PERILS
Chapter Twenty-Two
The two officers dragged the Doctor to one of the cells and dropped him onto the lone bench therein. Henry, having clammed up for many hours, but having no Time Lord talents to protect him from a rubber hose, had unclammed and admitted the merest shadow of a possibility that the Doctor, as fine a gentleman as he seemed, might have hidden the boy in the back of the van without his, Henry's, knowledge, much less permission. He had not been allowed to make a phone call but he had been permitted to give his phone number to the officers so that they could call his wife. "She's down in Lindale, near Rome, but she doesn't drive," he said, "that's pretty darned far anyway, and we don't have but the one vehicle at any rate, but you can talk to her. Our marriage certificate is on record in the County of Ordinary. You can call them."
*0*0*0*
That part of the Doctor that kept watch over the rest of him somehow informed him that it was time to awaken from his self-induced coma, and he slowly did so. The first thing he perceived, before even opening his eyes, was that he was lying on his back on a hard bench. Then he became aware that he was not alone, so he opened his eyes and sat up. He could see Henry sitting on the bench in the other cell, gazing back at him, looking as exhausted as the Doctor had felt before his unusual nap. Outside the cells was quite a crowd: Officers Darrach, McLean and Smith, as well as two other officers (with different insignia on their shoulders), a man in a suit, Miss MacDonald and the boy, whose hands gripped the bars as he stared, distressed, at the Doctor.
"You see?" declared Darrach, "the poor kid's terrified, just looking at him. We shouldn't have brought him here. He's been through enough."
"No," said Miss MacDonald, "he still hasn't told us his name but he wants the yellow-haired man."
"Pathetic," said McLean.
"No," insisted Miss MacDonald, "No, I don't see any coercion here. Look how many of us are here. What harm can there be? Please let the boy talk to the Doctor."
Darrach opened the cell door and the boy rushed into the Doctor's arms.
"I don't understand," said the Doctor, holding the boy lightly. "Until I saw him in the dirt, I didn't know this boy. I don't even know his name." He looked down at the boy. "What's your name?"
"Tommy Clark" was the muffled response.
"Tommy," continued the Doctor, "How did you get into the van without anyone seeing you?"
"Get his address," called McLean. Smith shushed him.
The Doctor bestowed a long look upon the small group on the other side of the bars, then gently freed himself from Tommy's grasp and held the boy out not quite at arms length. "Tommy, you're not in trouble. I need to know where you live."
"Don't send me back!"
"Tommy, I'm just trying to understand what happened. I'm not mad at you. Can you tell me what happened?"
"I seen you at the mill."
"You work at the mill?" Tommy nodded. "How old are you?"
"Eleven."
"Okay, you saw me at the mill and then what happened?"
"I followed you. I seen you talking to the salesman and then I seen you talking to him…." Tommy indicated Henry. "And I get into the back of his van when you ain't looking. I'm sorry. I can't get back out so when I got to go pee I did it in there. Only the one time, though, honest. And it got so hot I felt sick."
"Ask him why he ran away," suggested Miss MacDonald.
"I know why he ran away," said the Doctor, but asked anyway, "Tommy, why did you get into the van?"
"I seen you looking at me. I seen your face. You knew."
"What is he talking about?" demanded McLean.
"The mill," explained the Doctor. "They have little children working in horrible, horrible conditions. Horrible and dangerous. If I were a child in that mill, I would run away too. Quite frankly, if Tommy had asked me to get him out of there, I would have got him out of there."
"Away from his parents? Away from his family?"
"Tommy? Tell me about your family."
"I ain't got no family. I got a Ma, and she's got a boyfriend that pretends he's my Pa but he ain't my Pa. Sometimes I sleep rough. It beats bein' beat up. Please don't send me back!"
*0*0*0*
Neither Henry nor the Doctor had been formally charged with a crime. Henry's wife and the County of Ordinary had both confirmed the marriage of Henry and Louisa Miller (née Broussard), so despite Margaret's having innocently outed her father, and Forest's protestations that his father-in-law was a "pervert," Henry was released the next morning. "You take care of yourself," he told the Doctor, shaking hands through the bars of the Doctor's cell. "If you need me to speak up for you, this is my telephone number." He handed the Doctor a slip of paper not unlike the one Claudine had handed him so long ago… two weeks, maybe? The Time Lord had once more completely lost track of time.
Tommy's mother had no telephone but the mill did, and the police were able to confirm that a Tommy Clark was employed there and had not been to work for a couple of days. Miss MacDonald objected to his being sent back home, and the Doctor, who was not asked and at any rate would have had no say in the matter, objected just as strongly. Henry's offer to help in any way he could had been ridiculed. Tommy himself begged to be able to go with the Doctor, whose fate had not yet been decided, and the Doctor himself apologized that he was, at the moment, homeless, and could not care properly for a child.
"We can hold you for vagrancy," threatened McLean.
"Let him go with a warning," said the man in the suit, on his way out of the station. "Go arrest some thieves or murderers or something."
A very unhappy Doctor thus found himself at the edge of town with a dirt road at his feet (and without his sack of food, which would have gone bad by then anyway, he reasoned) and only the sky to tell him which in which direction to begin trudging. There was no use sticking out his thumb; the dirt road saw no traffic at all for the first two hours. The road wound about so much in the mountainous terrain that he wasn't at all sure he was still walking even approximately northward and after a third hour he sat down under a tree to contemplate his situation logically. There was no logical way to contemplate it, other than to admit he was lost, with almost no possibility of getting unlost without help, and even lower odds that help would materialize out of nowhere. He was hot, hungry and almost intolerably thirsty.
"Are you proud of me?" grinned the Master, leaning on a stick. "I am very proud of myself."
The Doctor was understandably startled but recovered himself enough to reply, "Aren't you always?"
"I almost went your bail," said the Master, "but there wasn't any. You never made it to court. How sad. I would have loved you to be in my debt. Well, now you are, anyway. Here I am to rescue you!"
"I didn't hear you materialize."
"Oh, I parked discreetly. I didn't want to give you time to run away again. I had a devil of a time finding you."
"And yet here you are." The Doctor stood up. "And you still haven't got your tissue compression eliminator. How do you propose to convince me to go with you?"
"Oh," said the Master, "I hate to admit it, but humans have invented quite a few handy weapons their own selves. Oh, look at me, I've been in Dixie too long!" He hefted the stick on which he'd been leaning; it wasn't a stick at all, but a Gewehr 98. "Mausers. Fine instruments, for their time."
"If you like that sort of thing."
"Right this way, Herr Doctor." The Master was grinning again as he waved the rifle to direct the Doctor, who had no choice but to obey. As the Doctor passed him, the Master used the rifle again, this time to thwack the Doctor across the lower back. The Doctor grunted and fell. "Just to show you I am serious," explained the Master.
"I knew that," croaked the Doctor, rising again and walking ahead of the Master to his now-visible TARDIS: a large tree that seemed out of place only by virtue of being a paper birch in an Appalachian forest of oak and red maple.