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'Oh,' said Chris. 'Cosmic, you think?'

'Oh yes,' said Roz, 'definitely something cosmic.'

'You don't think he just fell asleep and got buried by children?' asked Chris.

'Absolutely not,' said Roz. 'The Doctor would never allow himself to be incarcerated in such an absurd and undignified manner without the most exquisite and subtle of purposes.'

'Perhaps we should ask him?'

'Best not, we might disturb his concentration.'

The Doctor watched as the two walked out of his view.

'Chris,' he heard Roz say in the distance, 'are you sure we're supposed to stand on these things . . .'

You make one little mistake, thought the Doctor, and the whole world queues up to make fun of you. He went back to trying to calculate the correct harmonic frequency but the itch in his nose was too distracting.

Bernice came along and sat on his chest.

'Gosh,' she said, 'I bet your nose is really itching.'

'You really had to say that,' said the Doctor plaintively.

'I had a dream the other night,' said Bernice.

The Doctor's hearts sank. 'Yes,' he said.

'I meant to ask you about it but then I got distracted.'

'People attach far too much importance to dreams,' said the Doctor. 'They are, after all, merely a sort of filing system for the unconscious.'

'Is that so?'

'Oh yes,' said the Doctor, 'nothing significant about the images whatsoever. By the way, did you know Roz is learning to surf?'

'Shall I tell you about it?'

'Please don't go to any trouble on my account,' said the Doctor.

'It's no trouble,' said Bernice. 'I was talking to this Dalek –'

'Well, there you go,' said the Doctor, somewhat desperately. 'Daleks, objects of childhood fear, all standard stuff, nothing metaphysical about that at all.'

'If you don't shut up, Doctor,' said Bernice, 'I'm going to bury your head.' She waited for him to say something but he wasn't going to risk a face full of sand. 'Kadiatu was there and so were you,'

began Bernice.

The Doctor sighed. Sometimes he thought that Bernice was just too perceptive for his own good.

'I've been thinking about the TARDIS's ever so convenient translation system,' said Bernice. 'It occurred to me that we're all connected, you, me, Kadiatu, all your companions. I had an interesting little talk with aM!xitsa and he said that Kadiatu was doing most of her thinking while she was asleep and that in some way her own thoughts were altering the actual biochemistry of her brain.' She reached out and idly scratched the Doctor's nose. 'I think you had no intention of letting me make the decision but you knew if I was involved that it might influence Kadiatu on a subconscious level through the link with the TARDIS.'

'It's an interesting theory,' said the Doctor. 'Personally I think we just got lucky.'

'You're not going to tell me, are you?'

'I don't have the vocabulary,' said the Doctor.

'It's not fair,' said Bernice. 'You're a mythic figure, Ace is fast becoming a creature of legend, people are bound to start using Kadiatu to frighten small children and Chris looks like he stepped off the Elgin marbles. What I want to know is, when do I get a bit of fame?'

'Benny,' said the Doctor, 'I happen to know that you are an object of veneration in at least two cultures.'

'Really?' said Bernice suspiciously. 'What kind of object?'

'Oh,' said the Doctor, 'a sort of female version of Bacchus.'

'I'm a god of wine?'

'Not just wine,' said the Doctor hurriedly, 'all alcohol really, sort of the goddess of indiscriminate drinking.'

'I'm completely overwhelmed.'

'And sarcasm,' said the Doctor, 'in your manifestation as the goddess of the morning after the night before.'

'Goddess of hangovers,' said Bernice, 'I might have guessed. What's Roz then, the goddess of bad manners?'

'Really, Bernice,' said the Doctor, 'there's more to life than being mistaken for a supernatural deity.'

It rained the next day. Chris, Dep and Kadiatu were slouching around in the living room when the Doctor walked in with a chess set. He laid the board out on one of the floating tables