Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [51]
We stood around the van for a few minutes, stretching our legs and puzzling over his new development. ‘Who’s she meeting?’ Peri wanted to know. ‘I thought you said that guy was dead.’
‘That’s right,’ said the Doctor. ‘Cobb tried to arrange a meeting between one of the Eridani and one of his fellow technology enthusiasts, with appalling consequences. The Eridani still aren’t clear on exactly what happened. Certainly someone tried to betray someone else... perhaps Swan is planning to meet the third party.’
5 A Bulletin Board System is a meeting place for computer users. It’s not a network, but a single machine: the users can connect via modem, leave public messages and send and read private email and swap files. Bob showed me the BBS in question, a private bulletin board for a clique of technology collectors, with an unlisted number. Since Cobb had inadvertently made it so easy for Bob to break in, I don’t think they ever realised he had visited. There must be hundreds of accounts on BBSes and the ARPAnet where the owners never see the footprints of intruders.
‘But they couldn’t have another one of the components.
Could they?’
‘No. The Eridani retrieved it after the disastrous meeting, along with...’ The Doctor saw me listening. ‘Swan is on a wild goose chase.’
‘Well why are we driving all this way then? Why not just let her waste her time?’
‘For information,’ said the Doctor.
‘But can’t Bob just get that off Cobb’s computer?’
‘Not if it isn’t on Cobb’s computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob’s filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line.’ The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. ‘Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye.’
‘Not if it isn’t on Cobb’s computer. Not everything is out there in the great green and black void, you know. Swan had to invade Bob’s filing cabinet to get his details. It will be some years before she could rustle up the same information over a phone line: The Doctor stretched his arms above his head and yawned. ‘Besides, I want to meet Swan eye to eye:
‘Let me guess,’ said Peri. ‘You figure that if you can talk to her in person, she’ll come around to your point of view.’
‘It has been known,’ said the Doctor, with dignity. ‘If nothing else, once we make contact with her, she’ll find us very difficult to dislodge. And that will make it harder for her to do anything with us knowing about it – or stopping it, if it comes to that.’
I’d never driven over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge before. It’s the strangest thing – two four-mile ribbons of road floating a couple of hundred feet above the water. It’s actually two bridges side by side, so there’s a lot of empty air between you and the cars going the other way. The feeling that there’s nothing between you and the water is eerie.
‘You know,’ I told the Doctor, ‘when I was a kid, we always spent our holidays driving around the outback, staying in caravan parks. We’d spend all day driving to get somewhere. But it wasn’t much like this.’
Despite that, sitting behind the wheel on a trip across the US countryside was, surprisingly, not much different to sitting in the back on a trip across the Australian countryside (or more often, lying down with my bare feet pressed against the window, watching the gum trees rush by). You still ended up in those long, thoughtful silences – not quite highway hypnosis, but some relative of it.
I found myself imagining what if would be like if Mr Ghislain’s extraterrestrials were real, trying to pursue the consequences of that. (I guess I was looking for a contradiction to catch the Doctor out with.) Imagine if they were out there right now, circling the fifth brightest star in the constellation of Eridanus. Think