The tourists on board the boat burst into a round of applause. The Doctor broke into a smile, and gave a little bow, letting them take photos.
"You wouldn"t be smiling if you"d fallen into the propeller." The skinny man looked ready to throw him overboard, but instead scowled and said, "That"ll be twenty-eight dollars."
The Doctor fumbled for notes, pressed some amount into the tour operator"s hands, and squeezed through the admiring crowd. At last he sank into a seat, letting out a sigh of relief. The sh.o.r.e was receding as the boat cut a frothing wake across the troubled waters of the Bay.
"Heck of a jump," said a voice. "Specially in this gravity."
The Doctor turned. Another man in grey was sitting next to him.
"Shy and gentle, my a.r.s.e," Fitz muttered. "Something with a horn that size, you tell me why it hangs around virgins."
Sam trailed along behind him, said nothing as he opened the hotel room door. When she reached for the doork.n.o.b she felt her hands floating, fuzzy and unresponsive, out of focus.
She sank into a chair. Fitz picked up the phone and spent several minutes scribbling down messages.
"Yeah. "Swinging single horn seeks virgin. Must have comfy lap. Chocolate bar an advantage."" Sam didn"t move in her chair.
"Well, come on," he said. "Something I"ve said in the last twenty minutes must be worth a chuckle. Or at least a grunt."
"I want to get plastered," she said. "Nah. I want to get so stoned I can"t speak."
86.Fitz blinked. "Fab," he said. He was staring oddly at her maybe amazed that those words could come out of that oh-so-innocent mouth. "Maybe afterwards we can check out the town a bit. See what"s around."
"Don"t want to go out." She pulled her legs up on to the wooden chair, knees to chin. Going out meant getting mugged again. Next time would be even crazier.
Three times in two days, boy with knife, men in grey, unicorn. Less than two days, since she"d left work and gone home to read the impossible postcards. . .
Less than forty-eight hours. . . Oh screw it, she"d lost count.
Guess that"s what it meant to time travel.
Fitz was hovering, awkwardly. He wanted to put an arm around her, but didn"t quite dare. "Hey," he said. "It"s all right. You didn"t get hurt "
"This time," she muttered. "I still want to get off my face."
"Well, one thing at a time," he said.
She"d had enough. She wanted it to stop. She and her mates had joked about needing it, needing a little pill just to get back to being human. Sam was not the same without an E, she"d said. It was just a joke, of course. But her little voice was yammering again, adding to the din in her head, go on, you"ve been go on, you"ve been off the hard stuff long enough, you can handle it no problem. off the hard stuff long enough, you can handle it no problem.
"Can"t believe it," she said. "Can"t believe I chose this."
He shrugged, smiled in a way that was supposed to be faintly ironic. "You did say it was your choices that made you you. Celebrate your uniqueness. All part of life"s rich pageant."
"No," said Sam. "I meant running off with a headcase and getting beaten up in a foreign country."
"Ah," said Fitz.
Bob was working his way through a packet of crisps, leaning back in the chair.
The Doctor was peering out at the water, looking for any sign of disturbance.
Neither of them was paying any attention to the tourist chatter of the boat"s Tannoy.
"What happens now?" asked the Doctor absently.
"With a bit of luck," munched Bob, "I nab you when we get off the boat."
The Doctor glanced at him. "And if you don"t?"
Bob shrugged. "No point in worrying about it now. Might as well enjoy the ride."
The odd thing about Bob, thought the Doctor, was that, as soon as you looked away from him, you more or less forgot what he looked like. You were left with 87.a general impression of dark hair, average height, average build, grey clothes. . .
In fact, Bob was one of the most nondescript people the Doctor had ever met.
"Where are you from, Bob?" he asked.
"BioHazCorp," said Bob. "We were supposed to be delivered to the war zone on Teso Peope. We ended up here by mistake. When the crew realised they"d arrived at a populated, low-tech world, they dumped us and ran for it."
"So you"re stranded too," sighed the Doctor. "You"re a Hench, aren"t you?"
Bob"s head bounced up and down. "Guess what model."
The Doctor looked him over. "Five?"
"Flatterer," said Bob amiably. "Four point one point two."
"Well, you"re certainly thoroughly forgettable."
Bob said, "That"s because we"re in plastic mode."
"Plastic?"
"None of our optional extras have been activated," said Bob. "So we haven"t been set to specialise in any given task soldiers, guards, clerical a.s.sistants.
Just some of our wide variety of uses."
The Doctor said, "But if you"re functional at all, you must have imprinted on someone. Like a duckling learning to follow its mother." He looked out at the shapes of the city"s buildings. "Someone here. Another castaway?"
Bob shrugged again. He crumpled the plastic bag up in an average-looking hand. "Here comes our first stop."
The Doctor stood up as the boat began to slow. There was a row of the grey men waiting on the pier.
Without hesitating, he jumped up on the railing and flung himself into the water. He heard more cameras snapping just before he hit.
Fitz had made some coffee with the hotel"s little electric jug, but Sam was just ignoring it. "I don"t get any control over any of it. Not ever, really." Distantly, she noticed how small her voice was getting. "All this craziness. Can"t even choose to go mad."
Fitz shuddered, purely reflexively. "No. No. Don"t even think that way," he said quietly. "I"ve seen madness. It doesn"t help."
He knelt down in front of her, next to the desk, trying to get his face close to hers, his eyes skittering around as though he was making a determined effort at eye contact but didn"t quite know how. "You"ve got to remember, whatever gets thrown at you, it might be weird but it"s not crazy. Just believe that, all right? It makes sense to someone, even if you don"t know the rules yet. It"s not crazy. It"s not "
88.The phone rang, right next to them, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. "h.e.l.lo. Yes. OK.
Where? All right, whatever you say."
Fitz put down the phone. "That was the Doctor," he told her. "He wants us to meet him in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge."
The taxi driver insisted on letting them off on the shoulder just before the bridge. He made Fitz pay his return fare before roaring off. G.o.d only knew how they were going to get back. That was the Doctor"s problem, she decided.
Let him pull off another throwaway miracle. That was what he was there for.
They could just see him, far ahead, at the highest part of the bridge"s arc, looking off into the distance from the edge of the pedestrian walkway.
The bridge was huge, making you crane your neck to look at the tops of the towers, the bright orange-red glowing against the green of the bay and the land in the distance. The wires and cables sang in the wind.
Sam looked out as she and Fitz half walked, half jogged along the walkway.
It would have been a stunning view, except for being overcast and dull-grey and chilly as h.e.l.l frozen over. A little to her right there was nothing for sixty-odd metres straight down.
She didn"t look. It wasn"t fun being close to the edge like this. Go on, jump, Go on, jump, just "cause you"re not supposed to. just "cause you"re not supposed to.
"OK?" puffed Fitz. "You"re OK?"
She gave him a little nod. OK for the moment. Until the next whatever was dumped on her. He nodded back.
The Doctor was staring through a battered pair of binoculars, the sharp wind blowing his coat unnoticed behind him. He stood quite still, expressionless.
"Well?" she said. He handed her the binoculars. Sam suddenly realised that he was soaking wet, but it didn"t seem to bother him.
"You can"t really see it from ground level," he said gravely. "Not yet. Look out in the Bay. Just past Alcatraz, to the right."
She started looking, struggling with the focus k.n.o.b.
"What happened to you?" said Fitz.
"Our grey friends are still taking turns jumping in the water to look for me,"
said the Doctor. "I hitched a ride with a fishing boat and doubled back."
She kept looking through the anti-suicide fence. There wasn"t anything no, she could just make it out, a sharp change in the water. A line, running from near the waterfront, disappearing behind Alcatraz Island and stretching almost to the opposite sh.o.r.e. Along the line, the texture of the water changed from 89.broad wide ripples, becoming choppy, churning. The grey surface was flecked with white, roiling like a wake that refused to dissipate.
Almost the whole width of the Bay.
She looked questioningly at the Doctor.
"I said that something really nasty would come along," he said. She knew she had to ask. But she didn"t want to. Asking would make it real.
She raised the binoculars to take another look, but he put his hand on top of them, meeting her eyes. "That turbulence is caused by a very sharp change in depth. There"s something very big down there, and that line is one edge of it."
"And the other edge?" asked Fitz.
Sam tried to find it, but it was pushing the limits of the binoculars. Maybe another quarter of a mile away? She tried to move her fingers, and couldn"t.
The wind was so cold they"d seized up on the focus rings.
The Doctor took the binoculars out of her hands, and she tucked them under her armpits, stamping her feet to try to get the blood flowing again. "Call it a Kraken," he said quietly. "It comes from the higher dimensions. It floats in the void, twisting itself through the folded s.p.a.ce in ways we can barely comprehend."
He offered the binoculars to Fitz, who shook his head. "I don"t want to know.
Are they intelligent?"
"No. Vast, implacable brutes, who exist only to sense food and to reach it."
His voice was soft, like someone talking in a church. Someone a bit frightened.
"They graze on exotic matter, on plumes of raw cosmological power. . . features which are undetectable in our s.p.a.ce, but fountains of energy in the upper reaches."
"And the scar?" asked Fitz, hugging himself.
"Sounds like one large dinner gong." The Doctor pulled a smile on to his face. "It must have rotated itself into these dimensions just before we used the TARDIS to m.u.f.fle the beacon. That"s what it was following, you see. It can sense the energy pattern of the scar." He looked out over the Bay. "As long as that signal is blocked, the Kraken doesn"t know where to find the food but it hears enough echoes to know the food is here. It knows. And so it waits."
"And then," said Fitz, "when the TARDIS finally gives up the ghost, if we"re not lucky then that thing can hear the beacon again loud and clear."
The Doctor nodded slowly. "It will follow it, and it will devour it."
"Crunchy," said Fitz. "And a dirty great lump of San Francisco gets mashed by its slime trail on the way."
"Oh, no slime," said the Doctor offhandedly. "Just the Kraken. That"s enough."
90.Sam stared at the two of them, her eyes streaming in the wind. They were taking it so calmly hang on, she she was taking it so calmly. She hadn"t even said a word about it. There was a sea monster down there, and the only thing in her head was the blaring of the traffic and the distant low rolling of thunder. was taking it so calmly. She hadn"t even said a word about it. There was a sea monster down there, and the only thing in her head was the blaring of the traffic and the distant low rolling of thunder.
"How long?" asked Fitz.
"About a day and a half," said the Doctor. "Except. . . "
"Oh boy," said Fitz. "There"s an except."
"Except that, as the TARDIS gets closer to dying, pulses from the beacon will leak through, more and more frequently. That might be enough to wake the Kraken. Or it might not."
There"s a frigging man-eating city-crunching sea monster down there, Sam told herself, just to see if there was any reaction.
The Doctor had swept her along from one impossibility to the next, without even a moment to consider it, until she"d stopped feeling as though she had any say about what was happening to her. No more than she had a say when Dave cancelled her pay rise because his stomach was playing up.
It was always the same they were driving, she was in the back seat, and there was no way off the road when you were in the middle of the bridge.
The thunder was growing, louder, unbroken, closing in on them. It sounded like hooves, like uncountable hooves.
The Doctor looked up. "Oh no," he said, snapping into the present. He shouted, "Hold on "