Downtime - Marc Platt [88]
He wondered if he was going mad.
‘Sir?’ called Harrods. ‘Where are we going, sir?’
‘Don’t worry, Sergeant. I have someone working on it.’
The Brigadier eyed a security camera on the ceiling. ‘As long as he doesn’t lead us on too long a dance.’
Harrods was having to scuttle to keep up with him. He was grinning to himself
‘Ever see Wilson, Kepple and Betty, sir?’
Lethbridge-Stewart wondered if they were both going mad.
‘The variety act? Two funny little men in Egyptian clobber doing sand dances? And a girl doing a sort of exotic belly dance?’
‘Oh yes, sir. My favourites, they were.’
‘Really,’ the Brigadier said, trying to sound interested.
They had turned left, left and left and were in severe danger of turning left again and ending up where they had started.
If Hinton was acting as their spirit guide, where was he when they needed him?
‘Three times I saw them, sir. And every time the Betty was a different person.’
‘Three different, Bettys.’ The Brigadier laughed appreciatively. But he doubted that Time Lords toured the universe performing novelty acts on the variety circuit.
On the other hand...
‘Sir!’
Harrods was crouched by a doorway marked ‘NW FM’.
There was a shape inside. The figure of a man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with headphones draped round his neck. He was slumped against the glass, covered in swathes of web and his dead eyes were staring wide open.
The door was jammed tight.
‘Gets worse, doesn’t it, sir?’
‘It does indeed, Sergeant. Let’s keep moving.’
Faced with the opportunity of going left again, the Brigadier opted for right. The way was closed.
Since there was no promised clue from Hinton, he settled on left instead.
A deep chanting noise was emanating from the gloom.
Before they reached the lift, they came to another viewing window in the wall. It looked into a large room resembling a language lab. In the dim light they could make out row upon row of computer terminals with a Chilly seated in an attitude of contemplation at each. The same web was draped over the students and the machines. It caught the light of the terminals, glittering malevolently as the Chillys kept up their chanted dirge.
‘Like a morgue,’ whispered Harrods.
‘Like a trap,’ corrected the Brigadier. He could see that several of the Chillys held silvered spheres on their laps. Some of them were starting to rise from their places.
Where the hell is Hinton? he thought.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Back to the lift!’
It had been a struggle to get the lift as far as Floor Three.
Almost as soon as the Brigadier had left the confines of the lift, Danny had felt a new command in the system.
The lift was being summoned to Floor Eight, the top level.
Danny put a countermand option through Kate’s fingers, but his momentary lapse in concentration had let things slip.
The doors closed and the lift went up unhindered.
He fed Kate a command to stop the doors opening at the top, but was overruled again.
She was a good medium for his thoughts. She had let her mind loosen, allowing him open access to move her fingers over the keys. No longer confined to his human body, no longer genetically challenged, he found that his thoughts were freed up too. It was the flying he had always wanted. He was able to think so fast now that he was afraid of hurting Kate.
He fed her another instruction: a command to stop the lift in its tracks.
He sensed the doors closing on the eighth floor. He put in an override command to open again.
He felt the doors judder. The logic commands were counteracting each other. He wanted to keep this up for as long as possible, but he heard Kate gasp.
‘I can’t move my fingers,’ she protested. ‘What is it?’
‘Hold it there!’ he snapped. He had to stop whatever was in the lift from descending.
He knew what was in the lift. He still felt the tug of what had once been his body. The Intelligence’s powers had widened. It no longer needed to construct robots to serve as its heavy brigade. The university had a whole section devoted to nanotechnology and atomic engineering. The Intelligence could overwhelm and transmute