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The Doctor stood there, in silence.

'You can't stop us, can you?' said Watson, walking up to the fourth stair.

'You can't raise a finger against us.'

"That machine down there is a weapon,' said the Doctor, his voice a little higher, as Watson climbed another step towards him. 'It can hurt you. I can make it hurt you, if I have to.'

'You seriously expect us to believe you'd throw such a weapon down the stairs?'Another step closer.

'It's part of the arming procedure,' said the Doctor, rather lamely.

Watson was over halfway up the stairs now, but the Doctor was holding his ground, impassive.

'You think of yourself as a good man, don't you, Doctor? Righting wrongs, crusading for justice...'

'I heard how upset you were with the way Roley was treating us through the office door,' Lucy called up. 'I thought you'd be on our side.'

'Yes, how about that, Doctor, eh?'Watson was nearly at the top of the stairs now. 'Defend the underdog until it bites the hand that beats it, then take a stick to it yourself, is that it?'

'That's not true,' said the Doctor. 'What you're doing to people is wrong, evil, you know it is.'

'I fought a war for a country that turned its back on me. Is that not wrong?'

stormed the captain, finally losing his cool, his voice getting louder. 'All of us, we've been shunned, despised, looked down on.' He looked down at Maria. 'Abused.'

'You've also been cared for, looked after when you couldn't fend for yourselves...'

'My war wound, my arm, remember?' Watson raged. 'I got that in 1948.

Electric-shock therapy, they called it. Broke my ruddy arm, it did.'

The Doctor ignored him, desperately imploring the others to heed him.

'Before you all came here your illnesses were more or less in remission. It is coming here together that has -'

'- liberated us,' said Watson. 'We've been damned all our lives,' he snapped, as if tired of stating the obvious. "The devil holds our souls in his purse.'

The Doctor looked at him, that face that was somehow both supercilious and sympathetic. 'But you don't believe the devil has you now, do you?' he said, softly, shaking his head. 'You're happy to do all this purely for the benefit of Captain Davydd Watson, retired. Aren't you?'

'The world will be a very different place by the time I leave it,' said Watson, restrained once more. 'No good, no bad, no unfairness...'

'Oh yes, I know, just one glorious nothing, yours for evermore...' The Doctor abruptly raised his voice again, calling out to the others like a vicar giving a sermon. 'Listen to me. An evil was placed in you, long ago, and it's made you sick. You were all chosen by that machine down there to be executioners, to destroy a life form that has as much right to exist as any of us. Fate cheated that evil, put it to sleep in your minds, but now it has woken and is getting stronger. You're feeding it between you, magnifying it, engorging it, and it will kill you if you let it. But if you allow me to help you, we can make it sleep for ever. Help me make you well again!'

Now he sounded like an MP seeking re-election. Fitz wondered if any of them would swallow it.

***

Watson clapped, slowly, in response to the Doctor's speech, the noise ringing out around the hall. 'And are you happy, Doctor, with your "normal"

life?' he asked.

The Doctor paused. 'I made a choice,' he said, 'and I live by it.'

'Well, Doctor,' said Watson. 'We made a choice, too, didn't we?' He walked up the last step, looking into the Doctor's eyes. 'And you die by it.'

Watson stabbed out a hand to grab the Doctor by the face, but the Time Lord feinted back and kicked Watson's legs from under him. Watson stumbled and fell backward, and the Doctor leapt over him; but, before he could reach the bottom of the stairs. Taylor was there, blocking his path.

The Doctor looked to jump over the banister rail, but Russell, Mrs Kreiner and Lucy had gathered below him, arms outstretched to grab him. He whirled round, to find Watson back on