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By Root 487 0

hand, your friend Doctor Watson, being a man who works on the instinctive rather than the intellectual level, comes to terms with new sets of rules remarkably quickly. A very adaptable man, and one much after my own hearts.'

'He's not my friend,' I murmured, not liking the way the Doctor had rolled the word around his mouth, getting every last nuance out of it.

'Don't you like him?' the Doctor said innocently.

'I like him, but...'

'I thought you two were getting on rather well.'

'We were. We are. But I'm not going to have an affair with him.'

'Well, that makes a change,' he murmured. 'I'm worried enough about Ace's amorous predilections without every male you meet falling for you left, right and centre.'

He glanced at me with a twinkle in his eye. I smiled back, but beneath his serious surface and his humorous interior I could see something else, a deeper, more fundamental worry.

'What's the matter?' I asked.

He shook his head.

'A word, that's all.'

'A word?'

'Something I heard back in Tir Ram's cavern. Something in that chant.'

I shook my head.

'I couldn't make any of it out,' I said. 'It didn't sound like a real language at all. I'd have understood it otherwise, surely?'

The Doctor pursed his lips for a moment. I took the opportunity to look around. Nothing had changed. The plain was still plain, the mountains still touched the sky. Watson still walked too fast. Holmes was still sulking.

'It wasn't a language as such,' he mused finally, 'more a polyglot collection of words which I've heard before on half a hundred worlds across the universe, although with translations as varied as "window", "reddish-green"

and "happily unicycling in an easterly direction". The actual chant was meaningless, but one of those words made me think.'

'Don't leave me in suspense. Which one?'

' "Azathoth",' he said gloomily.

Now it was my turn to frown.

'I know that word. I've seen it somewhere. An article, or a journal, something. Maybe on Braxiatel...'

'Azathoth is a god of anarchy and chaos: one of a pantheon whose worship sprung up on various planets across the universe at more or less the same time. The Silurians, for instance, venerated them before mankind was even a gleam in evolution's eye, as did the gargantuan entities that ruled Earth a hundred thousand years before them. Hundreds more races sacrificed in their names. There was even a cult amongst the Shobogans at one time.'

'Shobogans?'

'New Age Time-Lord drop-outs, but that's not important right now. Azathoth is a representation - an avatar, if you like - of one of the Great Old Ones.'

'And they are . . .?'

The Doctor sighed explosively. Watson looked round at the sudden noise, tripped over his feet and almost fell.

'I was hoping not to have to go into this.'

'Start at the very beginning.'

'A very good place to start. Very well: the universe is cyclical, which means that it periodically goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, punctuated by a series of big bangs.'

'I think we can skip the history of the universe, if it's all the same to you.'

'No, no,' he complained, flapping his hand at me, 'the Great Old Ones predate even that. In the dying days of the universe before this current one, which is forever separated from us by a point where time and space do not exist, a group of beings discovered how to preserve themselves past that point where their universe ceased. They shuttled themselves sideways, into a parallel universe which, for various reasons that I will not even attempt to explain now, ceased a split-second after our one. With me so far?'

'No.'

'Good. Just before that universe ceased, they jumped back to our one, which had just started expanding afresh after a moment of nothingness.

The trouble is, the universe before ours was set up differently.

Fundamental physical laws such as the speed of light and the charge on the electron were different, which means that the Great Old Ones have powers undreamed of by anybody in this universe. Powers that make them look like