Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [52]
So does that mean they’re incredibly long lived – even immortal? Do they shoot one of their ‘slow packets’ out into space the way we would post a letter – confident that it will be delivered and replied to quickly enough to make it worth the effort of licking the stamp? Or is it a monumental event, a moonshot?
Ghislain claimed they had to hire a faster boat from another bunch of aliens, ones who did know the secret of faster-than-light travel. Are the Eridani jealous of their neighbours? Can’t they scrape up enough cash to buy their own starships? Or do they scoff at those hotrods, the way we might smirk as a teenager roars down our street in his first hoon-mobile? I can’t imagine human beings carrying out a mission that spanned centuries – politicians can barely see past the next election.
I found myself trying to imagine the great, cold minds who could operate at that speed, and had to snap myself out of the reverie. ‘What is that thing you’re building?’
‘You’ve heard of elegance in software design,’ said the Doctor. ‘Programs which rely on cleverness to solve problems in the quickest, cleanest way possible.’ He hefted the machine he had built. ‘This represents the opposite of that approach.’
‘Brute force,’ I said.
‘Just in case we need it.’
When we got to Harrington, we drove around for half an hour trying to find the State Fairgrounds. There were grounds, all right, but no Fair. We all looked at one another. ‘I guess we better ask someone,’ said Peri.
A gas station attendant looked at us as though we’d asked for directions to the Martian Embassy. ‘The State Fair is only on in July,’ he explained. ‘You’re kind of late. Or maybe kind of early.’
Peri said, ‘Maybe she meant she was going to meet someone at the fairgrounds, not the Fair.’
‘We drove all over,’ said Bob. ‘There was nobody there.
Have we ever been had. What a bunch of hosers.’
‘Swan has discovered the tap on her phone’ said the Doctor. ‘We’ll have to let Bob know – there’s not much point in monitoring her calls if she’s going to use them for disinformation. Blast. That’s quite a useful resource, gone!’
Peri and I exchanged glances. I wonder if she was feeling a little relief that we wouldn’t be using the tap again, the same as I was. Computer crime is too new to give you the creeps the same way that eavesdropping on someone’s phone does.
‘So, after that little diversion, it’s on to Ocean City,’ said the Doctor.
‘We’re on our way,’ I said.
‘She knows we’re going there,’ said Peri. ‘lf she found the tap on her phone, then she must know we heard her earlier calls.’
The Doctor didn’t have a reply to that. ‘Do you want to take that turn behind the wheel?’ I asked Peri. We pulled over and they both got into the front. I stretched out in the back seat. I wished I could take my shoes off and press my feet against the window.
Ocean City is basically one long street, several miles running down the finger of a peninsula, with cross-streets travelling just two or three blocks from the oceanfront to the bay. In December it’s almost but not quite a ghost town – there are still cars, but far too few to justify eight lanes of road... closed miniature golf courses, boarded-up diners. The average age of the people in this town goes up twenty years in the off-season, and every one of those years seems to be added to the age of the town itself. The sky is grey, the houses are grey, the sea is a slab of slate.
Cobb’s house was a faded clapboard relic of the ’50s, off on the bay-side down near the Route 50 bridge – standalone, but not much elbow room between it and the neighbours: land is scarce and pricey on a glorified sandbar. More and more of the sand is being eaten away on the ocean side: eventually the big hotels are going to end up on stilts. Back in the ’30s a