I snuck out of the bathroom and headed for the dark stairs.

Was this how Luis had felt about the monster? And now Swan? Was the monster clouding up the air around me with irresistible pheromones? Or was it doing something directly to my grey matter? The urge to toss it away rose up in me again, like the first thump in your stomach when you know you're going to thunder and nothing can stop it. But something did stop it. The ugly fear that I was being reprogrammed faded into the background, beaten by my need to get the monster somewhere safe and start feeding it breakfast cereal.

Swan met me at the bottom of the steps. I was so wrapped up in my furry armful that she just stepped out of nowhere and hit me across the back of the shoulders with a baseball bat. All my muscles stopped working for long enough that she could take hold of her alien baby and shove me back onto the uncarpeted stairs.

The thump of wooden angles into my spine seemed to break the monster's spell. Swan gripped the thing tight against her winter coat, and I had no jealousy, no urge to take it back from her. I could have got the baseball bat out of her awkward grip in a moment, but instead I just lay there, propped up on my elbows, waiting to see what she'd do next.

Swan cussed me out in no uncertain terms and added, 'I'm going to ruin you, freak. Just ruin you.'

'Screw you, lady.'

'You must've realised the call at the office would warn me.'

'I can't believe you just left it there. Not with everybody that wants it.'

'You'd never have got it out of the house,' snorted Swan.

'Is that right,' I said, hauling myself to my feet. I was in her face, but she didn't so much as take a step back.

I am lying on that second-floor bed in Los Angeles, naked as a snake, sunshine slanting in hot white beams across the room. I am yelping in time with Heart of the Sunrise Heart of the Sunrise. The record player is under the bed, speakers tipped onto their backs, so the sound is coming to me from another planet, through a wall of springs and mattress and bedclothes and my own skinny, helpless flesh. Each time the guitar starts its merciless climb and fall, like a race car driver accelerating, I am shouting out CHRIST JESUS and bursting frozen sweat through every pore. I'm riding a bull, naked, bareback, I'm flying and leaping over as it tosses me away again and again, circling round to land on its back, like a piece of stretched elastic snapping home. The bull will not stop, its buck and plunge matching the rise and fall of the guitar. The acid I have taken has turned out to be angel dust and everyone I know in the whole city is peeking in through the crack of the bedroom door.

I landed back in the present again, sitting on my a.s.s at the bottom of the stairs. Swan and her baby were gone. Every inch of me was soaked, as though I had been covered in snow and thawed out. For a paranoid moment I was sniffing my own sleeves, nervous that Swan had doused me with petrol. After a moment I realised I was covered in sweat, my hair heavy with it and glued to my face.

I had never, never been able to remember that s.h.i.t before.

People had told me a little about it, looking at the floor while they hinted at what had happened that afternoon. Now I had all the details in hi-fi stereo Technicolor.

I could hear Swan upstairs, cooing to her little mutant baby in the bathtub. I disappeared out the front door, not giving a d.a.m.n about cameras, and shot through.

90.

The Doctor bit my head off when I confessed. 'The Savant could have done irreparable damage to your brain!' So could the angel dust, I thought, but I kept that to myself. 'It's obviously bonded deeply with Swan. It was just beginning that process with Luis when she stole it away from him.

Threatened with being s.n.a.t.c.hed from her side, it responded with a mental attack. A very low-level one, happily, for your peace of mind.' That was low-level? I was there, absolutely there, as though every molecule of the event had been recorded somewhere in my body and played back like a tape.

'Why do you imagine we simply didn't knock the door down and purloin the component? Why do you think the Eridani haven't done it themselves? No, now that the Savant has fallen into the proverbial wrong hands, we've got to handle this with the proverbial kid gloves.'

He seemed to have run out of steam. I had been sitting on the arm of my sofa through the whole speech. Now I slid down onto the cushions. My head was freezing cold after walking through the winter air with my hair full of sweat. In a few minutes I'd take a hot bath and try to forget about the whole thing.

I said, 'I still don't get your angle, Doc'

'What?' he huffed.

'What's in it for you? Besides whatever the Eridani are paying.' He sniffed at that, like it was an insult. 'I could really believe you'd do this even if they didn't have a red cent. For a good cause. Or Just to put Swan in her place.'

'That certainly needs doing,' he said archly. I thought of Swan's speech about the food chain. The Doctor was making a mess of the whole concept of stronger beats weaker, winner takes all. I wondered what kind of card player he was. 'Peri was right,' sighed the Doctor. 'In the end, this is about taking a lost child home. An enormously dangerous child.'

'I gotta tell you the thing looked perfectly happy with Swan to me.'

'She simply cannot care for it,' said the Doctor. 'No matter how slavishly devoted she may become to its needs, only the Eridani have that expertise. There may be nutrients it requires that aren't even available on Earth it could be starving slowly to death for want of them. Its neurological development will already have been stunted by lack of contact with the rest of the components, particularly the control unit.' By now he was talking more to himself than to me. 'No. We must restore it to the Eridani, whatever their purpose for it.'

'Couldn't we get them to hand over the manual or something?'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'And do you fancy raising the Savant to maturity?'

I hauled myself up off the sofa. 'The only thing I want in my bathtub right now is me.'

Swan was as good as her word. She phoned my editor at home, where he was relaxing with his wife and three kids, and told him all about my adventures in LA. She convinced him to check the news archives over his modem. He spent half an hour digging up the little news item about how I'd slugged the editor of a well-known west-coast newspaper.

Swan called him back the moment he logged out. 'Well?'

'You're right about the a.s.sault charges,' he said. 'But there is no way that man is a f.a.g.'

'You saw what the paper said.'

'I don't care care what the paper said. I've met three of Chick's girlfriends.' what the paper said. I've met three of Chick's girlfriends.'

'Camouflage,' she spat.

'Bulls.h.i.t. Maybe one lady, sure, but three? Now if someone in San Fran called the man a p.u.s.s.y, I can understand why he might take a swing at them.'

'Better make sure he doesn't take a swing at your a.s.s.'

'You've got a dirty mouth, ma'am. What'd Chick ever do to You?'

'I'd be more worried about what he might do to you,' said Swan, and slammed down her phone.

Swan ground her fists into her temples. Nothing was working. Nothing was helping. The Doctor seemed unmoved by her threat to destroy his young proteges life. Her threat to wreck mine bad hit a dead end. There wasn't the slightest hint of a shred of information on the network about her precious windfall, and even it was out there somewhere, the Doctor would pester and plague her every step.

She ought to be on top of the world, and instead she was boxed in on every side.

Bob could be crushed simply by pressing charges. There must be more to my story than she had been able to find, something she could use to turn my editor's stomach the way it had done in Los Angeles. And the Doctor; what could she find out about this Doctor, what was there about him that he would never want the authorities to know? She would dig and sc.r.a.pe and claw until she ruined us.

It didn't take the Doctor long to find Luis Perez. He traced the MUD connection back to a forged university account, had a word with the sysadmin and got help tracing the connection back to a second forged account on another machine, and left a message in that account with a request for Luis to email him at Bob's account.

Luis asked for a meeting in a cafeteria in one of the Smithsonian buildings. It had a sort of conveyor belt on which the food went round and round, and you s.n.a.t.c.hed what you wanted. Kids stood next to it, watching all those desserts cruising past, just out of their reach.

The Doctor had insisted we all stay behind; he didn't want to intimidate the man and he wasn't sure if he was dangerous.

Bob and Peri protested a little, but it was obvious they were going to do as they were told. Not so me. I wasn't going to miss a thing.

'You got to remember,' said Luis, raking at a bit of hair over his ear. 'You got to remember what Swan has is a reputation reputation. She's supposed to be able to do anything. If word gets out that some other guy can beat her, that she can't even do her thing without you peeking over her shoulder, then she's got nothing.'

'Good,' said the Doctor. 'Then she must realise that the only way to get rid of me is to hand over the Savant.'

'She can't do that, man.' Luis's fingers tightened around that lock of hair. 'She can never let anybody beat her. If it happens once, it could happen again. If anybody even gets close to winning a bout with her, she crushes them down so hard they can't get up again.' He looked up at the Doctor.

'That's what she's gonna do to you.'

The Doctor said dryly,'She is welcome to try.'

'If she can't hit you, she'll hit the people around you. I've watched it happen. I've seen the lights go out.'

'That's not the only reason Swan can't hand over the Savant,' said the Doctor. 'Is it?'

Luis shook his head. He went back to spooning his chocolate pudding around and around in its gla.s.s. I opened my mouth to ask a question, but the Doctor held up a hand to silence me. Luis muttered, ' What hatched out of that egg?

What did it do to me?' He traced a circle in the air with his spoon, in front of his breastbone. 'Is this feeling going to stop?'

'Mr Perez,' said the Doctor, 'I promise you I'll do everything I can to help you '

'That's not enough, man!' Luis slapped the spoon down on the table, knocking over the pudding. 'I have to get that thing back from her.'

'But that's exactly what we want you to do,' said the Doctor.

Luis stared at him. We both did.

'Mr Perez, your contact with the Savant puts you in a unique position. You have already established a rapport with the creature. You should be able to approach and handle it safely. None of us could do that without risking a devastating psychological attack.'

'You mean it can't do anything worse to me,' said Luis dryly.

'That's one way of looking at it.'

'What if I can't let it go?' mumbled Luis. 'I feel like... if you tried to take it away from me again, I would kill you. I'd use it to kill you.'

'I think he could do that,' I muttered.

'We'll deal with that if and when the problem arises,' said the Doctor.

'You got to understand,' said Luis. 'I don't want that thing. I mean, I want it more than anything else in the world. I am not eating and I'm not sleeping because I can't think about anything except getting it back. I'm like a mother whose baby was kidnapped' A few people were looking at us now. 'Except sometimes it's like I'm its baby. Like I'm a kitten mewing and mewing for its mama. This is worse than being in love.'

The Doctor brought Luis back to my flat. He made the man take a nap on the sofa while he explained the plan to us in the kitchen.

'In Luis's hands, the creature will be harmless.'

'Harmless to everyone except him,' said Peri. 'Won't it go on changing the structure of his brain?'

'I'm afraid he's already badly affected,' said the Doctor quietly. 'He can barely function as it is. If the Savant can reestablish contact with his central nervous system, there is a chance we can use it to return his brain patterns to their original state. We'll need the Eridani's help, of course, but I think I can convince them to do their bit.'

Peri said, 'Are you sure we can fix him?'

'No. I'm not,' said the Doctor flatly 'I'm gambling what's left of Mr Perez's sanity that he can help us retrieve the Savant before anyone else can be harmed by it. If he can be cured, so can Swan and the people of Ritchie.'

'He's like a guinea pig,' said Peri, but she didn't protest further.

The Doctor made my bed. This was a strange thing to behold, especially when he plucked a sock from the sheets and flung it over his shoulder without a backward glance.

'Couldn't we just use the kitchen table?' I said.

'I want something with a little give,' said the Doctor, making a perfect hospital corner.

I sat down on the laundry hamper and watched as he smoothed out the covers. We had already lugged my TV into the bedroom an ancient set donated to me by a fellow journalist who said it had been used to watch the Watergate scandal. My joke is that I prefer my television in black and white, like my newspapers. It was set up on the dresser, an inch or two sticking out perilously over the edge of the wood.

The Doctor placed the device in the exact centre of the bed, patting down the covers around the plastic ball. Then he fished in his jacket pocket and drew out an old-fashioned watch on a chain. He snapped it open. 'Just a moment now,'

he said.

He switched the TV on and started twiddling the tuning dial up and down the channels. We stood, watching the dance of the static, the rise and fall of the ocean hiss. He flicked past the local TV channels without stopping, brief squirts of people and speech; then up and up into the higher frequencies.

'Ah,' he said at last. 'There we are.'

The roar and flicker resolved itself, and Mr Ghislain appeared on the screen. For someone supposedly transmitting from outer s.p.a.ce, he looked remarkably crisp. He was still wearing his black suit and his hat no sign of a s.p.a.cesuit.

' transmit to you,' he said. 'The Interrupt will neutralise the Savant's mental process. This will allow you to detach all undesirable connections. We are pursuing a reversal method for affected neurologies.'

'Hang on,' I said. 'Isn't everyone in the District also watching this show?'

'Not at all,' murmured the Doctor. 'The Eridani's'

transmission is targeted to our co-ordinates.'

I wondered why they didn't just use the speakerphone again. Fear of phreaks eavesdropping on the conversation? Or did it just depend on which satellites they could hijack at any given time? I shook my head. I was starting to buy into the Doctor's cover story, imagining Ghislain and his exotic parrot lurking about somewhere between the moon and the sun. They were probably in a TV studio in downtown DC, and this transmission was being 'leaked' to eager Russian eyes.

' affected neurologies,' said Ghislain, repeating his message. 'We will do all possible things to comply with your request to "leave the planet as we found it".' The message must have been recorded; the screen went blank for a few seconds, and then it started over. 'Within the prearranged time parameters we will transmit to you. The Interrupt will neutralise the Savant's mental process.'

'I don't think Peri will approve of that,' murmured the Doctor. 'A little adjustment may be in order.'

'What's the Interrupt he's ranking about? A program?

Something that will kill the Savant?'