Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [13]
'The Cybermen, of course, silly,' Polly said. 'You'd only need a really big net to stop those other creatures.'
'I think that, perhaps, you are both missing the point,' mused the Doctor. 'We were not attacked by a rampaging horde of Cybermen. We were presented with the head of a single Cyberman. A trophy, if you will.'
Ben blanched. 'Bloody hell. Something that can rip the head off a Cyberman.'
Polly rolled her eyes. 'It wasn't a real head. It disappeared.'
'Consider.' The Doctor raised a finger. 'The Menoptra. He was presented to us too, wasn't he?'
'Do you mean that they weren't really there, then, in any physical sense?' asked Polly.
Ben massaged his temple wearily. 'This is giving me a headache.
Again.'
Polly, though, was warming to her theme now. 'You said before that they were a message of some kind.'
'Exactly!' The Doctor beamed, clapping his hands together in delight at Polly's observation. 'But Ben was right, to a degree. Whatever is here has encountered the Cybermen and survived. It also knows that I have met the Cybermen. And the Menoptra.'
'But how could it possibly know that?' Again, Polly was clearly unnerved by this idea.
'I'm not sure, yet,' the Doctor said. 'I sense that someone is playing a kind of game with me. And whoever it is, I'm very much afraid that their abilities may be as far beyond mine as mine are beyond –'
'Ours?' Ben flinched and looked away from the Doctor's suddenly intense, penetrating gaze. It sounded like a petulant comment caused by the stress of the situation, but it made me shiver. Who exactly was the Doctor?
I seized on the uncomfortable lull in the conversation to step forward. Polly and Ben both smiled warmly when they saw me; the Doctor's expression was unreadable.
'Hi,' I ventured.
'Any news?' Polly gave me a hug as if we were old friends.
'Yeah ... maybe.' I passed the note with the Goblin's address uncomfortably from hand to hand. 'That reporter from the Oracle said someone had seen Denny.'
'That's wonderful,' Polly said.
I nodded. 'It's cool.'
Ben obviously saw right through me. 'But?'
'They think he might have been with some heavy guy ... a dangerous guy.' I looked into their faces hopefully. 'Stimson said I shouldn't go alone.'
They both looked to the Doctor, but he was lost in thought. 'Does this man have something to do with those Blue Moonbeams?' he eventually asked.
'I don't know. Maybe.'
He pondered for a moment, then said, 'I'm sorry, my dear, but I'm
afraid I have my own, rather pressing business to attend to.'
'Doctor? 'Polly prompted. 'Summer needs help.'
But he had already wandered off, lost to that strange mechanical device in his hand. His voice floated back to me as he entered the police box: 'See you again soon, my dear.'
It was a weird time to be alive. The Age of Aquarius was coming up fast. Suddenly all the certainties my parents had clung to in the 1950s were crumbling. The occult was grooving in the mainstream. You could watch Johnny Carson on one of those TVs in the window of Ellison's on Page and then go next door to get a Tarot reading or listen to Alan Watts lecture on Maya across the bay in Sausalito. There were more witches in the Haight than America had ever admitted to since the Salem trials. It was a time when anything was possible, when every single frontier had crumbled, and that was a very frightening situation to be in. Who could you believe any more? Before, there were pipe-smoking scientists and the bomb and Telstar lighting up the night. In their place we got magic, aliens and, eventually, ley lines. The day after I arrived in the city some guy was on a soapbox in the Panhandle warning everyone that demons really existed, and that they were walking among us, secretly tormenting us. At the time it was nothing, another San Francisco nut, but as I trailed reluctantly through the streets towards the Goblin's hang-out, I started to wonder: is that what the Doctor was? There was something about him that was different, otherworldly; most people wouldn't have seen it, but