Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [37]
‘Perhaps they’ll be able to work it out. They’ll have far more resources than I do. Hopefully they’ll be able to do something for Dot.’
The Doctor pushed aside his cooling tea. ‘I told her to stop,’ he said quietly.
‘We found her translator drone. It confirms your story.
But now everyone knows you’re an alien.’
‘It’s easy, isn’t it?’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s always so easy.
Something terrible happens, and you grab the nearest outsider and blame them. Obviously someone like you would never do such a thing...’
‘Hey,’ said Byerley. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. I know how hard you’ve been working to help us.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘If it isn’t an experiment, then what is it? Who’s doing this to us?’
‘I need Chris,’ said the Doctor. ‘I need to find out what that voice was. Something built in by the virus? Something on Yemaya itself? Only telepaths have disappeared.’
‘That’s right. They’re going to start searching again in the morning.’
‘We have to assume they’re following the “voice”. That means we have to keep the others under observation.’
‘I’ve asked them to check in with me every two hours.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
‘There is a question of doctor-patient confidentiality here.’
‘There’s also a question of something out there in the darkness eating little colonists. Believe me, when the Company gets here, they’re not going to be worried about a little thing like medical ethics. Not if they’re in the habit of spiking inoculations with experimental viruses.’
Byerley pushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘On my planet,’ said the Doctor, ‘we have a saying. Panic about one thing at a time.’
Roz came in. ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘no-one has seen Chris since early this evening.’
‘Well,’ said the Doctor, ‘no more than two things at a time.’
8 The Poetry of Madmen
Benny was looking for the Doctor.
She didn’t quite know what she was going to say when she found him. What was she going to do? Lecture him? Slap his wrist? What do you say to someone who has driven someone else insane?
It was the middle of the Yemayan night. She had been trying to sleep, tossing and turning in her TARDIS bedroom.
But the dreadful, inarticulate sounds that Dot had been making kept playing back inside her head, over and over.
The Australian hadn’t even been trying to sign, terrified beyond language, her hands and knees drawn up to her chest.
So in the end Benny had crawled out of bed, started picking up things in her room, needing to do something totally routine and normal. That was when she found her denim jacket, and the piece of dirty metal in the pocket. So she was looking for the Doctor to show him the piece of spacecraft, walking the darkened corridors of the habitat dome.
It would be comforting to believe that the Doctor was under some sort of influence, that perhaps the alien memories had risen again to force him to lash out at Dot. But, whatever he had done to her, he had done because it was the necessary thing to do. The right thing to do. No matter how wrong it was.
And there was nothing she could say to him, because she had done precisely the same thing on a British beach.
She found him in the infirmary. With Dot.
The woman lay under a reflective blanket on the gurney
— the same gurney they’d tied him to. God, that was only a couple of days ago. The lights were turned down almost to nothing.
He sat beside the gurney, eyes closed, one hand in Dot’s hair.
Benny almost started forward then, almost dragged him away before he could do any more harm to the helpless human.
In that moment of hesitation, she realized that his left cheek was glistening with dark droplets. Tears of blood.
‘Help me, Dot,’ he breathed. ‘Tell me who’s calling you.’
Dot moved, just a little, twitching like a kitten in a nightmare. ‘Get away from me!’ the Doctor gasped, and Benny realized it was Dot talking.
‘You built the bridge between us,’ said the Doctor. He stroked her hair with trembling fingers, keeping the contact