Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [6]
A clear head. That was a joke for a start. It was precisely because of his inadequacy in that department that Mike had been given this assignment. He couldn‟t believe that almost six months had passed since it had all begun. It seemed like no time at all since he had been sitting behind the desk at Global Chemicals in Llanfairfach, purporting to be the „Man from the Ministry‟. As usual things had gone a bit haywire before the Doctor had managed to sort it all out. Turned out the company, which had been pumping lethal industrial sludge into the village‟s abandoned mine workings, was being run by some sort of super computer which called itself BOSS
and which could scramble its employees‟ brains, turning them into mindless zombies.
For a while Mike himself had fallen under its influence.
BOSS had dismantled his thoughts and put them back together in a different order, had made him believe his friends were his enemies. He‟d nearly shot dead the two people he trusted most in the world: it had seemed perfect sense at the time, before the Doctor had shown him the error of his ways with the aid of a blue crystal he‟d picked up on some far-flung planet or other.
After that, Mike had been fine for a while, had felt better than he‟d felt for a long time in fact. But then weird thoughts and feelings had started to spring up, like weeds in a well-ordered garden. He had begun to suffer odd bouts of depression, feelings of futility. Despite the vital part he‟d played in repelling the many and various threats to Earth over the years, he had started to convince himself that his life was meaningless.
Eventually, inevitably, this emotional instability had affected his work, and the Brigadier had ordered him to undergo a course of pathological assessment and then to take some compassionate leave. Perhaps if the Doctor and his blue crystal had been around all of that might have been avoided, but he had been distracted and irritable ever since his assistant, Jo Grant, had quit UNIT after announcing her intention to marry Llanfairfach‟s resident eccentric, Professor Clifford Jones. The Doctor had spent most of the past six months going off for solitary jaunts in his TARDIS, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch.
He had been absent when Mike‟s problems had come to a head three months ago, and was absent again now, having slipped away in the night two weeks ago, much to the Brigadier‟s chagrin.
It had taken Mike a month or two to sort himself out, but now he was back for good and itching to get down to some proper soldiering. However, his return, and the Doctor‟s increasing absences, had coincided with a lull in the type of incident UNIT usually dealt with. Perhaps that was a good thing, Mike thought. Perhaps it was better to ease himself back in gently rather than throwing himself head-first into the fray.
It didn‟t feel better, though; that was the thing. It felt to Mike as if he was cheating. He set his jaw, gripped the handle of his small suitcase more tightly and rapped sharply on the lemon-yellow front door of the guesthouse. „I am making a difference,‟ he whispered to himself as he waited for an answer, and instantly felt a little better, as his psychologist, Dr Cutler, had assured him he would.
As the door opened a pair of seagulls began squabbling directly overhead, as if some flapping, screeching entity had been released from the house. He quickly recovered his composure and smiled at the woman who stood on the threshold. Her birdlike face was austere, her lips pressed so tightly together that they seemed bloodless. She looked disapprovingly at Mike‟s burgundy cords and brown suede jacket.
„Mrs Macau?‟ he enquired, pronouncing it „Ma cow‟.
„Macau,‟ she corrected, so sharply that he bit back the response that sprang to mind: „Ah, like the exotic bird.‟
He covered his near faux pas with a smile and said smoothly,