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Your Clearspring Water Company doesn't actually exist as such. Does it?'

the Doctor said.

'Oh yes.' Finer nodded vigorously. 'It exists. I'm expecting great things of it.

It's going to be very profitable as a matter of fact. Consumers are endlessly gullible.' He lifted a bottle from an open carton on the floor by its top and tossed it to the Doctor. It was a more streamlined design than the others, with a simplified label. 'Better packaging don't you think? It might only be water but you can't sell it to them in a bucket.'

I assume it's not tap water,' the Doctor said, turning the bottle round in his hands and looking at the label.

'Genuine spring water,' Finer said. 'Try it.'

Thank you, no,' the Doctor said and tossed the bottle back to Finer, who missed it and did not bother to retrieve it from the floor.

'What sort of drug was it?' the Doctor asked.

Drug?'

'In the first of the free samples you gave out.' Although he was curious to know, the Doctor half-hoped Finer would deny any knowledge of drugs.

The man was confiding far too much. It suggested to the Doctor that he was not intended to survive for very long.

'Biotechnology isn't my field,' Finer said conversationally. 'But I do have a controlling interest in a company that's trying to develop cognition enhancers. They improve brain function that sort of thing. One of the drugs showed early promise but unofficial tests threw up some unfortunate side effects. There was a certain amount of short-term psychosis.'

'Psychosis?'

'Schizophrenic episodes: mild paranoia, hallucinations.' Finer shrugged.

'Short-term psychosis.'

'How short term was short term?' the Doctor asked.

"The subjects all recovered,' Finer said impatiently. 'What was important, what interested me, was a recurring theme in their hallucinations. They all thought they had paranormal gifts. It occurred to me that in one or two cases it might be true and the drug might be a trigger. A parapsychological enhancer perhaps.'

'You gave that stuff to everyone?' It was what the Doctor had suspected, but he was still shocked by the enormity of what had been done. 'That's monstrous.'

'I needed to kick-start that idiot.' Finer used the wand to freeze the image of Barry Hitchins. 'He was getting nowhere. I was running out of time.'

'A student has committed suicide.'

'There was no connection.'

'With short-term psychosis as a side effect how do you know?' the Doctor challenged. 'She was part of his experimental group.'

For the first time Finer looked irritated as well as impatient. 'I don't have to justify myself to you.'

'Then why are you telling me about it?'

'Good question. I'm relieved you're not stupid.' Finer waved the wand. 'I want your help with this.'

The Doctor stared at the new image which filled the screen. He was looking at some sort of dark tunnel in which stood a projector. It was not unlike a primitive laser projector but probably much bigger: there was no way to judge scale from the image. What was terrifying was what it was doing.

Starting at the projector, steady pulses of energy flickered backwards and forwards through a line of circular tubes of perfect, shadowless light. Each pulse seemed to gain power by bouncing backwards and forwards through the circles until it reached a critical mass when it suddenly disappeared.

In that moment everything reversed itself. In a bright tunnel the tubes of perfect light became tubes of perfect darkness. The pulses of energy became non-pulses of absolute emptiness. As this negative process de-flickered to an un-climax and reversed itself, the next positive pulse was already running across it. Positives and negatives whirled and danced over and round one another, bound together but separate, blurring at any point of focus but needle-sharp in passing.

Here and there it looked random, but the Doctor knew it wasn't. Positive pulses and negative non-pulses grazed edges and