DOCTOR WHO : BLUE BOX.

by KATE ORMAN.

In memory of Jack Warren Orman ('Papa') 1916-2001

Journalist Chick Peters has written for Infodump Infodump, Computers Computers Now! Now! , , Phreakphest Phreakphest and and Newstime Newstime. This is his first book. The narrative that follows is based on interviews, reconstructions and Chick's own witnessing of events.

REM.

Once upon a time there was a young princess who lived by the seash.o.r.e. One day she and some of the court's ladies were gathering flowers in a field, when they were approached by a huge bull. It was pure white, from its glittering horns to its tail.

At first the young women were badly frightened, but the bull moved so slowly and gently, meandering harmlessly through the many-coloured flowers, that they soon lost their fear.

The princess was charmed by the bull. She held out flowers to him, and he slowly chewed and swallowed them, to everyone's amus.e.m.e.nt. She made a garland of flowers and laid it over his neck while her friends giggled. He let all of the young women pat his head and stroke his shoulders, but the princess was his favourite.

Finally the bull lay down in the gra.s.s amongst the flowers.

Laughing, the princess clambered onto his broad back, sitting there as though he was a horse.

In an instant, the bull had leapt up, the princess holding onto him in surprise, trying not to tumble to the ground. The bull began to run, heavy hooves pounding the gra.s.s, and then the damp sand as it rushed onto the beach. The princess's friends ran after it, calling out in alarm, but they couldn't catch up with the bolting animal.

The princess cried out as the bull plunged into the ocean, his skin the colour of the foaming surf that surged around him.

She was terrified he would drag her beneath the waves. But instead the bull swam in powerful strokes, further and further from the sh.o.r.e, deeper and deeper into the ocean. Soon the sh.o.r.e behind was just a shape, then a line, and then it was lost to her.

All she could do was cling to the neck of the bull, and pray that one day it might take her home again.

10.

One.

I want to describe the Bainbridge Hospital for you. But they don't let journalists in. In fact, they don't let anybody in. Just the patients, their carers, and sometimes the men in black suits. CIA? Probably, with the headquarters at Langley so close.

All I can describe is what you can see from the outside.

Take a trip south from DC, then south-east along I-64; one of those antique Virginia farmhouses in the distance is actually the hospital. Whichever way you approach, you're always separated from the tidy white building by a field of waving crops.

In late 1982, I drove around for a couple of hours trying to find a road that would lead to the building itself. I never found one, not even one barricaded and marked KEEP OUT. In my pa.s.senger seat, Sally tried to stay patient as we meandered back and forth, the white building always tantalisingly visible in the distance. At last she said, 'If even a reporter can't find the way in, how do the CIA get there?'

I pulled over into the gravel and shut off the engine. The country silence rang in our ears. 'Maybe they walk in,' I said, exasperated. 'Or maybe they've got underground tunnels.'

'How about helicopters?' said Sally 'You seen any helicopters?'

I shook my head. But for all I knew, she was right.

Bainbridge was supposed to be where the government kept mental patients who knew too much. A loony bin for spies whose cookies had crumbled under the pressure. Rumour had it they weren't the only patients: defectors recovering from brainwashing, soldiers who'd been dosed with LSD in secret trials, commandos undergoing intensive mental programming to turn them into fearless super-soldiers. And civilians who had, one way or another, been caught up in the hidden machinations that lay under the surface of life in the free world and had been spat back out again.

We got out of the car to stretch our legs. I got my camera bag out of the trunk and pushed a brew into the pocket of my jacket. Sally sat on the bonnet, swinging her legs and reading her romance novel. I screwed the telephoto lens into place and stared through it at the house in the distance.

There were a few people out in the grounds. Without the lens, they were like white dots against the green lawn.

Through the lens, I could see they were mostly in wheelchairs, pushed around by uniformed nurses, or parked under trees. I couldn't make out any faces from this distance. The afternoon sunshine was warm: they'd be out there for a little while.

'I wonder how close I can get?' I said. I slung the camera around my neck, and swung my legs over the low wire fence that bounded the cornfield.

'Aren't you gonna ask me to come with you?' said Sally, jumping down from the hood. Her cowboy boots crunched in the gravel. She put her head on one side, feathered blonde hair falling fetchingly around her oval face, and smiled.

'I'm working,' I told her, from the other side of the fence.

'Sorry, Sally. I can't stop to fool around in the corn.'

'Well, what am I supposed to do if someone comes along?'

'Tell 'em the car won't start and your boyfriend went to find a phone. Get a Bud out of the trunk If you want one.'

The rows of corn ran perpendicular to the road. I moved sideways through a few rows, so anyone who did stop to check on Sally wouldn't have a view straight down the row I was in.

The ground was warm and a little moist from last night's rain.

I wished I was wearing boots; my sneakers were getting covered in mud.

It took about a quarter of an hour to walk to the other side of the cornfield. The cold can kept me company. When I could see I was running out of cover, I ducked down and knelt in the dirt. Now I had a much better view of the patients. A couple of old guys played chess at a little stone table they didn't have wheelchairs, and neither did a few others I saw walking around on gravel paths or sitting on benches in the sun. The wheelchairs were arranged in a horseshoe under a shady cl.u.s.ter of big oaks.

There. I focussed on one of the faces, a familiar one. A woman in her late thirties. Her platinum blonde hair had been trimmed back severely, like a soldier's haircut. Her eyes were a hot blue. She stared at a spot in the distance. Every so often, as I watched, she would raise her hand to bat away an insect buzzing around her face, but she never took her eyes off that spot.

Let's call her Sarah Swan. Her real name is on the government's files, of course: a casualty in the secret war to keep America safe. Not that Swan is an innocent bystander.

But one year ago, she was one of the best-known hackers in the District hacker in both senses of the word. Swan was not only an accomplished programmer and head of development at an innovative defence contractor. She was also a computer criminal, perpetrator of illicit electronic acts both great and small, respected and even feared by her fellow hackers, crackers, and phreaks.

That was last year. Now Swan sat in a wheelchair and stared at nothing.

After a while I got tired of kneeling in the mud, waiting for Sarah Swan to do something. I zoomed out a little and looked around. I didn't like what I saw: the nurses had grouped together, talking about something, and a few shot glances off in my direction. Maybe they could see the glint off the camera lens, or maybe I had tripped some hidden sensor in the field. I stuffed the camera back in its bag.

Hurrying back through the corn, I got diagonal glimpses of the car through the rows. Soon I could see there were two cars: mine, and a black-and-white police cat s.h.i.t burgers, I thought. I crouched down in the corn and whipped out the telephoto lens for a better look. Sally sat behind the wheel of my car, looking nervous as h.e.l.l. There were two troopers, also sitting in their car, parked in front of mine.

I didn't know which way to jump. The troopers had a clear view up and down the road; there was no way I could walk out of the field without being spotted.

I waited in that ditch for an hour. I was sure that eventually they'd get bored, get out of their car, and start searching the cornfield. I was d.a.m.ned if I could think up a good story to tell them. But there was no film in my camera. I kept telling myself that, over and over. I was only using the lens, like it was a telescope. There's no film in the camera, so there's no way they can claim you were spying. It was bulls.h.i.t, I know, but when you're stuck in a muddy ditch for an hour with your bladder bursting and your girlfriend looking p.i.s.sed off enough to drive away and leave you there, you need to tell yourself something.

Finally, one of the policemen, a big guy with a big gut, got out and had a few words with Sally. I had no idea what he was saying or how she was reacting. But then Sally started up my car (after a couple of faked failed attempts, bless her) and pulled out onto the road. The cop car followed.

She came back again, alone, about half an hour later, just as I was deciding to get up and try and walk to the nearest town before it got dark. I threw my camera in the back and took over the steering wheel. 'Lemme take you away from all this,' I said, and we headed north, back to DC.

'I did just what you said,' Sally told me. 'I told them my boyfriend had walked up the road to find a phone. They offered to make the call for me, and when I said that it would be OK, they didn't have to, they offered to wait here with me.

What was I supposed to do, tell them to get lost?'

'You did fine,' I said. 'You did the right thing.'

'Did you find out what you wanted to?' she said sullenly.

'Oh yeah. Last piece of the puzzle.

'Well, I just hope they don't come after us. That fat cop was real polite, but his partner kept trying to look down my shirt.'

'Relax,' I told her. 'You weren't doing anything wrong.'

'What about you?'

'Trespa.s.sing, maybe. You know,' I said suddenly, 'I think I left a beer can out there in the field.'

Sally said, 'You better hope they can't get your fingerprints off it or something.'

The back of my neck tightened up like a twisted rubber band. She was joking, but actually my fingerprints have been on file since that little incident in Los Angeles in 1978, the reason I moved to the east coast.

We could turn around, try to find the spot where I pulled over try to find that empty can out at the end of the cornfield. I thought about it, but in the end I just kept driving back into Washington. 'When the book comes out,' I said, 'they'll know all about it anyway.'

Two.

The sad story of Sarah Swan ends in a wheelchair somewhere in Virginia. I could start the story in any one of about a dozen places. But let's begin in a kids' theme restaurant on Rockville Pike, Maryland, two days before Christmas 1981. Let's begin with a young lady we'll call Peri Smith1.

The right word for Peri is 'pet.i.te'. She's short and slender, with dark hair cut in a bob, deep-brown eyes, and a full mouth that curves into an impish smile. That night she was wearing jeans and a burgundy sweater. It's not the image that you get when you think of a computer criminal: the picture in your mind is some socially inept, grody teenage boy, either bloated on Doritos, or pale and skeletal like a forgotten potted plant.

It was Peri's parents who gave her the wanderl.u.s.t. A mating pair of archaeologists (her mother had divorced and remarried when Peri was ten), they took her with them from one continent to another throughout most of her teenage years.

Staying still for her first year of college, in a tidy dorm instead of a cheap hotel or a tent, had felt like being set in concrete.

She joined her step-father in the Canary Islands for the summer vacation, looking for a way out. When she met a migratory English hacker-hippie who called himself 'the Doctor', she knew she'd found it.

They had an unusual relationship, these two travellers. For one thing, he had never shown a flicker of interest in her. The Doctor was twice Peri's age at least, but he didn't act like a father or an uncle more like a big brother with a bad case of sibling rivalry. They spent a lot of their time in halfhearted bickering, usually when one of them made some stupid mistake. He burnt dinner, she got lost, he couldn't steer, she got attacked by some animal This time it was the Doctor's turn to screw up. They were supposed to be visiting her family, but the Doctor had got them there at the wrong time, messing up her reunion plans.

1 Not her real name

So now she sat in a booth, looking at a cartoon pizza menu and picking over the contents of her plate. It seemed a little weird to be surrounded by familiar language, money and food. A little creepy, even, reminding her of those long months dragging around at college.

They'd had a fight about it, like always. Now the Doctor was off sulking, sitting in another booth and bugging some waiter who had more important things to do than talk to him.

She' glanced over. The lanky, bald-headed waiter had actually sat down at the table with him.

Usually, the Doctor dressed like a cross between a flower child and a character out of d.i.c.kens. For this trip to stop her father panicking she'd insisted he wear something more normal. He'd come up with a tailored black suit and a multicoloured tie. His curly yellow hair still stood out a mile.

The next time Peri looked up from her salad, he was gone.

So was the waiter he'd been talking to. Peri shrugged and stabbed her fork into a lettuce leaf. He'd get over it eventually, and then they'd get out of this dump and go somewhere interesting.

After half an hour, with her plate long empty and the ice cubes in her c.o.ke melted, she decided she'd better go and look for him. She wandered around the restaurant, dodging uniformed waiters and shrieking kids. There was a big video game section, and against one wall four robot dogs jerkily mimed to the Beatles. She hoped the Doctor hadn't brought her here because he thought she would like like it. it.

Peri played a couple of games of Centipede and went back to the booth. It was empty: the dregs of her snack had been removed and the table wiped.

Where was he?

Peri hovered on the sidewalk, trying to pick the Doctor out of the last-minute Christmas crowds running in and out of the cl.u.s.ter of stores bordering the parking lot. She slumped back into the booth inside, clutching her handbag.

Wouldn't this be just the perfect opportunity for him to dump her, so close to home? A theatrical exit like this would be just his style. But on the other hand, what if someone had grabbed him? He was always getting thrown into jail for one thing or another.

What if whoever had got him was waiting to get her, too?

She had the restaurant call her a taxi, and dashed into it the moment it appeared. She had plenty of cash and a couple of credit cards the Doctor had given her. She told the driver to take her to the first hotel she could think of, the Marriott in Bethesda she'd been there once for an aunt's wedding. The hotel's tourist shop was still open, so she bought some toiletries and an oversized T-shirt that said 'WASHINGTON DC' to wear as a nightshirt.

She took a long shower and collapsed into bed, going over her options in her mind. She could have gone back to their boat, maybe left a message for the Doctor. But she didn't want to lead any bad guys there, and what was worse, she realised she didn't even have a key. What about leaving a message at the theme restaurant? Same problem. What was she supposed to do?

She wasn't sure where in the world her parents were right now Could she keep on travelling, by herself, until she was ready to go back to college? Were the Doctor's credit cards real or were they fakes? How long would they last? Where was he? Was he OK? Would she ever see him again?