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Pleasantly, the phone was still ringing when Sam reached the box. It was a perfectly normal telephone kiosk, the kind you could have seen anywhere in London before British Telecom discovered the joys of transparent plastic. The kind you still saw on postcards for tourists.

‘Red,’ Sam told the box. ‘You’re red. How come you’re the only red thing here?’

Unsurprisingly, the box didn’t answer. So Sam picked up the receiver, and held it to her ear.

‘At the third stroke, it will be seventeen minutes past midnight on the eighth of August, 1996. Precisely.’

Sam frowned. Just in case anyone was watching her.

‘At the third stroke, it will be seventeen minutes and ten seconds past midnight on the eighth of August, 1996.’

Bizarre. Sam inspected the telephone a little more closely. There was a dial, rather than a push‐button panel, and in the centre of it were the words: operator, 777.

Naturally, she couldn’t resist it. She dialled the number.

There was a pause. A click.

‘Hello?’ said a voice at the other end of the line.

‘Doctor?’ said Sam. ‘Where are you?’

Another pause. ‘Well… I’m in the console room.’

‘Yeah? I didn’t know there was a phone in the console room.’

Yet another pause. Then, quite quietly, ‘No. Neither did I. Where are you?’

‘I’m up on a hill. In a phone box.’

‘I see.’ Sam could have sworn she actually heard him nodding. ‘You’d better stay there. I’ll be along in a moment.’

He arrived at the bottom of the hill two or three minutes later. Sam watched him clambering up the slope, occasionally stopping to point at some piece of rubbish or other and look surprised. Finally, he reached the box, pretending not to be out of breath. Sam put the receiver back on the cradle, and let the Doctor answer it for himself.

‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor.

‘Ah what?’

‘Ah. It’s apparently twenty‐four minutes past midnight on the eighth of August, 1996.’

‘Precisely?’

‘Precisely.’ The Doctor held the phone away from his ear, and stared at it. ‘Which is odd, because we’re in flight. Not in any time or space at all.’

Then, suddenly, there was that old ‘alert’ look on his face. He slapped his forehead with his hand, but unfortunately forgot to drop the receiver first, and almost concussed himself.

‘The space‐time telegraph,’ he whispered.

‘The what?’

‘On Earth. When I was stranded there back in the 1970s. Or was it the 1980s? I left a space‐time telegraph with the UN. A way of calling me back in case of dire emergency.’ He dropped the phone, and let it dangle from its cord. ‘I’d forgotten. The receiver was expunged from the console when the TARDIS refitted itself. It didn’t use to look like a telephone box.’

‘Yeah? What did it use to look like?’

‘Well… a telegraph. That’s why it was called a space‐time telegraph. Why would anyone give it such a stupid name if it didn’t look like a telegraph?’

Sam fluttered her eyelashes at him. ‘Say “expunged” again. It’s cute.’

‘No.’ The Doctor clapped his hands together, then set off down the hill at a trot. ‘Right. No time to lose. It’s already, oh, a quarter past midnight, I should think.’

And then, Sam suddenly realised what he was saying.

‘Doctor,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘Wait.’

So he did. He stopped dead, on the side of the hill, his arms spread wide to stop himself losing his balance.

‘You mean, you’re taking us back to Earth?’

The Doctor didn’t move. Well, he waved his arms a bit, but only because he had to.

‘Yes,’ he said, eventually.

Sam didn’t say anything else. She could tell the Doctor was waiting, hoping she’d take the initiative. But she didn’t have anything new to tell him.

Finally, he turned around to face her.

‘This is goodbye, then,’ he said. Lamely.

Fortunately, he slipped on a half‐finished copy of the Venus de Milo at that point, and tumbled down the hill on his backside. Which kind of made up for things.

* * *

Now

Getting into the hotel wasn’t hard. Sam just pretended she owned the place, and strolled right through reception. The hard part was nonchalantly hanging around near the