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'Will you catch the murderer?'

'Oh yes,' said Roz. 'You were very fond of vi!Cari, weren't you?'

'The drone was there and now it has gone,' said the ship. 'We had memories in common. Now that it is gone I have become less than what I was.'

Roz nodded. 'A simple yes would have done.'

'You find it,' said S-Lioness. 'You find the machine that did it and you disassemble them. You hear me, Roslyn Forrester?'

'I hear you.' She stepped back into the lift and turned. 'Evening all,' she said. She waited until she was halfway up the shaft before saying in a loud voice – 'One of you is for the scrap heap because I've got vi!Cari's diary.'

One second later, someone tried to kill her.

'Let me see,' said the Doctor. 'The power comes from the turbines on the pylons and is fed into the capacitors there, which connects to that thing over there which I don't recognize and into that converter.'

'Which does what?' asked Bernice.

'Converts it, I assume,' said the Doctor.

'What are we looking for?' asked Chris.

'The thingumajig that records where the power goes,' said the Doctor. 'We're lucky that, however designed, this place had a thing about antique machinery.'

The main control panel was a bank of radial dials with analogue pointers, sixteen ranks high and twenty across. Chris strongly suspected that most of them were for show. A sloping shelf jutted out of the wall at chest height, mounted with big-handled rheostats and shiny metal switches. It looked like something out of the museum of ancient engineering at Spaceport Three.

Chris tried to remember the layout. Ducking under the shelf he saw a line of plain metal panels with hinges and handles. He tried one and it opened. Inside he could see tangles of multicoloured wiring held onto connections with cute little crocodile clips. He was sure he saw valves glowing in the background.

He heard Bernice complaining that the place was a prehistoric pile of junk. 'But I thought you liked prehistoric junk,' said the Doctor.

Chris opened the next panel and found much the same stuff as before.

'Only when it's real prehistoric junk,' said Bernice. 'This stuff is about as authentic as that dinosaur park in Costa Rica.'

He found it behind the fourth panel: a pair of slowly turning metal drums with lined paper spooling between them. Three mechanical arms with pens on the end traced continuous lines across the paper.

'Down here, Doctor.'

The Doctor stuck his head into the panel. 'Good work, Chris, just what I was looking for. See if you can get the drum out.'

Chris reached around the back of the drums and found a pair of locking clamps, then with Bernice's help he lifted them out as a single unit. The Doctor unwound the paper by the simple expedient of kicking the drum along the floor. He got down on his knees and started to work his way along.

'If we assume that the top line is the turbine input,' he said, 'the middle line is the whatever-it-is and the bottom line is the capacitors. Then we should be looking for a place where the lines diverge.' He slapped his hand down on one section of the sheet. 'Here we are, lots of power going in, plenty of power to the thingamywhatsit but none going to the capacitors. And all this happening three days, sixteen hours, five minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. Which as you all know was the night of the murder.'

'There's no time code, Doctor,' said Bernice. 'How can you possibly tell when it happened?'

'Because,' he said, 'I made a note of how fast the drums were rotating.'

'So now we know for sure where the artificial lightning bolt came from,' said Chris.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'But we still don't know how it was done.'

'Perhaps someone modified the thingamywhatsit doodad,' said Chris, pointing at the gunmetal grey box that was situated halfway up the wall.

'Don't you start with the metasyntaxic variables,' said Bernice.

'What makes you say that, Chris?' asked the Doctor.

'Because,' Bernice said before Chris could answer,