Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

by Mark Speed

  Peterson gave Thickett a meaningful look. "Well, well," said Thickett, rocking up and down on his toes with glee. "Dr How. Who'd have thought it?"

  "Do you really think it's him, after all these years?" asked Peterson. "Surely he'd be in his nineties by now? Or even older. Probably dead, in fact."

  "The description is perfect, Miss Peterson. I told you – age doesn't matter a jot to him and his ilk." He rubbed his hands. "And he has a new assistant. He's up to something."

  "Here, what's all this about?" said Grove, swallowing the last of his food.

  "I want you to show us exactly what you showed the other two earlier today," said Thickett.

  "I've got a business to run," said Grove, and turned his focus back to his paper.

  "I don't think you understand me, Mr Grove," said Thickett, fixing the man with a stare so cold it could roll back global warming. "I think you'll find you have no choice but to cooperate with us."

  "We don't wish to be heavy-handed about this, Mr Grove," said Peterson with a smile. "But we really do need you to show us what the other two were interested in. It's an issue of national security. I'll get the sampling packs from the car."

  "I noticed your CCTV camera pointing towards the exit," said Thickett. "I take it that your recent visitors went in that direction?"

  "Yeah, they was on foot. The monitor's over there. Captures two frames per second."

  "I'm sure that's all we'll need."

  Grove went over to the monitor and hard disk, which were in a secure cabinet. Peterson came back in with a black box and looked over Thickett's shoulder as Grove fiddled with the controls. "Don't ever need to do this, guv. Sorry. I reckon they arrived about half-ten. Right, here we go." Two sets of blurred legs walked into view, then the image went fuzzy for a second, before becoming clear again, showing the same view.

  "Play it again. Slow-motion. One second of replay at twenty-four frames per second is twelve seconds of real time," said Thickett.

  Grove did as he was told twice more in slow-motion. Each time the image went fuzzy just after the Doctor and Kevin's feet came into view, then cleared once they were out of the camera's view.

  "Damn! Of all the rotten luck," said Thickett. "When did they leave? We can at least see their clothes, relative height. Maybe one might even turn to talk to the other and we'll see a profile."

  "Hang on, hang on," said Grove. He spooled forward and let the video run. "Here. See? That's the edge of the door just coming into the frame there on the bottom right as it opens when they leave." The screen went fuzzy, then it cleared to reveal the empty scene again.

  "What?" screamed Thickett. He put a hand on Grove's shoulder. "Did you do this? Did the Doctor tell you to do this?"

  Grove pulled himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest. "I don't know nothing about no Doctor, mate. Now you come in here with your badge and your accusations but I don't know who you are. I ain't ever heard of no MI16, and if this is a wind-up you'll be eating hospital food."

  "I'm sorry," said Peterson. "My colleague's a little overwrought. Our department has been trying to track down this... man, the Doctor, for quite some time."

  "Yeah, but I don't know who you are, do I? For all I know, this Doctor could be the good guy and you could be the wrong 'uns."

  "I assure you that we're above board, Mr Grove," said Peterson. "If you'd care to call SO15 on this number, they'll vouch for us."

  "SO15? What's that?"

  Thickett pushed into the conversation. "It used to be called Special Branch. If you'd prefer, we could get a warrant to search your premises, Mr Grove?"

  "We would just like some answers," said Peterson. "Did you tamper with the CCTV?"

  "No. But, come to think of it, the lad was alone in here for a couple of minutes whilst this Doctor fellah took a sample. But then I don't see how he could have nobbled the footage after they left."

  "Right enough," said Peterson. She turned to Thickett. "I seem to recall reading something about this in the files. Some kind of intelligent disruptive device. They were notoriously difficult to photograph, and they were nondescript – an everyman." She turned to Grove. "Tell me, could you describe these two men in more detail?"

  "The older chap was in a black suit, black shoes and a white shirt."

  "Colour of tie?"

  "I...I don't know if he was wearing a tie, Miss."

  "Hair and eye colour?"

  "Dark hair. Eyes were... I don't recall. Sorry. I'm normally quite good with faces. You know, when I used to pick up fares it was handy – in case they did a runner or something." Grove shook his head.

  "The youth? What about the youth?" asked Thickett.

  "Mixed race." He shrugged.

  "The colour of the hoodie?" asked Thickett.

  "It wasn't white. Grey? Or was it blue? I don't think it was red, but...I'm sorry." Grove rubbed the back of his head. "I can't really see them in my mind's eye. The more I think of them, the less I see them. Look, I'm not being funny but to be honest I don't remember too much about this morning."

  "It's okay, Mr Grove," said Peterson. "Just show us where you took them. Show us the vehicles."

  As they went out into the yard, Thickett touched Peterson's arm and muttered, "Do you see now? Do you see why they need to be controlled? This one, this How character – he's the most dangerous, I'm sure of that."

  "My understanding was that we owe them a great debt," said Peterson. She opened the box and took a phial out to sample the same puddle that the Doctor had tested. "He hardly seems to be a threat. Quite the opposite, I'd have thought."

  "Well, Miss Peterson, it is our department's remit to find and control this kind of technology. The kind of technology that your friend the Doctor uses so casually."

  Peterson rolled her eyes at Thickett's provocative language. Although he was her boss in the department, it was only thanks to his long years of service. She didn't know much about his background, but was sure she'd find a wealth of disappointment and petty resentment in it. As far as she was concerned, if things didn't pick up soon she'd try her luck elsewhere. A Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Imperial College carried no weight with a dyed-in-the-wool mid-ranking civil servant like Thickett.

  She put the phial in the box and walked over to join Grove and Thickett at the bent fence. She felt a twinge of excitement coursing through her veins as she did a mental calculation of the forces that would be required to perform such a feat. She ducked down and stepped through the gap, leaving the two men in the yard. Her eyes followed the mutilated undergrowth along the back of the properties. They took in the pile of earth at the side of the embankment and she smiled. She was glad she wasn't wearing heels.

  "Are you alright there, Miss Peterson?" Thickett called after her.

  "Fine, thank you. Just going to take a few samples."

  And there they were, in the soft earth: the Doctor's shoeprints. She placed a phial on each of them for scale, and took photographs. She could figure out his shoe-size later. If it was really him. It was trivial but here, at last, was physical proof of his existence. She touched the impressions lightly with the tips of her fingers and smiled again to herself.

  The Doctor looked with disdain at the food on his plate.

  "You said less of the KFC and more of the piri-piri, Doc," said Kevin.

  "I meant for you, not me."

  "That's proper flame-grilled chicken, that is."

  The Doctor ran his Tsk Army Ultraknife over it. "It may once have seen fire, but that was around three weeks ago, in a factory. The chicken itself came from Thailand. It was merely defrosted and microwaved in the so-called kitchen."

  "Straight up, your Ultraknife is a food critic too? Maybe it could start its own blog."

  "No, it can't analyse food, Kevin. At least not to that extent. I was using my Ultraknife's UV function to eliminate what I'm quite certain are large colonies of bacteria. The facts behind the origin of this food are my own deduction. Those marks that are supposed to look like it's b
een flame-grilled on a barbecue are actually printed onto the meat."

  "Is that right?" said Kevin through a mouthful of bun, chicken and spicy sauce.

  "Of course. If any grill were that dirty this place would lose its licence. Although frankly, I'm surprised it got one in the first place."

  "Delicious, though. And a healthy low-fat alternative to fried chicken."

  The Doctor took a reluctant bite. His phone gave a quiet ping and he drew it out of his pocket. "Ah, preliminary results from the tests are back."

  "What tests?"

  "The samples we took a couple of hours ago, remember? The preliminary results are back. Now, let's see..."

  "Back up a bit, Doc."

  "Why?"

  "You haven't taken them samples back to the lab yet."

  "I didn't need to." The Doctor put his phone on the table, took another bite and continued to read the message on his phone.

  "You just put them in your pocket."

  "Of course. That's how they got back to the lab in the Spectrel."

  "No, Doctor. Listen, listen. You are, like, telling me that you put your hand in your pocket and it reached back into the Spectrel? And you put the samples in there to be analysed?"

  The Doctor thought for a moment. "Yes, I suppose that is what I am telling you. What of it?"

  "Wow! Like, how does that work?"

  "Do you really want to understand how it works?"

  "Absolutely!"

  "In that case, I suggest you join the Theoretical Physics department of a major university and do a doctorate. However, I will explain it in layman's terms for you. You know computers, don't you?"

  "Yeah, like somewhat, Doctor. I only hacked into the system that hacked into your system, didn't I?"

  "That's a matter for some debate. My understanding was that they used you as a proxy, but we'll let that one pass. So you know what a desktop shortcut does?"

  "Yeah. Put a shortcut on your desktop and you don't have to navigate all the way down through the folders to get to a file. One click and it's open."

  "Exactly. And you understand how that works with a shortened URL going to a specific page on a website too?"

  "Similar sort of thing, innit."

  "And you know what a zip file is?"

  "Of course. Files contain a lot of repeated code. If you can crunch out all the spare code you create a much smaller file."

  "Same principle."

  "I still don't understand."

  "That's because you don't have the doctorate. That's an analogy. Matter – all this stuff around you – is mostly empty. There's nothing really there when I tap this table." The table sounded solid enough to Kevin under the Doctor's knuckles. "It's just opposing forces meeting and not moving. The things that generate the forces are miniscule. It's mostly just empty space."

  "Okay, I get that. But the shortcut?"

  "Other dimensions."

  "Seems simple enough."

  "Excellent. I look forward to hearing you explain it to an audience of your esteemed peers when you pick up your Nobel Prize for Physics next year."

  Kevin sucked his teeth. "I mean, you explained the analogy so brilliantly, Doctor, that even a lowly human couldn't fail to understand it. Anyway, what do the results say?"

  "D'you know, they're rather interesting. Whatever the implement was that cut the steel fence and the fuel lines of the taxis wasn't made of metal. Nor, in fact, was it anything like diamond. In fact, it was biological in nature."

  "Come on, Doc. That isn't possible."

  The Doctor fixed his assistant with a stare. "Please don't make me go down the baboon analogy again because I couldn't face another conversation like that with your mother. Nothing is impossible, Kevin. Heavier-than-air flight was thought impossible. If you want to be my assistant – and especially if you want to be an assistant who survives the experience, and I hope you do, because I'd imagine the conversation with your mother would be even worse than the one about the baboon analogy – then you'd better start believing in the impossible."

  "Okay, I get the message."

  "Look at nature on your own planet, for heaven's sake. You have insects that can support five hundred times their own weight when they hang upside-down. They don't need to be able to do that, but they can do it all the same. And you've still to invent something superior to the silk produced by spiders."

  "I suppose so. I've seen Trinity cut open a tin. That was out of this world, man."

  "Exactly. So at least we know that we're probably dealing with something biological in nature. Or something that has a biological appendage. Though I can't see any good reason to add a biological appendage to a machine. It has been done, though. Hmm. Food for thought, and a distinct possibility."

  "Yeah, it could be a machine that runs off diesel. With a jaw made of some super-hard biological material."

  "Most of the things that run off petrochemicals aren't motors, Kevin."

  "You what?"

  "Bacteria digest petrochemicals. Diesel would be a pretty good food source for a creature that evolved in a carbon-rich environment."

  "You're kidding me."

  "Plenty of life-forms live off methane, often in liquid form."

  "But it would have to be freezing for liquid methane."

  "Nice thinking, but not if the pressure were high enough. Bees feed off sugar, which is just a crystalline hydrocarbon. Put the same molecules in a ring and you'd have an oil. Bacteria quite happily store energy as plastic, the same way you store your excess chicken nuggets and milkshake calories as fat. Anyway, we digress. It needs diesel, for whatever reason. Almost certainly as a source of energy. That diesel tank it ruptured at the filling station must have been a bit of a shock for it. A bit like a drunk drowning in a vat of whisky. No wonder it didn't stick around."

  "Wasn't there another sample? The one from the puddle."

  "Hydrocarbons again – as you'd expect in a car park for taxis. But also some amino acids."

  "What, amino acids as in protein?"

  "Very good. Yes, amino acids of some sort. Not necessarily what you'd expect in a puddle in a car park. I did take a control sample from another puddle. The hydrocarbons in that one were human industrial in origin, and there were no amino acids."

  "So you think it's like a creature, or something. Something alive, I mean."

  "A pretty fair bet. A very powerful creature that feeds off diesel. I'd guess its extraordinary strength comes from its need to burrow."

  "This is all well and good, Doctor," said Kevin, using the last of his bun to mop up some piri-piri sauce from his plate, "But I've no idea how we're going to track this thing down."

  "And if you think I do either, you're very much mistaken."

  "But that's hopeless!"

  "Isn't it exciting, though? For all we know, that creature – or hundreds like it – could be tunnelling away under our feet right at this moment. Who knows when and where it – or they – might strike next?"

  "So can't you work it out?"

  "Eventually. But there's not enough to go on yet. I think the answer may lie elsewhere."

  "Doctor, I've had enough of Dagenham now. "I know bits of Tulse Hill is bleak, but this is just hideous. I mean all the houses are this horrible pebble-dashed grey and brown."

  "These are called 'banjos' by the locals, you know. If you look at the shape of the streets from the air, they're like a giant banjo. A circular bit at one end, then a couple of parallel streets leading off back to the main road. I suppose the idea was that there wasn't any through-traffic, and you got a bit of a community feel to it. These are suburbs designed for the age of the automobile. We're in Dagenham, after all – Britain's equivalent of Detroit, I suppose."

  "Yeah, Detroit without the charm. Or the glamorous architecture. Or the contribution to black music. And the problem is that if you go up one of these banjos, you have to come all the way back down before you get to the next one, innit? It's a mad idea. Especially if you is on foot. I don't know w
hy we didn't get a cab or something. Or the Spectrel."

  The Doctor had his Tsk Army Ultraknife out, and was sweeping it slowly from side to side as they walked up the street at a snail's pace. A woman pushing a pram gave them a suspicious look as she passed the other way.

  "My apologies; bad management on my part. I should have explained this afternoon's objective to keep you motivated. We're trying to find where Where is. Where is here somewhere."

  "Sorry?"

  "I said Where is here somewhere."

  "You've lost me again, Doc. Where's here?"

  "Yes, exactly. Now keep your eyes peeled."

  "Nah, I still don't get it. Who is where?"

  "No! Where isn't Who. Nothing like him. Where is here. Somewhere. Who is elsewhere."

  "Where's your cousin?"

  "Well, if I knew that, I wouldn't be looking for him, would I? Pay attention, would you?"

  "No, I'm saying that Where is your cousin. Your cousin is called Where."

  "Of course he is. Honestly, Kevin. I thought you were pretty bright but now I'm having doubts. We're trying to find where he is."

  Kevin took a couple of deep breaths and counted to five. "I take it he's not on your Christmas card list no more."

  "No."

  "Your family had this big falling-out, yeah? And you hasn't spoken since?"

  The Doctor nodded.

  "But, like, you should be able to find each other easily. You have all this hi-tech gear. It would be like trying to find an elephant in a herd of cows, surely?"

  "Bad analogy. More like trying to find a tiny chameleon on a green wall covered with ordinary lizards. Actually, that's also a bad analogy because you might be able to infer the presence of the chameleon by the absence of other lizards, or the behaviour of the other lizards due to the presence of the chameleon you can't see. Maybe a tiny chameleon living on the back of a lizard on a wall covered in lizards."