We had made a hasty exit, climbing over a fence and running through the concrete at the back of a garage to avoid the neighbours' eyes. (The Doctor has a surprisingly light stride.) We ran through the blackness to the Travco, still parked safely where we had left it.

None of us spoke until we had been on the road for several minutes. Peri sat on the bed right at the back, watching for police lights through the venetian blinds. Nothing. We had got away with it.

'So,' said Peri. 'The real point of all that was to get rid of anything Cobb had left behind about the Eridani.'

'The other motives were real too,' said the Doctor. 'That was quite well done.'

'Gee thanks' said Peri. How long had they been planning that little stunt? What else was going on that they weren't telling me?

'Doctor,' I said, suddenly alarmed. 'You didn't trash Cobb's house to prevent me from getting a look at the info did you?'

'Far from it,' he said. 'The most sensitive information would have been dangerous only to those who believed in it.'

'You know everything Cobb did don't you?'

'There's quite a lot I can still tell you. On the trip home.

Let us absquatulate. In fact, why don't I take a turn behind the wheel?'

'You comfortable with driving on the wrong side of the road?'

'You seem to have got used to it.'

'Yeah, but I've had years of practice: 'Trust me,' he said.

'Uh,' I said. 'It's OK. I'll drive for a while.'

Route 50 begins two blocks from the Atlantic, and runs the whole way across the country. As we left town on the Route 50 bridge, pa.s.sing under the "Sacramento CA 3073 miles"

sign, I glanced in the rear vision mirror and got a glimpse of the ocean. It felt like the waves were gaining on us. And the rain started to fall, the first fat, dusty drops.

70.

One.

Swan contemplated her plan long and hard. It had to be flawless. There was no margin for error; if this realised her intentions towards his new toy, there would be no getting it away from him.

She considered setting up an automatic program that would email him at intervals, convincing him she was somewhere she was not. Maybe even an ELIZA. program that could chat with him in real time over the wires, feigning a human conversation just well enough to hold his attention. She could build in a subroutine that imitated typographical errors to make it more convincing.

In the end she rang him up and asked him to meet with her right away. When he went out, she went in and stole the monster.

Luis had given her a duplicate key to his apartment when she had first arrived in DC; she had stayed with him for a few weeks while house-hunting. (As far as I've been able to find out, romance did not bloom as a result.) She had a heart-in-mouth moment when she pushed the key into the lock had he changed it? But the innocent door opened up for her.

Swan stalked into the apartment and into the bathroom.

The creature was sitting happily in the tub, playing with Lego and munching on breakfast cereal. She stuffed handfuls of Lego and half a box of cereal into her backpack, plucked Luis's dressing gown from the back of the door, and wrapped the monster in it. It didn't react in any way when she touched it, stuffed it into the threadbare fabric, and hoisted it into her arms. It was too busy pushing two blocks together and pulling them apart again, over and over.

Swan locked the door behind her, walked down the back stairs to her station wagon, and drove off with the monster hidden under old clothes in the back. It was as simple as that.

Luis waited for her in a nearby coffee shop for fifteen minutes until he realised what was going on. He sprinted back to his apartment, faster than he had ever run anywhere, arriving on the stoop with lungs wheezing and legs trembling. He still loped up the stairs two at a time.

When he saw the empty tub, he actually screamed. The sound was forced out of him involuntarily, the way it had been just once before when, as a child, he had been riding his bicycle and turned to discover an immense dog trying to bite his leg.

He searched the apartment, knowing full well that Swan had come and taken the creature, hoping like a lost child that he would find it if he only kept looking for long enough. It was not under the bed or behind the sofa and it certainly wasn't in the fridge.

Luis sat down for a moment. He felt sick. Not just queasy at this betrayal by an old friend, nor shaken by his hyperventilating race home. His hands trembled, he couldn't focus on anything, and the floor felt as though it was falling out from under him.

After several long moments in this limbo, he realised why Swan had done it. The craving he felt for the monster had overcome her. She had not been acting out of her own will, any more than he was when the urge to find the child propelled him up from the sofa and made him pace the flat, forcing himself not to just run outside and search and search at random until he found it. Swan didn't mean to deprive him of the child, she couldn't help herself. In fact, she needed help.

And he was the only one who could help her.

Luis's fists clenched and unclenched. He went out, slamming the door behind him, unlocked. There was nothing left worth stealing.

He sat in his car for five minutes before he realised that he had no idea where Swan lived these days.

Two.

And so we were on the road again, leaving a trail of mayhem behind us. Around four hours later, we picked up Bob from his motel room. We could have used some rest, but the Doctor insisted we keep on the move. Peri drove while the Doctor navigated. They argued pretty much constantly about where we were and which road to take. Bob and I exchanged a smile; it was like being the kids of an old married couple, listening to them bicker from the front of the car.

I held the radio from the police car in my lap. The Doctor ran a cable from the cigarette lighter to power it. So far I hadn't heard anything to suggest our little encounter at the lookout had sparked a state-wide search: it was always possible that an embarra.s.sed Officer Moustache had decided to keep the details to himself. I was still nervous as h.e.l.l tooling around in such a conspicuous vehicle.

Exasperated, Peri said,'It would help if I knew what you were trying to find!'

The Doctor said, 'Somewhere safe and private to hide away for a few hours. I have arranged a meeting with Sarah Swan.'

Peri slammed on the brakes. The campervan rolled onto the side of the road and stopped there, engine grumbling. We all looked at the Doctor.

'Not out here,' he said. 'Inside the world of the computer.'

'Well what would have been wrong with Bob's motel room?' she said.

'Peri. If it's at all possible, I'd like to be somewhere that no-one knows we are.'

She took a moment. 'You're not thinking of breaking into a house or something, are you?'

'Certainly not!'

'I know electrical power isn't a problem, but we are going to need a phone line. And I think somebody might notice if you shimmy up a pole in the middle of town.'

'Hmmm, yes. I'm afraid that publicly accessible computers are some years away yet.'

'G.o.d forbid,' Bob sniffed.

'Ah! Stop!' Peri startled and braked rather suddenly, jumbling us about. 'Shangri-la!' he declared. 'Utopia! Solla Sollew!'

We stared out the campervan's windows at the damp grey wreckage of a gas station. It looked like it had been abandoned for months, maybe years long enough for weeds to carpet the concrete and a ragged forest of shrubs and s.h.a.ggy trees to have sprung up in the wasteland around it. Patches of snow lay around, mostly melted by the cold rain.

Peri piloted the campervan around a pile of rusting rubbish and parked it in back of the building. With the engine off, the silence was deafening.

'Some Shangri-La,' said Peri.

'There should be a phone line somewhere inside.'

'Come on, Doctor. There's not going to be a working phone.'

'We only need the line,' said the Doctor. 'Bob, your task will be to use a public telephone in the town to bring our borrowed line back to life.'

We hopped out of the campervan, stretching our legs. The back door of the gas station was shut with a padlock and chain. The Doctor fiddled with it for a few minutes, using an unbent paperclip and then a knitting needle. Then he sighed, stood back, and stiff-armed the door. It popped neatly off its hinges. He caught it by the handle before it could fall backwards into the station, and laid it neatly beside the dobrway. 'A somewhat unorthodox entry. Remind me to repair that before we leave.'

Peri looked around the inside of the station. 'Honestly, Doctor, I don't think anyone's going to care.' It was mostly empty, but trash was piled against the walls, yellowed newspaper plastered over the windows. An entire car engine had been left sitting where the cash register once must have been. The place had a rich smell of mouldy rags and oil.

We carried the computer equipment into the place in cardboard boxes while the Doctor ran a cable from the campervan's generator. 'You know what would be cool to have,' said Bob, hefting a box onto the counter. 'One of those computers you can fold up into a suitcase.'

The Doctor began to unpack the computer equipment, giving the deceased engine a look of annoyance. 'Phone jack's right here,' said Bob, crouched on the floor behind him.

'Very well. Young Bob, make me a miracle.'

Bob gave him one of his serious, frowning nods, and scooted out of the station. We were maybe ten or fifteen minutes' walk out of town. Privacy, just as the Doctor had ordered.

The Doctor fussed over the computer. Peri got bored and wandered out, and I followed her, in hopes of an uninterrupted smoke.

Behind the station, Peri sat scrunched in the open door of the Travco. She held the camp stove in her lap. 'All right?' I said.

'I'm fine,' she said, with an attempt at a smile.

'I bet you kick a police officer in the garbanzo beans and torch some house every day of the week.' I pulled out my ciggies. 'Got a light?'

Peri had to laugh at that. 'I was kind of thinking of making some coffee,' she said, turning the camp stove around. 'Or maybe a cup of soup.'

'Do we have any coffee?' I said.

'No, and we don't have any cup of soups, either.' She turned and dropped the stove back inside the campervan.

'What are we doing out here?'

'Staying invisible, I guess,' I said.

'It doesn't matter where we drive to, does it? Swan is always just a phone call away.'

She was right. The net was always there, in the same place. We could have dialled in from California and Swan could have called from Germany and the net would still have been in the centre. There's a Chinese proverb which says 'Heaven's net may look loose, but nothing can escape getting caught in it'. For a moment I knew how Bob had felt, looking up at those stars: we were surrounded, 'It's not gonna do any good, just talking to Swan,' Peri was saying. 'The Doctor always thinks he can talk people out of things. If they'd only listen to reason... but they never do.'

'Never?'

'Pretty much never,' said Peri. She held out her fingers, absently, and I pa.s.sed the cigarette to her. She took a drag and started coughing and wiping her eyes. I took the b.u.t.t back. 'I haven't done that for a few years,' she wheezed apologetically. She glanced at the station, like the Doctor might catch her smoking in back of school.

'What is it with you two?' I said.

Peri broke up, half-laughing and half-coughing. 'We are not not a couple!' I back-pedalled like crazy, but she didn't seem offended. 'I did have kind of a crush on him. once. He was a lot younger then... but it was like the crush you get on your high school teacher.' a couple!' I back-pedalled like crazy, but she didn't seem offended. 'I did have kind of a crush on him. once. He was a lot younger then... but it was like the crush you get on your high school teacher.'

I already knew they weren't together; all those little touches and glances and familiar words that two people build up, none of those were present. It wasn't even like an intimate friendship that also has that secret, shared vocabulary. But I said, 'No offence. It's just that you sound kind of like my parents used to.'

Peri gave a little laugh. 'I guess we do sound like an old married couple sometimes. But we're just good friends' She saw my quizzical look. 'The Doctor is the smartest person I know. I have a lot of respect for him. The problem is, he's also the smartest person he he knows.' She dropped into a gruff-voiced impression of the Doctor. 'I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.' In her own voice she said, 'He just can't stand it when other people can't keep up. knows.' She dropped into a gruff-voiced impression of the Doctor. 'I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.' In her own voice she said, 'He just can't stand it when other people can't keep up.

Mostly me,' she sighed. I nodded at her to go on. 'You know, mom used to say that I wanted to be a botanist because I wanted to be alone. Just me and the plants. It's a lonely profession, she said. I think she was really talking about archaeology, though. Just her and the artefacts. Listening to dead people.' She took another puff from the f.a.g and managed to keep it down this time. 'She actually called it that once.

Listening to dead people.'

'I get the same impression when I talk to hackers,' I said.

'They spend most of their time talking to computers.

Sometimes they're not so good at talking to other people.'

'Bob's like that, isn't he? He always gives me the feeling I'm wasting his time.'

'They can be a little wrapped up in themselves. A little impatient with everybody else,' I said. 'I think they get disappointed when the rest of us aren't as smart as they are.'

Peri took the f.a.g out of her mouth, which was curling into her slow, wry smile. 'I think I know somebody like that.

You're writing an article about us or something, aren't you?'

'I don't think the Post Post is going to be too interested in aliens from Epsilon Eridani.' She handed the smoke back to me and I took a puff 'Mostly I'm just curious, though. I can't pin the Doctor down at all. I can't pin down your relationship. is going to be too interested in aliens from Epsilon Eridani.' She handed the smoke back to me and I took a puff 'Mostly I'm just curious, though. I can't pin the Doctor down at all. I can't pin down your relationship.

You seem distant and close at the same time.'