by Doctor Who
‘News,’ moaned Arno Finch. ‘It must have been. . . I can’t remember, but it must have been on the news.’
‘If it’d been on the news, Arno, we’d all know about it. I think you’ve been watching something else. You’ve been watching Static, haven’t you?’
‘No! No, I wouldn’t!’
‘It’s all right, Arno, it’s not all your fault. You’re changing channels one day and Hal Gryden comes on, and you’ve heard so much about him and he’s saying things that you want to be true, and you’re curious. But you have to understand that that man has made you sick. Hal Gryden is fantasy crazy, Arno – and you know how fiction spreads. You’re doing it yourself. You’re making people afraid, making them imagine the future, and you know where that leads. As it is, everyone in this room – even the people you let go – will need coun-selling. They’ll probably have to shut the bank down. You’ve got your revenge, Arno.’
‘I just. . . No. Not until they say they’re sorry. Not until they promise to. . . to treat me better. Move my desk closer to the. . . the. . . ’
‘They can’t, Arno. You’re a bright man, you know how things are.
We’re only a small world. Our resources are stretched to the limit.
There’s no more. You have to accept that. Concentrate on the fact and forget the rest, the static.’
‘But. . . but no, that’s not true, because I’ve seen people, normal people like me, and they were answering questions and being given. . .
m-money and cars and. . . and holidays away from this place.’
Waller shook her head, pitying him even as she despised his weakness. He wasn’t the villain here. The villain had done his work, beaming his corrupting ideas into this fool’s brain, and he was long gone.
‘I’ve heard about shows like that – but they’re fiction too, Arno. Just like the ones that tell you not to trust the police when you know you can. You ever meet someone who’s been on one of these question shows? Anyone who’s won one? Can you prove they’re real?’
He was sweating and shaking. He was about to make his choice: 40
either give up or do something stupid.
‘No. You can’t. Then they aren’t real, are they?’ She took a step towards him, hoping her physical presence would ground him, reassure him. Or just intimidate him – she didn’t mind which. As long as he was thinking about nobody, nothing, else.
The geek let out a plaintive wail and tried to back away from her.
The trifle bowl slipped out from under him, and he toppled backwards off the table and fell out of Waller’s sight.
Her heart leaped into her mouth. She sprang forward, straining her micro-motors to the limit, knowing it was already too late.
Time seemed to freeze, possibilities suspended unrealised.
And then the room exploded and didn’t explode.
It was as if Waller was living in two worlds at once, one overlaid upon the other. She could see the ballroom intact at the same time as it was blasted apart. Her way to the geek was clear and yet filled with falling, flaming masonry. People were screaming and crying and yelling for help, and that was the same in both realities.
It was just like before.
Only this time she could fight it, because she knew what it was.
The explosives had detonated/hadn’t detonated. One was fact, one fiction. Waller didn’t have to know which was which. In the first case, she could do nothing. The ceiling had fallen in and she was pinned.
In the second. . .
She ignored the pains in her limbs that may or may not have been real. She vaulted over the table on which the fiction geek had been standing. She found him on his back, whimpering to himself. His eyes bulged as he saw her and he made to activate the detonator but realised he had dropped it.
Waller and the geek lunged for the black box in unison. Twenty fingers fought to be the first to close around it, but it skittered away from them all. It was brought to a halt by a battered brown shoe.
Waller’s world lurched again as she looked up, not knowing what she would see, half expecting to blink and find she was trapped in the rubble, bleeding.
41
The Doctor scooped up the detonator, glanced at it and said cheerfully, ‘TV remote control.’ He flung it over his shoulder and dropped to his haunches beside them. ‘Thought so, but I couldn’t be sure. I had the sonic screwdriver ready to block the radio signal.’ He gave Arno Finch an almost congratulatory slap on the shoulder. ‘But you were just having us on, weren’t you?’
His presence was like an anchor, pulling Waller back to sanity.
The nightmare fell away and she let out a breath of relief as she knew at last that the worst hadn’t happened. She was alive – they were all alive – the building was intact and the geek was beneath her, the struggle knocked out of him. But what had the Doctor just said. . . ?
There were no bombs! Why hadn’t she realised? She had been so quick to accept that fiction, to believe in something she couldn’t see for herself. She had forgotten the first rule.
Angry with herself, she rolled the geek over and spray-cuffed his wrists behind his back. ‘It’s the Big White House for you, pal,’ she snarled, ‘and I hope they fry your brain for what you’ve done to these people, you pervert!’
She regretted her harsh words almost immediately, regretting even more the fleeting truth in them. She did understand, beneath her frustration. She had sought out the Static channel herself once, on a cold, lonely night. She had just wanted to see. She had been lucky.
She hadn’t found it. The difference between her and the Arno Finches of this world, the fantasy crazy, was more slender than she cared to admit.
‘Y-you’ll tell them, won’t you?’ the geek stammered, tears in his eyes. ‘You’ll tell them it wasn’t my fault. I was just. . . just doing what they said on the TV.’ The Doctor leaned over him and muttered something in his ear. Waller didn’t catch the words, but they seemed to calm the geek down a little.
The bankers were picking themselves up, adjusting to their new reality – those who could. Too many were still on the ground, curled into foetal balls, sobbing.
‘You see what I mean now?’ Waller said to the Doctor.
42
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘This is what Gryden does. This is why he’s so dangerous. This TV
station of his, it’s making people greedy, teaching them to disrespect authority.’
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘He’s driving them crazy!’
‘I’ve misjudged you, Inspector Waller. I thought you were the monster here.’
He bounced to his feet while Waller was still gaping. ‘There are no monsters, Doctor,’ she spluttered.
‘Yeah, there are,’ he said. ‘Some of them are just better at hiding than others. And then there’re the ones we wouldn’t know if we saw them. C’mon, we’re going.’
He set off at a jog as if he expected Waller to follow – and somehow, maddeningly, she found herself doing just that.
‘Where to?’ she cried after him, helplessly.
‘Big White House,’ he called back over his shoulder. ‘I want to see what happens next.’
43
‘’Scuse me, guv, you got a credit for a cold beer?’
Captain Jack hadn’t seen the tramp slumped in a nest of cardboard in the doorway of a boarded-up shop. He’d been distracted by an advertising hoarding across the street, on which a tin of toothpaste was depicted beside the slogan ‘Not Quite as Effective at Plaque Re-moval as the Market Leader, But It Costs a Bit Less’. He was beginning to see what Domnic had meant about the problems of selling on this world.
‘I’m having these visions, see, keep dreaming I’m one of them rich businessmen. I need the booze to numb my brain before I go fantasy crazy.’
Jack grinned. ‘I like your sales pitch.’
The tramp looked up at him, forlorn in his layers of tatty clothing.
‘Just telling the truth, guv. Wouldn�
�t have me do less, would you?’
‘I got no cash, though, sorry.’ The tramp looked so downcast that Jack couldn’t help but reach out to him. ‘Here, come with me. I’ll get you a meal and a hot drink or something.’
‘Rather have a beer. Thought you said you had no money.’
‘I’ll use my imagi – I mean, I’ll find a way.’
45
The tramp took the proffered hand and let Jack lift him to his feet.
He was shorter than the American and his stooped shoulders made him seem shorter still. He was getting on a bit, his hair thinning and his beard white, but his eyes were bright and alert.
‘Knew you’d help me, guv,’ he wheezed gratefully, ‘soon as I saw your clothes. You’re not one of the drones. You’re a thinker. I’m a thinker too.’
Jack just nodded, remembering the last ‘thinker’ he had encountered.
He remembered the horror he’d felt as Domnic had leaped out of his grasp – at knowing it would take the young man long, agonising seconds to die and that he could do nothing but watch him fall.
Then Domnic’s flailing hand had hit the anti-gravity updraught of the fire-escape cage, attached to the wall a few metres away, and horror had turned to amazement.
His momentum had been stolen. Drifting like a feather, Domnic had somersaulted into the confines of the cage’s three vertical bars.
Then he had fallen again, faster than before but with the promise of a gentle landing.
Jack had had all of two seconds to think about following, but the leap was too far: the cage was meant to be accessed from the roof, not from here. Suicidal he may not have been after all, but Domnic had still taken one hell of a risk.
Jack couldn’t work out why. One moment, he’d been happy to talk, apparently glad to have found two kindred spirits. The next. . . It was as if he’d become paranoid, imagining the worst of them and believing it. As if the people who ran this world were right and dreams were dangerous.
Perhaps they were, to people unused to dreaming.
The sun was rising over the grey buildings, but it was a cold day and the sky was heavy with cloud. The roads were clogged as usual, and the pavements were packed too: people with grey jumpsuits and grey faces, keeping their heads down as they marched to work. The hoverjets of stalled vehicles kicked up grey dust, which swirled around the pedestrians’ ankles. Domnic was right, thought Jack: this was a 46
black and white world.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ he said. ‘Hal Gryden. Runs a TV station.
Heard of him?’
The tramp shrugged. ‘You won’t find many as haven’t heard of Hal Gryden. Probably seen him too, if they’re honest. They say his son was picked up on a minor storytelling charge, sent to the Big White House.
Took his own life, he did. That’s why Gryden hates the system.’
That tallied with what Jack already knew. After Domnic had run off into the night, he and Rose had spent two hours surfing the Ethernet back at the hotel, in a little cubbyhole behind reception. The night manager had given them a code card and added a charge to their account. They’d found an address for Domnic Allen easily enough, and thousands of mentions of Hal Gryden, but no concrete information. If he had been a businessman as Domnic had claimed, if he’d ever had a listed address or a vidphone number, they could find no trace of it.
‘Hal Gryden. That can’t be his real name, can it?’
‘Reckon not,’ said the tramp. ‘So they say, anyway. I hear a lot, I do.
Keep my ear to the ground.’
‘You ever hear his real name? Or how to find him?’
‘Saw him on the info-screen at the end there, few weeks ago. He cut in on RTV 4 for a minute. Bounced his signal off their own satellite, so they say. Clever fellow. You ask me, if anyone can save this world it’s him.’
‘Everyone must know his face,’ said Jack. ‘How can he hide?’
‘You get me a beer, I’ll tell you everything I know.’
‘You old fraud!’ Jack grinned. ‘You don’t know a thing, do you?’
‘I tell no word of a lie, guv.’
‘Where do you get a beer round here, anyway?’
‘Pub.’
‘At this time of the morning?’
‘Open all hours. Alcohol’s good, in the right dosage. Numbs the brain, saves us thinking too hard, keeps us sane. Keeps things real.
There’s a decent place just round the corner.’
‘OK,’ said Jack. ‘Lead on.’
47
As dawn had turned the sky red, Rose had crashed out in their room. She would catch up on a few hours’ sleep, then go and find Domnic. With luck, the Doctor would be back before she left. If not. . .
well, that was one more thing to worry about.
In the meantime, Jack was left to find one man in a city – a world
– of twenty million, according to the Ethernet. He didn’t fancy his chances. Unless he did something that Domnic had inadvertently suggested. Something risky.
This, then, was his mission. To tell stories. Ask questions. Draw attention. Make a name for himself.
And make Hal Gryden come to him.
An hour and a half later, Captain Jack was in his element, perched on a bar stool with a semicircle of rapt faces in front of him: tired nightshift workers and dispossessed unemployed, who’d been wallowing in their own misery before his arrival.
‘So this poor guy walks into the refectory all dressed up like the Face of Boe, with the admiral standing right there. You should have seen him when he realised it wasn’t a costume party at all. He didn’t know where to put his. . . well, his whole body.’
He leaned back against the bar and took a swig from his bottle, revelling in his audience’s appreciative laughter.
It hadn’t been like this in the first bar. The customers there, all sitting in silence at their tables in the gloom, had just glowered at him.
One couple had plugged their ears and started to sing loudly. Someone else had thrown a bottle at him and called him a ‘fiction geek’.
The second place he had been thrown out of by a surly bartender almost as soon as he had opened his mouth.
Not that he was short of hecklers here. ‘You should go see a doctor, you should,’ snapped a sharp-featured old woman from the other end of the bar. ‘And the rest of you oughtn’t to be egging him on.’
‘It’s the truth, I swear,’ said Jack.
‘I believe him,’ piped up another patron, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. ‘I don’t reckon there’s anyone could make up stuff like this.’
‘Yeah? What about that Hal Gryden?’
48
The old woman had found a supporter. ‘If you’re telling the truth,’
he challenged Jack, brandishing a glass, ‘where’s your ship? Why didn’t we see it landing?’
‘It’s out in the jungle, and it didn’t land. It materialised. Yeah, you heard me,’ said Jack, raising his voice above the renewed gales of laughter. ‘I came here in a time/space capsule. From the outside, it looks like something called a police box. They had them on Earth in the twentieth century, but this one’s bigger on the inside.’
The old woman slammed her glass down and spluttered, ‘You expect anyone to believe that?’
‘It’s OK, ma’am,’ Jack called after her as she made a show of storming out, ‘you can listen. The police can’t touch us because this isn’t fiction. It’s my life!’
‘Prove that to the doctors!’ she spat as a parting shot.
‘Tell us about this capsule of yours,’ someone requested.
‘Oh, it’s not mine,’ said Jack. ‘It belongs to this guy called. . . Well, I’m not sure you’re ready for that one yet.’ He affected a mournful look at his empty bottle, which had the desired effect. A cute blond builder type stepped up to buy him another. ‘And one for my friend,’
requested Jack cheerfully. He turned to the table in the corner with a thumbs-up gesture, but it was empty. He frow
ned and surveyed the crowd, seeing the tramp only as he appeared at his elbow.
‘Reckon it’s time we left, Cap’n,’ he muttered.
‘You kidding me? I’m just warming up. And I got us another –’
‘There’ll be other places,’ hissed the tramp fiercely, ‘but not if we hang around this one. The old bat – she’ll be on her vidphone to the police by now.’
Jack practically fell off his stool in his haste to stand. The old man was right. He’d have seen it himself if it hadn’t been for the booze.
He’d only meant to have one, just to get in the mood. Soft drinks only in the next pub, he swore.
‘I’ve just been reminded,’ he announced, ‘of a pressing appointment.
It’s been cool speaking to you all, and if anyone comes looking for me
– apart from the police, I mean – I’m staying at –’
‘Just tell them to look in the static,’ the tramp interrupted hastily.
49
Jack gave the old man a protesting look as he was taken by the arm and led to the door, to the disappointed groans of his audience.
‘What did you do that for?’ he complained, blinking in the daylight.
‘You want the police down on you?’ asked the tramp.
‘Who cares? Anyway, no one would have talked. They’d have nothing on me.’
‘How much do you think they need?’
‘And I’m meant to be getting attention. I want to be found.’
‘By Hal Gryden,’ the tramp reminded him, ‘no one else. And he’ll find you if he wants to. You ever seen him on the TV? He knows what goes on. He’s got eyes and ears everywhere. He wants to find you, Cap’n he’ll find you – trust me on that one.’
It was early afternoon as they made their escape from Jack’s fourth successful recital. They used the back door.
He had been feeling pretty pleased with himself. Already, his reputation was preceding him. He was being applauded on sight, recognised by his dress sense alone, and was finding more and more people eager to listen to him. In a world starved of stories, Jack supposed they spread all the more quickly.
