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'Doctor?' Leela said, interrupting his spiralling thoughts. 'Why have we stopped here?'

'Stopped here?' the Doctor said vaguely. He looked around him. It was a pleasant octagonal space with a tree at its centre, the campus book shop and the main library on one side, lecture theatres on two others. There were students bustling about. Why had they stopped here? he wondered.

Where were they supposed to be going? 'Do you remember the way?' he asked.

'Yes I do,' Leela said, and pointed to a broad flight of steps.

'Lead on,' the Doctor said and smiled at her. He was uncomfortably aware that he still

couldn't remember where they were going. 'We don't want to be late.'

Leela said, I thought Doctor Ghostbuster Bazzer Hitchins gave you a key to his laboratory in case he was not there when we arrived?'

Of course, the Doctor remembered, that was where they were going. He must examine immediately the tapes of all the recent experiments to see how serious the danger was and how difficult it was going to be to put things right. There's no time to waste,' he said. 'We have a lot to do and very little time to do it in.' Judging by his own incoherence, very little time indeed. The feedback loops must be intensifying by the moment. Unless it was nothing to do with parapsychology and its links to temporal shift anomalies and multidimensional voids.

As they hurried up the steps he reminded himself that he must remember to get the Clearspring bottled water tested.

Its over,' John Finer snarled. 'This dog and pony show is at an end.' He stalked round the laboratory, pausing every so often to stare at something and shake his head as if he could not believe what he was seeing. 'What a waste of time and effort and money. How did you get away with it all this time?'

Barry tried to be angry but he couldn't quite bring himself to it. 'Why do you take it so personally?' he asked. "The time and effort was mine not yours.'

He was suddenly aware that he was using the past tense. Was that why he wasn't angry: because he knew it was over? 'It's not as if the money came out of your departmental budget. Though God knows you could have spared it. This was outside funding. The Kellerfield Foundation weren't interested in developmental engineering. They weren't about to finance your quest to build a better mousetrap. So why is it important to you, Finer?

Why me? Why are you after me?'

Why me? Why are you after me?' Finer sneered. Isn't that just typical. I'll tell you why shall I? Because this,' he gestured round, 'this pseudoscience is an embarrassing disgrace in a serious academic institution.'

You pompous pillock,' Barry said. 'A serious academic institution? This is a polytechnic with ideas above its station.'

'A girl is dead, Hitchins.'

'You're saying that's my fault?'

'She was obviously unstable. You encouraged her instability. You intensified it in fact.'

Barry sighed. 'Yes that's possible,' he said, miserably. 'That is possible.'

'You imagine you're going to be allowed to continue under those circumstances?' Finer demanded triumphantly.

'I don't get to put my side of it to the senate?'

'No, of course you don't.'

"What about the council?'

'Not a chance. They'll be skating in hell before you'd get anywhere near the council.'

'There's always the press,' Barry said, in an attempt at defiance that sounded unconvincing even to him. 'I still have friends in the media.' It wasn't much of a bluff, he thought. 'I don't think anybody would like that sort of publicity would they?'

Finer said, 'Least of all you, presumably'

Whatever else he was, Finer wasn't stupid, Barry thought and said,

'Suppose I take my funding somewhere else? The University of East Wessex isn't the only polytechnic on the make.'

'Pay attention, Hitchins,' Finer said pityingly. 'The girl killed herself in questionable circumstances. In spectacularly questionable circumstances.

Everyone's running for cover on this. It isn't just the university that's disowning you. The Kellerfield Foundation terminated