Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [17]
People communicated by talking. He paused. Body language?
Where did that thought come from? At some stage he had been trained to interpret non-verbal signals. Why did he remember that now?
Poul left the arcade and recrossed the road, walking briskly and directly towards where the man stood waiting and watching.
As he got closer he could see that it was a man. About average height, brown hair, dressed in the plain smock and leggings of a man of taste and moderate wealth. But there was still not the smallest acknowledgement from him of what Poul was doing.
Not a human gesture of any kind. Poul was getting angry. It was insulting. It was deeply insulting. He was being treated as though he was not worth bothering with. As though he was not important enough even to acknowledge. If it had not been for an almost imperceptible movement of the head, the slightest turn which kept the eyes focused on him, Poul would have thought this man was not alive at all, not a man at all. He would have taken him for a robot.
He would have thought he was a robot.
He would have known it was a robot.
It was a robot.
He had not been expecting it. He had not even considered the possibility. Now in this moment everything he wanted to be true was a lie. The world, his world, vanished and he felt himself falling apart. He felt his heart lurch and flutter and the quivering filled his throat and choked him. He could not get his breath.
His lungs squeezed inwards and would not let him draw in the air he was gasping for. The muscles of his arms twitched and flexed involuntarily. His stomach jumped and convulsed. He could feel his legs losing strength so that he could not be sure of keeping them straight and he staggered. His sense of balance deserted him and he almost fell down. He felt slightly ridiculous, suddenly comical. And gibbering horror screamed in his head and he did not know whether he could be screaming out loud without breath.
It was a robot.
He wanted to stop moving towards it.
It was a robot.
He wanted to stop and turn and run away. But somehow he couldn’t do any of those things now that the world had ended.
It was a robot.
He forced himself to stop and he stood swaying and staring at it in screaming silence.
It was a robot.
‘What do you want?’ he managed to say at last, or was it shout at last, or was it croak at last, he couldn’t tell at last. ‘You are following me. Why are you following me?’
‘Ander Poul,’ the robot said politely, ‘I have been sent to kill you.’
Chapter Three
‘People? People!’ the Doctor called and clapped his hands, trying to bring some sort of order to the milling throng of strange sextuplets. It was a waste of time, as he knew it would be. They all wandered about like adult-sized small children, curious to examine everything that came within their reach, and quickly losing interest in whatever that was. They seemed to have the attention span of hoofed herbivores. But they were not basically stupid. He could see that they were learning all the time. And they were doing it in almost complete silence. But although they did not speak they still appeared to understand what it was that he said to them. When he had asked: ‘Can any of you remember where you came from?’ a number of them had pointed up towards the gantries before getting bored with him and his questions and drifting off. Several of them had found their way through the doorway into the TARDIS and he had to shepherd them out again and lock the door against the others.
Watching them, the Doctor had begun to think that what one member of any particular group of six learned, the others in that group would also know. How the information was communicated within the group he was not yet sure and he could not tell whether there was the same communication between the different groups. Were they factory-produced clones? He wondered. Was each group of six effectively a multiple of one single individual? And was that the root of their mysterious