Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

by Mark Speed

  Ware's cab crunched to a halt in Doctor How's drive just before midnight. They got out to inspect it. Apart from the missing front bumper, there were scrape marks all over the paintwork and windows, plus a few dents in the roof. The rear looked as if someone had thrown paint-stripper at it. "Well if that's what it does to its girlfriends," said Ware, "then I bet they're an endangered species."

  A chink of light appeared from between the curtains of Mrs Roseby's bedroom window.

  "Come on, let's get inside," said the Doctor. He let them into the porch and insisted on two UV baths back-to-back. "No offense, David," he said as he let them into the hallway.

  There was a flash of black, and Ware was pinned to the porch door. He screamed.

  "Doctor, stop Trini!" yelled Kevin. "She'll kill him!"

  "Argh!" shouted Ware. "Get orfm—" His cries were muffled by Trini, who – appearing as a large black cat – had her paws on his shoulders and her jaw in his face.

  "Doctor!" shouted Kevin.

  The Doctor leaned back against the banisters and laughed.

  Ware grasped Trini's head in both hands and pushed it away from him. "I missed you too, but I just hate it when you do that."

  "Careful, Trini," said the Doctor, catching his breath. "You don't know what you might catch."

  Trini relented and jumped down, rubbing herself against Ware's legs, purring deeply. He reached down and stroked her. "Good girl. Fifty years on and you ain't changed a bit, my darling." Ware surveyed the hallway. "And this place ain't changed none, either. I'll give you that, Peter – somehow your style is always contemporary."

  "Good taste never goes out of fashion," said the Doctor, subduing a proud smile.

  Ware wandered over to the paintings. "And these will be worth a ton more money now, eh?"

  "Those will never have a price put on them, David. Given me by friends. The other things I've collected on the way I feel free to trade."

  Ware turned to Kevin. "You want my advice, son? You stick with Peter. Brightest of the bunch. We've all done pretty well, but he's a master. Buy what he buys when he's buying, sell what he sells when he's selling."

  "Still got your Hockneys?"

  "Yeah, thanks for the tip. Must've been the last one you gave me."

  "I hope they weren't in the house."

  "Gawd, no. Vault. Always surprised you never bought his work."

  The Doctor wrinkled his nose. "As I said, good taste never goes out of fashion. Still, I'm sure they'll appreciate even more when he passes on."

  "You guys are no better than thieves," said Kevin.

  "I beg your pardon?" said the Doctor.

  "Pretty easy to speculate on the art market if you're a time traveller, isn't it? See what the prices are next year, travel back in time and buy it. Sell it in the future."

  "Heavens, no. We're strictly forbidden by intergalactic treaty. We're trusted and licenced to travel in time, and we'd not want to lose that. No speculation allowed."

  "What? Why?"

  "It would distort markets. Besides, if I bought a load of gold when I thought the price was going up, then it would drive up the price at that point. When I came to sell in the future it would depress the price. Thus, I wouldn't make the killing I thought I would, would I?"

  "Yeah, but futures contracts."

  "Same thing, dear boy."

  "Art, then."

  "If I bought Constable's Hay Wain direct from the artist it wouldn't have the same cachet as it does today. The absence of that piece from the market might mean that all of his work was devalued."

  "Yeah, but you could bring another piece back."

  "Ah, then the paint and canvas wouldn't age correctly. For older objets d'art, the carbon dating would show it was younger than it should be. Sorry, Kevin. You're not going to get rich by temporal smuggling or speculation."

  Ware laughed. "That's put a dampener on a little scheme at the back of your head, eh?" He ruffled Kevin's afro hair.

  "All I'm getting is expenses!" said Kevin.

  "Bleedin' 'ell!" said Ware. "You're paying them now, Peter?"

  "Sign of the times," said the Doctor. "Decay of society. His mother even wanted some kind of apprenticeship contract."

  Ware whistled. He took Kevin by the shoulders. "Wisdom is beyond price. My companions haven't done too badly in the past, either. But just a hint. When you do travel in time, you will notice the bigger trends. You can't lose money by following the bigger trades. You understand me?"

  "Not really."

  "Look, at the turn of the nineteenth century every smart-arse on Wall Street was buying the shares of the companies that cleaned up the horse manure in Manhattan. It was a sure bet – all the predictions were that the place would disappear under ten feet of the stuff after a year without them. A decade later, they were all bust. Why?"

  "Uh. Motor vehicles?"

  "Good lad! Same thing goes with other stuff. People's houses kept blowing up because of gas lighting. Mr Edison comes along with electricity. Get it? If my cousin takes you to the future and you see driverless cars, the last thing you want to do is spend four years of your life doing the Knowledge to become a London hackney carriage licence-holder."

  "Yeah. Got it. Hey, Doc – when can we go ten years in the future?"

  The Doctor laughed. "We can only go where and when our missions take us."

  "But we might never go ten or twenty years into the future!"

  "Ah, but you can always read a history book when you go further." The Doctor switched focus, as if tapped on the shoulder. "Oh. My Spectrel has returned, David. Without yours, alas."

  The other two followed him down into the basement, where his Spectrel stood in the corner, gleaming. He pressed his hand against the crown above the door. "Good news and bad, David. The good news is that mine is now in touch with yours transdimensionally – although she's still not able to take a power feed because I couldn't do that last jolt. The bad news is that she's just about to be taken into custody."

  "Taken into custody?" asked Kevin.

  "Half-inched?" asked Ware.

  "Guess who by?" asked the Doctor.

  "Don't tell me. MI16," said Ware.

  "Still around after all these years," said the Doctor. "Relentless. How terribly tiresome."

  Thickett was bouncing up and down on his toes again. Before that morning at Grove's, Peterson had never seen him do it in the eight years they'd been working together.

  "This, Miss Peterson, is the state of the art," said Thickett, as he ran an admiring finger over the curve of the front wing of the black cab. "Something we dare only dream of." The flickering red and blue lights of the emergency vehicles made his grin look even more manic than it was. "Oh, this is a beauty alright. I've waited my whole career for this."

  When they'd got to the scene, Peterson had been more interested in the glutinous liquid in the driveway. Unfortunately, the water coming out of the burst central heating system had washed all but a corner of it away, but she'd still managed to get a tiny sample, which was now safe in the car. Her colleague had shown no interest in the fact that it was four days fresher than those taken that morning, and that it hadn't been diluted with dirty rainwater. Instead, he'd taken a cursory look at the damaged house and garage, then become fixated on the black cab standing on the road outside.

  "The telephone box was right next to it, do you see? One witness says she vaguely recalls a tall man in a suit touching the box and the car. Another witness says that there might have been three or four of them. That's them, you see? That's Doctor How, and his assistant. And another Doctor and his assistant. Do you understand what this means, Miss Peterson?"

  "Yes. It means that two of these Time Keepers are talking to each other. In person."

  "Exactly! Exactly! That means they're up to something, doesn't it? They're on the move again. There has to be a reason for it."

  "The reason seems obvious to me." said Peterson. "Something demolished this house, smashed up the adjoining garage, then di
sappeared back down underneath the house. Maybe it was looking for something, or someone. It didn't find it, so now it's on the loose again. Or maybe it was after the Doctor and the Doctor fought it off and then left? Maybe it managed to get one of them before they fought it off? Maybe what I have in my sample is the blood of the thing that attacked them? And according to eye-witnesses this thing was rather big and scary. Unfortunately, their memories are fading as fast as the fluids that it left behind." Despite the coolness of the night air, the rest of the glutinous liquid had evaporated. "And it looks like it managed to attack the vehicle the Doctor was travelling in. And, correct me if I'm wrong, the vehicle was a black cab – what's left of the bumper matches this one."

  "Yes, yes," said Thickett. He tried the driver's door for the twentieth time but it wouldn't budge. "But this is the other Doctor's. The house belongs to one David Ware, a licenced cab driver. David Ware. Where, you see? Doctor Where. This is his –" he lowered his voice so that the police and fire crews couldn't hear – "time-machine. His Spectrel." He hissed that last word in an awed whisper.

  "So you think he drove off in his other taxi and left it behind?"

  "Yes."

  "So it must be broken. I mean, look at it – it's got flat tyres. That's not state-of-the-art, is it? Surely he might have taken his Spectrel."

  "He has his reasons. They have their reasons. Maybe they're spying on us?"

  "Then it could be a trap. Or a piece of misdirection?"

  "Ah, maybe that's what the Doctor – the Doctors –– want us to believe."

  "The Doctor isn't a threat, Mr Thickett. However, whatever demolished this house presents a clear and obvious threat to the British public. Our remit is to protect them."

  "Yes, yes," snapped Thickett. "But it's also to protect them by advancing and incorporating scientific knowledge. This beauty is mine. Imagine what we're going to learn from it. Ah, here we are."

  A parking enforcement truck pulled up. It was the kind which had a small crane with a sling, capable of lifting a vehicle onto its back. Thickett went over to the driver, shouted some orders over the noise of the engine and gesticulated at the black cab.

  Peterson shook her head and looked back at the house. Thickett would be shocked if he knew what she thought she knew about the Time Keepers and their Spectrels.

  The fire crew had turned off the water at the mains, as well as the electricity and gas. Two of them were tightening a piece of scaffolding in the centre of the smashed front of the house to shore it up. Their watch supervisor came over to her.

  "It's safe now, Miss. Want to take a look inside?"

  "Sure."

  They walked over the detritus on the lawn – pieces of splintered floorboard and ripped carpet – and stepped through the hole into the remains of the living room. The ceiling had been caked in mud as the creature had burrowed into the layer of heavy clay that lay beneath the fertile topsoil of Essex.

  "Don't know how you explain that one on the household insurance," said the fireman.

  "I don't know how you explain all the soil in this room. How would you? Ever seen anything like it?"

  "Nope. If you asked me, I'd say you might mistake it for a low-velocity gas explosion. You know – one that didn't quite go supersonic and create enough of a shockwave to blow everything to bits. Just enough of the right methane-air mix to create a mess, blow the window out, churn up the soil."

  "Except that...?" prompted Peterson.

  "Except that there was no gas leak, no evidence of fire, and if the explosion was strong enough to blow the front of the house out then why's the back and everything else still alright?"

  "Nor would that explain the damage to the garage. So how do you explain it?"

  "No idea, but I'm open to suggestions. I understand you're the expert."

  "Not necessarily an expert per se, but I'm a scientific officer who is charged with explaining the otherwise inexplicable."

  "Oh, very X-Files. MI16, your boss said. You've seen something like it before?"

  "Somewhat like it. Been a bit of a spate of them. I'm sure it has a perfectly rational explanation."

  "Well, let me know when you do." The fireman picked up a piece of newspaper from the detritus and scribbled his number on it. "I'd love to hear more about your glamorous line of work over a drink sometime."

  "Thank you, I'm flattered," said Peterson, putting the paper in her wallet. She emptied it of such scraps on a monthly basis. In her head she kept a bar chart which displayed the number of solicitations per month, and she carried out multivariate analyses of the various factors she felt affected it – clothing, makeup, weather – to see how they affected the number of hits. She tried her best to minimise the attention because it was a distraction to her work. Of course, the running analysis was itself a distraction, so she recognised she was in a zero-sum game with her subjects. She wished she could dump the research, but her brain never seemed to be short of memory or processing capacity so it just kept accumulating the data and analysing it without her consciously doing so.

  "It's no more glamorous than your line of work," she said, then realised what an insult it probably felt like to a man who was used to veneration by members of her sex. She took a few photos of the mess, doubtful they'd be of any use. Whilst she knew blood-spatter patterns could reveal a great deal about a murder scene, she doubted mud-spatter would cast much light on the incident.

  "Going to board it up now, boss," said one of the fire crew at the front of the house, so they picked their way back to the hole and stepped into the front garden.

  "Was your team first on the scene?" she asked.

  "Yeah, we were as it happens. I thought I knew the area, but I have to admit we were a bit confused. All these roads – they call them banjos round here – are a bit alike. I reckon we must have passed it at least twice before we found it."

  "Oh, that happens."

  "Well, we get measured on response times, so I'm for the high-jump."

  "So do you actually remember driving past it the first couple of times?"

  "Between you and me, the whole thing's a bit hazy. I could have sworn we passed a telephone box. But there isn't one on this road. I mean, there would never be one in the middle of a banjo, would there? Why do you ask?"

  "Just curious. Here's my card. Give me a call if you recall anything else – no matter how trivial you think it might be." She gave him a smile that she'd mathematically proven would make most men remember her instructions.

  The pitch of the parking enforcement truck's engine changed, and she looked round to see it straining to lift the dilapidated cab. Thickett watched impatiently from the kerb as the driver worked the controls at the side. "Too heavy!" he shouted above the din.

  "It can't be too heavy. Try again," insisted Thickett.

  The driver went back to his controls. This time the cab lifted immediately, causing the truck to rock dangerously as the cab swung back and forth.

  "Careful!" yelled Thickett.

  "I am being careful!" shouted back the driver. "It's too light now."

  "You must be mistaken," said Thickett.

  "Must have been stuck," said the driver. "I didn't see nothing. You sure the engine's not dropped out or something?" He left the controls and studied the underside of the cab, and the area where it had been parked. "Inertia," he said.

  Thickett made eye contact with Peterson and made excited gestures which she took to be about the apparent variation in weight and its impossibility.

  The driver swung the cab slowly into position, two feet above the back of the truck, and lined it up. There was an ominous creaking noise from the neck of the crane, and the truck groaned uncomfortably as it settled down onto its suspension. Its wheels flattened against the road. There was a loud retort as the bolts that fastened the neck of the crane to the hydraulic pistons shattered and the driver jumped for his life. The cab slammed down onto the back of the truck with a massive crash. The truck's windows shattered and the crane neck bounced off
the roof of the cab then fell onto the roof of a car parked on the other side of the road, crushing it and spraying shattered glass everywhere. The car's alarm activated, and wailed to the neighbourhood.

  "Be careful!" said Thickett.

  "You be careful!" said the driver. "What the hell is this thing?"

  "If it's damaged I'll hold you responsible," said Thickett, climbing up onto the truck to inspect the miraculously undamaged cab.

  "You never told me anything about this," said the driver. "I'm off the job, mate."

  "Oh, yeah?" said Thicket, jumping back down and pulling himself up to his full height, which fell short of the driver's by several inches. "Well, I don't think you've got much choice, have you? You're not getting it off in a hurry. Your equipment's clearly sub-standard, and I'll hold you personally responsible if this specimen isn't delivered to our depot by nine tomorrow morning. Do you understand?"

  "Specimen?" said the driver. "Jesus. I'm not going anywhere with this. No way."

  "You have to," snapped Thickett. "Remember who you're under contract to." He pulled out his wallet and stuck his badge in the man's face. "Now get moving."

  "Well, I'm not going without my crane."

  A couple of police officers had taken an interest, and stepped between the two men. One of them explained that the crane would have to stay where it was, pending an investigation by the Health and Safety Inspectorate the following morning. It was explained to Thickett that driving a truck with a shattered windscreen would be a serious traffic violation. Either the truck and the cab would have to be towed, or the windscreen would have to be repaired in situ.

  "If you don't mind, Mr Thickett," said Peterson, "I think I'll call it a night here. I think we've reached a logical impasse. Don't you?"

  Thickett glared up at her. "You saw it, didn't you? You saw that it could vary its weight. How do you explain that within your current understanding of the physical universe, Doctor Peterson?"

  "As I said, Mr Thickett, I was much more interested in the danger presented by whatever demolished the house. Quite why you remained so interested in an apparently unrelated object is something that defies rational explanation in itself."