Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [42]
The first thing Swan saw were the gadgets lined up on the rim of the tub. There was one of those plastic trays across the tub, piled with half-disassembled radios, Walkmen, circuit boards, Tandy hobby kits. There was more stuff in the dry tub.
It took her a long moment to see, really see, what was sitting in the bath along with all that junk. Her first thought was that Luis had fished a mermaid out of the half-frozen Potomac.
The thing in the tub was shaped roughly like the letter ‘Y’.
It had long, raised scales, or perhaps short, stiff feathers. What Swan had taken for its tail seemed to actually be its head: a long cylinder rearing up above the other two limbs. Each of those held several pieces of an autopsied television set, as well as a couple of screwdrivers and some lengths of wire. Swan couldn’t see how it was hanging onto so many things at once –
she couldn’t see hands, or fingers. Perhaps the scale-feathers did the gripping?
It didn’t have a face. There was a truncated beak the colour of mahogany that looked as if it had been pushed into the flesh behind the dirty yellow feather-scales. She couldn’t see eyes, ears, a nose, anything but the dull beak.
‘Jesus, Luis,’ she said. ‘What do you feed that thing?’
Luis put the toilet lid down and sat on it. ‘The only thing it seems to like is Kosher Pareve fruit loops.’
‘You can’t give it human food.’
‘It wouldn’t eat anything else. Anyway, think of how little the egg was. It’s thriving.’
Swan stared at the animal. It didn’t stare back, turning a piece of circuitry over and over at the end of a cylindrical limb. ‘Do you think it knows we’re talking about it?’
‘I don’t think it cares. All that interests it is mechanical things, electronic things. I gave it an alarm clock and a child’s toy telephone and it plucked them apart.’
Swan leaned against the wall, the towelrack pressing into her back. ‘OK,’ she admitted. ‘You got me. I’m impressed.’
‘We should leave it alone,’ said Luis, but he didn’t get up.
‘That coffee must be done.’
‘I don’t want to go out,’ said Swan. ‘I want, to watch it’
She gave a little shudder, as though waking up out of a daydream. ‘I guess I want to convince myself it’s real.’
‘It’s a fascinating little thing, isn’t it?’ said Luis.
‘Sometimes I find myself watching it for hours. I watch it take some appliance apart and put it back together again, over and over.’
‘Just like its daddy,’ said Swan. Neither of them moved, and in the kitchen, boiling coffee sludge escaped its saucepan and spread across the stovetop.
Bob called the number for the Eridani’s bolthole again and again, but each time all he heard was ringing, a click, and a sort of screeching that got louder and softer.
‘Do we have to move again?’ said a weary Peri, stuffing her few possessions into a shoulderbag.
‘We’ve gotta get off the grid,’ said Bob. ‘Isolate ourselves.
Swan’s all over the phone system like a rash.’
We went through the whole routine one more time: checkout, sneak out the back way leaving the rent-a-car in the parking lot, taxi to yet another car place. Bob paid cash for the remains of a ’71 Travco (‘designed and appointed to assure the finest in plush living for two people’) and loaded it up with what remained of his nuclear survival kit. The RV looked like the unnatural offspring of a caravan trailer and a school bus.
‘We got one heavily armoured recreational vehicle here, man!’
enthused Bob.
‘How are we going to find the Doctor?’ said Peri.
Bob said, ‘We’re gonna mail him a letter.’
Meanwhile, the man in question was sitting in his rented Mercedes, looking up at a cop.
He had got out of the Eridani’s apartment building with seconds to spare: just as he was about to knock on their door, he heard the elevator doors ping across the hallway and saw the blue of uniforms inside. He hoofed it down the concrete stairs of the emergency exit two at a time and slid