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The Doctor stood up. 'That should do it,' He turned to Shuskin. 'I suggest we land as soon as possible.'

She nodded and walked into the cockpit.

'What did you do?' asked Liz.

'I've diverted all the auxiliary electrical power to the helicopter's outer structure. Suitably modulated, of course.

The sonic screwdriver is insulated against electric shock, but here I'm using it to divert the power supply from the wire to the ship's exterior, via that metal pin.'

'So?'

'So it will protect us from the weapons of those creatures'

He looked around him, then drew a Paisley handkerchief to wipe across his brow. 'Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?'

The last rays of the dying sun caught the surface of Lake Geneva, throwing off a bedazzling display of fractured light.

Lethbridge-Stewart rested on the balcony rail of his hotel, looking across the lake towards Montalegre harbour on the southern side. A little inland was the Villa Diodati, where Milton had once lived, and where in 1816, at the maddest Mad Hatter's tea party of all time, Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Claire Godwin, and John Polidori had terrified each other with ghost stories.

'And what were thou, and earth, and stars and sea,/ If to the human mind's imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy?"' he mumbled to himself.

The Brigadier shook his head. A childish passion for dead poets was the last thing he needed on his mind right now. And yet he couldn't help but let himself drift back to Harrow school in 1943, and an essay on the homoerotic content of Adonais'. Now, like Ozymandias, the king of kings, he found himself sitting amid 'the decay of that colossal wreck'. His attention turned to a minor domestic incident in the street below - an angry holiday family arguing with a gendarme over the loss of their car. So much for the most civilised country in Europe.

He left the veranda and went back into his hotel room, sitting on the bed and opening his briefcase. He took out the stock on his Colt Commando high-velocity rifle. Having screwed the barrel into place, he checked the weapon's sight, aiming at the fountain in the lake. Click. His finger touched the trigger lightly and, metaphorically, the fountain lay dead.

As if in acknowledgement of the Brigadier, the water pressure seemed to dip momentarily. Lethbridge-Stewart's heart pumped faster. Join the army. Be a man. Kill someone.

The noise from the street, the babbling conversations in French, irritated him. He stood the rifle by the bed and crossed again to the window. He had put off thinking about the full consequences of his visit, but now knew that something had to be done. He still wasn't sure what that something was.

The telephone rang, startling him. He picked it up, half expecting to hear someone from HQ demanding to know what he thought he was doing sitting in a hotel room playing espionage games. Instead the hotel receptionist informed him that he had an overseas call from London, England. A knot tightened in his stomach.

Merci beaucoup,' he replied quickly and waited for the line to clear. 'Lethbridge-Stewart,' he said, hoping to cover his anxiety with bluster, as usual.

'Good evening, sir.' It was Yates. 'I'm sorry to trouble you'

'That's quite all right, Captain' Relief flooded through the Brigadier. 'How are... things?'

'Well, sir,' said Yates, with a dip in his voice that told the Brigadier that 'things' weren't good, 'I'm rather afraid we've had a terrorist incident.'

The Brigadier listened intently as Yates quickly explained about the bomb, adding that apart from Benton's relatively minor injuries no one else had been hurt.

'That's a small consolation, I suppose,' said the Brigadier.

'How on Earth was security penetrated?'

'As far as we can tell, sir, it wasn't,' continued Yates. 'The most important aspect of the case seems to be the design of the bomb. Certain elements indicate that it's of Soviet origin.

And there was a UNIT serial code on it.'

The Brigadier said nothing for a long time. He was thinking about what Shelley had written in 'The