Part 1 (2/2)

'Go on, what?'

'You ought to apologize.'

'No fear... What for?'

Tor spoiling the Doctor's plan.'

'Listen, don't you start. We got rid of the Intelligence and that's that. It's well away.'

'Not permanently though.'

'How was I supposed to know what the Doctor was doing?

He didn't let on he had a plan.'

'I still think you should apologize.'

'Och, why do you have to be so... so... 'Reasonable?'

There was a long pause, and the Doctor knew that Jamie was sulking. Then...

'Maybe he he should apologize to should apologize to me me first!' first!'

'Jamie!' she scolded.

With a loud crunch, the Doctor booted in the TARDIS door. He waited a moment for maximum effect and then turned, arms flouris.h.i.+ng, his face lit by a triumphant smile.

'Jamie, I think we both owe Victoria an apology...'

The Doctor had entirely forgotten about the tea by the time Victoria found him. He was sitting on the floor in a darkened corner of the TARDIS with the entire contents of his pockets strewn around him.

She picked her way through the debris and presented him with his cup. 'Have you lost something?' she asked.

He surveyed his work and took a sip of tea. 'Actually, Victoria, I think I've just found any number of things I thought I'd lost.' He sighed. 'Only they weren't what I was looking for.'

'And?'

'Ah. I expect you want to know what's missing. I certainly do. The trouble is I can't remember. Where's Jamie got to?'

'He ate enough porridge for three people and fell asleep in an armchair. This thing you lost? When did you last have it?'

'I'm not sure that I did. It might have been somebody else.

All I know is that something's not right. Something's not complete.'

'You're still upset about the Great Intelligence,' she said.

'And there was no need to apologize.'

He smiled gently at her. 'Dear Victoria, you're always so thoughtful. But I thought it might be you that was upset.'

She looked up in surprise, but he continued anyway.

'You see, I haven't forgotten that when we first met the Intelligence in Tibet, it took over your mind and used you as its p.a.w.n. I know what it's like to have the control of your own thoughts stolen by something so callous and cruel.'

'At least it didn't happen again,' she said. Not to me anyway.'

'I think you've been very brave when really you've been having a very frightening time.'

She was quiet for several moments, and he wondered if she was going to burst into tears. 'Sometimes,' she said at last, 'we arrive somewhere and I worry about what we'll find out there.'

He nodded, even though it was just that sort of mystery that made him so eager to experience it. 'I promise to try to get us to somewhere a little less harrowing.'

'And whatever it was you were looking for?'

'I expect it'll turn up where or whenever I least expect it.'

So saying, he proceeded to return the impossibly vast range of obscure objects to his absurdly small coat pockets.

He suggested that Victoria take a much needed rest, and headed for the TARDIS console-room, where Jamie was snoring fit to wake a score of Sleeping Beauties.

Comforted that nothing unusual was occurring, he activated the scanner and gazed out at the vast prospect of s.p.a.ce and time.

He had become parent by proxy to Victoria Waterfield, but he wondered how grateful her late father would be if he witnessed the changes in his daughter. Certainly Edward Waterfield, Victorian scientist, unjustly martyred by his cruel Dalek oppressors, would not approve of the 1960s miniskirt for which his child had abandoned her voluminous crinolines.

Yet she remained gentle and kind, and a little prim, as Jamie knew to his cost. Yanked brutally from her own time and home, she was learning rapidly how to fend for herself. Good housekeeping, he supposed.

Jamie's snoring changed note. Brought out of his reverie, the Doctor stared at the scanner screen. Stars were there. And more stars beyond them. And clouds of gas in imperceptibly slowly billowing iridescence. And more stars. And clouds of imagination and possibility. And s.p.a.ce curved slowly through the stars, turning oh-so gradually round, above, below, so that beyond the infinite abundance of stars, he thought he eventually saw, far, far away, the back of his own head.

And somewhere in the darkness between the stars, lurking, waiting, an insubstantial ma.s.s of hateful thoughts, perhaps just behind him, was the Great Intelligence.

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