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Pertanor started forward again. ‘It’s got to be around here somewhere. It’s just a question of getting the search pattern right.’ He stopped abruptly.

Behind him, Rinandor almost stumbled into his back.

‘What is it, what’s wrong?’

‘Did you see that?’ he whispered.

She peered past him. ‘See what? I can’t see anything,’ she said. ‘Is it getting dark already? How long is it to nightfall on this crapsoid?’

‘Quiet!’ he hissed.

They both stood quite still in the gloom under the jungle canopy. She still couldn’t see anything but now she thought she could hear something. It was a slithering sound and it seemed to be all around them.

‘The data on life-forms?’ Pertanor said.

‘What about it?’ she asked, straining to hear and trying to decide whether the sound was getting louder.

‘There wasn’t any mention of dangerous stuff, was there?

Squad snakes, anything like that?’ he asked.

‘No.’ It was. It was definitely getting louder. ‘But then...’

He finished the thought for her: ‘There was no mention of this jungle, either.’

‘I think now would be a good time to find the ship,’ she said.

‘Gets my vote,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be close.’

‘So is that... whatever it is... What do you think it is?’

‘I think I’d rather not know.’

They started to walk again, Pertanor leading, Rinandor close behind him. They were continuing along the line of march that they had originally calculated should bring them to the ship if for any reason they lost electronic support systems. The slithering seemed to be keeping pace with them. They picked up their speed, moving as quickly as they could, but the jungle was too thick to let them run.

The Doctor’s stroll through the pine forest was beginning to relax him. He had been hoping for a breeze but stillness brought its own pleasures. In the circumstances it was disappointing that one of those pleasures was not the sharp scent of pine sap mingled with the soft musty odour of loam, but sometimes things went that way. In fact the forest did not smell of anything very much, which did strike the Doctor as mildly odd, since it looked like any other collection of needle-leaved evergreen trees to be found on any number of similar M-class planets. Minor variations aside, it was a fairly routine evolutionary development, an unremarkable adaptation of a planet to standard environmental limits. And it should smell.

There should be things visibly living in it too. He knew that these forests often did not abound in fur and feather. This was logical since the pines themselves were a response to marginal conditions, but tiny birds and small hardy mammals had usually adapted to the impoverished living and could be heard and occasionally even observed by the quiet walker.

But not in this forest it seemed.

He wandered on through the gloom of the trees and as he got deeper into his thoughts he began to discuss with himself the differences between truth and reality. Like most people who spend time alone for whatever reason – in his case it was because he preferred to – the Doctor was in the habit of talking aloud to himself. It had been suggested to him once, at least once, that this was eccentric behaviour and he had considered that possibility. He had tried listening more carefully to what he was saying to himself and had concluded that most of it made sense at least to him, and since he was the one he was talking to there seemed no reason to be concerned.

‘There must be objective truth,’ he was saying now, ‘which must exist outside ourselves. Reality exists within us. The world is what we think it is. How can it be anything else? But truth simply is. Unless I’m imagining everything. But if I am, then objective truth must still exist because I have imagined it to exist. True is different, though. If enough people believe something is true then it is true. That must be the basis of democracy, surely. But it’s not the same as truth. Not necessarily. Not necessarily not, though.’

As he walked and talked in the smell-free, silent forest the Doctor