Before the Doctor could answer,

i need help.

Ritchie was a spot on the map somewhere near Frostburg, just outside the fog belt, surrounded by low and stony mountains carpeted with snowy trees. US 40 narrowed to two lanes as we drove past clapboard houses and brick boxes. We pa.s.sed a red Amish barn. 'Hex sign,' noted the Doctor, making Bob sink a little deeper into his seat.

We arrived that night, parked the Travco on a bit of disused gravel between the railway line and the old ca.n.a.l.

B&O coal-hoppers clanked past, leaving dark lines where the rails cut through the Christmas snow. The next morning I stood outside the van, pulling hot smoke into my lungs, taking in the view. You could see from one side of the town clear to the other, the way I could see right across Canberra as a kid. It was just the place for an alien invasion.

You want to know how small Ritchie is? The local Mickey D's has only one arch out the front. I'm serious it's tucked into an awkward bit of land between two intersecting narrow roads. The building is shaped like a slice of pie and there's only enough room for one of the golden humps.

We headed inside for camelburgers and hot coffee. The Doctor refused to sully his palate with the stuff, but he quizzed the server about anything interesting that had happened around town.

I summoned my courage and called Trina to apologise for missing her birthday. I tried to explain that I really had been incommunicado all this time, that I was following up the story she had given me, but it only made her madder. 'You could have called me if you had just remembered to,' she said. There was no arguing back to that. She gave me quite an earful. I tried imagining her in her underwear, but that didn't really help.

The Doctor joined us at the cramped plastic table. 'There's something the matter with that young woman,' he said.

I craned my neck. She was a redhead with a shape even the Scottish Restaurant's uniform couldn't ruin. 'She looks just fine to me.'

For once, the Doctor said nothing. I strolled over to the counter, where the lady in question was waiting for her next customer. She didn't seem to see me coming, her eyes focussed on the blank plastic in front of her.

'G'day,' I said. She blinked a little and looked up into my face. 'I could use some more hot coffee. You know, in Australia, it's the middle of summer right now.'

Usually this led to some cute questions about koala bears.

Instead, she spoke slowly, as if trying to remember each word: 'Do you ever get that feeling, when you go into a room and you can't remember why you went in there? Maybe you're in the kitchen, and you sort of wake up, and find yourself staring into the fridge. Does that ever happen to you?'

'Oh yeah, all the time,' I said.

'Or do you ever get that feeling when you know you had an idea just a minute ago, and you feel something kind of speed up and crack inside your head, and you know you're going to forget what you just thought of, and then you do?'

'I guess I know what you mean,' I lied.

'Or do you ever feel like there's something missing from your life? Something really important, something that would make everything complete, but you just can't put your finger on what it is?'

'Jesus, lady, are you all right?'

She blinked again, slowly, and turned to pick up the coffee pot from the burner. It made me nervous as h.e.l.l to watch her handling the scalding liquid, but her autopilot saw her through.

She even asked me if I wanted fries with that. I didn't.

The Doctor gave me a querying look as I squeezed back into my seat. 'That's more than just too many hours flipping burgers,' I said. 'It's not like she's a vegetable... but something's missing.'

'Something is constantly claiming her attention,' said the Doctor quietly. 'Something which is no longer here, and never will be again.'

We drove out to the farm at the address Luis had supplied.

To no-one's surprise, the place was abandoned, 'for sale' signs dotted around. The barn had, after all, only been a staging post for the auction that had sold him a hunk o' furry brain damage.

The Doctor spent upwards of an hour sniffing around for dues, but came up empty-handed and grumbling.

We meandered around the town a bit, taking in the sights, such as they were. The Doctor oohed and aahed a bit over a restored railway station. He had a surprising ability to strike up a conversation with anyone he b.u.mped into whether they liked it or not.

There were people with the faraway look everywhere we went. The owner of a Chevy dealership, his flock of used cars huddled under a white awning. His wife came out to talk to us, patting her distracted husband on the shoulder. He hadn't been himself for more than a month, she said. She mentioned the Doctor he bad been seeing.

We found a Doctor's surgery, a brick building with a colourful flag of birds and flowers hung outside. The receptionist wouldn't let us talk to him unless it was an emergency. I asked to use the bathroom and caught a glimpse of him in his office, fiddling with the bits of paper on his desk, staring out the window as if trying to spot something in the distance.

There was no real pattern to it, no transmission from person to person, nothing they all had in common except that they lived here in Ritchie. If some poison, some bit of radioactive waste had fallen from one of the trains that clattered through the town, you might have seen something like it people spattered by the invisible fallout all around.

We sat on the steps of the public library closed and breathed plumes of steam into the air. Bob shifted uncomfortably on the cold, dry stone, and said, 'Can we get a medical team in here or something?'

The Doctor just shook his head. The cold didn't seem to bother him at all. In fact, I don't think his breath was even misting. That English const.i.tution. 'To the Eridani's technology, the human brain is only another form of hardware.

Something that can be tinkered with and modified as required.

Human medicine cannot yet say the same.'

'Well what about us?' said Peri. 'We've been carrying it around all this time...'

'It hasn't been switched on,' he said a little nervously, I thought. 'Well, only briefly. None of us have suffered any ill effects.'

'That we're aware of,' said Peri. The Doctor made an impatient gesture as though he was chasing away her needless worries. He was probably worrying about the pair of cops who'd pulled him over. 'We know those components have been all over. You think somebody would have noticed by now... all those people...'

'I suspect that the components only became dangerous around the time of the auction,' said the Doctor. 'The auctioneers probably tampered with them before selling them.

I doubt they realised what they had on their hands.'

We crammed back into the Travco (Bob had started to refer to it as the 'white elephant'). I volunteered to drive again, knowing they'd speak more freely amongst themselves if they thought I had my mind on the traffic. But they weren't in a chatty mood. Peri announced she wanted something to take her mind off of things, so she sat cross-legged on the narrow bed, going through another pile of printouts with her highlighter pen.

'Doctor,' she said, 'Have a look at this.'

She pa.s.sed it forward to the Doctor in the pa.s.senger seat.

He hunched over it, running a finger down the columns of figures to the data she had marked.

'How very interesting,' he said. 'Our Miss Swan seems to have developed a sudden interest in security equipment.'

'Looks like she bought half a dozen security cameras and an alarm system,' said Peri.

'Now, what does that tell us?'

For a moment they looked like teacher and pupil. Peri answered, 'Swan is keeping the final component at her own house.'

The Doctor nodded. 'I should have realised at once. She could haye hidden it anywhere. But she's beginning to withdraw into herself, losing her trust in everyone else not only trust that they are on her side, but trust that they can do anything as well as she can. She has become the only person she can rely on.'

'Is that good or bad?' said Bob. 'I mean, from our point of view. If she's paranoid, does that make her more isolated and vulnerable, or more careful and dangerous?'

'Perhaps a little of each, said the Doctor.

Three.

We pulled into the parking lot behind my apartment building in Arlington at around six o'clock that night. I went up first, then flashed the lights a couple of times to let them know it was OK to come on up.

Peri looked around dubiously. My flat is a bunch of horizontal surfaces covered in stacks of books and newspapers and in-trays made out of cereal boxes. 'You sure n.o.body's been searching in here?'

'Relax. I have my own filing system. If they'd moved one piece of paper I would have spotted it right away.'

'Where can we set up, Chick?' said Bob, who was clutching his much-travelled Apple in its protective cardboard box, I unplugged my IBM Selectric typewriter and hauled it off my writing desk with an 'oof'. Everything else had to come off as well, to make enough room for the computer and its peripherals: the stacks of paper, my Walkley award, the statue of a raven on a branch. I relocated it all to the kitchen counter, where Stray Cat was stealing leftovers from a dirty dish. She gave me a cynical look and one of her monotone meows.

I phoned for takeout while Peri took a shower and borrowed some of my clothes. (I had to stall her long enough to hide the p.o.r.no wags in the bedroom.) She emerged from the bedroom in high boots, a cowboy shirt, and jeans that were slightly too tight. She stopped towelling her hair, and gave Bob a meaningful look.

He sniffed at his tuxedo tee. 'G.o.d, I better change this thing,' he said. He pulled it up to reveal another T-shirt underneath that said FLEX YOUR HEAD and went back to the keyboard.

I put Ghost in the Machine Ghost in the Machine on the turntable. It seemed appropriate. on the turntable. It seemed appropriate.

'Hey, Doctor,' said Bob, a few minutes latet 'Come and have a look at this.'

The Doctor grabbed a kitchen chair and sat down next to him at my desk. He gazed over Bob's shoulder at the screen.

It was literally gibberish a great block of random characters. I could see from the headers that the computer in Swan's kitchen had sent all this garbage to her email account at the office. Bob tapped the keys. There were more of the gibberish messages. Dozens of them.

'They're all exactly eight K,' said Bob.

'Maybe it's camouflage,' suggested Peri. 'She's deliberately sending nonsense messages to confuse us.'

'Maybe it's the aliens talking to one another,' I said. I expected a sarcastic response, but Bob and the Doctor were too intent on their new discovery to notice either of us.

'It must be some form of encryption,' mused the Doctor.

'Oh! Slaps forehead! I know what this is!' Bob started hammering the keys. 'It's uuencoded binary data. No problem.

Just let me uucp a copy of uudecode over to my account.'

We waited while he copied the key program that would turn the garbage back into some kind of information. The Doctor had a.s.sured me there was no way their calls could be traced to my number. Tired of running back and forth, he and Bob had come up with a way of confusing their trail through the phone system. Anyone trying to trace them would find a succession of connections between trunk lines, bouncing back and forth like reflections in a hall of mirrors.

'I think it's some kind of graphics file,' said Bob. 'Wait, see if I can display it in Applesoft: The Apple's screen manifested something that looked like a spray of coloured dots.

'I know what it is,' said Peri. We all turned to look at her.

'It's pictures from Swan's security cameras. Look, that's the edge of a table, that's the window over the sink. Move back to where I'm standing and I bet you can see it better.'

She was right. It was like looking at a newspaper photo up close, all those dots and blobs. But with a little distance, and you could make out what the picture really was.

'Good heavens,' muttered the Doctor. 'Swan has invented the Webcarn: Now we all looked at him. The Doctor fluttered his hands in a 'never mind' gesture. 'It appears Swan has fed the output of her cameras into her personal mainframe It then encodes the images so they're compatible with email, which can only carry text, and sends them to her work account.'

Bob was decoding one image after another and displaying them on the screen. 'These are screen dumps from another Apple II. It handles the graphics and the mainframe does the rest.'

Pert said, 'So she set up the cameras to send her a picture every so often, so she can keep an eye on things while she's out of the house?'

'Looks like it,' said Bob. 'Look at the time stamps on the messages.'

'They don't all match, though,': said the Doctor. 'She may be using motion sensors to trigger the emails. If someone broke into the house, she'd see a sudden rush of messages. It would act as a very simple alarm system.'

'So if Swan isn't home, what was moving in those extra images?' said Bob. Again his fingers went chocka-chocka-chocka and brought up one of the rough pictures. There were only six colours in them, making me think of those fluoro hippie posters.

'Kind of looks like the bathroom,' said Peri. We all stared into the image, trying to work out what was important about it.

'It's a still frame, of course. Wait until I bring up a couple more,' said Bob.

There was something disturbing about seeing the inside of someone's house like this. I've looked through enough windows and listened in on enough extensions that my stomach no longer tightens when I drop myself invisibly into someone else's private life. What was creepy was the idea of pointing cameras at your own house. At the front yard, sure.

But the kitchen? The bathroom, for G.o.d's sake? Swan had become her own Big Brother.

'She could watch herself walking around in there,' I muttered. 'See what she did the day before. You know, where did I put my keys? Just rewind the tape and see.'

'There,' said Peri. 'There's something in the tub.' She used the same tone of voice you might use to say There's There's something in my sock and it's moving something in my sock and it's moving.

A quick succession of possibilities a corpse but it's moving flies? a visitor?

'Look at the timestamps,' said Bob. 'Whoever's sitting in the bathtub, they've been there all day. I think the curtain is drawn, over to about here. We get a snapshot whenever they move back far enough that the curtain isn't in the way and the camera sees them move.'

He tapped a key, and the bathroom images cycled. There was something wrong about the shape in the tub. Peri had seen it at once, but I was having trouble making it out.

'It looks like a crippled kid,' I said. 'Maybe an injured dog. No arms. Or no legs, maybe. it's probably trying to get out of the tub.'

'It's what Swan took from Luis, isn't it?' said Peri.