Doctor Who_ Wonderland - Mark Chadbourn [28]
'So it would be easy for her to hand out the Blue Moonbeams to the crowd,' Polly suggested.
Ben and I froze; we were both picturing the same sickening image. 'Why would she do a thing like that?' Ben asked.
'How many are supposed to be going?' Polly said.
'It's going to be big, big, big,' Stimson said. 'Everybody in the Haight – every mover and shaker from Leary and Ginsberg to Janis and the Dead ... and they're going to be coming from all over the West Coast.' He raised his eyes while he worked up a figure. 'Say, maybe, twentyfive thousand?'
We came out of the Oracle offices in a daze. If the Blue Moonbeams were dropped by the crowd at the Human Be-In, it would be an atrocity.
'We could go to the police,' Polly suggested.
I laughed. 'They'd probably come down and help hand out the tabs.'
'She wouldn't do a thing like that,' Ben said, as if trying to convince himself. 'What would she get out of it?'
It wasn't a question any of us could answer, but it left us in a bleak mood as we set off to try to find the Doctor.
The Doctor emerged from his police box to find us waiting outside. He was tossing up and down one of the Blue Moonbeam pills he'd obviously saved from Mathilda's place. 'Very strange,' he mused, half to himself, before turning his attention fully to us. 'I've given this a thorough going-over, and there's one element in it that I can't identify.'
'The bit that's responsible for what happened to all those poor sods,' Ben said.
'I expect so.'
I was pleasantly surprised that the Doctor had taken time out from his own investigations to examine the tab. I told him our suspicions about the Human Be-In, and his face darkened. 'You think that could be what she's planning?' I asked.
'I think Mathilda is a very dangerous woman indeed.' He tossed the pill one more time with distaste, then dropped it into his pocket. 'Something must be done.'
The plan was quite simple in the telling – get into Mathilda's house, render her stash of Blue Moonbeams unusable with an acid-based concoction that the Doctor had brewed up, then get out – but Ben, Polly and I all realised that it was nigh-on impossible to achieve. Any optimism I had felt about the Doctor's increasing interest in the Blue Moonbeams had vanished when he had declined to come with us. And when we'd arrived at the gloomy, gothic house, even the thin hope we'd nurtured had blown away.
The house was dark and empty, Mathilda and her entourage had long gone. Ben managed to break in through the roof-space that we'd used the previous night, and let Polly and me in the front door We searched the place from top to bottom, but found nothing incriminating. The bodies were gone, the bloodstains wiped up, no stash of Blue Moonbeams anywhere.
'She's gone to a bolt-hole,' Ben said redundantly.
'Where do we go now?' Polly hugged her arms around her against the growing chill. 'Back to Jack? He might have an idea where she's gone.'
'He's somewhere down at the preparations for the Human Be-In doing interviews, remember?' I said disconsolately. Alan Cohen, one of his editors and the Oracle's co-founder, was an organiser and the whole staff had been drafted in to report on it. Then it struck me: 'The Diggers.'
'The free food people?' Ben led the way along the street. Nearby a few people were listening to a guy playing Dylan numbers on a guitar.
'There are two kinds of people in the Haight,' I said. 'There's the art crowd – the sit back and smoke and paint and make music and write crowd. And there are the activists – the fighters, the change the system crowd, the people who get things done.'
'And the Diggers are the fighters?' Polly said.
'Yeah, they're artists too, a lot of them ... poets, painters and street actors. But they've got this idea of a socialist utopia ... they're named after some ancient English commune or something. Anyway,