Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [90]
‘But not political power?’
‘I never read even the politics in the paper,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember the last time I voted. Why are you so interested in politics?’
‘I can’t help it,’ I said, in a voice like chalk ‘I’m a Washington reporter.’
‘Oh... you mean, why don’t Luis and I take over the world.’
‘Uh, I didn’t mean to give you ideas.’
‘I will have to push the authorities around a little. I’m going to need total access to the phone system, for example.’
She gave a loopy grin. A smile didn’t belong on that face.
‘Luis is a blue box,’ she said. ‘A blue box for the human mind.
All you have to do is press the buttons, and you get access to the system. Open wide. And I’ve got it.’
My heart had just about jumped across the diner a moment ago. But Swan really couldn’t see the potential of her mind-control device. Or, more likely; she really wasn’t interested in world domination. Not the real world, anyway: her megalomania was confined to the world inside the computer.
The waitress returned with Swan’s apple pie. Her eyes brushed over us, but her mind was far, far away. It was the look of Ritchie.
Swan was never going to stomp the world like Godzilla.
Instead, she was going to leave a slow trail of collateral damage, like a man walking around with a radioactive rod in his pocket.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I miss summer in Sydney. I miss Avoca Beach. Maybe I’ll put this hundred dollars towards a ticket home.’
‘You do that,’ said Swan. ‘Go on home to your family, little lady. Buy yourself some pretty dresses and go for a walk on the beach.’
‘Like you say,’ I told her, standing up, waiting for her to make Luis stop me from going. But she didn’t. She was enjoying the apple pie too much.
This would have been the moment to run. I had already crossed the line from observer to participant. Doing that had made me a target for the thing sitting in the diner.
I should have got on the road that instant. There was nothing left for me in Washington, not now the cat was out of the bag. There wasn’t anything I could do to help the Doctor.
It was time to do another of Charles Peters’ vanishing acts, get on the road, drive until I couldn’t stand the flash of the highway past my eyes any more.
I walked through the parking lot, crossed the road, and went into a phone booth. The traffic would hide me, and I was pretty sure Luis couldn’t somehow detect me at a distance.
One last call before I left. Luckily, by then the Doctor had returned from burglarising Swan’s house.
I related her theory – that the Savant had been programming Luis as some sort of hypnotist, all along. ‘No, no, no,’ said the Doctor. ‘It hadn’t done anything to him except to create that intense bond. OF COURSE. When the interrupt pulse hit the Savant, it reacted by making a backup of itself. Right into poor Luis’s mind’ His voice sagged. ‘If he was aware of what was happening, he may even have welcomed it. The ultimate protection for the Savant – inside his own skull. It might have been better if I had simply let the Eridani kill the Savant. A sudden and painless death instead of this infection.’
‘There’s nothing we can do to make him normal again, is there?’
‘It might be possible for the Eridani, but I doubt it. What is now inside Luis’s head may not be human in any real sense.’
‘Doctor, that’s gross,’ said Peri, in the background.
‘Gross?’ he said. ‘Grotesque. But this is the Savant’s whole purpose – find a network and copy itself throughout it.
Was that the Eridani’s real intent all along? Or is this just an unexpected branching of the program?’
‘Are you saying it could happen again?’ I said.
‘If anything should happen to Luis,’ said the Doctor,
‘there’s no reason the Savant couldn’t repeat its little trick.
Copy itself into a fresh brain.’
‘Doctor; I said. ‘Could it happen even if something didn’t happen to Luis?’
The Doctor froze. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I think it could. If Swan realises