Doctor Who_ The Turing Test Part 19

He didn't recoil, didn't even blink, but an answering sadness darkened all the shadows on his face.

'Sometimes I think that too,' he said. Then his voice resumed its normal briskness. 'But that's not what I'm talking about. What is, literally, above the sky?'

I thought for a moment, then said, 'You're trying to tell me you're from Mars, or something? I think I'd prefer the band of fallen angels.'

'Prefer whichever you like. Another world, real or metaphorical. The point is, they have to go back there.'

'You've told me that already. You haven't told me how, or why, or why I should be fighting on their side.'

'Why do you fight on the American side?'

'Because I'm American, and there's this thing called the draft, in case you haven't read about it. I don't get any choice.'

'So you're just a machine, obeying an instruction set?'

It took me a moment to work out that by 'instruction set' he just meant 'orders'. His language was odd like that, full of phrases that weren't quite right, didn't quite make sense, until you thought about them.

I denied that I was a machine. 'I'm a human being!' I told him. 'Why do you think I went mad? Why do you think I crash-landed my plane and broke a healthy young man's legs? Because I can't obey an "instruction set"! Because I'm an American who doesn't want to kill Italians and Germans and Frenchmen and Romanians and Russians just because they happen to be on the wrong side, or living on the wrong side. The people we bomb are innocent and we rip their guts out! How do you think I feel about that?'

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully, and muttered, 'You'll do.'

I was so relieved at having pa.s.sed the test, and at having been able to speak what I thought without its having been denied, that I completely forgot that I hadn't been trying to be accepted. By the time I remembered, it seemed to be too late to say no.

Chapter Twenty-two.

In the next three days more things were explained to me. None of them were any use. I learned that you could question the Doctor's decisions at any time, but it would always turn out that you'd made a mistake. I learned that he had an 'affinity' with the strangers Turing's description and that his reasons for being with them in Dresden had more to do with that affinity, and a kind of pathological curiosity, than any particular desire to help them. I learned that Turing was in love with the Doctor, an excited, hopeless, s.e.xual yet nons.e.xual, adoring, stupid, profound love that had turned his whole life upside down.

'Do you think he feels anything for me?' asked Turing.

'I'm sorry?' We were sitting at a table in that restaurant on Chemnitzstra.s.se, eating the vinegar-coated cabbage. It was making me feel slightly sick. We spoke quietly, so that no one would notice the alien English language. The Doctor was on a stool by the only window that wasn't broken and boarded up, staring at the pa.s.sers-by like a cat examining pa.s.sing birds. Perhaps he was watching out for Elgar. He hadn't said he was, but we visited this restaurant every day, and the Doctor always looked out the window, so Turing and I had drawn our own conclusions. We knew it couldn't be the cabbage.

The strangers weren't with us. They never came out, but remained encrypted in the steel-andstone chamber that they'd hacked out from the damp catacombs under the church, no doubt doing whatever it is that fallen angels from the cold heavens above us do when they're not pretending to be human.

'The Doctor. Do you think he has any human feelings?' Turing's face was earnest, excited, and innocent. A piece of limp cabbage adhered to his upper lip. His tongue kept flicking out, trying to move it, failing, then making a new attempt. Turing was, probably, oblivious to the process. I stared, fascinated, while he elaborated: 'If he has human feelings then he might do you think he might? take me with him.'

I frowned. 'Where to? He doesn't even know where he lives. Whether it's Outer s.p.a.ce or the Inner Circle of h.e.l.l. And do you really want to live in either?'

Yet again he didn't catch the irony. 'I don't know. It might be better than here.'

I noticed that the cabbage was gone from his lip. 'Better than a stinking restaurant in a defeated country which might be bombed to h.e.l.l and back any night? Perhaps. But better than home? Warm fire, logs, thatched cottage, whatever you English have.'

Turing smiled. 'A dream, I think.'

I knew it was. But I still had hope, back then.

'Hey! You two!' The Doctor's voice, from the window. He came over to the table and put a guiding hand on Turing's arm, spoke in a stage whisper. 'They're coming! Alan you and I need to disappear. h.e.l.ler watch them!'

Turing got up and he and the Doctor pushed their way through a heavy, dark-paneled wooden door into the dull steam of the kitchens. I heard a rapid, angry conversation in German at the same time as Greene and Colonel Elgar walked in through the front.

I recognized them from the Doctor's description. Greene was a heavy, cantankerous man, ugly-featured and peak-browed. He looked anxious and confident, self-satisfied, sensitive and cruel. Elgar looked like a wax dummy: the curve of his thinly cropped head, the gla.s.s of his eye, the set and carriage of his body under the German uniform, were too perfect to be real. He was a machine on the march, a digest of everything that wasn't human. They didn't talk very much, and what little they said was in German. I waited while they waited, watched them watching, trying not to be too obvious, trying to be a good spy. After about half an hour I tired of sitting there under the suspicious gaze of the German waiters and shuffled out, hoping I wouldn't be asked anything by the very large doorman, who had argued with Elgar and Greene on their way in. He breathed sour breath on me but didn't speak.

In the street I waited some more, feeling colder and colder. For lack of anyone else to talk to, I talked to an iron lamppost that stood on the other side of the street from the restaurant. Perhaps, I told the lamppost, s.h.i.+vering, an Italian posting hadn't been so bad after all. I propounded a racial theory to it, worthy of the n.a.z.is: perhaps one of the reasons the Germans were the bad-tempered villains they were reputed to be was the cold, gray hardness of their winter days. The easy-going Italians too were molded by their climate. Their wh.o.r.es were soft and supple: German wh.o.r.es, I imagined, would be hard and angular, full of turning-on and putting-off devices...

At last Greene and Elgar left the restaurant, and I followed them to and fro along Chemnitzstra.s.se until they selected somewhere to stay. Then I returned to the church, dressed in one of the strangers' purloined SS uniforms, and went out again in the middle of the night and arrested Greene and Elgar at the Cohns' house. The rest is history, you've read it already, but, like most history, it's incomplete, and written by the people who happened to be alive at the end of it.

I don't know whether Mrs Cohn died. I didn't even know she was there. Greene never told me.

Three hours later, I was standing in the church and waiting for my good ol' American colleagues in G Wing to drop their bombs on me and blow the whole crazy situation to h.e.l.l. I'd already sat through a half-hour of Greene, the Doctor and Turing discussing the moralities and possibilities. They were very good at discussion, I'd decided, and much less good at action. The strangers remained silent and slightly threatening, their mysteries unexplained. The only plan of action I'd heard was a complex, mathematical, incomprehensible double-brained lecture from Turing and the Doctor, the gist of which was that the shock waves from the exploding bombs would interfere with the interference from Elgar that was stopping the strangers going wherever they wanted to go which was why we were going to leave Elgar in the crypt when the bombs went off. The lower the better, apparently. The Doctor didn't want to kill him, if he could help it. What was happening to the Art Deco submarine-like chamber in its s.p.a.ce beneath the crypt, and what the strangers were going to do, exactly, hadn't been too clear.

I'd heard the air-raid sirens first I was attuned to them, I guess. For the first time, I wished I was in one of the bombers. It seemed a h.e.l.l of a lot more dangerous down here.

We went outside Turing and Greene first, the Doctor and I following, the strangers getting from one location to another in that flowing, silent, unnoticeable way of theirs. The raid was well under way, flame-light brighter than moonlight and infinitely more b.l.o.o.d.y. The church building squatted above us, its solid stone seeming to dance in the growing firelight. It was obscene, alien, a huge spider waiting to gobble us up, yet the Doctor didn't seem afraid of it. He was arguing with Greene, their bodies bobbing vehemently like two insects in a mating dance. Fragments of dialog drifted over to me: more philosophy, morality, consciousness. I looked at my three dark, tall companions. They looked less incongruous in SS uniforms than they had in priestly robes. The military ironmongery suited them, glinting in the bomb light: it made them seem unreal, which they probably were. They looked back with sorrow in their eyes. Or perhaps it was just an effect of the light.

Then the church exploded, windows cascading outward in a thick spray of fire, and Greene bolted in, right into the centre of it, with one of the strangers in pursuit with a gun. That was the one with the roofing slate buried in his shoulder. The sight of him moving forward with what should have been a fatal injury, the gun still in his hand, scared me as much as it scared Greene.

The Doctor screamed after the stranger, 'Don't kill him!' and he didn't; but that wasn't quite enough to rea.s.sure me.

A moment later the Doctor was next to me, pressing a hard, cold piece of metal into my hand. 'If Elgar gets out we'll have to disable him,' he said.

And as you will know, Greene got Elgar out, and, as you will have guessed, I lifted the cold, hard piece of metal, and watched Elgar start to scream. The Doctor caught him from the other side. The strangers joined in. Elgar's arm began to burn. I knew straightaway that the Doctor had lied to me. We weren't disabling Elgar: we were killing him. I I was killing him. I was standing there, killing an intelligent being, on the say-so of people I didn't understand and didn't entirely trust. It was just like being in the US Air Force. was killing him. I was standing there, killing an intelligent being, on the say-so of people I didn't understand and didn't entirely trust. It was just like being in the US Air Force.

Then Greene came out of the church and started waving his revolver around as if it were the business end of a hose. I've never been so relieved to see a man. I didn't want to kill anybody, and now I had every excuse to dive for cover, which is what I did, bruising my cheek on the rough ground that was already starting to feel hot. When I looked up, the Doctor was down and Greene was running away. For some reason it was Turing the only one of us who was unarmed who set off in pursuit. All three the burning Elgar, the frightened Greene, the bizarre Turing vanished into the relative darkness of the street.

'There's still a chance!' snapped the Doctor, rolling upright with remarkable rapidity for a man who'd just been shot. I couldn't see any blood, and concluded he'd been playing possum. A quick thinker, obviously. And used to being shot at, which told me quite a lot about him. 'Quick!' he snapped. 'Into the crypt! We'll use the chamber!'

I followed them. Others might have been curious about the science and mathematics of it, or the beauty of it, or might've wanted to find out the truth after all the excitement. I just wanted to stay alive. The crypt was deep. I knew a lot about what high-explosive bombs could do to you, and there were a lot of them falling all around us.

Nothing happened.

I didn't know what was supposed to have happened, but I could tell from the Doctor's grim-faced determination that something was wrong. The Deco curves of the construct hadn't glittered, hummed, bent, or done whatever they were supposed to do. The strangers were still there, as sorrowful and robed as before.

'Elgar's still here,' said the Doctor. 'And he's still blocking the signal.'

'So you're going to have to kill him?' I said, after a decent interval.

'Yes.'

There was a long silence, followed by an irregular chiming sound, like an out-oforder carriage clock. I counted the chimes: when the count reached thirteen I realized that it was someone knocking at the door. One of the strangers walked into the darkness around the entrance he looked as if he were walking down, though I knew the floor sloped up toward that way. Geometry was strange in the strangers' excavation.

I heard Turing's voice. 'He's with Elgar.' The voice echoed in the long stone-andmetal cavern: 'gar gar gar'. 'He's not dead (ed ed ed).'

The Doctor and I looked at one another. 'We're going to have to catch him.'

'I'm not going to help this time. I don't like killing people.'

His eyes held mine, hypnotic. 'We'll see.'

Chapter Twenty-three.

'We'll have to find a dead body.'

He seemed to be talking to the strangers this time, which was just as well. They didn't say much, but the tallest one, the one who had been injured while pursuing Greene into the church and who still had a foot-long roofing slate protruding impossibly from his shoulder, started off toward the flames. I shuddered. With Dresden burning around us, it seemed unlikely there would be a shortage.

We were approaching the river. There had been no way to follow Turing's directions to the cellar: the whole street was on fire. Even getting to the river was hazardous. The city was a bonfire, white-flamed buildings crumbling like Christmas cake. In the intervals between the roar of flames and falling masonry particularly as we neared the river, where there was more s.p.a.ce I could hear the scream of overloaded engines. I could even smell aviation fuel. The panicky young men of G Wing were above me, destroying a city and being destroyed. I knew the feeling.

The tall stranger returned, the slate replaced by a drooping corpse wrapped around his neck like a m.u.f.f, like one of those dead foxes favoured by a certain kind of society woman before the war, the eyes still wide and staring, as this man's were. I vomited.

'Good!' said the Doctor cheerfully. 'With a blanket around the head he'll look as good as new.'

'All it needs is your clothes.' This was Turing. Wiping my face on my sleeve, I eyed him with cold horror, but it did no good. The horror of it had started to pa.s.s him by. I knew the sort of man. They busied themselves with the instrumentation of life, with charting a course and reaching a destination. Dead bodies were incidental.

It was the Doctor who demurred. 'This jacket's been with me a long, long, time,' he said. 'Since before I can remember.'

'If you don't do it,' I said, 'one or the other of them will kill you.'

The Doctor admitted that this might inconvenience him a little, and agreed to part with the jacket.

Ashamed of having spoken and joined in the tacit conspiracy of killing, I hung back as we carried on along a wind-lashed street poor cottages, windows broken and walls blackened, but intact. At the end there was water, a ca.n.a.l with a towpath. We walked along it, far too near to a burning factory building on the other side. Flames shot up from charred brickwork and exploded panes of gla.s.s. A chimney hung perilously in the midst of the fire, waiting to fall. It seemed to be swaying. I could feel the heat.

'There!'

I could see Greene then. Elgar was with him. They were standing on a sort of jetty, set into a brick tunnel under the burning factory. I don't think they realized the danger. Several people were shouting at them from our side, but they weren't taking any notice.

Greene, however, saw when the strangers advanced and dumped the Doctor's faked corpse in the ca.n.a.l. The Doctor and I hung back with Turing, keeping to the shadow of a frayed tree. I was pretty sure he couldn't see us, let alone recognize the man he thought he'd killed. He looked stricken, as if it had worked.

'A boat!' said the Doctor suddenly.

I could see the boat, a wooden c.o.c.kroach of a thing with two oars, tied to a stanchion by a frayed cable.

'It will need two of us,' gabbled the Doctor. 'Alan give me your coat! And h.e.l.ler take your uniform jacket off. He hasn't seen you except at the arrest so he won't recognize you straightaway.'

I stamped my foot on to the hard stone of the wharf. 'I'm not getting involved.'

The Doctor was shuffling his way into Turing's jacket.

'I don't even know which side is which,' I pointed out. 'How do we know your friends are the good guys?'

The Doctor grabbed my shoulders and treated me to another of his hypnotic stares. 'I know,' he said. 'Believe me, I know.'

'Why should I believe you?' But I did believe. There was no rationality to it: I had faith. It was a choice. I could let Elgar slip, risk allowing him to kill the Doctor and the strangers, and quite possibly me, and then who knew? Or I could help the Doctor to kill him.

I removed my uniform jacket, and stepped out of the shadows, down the worn steps that led to the rowboat. The Doctor handed me that cold, cold piece of metal, and we set off for the other side.

I hoped Elgar wouldn't get on the boat, but he did.

I hoped Greene would push us into the water when I drew the weapon, but he didn't notice it at first, because he was staring down the ca.n.a.l where the body he thought was the Doctor had floated away. Suddenly Elgar turned, and I saw he was blind.

The Doctor made a movement with his hand, and the flames started.

Last time I could argue that I'd been tricked. It had been the Doctor doing the killing. Now I knew what I was doing. Now it was murder. I watched as the flesh fell away and the ululating screams choked off. I watched the eyes as they melted and knew that there was no difference between this thing and a man.

I heard the Doctor shouting, felt a hand tug my arm, pus.h.i.+ng me off balance and over the side. I fell into the cold murky water. For one glorious minute, as I struggled to right myself and catch my breath, I thought that the Doctor had saved me from this execution. Then I saw the Viking pyre that the rowboat had become, the melted remains of Elgar sinking into hissing water, and realized he had merely saved my life.

I dipped down, deep, deep, and tried to drown myself, but he saved me again, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Chapter Twenty-four.

It took us an hour to get back to the church. The city was still burning in the distance. The nearer streets were simply charred, as if the Christmas cake had been left in the oven too long. Embers flew like small meteors, and the air smelled of charcoal. We all coughed a lot, even the strangers. There were bodies around, obscene charred things. We tried hard not to look at them, and all failed, I think.

Greene, the Doctor, and I, who had all taken a dip, slowly dried out in the heat. I couldn't look at Greene: shame choked me. I'm not sure why he walked with us. Perhaps there was nowhere else to go.

Turing sidled up to me. 'Do you think the Doctor is human?' he asked.

I stared at him. 'Why does it matter?'

Turing stared back, amazed. 'It matters to him.' He frowned. 'You see, if he's human then '

'I've just killed someone, Turing.'

He patted my shoulder! 'I know, I know. That's what I mean. Look, I have this theory. If you can't tell the difference between an intelligent machine and a human being, then the machine must be human. Yes?'

'So, I've just killed someone. In cold blood. On the Doctor's say-so.'

'But if you can tell the difference, then it isn't human. Now, can you tell the difference?'