Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [28]
‘Not here.’
Peri told me she’d been wearing more and more garish clothes herself, not to compete with him, but to try to make him realise just how outlandish his own outfit was. It hadn’t worked. He was too comfortable to care.
It took me a while to notice that, hidden by the dapper black trousers, he was wearing fluorescent orange socks.
The amazing thing is, not only did the Doctor’s ‘contacts’ say yes, they even let me come along – once I persuaded him and he persuaded them. I think the Doctor let me tag along for the same reason he let me sit in on his hacking session; he wanted me where he could see me, a controllable element.
As good as his word, the Doctor had Bob drive us to a small apartment in northwest DC, off Connecticut Avenue.
The rooms were furnished – classy, but anonymous, modem wood and plastic reflecting the taste of no-one in particular.
There were no books, no knick-knacks. The kitchen looked as though it was never used. It was another hotel room, not a home.
The man the Doctor wanted us to meet sat stiff-spined in an easy chair. He wore a black coat and hat, as though he was just about to go out. He had a blandly handsome face with a blandly pleasant expression. Behind him, there was a parrot in a cage, constantly chirping and clucking to itself. It was a weird breed: long stiff tail, oversized beak, eyes so small they were barely visible through the mix of lemon and lime feathers.
‘Sit down,’ murmured the Doctor. We arranged ourselves on a couple of pale sofas, and I flipped open my notebook.
‘Allow me to introduce Mr Ghislain’ The man’s eyes moved back and forth over us a couple of times. ‘With the invaluable help of my friends here, I’m very close to finding one of the missing components,’ he said smoothly ‘But they would like to know a bit more of the background to our job.’
He said, ‘Allow me to tell you a story’ He spoke precisely, almost in a monotone; his voice had a trace of accent which I couldn’t place – French? ‘You may take or leave this story as you please.’
Once upon a time (Mr Ghislain told us) there was a space vehicle. It was not made by human beings. In fact, it had been travelling for centuries by the time human beings discovered radio.
The spacecraft was sent from a world circling Epsilon Eridani.4 The people of Eridani could not make ships that could travel faster than light. But they were patient, and had established colony worlds gradually and quietly over a huge volume of space, communicating with one another with slow messages and slower parcels. This particular spacecraft contained a supercomputer, broken into five components for storage in the slow packet, a gift to a fledgling colony circling Van Maanen’s Star.
The spacecraft’s flight path took it through Earth’s solar system, a slingshot around the sun that would boost its speed towards its destination. But the closer the ship came to Earth, the more saturated its systems became with radio transmissions. The Eridani had not anticipated this; they expected a long, patient voyage through silence.
Bewildered by the flood of signals, the slow packet concluded that it must have already reached its destination, and landed its precious cargo on the planet Earth.
When the Eridani realised what had happened – almost eleven years later – they took the unusual and expensive step of chartering a faster-than-light ship from a neighbouring civilisation, and sent two agents to retrieve the package. But during those eleven years, their parcel had already been discovered by human beings. It had passed through a succession of hands, the components becoming separated as owner after owner tried to discover their secrets.
The Eridani have managed to find three of the components in the three years they have been on Earth. But then one of them was killed by a human being they had employed to help 4 This is a real star, a class K orange dwarf about eleven light years from Earth. The Doctor mentioned that scientists on Earth had scanned