Doctor Who_ The Algebra of Ice - Lloyd Rose [30]
But the screen had gone dark, and an instant later the computer itself shut down.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Molecross insisted, against all advice, on leaving the medical ward. Before they reluctantly released him, he went through one last round of questioning. He didn’t find this a problem, he simply told them the truth: that he had neither seen nor heard anything. What he did not, could not, reveal was the ecstasy that filled him. He wept as they interrogated him, and they thought it was the pain, but it was from joy. Wonder quenched his dry soul.
When he got home, he took a handful of painkillers and collapsed on the carpet between two filing cabinets. He lay suspended. No food passed his lips, no waste passed from his body. The thin pile beneath him was a couch of feathers. Time was only a murmur at the edge of his consciousness. He knew things now, knew them powerfully. Oh rapturous secrets. Truly, he was one of the blessed.
Then the snake entered his sweet Eden.
Curiosity. He wanted to know the cause of his vision.
No, he thought desperately, but it was no use. Human nature claimed him and he fell back into his self, a husk dry as nutshell. In rage and anguish he pounded the carpet. He shoved furiously at the filing cabinets like Samson at the pillars of Gaza and strained his back.
Molecross spent the next several minutes sitting on the floor of the shower with his neck beneath the dribbling spray and his bandaged stump stuck outside the curtain, until the hot water ran out. Then he huddled in a blanket next to the space heater and thought. When he returned to himself just now, had he really descended that low? After all, he was a journalist, one of the world’s highest callings. He pursued truth. Not just transcendent truth, but the ordinary, small, earthly sort too. Such as: what exactly had happened that night?
Whatever it was, the Doctor was interested in it too. He knew the little man was the Doctor, even though he looked like none of the few descriptions Molecross had come across. The descriptions didn’t look like one another either; perhaps he changed shapes. This was a wonder too. Molecross’s heart beat faster. Another of the Great Secrets. A mystery only he could uncover. It would 66
The Algebra of Ice
be the headline of every paper in the world, in 72-point type. Let them sneer then.
But what about the other problem? What had frozen the ground and taken his hand?
Sobering now, he realised that it was likely he had been the victim of some super-secret government weapon rather than an alien force. That was so much more probable. In Molecross’s experience truth favoured probability, and he was committed to the truth. For a moment walls pressed in on him and he breathed the stale air of reality, glimpsed how very small, what a poor thing, the world was. Then he shoved the revelation away. The government had mutilated him. That would be a front-page story too.
His stump was beginning to throb beneath its bandages. He stumbled to the medicine cabinet and took some more pain pills. Damned things didn’t really work. He could still feel the pain, dulled, like it was buried beneath a layer of rugs, but still there. How long would he hurt? He was supposed to return to the UNIT medical facility in two days to be checked.
God, what day was it? In panic he staggered into the kitchen to read the clock on the microwave.
He had only been home three hours.
Ace was frustrated. She had been well chuffed when the Doctor finally gave her something to do: i.e. sneak into Molecross’s house while he was in hospital to see if she found anything interesting. The Doctor persuaded UNIT to send a car for her, so she didn’t have to take another boring train and bus journey. From UNIT HQ, she cycled to Molecross’s cottage, careful to stop about a hundred yards away and hide the bike in a spinney before she approached. The cottage was a pretty little place, like something out of a fairy tale, but Ace suspected it was not much fun to live in. She crept up to the tiny front window and peered inside. The interior was dim and for a minute