PERILS

Chapter Twenty-Seven

As the effects of the drug wore off, the Doctor was more and more aware of the pain in his right cheek and forehead, and his back was beginning to hurt more intensely. He couldn't stop the Master from embracing him, which intensified the back pain, then bestowing an avuncular kiss upon his forehead, which the Doctor did not return. "Goodbye, my dear Doctor. I shall miss you. Our spats, our spars, all of our games – I shall miss them terribly. Goodbye, one last time!" The Master climbed into his motorboat and zoomed away in the downpour, back toward the island.

As soon as the Master was a fair distance off, the Doctor heard, over the fading rumble of its engine, a rumbling and splashing on the other side of the San Marcos. He stumbled to the gunwale and saw a seaplane approaching. He looked around the deck, was able to locate what he hoped was the signal bridge and headed toward it. He was right: it was indeed the signal bridge, and the flag bags were even easier to find. They were hung alphabetically, in labeled canvas bags. He knew what he wanted by sight – a red square within a white square within a blue square – but could not for the life of him (and it was the life of him at stake) remember its name, so he opened every bag, beginning with A, until he reached W and had the whiskey flag in hand. Before he could hoist it on the signal halyard, the seaplane had taken off, was overhead and had launched a torpedo, which just missed but still shook the battleship so violently that the Doctor was knocked down and almost dropped the flag into the sound. He caught it, took a deep breath and began to hoist the flag. A second torpedo struck the deck. The Doctor went down again, but the flag was up, so he scrambled back to the flag bags and tried to use them as buffers.

He waited for a third torpedo but none came. The seaplane landed and roared alongside what remained of the San Marcos. Realizing what the sound had to be, the Doctor came out from among the flag bags and down onto the deck to meet his two rescuers. "Hello," he said, trying to smile. The rain was making him squint. "I'm the Doctor."

"I think," said the bombardier who helped the Doctor into the seaplane, "you mean that you need a doctor."

*0*0*0*

The Doctor was transported through the rain in the seaplane to Greenbury Point, where he frustrated a handful of naval officers by being unable to explain how he had come to be on a target ship at such an inconvenient moment. He'd had time enough but insufficient energy to think of a credible story (if he told the truth, he would certainly be detained, possibly in an insane asylum), so he offered none. "I can't remember" was all he said, no matter what they asked, except, of course, for his name, which didn't satisfy them either. After a few hours he realized he was being detained anyway, under suspicion of espionage, and that his initially somewhat benevolent questioning was becoming a rather belligerent interrogation. His request for counsel was ignored. Unsure of what his rights were, with the methylpentynol all but out of his system, but now quite exhausted, the Doctor needed some time alone to work out a story. His interrogators, who had taken his coat, never left him alone; they grilled him in shifts.

Finally, the Doctor closed his eyes and drifted off. When the interrogator of the moment shook him, he refused to stir. He didn't dare go into a self-induced coma for fear of being hospitalized and drugged (he'd had quite enough of that!) but he managed to block out everything but his own thoughts and buy himself some time to organize them. When he opened his eyes, he had what he hoped was a reasonable tale to tell.

"I remember a little now," he began. "It's coming back to me. I was drugged, you know."

His interrogator held up a hand to stop him, went to the door of the brightly lit room and waved two more men in, a short older man and a tall younger one. "Go on," he said.

"I was hitchhiking from Florida, trying to get to New York, and I'd…."

"Where in Florida?"

"Where in… oh, Kissimmee."

"Not Pensacola?"

"I don't even know where Pensacola is."

"You're sure about that?"

"Yes, I don't know where it is and I wasn't there. I was in Kissimmee. And I got as far as North Carolina…."

"Not Pensacola."

Frustrated, the Doctor insisted, "No, not Pensacola. Anyway, when I was hitchhiking in North Carolina, this guy picked me up. He said he was going as far as Baltimore. I figured that was better than nothing." The three men nodded. "We stopped for coffee somewhere in Virginia and I guess he drugged me there because the next thing I knew we were on a motorboat, headed for that battleship. He didn't rob me. He did hit me." The Doctor indicated his face and his back. "He left me on the ship and the rest you know. He never said why." The Doctor stopped and looked at the three men, trying to assess whether they were buying his story.

The one who'd been interrogating him asked, "Why didn't you just tell us this before?"

"I told you: I was drugged. I couldn't remember anything."

"Are you ready to tell us your name now?"

"Yes, sir," agreed the Doctor. "Richard Nixon."

The two men who had just come in whispered together, and then the older one said, "We did find a PATH train ticket in his pocket, along with, well, this is weird, but he had an awful lot of stuff in his pockets, but no kind of identification, no driver's license, no business card, no little black book. Just two scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. One has a name and a Georgia address too, but the name isn't Dixon."

"Nixon," said the Doctor.

"Anyway the weirdest thing is, the ticket has tomorrow's date on it."

"That's why I was so eager to get to New York," bluffed the Doctor.

"And one more thing: cartridges, eight millimeter, rifle ammo looks like, five of them."

The three men stared at the Doctor.

"Long story," said the Doctor. "It's not what you think."

"What were you doing in Florida?" asked the interrogator.

"Visiting my friend Lena."

"Is she your girlfriend?"

"No, just a friend."

"Is she a spy too?"

"I'm not a spy and I am sure she isn't a spy either."

The interrogator leaned on the wooden table in front of the Doctor's hard wooden chair. "Isn't Lena a German name?"

'I wouldn't know but I can tell you my friend Lena is not German."

"Isn't it so that you were checking out our new facilities in Pensacola?"

"I know nothing about that. I told you, I don't know where Pensacola is. I was in Kissimmee."

"And whose phone number is that on the paper, the Georgia number?"

"I was visiting my friend Henry… and his wife."

"What's his wife's name?"

This caught the Doctor up short. "Wow, don't tell Henry! I have forgotten her name. I only met her the one time." He hoped he wouldn't be asked for a description. In truth, he'd not been privy to the calls either to her or to the County of Ordinary, and Henry had never mentioned her by name.

When they asked him where he lived, he gave Mrs. Salt's address but added that he had no permanent residence. When they asked him where he was from, he quickly told them, "Wales."

The tall young man asked the short older man, "Whose side are they on?" The short older man shook his head.

"I'm a bit chilly," said the Doctor. "May I please have my coat?"

The three men looked at him, not for the first time, as if he were insane. Late August in Maryland is anything but chilly and the room was not air conditioned. Nonetheless, they brought him his coat, after a long debate among the three of them about whether or not to restuff the pockets (which they grudgingly did, minus the five cartridges, which they kept). "We're going to call those telephone numbers," averred the interrogator.

"I understand," was all the Doctor said.

Then, for the first time in many hours, the Doctor was left alone in his wooden chair, in the brightly lit room. He put his head down on the wooden table and closed his eyes.

*0*0*0*

The tall young man who had observed the Doctor's interrogation returned to the interrogation room to tell the Doctor he was being released and warn him not to mess with the United States Navy.

"Do you think someone could give me a ride to where I can hitchhike to New York?"

"Not my job," said the young man, curtly. He indicated that the Doctor should follow him. They trotted up and down some gleaming hallways and then emerged into morning rain – was it raining again or still raining? The brightly lit room had been windowless but the Doctor wasn't at all surprised to realize he'd been in that room overnight. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn he'd been detained for a week – in fact, he asked the young man what day it was, just to be sure, but the only response he got was, "If you were drugged, you drugged yourself – probably with rubbing alcohol."

A uniformed cadet who (unlike anyone else the Doctor had met so far at Greenbury) introduced himself as Midshipman Fourth Class Purvis. "I understand you can't wait to get out of here, right?"

"I've been waiting," replied the Doctor, affably enough but in truth he was beyond eager to be on his way and glad already not to be relentlessly pestered with silly questions.

"Follow me, sir," said Purvis. Impressed to be addressed as "sir" the Doctor followed him in the rain through some pretty drab, muddy terrain to the inland end of the facility. Purvis left him without so much as a "seeya" on the other side of the gate at Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard.