The Road to Shalka Part 3: Skypigs

[Soldeed]

The planet Agrathus. A sparkling jewel in the murk of the cosmos, its crystal lakes and rivers filled with leaping silver fish, its rolling green hills and forests a peaceful haven for a colourful medley of flying, climbing and grazing creatures, its towering snow-capped mountains a gleaming, pristine wilderness. The planet's sparse population of human-like inhabitants lived a comfortable, stress-free existence, the meagre income from their simple trades supplemented by exorbitant fees charged to a handful of super-rich tourists.

Those holidaymakers fit enough to make the steep eight mile hike up the winding track from the hoverpad were always keen to visit the famous hot springs of Onsilar. There, they could relax in the steaming, bubbling waters, safe from the chilly breeze rolling across the surrounding grasslands, and take in the staggering view of the river valley far below, and the sunlit peaks of the mountain range stretching away into the distance.

On this particular day, the main pool was the setting for a game which to some extent resembled water polo, but which chiefly involved a great deal of screaming, laughing, pushing, ducking and splashing on the part of a dozen or so young locals. The two newcomers paid them no mind, but pressed on up the slope, turning off the track and pushing their way through the swaying two foot grasses, their heads turning and craning as they scanned the hillside. At last, a full fifty yards from the path, they came upon the prone figure of a man.

The two young men exchanged glances. This immaculately apparelled individual with the ornate black and gold waistcoat, silken silver-grey shirt and diamond tiepin was not what they had been led to expect. He lay sheltered by the surrounding grass, his head cushioned on a rolled-up black coat, his hands linked across his stomach, the sun illuminating his narrow, quick features, and appeared to be fast asleep.

"Is that him?" whispered Jordo.

"How should I know?" Seram was impatient with this whole expedition. "Ask him."

Jordo stepped forward, and cleared his throat shyly.

"Ahem. Excuse me. Are you the Doctor?"

The man's eyelids didn't so much as flicker.

"No. Go away."

His visitor hesitated, looking round at his brother for support, but nerved himself to persevere.

"Please. We need your help."

"Tough. I'm on holiday."

"It's our youngest brother. He's disappeared."

The Doctor's eyes flicked suddenly open, and Jordo found himself stepping back from their dispassionate, unshifting gaze, but the man on the ground didn't stir a muscle, his hands remaining linked immoveably on his stomach.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I really am. But it's my assistant's birthday this week and I promised her a holiday." His eyes snapped shut. "And whatever you may have seen on that rotten vidshow on Channel 12, I don't actually regard every missing person in the universe as my responsibility."

Jordo shrank away, defeated, but Seram pushed his way forward.

"You know, it's not much to ask. A little help and advice. I think it's the least you owe us. Most people have to pay a fortune to take their holidays here."

He loomed over the man on the ground, his foot inches from the side of his head, but the Doctor still looked as if he was talking in his sleep.

"Then it's lucky for me the Council of Elders voted me lifetime freedom of the island."

"That was eleven hundred years ago!"

"Yes, well, they knew I was a Time Lord when they made the decree. I think you'll find it's still legally valid."

Seram fumed, and was gathering himself to start raising his voice, but Jordo laid a gentle hand on his brother's shoulder.

"No, Seram, it's true what he says. We've no right to expect him to help us, he doesn't owe us a thing. Come on. We'll try talking to the constable again."

Seram resisted stiffly for a moment, glaring down at the apparently comatose man at his feet, but allowed himself to be drawn away and they made a disconsolate progress back down the hill. The Doctor lay quiet, warmed by the sun and cooled by the breeze, until another set of footsteps came rushing up the slope towards him.

"Doctor!"

He blinked, and pushed himself up on his elbows to watch Jasmine, heavily swaddled in an enormous fluffy white towel, sodden hair trailing around her shoulders, come tearing through the grass towards him. Her wide, dark eyes were bright with excitement and her young face lit up by her unrestrained, exultant smile. She hugged the towel tightly around her and hopped from one foot to the other as the wind chilled her damp skin.

"We won!" she announced. "Did you see?"

"No," admitted the Doctor, the habitual hard line of his mouth curving upwards in an almost-smile. "But from what I heard there was a disgraceful amount of cheating going on."

"I didn't realise you were so famous here. A lot of them wanted me to get them your autograph."

"I hope you told them to..."

"Yes, I did. Anyway, I've been invited to go up to the source of the spring. Apparently you can jump in and it sort of swooshes you along this channel and drops you back down into the pool. They tell me it's what they call a 'rush'".

"Do they?" The Doctor lifted his head to eye the four youngsters, three boys and a girl, who waited shyly at a safe distance. He had been concerned her ludicrous Victorian swimsuit might be the target of ridicule, but these people had seen many alien tourists and were used to cultures even stranger than that of 19th century England. "Well, no doubt the teenage misfits you've fallen in with know what they're doing. Have a nice time."

A dazzling smile, and she was dashing off back to her friends.

"Dinner in the village square?" he called after her. "Sunset?"

She turned and nodded cheerfully, still back-pedalling away, then completed a 360-degree turn and raced off.

The Doctor sat up, breathed in the sweet, clean air, and for a few seconds gazed out contentedly at the heartbreakingly beautiful view of the mountains across the valley. Silence. Peace.

He frowned.

He looked over at the path down which his visitors had disappeared, then back at the view, this time with little pleasure. His mouth twisted down in a grimace and he gave a resigned sigh.

"Oh, damn."

The Doctor jumped up, shook out his coat, and trotted off after them down the hillside.

[Soldeed]

It was a warm, still evening in the village square when Geris, a wealthy young Demeran properties broker, spotted the girl sitting alone on the terrace.

She was remarkable. A sweet, rounded face, wide dark eyes, skin that shone golden brown in the glow of the streetlamps. Her elegant, robelike grey dress and ornately coiled hairstyle couldn't conceal her tender youth. It was hard to be certain of her race, and there were always physical compatibility issues with girls you met on foreign planets, but she appeared to have everything he was looking for, and after all he wasn't thinking in terms of setting up housekeeping.

He strolled over, straightening his insanely expensive, perfectly tailored suit and brushing a curl of hair from his brow.

"Mind if I join you?"

Those fine eyes turned towards him.

"Not if you don't mind my jabbing you in the face with a fork."

Jasmine watched the young man's flustered attempt to preserve dignity in his retreat and drummed her fingers on the table. That had been uncalled for, she knew, but she was worried. The Doctor was an hour late, and while if he had been embroiled in the intricacies of the Tardis' dematerialisation circuit that would have been nothing out of the ordinary, in this place, where he seemed to have genuinely rid himself of all distractions, it was something new.

"Oh, Doctor," she murmured, "What have you done now?" She sniffed the air and screwed her face up. "And what's that smell?"

This had been clawing at the edges of her consciousness for a while, even as she fretted over the Doctor's absence. A kind of smoky, metallic odour, that clung to the inside of her throat and stung the back of her nose. It didn't seem to be bothering anyone else, but it seemed so strange in this world where the only smells were those of flowers and good cooking.

A rumble of thunder. People sitting at the open air tables in front of the restaurant fidgeted, peering up speculatively at the black sky, reaching for coats and gathering up glasses ready to rush indoors. Jasmine stood, and watched a broken blue streak of light stab its way up from the old fort at the edge of town.

She was away before anyone could realise she hadn't paid for her drink.

* * * * *

There were not many old buildings on Agrathus. Until a few hundred years ago its people had been largely nomadic, roaming the generous wilderness with little use for permanent stone structures. The fort was an exception, an ancient stronghold and sanctuary for the local clan, and the Doctor had shown her round on their first day here, annoying the guide by loudly explaining the errors in the free leaflet.

There was no one here now, though. Jasmine scrambled through the great breach in the collapsed outer wall, regretting her decision to wear something impracticably classy for dinner. During her travels and adventures with the Doctor her concept of decency had relaxed to the point where she was comfortable in an outfit which showed her ankles and even a glimpse of her collarbone. Now, she wished she was back in that throat to ankle trouser suit. She stood alone and unhappy in the roofless interior, surrounded by signs explaining where there had once been corridors, chambers, dungeons.

"Jasmine?"

She whirled, and faced the young man who was clambering in through the breach after her. His simple clothing and bland, innocent expression marked him out as a local.

"It is you, isn't it? The Doctor's assistant? You must have come to look for him."

"Who are you?"

"Jordo." He looked shamefaced. "I'm the one who asked him to come here. I was hoping he could find out what happened to my brother. But now my other brother has disappeared, and I can't find the Doctor either."

Jasmine folded her arms, her face still.

"You called him here?"

"I had to..."

Her scowl was enough to silence him.

"You just couldn't leave him alone, could you? He was having a nice time, don't you understand that? I've never known him so relaxed. I even saw him smiling and being polite to someone yesterday. But oh no, you had to come whining up to him with all your little problems."

"Well..." Jordo looked lost, as if unable to decide whether to be aggrieved or apologetic. "He didn't have to help if he didn't want to."

Jasmine looked away contemptuously.

"Of course he did."

She strode by, and started climbing out of the fort.

"Come on, then. Where did you see him last?"

"He... um..." Following close behind her, Jordo gestured vaguely in the direction of the squat rectangular concrete structure on the other side of the street. "I think he..."

But Jasmine wasn't listening. She was pointing, open-mouthed at the building.

"What's that? Where did it come from?"

"What do you mean? That's the registration bureau. It's been there for years."

"No it hasn't! It wasn't there when I went into the fort."

She looked round to see Jordo staring at her as if she were a lunatic.

"Aah!"

Jasmine waved a hand in disgust and left him behind, plunging in through the open archway at the concrete building's centre. There was someone here. For a moment she thought it was the Doctor, then she knew it wasn't, then...

A stooped, frail figure, wrapped in a shapeless black coat and battered old hat, leaning heavily on a stick. When a crumpled benevolent visage turned to face her, Jasmine drew in a breath and seemed paralysed, unable to release it, for the face was a lost memory from her childhood.

"Doctor!"

The old man stumbled back as with a gasp she rushed forward and wrapped her arms about his chest.

"Oof! Good heavens. Young woman, control yourself..."

[Soldeed]

With a jingle of chainmail and tramping of hobnailed boots against the flagstones, two guards used the hafts of their spears to goad Anna forward. She was in her early twenties, dressed mannishly in sturdy walking boots and khaki trousers and shirt, and her dynamically drawn features, sharp eyes and curtly cropped blonde hair made her striking rather than beautiful. She stumbled and snarled at each shove, and seemed constantly on the point of rounding on them like a leopard, but with surly obedience allowed herself to be driven along. In the murk of the cramped stone passageway, barely alleviated by guttering torches set into iron sconces in the wall, they marched up to a third guard at his post in front of a heavy wooden door.

"One to be held overnight," rapped out one of her escorts. "For interrogation in the morning."

"Right." The guard on the door winced at the return of circulation as he shifted from his comfortable position leaning in the corner. "Just a minute."

"How's the other prisoner?" asked the third man. "He looked even stranger than this one."

Anna perked up instantly, listening. The other prisoner?

"He's fine now. He's writing on the wall."

"Writing?"

"Yeah, it was unbelievable. He wouldn't settle till I gave him a bit of chalk."

The two soldiers sblack personed at this.

"You gave him a bit of chalk? What, are you the prisoners' serving boy now? Are you bringing him a cup of hot milk before he goes to bed?"

The guard scowled and shook his head.

"You weren't here, you don't know what it was like. He was going berserk in there, yelling and screaming, banging his food dish against the bars. 'Chalk! Chalk! Chalk!' he kept shouting. I threatened to go in there and sort him out, but he just kept saying all he wanted was a bit of chalk and then he'd shut up. It was worth it in the end just for a bit of peace. He's been quiet as a lamb since he got what he wanted."

Anna frowned, puzzled. Bits of this sounded like the man she was looking for. Bits of it certainly didn't. She tried standing on tiptoe to peek through the tiny viewslit in the door but could see nothing.

"Ah, in a hurry are you?" smirked the guard. He drew back the heavy bolts and pushed open the door. "Well, in you go, and get plenty of rest. You've got a long, hard day ahead of you when the magistrate gets back tomorrow. He just loves a good interrogation."

Anna's look of scorn was withering.

"You... you're just not worth the effort of a witty retort."

The guard gave a strangled cry as she grasped his nose between her first and second fingers, twisted ninety degrees, then released him with a sharp upward jerk. He stumbled back into the corner and Anna was shoved violently forward into the cell by the butt of a spear between her shoulders. The door slammed shut at her back.

The dungeon was a cavernous chamber, that looked as if its architect had overestimated local criminal activity. Chains hung forlornly unused from the walls, and the stone bench which took up one entire wall, with leg irons laid out in front for thirty occupants, was empty. The sole illumination was a narrow shaft of sunlight from the little square barred window high up in one wall, and it lit up the sole occupant, standing scratching away at the stones with his fist-sized hunk of chalk.

Anna knew disappointment. It wasn't the Doctor, but a much younger man, dressed in fancy clothes. He cocked his head at her approach but didn't stop writing.

"Ah. Company. Come in, sit down, stay quiet. Watch out for the oubliette."

She took his advice and sidled carefully away from the sinister looking black pit in the corner. What was he writing? He'd already filled up several square metres with a dense pattern of what could have been a mathematical formula, but most of the symbols she'd never seen before.

"Um..." she spoke up cautiously. "Have you seen a very old man? He..."

"Shush."

With a sigh, she gave up. The heap of straw in the corner looked comfortable enough, and it had been a trying day. After you got used to it, the steady click and scratch of the chalk became almost soothing, and she soon drifted off to sleep.

* * * * *

In fact, she became so used to it that when the noise suddenly ceased she started awake, blinked, rubbed her eyes and looked round. It was early evening now, judging by the hazy grey light filtering in through the window, and she dumbfoundedly took in the fact that the entire wallspace of the dungeon was now covered in mathematical formulae from floor to ceiling. The strange man was standing in the centre of the floor, scanning his work, slowly gnawing a thumbnail.

"Finished have you?" This time, she thought as she stretched and got to her feet, she wouldn't take his rudeness. "Then maybe you can spare me a few seconds of your precious time. It's not as if you're going anywhere."

He turned unhurriedly as she came up behind him, and looked her directly in the face for the first time. For all the possible reactions she had anticipated, she had never dreamt of what happened next.

He stared at her for a second, eyes wide with astonishment, then a coruscating, disbelieving joy suffused his features and he cried out:

"Anna!"

Before she could move, he had lunged forward and was grasping her about the waist and whirling her up into the air, laughing like a maniac. She wriggled furiously, broke free, and struck him on the chin, watched him topple like a tree and lie on his back, still laughing helplessly.

"I see the old left hook's still in good shape!"

"Who the hell are you?" she demanded, standing over him.

He lifted his feet up into the air, then swung them down, using their momentum to roll forward onto his feet.

"I..." he announced, spreading his arms wide, "... am the Doctor!"

"You are not."

"Oh yes I am, and you're my assistant. So shut up and do as I say."

[Soldeed]

Jasmine felt like she was twelve years old again.

The old Doctor, the man who had taught her virtually everything she knew that had ever come in useful for anything, had listened patiently and attentively to her chaotic and overexcited version of events. He sat on one of the hard plastic benches that lined the registration bureau waiting area, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hands where they clasped on the head of his stick, his weak grey eyes never leaving her face. When she was done, his dry, quiet voice seemed to speak to her out of her childhood.

"Well, you've had an unsettling experience, haven't you? I must say I think you're coping with the phenomenon of one Doctor being replaced by another with rare aplomb."

"Huh. Yes." Jasmine fidgeted agitatedly on the opposite bench. "Well, you should have seen me when you first regenerated into him. I..."

The sad, serious look in his watery eyes made her fall abruptly silent.

"Please don't tell me my future," the old man said. He straightened and shifted his hands on his stick. "So. This is the last place your own Doctor was seen."

"Yes. I mean, yes, but... I mean, the man said so, but I'm sure this building wasn't here this afternoon. They don't even use concrete on Agrathus."

"Mm. Coupled with my own presence when I clearly shouldn't be here that's more than a little worrying. This is where I found myself all of a sudden when I'd just been out for an innocent walk on the hillside. A sudden swoosh and I was here, which, frankly came as something of a relief. The guards at the fort were giving me some very straight looks."

"Guards?"

"Indeed. And yet that very fort stands in ruins across the street, with nothing to repel intruders but a rather worn-looking velvet rope. Most interesting."

With a hunching of his shoulders, he shifted more weight onto his stick, in preparation for pushing himself upright. Instinctively Jasmine jumped up to help him, but with a grunt of effort he was on his feet. Frail as he was, she realised, this Doctor was not the virtual invalid who had been forced to regenerate when he found himself physically incapable of helping her rescue her guardian. His shoulders were bowed, but his stance was firm. He leaned heavily on his stick as he led the way towards the exit, but moved briskly, and she lengthened her stride to keep up.

"So where do you think he is?" she asked. "The other Doctor?"

"Well, now. He was here, and now I'm here. There would be a certain reciprocal elegance if it should turn out that he is now where I was then. I use the word 'now' loosely, of course."

Jasmine sighed, and concentrated, running over this sentence in her mind.

"You're saying the two of you have switched places? Switched times, I mean?"

"Exactly. Which brings us to the issue of what power could have caused such an event. For instance... um... hmm." He halted in the middle of the archway. "You said you thought this building we're standing in wasn't here earlier today?"

"That's right."

"And what about all of these buildings out here?"

Jasmine looked, and a chill shivered through the marrow of her bones. It was night, but she could see for miles thanks to the endless ranks of thousands upon thousands of yellow lights, stretching away to the horizon. Their steady glow showed her the tower blocks, faceless and identical, the factories pouring thick greasy smoke into the sky, the quarries which bit great chunks out of the mountainsides. The metallic smoky odour she had noticed before returned magnified tenfold, and she almost choked on the foul, grimy air. The relentless, grinding din of machinery, the cold artificial light, the bleak stretches of grey concrete, all seemed to swirl about her like a fevered dream of hell.

"No," she whispered, shrinking back behind the Doctor. "What have they done? It was so beautiful here."

"Quite so," he replied quietly. "But I fear the loss of some green hills is the least of our worries."

At that moment a deafening banshee wail started up, and the vehicles streaming along the tangle of highways laid out before them could be seen speeding up or veering off hastily onto sidestreets. Lights in windows and streetlamps started snapping out, a darkness spreading like black flame across the landscape. Then in a crackle of white flashes from all over the city rockets could be seen launching themselves skyward, hurtling up on columns of fire to vanish into the clouds. The Doctor and Jasmine stood and watched the pulses of dirty yellow light visible from the explosions far above. Speaking to herself rather than expecting an answer she asked:

"What are they shooting at?"

[Soldeed]

"I still don't believe you."

The Doctor, or the man calling himself the Doctor, shrugged and turned away to inspect his calculations chalked across the dungeon walls.

"I can live with that."

Anna scowled, but just wasn't sure enough of her ground to pursue the point. She had heard of the concept of regeneration, but had always assumed this meant the Doctor would revert to a younger version of himself. This ascerbic and rather rude individual was not what she had been expecting.

"What is all this anyway?" she asked grudgingly, indicating his mathematical graffiti.

"Well," he said, still contemplating it. "Before I got unexpectedly swooshed up and dumped down just outside the fort, I was conducting a little investigation into the disappearance of a young man. Unfortunately the guards took my instruments away from me while they were reading me my rights, or rather lack of them, but I remember a lot of the readings and I've just been figuring the ramifications."

"And?"

The Doctor pointed. Anna looked down into a dark corner of the cell and saw a heavily underlined solution at the end of the vast and incomprehensible series of formulae.

"Four."

He took another appraising look at his work and nodded with confidence.

"Yes."

"Four?" She looked round at him incredulously. "Is that it? After all this? What's it supposed to mean?"

"Quite a bit, considering that figure would normally be at least one point three six times ten to the power of seventeen. Rather worrying, considering it's a measure of the integrity of reality."

"The integrity of... what?"

He gave her that curving, lopsided smile.

"Oh, yes." He stamped his foot a couple of times on the floor. "Feels solid enough, doesn't it? So does thin ice, until it cracks beneath you. We're just a tenuous membrane away from total collapse. Not of matter or energy, but of the very stuff of existence, the thing that allows matter and energy and all physical laws to exist. Chaos, death, darkness. Not a pretty picture." He looked around pensively. "Either that or I've made a mistake, but that's not very likely."

Anna had been listening to him in gathering horror. The certainty that he knew exactly what he was talking about grew with every word.

"You mean... the end of the universe?"

He looked at her scornfully.

"Don't dramatise." He wandered off to go and peer down into the oubliette. "No, no, the effect would be very localised. End of the world. Well, the star system."

"What are we going to do?"

"Don't know." He lost interest in the oubliette and surveyed the rest of the cell. "But we should probably think about escaping from this dungeon at some point."

"Ah." Faced with a problem she could get to grips with, Anna recouped some of her usual cool. "Tell you what, I'll call the guard, tell him you've fallen ill, fainted or whatever, then when he comes in I'll bash over him the head with that stool, we'll put you in his uniform, and you can just march me out pretending you're taking me off for questioning or something."

The Doctor stood and let her finish speaking, but she had never seen anyone look so resolutely unimpressed.

"Yes. Well, one should never neglect the classics of course, but I think we'll try something a little less Buck Rogers."

His gaze swept every corner of the cell.

"Anna. Make yourself useful and unwind the chain from that bracket."

She took a deep breath, knowing this wasn't the time for an argument about his assumption that he was in charge around here, and did as she was told. The long iron bracket under the stone bench along the wall was wound around with a continuous length of chain - immoveable if somebody had been attached to any of the manacles linked into it, but as it was she was able to unwind it and drag it clear, leaving her with a tremendous bulk of loose metal that she couldn't even lift. She glanced over too see the Doctor dragging a great chunk of loose stone across the floor, pressing it up against the door.

"What are you doing? How are we supposed to get out now?"

"More to the point, how are they going to get in?" He looked over to check her progress. "Oh, good. Now throw it over the ceiling beam."

Anna looked up, and for the first time noticed the huge wooden support, which looked like an entire tree trunk roughly hacked into an approximate square, which ran acros the breadth of the cell. The gap of a few inches between it and the ceiling were plenty to allow her to toss the end of the chain up and over with a single well aimed throw. She pulled the dangling end down and waited for further instructions.

"Now take the other end," he puffed, heaving another great cube of rock across the flagstones, "And tie it to the bar in the window."

Still flummoxed as to what he had in mind, she did so, looping the chain around the single horizontal iron bar that blocked the little window, tying it with the best knot she could manage with the cumbersome material, and reinforcing it with strips of hessian from the cell's rudimentary bedding bound tightly about the links to prevent slippage. She looked over at the Doctor, and found him wrapping his block of stone in an elegant chain parcel, adding in neat little hessian bows just as she had done.

"What's going on in there?"

The guard's voice, accompanied by the sound of a spear haft hammering against the door.

"Mind your own business," returned the Doctor, not looking up.

The bolts were drawn back sharply, and the door was thrust inwards, only to collide and jam against the lump of rock the Doctor had pushed against it. He looked up to survey the contraption they had just put together. The chain led up from the block at his feet to the beam, then drooped loosely down on the other side, trailing across the floor until it rose up to where it was tied to the bar in the window.

"Good."

A single vigorous shove with his foot pushed the rock over the edge of the oubliette where it plummetted out of sight. Anna watched the chain rattle over the beam, in a whiplash drawing up the slack on the floor the other side, and with an explosive impact like a rifle shot ripping the bar clean out of the window. A lethal iron missile, it hurtled across the room to embed itself four inches deep in the ceiling beam.

The Doctor shook his head as if in wonder at the success of his own plan.

"I am such a genius."

As more guards arrived in the corridor outside, hammering and shouting at the door, he ran across the room and clambered up, squeezing out through the window and onto the muddy ground beyond. Anna ignored the helping hand held patronisingly out to her, and scrambled up after him.

It was dark now, and raining steadily. The Doctor pushed his hands into his coat pockets and looked resentfully up at the sky.

"Oh, perfect."

"Come on!"

Like a dog straining at the leash, Anna trotted several steps ahead and looked back hopefully, willing him to get a move on and follow her. But he raised no more than a brisk walk.

"No hurry. They can't track us in these conditions, and no one's going to be rushing after us on a night like this anyway. Hmm." He was looking interestedly around at the curtain wall, dimly visible in the gloom, which looped out from the fort and enclosed a densely packed cluster of single storey thatched buildings. "Now, that's new. Last time I was here the fort was the only building for miles around."

"Look, we'll head for the Tardis," said Anna. "It's up on that hill, hidden in some trees."

"I know where it is. True, it's been a while but I can still remember where I parked it... oh."

He had been heading for the hill as she suggested, but something caught his eye and he made a ninety degree switch in direction, towards the dirt track that lead back to the gates of the enclosure.

"Not the road!" Anna called after him, horrified. "That's the first place they'll look for us!"

"Won't be a moment, I'm just going to give this gentleman a helping hand."

She trailed after him, barely able to make out the figure of a man on the road struggling to shift a wooden handcart, one wheel sinking ever deeper into the gurgling mud.

"We've got to go," she insisted. "We don't have time for this."

"There's always time to be helpful."

Anna felt like she would burst with frustration as she watched him brace himself against the rear of the cart.

"That's so..."

She stopped herself. The Doctor looked up with an amused flicker of an eyebrow.

"Typical of me?"

Shaking her head in disgust, she took up position next to him, and with a synchronised heave they drove the wheel clear of the mud. The cart's owner looked round, relief flooding his features.

"My thanks to you. Both of you. You'd better come with me now. We have to get under cover."

The Doctor held out his hand to catch the rain.

"Why? It's only a shower."

The man stared at him blankly as if this were the most incomprehensible remark imaginable.

"It's when it rains that they come," he said, clearly hesitant about telling them something so obvious.

"When who comes?" asked Anna.

This bewildered him still further.

"Skypigs!"

He shook his head in disbelief at their obtuseness and dragged his cart away at full speed towards the fort. Anna and the Doctor exchanged glances.

"Skypigs?" she repeated.

They both looked up at the empty night sky, needles of rain splashing down on their upturned faces.

[Soldeed]

Jasmine fidgeted anxiously while the Doctor, his ancient face grave and still, watched a flaring red ball of fire hurtle down from the clouds and slam into the city centre with a dull whump, slicing the corner off a residential block like a hot knife through ice cream. The flames, the running figures, the emergency vehicles, all looked very small and remote from their vantage point on the hill.

"Shouldn't we get under cover?" she prompted him. "It's dangerous out here."

"It seems to be rather dangerous indoors," he remarked. "But you're probably right, we're not really accomplishing much standing about in the street."

Leaning forward on his stick, he kept his movements to a bare minimum, turning his head to sweep the faceless rows of concrete buildings with his gaze. Jasmine waited, and forced herself to be patient and to ignore the rockets sporadically fizzing up into the sky from different points around the city. It was hard to see what he could be looking for. All the buildings looked equally ugly, low-slung and sturdy. All she was certain of was that they should be avoiding the one flimsy structure of wood and plaster that reminded her of how the village had been when she arrived, before whatever had happened to transform it into this sprawling, polluted concrete metropolis. It looked as if it would burn to the ground from the first spark. With a sinking feeling she realised the Doctor was eyeing it fixedly.

"This one looks nice."

"Um..."

She stopped herself. She should know by now there was no point arguing with him and in any case he was already hobbling determinedly forward, his stick clicking against the asphalt of the street. Jasmine fell into step behind him and waited as he tapped three times on the timbers of the front door.

"Hello?"

The door opened a crack, and an eye and a bit of chin were all that were visible of the voice's owner.

"Good evening," said the Doctor pleasantly. "We were wondering if..."

"It's you!"

The door was flung open to reveal the chubby, pale-faced youth on the other side. His eyes were wide and bulging with excitement.

"It is you, isn't it? You're him! You're the Doctor!"

The Doctor paused, and looked round inquiringly at Jasmine.

"You're very famous here," she supplied, "Because of what you did eleven hundred years ago. There's even a vidshow about you. The Doctor says it's rubbish."

"How nice." He returned his attention to the youth at the door. "Do you think we might possibly come inside? There appears to be some form of air raid taking place."

"Of course! Of course!" He stood aside and ushered them in energetically. "I'm Inchel, by the way. Sit down, please. Can I get you a drink? Something to eat? Ooh! There's something I'd really like to ask you about. Just wait for a minute."

He rushed out into an adjoining room, leaving the Doctor and Jasmine unattended in a comfortable but hopelessly cluttered living area in which all the furniture was gathered attentively round a huge viewscreen that took up a large part of one wall. The Doctor inspected a deep, squashy armchair.

"Dear me. You'll help me up if I sit down in this, won't you Jasmine? I could do with a rest, but you have to think ahead at my age."

"I always used to help you up," recalled Jasmine. "When I knew you, you..." She caught his eye. "Oh, sorry. I mean, yes, of course I'll help you."

She watched him drop with a sigh of relief into the chair, the cushions crushing down beneath him, and took the adjacent seat for herself as their host bustled back in, a transparent plastic square clutched in one pudgy hand.

"Look, let me show you this bit from episode 6, series 2. It's never quite made sense to me, and maybe you can explain to me what I'm missing."

Jasmine recalled uneasily her own Doctor's contempt and constant interruptions the one time they had attempted to watch the show together.

"I'm not sure this is such a..."

"It's all right," the Doctor interjected placidly. "Let's see the programme. I'm interested."

"Great, great," proclaimed Inchel. "Here." He knocked an empty food packet aside on the table and flicked a switch on the rectangular white box concealed beneath it. "You know," he said as he stood back. "This is quite an experience for me."

"Really?" said the Doctor with polite interest.

"Yes, I've been hearing about you all my life. The great hero. The man who saved us all from Krongeist. The invincible, ingenious, indomitable Doctor. It's quite something to meet you at last and find you're nothing but a stupid, useless, doddering old fool."

In the stretched, taut silence that followed, Inchel's oily smirk grew and stretched across his face as if it would meet around the back of his head.

"Well, now," came the Doctor's quiet voice. "I must confess, I wasn't expecting you to show your true colours so soon."

Inchel nodded and shrugged.

"You suspected something. Well, that's nothing to be proud of. You don't have to be a genius to wonder why this is the only house that hasn't been replaced by a concrete bunker. Just makes you all the more of an idiot for wandering in here, head in the clouds like that."

"To be blunt, since you're obviously a bit of a twit I hadn't really considered the possibility of not being able to get the better of you once I was inside."

"Well, guess again." Inchel indicated the rectangular device on the table. "This is a spinoff from our new technologies. We discovered that uncontained temporal fields warp neural messaging processes. Put simply, it blocks the messages from your brain to your muscles. Put more simply still, you're awake and conscious but paralysed from the neck down, the most helpless of prisoners, you and your dim but pretty assistant."

Jasmine's furious retort to this died in her throat as she tested the truth of what he said and with a chill realised it was so. She felt no physical discomfort or weakness, but like a bad dream when she tried to move, tried to stand, nothing happened. Only her head remained free. The Doctor spoke calmly.

"As traps go, well above average I'll grant you. But it's the use of temporal fields which interest me, seeing that they're entirely beyond the technology of this planet or any other in this galaxy. Who helped you?"

"No one. The professor is a genius. This is a great breakthrough for Agrathan science."

"Indeed. And just what have you been doing with this great breakthrough of yours? Nothing foolish and irresponsible, I hope?"

Inchel drew breath for a quick reply, then closed his mouth, paused, and spoke more more steadily, with a tight little smile:

"Oh, I'm going to tell you all our plans now, am I?"

"Of course you are. You're quite obviously bursting to tell someone how clever you've been. It's the same reason serial killers always get themselves caught in the end. The longer they avoid capture, the more the frustration builds at not being able to brag about what they've done. They end up wanting to get caught."

"Very interesting. But I'm not a serial killer. I'm a part of something far grander, something that will make me a legend on this planet long after you and your childish heroics have been forgotten. I'm going to change the world."

"Ah, yes. You're a typical small man wanting to be big. I've seen them come and go on a thousand different planets. Let me guess: you were a mediocre student at school and the other children excluded you from their games. The girls ignored you on a good day, mocked you on a bad one. When you grew up, you found yourself in a menial occupation which you felt degraded you. You always believed you were better than those around you, that you deserved more, and yet you failed to excel at anything you attempted, failed to..."

"Shut up!"

Inchel's white face twisted savagely as he snatched up the device from the table and pushed it threateningly at the Doctor's face.

"You don't know anything about me. You ought to think about being a little more polite, old man. Try and remember I'm the one who's been kind enough to leave you the use of your mouth and your heart and your lungs."

"Should I beg for mercy?" continued the Doctor, his tone unchanged. "Would that make you feel good about yourself? Would it alleviate the knowledge of your failures and disapp..."

With a snarl Inchel jammed his finger down on one of the controls, the Doctor's voice came to an abrupt halt and Jasmine felt herself unable to breathe, as if an invisible pillow had been pressed over her face, and a leaden weight descended over her heart. She tried to cry out, but her voice had been taken as well. Her head fell forward limply and her vision greyed.

"I think I've made my point?"

In an instant it was over, and Jasmine straightened with a gasp, feeling the harsh thudding in her chest that meant she was still alive.

The Doctor started talking again as if nothing had happened.

"Ah, yes, that power of life and death at the press of a button must feel good to you. I must say, you remind me of a similarly unhappy young man we met on Iphigeneia Six. Remember him, Jasmine?"

She twisted her head and found him looking at her, a serious appeal in his eyes. This was madness. She couldn't face going through that experience again. But, it was the Doctor...

"Oh, you mean that pasty little weed who kept eyeing me when he thought I wasn't looking," she said airily. "He wanted to take over the world too. In the end I had to give him a slap and take him home to his mother."

Instantly that choking, suffocating grip returned, and Jasmine's eyelids fell limply half shut, her mind fogging and a dull pain spreading out from her chest. It seemed much longer this time before Inchel's voice returned.

"Shut up. Shut up, the pair of you. Do you think I'm playing games? Do you think I won't kill you?"

She looked up at him, standing directly over her now, his eyes wild and desperate and his finger poised over the button.

"Oh, I don't think we're doubting you on that score," came the Doctor's voice. "After all, it doesn't take any great intelligence or strength of character to kill someone, I'm sure even you could manage it."

"But it won't make you any less of a loser," finished Jasmine, and watched his fingertip jam down onto the control.

She was dying, she knew, this time for real. Her body was stilled, her eyes were dull, her mind was slowing to a halt. No pain, no regret, no fighting to survive. It was as if she was dead already. Then she was staring at her shoes and the Doctor was patting her hand where it lay on the arm of the chair.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "I'm sorry you had to go through that with me."

Jasmine blinked and sat up, stretching her limbs and breathing deeply. She looked around and saw Inchel lying flat on his back unconscious in the middle of the floor, the smoking, melted remains of the temporal device still clutched in both hands.

"Overload," commented the Doctor. "He should have known that would happen if he kept turning it up to maximum like that. But he was, as you observed, a bit of a loser."

[Soldeed]

"This is terrible," complained the Doctor loudly as they toiled along through the pouring rain towards the woods. "These shoes are going to be ruined and I've no wish to cause a temporal paradox by fetching them out of the cupboard on your version of the Tardis."

Anna scowled and muttered curses at his back while pulling her own feet clear of the sucking mud. The cold, the wet, and gathering weariness were doing nothing for either his temper or hers. At least he seemed to know where he was going. It was so dark that she could barely make out the line of the hillside and the trees ahead. Looking about once more to try and get her bearings, she was first relieved, then immediately scared, to see a point of red light up in the sky ahead.

"Doctor."

Though still not convinced, she was calling him that for lack of any other name.

"Don't go all wobbly now, we'll be there soon."

"No," she said, swallowing her irritation. "Look."

He followed her pointing finger, and frowned.

"Hmm. An artificial flying object, on a planet where such things aren't invented for nearly a thousand years. And the natives have warned us to beware of Skypigs. The likely conclusion being...?"

"Don't patronise me."

They stood in silence and watched as the flaring red light drew steadily closer. It was a flame, a flickering, gusting red flame that illuminated the strange objects above and below. Above was visible the slow curve of a great cigar-shaped grey mass, below, much smaller, a bulbous, crouched black figure, clearly metal, glinting in the firelight, but looking for all the world like some fat, hideous, malevolent creature, its spite focussed upon them as it glided forward through the wind and rain. At its front, something that could have been a mouth gaped open to reveal a hellish interior of livid fire. It spat, and the Doctor and Anna crouched instinctively away from the searing ball of hot gas that hurtled over their heads and incinerated a twenty foot circle of sodden grass in a storm of heat, smoke and sparks. The Doctor straightened and stared at the Skypig as it hurtled over them and on, towards the fort. The hole in the underside of the cigar shape was clearly visible, directly above the flame which Anna had first sighted, which also illuminated the steel cables that held the "pig" in place beneath.

"An airship?" the Doctor exclaimed. "And fuelled by hot air? Ridiculous!"

"Ridiculous or not, it was a few yards away from burning the both of us to charcoal."

"Yes. And now it's heading for the fort."

"Er..." Anna felt a sting of alarm in her belly. "Actually, it's turning round."

It was true. The Skypig was leaning over to one side and starting a wide turning circle that would take it straight back to them.

"Ohhh... yes," said the Doctor slowly. "Looks like our friend was right, and they prefer to find their prey out in the open. Anna, you remember that idea you had earlier?"

Transfixed by the sight of the demonic machine of black metal and fire rounding on them, Anna wrinkled her brow and tried to remember.

"All I said was we should run a... oh."

She turned and sprinted off after the Doctor, who was already disappearing at high speed towards the trees.

* * * * *

Jeff had succeeded in removing one of the panels from the base of the Tardis console and was lying on his back poking about fascinatedly in the inconceivable complexities of the machine's innards when two soaked, muddy people came crashing in through the doors, and closed them hastily against the rainstorm outside.

"Jeff, what have I told you about messing with the Tardis' circuits?" came an authoritative voice.

"Sorry, Doctor." He slid guiltily clear of the console. "I was just... who are you?"

The face looming disapprovingly over him was that of a total stranger. Perplexed, Jeff threw a questioning look at Anna, who spread her arms irritably and squelched off in the direction of her quarters.

"Some years ago," the newcomer said, "You used to know me as 'Doctor'. As I recall, I used to be indulgent towards your aggravating habits such as attempting to dismantle machinery a million years in advance of your knowledge. I can assure you that I am now an altogether unkinder, ungentler individual."

Jeff rolled over and climbed to his feet. He was a young, shortish man whose rounded, boyish face seemed scarcely capable of supporting his soft, neatly trimmed moustache. Behind steel-rimmed spectacles his dark, lively eyes inspected this strange person with fresh interest.

"Is it really you? Have you regenerated?"

"No, no," said the Doctor, turning and heading for one of the storage lockers. "Well, yes, but... Oh, let's just stick to yes, we've got work to do."

"This is fascinating!" Jeff exclaimed excitedly, following him like a shadow. "I always hoped I'd get to see this. What's it like?"

He experimentally poked the flesh of the Doctor's cheek with his fingertip. The Doctor slapped his hand away.

"Stop that."

He yanked the closet open and plunged in, dragging boxes and clutter aside and half disappearing from view behind a chaotic medley of fishing rods, garden ornaments, wineracks, oil paintings, giant china vases, umbrellas, a canoe, and countless other pieces of mismatched bricabrac. Jeff leaned to one side to evade the flying Mr Punch puppet hurled over the Doctor's shoulder.

"Er, can I help?"

This time he wasn't quick enough to dodge, but managed to catch the two foot long model train before it smacked him in the face.

"No," came the Doctor's voice, "But you can get your coat. While you're there, bang on Anna's door and tell her to hurry up with whatever she's doing and join us back here... aha!"

Triumphantly he pulled back and dragged free from the other junk a savagely barbed six-foot long nineteenth century whaling harpoon, its heavy rope looped over his shoulder.

"Good God!" exclaimed Jeff. "Where are we going?"

The Doctor tested the implement's rusted, razor-sharp spike with his fingertip.

"Pig hunting."

[Soldeed]

"Is he not awake yet?"

Determinedly knotting yet another piece of string around Inchel's already securely bound ankles, Jasmine peered closely at the young man where he sat propped against the wall.

"I think he might be faking," she said.

She drew back her hand and fetched him the hardest slap across the cheek she could muster. Shaking her hand to relieve the stinging, she inspected his reddening face.

"Oh. No, he isn't," she called over shoulder.

"Not to worry. We probably wouldn't have got anything out of him anyway. This device, on the other hand, is fascinating."

Jasmine scrambled to her feet and walked over to where the Doctor sat sunk in his armchair, his glasses balanced on his nose, the myriad disassembled parts of the gadget Inchel had used to paralyse them spread over his lap.

"See?" he was saying. "This is a teleprobic calibration unit, this is a phasing ortic interface, this is a metron wave synthesiser..." He glanced up at her blank expression and smiled. "Oh, yes, sorry. What I meant to say was, this is a quite astonishingly advanced piece of work, it shows a complete understanding of temporal mechanics. Even the Daleks don't have this technology. In fact, I've seldom seen anything like it outside Gallifrey."

This was a name Jasmine had heard before, and she knew enough to understand what it meant.

"You're saying the Time Lords could have built this? Surely they'd never mess about with this planet's history, would they?"

The Doctor looked unhappily thoughtful.

"I can think of one or two who might."

He shrugged this off and held out his hands to her. Just as she had used to do in years gone by, she grasped his hands and leaned back, providing the counterweight to lift him up out of his chair and into a standing position, the bits of circuitry rattling onto the floor at his feet.

"Now then," he began, taking his stick as she picked it up and handed it to him. "What we're looking for is some sort of laboratory or operations room. Whatever games these people are playing with time have to be controlled from somewhere."

Jasmine looked around the unpromisingly mundane shabbiness of the room.

"Um, all right. Where do we start?"

"Well..." He shuffled his way over to a simple wooden door in the far wall. "Since they're not actually expecting anyone to come here searching for them, I'm hoping that..." He pulled the door open to reveal a brightly lit, gleaming stainless steel chamber. "... They won't have bothered to hide it."

Jasmine trotted across to peer over his shoulder. The room beyond was cavernous, its full size and shape impossible to make out, jammed as it was with rank upon rank of glowing computer banks, cluttered workbenches, and floor to ceiling racks of nameless gadgetry. The throbbing hum of power pervaded the whole space.

"It's huge! Surely it's bigger than the house?"

"Well, the house backs onto the hill. The room must extend underground. Now let us see if we can find this Professor our young friend told us about. Carefully, Jasmine, stay behind me."

Jasmine couldn't help smiling, but said nothing, as the Doctor led the way, protecting her with his frail, stooped body. They made a cautious progress between towering blocks of machinery until she glimpsed a flickering light and looked across at where a cluster of flat black rectangles were visible, propped up on silver metal rods at different heights and angles so that they all faced in at a central point, at the same time keeping that point hidden from view. Hidden, that is, except for a glimpse of a man's shoe, hanging loosely in space.

She touched the Doctor on the shoulder and pointed silently. He looked, nodded, and switched direction. When his cane clicked against the floor he glanced at it, frowned, and handed it over to Jasmine.

"Stay back," he murmured, his hand resting on a workbench for support. "I need to see who that man is, and I don't want both of us walking into danger."

"But..."

"Please do as I ask," he said seriously. "This is not for your benefit. If I get into difficulty I shall need you to think of a way to help me."

Jasmine's half step back signified her acceptance, and she watched in concern as the old man made his slow way forward, leaning heavily on every convenient object. He penetrated the screen of black rectangles, and his arms fell loosely to his sides.

"Doctor!" she hissed, whispering and yet making sure the sound would carry across to him. "Doctor, are you all right?"

There was a moment's pause, but then he turned and beckoned her forward. She lost no time, and in a second was at his shoulder, staring at the man who sat on his high chair, surrounded by a hundred monitor screens, each showing a different nightmare image.

"Who is he?" She whispered the question, though the man seemed oblivous to their presence.

The Doctor shook his head.

"I've really no idea."

The man in the chair was old, thin, and sickly, dressed in an off-white coverall that hung loosely on his sticklike limbs. Yellow teeth protruding over his lower lip, his damp, fishy eyes stared at screens that showed a sewage pipe discharging its effluent into the sea, a hulking factory pouring thick yellow smoke into the air, a wasteland of felled trees stretching to the horizon, an open cast mine carved into green hills. A single tear rolled down the sagging flesh of his cheek.

Jasmine found herself stepping forward, into his line of sight so that he blinked and focussed on her.

"Are you all right?" she asked gently.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, it's... it's so beautiful."

[Soldeed]

The Doctor and Jeff hauled on the rope, hearing the painful creak of the overhead branch as it was dragged down towards them. Anna deftly wrapped the rope's end about an iron peg and hammered it deep into the ground with a few well placed blows with a mallet. They released the rope, and stood back warily while it was stretched taut by the branch's elasticity. It held, the peg shifting in the earth until Anna gave it one more bash and it disappeared almost completely under the ground.

"That's good," said the Doctor. "Now, Jeff and I will finish up here. Anna, you go out onto the hillside, wait for the Skypig to appear, then lead it back towards us."

Anna drew back incredulously.

"What?" she burst out, her voice high-pitched in disgust. "Why me?"

He blinked, looking genuinely surprised that this was an issue.

"Because that's how we do it. Jeff does the strenuous mechanical stuff, you do the running, shouting and hitting people, and I stand about giving instructions."

"That's when you're a frail old man! You can do your own damn running and shouting now."

The Doctor seemed ready to argue, but just shook his head in annoyance.

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder as they say. I'd forgotten how difficult you used to be. Fine. If I get killed it'll be your fault." He turned and set off towards the open land beyond the woods, looking back to deliver his parting shot. "And if that thing's not ready by the time I get back I shall be most upset."

Alone once more, the Doctor walked out onto the grassy hillside and pushed his hands into his pockets unhappily. The rain was still monotonously pouring down, the hazy moonlight through the clouds barely enough to allow him to discern the vague outline of the surrounding landscape. Only the flickering torches along the walls of the fort in the distance provided a clear visual reference point. He looked up at the sky.

"Come on, little piggy," he muttered. "Don't keep me waiting. I'm not getting any more lonely and defenceless."

He stood there till he was soaked to the skin, his sodden hair plastered over his forehead, scanning the horizon. He began to fidget worriedly.

"Please don't let me go back there and let Anna tell me she told me so. I'm... woah!"

Out of nowhere, in a flare of red fire the Skypig was soaring overhead. Startled, the Doctor toppled over backwards in the mud, and watched wide-eyed as its bulbous black metal form glided inexorably uphill towards where the light of his companions' flashlights were visible through the foliage.

"Fascinating! I mean... oh no!"

He jumped up and tore off in pursuit of the machine, bellowing at the top of his lungs:

"Jeff! Anna! Skypig!"

Drifting in the wind, the pig hardly seemed to be moving, but covered the ground at deceptive speed and outpaced him easily. He had barely reached the treeline when the mechanical monster vomited flame down into the woods and the glow of the flashlights was consumed in a storm of livid orange. The Doctor halted, grasping the branch of a tree for support, his pale, drawn face illuminated by the firelight.

"No. Not like this. This isn't the way it happened."

He ran on, while the Skypig began its long, slow turning circle. He was almost upon the blackened, scorched clearing, the flames dying under the weight of the rain, that he heard the voice:

"Doctor! This way."

"Jeff?" He skidded to a halt and looked at the young man with a kind of resentment. "What are you doing here, alive?"

Jeff pointed.

"We threw the torches over there when we heard you shouting about the Skypig. I thought perhaps they were what was attracting it."

The Doctor looked past him at Anna, a fresh torch in her hand.

"Sound thinking. Right, it's coming back. Let's execute my brilliant plan."

They hastened back to the makeshift construction of wood and rope outside the Tardis.

"Anna, get ready with that machete."

"What machete?"

"You didn't bring the machete?"

"You never said anything about a machete."

"Go and get a machete."

"It's all right," the Doctor confided to Jeff as she stormed off back inside the Tardis. "I'm just messing with her. We don't need a machete. Here goes."

He glanced up at the fast approaching red light in the sky.

"Lucky these things are so easy to see coming. If there's any part of your body not already crossed, cross it now."

He kicked the tip of the iron peg, and it sprang clear of the ground, wrenched clear by the whiplash action of the tree branch rebounding back into its natural position. The harpoon, wedged into the cleft where the branch split, was catapulted into the sky, its rope streaming out behind it.

"Yes!" Jeff punched the air triumphantly as the missile struck the Skypig's balloon with a hollow slap. The whole contraption seemed to stagger in midair, the harpoon dangling by its barbs from the ragged hole in the material.

"Don't let it get away!" ordered the Doctor. "Grab the rope. Anna, stop messing about in there and give us a hand."

The two men seized the rope as it slithered across the ground and threatened to be whisked away and be lost in the wounded Skypig's escape. A second later Anna rushed up and joined them, dragging down with clenched teeth.

"I think it's coming loose!" exclaimed Jeff as something perceptibly slipped in the harpoon's grip.

"That's the idea," said the Doctor, leaning back and digging his heels into the mud against the Skypig's forward traction. "Did I not mention? We're not trying to to pull it down to earth. The point of this exercise is to rip the largest possible hole in its balloon." He gave the rope another wrench. "Then it'll just make its way down to us of its own accord."

Anna swung her feet up in the air, putting her full weight on the rope, hung for a moment then thudded down to earth. All three of them felt the steel hooks tearing clear of the balloon.

"That's it! It's coming!"

As one, they stared up, directly above their heads, and bolted in opposite directions. The harpoon smacked down to the ground and stuck, quivering, in the undergrowth where they had been standing an instant before.

"All right," said the Doctor from a safe distance. "A slight kink in the plan, there."

The Skypig was visibly limping now, the balloon crumpling around the three foot gash torn in its flank. The thrusters at its rear glowed red and pushed it forward, but when it heeled over to the side, losing height all the while, it only succeeded in moving round in a spiral. The Doctor and his two companions watched the last of the air escape from the balloon, and the Skypig plummetted into a nosedive, crashing face first into the ground not twenty yards from the Tardis door.

[Soldeed]

"Oh, you liked it the way it was, I expect," the emaciated old man said derisively, looking down at the Doctor and Jasmine from his high chair. "All pretty trees and flowers. You probably think it's all spoiled now."

"My dear sir," the Doctor began, "I can assure we're entirely neutral observers to this whole affair. Perhaps you could explain..."

"Don't be nice to him!" Jasmine burst out. "You! You've ruined this whole planet. You've turned the most beautiful place I've ever seen into some kind of poisonous concrete hellhole. And you're sneering at us? Are you some kind of lunatic?"

"Jasmine!" The Doctor gave her a reproachful look. "I don't know where you learned to speak to people like that, but I'm sure it wasn't from me." He gave the old man a benevolent look. "I'm quite certain this gentleman has an entirely sound explanation for everything he's done."

The man peered down at the two of them suspiciously, but the ensuing silence stretched out into seconds and formed a vacuum that had to be filled.

"There's no harm in telling you," he began. "It's all done now. There's nothing anyone can do to reverse it. My name is Temore. I am the greatest scientist on this planet."

For a moment Jasmine thought the Doctor was snorting with laughter, but he was just coughing a little, a handkerchief pressed firmly against his lips.

"Have you ever considered, you tourists," Temore went on, "What it's like growing up an Agrathan? Oh, you love all the sights, don't you? You like our unspoilt countryside, our clean air and rivers, our wide open spaces. You compliment us on them. But secretly, you think you're better than us. You, with your technology, your money, your power. You look at my people living their simple pastoral existence, and you say how quaint and picturesque they are, and deep down you laugh at them. My race has allowed itself to settle for being waiters, porters and hoteliers for rich aliens. Can you conceive the humiliation of that knowledge to a young man who dreamed of being something more? No, you think the planet was pretty the way it was, and you think I should have just learned my place and got a job as a tour guide.

"So I thought it might be. I'd completed my schooling and had nowhere else to go, but one night I had a strange, vivid and unusual dream. No naked ladies, no exams that I'd forgotten to revise for, but a dark man, with features I could never remember, with words of thunder that caught in my mind and couldn't be shaken loose. Science. Mathematics. Concepts the like of which had never been touched on in my studies. I woke, and laughed at myself for dreaming something so nerdy. But where other dreams would fade away and be forgotten, these facts and figures stuck like something learned and known. I looked into them, and found they were not only true but that they were known to no one else, only me.

"Soon after, I dreamed him again, and then the following week again. It wasn't long before I grasped the secret that, piece by piece, he was imparting to me. Time travel. The dream of every scientist in the galaxy. The power to identify what went wrong in our history and change it, to make our present better.

"I knew what the problem was. Life for our ancestors was too easy. They strolled around the wilderness, untroubled by predators or enemies, pulling up tasty roots and plucking fruit from the trees. So they had no incentive to form organised, settled communities and that's why we never had any technology of our own. That's why I invented the Skypig.

"You understand? A menace, something to scare those ignorant, lazy transients into action. When people see fire-breathing black metal demons in the sky above them suddenly the nomadic lifestyle doesn't seem so attractive. They have the incentive to gather themselves together and to make themselves strong. They build citadels, then towns, then cities. They make weapons, and develop the technology they need to make new weapons. It wasn't hard to find a few like-minded individuals to help me, and the pigs themselves were very straightforward to construct. I made them slow, and vulnerable, so the people would discover that when they banded together and used their intelligence they could defeat them. Of course I also made sure that after they were brought down they would self-destruct, and take anyone nearby with them. Didn't want them to lose their air of mystery.

"And it's worked. Look at these screens. Agrathus is no longer some backward little nonentity where the super-rich of the galaxy can get away from their real lives for a week or two. We have a population of billions, a thriving industrial base, a powerful, well-equipped military. We are known and respected across the quadrant. Are you going to tell me now that I've ruined my planet?"

Jasmine felt an almost physical sickness at the sight of Temore's self-satisfied visage scanning the screens in front of him.

"Your people are choking in squalor and drowning in their own filth." The words tumbled out unstoppably. "They live their lives crouching in concrete bunkers, sheltering from your Skypigs."

"Interesting, that," mused Temore reflectively. "A Skypig would be destroyed in seconds by these modern rockets. I must admit, I'm not sure if the authorities genuinely don't realise the truth, and just keep panicking and opening fire on flocks of passing birds, or if they've been intentionally maintaining the illusion. Shrewd thinking if so. There's no more potent means of keeping the populace docile than a mysterious enemy. Makes them content with what they've got. Stops them questioning the status quo. You see, there haven't been any real Skypigs for centuries."

"That's not true! It can't be! We saw a firebomb falling on the city."

"Sometimes the rockets malfunction, and fall back to explode on the ground. The Skypigs get the blame. Again, I'm not too sure if it's deliberate or not."

Jasmine grimaced in disgust.

"And you're proud of this world you've made?"

Temore smiled down at her indulgently.

"Oh, yes. It's wonderful."

"But not for long, I fear," said the Doctor quietly.

"Ah, is that so? And who's going to put a stop to it, may I ask? You?"

"I don't have to. You have all this knowledge, but no understanding. You can't change history."

"I already have."

"You can't change history," the Doctor repeated. "A true time machine has the power to travel freely up and down its own timeline. Wherever it comes to a stop, it becomes part of the history of that moment. The machinery I've seen here is a crude and stupid variation on the theme; it cant move smoothly along the timeline, it can only jump clear of it and then smash its way back in at another point. You can't change history, you can only destroy it."

"Oh, change it, destroy it, what's the difference? My world is as I want it. That's what matters."

"What matters is that the cosmos has been twisted out of shape by your interference. Reality is like the branch of a tree, it will bend a certain way and then snap, and we are well past snapping point. You, sir, have brought about the complete destruction of your world, the annihilation of an entire corner of our universe, unless my young friend and I can find a means to prevent it."

With formality, he retrieved his stick from Jasmine, and turned to go.

"You're not fooling me, you know," said Temore slyly.

The Doctor walked away, and with a shrug Jasmine followed.

"You think you can trick me into helping you undo what I've done?" Temore called after them. "You're wasting your time. I know what I've done. I've built a new world. I've shaped it in my own image. I'm the saviour of my race."

"Just ignore him," said the Doctor as Jasmine caught up and walked at his shoulder. "Little enough point debating the matter with someone who's soon enough going to be dissolving into unreality."

"But shouldn't we... I don't know, put him out of action in some way?"

"No, he's already done all the damage he can. We have to focus on undoing it." He halted when they arrived in the shabby living area in which Inchel still lay tightly bound, and turned the head of his stick thoughtfully in his hands. "Would you mind showing me the way to your Tardis? There's someone with whom we should really discuss the matter."

"Is there? Who?"

* * * * *

Clustered interestedly around the fallen Skypig, the Doctor, Jeff and Anna looked up, startled, as a wheezing, groaning sound and a flashing blue light filled the clearing.

[Soldeed]

The two identical police boxes stood side by side in the forest. Behind the three foot high, fifteen foot long metal bulk of the crashed Skypig, Jeff, Anna and the Doctor watched and waited until the door of the new arrival creaked open and Jasmine's face peeped cautiously out.

"Doctor!" Her eyes brightened at the sight of him, only to widen in horror on recognising the Skypig for what it was. "Doctor, look out, it has a self-destruct mechanism!"

Sonic screwdriver in one hand, the Doctor held up a chunk of unrecognisable gadgetry in the other.

"You mean this thing?"

She stooped with relief, her smile lighting up her face, and ran out to join him. While Anna and Jeff hastened towards the open Tardis door, the Doctor threw the self-destruct device away, pocketed the sonic screwdriver, and placed his hands firmly behind his back to ensure that she halted three feet from him. Quickly he ran his eyes over her from head to toe.

"Undamaged and in high spirits, I see," he remarked. "Been having an exciting time?"

Jasmine nodded quickly.

"We..."

She had enough awareness and self control to hold on to the story for later when she saw the Doctor's eyes sliding from her face and looking over her shoulder. Quietly she turned to watch as he moved past her.

Anna and Jeff were blocking the view, clustered around the Tardis door, busy with their own reunion, but they fell back and stood aside as the elder Doctor, stick clutched tightly in one knobbly hand, shuffled his way through. The two Doctors faced one another, six feet apart at the centre of the clearing. The younger, the taller, leaned forward to bring himself more to the elder's level and glimpse his pale old eyes under the brim of his battered black hat. They eyed each other in fascination, bobbing their heads this way and that to shift angles, like people admiring themselves in distorting mirrors at a fairground. The same smile spread across the features of each of them, widening into the irrepressible laughter of pure, childlike delight.

* * * * *

Many introductions and explanations followed, and once they were settled, Jeff, Anna, and the elder Doctor perched on the carcass of the Skypig, Jasmine and the younger Doctor on a fallen branch opposite, there was little laughter left.

"So there's our situation," the elder summarised. "We have an ignorant misguided scientist meddling with time. We have a cosmic distortion leading to an unstable timeline. By my own future self's calculations, we inhabit a reality teetering on the edge of total collapse. And we have a mysterious, unidentified stranger, described simply as a 'dark man', who can apparently invade another's dreams, who has total knowledge of temporal physics, and who is ultimately responsible for this entire affair. Now, I would suggest that our primary task is to trace this mysterious individual, because when we know his identity, I believe we'll have the key to the whole problem."

"It's Krongeist."

The younger Doctor spoke quietly and looked up, as if surprised by the silence his words had brought.

"It's actually quite obvious once you have all the facts."

"Which is good news," the elder Doctor remarked drily, "For those of us who have them."

"Krongeist," repeated Jasmine. "Inchel mentioned him. You..." She looked from one Doctor to the other. "... I mean you, are supposed to have saved the world from him."

"I did. You see when I..." He glanced up at the elder. "... I mean you, first came to this world, there were no Skypigs, no fortified towns, just a little tower on the hillside and a scattering of peaceful nomads. But things weren't as idyllic as they seemed. While Anna was going for a swim in the river and Jeff was setting up his old brass telescope to map the stars, you discovered that the people here were living in terror of a strange, powerful spirit they were calling a god. It demanded prayer and sacrifice, it took their children and killed all those who spoke a word of a protest. To cut a long story short, eventually you realised it was a time sprite."

"A time sprite?" Jeff looked unimpressed. "Sounds like some kind of elf that comes down the chimney and fixes all your clocks for you."

"Not exactly," the elder Doctor said, his eyes never leaving his younger self. "A time sprite is a creature whose existence has been posited by Gallifreyan theorists, but which has never been seen. An intelligence of pure temporal energy, which would exist simultaneously at all points in time from the big bang to the end of the universe. It would be immortal, it would have the power to shape reality to its will, and it would be, if for some reason one should come into conflict with such a creature, absolutely invincible."

The younger nodded.

"All excellent reasons for steering well clear of it. Unfortunately this one had conceived the ambition to make something more of its existence, and to that end it was gathering psychic energy from the people's minds, to increase its own power. Left unchecked, it would have not only annihilated the entire population of this planet, but in doing so it would have gained the ability to project itself across deep space to other worlds, and do the same to them."

"Not a happy situation," the elder remarked quietly.

"Quite. As you said, it couldn't be killed. Its mode of existence was so different from our own that from our perspective it could barely be said to be real at all, except when it chose to manifest its powers. In the end you hit on the idea of reconfiguring the Tardis dimensional control array to warp Krongeist's own energy, so when he tried to attack he ended up shifting himself outside of our reality, where he couldn't do any more harm."

"Oh." The elder Doctor considered this with interest. "That was clever of me."

"I thought so too at the time. I'd calculated that he might just have the strength to pierce the barrier he was trapped behind, and project some of his power back into our reality, but I didn't think it would be enough power to achieve any meaningful effect. I hadn't considered that he might give a malcontented scientist the secrets of his own nature, and persuade him to undertake a dangerous attempt to change history."

"Ahh." The elder leaned back and closed his eyes. "Of course, I've been slow. I'd imagined this creature was undertaking a reckless attempt to change history so that its original defeat would never have occurred. But it's not as simple as that."

"That was the simple version?" asked Jasmine with trepidation.

"Indeed. You see, Krongeist is trapped outside reality, so changing that reality by sending the Skypigs back through time has no effect on him. To escape, he must tear a hole in reality itself."

"And that," the younger added, "Is exactly what he will achieve as a result of the massive temporal paradox the Skypigs have caused. A giant rift in the fabric of the universe. This planet will be annihilated and Krongeist will be free, lying in wait for unwary travellers so he can build up his power anew. Unless we can stop him."

He looked around at the assembled company, as if challenging anyone to fail to take the situation seriously.

"So how do we stop him?" spoke up Jeff.

In silence the two Doctors looked at one another. Their expressions didn't inspire confidence.

"I don't know," the younger said at last.

"No," said the elder. "Our problem is not to defeat the Skypigs, or even Krongeist. This entire artificially created timeline is unstable and... heh... really needs to be thrown away and replaced with... um... hmm."

He fell quiet and rocked back on his seat, casting his eyes up at the sky. The other Doctor looked away to the side, fingers at his chin. Then as if some unseen signal had been given they both leaned forward, eyes locked together and started to talk:

"We could..."

"A cataclysmic event..."

"On the..."

"With the..."

"We'd have to..."

"I think it..."

"The best thing..."

"Part of the anomaly..."

"A bonus..."

"A little patching here..."

"A little needle and thread there..."

"Not much time..."

"But we have..."

"And anyway..."

"On automatic..."

"Simple program..."

"Then you and I..."

"Diversion..."

"Flip back..."

"And..."

"But..."

"Then..."

"Still..."

"With a little luck..."

"Exactly..."

"Good."

"Good."

They settled back and relaxed, each still meeting the other's gaze. The three companions looked from one to the other in bewilderment.

"What the hell was all that about?" asked Anna in annoyance.

The elder Doctor gave her a reassuring smile.

"It's all right. We have a plan."

"We're going to repair the Skypig," said the younger.

"And we're going to use it to destroy the universe."

The younger looked upset.

"I wanted to say that."

[Soldeed]

The elder Doctor sat and rested on a fallen tree trunk, his cramped, shrivelled hands resting on top of his stick, and watched the progress of the repair work on the crashed Skypig. Jasmine's nineteenth century feminine training had finally come in useful for something, and she was skilfully darning the hole in the airbag; Jeff was carefully dismantling its crumpled nosecone piece by piece; Anna was bashing the dented plates back into shape with the aid of a heavy lump hammer. Not without a trace of envy, the Doctor watched his younger self energetically supervising the operation, darting from place to place, imparting instructions and advice without pause or hesitation, dismissing objections, ridiculing fears, untiring. Not for the first time since this affair started, his thoughts turned to regeneration. He felt so tired and weak now, all the time. To be that way... it had been so long he could scarcely remember how it had felt to rise from a chair without a struggle. But no. This old body might be wearing a little thin but it had years left in it. Years he might need someday.

Jasmine was fidgeting restlessly, and on checking that the younger Doctor's back was turned, so she would not be scolded for neglecting her task, she sidled up to Jeff.

"Do you actually understand what we're doing?"

He gave her an apologetic, kindly smile.

"I usually find it's better to just get on with it, and hope he explains when it's all over."

She turned hopefully to Anna, and was rewarded with a dark scowl.

"I'm working with a lump hammer here. Does it look like I understand all the cosmic whosits?"

Jasmine backed off and glanced around. Her own Doctor was hard at work freeing something from the Skypig's innards, but the elder didn't look busy. She sidled up to him. His beatific look was always hard to read, but he looked pleased to have the company.

"Finished already, Jasmine?"

"Um, almost." She glanced guiltily over her shoulder. "I was hoping you might tell me a bit more about the plan."

"Well..."

"I mean, all the stuff about how we're going to destroy the universe, that's just melodrama isn't it?"

"Ah." His parchment-like face creased with the effort of suppressing a smile. "Well, yes, I suppose it is rather. But from our perspective at least it's also the literal truth. This reality is, to use a technical term, broken, and needs to be done away with. Now, when Krongeist rips open the weakened membrane of the universe so that he may escape his present limbo state he will leave a gap which, while it will eventually heal up, will for a few hours be in an appallingly fragile and vulnerable state. So when we fly our patched up Skypig directly into it, the resulting cataclysm will be so vast that it will achieve the required result. Not merely to devastate or destabilise this reality, but to annihilate it completely, so that everything that has happened here will never have occurred, and all will be as it was."

He spoke so calmly and pleasantly that it was hard for Jasmine to believe she had not misheard him. The insane, grandiose scale of the plan was impossible to reconcile with the hunched, inoffensive old man sitting in front of her.

"But... but..." She grappled to find a question that made sense when the entire plan clearly didn't. "But if everything's back the way it was, what's to stop Krongeist doing exactly the same thing all over again?"

"Excellent question," the Doctor complimented her. "But, you see, the temporal distortion caused by sending the Skypigs back in time is very localised. As an incomer, from outside its influence, you weren't affected by it and that's why you could see the changes taking places on Agrathus when the locals couldn't. Similarly, if we destroy the alternate timeline he has created, it won't change the fact that Krongeist has expended most of his reserves of power on penetrating reality to contact Temore. He won't be able to do it a second time."

Jasmine shook her head, not in disagreement but as if physically dazed and trying to clear it. It was a relief to hear brisk footsteps behind her and the younger Doctor's voice:

"Do you think you could realign the spatial orientation circuits?"

"Ah." Moving slowly, the elder laid down his stick and accepted a tangled chunk of machinery in both hands. "A nice, sedentary task. Thankyou."

The younger turned to his companion.

"Jasmine. Finished already?"

She sighed.

"No, don't start. I'm going. But..." She curled her finger to point back behind her at Jeff and Anna, keeping it hidden from them by her body, and lowered her voice: "Have I met these people before?"

The elder looked up with interest at his future self's face, but the younger scarcely blinked before replying:

"Yes, they came and visited me a few times when you were tiny."

"Ah!" Jasmine looked relieved at a puzzle solved. "I thought they looked familiar."

She trotted off, back to work, and the Doctors watched her go. The elder spoke softly.

"You're not going to tell her?"

The younger looked round sharply, then lowered himself to sit beside the old man on the tree trunk.

"I'm thinking not." He looked awkward, glancing over at Jasmine again, tense for a reply. When none came, he grudgingly looked back at the elder. "How long have you known?"

"Hmpf. It took me all of two minutes to spot the family resemblance. I must be getting senile. In my defence, the concept of Jeff and Anna choosing to spend five minutes more than necessary in one another's company seemed unlikely enough, let alone their choosing to have a child together."

The younger sighed reminiscently.

"It took time. A lot happened."

"Why doesn't she recognise them? Ah, no." The elder held up a hand as the other Doctor flinched. "She already told me she never knew them. I don't want to hear about that. I just wondered why she didn't recognise their names."

"Oh. Well, they had to adopt false names when you eventually returned them to Earth. You remember before you left there was that business with Anna punching the Queen's Equerry."

"Oh yes."

The two were silent for a moment, lips twitching at the identical memory that flashed across their minds.

"Well." The younger placed his hands on his knees decisively. "I'd better get back. Before Jeff decides to take the whole thing to bits and find out how it works."

"Are you being kind to her?"

The younger paused at the abrupt question, and slowly drew his hands away to rest them on the tree trunk by his sides.

"In my fashion."

He saw the sceptical expression on the elder's face and quickly spoke again.

"Well, we can't all be loveable old codgers, you know."

"My dear young man," the elder said, "That girl has lost her home and her family and everything she ever knew. She has nothing and no one, she belongs nowhere..."

"She belongs with me."

The quiet, serious tone of the reply gave the elder pause, but he leaned forward and spoke gently.

"Does she know that?"

The younger frowned and looked away.

"Don't lecture me," he said distantly, as if his mind were elsewhere. "I'm more than twenty years older than you."

"Then no doubt you've considered this. If Jasmine does not feel loved, if she doesn't feel the Tardis is her home, then the first time she finds someone she can care for, or a place where she can be happy, she will leave you. And you'll be left once again, spinning aimlessly through the cosmos, alone."

The younger Doctor rose to his feet and looked down contemplatively at his ancient former self.

"It's something to think about."

He walked away across the clearing, back towards the others.

[Soldeed]

"Problem."

The younger Doctor held up a slightly bent, lozenge-shaped metallic component between his hands and the others clustered round, the elder Doctor wobbling to his feet with the help of his stick and making his way over to join them.

"What is it?" asked Jeff, interested as always.

"It's the automatic guidance system from our tame Skypig. As you know the Doctor and I had planned to reprogram it to do our bidding, but as you can see..."

He held it up as if the difficulty would be obvious to anyone. Anna shook her head with an exasperated curl of her lip.

"What my youthful alter-ego is trying to say," the elder Doctor spoke up, "Is that the quadriphasic filternodes are clearly repilitated."

"That's still not really very helpful," Jasmine told him.

"To put it another way," the younger said, "It's broken."

There was a collective "Ah" from the assembled companions.

"Can't you fix it?" Anna asked.

"Given time, certainly. We could build a new one, in fact, much better than this. However..."

The others followed his gaze as he glanced up over the tops of the surrounding trees. A seething blade of light was clearly visible slicing up from the horizon into the clouds, splitting the sky into two halves.

"What's that?" Jasmine whispered.

"It's the beginning," said the elder Doctor, "Of the end of the world."

Everyone turned to look at him and he seemed a little embarrassed by this outrageous piece of melodrama.

"Well, I'm sorry, but it is."

"He's right," the younger confirmed. "Krongeist is beginning to break through. If we're going to make this work we need to move right now."

"But we can't, can we?" said Jeff. "You said we can't control the Skypig."

"I said the automatic guidance system was broken. But there is one other way we might control it."

Slowly, he drew something from his pocket. Jeff looked at it blankly.

"String." It was indeed a long, wiggly piece of string, frayed in places, that looked like it had been used for many different purposes already. "Sorry, Doctor, I'm not following."

"You surprise me. It's a piece of engineering very much on your level. We attach one end of this piece of string to each of the Skypig's manoeuvring thrusters, and we steer it that way."

"But to do that," said Jeff slowly, feeling his way along, "You'd have to be..."

"Sitting on the Skypig's back, yes."

"And when you flew into that rift thing, you'd be..."

"Killed instantly, yes."

With a sharp intake of breath Jasmine grasped what he was suggesting.

"Doctor, you can't!"

He was quite calm and serious when he looked down at her.

"Actually, Jasmine, I wasn't volunteering."

His gaze swept slowly across the group, to settle remorselessly on Jeff.

"Me?" The young man drew back, stuttering as he sought the words. "I... I... well..."

Anna's furious voice cut across him, her blue eyes like fire and ice.

"Who the hell do you think you are? It's your stupid plan, do it your own damn self! How dare you try and push Jeff into this? You..."

"He may be right."

The elder Doctor's quiet words silenced her instantly, and she turned to him, disbelieving.

"Doctor!"

"It's not as it seems," he told her gravely. "Jasmine and my future self arrived on Agrathus after the time distortion had come into effect. They're like outside observers to the whole phenomenon, which is why Jasmine could see things changing in the town which none of the local residents were aware of. The three of us, however, have been here from the start. We are part of this unstable timeline, which means that if we die it really doesn't signify that much, because if this plan succeeds and the timeline is deleted, then our deaths will be eradicated along with everything else."

"You're saying..." Jeff frowned, "That if I do this, and get killed, I'll just come back to life again?"

"More or less. All will be as it would have been if the Skypigs had never been sent back in time. We'll have no memory of any of these events because, from our perspective, they will never have occurred. Jasmine and the other Doctor, on the other hand will remember everything, because, as I said, they are observers to the distortion and not participants." His aged face crumpled in a sympathetic way, and he tapped a wrinkled finger against his forehead. "It's all very complicated and the human mind isn't really built for these concepts. As you yourself have often said, sometimes it's best just to assume the Doctor knows what he's talking about and get on with it."

Jeff smiled reluctantly.

"I didn't know you were listening when I said that." He took a deep breath and ruffled a hand through his soft brown hair. "Oh well. I suppose I'd better do it, then."

"I'll come with you," said Anna.

He looked at her, genuinely surprised.

"Really?"

She shrugged.

"Someone has to make sure you don't fall off."

"It's a good idea," the younger Doctor said. His voice was low, like at a funeral. He glanced over at where the balloon, propped over the burner on the Skypig's back, was steadily gaining buoyancy from the accumulated hot air, and twisted the string between his fingers. "Well. Let's get knotting."

[Soldeed]

Jasmine stood and stared up at the churning slice of light cutting up through the sky beyond the treetops. A tear in reality, the Doctors had called it, and looking at it she could believe this was the literal truth. As the bright white edges peeled apart she could see beyond, into something that was darker than dark, emptier than emptiness, something that made her feel as if she was always tumbling, tumbling helplessly towards it.

She glanced down uneasily at the contraption on which their hopes rested. The primitive, lumbering balloon now filled with hot air and straining against its cables, her own careful needlework, thankfully, holding fast along the gash in its side, the thrusters of the repaired Skypig humming with a steady, confident note, the dispiritingly low-tech piece of string which was to be used for steering hanging loosely on the pig's back.

She watched the tight huddle of the elder Doctor and his two companions saying their goodbyes, their heads bent close together, their voices inaudible. She started at a light touch on her shoulder.

"Sorry."

Her own Doctor stood at her side and gave her an apologetic shrug.

"Anxious moments, eh? Hard not to wish they'd just wrap it up, say goodbye and get moving?"

"Half the time I've been thinking that," she admitted. "The other half, I just can't believe what they're doing. Flying off to certain death on that inflatable junkheap. All this nonsense about rolling back reality so they won't be dead after all doesn't make it any less amazing."

"You're right, it doesn't."

There was a pause, and Jasmine looked up to find the Doctor gazing down at her contemplatively. He bit his lip, started to speak, changed his mind.

"Jeff and Anna," he began at last. "You like them, right?"

"Um..." She glanced round at the couple over by the Skypig. "Well, yes, he seems nice. She's a bit, well..."

"Scary, yes. Well, she has a heart of gold. Ah..."

He hesitated, and in puzzlement she looked at him closely. He seemed nervous, diffident, unsure of his ground. Everything she knew he never was.

"What's the matter?"

"I wasn't going to tell you," he said. "Because... because you never knew them, and you never seemed that interested in finding out about them, and I said to myself, what would it mean to you if I told you? You'd just be upset, and you wouldn't know what to do about it, and we have work to do. But now... because of what they're doing... I'm thinking perhaps you ought to know after all. Because I'd like you to be proud. Of your parents."

"My what?"

Jasmine's shocked, high-pitched reaction carried across the clearing, and she furtively looked about her as if she'd given away some secret. The Doctor winced.

"Right. I could probably have handled that better. But it's true, Jasmine. In two years' time, from their perspective, I'll return Jeff and Anna to Earth. They'll get married, and the following year they'll have you. It's the way it happened, it's the way it'll be."

Jasmine span, and stared at the two people across the clearing, while the Doctor's voice continued gently:

"The old man would probably come up with something wise and encouraging at this point. Since you're stuck with me, I'm afraid you're just going to have to work out for yourself what you're supposed to do next."

She watched her parents clasp the Doctor's hands, and the old man turn and hobble, shoulders bowed, away from them. She had no idea what she was going to do.

"Right." The two strangers were preparing to leave. "Right. Well... I suppose I'd better go and talk to them."

Jeff and Anna looked round at her approach.

"Jasmine." Companionable as ever, Jeff gave her a welcoming smile. "Well, looks like we're off. Time to say goodbye."

"Yes," said Jasmine quietly. She stood there dumbly, looking from one to the other of them until they became uneasy and exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

"Right," said Anna. "Well, goodbye. It's been... oh."

Embarrassed and taken aback, she nonetheless returned Jasmine's silent embrace, and they stood for a second pressed together, Jasmine's dark curls against her cheek, before they broke apart.

Jeff had watched the scene bemusedly.

"Well, it's nice you two have... oh."

He hugged the girl willingly, smiling through his puzzled frown. When Jasmine disengaged and stepped back she took a long look at the pair who stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the machine.

"Goodbye," she said. She reached out for the words. "I... I'm so glad I met you."

"Well, likewise," said Jeff, eyeing her closely like a scientific conundrum. "It's been, well, strange mostly, but I wouldn't have missed it."

"Look after the Doctor, won't you?" Anna chipped in unexpectedly.

"Oh yes," agreed Jeff. "You know what he's like. Someone has to keep an eye on him."

Jasmine nodded, and bit her lip. A constricting, suffocating paralysis took her by the throat, and when she spoke her voice was high and thin.

"I will. I promise."

"Oh, don't be like that." Jeff saw her glistening eyes and gave her his kindly smile, reaching out to touch her gently on the cheek. "We're going to die, but then we're going to be alive again. It's exciting!"

With a superhuman effort Jasmine held down the breathless ache in her chest and rewarded him with a stretched little smile and a quick nod of her head. Jeff stepped back.

"So long."

Anna gave her a comradely little half smile and a wink, looking as if she was trying to conceal it from the others, and then they both turned away and left her. Jasmine turned her back and hurried away across the clearing to where the two Doctors stood quietly waiting. The younger stepped forward and placed a companionable hand on her shoulder.

"Nicely handled, Jasmine."

The three of them watched Anna help Jeff up onto the Skypig where he straddled its back and took up the loop of string like the reins of a horse. Then she kicked away the restraining pegs and, as the contraption lumbered into the air, scrambled agilely up onto its back to sit behind him. When they turned to wave, they each seemed different, Jeff's softly pleasant features sharpening with purpose, Anna's face transformed by a wide and dazzling smile at the excitement of it all.

Jasmine waved, and smiled back with barely a tremor as they floated up and away, dwindling by the second. They were receding into the sky and gliding determinedly towards the rift before she finally turned and buried her face against the Doctor's coat.

[Soldeed]

"It's gone."

The elder Doctor's calm statement was lost in the gale, a howling wind that tore the leaves from the trees and struck the three people in the clearing like a physical barrier. The others moved quickly to catch him as the old man was blasted from his feet and all three stared up at the rift in the sky bursting open into a great gash, a vast hole into nothing, from which streamed something that looked like light one second, darkness the next. The night sky rippled and flared, the ground shook, the very air quivered.

"The Skypig!"

Jasmine jumped to her feet as the wind subsided and scanned the distance in vain hopes of glimpsing her parents' ramshackle flying machine.

"They should be all right," the younger Doctor said, struggling up with his older incarnation's arm wrapped about his shoulders. "If there's one thing balloons are good for it's riding strong winds. As long as..." He paused as Jasmine turned on him, wide-eyed. "Well, as long as they managed to stay on."

"I'm sure they'll be coping," the elder wheezed painfully, leaning on his stick. "They always do, somehow. Meanwhile we have our own part to play. That widening of the split won't be the last, but it's all Krongeist needs. He's free."

"What will he do?" she asked, tearing her gaze from the skies.

"Well, he knows who trapped him in the first place," said the younger. "And he knows where the Tardis is. So it seems reasonable to assume he'll be coming here. And not with friendly intentions."

"Oh." Jasmine glanced about nervously at the surrounding woods. "Um, should we go and hide?"

"Yes and no," the elder replied. "You, yes, us, no. You see, if Krongeist notices what Jeff and Anna are doing then he'll stop them, and everything we've done will have been for nothing. We have to try and divert his attention."

"Divert his attention? Won't he just kill you?"

"It's possible," the younger admitted. "But after penetrating our reality to contact Temore, and breaking free just now, he'll be low on energy. By his standards, that is. With luck, we might be able to keep him occupied for a little while."

"Well, let me help."

The one ancient, short and stooped, the other taller and straight-backed, the Doctors nonetheless seemed to move with a kind of symmetry as they looked at each other, then back at her.

"No," the elder said, "I think this is something for the two of us. Please do as we ask now."

Jasmine drew breath to object, but the two sets of eyes looking steadily across at her were too much to combat. She retreated into the shrubbery and watched from behind a tree trunk as they turned away from her, two long black coats, one shabby and ill-fitting, the other sharply cut and pristine. The younger pushed his hands into his pockets, the elder leaned forward on his stick, and they waited patiently side by side.

"What's going on?"

Crouching in the shelter of her hiding place, Jasmine twisted to look round incredulously at the newcomer who leaned forward behind her and whispered conspiratorially into her ear. A young man, clean-cut, with tousled fair hair, curious brown eyes, and dressed in plain beige shirt and trousers. He straightened and waited politely for an answer.

"Who are you?"

"Oh, sorry." The young man stuck out a hand and Jasmine, bewildered, instinctively took it. "Krongeist. Pleased to meet you."

"You..." She snatched her hand back as if from a spider. "You're human?"

"Oh, no no no." He looked down at his own body with interest. "This is a, what d'you call it, manifestation. I actually sort of live a different mode of existence to yours, you know, so I don't really have a body as such. It's an interesting sensation, but I can't say I'd want to be stuck with it. No offence."

He smiled apologetically at Jasmine's wary look, and blinked sleepily. She collected herself.

"What are you going to do?"

"Oh. Well..." He peeped through the foliage towards the Doctors, still in position at the centre of the clearing. "I thought I'd kill that man there, and that one..." His eyes returned to Jasmine. "And I suppose probably you as well. Ah, not necessarily in that order."

He didn't move, but watched mildly while Jasmine backed away. She tore past branches and stumbled over roots and scrambled her way back to the clearing.

"Doctors!"

They whirled, and stared past her at the young man who strolled unhurriedly out of the woods.

"Krongeist!" came the younger's sharp exclamation.

"Ah, yes," replied the young man, frowning in concentration. "Now, you're not the Doctor I remember, and yet you remember me, and you, old-timer, you're the Doctor I do remember, but you've never seen me before. It's very confusing, isn't it? And I'm a timeless entity of pure temporal energy who really ought to be up to speed on this sort of thing."

"So, you're free," the Doctor said. "Congratulations. You think that means you've won?"

"I'm quietly confident, yes. Of course I was confident last time and, to your credit, you proved me wrong. But that trick won't work a second time. You can't trap me outside a reality which has a dirty great hole in it. Now, then." He tapped a finger thoughtfully against his temple. "There was something I was supposed to do to you both. What was it? Help me out."

"One moment." The elder Doctor spoke up. "Before you kill us, I want to explain to you why your plans are all ultimately doomed to failure."

"Oh? Well, I believe I have a century or two to spare. Please continue."

"Let me tell you a story." The Doctor placed his finger contemplatively to his lips and began. "Many years ago, on the planet Earth, there lived three hairy, clumsy but sentient creatures known as bears, who lived in a cottage in the woods. One morning, they had prepared for themselves a nourishing meal of grain mixed with milk, but it was served very hot, and they elected to take a bracing constitutional to allow the mixture to cool to the optimum temperature and so that they themselves might work up an appetite. Now, while they were out of their house, there arrived a young human woman, whose name is not recorded by history but who was nicknamed Goldilocks in honour of the unusually bright yellow colour of her hair. This individual, showing I fear the lack of respect for private property and societal norms so common amongst the youth of certain cultures, gained entrance to the bears' home and without a second thought elected to steal the food which they had so carefully prepared for themselves. She initially tasted the portion set aside for the father bear, the patriarch of the house as you might say, but..."

"I'm sorry." Krongeist raised a hand apologetically. "Is this strictly relevant?"

"If you'll let me finish my meaning will become clear."

"Fine, I'll let you finish. Oh, wait, on the other hand..."

In a flash of eye-searing electric blue light the Doctor was smashed back across the clearing to slam against the trunk of a tree. The old man collapsed like an empty sack of bones.

Krongeist took a step forward and found his path blocked by the younger Doctor, his thin face taut with controlled anger.

"That," he said levelly, "Was impolite."

Languidly rocking back on his heels, Krongeist gave him a dismissive look.

"Oh look, it's the other one. So, do you have a story for me too?"

"No," said the Doctor. "I thought I'd try this the old fashioned way."

In a spurt of blood Krongeist's nose flattened under the Doctor's fist. He stumbled back, catching the spitting red fluid in his hand and staring at in bewilderment.

"What... what was that? What just happened?"

"It's..." The Doctor struck him again, on the cheek, driving him backwards. "... All part of... being human. A... novel experience for you."

"You're right." Krongeist's battered, bleeding face was calm and amiable as he seized the Doctor's wrist in mid swing, and he pushed him down to his knees watching with pleasurable interest the gasp of pain forced by the crushing power of his grip. "You know, this sort of thing is exactly the reason I started all this in the first place. I can see why you corporeal types are always hurting each other, it really is most satisfying."

His free hand swung upwards in a slow, looping punch that lifted the Doctor clear off the ground, to slam down heavily on his back. He lay like a dead man.

"Any more for any more?" Krongeist looked at them expectantly, then shrugged with an air of disappointment. "No? Then I suppose it's killing time. Goodbye, Doc... er... oh."

With an air of puzzlement he inspected the bloodsoaked metal spike protruding from his sternum.

"I was told," Jasmine said behind him, hanging on firmly to the shaft of the harpoon, "To look after them."

"Good... good job." Krongeist tottered a little, eyes rolling dizzily skyward, buckling at the knees. Then with a hiss he whipped around, tearing the weapon from Jasmine's grasp and seizing her by the throat with a grip like a knotted rope. "Because they're going to live a few seconds longer while I kill you."