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The beacon was still flaring across the cloudless sky. As another car drifted slowly past, leaving a spiralling slipstream of coloured molecules behind it, Ace realized that the scrabbling noise had stopped. She started to run again. Hang on, Doctor. Just wait, will you? Ace needs you too!

A hairline crack slowly traced across the sky and then began to open, at first like crimson lightning, then like a wound.

Ace rounded a corner and saw the familiar, blue police-box shape of the TARDIS ahead. As if in answer, the unnatural spread of time juddered back into a mode that she accepted as reality.

As she walked along the sunlit avenue, she could see the light on the TARDIS's roof still flashing. The Doctor was kneeling on the pavement, apparently using his umbrella as a lever on one of the TARDIS's lower panels. In the houses around, Ace could see net curtains twitching.

There was a sharp electrical crack. The umbrella flew backwards out of the Doctor's grasp and landed in the road. "Look at that!" he snapped as he saw Ace. He retrieved the umbrella and poked at a splintered hole in a panel at the base of the TARDIS.

Halfway up the side of the police box there was a scorch mark with an elegant swirled pattern burned into the paintwork. "This must be the impact point," he said and ran the tip of his umbrella down a blistered line which led straight to the splintered hole.

"Hang on," said Ace, "I thought you were ill."

The Doctor just looked irritated.

"Professor, I thought there was some megadisaster going on. Back there the whole of time and space was going crazy."

"You noticed it too then. Good."

"What?"

The Doctor flailed his hands in exasperation. "It's all muddled," he complained. "How can I find a rational answer if I can't even think of a question?"

Ace crouched down and squinted through the hole in the TARDIS. "Is something still in there?" she asked.

"How long did you say you'd been travelling with me in the TARDIS?"

"I don't know. Long enough."

"Yes . . . exactly what I thought."

That unnerved her. "What do you mean . . . long enough? I'm not going anywhere. I mean I'm staying with you!"

"Long enough to understand," he snapped and began to walk slowly round the outside of his ship, tapping at its sides with his umbrella like a blind man.

Ace followed and complained as she went. "Is it the silver cat? Or was that just another collective hallucination? I thought you were ill, Professor. And what's the matter with the TARDIS? If it's under attack I want to help." She stopped as a deep grating noise began to emanate from inside the police box. The Doctor winced and pressed his fingers to his head again. He sat down on the kerb.

"Something's got inside the ship," he said, his voice quavering.

"The cat thing? Is that what was scrabbling?"

He held up a hand to stop the questions while he tried to think. "I don't know what it is or how long it's been there. We may have picked it up in vortex. But it's a threat, that's why we were summoned back."

"Summoned by the TARDIS?"

"Possibly."

"Don't you know?" She sat down on the kerb next to him. "Professor, just how long have you been travelling in the TARDIS?"

"It's not an orthodox machine. It has little idiosyncrasies, especially when it's in trouble."

"Just like its owner."

"Exactly." He looked directly at her. "Just like anyone who travels in it." The grating sound increased suddenly and the sky began to pale from blue to orange again.

Ace stood up. There was a nagging irritation in her mind and she could guess the cause. "It's in dead lumber, isn't it? Real trouble. Sticking ideas in our heads to bring us home."

Something in his ship. Something coiling and squirming its way deeper. The Doctor felt its violation of his home as surely as if it was in his own head. He felt a cold ache and shivered in the warm sunshine. How could he cut the canker from his own mind?

From somewhere nearby, he heard the mocking jangle of an ice-cream van. It played