Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [69]
He tapped a key, and the bathroom images cycled. There was something wrong about the shape in the tub. Peri had seen it at once, but I was having trouble making it out.
‘It looks like a crippled kid,’ I said. ‘Maybe an injured dog. No arms. Or no legs, maybe. it’s probably trying to get out of the tub.’
‘It’s what Swan took from Luis, isn’t it?’ said Peri.
‘Take another look at the times,’ said Bob. ‘A group of images every fifteen minutes. Then, for about the last four hours, nothing.’
The Doctor sat back, steepling his fingers. Sometimes his face would go blank for a few long moments, as though his eyes were seeing some internal chalkboard where he was mentally writing out equations, trying to solve some problem.
Peri had obviously learned to wait for him to snap out of it.
Bob and I exchanged annoyed glances.
‘Bob,’ said the Doctor abruptly, ‘see if you can hack into Swan’s account. Check if she’s removed our email forwarding program.’
‘Right What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to give the Eridani a call,’ he said.
The Eridani, apparently, had retired to their space craft, which was lurking in one of the Earth’s LaGrange points6. They were able to transmit and receive by hijacking communications satellites, hiding their own messages amidst the flood of traffic passing through. Supposedly, then, the Doctor’s conversation with his alien pals was travelling along a channel that started with a satellite at one end, meandered through the international 6 A stable orbit point between the Earth and the sun, ideal for placing satellites.
phone system like breath through a tuba, and emerged from a speakerphone on my desk. Not exactly a Close Encounter.
The Doctor seemed to have a lot of trouble getting the connection to work. There was that annoying delay you always get with satellite phone calls (supposedly made a lot worse by the Eridani being around five light seconds away) but there were also a bunch of whooping and shrieking noises.
The Doctor listened patiently to these, like a blind phreak listening to the phone system’s language of clicks and clunks.
Finally the conversation got going. The Doctor brought the Eridani up to date. They seemed relieved that we knew where the missing component was, even if it was in Swan’s hands.
And they confirmed what we thought we’d seen in Swan’s crude camera pictures: it was alive. The ideal way for their colony to make more of the machines, they said, was for at least part of it to be able to reproduce itself.
The component forms a close bond with its user,’ said Ghirlain’s voice through a background hiss of space static.
‘Swan won’t harm it. She will have an instinctive sense of how best to take care of it.’
The Doctor was scribbling comments on a bit of paper for our benefit. ‘INSTINCTIVE?’ he wrote, and underlined it a couple of times. He was impatiently doodling up and down the margin of the sheet while Stray Cat lolled in his lap like the slut she was. ‘Can I assume you will collect your property at the first available opportunity?’ he asked.
A few moments of static. Then: ‘Breaking the bond may damage both the component and the organism to which it has bonded. It would be safer to wait for the component to mature.’
The Doctor sat forward. ‘And precisely what happens when it reaches maturity? Do we have any alarming physical transformations to look forward to?’
Ghislain seemed to be groping for the right terms. ‘It is a nymph, not a larva. There is no metamorphosis. Only, the development of its nervous system will be complete. It will be ready to interface with the other components of the system.’
Bob cut in. ‘Will it be sentient? Come to think of it, is it sentient now?’
Crackle. Hiss. ‘Not in the sense that you understand the word.’
The Doctor pounced. ‘And just what do you mean by that?’
‘Its nervous system is extremely specialised,’ said the Eridani. ‘It is expert in certain tasks, but incapable of others.’
‘If we’re going to contain this situation until it’s safe to wean the creature