Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [17]
As soon as she got home Miranda took hers straight to her father.
He was in his study, filling in forms. He smiled, glad to be able to finish them.
‘What have you got there?’
‘The latest craze. It’s a portable telephone, but it does other stuff.’
He picked it up and weighed it. ‘This is a telephone?’ He seemed surprised.
He put it next to his own mobile phone, which was about four times its size and weight. It was only now that the two phones were side by side that Miranda realised just how weird hers looked. It was all liquid curves, with a strange pearl-like sheen to its silver casing. The controls were dotted around, not laid out in neat rows. It didn’t have an aerial, let alone one you had to pull out.
The Doctor picked up the new phone and turned it over in his hand. ‘I don’t see how you get into it,’ he told her.
‘It recharges and repairs itself,’ she told him. ‘A few people dropped theirs, and they just. . . fixed. You can throw them against walls and run them over with cars and they’re fine.’
The Doctor looked impressed, then worried. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘They were just handing them out.’
He frowned. ‘This is worth hundreds of pounds. Who was handing them out?’
‘A girl. She’s quiet, but someone else said her dad’s just taken over an electronics factory.’
‘Provider Electronics? On the Buxton Road?’
‘That’s right. Was I right to take one?’
The Doctor tapped his lip thoughtfully. ‘As I said to King Priam, you should beware of geeks bearing gifts. If only he’d listened. Of course, I also told him not to look a gift horse in the mouth. . . ’
37
‘Dad. . . ’ Miranda said impatiently.
‘Did this come with a box or instructions?’
‘No. It’s meant to be easy to use. I can’t get it to work, though.’
‘You can’t?’ He pressed a button. ‘That turns it on, and –’
‘I know that. But –’
‘And I place it to my ear and. . . Oh, it’s gone dead.’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
The Doctor tried again. ‘Perhaps I’m pressing the off button with my ear,’
he suggested. A third attempt yielded the same result. He laid it down on his desk and looked at it for a moment. ‘This was free?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Miranda told him again.
The Doctor picked up a metal paperweight and smashed it against the telephone, neatly breaking open the casing.
‘Dad!’ Miranda cried out.
‘Merely the first part of my careful scientific investigation,’ he assured her.
He peered down into the mass of circuits and wires. Something caught his eye. He reached into the jumble with a pair of tweezers.
It was a glowing blue wire, and it wriggled in the grip of the tweezers like a worm.
‘It’s alive?’ Miranda asked.
‘No. . . I don’t think so. But it’s not a product of human technology, either.’
The Doctor dropped the ‘worm’ back into the mass of circuits. As he and Miranda watched, wires in the two halves of the telephone started twitching, reaching out for each other. A couple managed to grope blindly across the divide. They latched on to other wires, and started to pull together. Two minutes later, and the phone was back in one piece, and on standby.
‘I think I’ll pay that factory on Buxton Road a visit,’ the Doctor said, quietly.
‘I’m coming with you.’
The Doctor hesitated, then nodded.
They had parked close to the factory, then walked the rest of the way. It was in the little industrial estate right at the edge of town and was an old mill building with a slate roof. There was a ten-foot wall all the way around it.
Flecks of soot and dirt had washed into the brown stone over the years.
‘I’m amazed no one’s noticed that,’ the Doctor said, waving his hand towards the factory.
It was dark, but Miranda could see what her father was pointing at: a radio mast, taller than a tree, gleaming silver. It ended in three prongs, making it look like a gigantic trident planted in the ground.
‘Can you hear something?’ the Doctor asked.
38
Miranda could, right on the edge of her hearing, like the sound when you first turn a television on or blow on a dog whistle. This wasn’t a continuous tone, more a series of bleeps and blips.
‘Is