Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [43]
‘Everyone gets that,’ Sam told her, nodding sympathetically. But she was thinking about her first meeting with the Doctor, her first trip in the TARDIS. She hadn’t had any problems then. Like the bits of the brain that dealt with culture shock had been switched off as soon as she’d stepped into the console room. A side-effect of the TARDIS, or something in her genes?
Bregman pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and flicked it open. ‘I only joined up so I could get to see the Cybermen. Straight out of technical college. Me, I mean, not the Cybermen. I wouldn’t have joined the regular army if you’d held a gun to my head. Soldiers are boring. Cybermen are worth shooting at.’ She gave Sam a meaningful glance. ‘I was the kind of kid who had VirchCon fighters instead of Barbie dolls. You probably guessed that.’
Sam kept nodding. She’d had Star Wars figures, herself. Kathleen offered her the cigarette box. ‘Thanks, no.’
Kathleen grunted, then lit up a cigarette for herself with a disposable lighter, leaving the rest of the packet on the step beside her. ‘I wasn’t expecting them to be like this,’ she said, between breaths of smoke. ‘Qixotl. You friend. That Time Lord, what’s his name? Homunculette. What I’m saying is, they look human, but they’re not. You can tell. Don’t know how.’
‘Biodata,’ suggested Sam. ‘Something in the biology. The signals they give off.’
Kathleen shrugged. ‘Right now, I’m supposed to be socialising. I think I’ll lose my grip if I have to get near Homunculette again. You looked a hell of a lot more comfortable around your alien than I would’ve done, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘It’s not like you expect,’ Sam said. ‘I mean, being with the Doctor.’
‘Yeah? Why, what’s it like?’
Sam had to think about that. ‘It’s like... look, I don’t normally talk about this stuff, but I’ll tell you, OK? It’s like the one time I got totally off my face.’
‘The one time? Are you sure you’re human?’
Very funny, thought Sam. Yeah, the one time. The time she’d wanted to find out exactly how liberal-minded her parents were, when it came down to it. ‘It was like everything looked out of sync, all of a sudden,’ she told Kathleen. ‘Like the world had moved two inches to the left, and no one had told me about it. You get paranoid, you get confused...’
‘And that’s what it feels like hanging around with an alien?’
‘No. Listen. After a while, I figured out the best way of dealing with stuff, when you’re in that kind of state. You have to act casual. You have to pretend the world’s always been that way, and nothing unusual’s happening. And that was what it was like, the first couple of weeks I spent away from Earth. It was one stupid situation after another. All these planets I got taken to, all these places where the sky’s green or the sea’s made out of acid.’
‘Let me read between the lines here,’ said Kathleen. ‘What you’re saying is, you went crazy.’
‘No. You don’t go crazy. Well, maybe you’d go crazy if you tried to fight it, but you don’t. You give in to it. Like there’s a new set of rules, and you have to go along with them. Does that make sense?’
Kathleen nodded, but Sam got the feeling she wasn’t really following a word of it. Because Kathleen hadn’t given in to it yet, had she? She was still trying to live in a safe, ordinary, straight-line kind of world, and it was going to drive her mad, if she wasn’t careful.
Sam glanced down at the cigarette box, lying on the step between her and the Lieutenant. Sign of normality, she thought. The kind of thing you’d see stuffed down the back of the bike rack at Coal Hill, or lying in the gutters on Kingsland Road. Maybe the packet had been put there as a kind of reminder. A token of the things she’d given up when she’d walked into the TARDIS. A little something from the twentieth century.
She picked up the box, and read