Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [3]
‘You won’t trick me into incriminating myself.’
‘It’s against the law to tell ghost stories?’ the Doctor asked.
‘You know it is. When the story is true.’
‘It happened. No law can change the truth.’
‘Scientific law is the truth. Logically, what happened to me couldn’t happen. Therefore it didn’t.’
‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Ziyou.’
Ziyou couldn’t remember telling the Doctor his name.
He’d been careful not to tell him. Had the Doctor read his mind?
‘No,’ the Doctor said conspiratorially, ‘I just read your name-badge.’
‘I’m loyal, I’m not a criminal,’ Ziyou declared. ‘Doctor, I spent three months in a mental hospital. They started to wipe parts of my memory. I had to escape before... before there was nothing of me left.’
The Doctor gently touched his wrist and looked him in the eye. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong. You saw something, that’s all. Something that you can’t explain, something they can’t explain.’ The Doctor was staring at Ziyou with an intensity that he found frightening. ‘It’s a presence that science can deny, It exists outside the latitude of human minds.’
‘Please. They can hear every heresy, you know. Even down here.’
The Doctor smiled. ‘They’ve got most of the Strip covered, but this is a big planet. It s impossible to watch every inch of the surface all the time, especially out here beyond the frostlands. They only have two dozen spy satellites in irregular orbits, monitoring random sections of the planet’s surface. There’s a limit to the power of technology.’
Ziyou straightened, ignoring the last remark ‘I know all that; everyone knows it. But you can’t predict which sections they’re watching, that’s the whole point.’
The Doctor took a small white box from his pocket and held it up. ‘This little device picks up the telemetry of the satellites as well as military transponder signals. If anything artificial comes over the horizon, or there’s anything military within a fifty-mile radius then it gives a series of short buzzes. We’d have a little under two minutes before we were within range of a scanner. Plenty of time to change the topic of conversation.’
Ziyou couldn’t keep his eyes off the box. That something so small could be so... powerful. ‘You stole it?’
‘No,’ the Doctor explained, ‘I built it myself. I could build another one.’
‘May I hold it?’
‘I can let you have this one,’ the Doctor paused, ‘if you’d just tell me your story’. The Doctor handed the box over.
Ziyou turned it over in his hand, before opening it up.
There were a dozen metal plates, laid out alongside one another like a miniature piano keyboard, and a metal stylus slotted above them. Ziyou turned back to the Doctor, unable to hide his disappointment.
‘It’s a children’s toy. A musical instrument.’
‘Take the stylus,’ the Doctor prompted. He showed Ziyou where to tap the stylus and a discordant buzzing started up. It took a moment for Ziyou to decipher the signals, a detailed log of military movements over the last couple of days.
‘It works. Now tell me what you saw.’
‘I saw a ghost.’ Ziyou said it before he could catch himself.
‘Tell me more.’
‘There’s nothing more. I’m sorry. It was a year ago now, just before the peacekeepers arrived. In a deep cavern north of here, close to the Nightingale Facility.’ He rattled off the grid reference. ‘It never happened, there is no rational explanation. It must have been my mind playing tricks. My psychotherapist told me.’
‘Is that what you believe?’
‘There is no other explanation. She said what happened to me in the cave must have been an optical illusion, or a psychological disorder. I can’t remember everything, I can’t trust my own thoughts. What happened, what I remember happening, is just my brain trying to make sense of garbled information by piecing it together. A neurochemical imbalance, or –’ He stopped, disturbed by the Doctor’s expression. ‘What do you think it was?’ he asked angrily.
‘Do you know what they used to believe on Earth?’ the little man began. ‘According to the