Chapter Ten
"Why would these slime creatures want us?" I asked the Doctor.
"And what did Col mean about them wanting our intelligence?" Candy added.
The Doctor tapped his finger against his lip, his eyes narrow. "It makes a certain kind of sense," he said eventually. "What Col said about intelligence, and what I experienced last night." He pulled out his spectacles, fiddled with them for a few moments, and then put them back. "What d'you know about SETI?" he asked.
"Another word for a sofa?" I suggested.
The Doctor put his specs on and peered acidly at me over the top of them.
"Something to do with whales?" Candy ventured. "Cetaceans?"
He peered again and shook his head. "What are they teaching people in schools these days?" he whipped his glasses off again. "Come on—we've got work to do," he said suddenly. He spun around and his fingers dabbed at the video table: the overhead lights came on as the screens went dark. The Doctor raced around to the door.
"Where are you going?" I said, starting after him.
"Where are we going, you mean," replied the Doctor, halfway out the room.
I shook my head. "Duh," I muttered. Candy somewhat hesitantly took up the rear.
"Right," I called, trying to catch up. "Where are we going?"
"We," he called back over his shoulder, "are going to the same place that they've taken the others."
"Their nests?"
The doors ahead slammed open as the Doctor strode out into the orange daylight. "Nope," he shouted. "The river."
I finally managed to catch up with him, and Candy jogged to fall into step on the other side. "How do you know they've gone there?" Candy asked.
He tapped the side of his head. "That's one of the things the proteins told me."
"One of them?" I asked. "So they are transferring information?"
He pulled a disparaging face. "As information transferring goes, it's all a bit shoddy—a bit make-do-and-mend. Our slimy little friends are rather amateur, actually—but I suppose it did its job."
"Which was…?" I was starting to get annoyed with his vagueness.
The Doctor rounded the corner and headed into the main square. We ran to keep up.
"They wanted us all fired up, angry, acting on instinct," he explained. "It helps to override our intelligence, our free will. My guess is that they're still experimenting, still trying to work out the right proteins, the right RNA strings to pull our strings. Oooh!" He glanced at me. "Remind me to use that one again. Where was I? Oh yes," he plunged on. "I think they were just testing us—us non-otters, that is. They've had months to practice on them and by now have probably got the hang of pulling their strings perfectly. The stuff they injected into Garace—and that I injected into myself—was fairly simple: a few trigger chemicals, a sprinkling of dumb, a bit angry and just a soupcon of greedy. Oh, and some pictures."
"Pictures? Of what?" Candy asked.
The Doctor had reached the very center of the square and he stopped dead, spinning around on his heels. "Swamps, water, otters—just the usual holiday snaps. And a very nice postcard of your old city."
"The settlement? Why?"
"I think they're curious," he whispered. "About us and about what's in the settlement. Remember what Col said about them wanting our intelligence? Well, intelligence is only useful if directed toward a goal. If it's used for problem-solving. So we need to think what problems the slimies might have. If we can keep one step ahead of them, if we can outthink them, then maybe we've a change of stopping them. What is in the grey building, by the way? The one nearest the bank, where they were poking around as I left."
Candy frowned. "You mean… the technical services unit?" she said.
"Doesn't sound very exciting, does it?" he murmured. "The 'technical services unit.' What's a 'technical services unit' when it's at home, then?"
"It's where all the plans for Sunday City were kept, where all the power and communications were controlled. Sort of a nerve center."
"Ahh…" said the Doctor mysteriously. "Now that's more like it: a nerve center. In fact, I think it deserved capitals. A Nerve Center! And an exclamation mark."
"Why would the otters want the Nerve Center?" I asked.
"No idea."
"And what," said Candy nervously, "are we going to fight them with?"
"One of the greatest all-purpose tools in the universe," the Doctor grinned. "Not me this time." He paused, clearly hoping someone would come up with the answer. There was silence. I looked at Candy, wondering why she wasn't speaking, but then I realized: she didn't know. "He means us! Our minds! Our thick, yet imaginative, purely human minds!"
Candy stared blankly at me. The Doctor and I looked at each other. "Terrific."
"Honestly," he sighed, "my wit's wasted on you people, it really is."
,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,
The woven ball moved slightly in Martha's hands as the thing inside it shifted again. The dim moonlight filtering in through the roof of the otters' nest caught it. It was about the size of a fist but blobby and shapeless.
"It's a baby," she said in a whisper. "A baby slime creature!"
The otters squeed and chattered, and little groups of them joined hands as if for mutual support. I could have used a bit myself, but Martha's hands were occupied.
"Broken," said one—the one with a grey smudge on its ear. "Broken leader."
Martha blinked. "Is it ill? It that how you managed to catch it? Look," she said, voice growing firm, "thanks for the show'n'tell. But I'm not sure what you want us to do with it."
"Make broken," said the otter. "Make broken." Others joined in; within seconds they were chanting in unison.
I found it eerie, but Martha just sighed and set the ball down by her knee. She looked irritated. "You want us to make it more broken?" she asked, gesturing to the shaking ball.
"Leader," said the one with the smudged ear. "Make broken."
Martha's face lit up with understanding. "They want us to do what they can't, Grace. They want us to make the 'leader'—the parent of the thing in the basket—broken."
"They want us to kill it," I whispered. And somewhere by the river, it would be controlling so many people, telling them where to go and what to do, and they would obey. Even with everything I knew, what chance did we stand?
,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,
Candy began to hang back as we reached the rise beyond which lay the start of the old settlement. I fell back with her. I could smell the wet and damp from the flooded river plain ahead. "Something wrong?" I asked.
"I should have told them," she whispered. "I should have said something."
"You mean to the settlers?"
"You okay?" It was Doctor this time. He was looking at Candy strangely, as if he'd heard our quiet conversation.
Candy smiled—obviously forced—and nodded. "Just tired. Tegan is taking good care of me."
"Maybe you two should go back," he suggested. "Neither of you have had much sleep."
I shook my head. "No way!"
"We're fine, honestly," said Candy. "What's the plan?"
The Doctor grinned down at her. "Step one: we find out where they are. Step two: I use the sonic screwdriver to stun the otters. And step three: we move in and get your people out as quickly as possible."
"What about the slime creatures?" I asked.
"I suspect that they're not going to be much of a problem. So far, they've kept to the water—or pretty close to it. I suspect they're mainly aquatic, and they've used the otters as their hands and eyes and ears—at least until now. So I don't think we'll have to worry too much about them. Not yet, at any rate. But any sign of them and we leg it—got that?"
We nodded and dropped to all fours as we reached the crest of the rise. The Doctor glanced back and grinned. "Let's take a look, shall we?"
On his hands and knees, the Doctor crept to the brow of the hill. I glanced worriedly at Candy and she gave me a tight smile.
"They're there," the Doctor hissed.
I scuttled alongside him. Down on the mud flats I could see about half a dozen of the settlers. They were drifting in and out of the technical services unit, carrying bits and pieces, plans, wires. They looked like zombies, robots. And amongst them, stationary, like little brown statues, were the otters.
"Why aren't the otters moving?" whispered Candy.
"Probably been given orders to watch your people. They're the ones that the slimies are concentrating on."
"So this control… How does it work? The slimies put instructions in their heads and then…"
"Then the humans carry them out. They have to be relatively simple: the slimy's encoding isn't sophisticated enough to give them very complex tasks. Stuff like 'Go there—get this—take it there,' I should imagine. And there will be a homing instruction too. The proteins don't last long, so the slimies need to make sure that the humans go back to them for more instructions before the chemicals break down. If you hadn't tied me down last night, I'd probably have made a break for the water, trying to get back to them. Garace had a similar reaction."
"Where are the rest of the settlers?" I asked.
"They must be busy elsewhere. That's a bit of a bummer, isn't it? Still, can't be helped. If we rescue these, it's a start." He reached down and fished in his pocket for the sonic screwdriver. "Everybody ready?"
Slowly he stood, raised his sonic screwdriver, held it out, and pressed the button. The tip glowed its fiercest blue-white, and it began to hum. And then, with a noise like a rapidly deflating balloon, the light went out.
"What just happened?" I squeaked, trying to remember any episodes in which that had happened.
The Doctor shook it and tried again. This time it did nothing at all. He turned sharply to me. "What have you been doing with this?" He peered at it closely, shook it, even held it to his ear. "It's full of mud!" he wailed. "It's dead."
"It won't be the only thing," said Candy. "Look…"
We looked over the rise: down below, the otters had seen us and were flowing out from amongst the settlers. Toward us.
And suddenly, before the Doctor could even tell us to run, they froze in a broad wave about thirty-five yards away. Then they parted, moving aside to leave a clear path through their center.
"Oh… now that's interesting. Come into my parlor," the Doctor whispered. "Am I the only one to get the feeling we've been set up here?"
I glanced to the left and right and saw that the otters, without our notice, had executed a perfect pincer movement, slipping behind us and trapping us.
"I think they're inviting us in for a cuppa. It'd be rude to refuse."
"You're mad," said Candy.
"No," said the Doctor primly. "Just very well brought up. Come on—if we don't hurry, the tea'll be stewed. There's nothing worse than stewed tea."
"Apart from death at the paws of a thousand otters," Candy pointed out as the Doctor began to descend the slope.
"With rather large claws," I added, following and remembering the first otter we'd met.
"Yes," he said airily over his shoulder. "There is that."
Down on the mud flats, the half-dozen humans went about their business silently, like robots. The otters parted further, funneling us four to the edge of the water, which slopped onto the bank before dropping back, dark oiliness reflecting the growing clouds above us.
Candy shuddered. "If they think I'm going swimming, they're out of their tiny minds."
"Oh, I don't think they have tiny minds at all," the Doctor said. "Not the slimies at any rate. In fact, I think they have rather large ones. Not their own, granted, but still pretty big. Think of them as time shares." He looked down at her and smiled.
"SETI!" I cried, just as Candy's eyes lit up. "Not settee—SETI! That computer thingy." That was about as specific as I could get.
"But that was abandoned years ago," Candy said. "My grandpa was really into it. Grandma kept complaining."
"Knew you'd get there eventually," said the Doctor. "SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. So, tell me what you know about it while we wait for the sandwiches and cakes to arrive."
"Is this just so you can look all smug and clever?" Candy asked.
"Yup, every time," I answered her, then turned to the Doctor. "SETI was American. Like me and Grace."
The Doctor just smiled as I continued, "It was some sort of government scheme to look for alien signals, radio messages. And 'cause it needed loads of computing to analyze the signals, they came up with a kind of time-share plan. Ordinary people all around the world sort of logged on to this network and let their computer do the work, or at least some of it, for them."
"Gold star, Tegan," beamed the Doctor.
"So you're saying," said Candy, "the slimies are like that—but with brains?"
"It fits the evidence. In their natural state, I bet they're pretty stupid—tiny little brains. But when they land on a planet, they find some smart creatures and hijack their brains for awhile—get them to do some of the thinking for them. They hive off some processing into—well, say otters, people, or whatever they can, and later the otters or people go back to the slimies, upload the results of all that thinking, and the slimies repeat it again with other otters."
"Or people," I finished, thinking of Grace strapped down. "It's horrible."
"Very effective, though."
I saw I wasn't the only one appalled by the Doctor's attitude. It didn't seem much like him.
"The slimies use the resources of the planets they infect—no need to carry around whopping great brains of their own. They begin with a head start, as it were." (I groaned) "Who better than the natives to know how the local environment works, where stuff it, the weather, the best coffee shop? Instinct becomes intelligence—just like that! Straight to Mayfair, collect two hundred pounds. Brilliant!"
Okay, it was just like him.
His face changed as the water began to swirl and turn. I took a step back, only to discover that the otters had enclosed us against the shore.
"You know what you said earlier," Candy whispered, "about the slimies being aquatic? How we'd be safe it we stayed away from the water…"
Suddenly, a huge, foamy splash broke the surface. A figure rose up, drenching us all. I steeled myself for one of the tendrils that had attacked Grace. But the thing that came toward us was the last thing any of us had expected to see.
It was Pallister.