Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [85]
She suggested strongly that we depart. The Doctor looked at them and decided to comply.
Luis sat in the passenger seat of Mondy’s car, gazing evenly through the remains of the windscreen. Drops of rain were forming an intricate pattern on the surviving glass, glittering dots and spaces Luis’s shoulders had unknotted for the first time in days, his hands lying loose in his lap.
Swan said nothing. She drove through the gathering darkness, through rain that turned from spots to lines to a constant sizzling haze that dripped in through the broken windscreen. From time to time, when they were stopped at lights or when nothing much was happening on the road, she would glance at Luis. He watched the road with nothing to say.
It was hours later when the garage doors yawned for the Escort. Swan opened the passenger door and herded Luis into the house. Upstairs, she cleared all the junk out of the tub and ran a steaming hot bath for Luis. While he got undressed she laid the loaded shotgun across the little desk in the guest room.
She sat on the lid of the john while he soaked, both of them warming up after the long cold drive. When he was done she made up the guest bed and tucked him into it.
She sat on a wooden chair in the dark, turning a pen around and around in her hands, clicking the nib in and out.
this sat quietly, propped up with three pillows. His eyes wouldn’t close.
She brought him some of the Lego in an old plastic ice-cream container. She put it in his lap on top of the blankets.
Luis’s hands dived into the container and started feeling the shapes with their fingertips, turning each one around and replacing it. Swan switched on a small lamp on the desk, dragged her chair to the edge of the bed and watched. In just a few minutes, those probing fingers had worked out how to stick two Lego pieces together. Soon Luis was building more and more complicated structures.
After half an hour Swan took the plastic container away.
They were both going to need some rest. Tomorrow would be a big day for both of them.
100
The Doctor drove us to a gas station and pulled the Travco into the parking lot. Peri and I were both still vibrating with adrenaline. I was just starting to discover the little scrapes and bruises I had accumulated during those few dramatic seconds on the shoulder. A couple of police cars passed the station, heading back the way we’d come, sirens blazing.
‘They’ll get her,’ said Peri. ‘She must be driving the car with bullet holes in the windshield!’
‘Unless she hijacked somebody,’ I said.
‘I doubt that.’ The Doctor was perfectly calm. ‘Swan will not want to involve anyone else if she can help it.’ He wasn’t even breathing fast, as though nothing unusual had happened at all. He climbed into the back of the Travco to examine the Savant.
Peri peered at it from the passenger seat. Its stiff, stretched-out shape reminded me of a cat I’d had as a kid, poisoned by a neighbour and found in frozen running position underneath a bush. We’d had to dig a very long grave for it.
‘Is it OK?’ said Peri. ‘You didn’t kill it, did you?’
‘No I did not,’ the Doctor replied. ‘It has been thoroughly interrupted. In fact, it’s quite comatose.’
‘Now what do we do?’ said Bob.
‘I’ve arranged with its owners that they will collect it.’
Peri sat down on the bunk bed next to the solid Y. She tentatively stroked its fur. ‘Maybe we should keep it,’ she said.
‘I don’t trust those guys to look after it.’
‘You don’t establish an infraluminal interplanetary civilisation by being wasteful. I’m sure the Eridani will find some use for it, even though it’s run off the rails of its original genetic program.’ The Doctor didn’t sound entirely convinced.
But at least the little yellow bugger wasn’t a threat to anyone any more.
I said, ‘Didn’t you say something about it being born pregnant?’
‘Yes, well, it’s best if they collect it sooner rather than later’
‘So we win,’ said Bob. ‘We’ve deactivated the Savant.
We’ve stopped the