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‘Ace..,’ admonished the Doctor, taking off his hat and fanning himself gently with it, despite the sharp, cool morning air. He pulled out his shiny new fobwatch and glanced at it.

‘So... Alzheimer’s,’ she said. ‘Apart from it being what old folks get, what’s it all about then?’

‘It’s a form of degenerative disease,’ the Doctor said.

‘Amongst other things, knotty tangles of protein start clogging up the brain. Memory and personality start to dissolve.’ He paused, gazing into the distance. ‘Very sad, very tragic. Not only for the sufferers, but for their families and friends as well.’

‘Do Time Lords get it?’

‘Oh, we get far worse things than Alzheimer’s disease, Ace.

The dementias that plague us are much, much darker.’ He stopped, lost in his own thoughts. Ace said nothing for a few moments, watching his face for a sign that he’d come back to the present, back to the conversation.

‘And is there a cure for it?’

‘There’s a cure for everything, if you look hard enough –

even incessant curiosity and questions.’

‘But you must know what happens. It’s 1982 now, right. And this Graystairs place seems to have a cure for it. We’ve just come from 2012, and you’ve been all over the future, so you must know whether this is a real cure, or just the usual load of charlatans taking advantage.’

‘Oh yes, there’s a cure. But I’m not convinced this is the time or place for it.’ He gave her a deliberately enigmatic smile.

‘Besides which, I shouldn’t be telling you about the future of your species, anyway.’

‘Professor! How come you can take me all over the place –

the future, the past, outer space and all that; let me see things that haven’t happened yet, and then tell me you can’t let me in on a secret that I could have found out just by picking up a medical book in a bookshop a few hours ago?’

‘Context, Ace, context. It’s one thing letting you experience the future, seeing how it all fits together, how events of the past have inexorably led to that future – and just dumping a load of anachronistic information in your lap. It’s all about consequences –’

‘Webs of time, yes, I know,’ she laughed knowingly.

‘Think of it this way: if you knew what was going to happen to you – say you got a peek just 24 hours into your own future –

what would you do?’

‘When the future finally came around?’

The Doctor nodded, eyes narrowed, chin tilted back just a little, as if he were testing her. Ace shrugged. ‘Make sure it happens the way I saw it, I s’pose.’

‘But what if you could improve it, make it better in some way because of what you’d seen was coming?’

It was Ace’s turn to narrow her eyes. ‘This is a trick question, right? Well...’ She pondered it as the Doctor sipped his water.

Then she smiled: easy! ‘Seeing as it’s my future and not my past, I can change it, right...? It hasn’t happened yet, so nothing’s fixed in stone.’

His face gave nothing away for a few moments as he stared into the spring sunshine. Then he turned back to her and gave her a sad look of disappointment.

‘Wrong answer, eh?’ She sighed.

‘Every moment in time is the past from someone’s perspective, Ace. Just because it hasn’t already happened to you yet, doesn’t mean it hasn’t already happened to you then.’

‘This,’ she said wryly, ‘is the point where I start to glaze over, isn’t it? And you tell me not to go mucking about with time.’

‘Usually,’ he agreed sagely. ‘Just remember: I have a lot more experience of mucking about with time than you do.’

Ace eyed him dubiously. ‘What about Joyce’s message, anyway?’

The Doctor pulled out a rather dog-eared postcard –

yellowed and oddly brittle, like the newspapers that her mum had found lining the floor when she’d decided to splash out on a new lounge carpet – and handed it to her. Instinctively, she raised it to her nose and sniffed. It smelled old. But then, she remembered, it had been waiting for him with Countess Gallowglass for 30 years. The picture on the front was of rolling green and purple hills, an intense blue