Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [121]
The visitor winced. ‘Yes,’ he mumbled. ‘Yes, that is all rather difficult to explain. But believe me, I’m as interested in this blind man as you are.’
Magdelana leaned back in her chair, and let it rock backward and forward, all the time keeping her finger on the trigger of the shotgun. The man shifted uncomfortably in his seat, which had been the general idea.
‘You going to tell me who you are?’ she tried.
‘My dear lady, I’ve already told you. I’m the Doctor. My travelling companion, wherever she’s got to, is Miss Smith. Of Earth.’
‘I’m not a lady,’ said Magdelana. She suddenly imagined herself as an eight‐year‐old again, using an old Doreen to blow holes in the animal skulls her mother had lined up behind the house. Learning the firing techniques while she was still wearing her Sunday dress.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, eyeing up the end of the shotgun. ‘I think that’s becoming quite clear. Do you get many visitors on this planet?’ The switch in the conversation happened so fast, Magdelana didn’t even notice it until it was too late. ‘No,’ she said, without thinking. ‘Nobody comes here. Not if they can help it.’
‘Travelling shows can’t be very common, then.’
This is the first, thought Magdelana. First from offworld, anyway. There were freak shows that passed by from the towns off east, whole convoys of people who’d been twisted up by whatever chemical weapons had been dug out of the ruins there, but they usually got turned away at the gate. They were only ever after the food stocks.
‘Why’re you asking?’ she said.
‘Rather odd, wouldn’t you say? A travelling show comes all the way to a planet on the edge of the galaxy, where there’s no wealth and not much chance of a good audience. Not typical behaviour at all.’
Magdelana shrugged. Then the Doctor moved towards her, and for a moment her finger tightened on the trigger of the gun, until she realised that he was just leaning forward to look at the poster on her desk.
The poster was one of the adverts the blind man had put up, and Magdelana had found it stuck to her door when she’d got back to the office that morning. She’d torn it down in a fit of irritation, having just been saved from certain death by a blind man whom she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t ever be able to trust.
The Doctor carefully flattened out some of the wrinkles in the paper, then held the poster up in front of him. Magdelana watched his eyes flickering over the edge of the page. Annoyingly, he started to read aloud.
‘“All comers welcome, no refunds given”,’ he recited. He put on an even‐more‐stupid‐than‐usual voice when he said it, all rolling r’s and pumped‐up vowels. Then he peered over the edge of the paper. ‘I.M. Foreman. The blind man, do you think?’
‘Maybe. Why?’
‘I’ve heard that name before,’ said the Doctor. ‘Tell me more about these Remote people.’
* * *
At noon, the oldest of the Remote was sitting in his rooms at the dead heart of his spaceship‐cum‐town, surrounding himself with the trophies of two thousand years’ travelling. Technically, the Remote weren’t supposed to have a designated leader, but the Remote’s transmissions had become so corrupted over the years that they were starting to revert to what they called ‘basic hierarchical neural programming’. To all intents and purposes, it was the oldest who made the decisions, and nobody was going to bother arguing with him.
He’d already worked out that the stellar disturbance had been a natural eclipse, and that the Gallifreyan in the blindfold had been bluffing from the start. But it was best not to take any risks. He ordered – no, he asked – his people to unpack one of the two probe satellites that had survived the landing on Dust, and to program it to home in on Time Lord technology.
* * *
John Salt, the Missing Link. Melmoth, the Map of Scars. Ezekiel, the Angel of the Pleiades. Mohandas the Geek.
The Doctor had put the poster back down on the desk, the right way up for Magdelana to be able to read it. She was trying to tell the man about the Remote, but the words on the page kept grinding their way into her head