Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [55]
Over the following months, a gaggle of collectors and suspicious types turned up, looking to beg, borrow, or steal the components. The farmer quickly realised that what he had given up on as junk had a real value. He played coy, pretending he had already sold some of the items, making sure that each customer only got one piece of the puzzle.
Swan was surprised when she put these events onto a timeline. The computer had fallen off the back of the truck, or what have you, in 1970! All this time, its bits had been out there, becoming more and more separated. Why had its owners waited so long to retrieve their property? The only explanation was that they simply hadn’t known it was there.
When it fell off that truck, to them, it became invisible. That was a bit of luck for her imagined farmer. One of Cobb’s pals hinted darkly that the owners had visited the original finder and they hadn’t exactly brought him candy and flowers.
1970. Swan spun the chair back and forth, thinking. One hell of a lot had happened in computer technology since then.
Could the components really still be valuable after all this time? The auctioneer had certainly thought so, and she had learned to trust his judgement. An awful lot of freaks and hobbyists thought so too – they had pursued the components from one end of the country to the other.
That clinched it. If the technology was outdated and worthless, they’d never have bothered to come after it eleven years later. Perhaps losing it had stalled a research project, something truly revolutionary which could now continue.
More likely, the research had continued, and now there was a risk that the secrets of a new computer might be revealed if the early prototype was reassembled.
Swan closed her eyes for a few moments, massaging her eyelids. The picture of the thing in Luis’s bathtub kept drifting into her mind.
Who were the original owners? It was a toss-up between a big corporation and a spy agency. Swan guessed the latter –
more likely to have the resources and the drive to find and recover the components, more likely to need to keep its technology dark.
They had already got three. One from California, where it had been undergoing testing in a Silicon Valley lab. As far as Swan could tell, the owners – represented by ‘River’ – had broken in and taken it. One had got as far as Arctic Canada; it had been bought back at an exorbitant price.
And then there was the component Chip Cobb had been hired to retrieve. Swan had met him once, and they had swapped a few emalls; he was a hub in the collectors’
grapevine, best known for his ability to get hold of information about prototype computers (and very occasionally, the prototypes themselves). The components would have been right up his alley. River had been talking to him in email, promising cash and circuit boards If he could locate the device. (Cobb had spent a lot of time trying to trace River’s email connection. Only once had he been able to track his employer back to a pirated account at a defence contractor
– only to have River shut down that account and turn up again from a different direction. ‘He seems to be everywhere and nowhere,’ a frustrated Cobb had told a friend.) River was certain that the remaining three components had stayed on the east coast – in fact, had probably not gone far from what he once called the ‘crash site’ (confirming Swan’s theory that a secret transport had been involved). Although collectors were keen to get their hands on the devices, they eventually realised that they simply couldn’t do anything with them. Swan recalled her own frustration with the loopy plastic ball. So they had moved slowly through the grapevine, sold at auction or in private transactions. But one of the three, discovered Cobb, had been sold only once – from the original finder to an obsessive collector in Salisbury. The guy was famous for never playing with the toys he bought – just shrinkwrapping them in plastic and locking them away in a vast array of filing cabinets in his basement. Even if Cobb hadn’t been