by Colfer, Eoin
A BIG HAND FOR THE DOCTOR
Eoin Colfer
PUFFIN
Contents
About Eoin Colfer
Books by Eoin Colfer
A BIG HAND FOR THE DOCTOR
Copyright page
About Eoin Colfer
Eoin Colfer was born and raised in the south-east of Ireland. Artemis Fowl, his first book featuring the young anti-hero, was an immediate international bestseller and won several prestigious awards. He has written a number of other successful books for both adults and children, including Half Moon Investigations, The Supernaturalist and Airman. His new book, WARP: The Reluctant Assassin, is the first book in a major new series and publishes in April 2013. He lives with his family in Ireland.
Find out more about Eoin at www.eoincolfer.com
Books by Eoin Colfer
Airman
Half Moon Investigations
The Supernaturalist
The Wish List
Benny and Babe
Benny and Omar
The Artemis Fowl series:
Artemis Fowl
Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident
Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code
Artemis Fowl and the Opal Deception
Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony
Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox
Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex
Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian
Graphic novels:
Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel
Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident: The Graphic Novel
The Supernaturalist: The Graphic Novel
For younger readers:
The Legend of Spud Murphy
The Legend of Captain Crow’s Teeth
The Legend of the Worst Boy in the World
Coming in 2013:
WARP: The Reluctant Assassin
1
The Strand, London, 1900
The Doctor was not happy with his new bio-hybrid hand.
‘Preposterous. It’s not even a proper hand,’ he complained to Aldridge. ‘There are only two fingers, which is rather fewer than the traditional humanoid quota.’
Aldridge was not one to put up with any guff, even from a Time Lord.
‘Give it back then. No one’s forcing you to take it.’
The Doctor scowled. He knew Aldridge’s bartering style, and at this point the Xing surgeon usually threw out a red herring to distract the customer.
‘Would you like to know why I closed my practice on Gallifrey?’ Aldridge asked.
Red herring delivered as expected. Every time he turned to Aldridge for help, this story was trotted out.
‘Was it our title perhaps?’ the Doctor enquired innocently.
‘Exactly,’ said Aldridge. ‘Call yourselves Time Lords? How pompous is that? Someone previously registered Temporal Emperors, had they? A pity, you could have shortened it to Temperors.’
Temperors, thought the Doctor. That’s almost amusing.
Amusing because a Time Lord known as the Interior Designer had once famously suggested that exact title at a conference and been nicknamed Bad Temperor for the rest of his quantum days.
But the Doctor could not allow even a glimmer of a nostalgic smile to show on his lips – firstly because smiles tended to look like a death rictus on his long face and secondly because Aldridge would exploit the moment to drive up his price.
‘Five fingers, Aldridge,’ he insisted. ‘I need an entire hand just to do up my shirt in the mornings. Humans put buttons in the most awkward places even when they are quite aware that Velcro exists.’ He checked his pocket watch. ‘Or rather, will exist in half a century or so.’
Aldridge pinged one of the curved ceramic digits with a scalpel. ‘The exoskeleton has two fingers, I will grant you that, Doctor, but the glove has five, including the thumb, all controlled by signals from the exoskeleton. A bloomin’ bio-hybrid miracle.’
The Doctor was impressed, but would not allow himself to show it. ‘I’d rather have a bio-bio miracle if it’s all the same to you. And I am in a dreadful hurry.’
‘Come back in five days,’ said Aldridge. ‘Your flesh and bone hand will be ready by then. All I need is a sample.’ He thrust a specimen jar under the Doctor’s nose. ‘Spit if you don’t mind.’
The Doctor obliged, feeling more than a little relieved that spittle was all Aldridge needed from him. Some time ago, after the whole Inscrutable Doppelgänger fiasco, he’d been forced to part with two litres of very rare TL-positive blood from which to work up plasma.
‘Five days? You couldn’t get the job done with a little more urgency, could you?’
Aldridge shrugged. ‘Sorry. I have a cluster of amphibi-men in the back, all hissing for their tail extensions. It’s setting me back a fortune to hire a fire truck to keep ’em lubricated.’
The Doctor stared Aldridge down until the portly Xing surgeon relented.
‘Very well. Two days. But it’s gonna cost you.’
Ah yes, thought the Doctor, preparing himself for bad news. ‘How much exactly is it going to cost me?’
Although how much was perhaps the wrong term to use as Aldridge usually dealt in commodities rather than currencies.
The surgeon scratched the bristles that dotted his chin like the quills of a porcupine. If ever one of Victorian London’s cads, scoundrels, dippers or muck snipes stepped inside Aldridge’s Clockwork Repair and Restoration hoping to light-foot it down the Strand with a couple of glittering fobs, they would have had a nasty surprise. For Aldridge could balloon his cheeks and expel one of those venom-laden bristles with a speed and accuracy comparable to that of the rainforest nomads of Borneo wielding their blowpipes. The villain would wake up six hours later, chained to the Newgate Prison railings with very fuzzy memories of the previous few days. Prison warders had taken to calling these occasional deliveries ‘Stork Babies’.
The Doctor pointed pointedly at Aldridge’s chin. ‘Are you trying to intimidate me, Aldridge? Is that a threat?’
Aldridge laughed and his beard rippled. ‘Oh, come on, Doctor. This right here is the fun of it. The barter and such. Our little game.’
The Doctor’s face was unreadable. ‘Even if I hadn’t lost one of my hands, I would not be smiling like an idiot. I don’t laugh. I don’t play games. I have a serious mission.’
‘You used to laugh,’ rebutted Aldridge. ‘Remember that thing with the homicidal earthworms? Hilarious, was it not?’
‘Those earthworms excreted nitrous oxide,’ said the Doctor, ‘known on Earth as laughing gas, so I was laughing against my will. I do not usually indulge in merriment. The universe is a serious place and I left my granddaughter watching a house.’
Aldridge spread his fingers on the desk. ‘Very well, and I only make this offer because of the wonderful Susan. What I require for the rental of the bio-hybrid and the growth of a new hand in my vat of magic is . . .’ He paused, for even Aldridge knew what he was about to ask would not be swallowed easily by a Time Lord who did not possess a sense of humour. ‘One week of your time.’
The Doctor didn’t understand for a moment.
‘One week of my time?’ Then the penny-farthing dropped. ‘You want me to be your assistant.’
‘Just for the week.’
‘Seven days? You want me as your assistant for seven whole days?’
‘You hand over your time and I hand over . . . a hand. I have a really important repeat client that needs a job done. Having a smart
fellow like yourself at my elbow would help a lot.’
The Doctor pinched his brow with his remaining hand. ‘It’s not possible. My time is precious.’
‘You could always regenerate,’ suggested Aldridge innocently. ‘Maybe the next guy will have a better sense of humour, not to mention sense of fashion.’
The Doctor bristled, though not as dramatically as Aldridge did on occasion.
‘This outfit has been chosen by computer so that I may blend in with the locals. Fashion has nothing to do with it. In fact, fashion obsession is the sort of frivolous distraction that gets people –’
The Doctor did not complete his sentence and the surgeon chose not to complete it for him, though they both knew that killed was the missing word. The Doctor did not want to say it in case putting voice to the word would bring death itself, and there had been too much death in the Doctor’s life. Aldridge knew this and took pity.
‘Very well, Doctor. In return for four days of your time, I will grow a hand for you. I cannot and will not say fairer than that.’
The Doctor was grudgingly mollified. ‘Four days, you say? I have your word on that, as a fellow visitor to this planet?’
‘You have my word as a Xing surgeon. I can drop the hand at your TARDIS if you like. Where are you parked?’
‘Over in Hyde Park.’
‘You keeping your nose outta the smog? Actually I think I’ve got a few noses here if you fancy something less . . . pronounced.’
This was veering towards small talk and the Doctor had never cared too much for small talk or chit-chat. As for gossip and prattle, he loathed them both.
‘Four days,’ he repeated. The Doctor raised the stump of his left wrist upon which used to sit his left hand and without another word pressed the bio-hybrid claw-like fingers into the Xing surgeon’s chest.
Aldridge regarded the action in silence and raised his bushy eyebrows high until the Doctor was forced to ask, ‘Could you please attach the temporary bio-hybrid hand?’
Aldridge took a sonic scalpel from his belt.
‘Careful with that,’ said the Doctor. ‘No need to get carried away.’
Aldridge spun the scalpel like a baton. ‘Yessir. Careful is my middle name. Actually Clumsy is my middle name, but that doesn’t encourage clients and it makes me sound like one of those dwarfs that are going to be so popular when moving pictures get going.’
The Doctor did not respond, or move for that matter, as Aldridge was already working on his arm, attaching the temporary hybrid hand to his wrist and slicing away the burned nub of flesh and seeking out nerve endings.
Incredible, thought the Doctor. He seems to be barely paying attention and I can’t feel a thing.
Of course, that was the trademark of Xing-Monastery-trained surgeons – their incredible speed and accuracy. The Doctor had once heard a story about how acolytes were woken in the middle of a dark night by the pain of their own big toe being amputated by a professor. They were then timed on how long it took to reattach the toe using only the innards of a dental-floss packet, three lizard clips and a jar of glow-worms.
Hogwarts, it is not, thought the Doctor, realising that no one would appreciate this reference for almost a century.
Within minutes the surgeon was tugging on the thought-responsive plasti-skin glove and stepping back to admire his work.
‘Well, give ’er a wiggle.’
The Doctor did so and discovered, to his embarrassment, that the fingernails were painted.
‘Would this, by any chance, be a lady’s hand?’
‘Yep,’ confessed Aldridge. ‘But she was a big lady. Very manly like yourself. Hated laughing and such, so you two should get on very well.’
‘Two days,’ said the Doctor, pointing a finger tipped by a curved nail coated with ruby lacquer.
Aldridge tried so hard to hold back a fit of giggles that one of his bristles thunked into the wall. ‘Sorry, Mister Time Lord, sir. But it’s really difficult to take you seriously wearing nail polish.’
The Doctor curled his fake fingers into a fist, straightened his Astrakhan hat and resolved to acquire a pair of gloves as soon as possible.
Aldridge passed the Doctor his cane.
‘You never said how you lost the hand?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘I didn’t. If you must know, I was duelling a Soul Pirate who wounded me with a heated blade. If the blade hadn’t cauterised the wound, I think you’d be looking at a different Doctor right now. Of course, I managed to compartmentalise the pain through sheer concentration.’
‘Soul Pirates,’ sniffed Aldridge. ‘I won’t even serve those animals. They’re barred on principle.’
‘Hmmmph,’ said the Doctor, pulling his army greatcoat close to his throat. He might have said bah humbug, but that catchphrase already belonged to somebody else.
2
The Strand was filled with crowds of hawkers, and feral children who trekked daily from London’s rookeries to follow moneyed gents the way iron filings follow a magnet, and red-cheeked revellers spilling on to the street outside the infamous Dog and Duck pub. If anyone had noted the elderly curmudgeon striding along towards Charing Cross, they would have noticed nothing strange about this gent, apart from the fact that he was staring at his own left hand with some surprise, as though it had spoken to him.
A retired army man they may have guessed, nodding at his overcoat and his measured gait.
A world traveller perhaps people might have surmised due to his Russian hat.
Or an eccentric scientist – this inferred from the bolts of white hair crackling in his wake, not to mention the ivory handle of a magnifying glass poking from his pocket.
No one would have known that there was a Time Lord in their midst that evening. Nobody except his granddaughter, Susan, who was possibly the only person in the universe who could make the Doctor smile at the mere thought of her.
There were numerous things that did not make the Doctor smile: chit-chat, answering questions in times of emergency, answering questions in times of complete calm, the paintings of Gallifreyan Subjunctivists (confidence tricksters the lot of them), the Earth spread known as Marmite, the human TV show Blake’s 7, which was patently ludicrous, and the clammy, pungent squeeze of a Victorian London crowd. Londoners endured a signature aroma composed of two parts raw sewage, one part coal smoke and one part unwashed-body odour. The great stink knew no master and was sniffed from queen to washerwoman. This stink could be exacerbated by summer heat or prevailing winds and the Doctor thought that there was not a smell that he despised more in the entire universe.
By the time he reached Charing Cross, the Doctor could stand the stench no longer and so hailed a hansom. He refused the cabbie’s offer of half a sandwich, pressed an air-filter mask concealed behind a kerchief to his face, and hunched down low on his bench to discourage the cabbie from asking any further questions. The Doctor ignored the journey, including the detour round Piccadilly where a milk truck had overturned, spilling its load across the avenue, and he gave his mind to the problem that had cost him many nights’ sleep and, more recently, his left hand.
The Soul Pirates were abominable creatures: a rag-tag rabble of the universe’s humanoid species with only two things in common. One, as mentioned, they were approximately human in appearance; and, two, they cared not a jot for the lives of others. The Soul Pirates had a very specific modus operandi: they chose a planet where the inhabitants did not yet have hyperspace capabilities, then hovered in the clouds above and sent down a jockey, riding an anti-gravity tractor beam loaded with a soporific agent into the rooms of sleeping children. The anti-grav beam was clever, but the soporific agent in the beam was genius, because, even if the victims did wake up, the sedative would allow their brains to concoct some fantastic fairy-tale and so they would willingly allow themselves to be spirited away. They believed themselves able to fly, or saw the beam jockey as a glamorous adventurer who desperately needed their help. In any event, there was no struggle or
hoo-hah, and, most importantly, the merchandise was not damaged. When the kidnapped children were drawn into the pirates’ ship, they were either sent to the engine room and hooked to brain-drain helmets, or chopped up for organ and body parts, which the pirates would transplant on to or into themselves. Nothing was wasted, not a toenail, not an electron, hence the bandits’ moniker: the Soul Pirates.
The Doctor had relentlessly hunted the pirates across time and space. It had become his mission, his obsession. According to his galactic network, the crew who had taken his hand were the only ones still operating on Earth. He had last tangled with them in this exact city and now the TARDIS had detected their anti-grav signature here again. For the pirates it would be twenty years since their captain sliced off the Doctor’s left hand, but for the Time Lord, having jumped years ahead in the TARDIS, it was a very fresh wound indeed.
This was what Susan would call a break. Soul-Pirate ships often eluded authorities for centuries because they had impenetrable shields, making it difficult to track them down.
They must have lost one of their protective plates, surmised the Doctor. And that had made the pirates visible for a few minutes, before they effected repairs. Plenty of time for the TARDIS to find them. Well done, old girl.
Unfortunately, whatever hole had allowed the pirate ship’s signature to leak had now been plugged and the Doctor couldn’t know if the pirates were still hovering above Hyde Park, hidden in the cloud banks, or off to their next port of call. A typical pirate crew had over a hundred streets that they revisited in random order. But the pirates had a tendency to revisit good harvesting sites. So if someone really wished to track them down, all they needed was determination and lots of time.
And I have both, thought the Doctor. Plus a resourceful granddaughter.
Sometimes too resourceful. Perhaps it would be wise to check in on Susan, after all. Sometimes it seemed as though she wilfully ignored specific instructions because, as she put it, it seemed the right thing to do.
