Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures [034] - Warlock by Andrew Cartmel

Author:Andrew Cartmel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426204336
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1995-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Benny collected the Mercedes from the airport car park at Heathrow where she’d left it. She paid a machine and drove out of the airport on the network of curving roads.

It was a clear drive down to Kent and in less than two hours she was back at the old house in Allen Road, cutting the headlights as she coasted into the open garage.

She found the Doctor sitting in there, using one of the old computer terminals, sitting on a battered chrome bar stool hunched over the keyboards, typing rapidly.

‘Why don’t you use the voice interpreter?’ Benny said, getting out of the car and going over to stand behind him in the shadows. If the Doctor was startled by her sudden arrival he gave no sign of it.

‘Exactly what I intend to do.’

‘I’ll bet. You’re so old-fashioned. You’re going to communicate by typing on the computer.’

‘I am not,’ said the Doctor. ‘I just have to boot it up first.’ Benny watched as he typed a line of cryptic letters in glowing white on the monochrome computer screen. Instantly the screen blossomed into brilliant colours, icons springing up at its margins. There was a loud and extremely distinct throat-clearing sound in the darkness behind Benny. She spun around, frightened, but even as she did so she realized there was no danger. She saw where the sound was coming from. A pair of ancient horn-loaded loudspeakers were jammed up against one wall between a broken lawnmower and a wheelbarrow heaped with rusting garden tools. The speakers were each about as big as a cocktail cabinet and had been manufactured back in the days when the idea of using two speakers to create stereo sound was a hot new thing. They were ancient, dinosaurs of technology. But Benny couldn’t deny that they sounded lifelike.

‘Ready for access,’ said the voice from the speakers. The voice of the computer.

‘Can’t you improve on that?’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ said the Doctor.

Benny shrugged disdainfully and took the keyboard from him. She rifled among a pile of computer accessories in an old shoebox and selected a mouse. She plugged it into the keyboard and moved the cursor around the screen until she found the sound icon. She clicked on it and the voice on the speaker said, ‘Interactive speech sample, testing.’

Benny clicked through a menu of options. ‘Testing,’ said the voice, sounding young and virile, then old and frail, then altering to voice samples of various well-known personalities. Finally Benny got it to sound like Cary Grant, but as if Cary had been drinking mescal for a fortnight in a Tijuana dive, and she passed the mouse back to the Doctor.

‘Satisfied?’ he said.

‘These small things are important. Now what are you up to?’

‘It looks as if you got about as far as you could pursuing warlock in New York. I’m starting our own investigation here.’

‘Waiting for instructions,’ said the computer in its drunken Cary Grant voice.

‘Access all data on the warlock file.’

‘Warlock accessed,’ said the computer.

‘How come it knows about warlock?’ said Benny.

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