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RELATIVE YEAR 3177

ERA UNKNOWN

She looked at the Doctor, who was still looking at her with his arms folded, his face by turns sinister and politely attentive as the blue reflections danced across it. No clue that she was on the right track, but she looked back at the forward temporal probe display.

There seemed to be no correlation.

She looked back at him, and folded her arms in imitation of his stance.'A time eddy?'

'Sam!' The Doctor smiled, arms flung suddenly wide open in delight. He squeezed the tops of her arms and looked proudly at her.'No.'

Sam's bubble of pride popped, and she narrowed her eyes at the Doctor as he rubbed his hands together and moved round to the other side of the console. 'Some kind of time disturbance, though, surely,' she continued, determined not to come right out and ask, or to admit she was entirely wrong.

'My first thought,'said the Doctor.'But I've scanned the area. It's a bit of a backwater, really, the Thannos system. Quiet, inoffensive, nothing much of note to the seasoned traveller.'

'But on closer inspection?' Sam had picked up the opera glasses and was studying the Doctor through them.

'On closer inspection, the forward temporal probe -'

'Which you use when we're in the vortex to get an idea of what year we'll materialise in -' Sam was determined to salvage something from this latest bout.

The Doctor picked up her sentence as if he had been banking on the interruption:'- but which can also be used in real time to probe for temporal disturbance if aimed at a spatial target -'

'Uh huh.' News to her and he knew it, but never admit defeat.

'- reveals that this,' and he flicked a switch on the heavy, hanging monitor of the external scanner,'is the cause of our temporal fluxing.'

Sam waited, feeling impatient and a little excited as the cathode-ray tube inside the metal box warmed up and first interference patterns, then a hazy black-and-white image started to form on the screen. As colour seeped into the picture, she realised she was looking at a pinkish sphere, a thin crescent of its surface lost in shadow.

'A planet,' she said, blankly. Then she decided the game was up.'Is it?'

'Yes. It's the planet Hirath, apparently. Never heard of it, and I wish I hadn't had to.' The Doctor walked round in front of the monitor, his mane of light-brown hair seeming to leave dark trails of motion against the brightness of the screen as he shook his head from side to side. 'I don't understand how, but Hirath appears to be a mass of conflicting time fields. The whole planet's cut up into little pieces of the past and future.'

'Like paddy fields.' Sam drew herself up to her full five foot three and said, in a low voice,'The paddy fields of infinity.' She laughed, then stopped under the weight of the Doctor's stare, feeling more four and a half than almost eighteen.

'Sam,' began the Doctor, solemnly and quietly,'this is more than just a quirk in space and time. A planet's biosphere seems to be in a manipulated state of temporal flux. There's no way this can be stable, and the forces being brought into play on Hirath to make it like this, well... I wouldn't want to hazard how hazardous they must be.'

A heavy silence filled the console room, punctuated only by the occasional clicks and whirrs of the TARDIS flight systems. Sam broke it.

'So I guess we're going to have to find out for sure, right?'

***

In Yost's bright white office with en suite sleeping quarters, Vasid's alarm cut through the silence, screaming for attention. No one came. The drone of the signal would surely have driven Anstaar quite mad had she not disconnected it after the last time Vasid had used it to lure her outside in the night. Instead, she was asleep.

And nobody heard the whispering, rushing and then painfully grating sound of the blue box's alien engines as it began to take material form.

Chapter 2

Abandon

No answer.

So what would that mean? You're not so stupid. You're not.

Vasid wiped his pointed nose. No Vost, and now Anstaar wasn't answering.