Doctor Who (11 page)

‘Lemme get some of my stuff out of the trunk first.'

Moments later, Bob was babbling excitedly to the Doctor as they jumped into a taxi, already plotting their next move.

Peri and I looked at one another over the roof of Bob's car. ‘Can you drive?'

‘Of course I can drive. Even if you Yanks insist on using the wrong side of the road.'

‘No,' she said, ‘I meant, could you drive to the airport? I'm kind of out of practice.'

‘Oh. Sure.'

We wove over slushy roads through morning traffic. ‘Seems like the boys are leaving you out,' I commented, watching Peri out of the corner of my eye. She had put the passenger seat back a little and stretched her legs out. ‘Forgetting about you while they play with their computers.'

‘Oh, this is pretty standard,' said Peri, bitterly. ‘The Doctor always knows more than I do about everything. He's a lot older than I am. He's travelled a lot more. He's even finished college. You should hear him lecture me on how there's so much I could learn from him! Could learn, if he ever bothered to tell me anything!'

‘Seems like being the Doctor's sidekick is hard work,' I said.

‘It sure is, sometimes. Sometimes it's great. You get to see things nobody else has ever seen.'

Peri seemed happy to have someone to talk to – though from time to time I noticed her catching herself before giving too much away. She didn't let it turn into a one-way interview: she wanted to know all about my American dad, why I'd decided to come back to the States when I grew up. ‘I've had some bad fights with my stepdad,' she admitted. ‘But we still talk. We're still friends. I guess I'm lucky.'

At the airport we tried to call the motel, just to check on the Doctor and Bob, but the phone line was busy. ‘Figures,' said Peri.

‘Guess I should call my dad anyway,' I said. ‘Wish him merry Christmas and that.'

Peri looked stricken. ‘It must be tough being away from your folks like this.'

‘No . . . no, actually, it's OK. They won't be worrying about me. You go ahead and make that call.'

‘See you at the newsagent in a few minutes.'

As soon as Peri was out of earshot, I called Mondy's beeper. It never failed: a few minutes later, he called the other end of the loop-around pair we always used.

No sense in wasting time. ‘Did you talk to Swan?'

‘Ah, shoot,' said Mondy. ‘Like I had a big fat choice.'

‘You little bugger,' I hissed.

‘You know what she did?'

‘I shudder to think.'

‘She put everything back the way it was, Chick. My credit rating. My record. My
phones, mazel tov
. I have my life back. Wasn't that worth a teensy weensy bit of data?'

‘Yeah, well, you chucked me in the deep end, mate.'

‘Look, Swan doesn't have enough info to get Bob into real
trouble. Trust me. She's just trying to get you guys to panic, to make a mistake.'

‘I don't think it's gonna happen. The Doctor's really careful.'

‘So are you, man. Stay careful. Listen, you know you can't tell me anything now.'

‘You bet I know!'

‘I can't give away something I don't know. But she can still find things out, things you wouldn't believe.' We both knew what he meant. ‘Try and stay out of it, Chick. Really don't get involved.'

It was already the middle of the night in Melbourne. If I had actually called my Dad, he would have slammed the phone down before I could contaminate it.

The Doctor and Bob were having a whale of a time. The Doctor set up his Apple II in the motel room, plugging the modem into the phone socket. They had a list of email addresses, people Swan had mentioned the Eridani device to. Judging by the content of the messages, they were fellow collectors, people she was hoping to swap goodies or bits of information with to increase her collection of legal and illegal technology. (What I had seen at her house was only a fraction of that collection.)

So while we were at the airport, the two of them were merrily breaking into email accounts all over the country, reading more and more messages as they put together the same information Swan had. And, quite probably, in the same way she had. Unlike her, of course, the Doctor and Bob were prompted by the purest of motives.

Bob stirred some coffee into his chocolate milk and sucked the muddy result through a straw while he watched the Doctor at work. Every so often the Doctor would ask him a question,
checking some technical point. Bob would gush an answer with far more information than the Doctor needed.

They were deep inside a university on the west coast when the messages started to come. As well as sending email anywhere in the network, you can send a short ‘msg' to someone else on the same system, a sort of internal mail. The Doctor had tiptoed in: he took a snapshot of the computer's current list of users, then altered its ‘who' command to show that list instead of actually checking who was online. He was, in short, invisible. So he was suitably surprised to be challenged:

Hellooo! Who have we here?

‘Don't answer it,' said Bob, putting down his mocha milk.

‘There's little point in putting our heads into the ground,' said the Doctor. ‘They can obviously see us.'

‘Then let's get out,' said Bob nervously.

Cat got your tongue?

The Doctor had already typed the who command. There were only four users logged on that Christmas morning: the Doctor, a couple of sysadmins, and zydeco.

The Doctor opened the file he had edited to disguise his entrance to the system. Sure enough, there was no record of zydeco's login ‘It's another hacker,' he said. ‘And what a coincidence they should happen to be on the same system as we are this merry Michelmas morning.'

Bob gulped. ‘Swan.'

Amused, the Doctor typed:

Good morning. Are you working your way
backwards through the dictionary?

You can run, replied Swan, but you can't hide.

‘Oh please,' said the Doctor aloud.

No matter where you go, typed Swan, whenever you pick up a phone or dial into the net, I'll find you. You may be able to hide from the authorities but you can't hide from me.

Speaking of the authorities, replied the Doctor, they could be very interested in your connection to the death of one Charles Cobb.

‘Who he?' said Bob.

‘Just one link in the chain of people who brought Swan her little collector's item.'

Nothing to do with me, said Swan. I'm not threatening you. We should work *together*. You won the first round. I respect your skills. Let's combine our talents and our information. We'll both benefit.

The Doctor hammered out, You don't have the slightest idea of what you're dealing with, do you? What did you think that
device was? Did you run any tests? Take any precautions?

Tell me what it is.

You're like a little child who finds a detonator, said the Doctor. Take my advice: just this once, leash your curiosity before anyone else gets hurt.

Now you're threatening me.

The devices are the threat. Go back to your hacking and phreaking and leave well enough alone.

No more messages came from Swan.

‘
THERE'S ONLY ONE
thing for it,' declared the Doctor. ‘We'll wiretap the wiretapper.'

‘You want us to bug Swan's phone?' said Bob. ‘Waitaminute. You want
me
to bug Swan's phone?'

‘I have every confidence in your ability,' said the Doctor smoothly.

We were standing around at a rest stop on the I–95, stretching our legs, halfway home from Baltimore. Peri got a grape soda from a vending machine. ‘I love this stuff,' she confessed. ‘And the places we visit, you usually can't get it.'

‘My ability to get screwed by Swan when she finds out,' grumbled Bob. ‘I'm no phone phreak. I could use the test set to listen in through her bridging box, but that's kind of conspicuous. And she probably visits that box about as often as she visits the bathroom.'

‘Do we even know her phone number?' said Peri. ‘We'd need that, wouldn't we?'

‘C'mon,' said Bob. ‘She's not gonna be listed, is she?' He suddenly made a gesture as though turning his own head backwards. ‘On the other hand, maybe she's that cocky . . . hang on.' He got up and went to a payphone nearby.

Bob came back. ‘She's ex-directory,' he said. ‘So I did a CN/A on her. Couldn't believe it. First time lucky.' He showed us Swan's phone number, scribbled in ballpoint on his arm.

‘You did what?' said Peri.

‘I called up a Customer Name and Address operator and told her I was a linesman,' said Bob. He shook his head. ‘Never done it before. But she was only too happy to give out Swan's address and phone number.'

Peri shuddered. ‘Is there any way somebody can keep their private information private?'

Bob grimaced. ‘Not when people are really determined. Question is, what do we do now? I know there are ways of bugging someone from inside the telco, but I don't know how it's done.'

‘Peri,' said the Doctor, ‘why don't you and Bob go and get some lunch? I want to have a word with Mr Peters.' The kids wandered off to the kiosk to see if it was open.

‘Peri doesn't seem too happy about tapping Swan's phone,' I ventured.

‘Extreme situations call for extreme measures,' grumbled the Doctor. ‘I don't think it's possible to appeal to Swan's better nature. The question is, can we appeal to her common sense? Her desire for self-preservation? Or will we have to simply bludgeon her into giving up?' He scowled. ‘I never like to be reminded that simple rational argument, simple facts, are not enough to convince people.'

‘If you learned something you could use to blackmail Swan, would you?'

‘If it became necessary, yes I would. After all, we all have secrets we'd rather keep to ourselves.'

The little hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I usually only felt that just before I got into a fistfight with someone. ‘Are you threatening me?' I said.

The Doctor stopped, surprised. ‘Nothing was further from my mind.'

‘Oh, boy.' I shrugged, trying to get my shoulder to un-knot.
‘Well, Swan could make some serious trouble for me. She thinks I'm investigating you, helping her out. If she realises I'm just a neutral party –'

‘Are you a neutral party, Mr Peters?' said the Doctor. ‘Is it possible always to be a neutral party?' This was what he'd wanted to talk to me about.

‘Call me Chick. Staying neutral is the journalist's job. We don't make the news, we just report it.'

‘And yet, isn't there sometimes the temptation to interfere?'

I sat on the bonnet of the Pontiac. I thought of a story I'd been doing in Los Angeles about traffic safety. ‘Well, you know. I wouldn't just stand there and let a kid get run over by a car, or something like that.' Even if it would make one hell of a story.

The Doctor nodded. ‘But what if the stakes were higher than that?'

‘Higher than a child's life?'

‘Much higher. The lives of every child, woman, and man on the planet.'

My secret for dealing with people who are either mean or crazy is to imagine them in their underwear. I tried to imagine the Doc in his underdaks, and failed. ‘Right,' I said, uncertainly. ‘Because of the extraterrestrials.'

‘If you prefer, imagine the device we found to be the product of a secret weapons laboratory, years ahead of other research.'

‘So it is a weapon,' I said. The damn thing was in the trunk of the car. I slid off the bonnet.

‘It could be used as one,' said the Doctor. ‘By someone who penetrated its secrets.'

‘But if it's so far advanced, wouldn't it be like a caveman trying to figure out how, I dunno, an electric toothbrush works?'

‘A persistent enough caveman will eventually find the on-switch,' said the Doctor.

‘OK,' I said. ‘I can go along with that. So what's your angle?' He raised his eyebrows. ‘You're working for the “Eridani”, right?'

‘Not in the sense you mean. They asked for my help, and I was more than happy to help clean up the mess they'd got themselves into.'

‘And the mess they've got our vulnerable little world into.'

‘Indeed.'

‘So, altruism.'

‘If you like. Or think of it as involvement. My people – most people simply sit back and watch the universe go by. I prefer to roll up my sleeves and plunge my hands in. Get them wet, or dirty. Whatever's required.'

I was grinning. ‘I bet in school you were the kid who always ate the Playdough.'

‘Something like that,' he said.

‘I've got my hands plenty dirty,' I said, seriously. ‘I've done all the hard living I plan to. I've earned some time to sit back.'

‘How old are you, Chick?' asked the Doctor.

‘Thirty-three,' I said. ‘Sometimes I feel about a thousand.'

‘Hmmm.' He began the elaborate process of extracting a peanut butter cup from its wrapping. ‘You and I have both seen more of life than either Bob or Peri. Their enthusiasm and idealism hasn't been worn down against the grindstone of time.' I wasn't so sure about Peri's enthusiasm, but I held my tongue. ‘When you're young, it's hard to grasp the fact that other people can and will hurt you. It seems so unfair. We're both old enough to know that someone like Swan doesn't care about abstract ideas like fairness or privacy. When she wants to attack someone, nothing will stop her. If she gets hold of one of those devices, Mr Peters, I promise you that no-one's
personal affairs will ever be private again.'

‘Ah shoot – now what?'

‘I want you to give someone a little advice,' I told Mondy. I heard him sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘He doesn't know who you are, and he doesn't need to know. And I'm not going to ask you to do anything. I just want you to let him pick your brains for half an hour.'