Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [71]
‘Or like loa.
‘Get it?’
* * *
Lewis stared at his fist. His knuckles were covered in tiny little cuts, where the skin had been broken open by the glass, but the damage was… well, minimal. The moment his hand had gone through the set, he’d expected to be electrocuted, or burned at the very least. But no.
He looked up at the set. The glass was in pieces, some of the fragments lying inside the internal workings, some scattered across the carpet at his feet. On the other side of the screen, there was almost nothing. No electronic components, no cathode‐ray tube, or whatever it was called. There were a few wires stuck to the inside of the casing, but most of them went nowhere, as if the set had been opened up and disembowelled even before Llewis had smashed it. At the back of the casing, something black and sticky coated the plastic, slowly dripping down on to the shards of glass.
And the phone was still ringing. Llewis reached for the receiver without even thinking about it. He’d spent the day ignoring the thing, but, now he had so many other things taking up his attention, he’d forgotten exactly why.
‘Hello?’ said the voice at the other end of the line.
‘Huuh,’ said Llewis.
There was a pause. ‘Alan? That you?’
Llewis thought for a moment. Alan. Yes, he was definitely Alan. But the person he was talking to had to be…
‘Peter,’ he said. ‘Peter bloody Morgan.’
Another pause. ‘Christ, Alan, what are you doing there? We’ve been trying to get you all morning. Your wife told us you hadn’t even got back from the hotel yet. What the hell’s going on?’
Llewis looked back at the TV set. At the crumpled brochures on the bed. At the splinters of glass on the floor.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘You talked to Guest?’
‘Uhm.’
Llewis focused on the splinters. Tiny fragments of the screen, still shining. He realised he could still see pictures moving across the broken glass.
He picked up one of the slivers, and held it in the palm of his hand. The sliver wasn’t more than an inch or two across, but he could make out tiny points of light shifting across it. Stars, Llewis realised. Stars, moving against the night sky. And that shadow, there; part of something else? Something crossing the sky? A UFO, maybe?
He wondered if he could stick all the fragments together again. If they’d make a complete picture that way.
A sigh came down the phone line. ‘I don’t want to get funny with you here, Alan, but you sound like you’re wrecked.’ Yet another pause. ‘Listen, I could come down and sort things out if you’ve messed up the deal or –’
‘No,’ Llewis said.
‘Only you were supposed to be here this morning –’
‘Peter?’
‘Yeah?’
Llewis let the shard fall from his hand. It was funny, how calm you could feel once you’d done something stupid like punching out a TV set. ‘You remember that man you said you’d met at COPEX last year?’ he said. ‘The one who said he used to be a soldier. The one who said he used to work for the UN.’
‘Oh yeah. I remember him. Mr X‐Files.’ Peter bloody Morgan made a nasty snorting sound down the phone. ‘Why? Don’t tell me he’s there again.’
‘No. What did he tell you? About… aliens?’
‘That settles it. You’re pissed. I’m coming down.’
‘No!’ Llewis shook his head, not even caring that nobody could see him doing it. ‘Listen. He said… he said the UN had got hold of some kind of alien stuff. Hardware. He said they’d been collecting it since the seventies.’
‘Uh‐huh. And?’
‘You didn’t… believe him?’
‘Alan –’
‘Just checking,’ Llewis snapped. Then he hung up.
The Cold wasn’t possible. That was what he’d thought, when he’d seen the demonstration at COPEX. Not possible, even with