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‘You oughtn’t to wear yourself out for no good reason,’ he persisted. ‘You don’t think it’s your fault, do you?’

‘No,’ she said in surprise. ‘Not at all. I’m not guilty,’ she went on, a bit insulted. ‘I care about him.’

‘Of course.’ Chiltern was embarrassed. ‘Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply any lack of appropriate feeling on your part.’

‘That’s all tight,’ she mumbled. Maybe she did feel guilty, she thought unhappily. Why did being with the Doctor make her so protective of him? She looked at him again, then more closely. Just while she’d been talking with Chiltern, the pain had gone out of his face. And was that... Did she hear something? She bent and put her ear near his lips.

Sure enough, he was humming.

* * *

‘Stop that!’ said Sabbath.

‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor contritely. ‘You know how you get a song on the brain.’

‘No I do not.’

‘Oh, of course not. My mistake.’

On the theory that any direction he chose would be likely to take them away from this place in which they didn’t belong, Sabbath simply started walking. Sure enough, the black wall faded, and he found himself on a steep rocky path. When he looked up all he saw was something that looked like a starless night sky. He hoisted the Doctor to a more comfortable carrying position. ‘Any advice?’

‘Don’t look back.’

Sabbath never afterwards thought consciously about this journey through the unknown night. He had no reason to want to remember it, and on the few occasions that he for some reason tried, it would not be thought of. The experience was somehow too shapeless to focus on, too close to time itself to be comprehensible enough to recall. There was duration, terrible duration, in which the very conception of there being an end was somehow forgotten and unrecoverable. This eternal now was undifferentiated, one step after another on an unchanging path, not even Sisyphean, only repetitive. A single moment experienced forever. Sabbath, who did not believe in hell, knew that this was hell.

He would almost have been glad of the Doctor’s conversation, but the Doctor was silent. Was he experiencing the same thing, Sabbath wondered, or did the peculiar temporal elements of his biology make him immune? A long, long while passed before Sabbath allowed himself to understand that it was only his connection to the Doctor, that alien heart that somehow beat impossibly in both their chests, that allowed him to incorporate his surroundings at all instead of going suddenly, screamingly mad. Even as he realised this, the Doctor’s voice spoke softly in his ear:

‘You wanted to travel in Deep Time. This, where we are, is far deeper.’

‘It is terrible,’ said Sabbath simply.

‘Yes,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘It is.’

The very survival of his mind was in the power of this fantastic creature he was bearing on his back like the old man of the sea. The Doctor had dragged him into this like a drowning man pulling another under. True, the purpose was to attain something they both wanted, albeit for different reasons, but the Doctor had not consulted him. Had he thought Sabbath would refuse? Or did he just not care? Monstrous egotist, insane risk taker, manipulator and trickster. I have underestimated him, Sabbath thought grimly, a complacent and foolish thing to do, though not yet, fortunately, a mistake. I let myself forget he was not human, judged his capabilities and limits as if he were. If the gentleness was true, I presumed the ruthlessness was a front; if the ruthlessness turned out to be true, then I was sure the gentleness would be revealed as hypocrisy. But neither and both are true. He lives in contradictions as we cannot, and for him they are not contradictions but wholeness.

Good God, he thought with a rare trace of fear, what might a whole race of such beings have been like?

Or was the Doctor unique – an aristocrat of time, a prince of coincidence? Was the warping Elizabeth saw around him merely evidence of his peculiar temporal experience and being, or did it indicate something even stranger? It might be as well