Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [66]
‘G’day,’ I said. She blinked a little and looked up into my face. ‘I could use some more hot coffee. You know, in Australia, it’s the middle of summer right now.’
Usually this led to some cute questions about koala bears.
Instead, she spoke slowly, as if trying to remember each word:
‘Do you ever get that feeling, when you go into a room and you can’t remember why you went in there? Maybe you’re in the kitchen, and you sort of wake up, and find yourself staring into the fridge. Does that ever happen to you?’
‘Oh yeah, all the time,’ I said.
‘Or do you ever get that feeling when you know you had an idea just a minute ago, and you feel something kind of speed up and crack inside your head, and you know you’re going to forget what you just thought of, and then you do?’
‘I guess I know what you mean,’ I lied.
‘Or do you ever feel like there’s something missing from your life? Something really important, something that would make everything complete, but you just can’t put your finger on what it is?’
‘Jesus, lady, are you all right?’
She blinked again, slowly, and turned to pick up the coffee pot from the burner. It made me nervous as hell to watch her handling the scalding liquid, but her autopilot saw her through.
She even asked me if I wanted fries with that. I didn’t.
The Doctor gave me a querying look as I squeezed back into my seat. ‘That’s more than just too many hours flipping burgers,’ I said. ‘It’s not like she’s a vegetable... but something’s missing.’
‘Something is constantly claiming her attention,’ said the Doctor quietly. ‘Something which is no longer here, and never will be again.’
We drove out to the farm at the address Luis had supplied.
To no-one’s surprise, the place was abandoned, ‘for sale’ signs dotted around. The barn had, after all, only been a staging post for the auction that had sold him a hunk o’ furry brain damage.
The Doctor spent upwards of an hour sniffing around for dues, but came up empty-handed and grumbling.
We meandered around the town a bit, taking in the sights, such as they were. The Doctor oohed and aahed a bit over a restored railway station. He had a surprising ability to strike up a conversation with anyone he bumped into – whether they liked it or not.
There were people with the faraway look everywhere we went. The owner of a Chevy dealership, his flock of used cars huddled under a white awning. His wife came out to talk to us, patting her distracted husband on the shoulder. He hadn’t been himself for more than a month, she said. She mentioned the Doctor he bad been seeing.
We found a Doctor’s surgery, a brick building with a colourful flag of birds and flowers hung outside. The receptionist wouldn’t let us talk to him unless it was an emergency. I asked to use the bathroom and caught a glimpse of him in his office, fiddling with the bits of paper on his desk, staring out the window as if trying to spot something in the distance.
There was no real pattern to it, no transmission from person to person, nothing they all had in common except that they lived here in Ritchie. If some poison, some bit of radioactive waste had fallen from one of the trains that clattered through the town, you might have seen something like it – people spattered by the invisible fallout all around.
We sat on the steps of the public library – closed – and breathed plumes of steam into the air. Bob shifted uncomfortably on the cold, dry stone, and said, ‘Can we get a medical team in here or something?’
The Doctor just shook his head. The cold didn’t seem to bother him at all. In fact, I don’t think his breath was even misting. That English constitution. ‘To the Eridani’s technology, the human brain is only another form of hardware.
Something that can be tinkered with and modified as required.
Human medicine cannot yet say the same.’
‘Well what about us?’ said Peri. ‘We’ve been carrying it around all this time...’
‘It hasn’t been switched on,’ he said – a little nervously, I thought. ‘Well, only briefly. None of us have suffered any ill effects.’
‘That we’re aware of,’ said