Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [80]
I could hear Swan upstairs, cooing to her little mutant baby in the bathtub. I disappeared out the front door, not giving a damn about cameras, and shot through.
90
The Doctor bit my head off when I confessed. ‘The Savant could have done irreparable damage to your brain!’ So could the angel dust, I thought, but I kept that to myself. ‘It’s obviously bonded deeply with Swan. It was just beginning that process with Luis when she stole it away from him.
Threatened with being snatched from her side, it responded with a mental attack. A very low-level one, happily, for your peace of mind.’ That was low-level? I was there, absolutely there, as though every molecule of the event had been recorded somewhere in my body and played back like a tape.
‘Why do you imagine we simply didn’t knock the door down and purloin the component? Why do you think the Eridani haven’t done it themselves? No, now that the Savant has fallen into the proverbial wrong hands, we’ve got to handle this with the proverbial kid gloves.’
He seemed to have run out of steam. I had been sitting on the arm of my sofa through the whole speech. Now I slid down onto the cushions. My head was freezing cold after walking through the winter air with my hair full of sweat. In a few minutes I’d take a hot bath and try to forget about the whole thing.
I said, ‘I still don’t get your angle, Doc’
‘What?’ he huffed.
‘What’s in it for you? Besides whatever the Eridani are paying.’ He sniffed at that, like it was an insult. ‘I could really believe you’d do this even if they didn’t have a red cent. For a good cause. Or Just to put Swan in her place.’
‘That certainly needs doing,’ he said archly. I thought of Swan’s speech about the food chain. The Doctor was making a mess of the whole concept of stronger beats weaker, winner takes all. I wondered what kind of card player he was. ‘Peri was right,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘In the end, this is about taking a lost child home. An enormously dangerous child.’
‘I gotta tell you – the thing looked perfectly happy with Swan to me.’
‘She simply cannot care for it,’ said the Doctor. ‘No matter how slavishly devoted she may become to its needs, only the Eridani have that expertise. There may be nutrients it requires that aren’t even available on Earth – it could be starving slowly to death for want of them. Its neurological development will already have been stunted by lack of contact with the rest of the components, particularly the control unit.’ By now he was talking more to himself than to me. ‘No. We must restore it to the Eridani, whatever their purpose for it.’
‘Couldn’t we get them to hand over the manual or something?’
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. ‘And do you fancy raising the Savant to maturity?’
I hauled myself up off the sofa. ‘The only thing I want in my bathtub right now is me.’
Swan was as good as her word. She phoned my editor at home, where he was relaxing with his wife and three kids, and told him all about my adventures in LA. She convinced him to check the news archives over his modem. He spent half an hour digging up the little news item about how I’d slugged the editor of a well-known west-coast newspaper.
Swan called him back the moment he logged out. ‘Well?’
‘You’re right about the assault charges,’ he said. ‘But there is no way that man is a fag.’
‘You saw what the paper said.’
‘I don’t care what the paper said. I’ve met three of Chick’s girlfriends.’
‘Camouflage,’ she spat.
‘Bullshit. Maybe one lady, sure, but three? Now if someone in San Fran called the man a pussy, I can understand why he might take a swing at them.’
‘Better make sure he doesn’t take a swing at your ass.’
‘You’ve got a dirty mouth, ma’am. What’d Chick ever do to You?’
‘I’d be more worried about what he might do to you,’ said Swan, and slammed down her phone.
Swan ground her fists into her temples. Nothing was working. Nothing was helping. The Doctor seemed unmoved by her