances are variable but there’s a taste - to use Tilson’s rather fulsome terms - of them being the work of the same individual. He started talking about splash patterns and disposition or some such, but I’m afraid I found the whole thing quite distressing and didn’t listen to that bit very closely. The interesting thing, I gather, is that the timing and positioning of these murders - or at least, the circumstances that can be pieced together, as it were, when the remains come to light -
means that they cannot possibly be the work of one person. Two or three have been known to happen, apparently, on different sides of town within minutes of each other.’
‘So there’s more than one killer,’ said Jamie. ‘That’s simple enough.’
‘Quite possibly,’ said the Doctor. ‘The other thing is that possible killers have been caught - or at least, suspects and material witnesses have been identified and questioned. The trouble is that none of them have any motive, or any recollection of their whereabouts at the time the murders were committed - and other people keep turning up out of the blue, it seems, to furnish them with cast-iron alibis. Then vital forensic evidence vanishes without trace, other spurious leads crop up from nowhere and before any of it can even be begun to be sorted out, there’s another run of murders that put them right back to square one again. The police department here isn’t really up to dealing with something on this scale, and it has them running around in a bit of a flap. Also, I feel, the police, or anyone else, are not exactly in their right minds at this point.’