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'She was blind, I suppose.'

'No eyes.' The Doctor glanced to the glass balls. They were still. 'So you intend to recover her. And then what?'

'Finish it.'

'What your father started?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

Rust frowned.' Why?'

'Yes, why? It was a botch the first time. What's the point of repeating something that should never have been attempted in the first place?

Especially as the man it was supposed to aid is dead. What did he want, anyway, your father?'

'My father -' Rust began, then stopped. He looked up. The sun had slipped below the horizon. In the room's growing darkness, the little balls shone softly, making it easy to see that they had begun to rotate backwards.

Rust's head snapped towards the Doctor.

'I'm not a human being,' the Doctor said levelly. Using the wall for support, he was getting to his feet. 'You can't just drain off my energy and remove it from my control. I'm enmeshed in this time spell of yours, tangled in a web drawn from my own body. And you along with me. You haven't been playing with fire, Rust,' he snarled, suddenly furious. 'You've been playing with fission! You stupid child’.

The room shifted violently. Rust was thrown to the floor and the Doctor barely managed to stay upright. Bracing against the wall, evening his breath, he started shifting down through his levels of consciousness. Past the detail-noting, continuously reacting subconscious, through the several levels of metabolic awareness, into the state where he was more than peripherally aware of the separately operating functions of his brain. This was a tricky place, this step below the synthesising, unifying illusion that made consciousness possible. He felt his concentration distort at the edges, as if encountering a vacuum. But this was where he could sense his distressed, expanded energy, stretched horribly out from him.

Closing his eyes, he stretched with it - and then, nauseatingly, he himself was out, partially inhabiting his body, partially spread through the air, partially trapped in tiny glass spheres. His sense of form began to break down, and he knew that, if he didn't hurry, his mind, unmoored from its physical boundaries, would hiss away like water on hot iron. Who could say what consciousness was, but selfconsciousness was Will. The Doctor focused his desire - it sped in and out of the fabric of Rust's time spell like a glistening thread, reworked the weave, redefined the pattern. By this point, his sense of self was unravelling - he couldn't remember what he was trying to do, could only hope that he had launched into his trajectory from settings that would ensure he landed where he needed to be. With a last surge of will he shot upward, breaking through each level like an emerging swimmer, reclaiming the structure of his body's borders until, gasping, he burst back into ordinary consciousness

No more than a few seconds had passed. Rust had just regained his feet.

Now he stood surrounded by thin, translucent human figures, like the traditional depictions of ghosts. They were male and female, naked, gathering in a circle. Rust turned towards the Doctor, his face ashen.

'What have you done?'

'You know what I've done,' said the Doctor, still leaning on the wall. 'I've moved us back along that step we took to the side. We weren't in 1978. We were here, this night, in 1980, where you wanted to be, where you always are.'

In two strides, Rust reached the Doctor and seized him by the collar. 'Undo this.'

'It's your spell. You undo it.' The Doctor jerked free. "Though I don't think you can until this particular event has run its course.'

Rust turned back to the phantoms. 'I won't watch this.'

'You always watch it. It runs in your head like a tape. It's what's haunted and deformed you. It is you. You'll look.'

Rust swung his head like an animal in pain and made a noise that, even through the Doctor's anger, stabbed him with anguish. The man at the window, using the little