Part 7 (2/2)

He spluttered. 'You've got to be kidding.'

'If you give me what I want, I'll stop bugging you. Now and forever.'

Mondy was thunderstruck. 'You're full of it.'

'You know I keep my word,' she said. 'I never have bothered your mom, have I? Or your brother in Calvert County.'

'No,' he had to admit.

'Good. Then you know I mean it. No more trouble for you if you just do what I say.'

Mondy hesitated. Was this the real reason she had picked on him for so long because she knew one day she'd want to use his skills?

He smacked the listening end of the receiver against his forehead a couple of times. 'Ah, shoot,' he said at last. 'What do you want me to do?'

The Doctor's black suit turned out to be Peri's idea. 'You're not wandering around Was.h.i.+ngton in your circus outfit,' she had insisted. He'd made a lengthy speech about the historical variability of costumes and fas.h.i.+ons, but Peri had put her foot down for once. 'Maybe in Berkeley or something,' she said.

'Not here.'

Peri told me she'd been wearing more and more garish clothes herself, not to compete with him, but to try to make him realise just how outlandish his own outfit was. It hadn't worked. He was too comfortable to care.

It took me a while to notice that, hidden by the dapper black trousers, he was wearing fluorescent orange socks.

The amazing thing is, not only did the Doctor's 'contacts' say yes, they even let me come along once I persuaded him and he persuaded them. I think the Doctor let me tag along for the same reason he let me sit in on his hacking session; he wanted me where he could see me, a controllable element.

As good as his word, the Doctor had Bob drive us to a small apartment in northwest DC, off Connecticut Avenue.

The rooms were furnished cla.s.sy, but anonymous, modem wood and plastic reflecting the taste of no-one in particular.

There were no books, no knick-knacks. The kitchen looked as though it was never used. It was another hotel room, not a home.

The man the Doctor wanted us to meet sat stiff-spined in an easy chair. He wore a black coat and hat, as though he was just about to go out. He had a blandly handsome face with a blandly pleasant expression. Behind him, there was a parrot in a cage, constantly chirping and clucking to itself. It was a weird breed: long stiff tail, oversized beak, eyes so small they were barely visible through the mix of lemon and lime feathers.

'Sit down,' murmured the Doctor. We arranged ourselves on a couple of pale sofas, and I flipped open my notebook.

'Allow me to introduce Mr Ghislain' The man's eyes moved back and forth over us a couple of times. 'With the invaluable help of my friends here, I'm very close to finding one of the missing components,' he said smoothly 'But they would like to know a bit more of the background to our job.'

He said, 'Allow me to tell you a story' He spoke precisely, almost in a monotone; his voice had a trace of accent which I couldn't place French? 'You may take or leave this story as you please.'

Once upon a time (Mr Ghislain told us) there was a s.p.a.ce vehicle. It was not made by human beings. In fact, it had been travelling for centuries by the time human beings discovered radio.

The s.p.a.cecraft was sent from a world circling Epsilon Eridani.4 The people of Eridani could not make s.h.i.+ps that could travel faster than light. But they were patient, and had established colony worlds gradually and quietly over a huge volume of s.p.a.ce, communicating with one another with slow messages and slower parcels. This particular s.p.a.cecraft contained a supercomputer, broken into five components for storage in the slow packet, a gift to a fledgling colony circling Van Maanen's Star.

The s.p.a.cecraft's flight path took it through Earth's solar system, a slingshot around the sun that would boost its speed towards its destination. But the closer the s.h.i.+p came to Earth, the more saturated its systems became with radio transmissions. The Eridani had not antic.i.p.ated this; they expected a long, patient voyage through silence.

Bewildered by the flood of signals, the slow packet concluded that it must have already reached its destination, and landed its precious cargo on the planet Earth.

When the Eridani realised what had happened almost eleven years later they took the unusual and expensive step of chartering a faster-than-light s.h.i.+p from a neighbouring civilisation, and sent two agents to retrieve the package. But during those eleven years, their parcel had already been discovered by human beings. It had pa.s.sed through a succession of hands, the components becoming separated as owner after owner tried to discover their secrets.

The Eridani have managed to find three of the components in the three years they have been on Earth. But then one of them was killed by a human being they had employed to help 4 This is a real star, a cla.s.s K orange dwarf about eleven light years from Earth. The Doctor mentioned that scientists on Earth had scanned Epsilon Eridani for radio signals in 1960; they might have detected the Eridani if they had checked a wider band of wavelengths. He also suggested that the Eridani probably hadn't evolved on a planet circling that star (too young, at only a billion years of age), but had colonised a world there, one of their many waystations across our section of the galaxy. I have to give him credit for working out the back-story in detail.

them in the search. The human was also killed.

It was at this point that the Doctor stepped in with his offer to help find the final two components Human beings must not learn the secret of the Eridani supercomputer. The Doctor believes it would disrupt their society to gain this knowledge prematurely. The Eridani do not wish their primitive neighbours to become their technological rivals.

That is the whole of the story.

I hadn't stopped writing once while Mr Ghislain quietly related his tale, although I'd been tempted to flip the notebook shut and walk out. I wasn't interested in heading off into outer s.p.a.ce, but only in voyages into the inner s.p.a.ce of the world inside the computer. But if this was the way some of the hackers thought, I needed to know about it. Or was the ludicrous cover story a way of stopping the secret leaking out because if someone spilled the beans, no-one would believe them?

Everyone was looking at me to see how I would react.

'Whatever you say, folks,' I declared. 'I'm just along for the ride.'

Like the man said, you can take or leave this story as you please. My take on it? The 'Eridani' are code for the Russians.

The other aliens they're supposed to have borrowed a s.h.i.+p from? Maybe a submarine their agents. .h.i.tched a ride on. And the slow packet? That part's straight: the components of a new generation of supercomputer. They lost control of it on American soil, and now they want it back.

If you accept the Doctor's earlier claim that the US government doesn't know anything about it then the supercomputer's parts had got into the hands of private citizens. But lucky for the Ruskies, the parts had been split up.

Swan got one, realised how important it was, and had set out to search for the other pieces.

What did she hope to do with the machine? Patent it as her own work? Sell it to the highest bidder? Whatever her plans, you have to wonder if she realised just what fire she was playing with. Bob and Peri did her a favour by stealing that thing out from under her nose before the other side could find it.

Or before our side could find it. What if I'd guessed wrong, and the Eridani were Americans? What if I'd guessed right, and the Doctor was working for the Russians? Or even just the British? Bob and Peri were just following the Doctor's lead, but what was his angle?

Two.

When we got. back to Bob's house in the early evening, the first thing he did was go into the bedroom and emerge with a crowbar and a hex socket. 'Gotta check for wiretaps,' he muttered, giving me a look.

Peri picked up a phone and listened to the dial tone. 'It sounds normal to me,' she said.

'No clicks?' said Bob? 'No funny sounds at all?'

She listened for a few moments. 'No. Maybe I wouldn't know what to look for'

<script>