The old man watched her for a while. Then, knocking back a slug of what he imagined to be rum, he dismissed her from his mind.
Mel wandered about the near-deserted camp, for what she thought would be the last time. She wouldn"t have left her room at all had she not believed that.
She had spent almost three months locked away, shunning all contact.
She had long since given up hope of turning Avalone into what it claimed to be. The Camp Entertainments staff, Burney and Brison, were more interested in their own entertainment, and none of the few visitors to this so-called resort planet cared anyway. They came here to drink and sleep and forget.
Except Mel. Because no one had warned her.
Oh, but she had been so clever, hadn"t she? Fancying herself the great hitch-hiker, wandering the s.p.a.ceways with no dependence on anybody. She"d left Glitz and made for Earth, and never mind what he had said about her home world"s fate in this era. She would find the decimated planet anyway, pull its scattered populace together to rebuild and to reach for the skies again. She had found a cause.
Six months later, she had ended up here. The irresistible (so the brochures said) Avalone, a temporary rest stop before the final leg of her long voyage. Only, for "temporary stop", read "stranded in this miserable slate quarry for almost two years".
She"d tried, but even her infectious enthusiasm had its limits.
She had put her mind, instead, to leaving, but that was a harder task than antic.i.p.ated. Not many ship-owners came to Avalone: it was, on top of all else, some sort of navigational hazard.
Those that did visit refused to carry her away without an amount of money she didn"t possess.
Mel wandered past the hanging door to the filthy kitchens, where once she had worked before realizing that her wage covered only the exorbitant cost of accommodation and food.
51.No escape by that route. It was then that, having finally experienced enough of Avalonian life, she had made her retreat into solitude, breaking off her short affair with the cook, Peter, in the knowledge that only one man could help her now.
Well . . . two, perhaps. And after two years of loneliness - and three months devoting every waking moment to contacting one of those two men - second best was beginning to look quite good.
Two long years on Avalone. One more since leaving the TARDIS.
"Well, I suppose it"s time."
Silly cow, why had she said said that? that?
"Time that I left."
The more she went over it, the less her own actions made sense.
The Doctor had seemed upset at first. He had got over it quickly. "Excellent, yes. Mel can keep you out of trouble, Glitz."
So there she was, roaming the galaxy, many millennia into her own future, her partner a self-confessed thief and swindler and no type of home left to return to. What must she have been thinking?
She had contacted him last night: the fourth time she had entered the Galactic Banking Conglomerate"s computer system and left a message only he could find. The first one he had actually responded to.
She had been woken by the red light, pulsing through her eyelids, shocking the brain into wakefulness with one electric thought: freedom! Pulling the old computer out from under the bed, rubbing down the dirt-streaked monitor, moving the mouse frantically, pressing to gain purchase on the threadbare carpet.
She had activated on-screen menus, accessed details of the ice-breaking program which her own system had caught in the act and held trapped. She had smiled at the thought of the computer operator"s panic as he tried to close down his terminal, to remove incriminating traces.
He was in for a surprise.
52.Mel had activated the voice sensor. "h.e.l.lo Glitz," she had said, with satisfaction. Then she"d sat back, thought about him retrieving that message, and laughed for the first time in too long. A laugh born of relief, of the knowledge that her imprisonment was over.
That was two nights ago.
Mel sighed now as she pushed open the peeling yellow door to Chalet A113. After all this time, its interior still smelt musty and unused. She let her eyes adjust to the gloom, then stepped carefully over the equipment which littered the floor: stripped wires, junction boxes, screwdrivers, soldering irons and circuit boards salvaged from obsolete equipment, torn from the gutted corpses of crashed vessels. Avalone was a s.p.a.ceship"s graveyard. That, at least, had one advantage.
She had sent precise enough instructions to Glitz. He should be on his way; in fact, he should at last be close enough for visual contact. Mel fished out her computer again and worked the mouse with practised ease, negotiating her way through a series of gateways and surrept.i.tiously into her target system.
She toggled into telecommunications mode, sent out a call signal and drummed her fingers against the floor impatiently.
She counted the seconds for thirteen minutes before the light on the monitor"s top began to wink. Mel punched in the activation code, trying hard to contain a long-denied excitement. A graphical representation of Glitz"s roguish, bearded features appeared, its colours washed out, flickering and swaying as though wind-blown. The computerized Glitz was wearing an obviously forced smile, which well matched the forced tone of his electronically relayed greeting.
"Mel! How good to hear from you again."
"You could have fooled me," she said caustically. "You"ve been ignoring my distress messages for over a month!"
He feigned innocence. "Messages?"
"I checked my equipment dozens of times, Glitz. I know they got through. I planted them in the Galactic Banking Conglomerate"s computer systems, where I knew the Dragon cypher program I designed for you would find them in seconds.
53.So don"t try pretending that you never received anything."
"Oh . . . those messages." Glitz waved his hand vaguely. "All hopelessly scrambled, I"m afraid. I wanted to come and find you, of course, but I just didn"t know where to look."
Mel pursed her lips to prevent a smile from breaking through.
She was too glad to see him to remain angry. "You received my message about the opal shipment easily enough, I see. You hacked into that file in seconds and fell, incidentally, straight into my trap."
"Ah, well of course, I knew it was you. I wasn"t fooled."
"Or perhaps greed was simply a stronger motivator than friendship?"
"So . . . there isn"t actually an opal shipment, then?"
Mel laughed. "Okay, I"ll believe you, Glitz. Somebody has to."
"Well, it was nice talking to you -"
"Don"t you dare cut out on me now! I need your help."
Mel started as the picture fizzed and vanished. For one heart-stopping second, she thought she"d lost him. Then, thankfully, the image rolled back onto the screen, its pixels slowly updating to show that Glitz was now wearing an almost comically worried look.
Mel sighed. "Don"t worry, I don"t want to join up with you again."
"Is that a promise?"
"I just need a lift to the nearest civilized world," she continued, ignoring the implied insult. She cast her eyes about the dingy interior of the chalet. "I seem to have got myself unfortunately stranded."
"What, on Avalone? Whatever possessed you to go near the place?"
"Never mind that now. Can you come and get me? Please?"
"But you can"t be serious, Mel. That whole system is a navigational disaster zone. I"ve less chance of getting the Nosferatu 2 through that than of prising a ten-grotzit bit from the Bank President"s purse!"
"For heaven"s sake, Glitz, I wouldn"t ask if I wasn"t 54 desperate, you know that."
"Can"t anybody else help you? s.p.a.ce mercenaries land on Avalone all the time."
Mel spoke through clenched teeth. "I don"t have any money!"
"Then get some. Somebody with your computer skills could -"
"Unlike you, Glitz," she interrupted, "I am not a thief."
"But you designed the Dragon program."
"Because I didn"t know what use you"d put it to." She tried not to think about the handy subroutine she"d written to ensure that her bed and board on Avalone came free. What Glitz was proposing was a step beyond that. Not that she hadn"t been tempted, these past months.
He sighed then, defeated at last. "Okay. I"ll risk my life, I"ll come and pick you up. Just don"t ask any more favours."
Mel smiled sweetly. "I wouldn"t dream of it. How soon will you be here?"
"Two hours. Three, maximum. Less if I happen to run into a stray magnetic field and come down in burning fragments."
"I"ll wait for you by the landing site." Mel was about to sign of when she noticed the sheepish expression on Glitz"s face.
"What now?"
"I think you might want to evacuate your accommodation rather sooner than that."
Mel narrowed her eyes. "What have you done?"
"Well, since you pulled me into your system, and since you did have an open gateway into the Galactic -"
"You haven"t!"
"Ten million grotzits. The sting of the century!"
"You"ve used me to swindle the Galactic Banking Conglomerate?"
"Well, not exactly." Glitz looked embarra.s.sed. "I tripped an alarm, you see. They traced the intrusion back to your terminal."
Mel leapt to her feet like a startled cat. "You really know how to test a friendship, don"t you Glitz?" She broke the contact and, for a frightening moment, stood shivering in the darkness. Her thoughts tumbled over each other in their madcap desire to 55 reach the front of her brain.
Glitz had managed to implicate her in an attempted computer fraud of unimaginable magnitude. The punishment, if she was caught, would doubtless be a custodial sentence. And the thought of swapping this prison for an even smaller one was, especially after all her efforts, intolerable.
Mel knew that time wasn"t on her side. She had to make some sort of decision fast. And, much as she respected galactic law and prided herself on an ability to cooperate with authority of all kinds and at all levels, she knew there was only one rational, logical thing she could do.
She would have to run for it.
Mel hurried about the room that had somehow become her home. She packed up everything that meant anything to her, apart from the bulky hardware that would only impede her flight. As she bundled her clothes into a pillow-case - the property of Avalonian Resorts Inc. - she felt a brief stab of sadness at the thought of how little she had to show for her life.
A life that had once promised to be eventful and fulfilling. She wondered again why she had ever left the Doctor.
This was the sort of situation he might get into.
No, she corrected herself. It wasn"t. The Doctor"s adventures were on the slightly more glamorous side of this. He would never find himself packing up a few meagre dresses and preparing to run from a seedy resort on a backwater planet; keeping out of the law"s clutches long enough to make a rendezvous with a crook and to flee in his purloined ship. This was, by no means, the Doctor"s type of adventure. This was madness.
Mel shook herself from her reverie. For all its poverty, Avalone was still part of the Galactic Federation and thus it was only a matter of time before someone - or something came calling. She threw on her pink, half-length leather jacket, stuck the pillow-case beneath her arm, took one last look at a. room which meant more than she cared to admit and pulled open the door. She found herself staring at a security robot.
It was an unsophisticated model, abandoned here long ago, 56 but no doubt given fresh programming now from afar. Its bulky, archaic metal form hovered three inches above ground as it whirred and clicked what was unmistakably an order to halt.
Mel didn"t know what type of firepower, if any, this automaton had. That didn"t matter; she didn"t give herself time to consider the question anyway. Acting purely on instinct, she shook her worldly goods out of their pillow-case and threw them, diving beneath her would-be captor"s grasp and sprinting for cover.
The security robot paused only to shake Mel"s underwear from its sensors. Then it turned and glided after her at a more sedate pace.
Mel skidded across the loose stone, twisting, turning, dodging behind the derelict theatre and through the Happiness Wing, around the old anti-gray play-skimmer pool and past the tramps outside the Fun Pub. The robot clung to her tenaciously throughout. She had to end this. She might be faster but the machine was tireless and, although she had kept up her exercises, Mel could feel her body growing weary.
She left the camp behind her, heading out for the hills. She would find it harder to lose the thing here, but there was also less chance of it being able to call on reinforcements. She shot past the old man she had spoken to earlier and he reached out a hand to her, but there was no time to socialize. She leapt over the top of the rise and her heart plunged as she saw that the landing area was empty. As if it wouldn"t be! She had known that Glitz couldn"t have possibly arrived yet, but she had blindly hoped all the same.
She cast around for a hiding place, knowing the search would be fruitless. Then she spotted something that caused her to do a cla.s.sic double-take and made her heart swell with hope like it hadn"t done for a long time.
A battered blue police box nestled at the hill"s foot. There was only one thing it could be. When a familiar figure emerged from the object, Mel"s suspicions were confirmed.
He was still exactly as she had last seen him, that ridiculous question-mark pullover and all. He beckoned urgently, but even as Mel rushed towards him, she heard a high-pitched drone 57 behind her and realized that the robot had caught up.
She glanced over her shoulder: her pursuer seemed to be gaining speed on the downward slope. She pushed herself further, faster, expecting hot blaster fire to bring her down screaming at any moment. She reached him miraculously unscathed.
She was all for diving straight into the impervious TARDIS, but he steadied her with one hand. His face was grim as he turned to the approaching automaton and held up a long, thin, silver device which emitted a low hum. Mel flinched as the robot exploded with a loud bang and an outpouring of black smoke. She turned to him, panting, her face alight.
"You"ve saved my life," she whispered. "I really mean that, Doctor, you have saved my life!"
He didn"t say anything. He merely ushered her into the TARDIS. Mel felt that all her dreams had come true at once.
She still paused on the threshold. "I suppose I should contact Glitz, tell him there"s no need to bother coming." Then she considered the trouble he had caused her and the unanswered pleas of the past few months, and she smiled tightly. "No. Let him find out for himself."
The old man stared over the hilltop and his eyes widened as, with an asthmatic wheeze, the unfamiliar blue box faded slowly into nothingness. He shivered and hurled the empty bottle away from him; it bounced three times on its way down the slope, then came to rest with a soft clink against the remains of the destroyed robot.
Presently, three more of the automatons arrived. They cl.u.s.tered about their comrade, swayed to and fro and clicked with what the old man thought sounded very much like agitation.
As one, they turned to him then, and waited expectantly for the information they knew only he could give.
The old man shrugged helplessly and pointed up into the grey sky.
"She went thataway," he said.
58.