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he muttered, 'because someone is trying to kill us.'

The pain in her hand was getting worse. Injuries to the extremities don't hurt. Who had said that? Moire had said that. Moire the Dalek Killer. I wonder what happened to her?

Concentrate, Summerfield, now is not the time for nostalgia.

'If it was supposed to kill us, why is it so small?'

'It had to be,' said the Doctor, 'to get past God's general scanning pattern.'

'How about poison then?' asked Bernice. Was that a burning tingling sensation in her injured hand or was it psychosomatic?

'Too risky,' said the Doctor. Bernice let out her breath. 'Around here if they can get to your brain stem within twelve hours they can grow you a new body in three months. Money back guaranteed.'

'Which means,' said Bernice, 'that either that thing eats very quickly or . . .'

'Or there's an awful lot of them,' said the Doctor. 'The one that bit you must have been in the nature of a probe. Scouting out our location for the main body. That's why I threw it so far. With a bit of luck that should have disorientated it enough to give us some breathing space.'

'Shouldn't we be using this breathing space by adopting the ever popular and universally famous plan B?'

'Not right now,' said the Doctor. 'Pass me one of the sandwiches, preferably one with a meat filling.'

Bernice almost said, Now is not the time to be thinking about your stomach, Doctor, but she was fairly certain that she'd used that line before. She found a ham-analogue sandwich in the hamper and passed it to the Doctor. She had a pretty fair idea what his plan was, just as she had expected the Doctor to tear a corner of the sandwich and toss it onto the beach.

'Any second now,' said the Doctor.

The torn bit of sandwich lay undisturbed on the sand. Bernice risked a quick peep at the wound in her palm. It was still bleeding but the skin around it wasn't decomposing or anything horrid. It still hurt like crazy though.

'Wait for it,' said the Doctor.

They waited for it, but Godot obviously had the day off.

A seabird landed by the sandwich in a flutter of strong grey wings. It pecked experimentally at the bread –

And vanished in an eruption of boiling sand and bloody feathers.

'Tell me you didn't do that on purpose,' said Bernice in a sick voice.

The Doctor shook his head. 'There's some good news and some bad news,' he said. 'Which do you want first?'

'Surprise me.'

'They're not very smart and if we remain completely still it will take them a while to locate us.

The bad news is that there are probably something in the order of two hundred thousand grubs out there and we're probably surrounded.' He paused as if remembering something. 'You've never been to Wales, have you?'

'We're in trouble, aren't we?'

The Doctor was rummaging in his pockets. 'We could be, except I still have this.' He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and looked around. 'Right,' he said. 'See any pockets of marsh gas?'

'No.'

'Any handy minefields?'

'No.'

'We might be in trouble.'

'Doctor,' said Bernice, 'should the beach be moving like that?'

The area of the beach around where the seabird had vanished was seething in an unpleasantly organic manner. Bernice was too far away to see clearly but she just knew that the effect was caused by thousands of grubs churning up the sand. She looked around. Another patch was writhing to her left, a third was to their right and a fourth behind them. The Doctor had guessed right, they were surrounded. All the patches creeping slowly forward, Bernice didn't have to be a genius at trigonometry to figure out where they were going to converge.

'Plan B,' said Bernice through gritted teeth, 'is beginning to seem like a viable option.'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'but before we run we had better know where we're running to.'

'That'll be a first,' she muttered. 'The forest?'

The Doctor crouched down by the beer cooler and started pulling it apart. 'The soil there is too sandy, they'll swim right through it.' He ripped a small blue cylinder from