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The iron fist that gripped him brought every particle in his body to a standstill and the darkness folded in on him. And finally, despairingly, he knew where he was.

By the time the Doctor muzzily regained consciousness, Ace’s gentle patting of his face had turned into full-on slapping. He shooed her away with his hand.

‘Professor! What’s happening – they’ve not come back! We have to get after them!’

‘What? Who haven’t... oh, yes, yes.’ He sat up, shakily, helped by Ace and Michael, clasping his hat to his head. He looked round the solicitous crowd, gathered around him like gawpers at a car crash.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Very, thank you,’ replied Ace. ‘Now shouldn’t we be going after them?’

He pulled the control sphere from Ace’s hand and confidently tossed it into the air a couple of times. On the third, she snatched it from him, almost petulantly. ‘Why haven’t they come back for it?’ Her face suddenly fell. ‘Don’t tell me – they’ve got some other way of opening the stasis chamber...’

‘If they have,’ replied the Doctor, rising to his feet unsteadily, ‘then it’s not going to do them much good. Not where they’ve gone.’

‘They’re not on board the spaceship, then?’

The Doctor twinkled at her and took the control sphere back from her, pocketing it neatly. ‘Well they would be – if I’d been doing what they thought I was doing when they caught me doing it.’

‘Uh?’

‘So where are they?’ asked Michael cautiously. ‘Sent them back home, have you, back into outer space?’

Ace glanced over at Connie and Jessie, standing, hand in hand, watching the proceedings in a very good imitation of total bafflement.

‘Well, if home is where the heart is, then you could say that, yes.’ ‘You’re doing it again,’ Ace warned him. ‘Subtitles in English for the hard-of-thinking please.’

The Doctor took a deep breath and drew himself up, obviously relishing the fact that all eyes and ears were on him.

‘What was the thing that they all coveted, above anything else?’

‘Decent dress sense?’ suggested Ace. ‘A nice tan for Sooal?’

‘The weapons in the stasis chamber,’ said Michael suddenly

‘You’ve sent them into the stasis chamber!’

‘Give the man a banana!’ the Doctor beamed.

‘But how?’ Ace asked. ‘I thought that was the whole point of the stasis chamber – the perfect safety deposit box. Nothing could get in and nothing could get out.’

‘Well,’ the Doctor gave a modest little bow, ‘that’s the theory, of course. But that’s what Sooal’s little science project on board the ship was all about. Whilst he was working on reviving the Tulks’ memories for the codes to the stasis chamber, he wasn’t stupid – or naive – enough to assume that they would hand them over to him without an argument. And, of course, he had to take into account their ages, and the fact that one of them might die before he gave them their memories back. So he set up the parallel processor. He linked human minds together to form probably the most powerful computer this planet’s ever seen.

When I was in there –’ he frowned at the memory ‘– I saw what he was up to: it was a rather crude brute force effort to analyse the cycling frequency of the stasis chamber. Ingenious, but a heavy-handed way of being able to reach into the stasis chamber and take out what he wanted. But by the time I’d finished the calculations for him – not that I intended to –’ he added hastily,

‘he’d revived most of the Tulks and thought he should get the codes from them anyway, just as a backup in case the parallel processor hadn’t come up with the right frequency. That’s what I was doing with the transmat control – adjusting the frequency, setting it to home in on the stasis chamber.’

‘So when we thought you were just activating the transmat,’

Michael said, ‘you were setting it to send them into the stasis chamber?’

‘Neat!’ Ace said with admiration. ‘But why grab the control sphere off them before they went? Why not let them take it with them and trap that in there, too?’

‘Because in the fraction of a second that it took to actually pass through the transmat,