When Jack saw there was someone dangling from the barrage balloon, he wondered, firstly, how anyone could have got there in the first place, secondly, how they could hang on for, and thirdly, as a hypothetical excercise, how to explain to an inhabitant of 1941 that they'd just been teleported into an invisible alien spaceship. It would be a horrible death. And it was a girl, too; he could see long blonde hair, althought the sweater and slacks had fooled him at first—aha. Not slacks. Jeans. A little out of place here, or rather out of time. Gotcha, Jack thought. And she had a nice arse, too.
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Rose, her name was. Quite responsive to flirting, not so responsive to buying a supposed Tula warship. Jack wasn't at all sure that she was what she said she was. She seemed a perfect example of a 2000-odd girl. Didn't do our research, did we? Not a Time Agent; a rogue like Jack?
She had an innocence about her that made Jack feel about a hundred years odd. How long was it since he'd been so full of ideals and enthusiasm and bright shiny hopes? Somehow, he didn't relish the thought of conning her and tarnishing that brightness.
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Who was called "the Doctor"? Who carried around a sonic screwdriver? The Doctor was from no time Jack could place, which worried him because he was usually spot on with that. He insisted on treating Jack like a schoolboy who'd just done something stupid and dangerous. It wasn't Jack's fault that there were all these people with gas-mask heads asking, "Are you my mummy?", which incidentally was one of the most frightening things Jack had ever seen, though he would never say so to Rose. Nor to the Doctor. But it couldn't have anything to do with an empty Tula ambulance. Not possibly.
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Teleporting an unexploded bomb inside his ship hadn't been one of Jack's brighter ideas, really. He considered the theory that the nanogenes had somehow infected him with Rose's idealism or the Doctor's rectitiude. But no, he took chances, and you win some, you lose some, and this time he'd lost, spectacularly. And he mightn't be much good, but he wasn't a murderer. Not outside his lost two years at any rate. Luring the Doctor and Rose to the crash site and letting the bomb fall on them had never been part of the plan, not to mention Nancy and the hospital patients and Algy and the rest of the soldiers...He couldn't have let that happen.
A door opened, and there they were, the Doctor and Rose in their timeship, telling him to get his arse inside before the bomb exploded. It was quite impressive for a blue box, actually.
"It's bigger on the the inside," Jack said.
"So had you better be," the Doctor warned. Jack watched them dance together—quirkily, endearingly—and felt, for the first time, as though he might be.