Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues Part 11

'Think,' the Doctor sat in Henbest's chair. He swivelled around in it for a moment, apparently finding it to his liking. He began opening the drawers of the desk and pulling out doc.u.ments.

'What are you doing?'

'Going through Professor Henbest's personal papers. Don't try and dodge the question Ace. I want you to think. What happened just before Rosalita dropped the ca.s.serole, spilling the chilli and thus saving our lives?' He shut the last of the drawers in the desk and leaned back in the swivel chair again, his arms folded behind his head.

'Nothing,' said Ace. 'No wait, you said something about Ray. I know. You said he was going to be eating the chilli with us.'69.

The Doctor swivelled in the chair, his arms behind his head. He nodded, silent, smiling benignly.

'And she didn't want to kill Ray. So she dropped the chilli. She didn't want to kill Ray because they were working together. They're both enemy agents.

So tell me again why we aren't turning Ray in?'

'Is that what you want to do?'

'No, I personally like Ray. But with enemy agents, it's sort of the thing to do, isn't it?'

'We must learn more before we take any action. There's a great deal at stake here, Ace.'

'That's what worries me.'

'Very sensible. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with Edward Teller.' The Doctor got up from the swivel chair and came out from behind Henbest's desk. He moved towards the door of the office.

'He's a nasty piece of work, isn't he, Teller?'

The Doctor paused at the door. 'On the contrary, Ace. He's a human being, caught up in the inexorable machinery of history, like so many others. He and I are going to go over some figures together.'

'You're going to try and convince him he's wrong. About the chain reaction.

About the world going up in flames when they detonate the bomb.'

'Correct.'

'Because it isn't going to, is it?'

'I have to be going,' said the Doctor gently. 'Can I walk you back to the WAC barracks?'

'No, I think I'm going to sit here for a moment.'

'Here in Professor Henbest's office?'

'He's got some very comfortable armchairs. This is the first comfortable chair I've sat in since I've got here. I've got sore feet and I'm going to sit here for a minute.'

'Very well. But you mustn't return to the barracks after curfew again. I've received the most emphatic reprimands about bringing you back there late.'

'So our reputations are at stake,' said Ace. 'I'll make sure I'm back well before lights out. I'm just going to sit here for a moment.'

The Doctor smiled. 'Because your feet hurt.'

'And because I saw a dead rat today. . . and everything else.'

The Doctor came back and perched on the arm of her chair. He studied her.

'Do you want me to stay with you for a minute?'

'No, actually I need to chill on my own for a bit.'

'Chill away,' the Doctor smiled again as he bobbed up from the chair. He closed the door behind him as he left. Ace was alone for the first time in what seemed like ages. After the empty splendour of the TARDIS, sleeping in 70the women's barracks had seemed at first a pleasantly gregarious novelty, but Ace was now beginning to feel the lack of privacy. Also, the toilet paper was terrible. She leaned back in the soft embrace of the chair's bulging cus.h.i.+ons and peered dreamily out the window, towards the pond and the trees.

The door to the office popped open and John Henbest stepped inside.

'You're still here. Good.' He bustled in. 'Where is the Doctor?'

'He had an appointment with Teller.'

'I see. Good. Then we can proceed with your psychiatric evaluation.'

Ace cursed herself. Why hadn't she left with the Doctor? Henbest came towards the chair where she was sitting. There was a look of sudden concern on his face. 'Wait a minute. What's that on your arm?'

Ace glanced at her arm. There wasn't much of it that could be seen, under the navy-blue sleeve of her blouse.

'It looks like some kind of rash,' said Henbest, leaning forward to get a better look. He took something from his pocket, a small, white, metal case about the size of a cigarette packet.

'What, where, I don't have any rash,' said Ace.

'There under your sleeve. You can just glimpse it.'

'There's nothing to glimpse. There's nothing there. No rash.' But now that she looked at her wrist, Ace couldn't be so sure.

'Please,' said Henbest, 'roll up your sleeve. It could be a radiation reaction.

That happens sometimes. You must let me look at it.' He sat down on the arm of the armchair and leaned forward, bending his long body towards Ace.

At the word 'radiation' she had begun rolling up her sleeve and now she was proffering her bare arm to Henbest. Now that he mentioned it, Ace thought she could see a certain flus.h.i.+ng of the skin, the beginning of a rash. . . She looked up at Henbest.

'Hey, what are you doing?' she said.

Henbest had opened the white metal case and taken out a syringe. A yellowish liquid slopped in the barrel of the syringe. The needle caught the light as Henbest lifted it.

He leaned forward and plunged the syringe into her arm.71.

Chapter Six.

A Warm Night Ace saw her blood go back into the syringe and the yellow stuff from the syringe go into her arm. She was already reaching to push Henbest away, to get the syringe out of her flesh, but she was much too late. Henbest backed quickly away from her, dodging her blow, and leaving the syringe jutting comically from her arm. Ace stared at it. She reached down to touch it.

'Careful,' said Henbest. 'Don't break the needle. You'll get an infection.'

Ace carefully pulled the syringe from her arm. Then she wondered what to do with it. Then it seemed too heavy to hold, so she dropped it on the floor. The syringe fell softly on the carpet at her feet. Ace sat back in her comfortable armchair and looked at John Henbest.

Henbest seemed to be moving away from her on a receding tide of light. He rose from his chair and fought the tide of light, slowly wading towards her.

He bent over the sofa and grabbed her under her armpits and lifted her in a businesslike fas.h.i.+on, like he was s.h.i.+fting a sack of potatoes. Henbest moved her from the armchair to the sofa. He fussily arranged the cus.h.i.+ons behind her head. At one point Ace's head lolled back helplessly and she found herself staring deeply, helplessly into the tiny weave of the fleurs-de-lys fabric of a cus.h.i.+on before he carefully lifted her head again so she could see the room.

She saw him go to his desk and sit down and pick up his phone. Before he could speak into it, there was the sound of the door opening and then the sound of someone coming in. Major Butcher stepped into view. Henbest set the phone down. 'I was just about to call you. She's ready for interrogation.'

Henbest reached into his desk and took out another case, one coated in black rubber this time, as if designed to survive being dropped in the ocean.

He took out another syringe. 'The final ingredient in the c.o.c.ktail that we want to mix in this young lady's bloodstream.'

He came forward and gave Ace another injection. She didn't resist. She couldn't. As soon as she received the second injection her eyes began to drift shut. She heard Major Butcher say, 'Shouldn't you swab her arm with alcohol before you do that?'

'Which one of us has a medical degree?' said Henbest petulantly.73.

Then Ace's eyes closed and she was lost in a warm floating darkness, listening to voices echo around her.

Ace woke up to find the Doctor looking down at her. She knew right away from his expression that something was wrong. 'What is it?' she said.

'How much do you remember?'

Ace felt a twinge of pain in her right arm and looked down to see that the sleeve of her blouse was rolled up and there on the inside of her arm were two pink blotches and two tiny heads of dried blood. The pink blotches already showed signs of darkening into bruises. 'The b.a.s.t.a.r.d. He said something about a radiation rash. Then before I could stop him, he was injecting me.'

'And nothing after that?'

'Just a blur. What did he give me?'

'He would probably call it truth serum.'

'So I might have told him something.'

The Doctor chuckled. 'I imagine just enough to confuse them.'

'Them?'

'Major Butcher was there, too.'

'When you rescued me you mean,' said Ace, sitting up. 'Thanks for that, by the way.' Looking around, she was surprised to see that they were sitting in Cosmic Ray's front room. 'You brought me here?'

'It's the last place anyone will think of looking for us.'

'Except for me, man, except for me,' said Ray. He came in from the bathroom, followed by the liquid echoing roar of a flus.h.i.+ng toilet. He went to the record player and embarked on the endless ritual of changing the cactus needle in the tone arm. Ace was beginning to see why he was so paranoid about running out of the d.a.m.ned things. 'Now that the kitten's awake, us cats can listen to some music.'

'Tell me, Ray,' said the Doctor. 'Did you know that Rosalita was going to be there by the pond today?'

'Yeah, sure I did. We made an arrangement. So I could pick up my Lady Silk record.'

'But you didn't know it was her who was shooting us?'

'Not until you told me, man. I just knew someone was shooting in my general direction and I got the h.e.l.l out of it. I'm no war hero, daddy-o. Not on the battlefield, with bullets flying past me and stuff. I'm doing my bit here.

With my physics.'

The Doctor smiled at Ace. 'Yes, while you were asleep Ray and I have been having quite an interesting discussion about physics.'74.

'Yeah man, your Doctor friend here is pretty fast about grasping concepts.

Man, he's switched on. Hip. All I had to do was sketch an equation and he'd get what I was getting at, like right way.'

'Yes, well I'm glad I was unconscious during all that,' said Ace.

'So what you're saying,' said the Doctor, turning to Ray and adopting a gently persistent tone of voice, 'is that you were going to the pond to deliberately rendezvous with Rosalita.'

'Yeah man. I needed to get that disc. The record, Daddy-o. The song that old Butcher had impounded. Luckily Rosie brought in a few spare copies.'

'Were you the only recipient of these discs here on the Hill, or was she also distributing them to a number of other people?'

'No idea, man. No idea.' Ray put on a record and turned it up loud. The Doctor went over and turned it down again. Ray gave him a reproachful look but said nothing. Over the years he must have grown accustomed to people wanting to turn his music down.

'And the presence of your friend Private Dobbs '

'Old Dobbsy man.'

'His presence there at the pond with your latest s.h.i.+pment of cactus needles, that was all purely fortuitous.'

'Eh?'

'It was coincidental.'

'No, no, no man. I knew I had to meet Rosie with the platter at the pond so I arranged to also meet Dobbsy there with the cactus needles. Two birds with one stone, baby. Two birds with one stone.'

'And you had no idea that Rosalita was going to pull a gun and start shooting at us?' said Ace.

'No man, I told you before. This is like listening to a stuck record.'

'Speaking of records,' said Ace.

'I'll turn this one up, baby.'

'That's not what I was going to say. I was going to say, what happened to the Lady Silk record? The Doctor found it before Barker did and he gave it to me to look after.' She looked at the Doctor. 'What did you do with it?'

'I gave it to Ray.'

'You did what?' said Ace.