It certainly was bigger on the inside. Nick Cutter felt his mouth drop open as he walked into the TARDIS, looking around in awe. There was some kind of command console in the centre of the room, which was definitely larger than the cramped office he'd just stepped out of, and staircases that went both up and down. He wondered where they led to.

"What do you think?" the Doctor asked merrily, clapping his hands as he turned to watch Cutter's reaction.

"It's..." Cutter gestured hopelessly around as he tried to think of something clever to say. It wasn't often that words failed him, but they had done so the first time he had seen an anomaly, and they were doing so now.

The Doctor grinned. "Yep."

"So," Cutter began, when he couldn't think of anything else to say, "where to now?"

For the first time, the Doctor looked sheepish. "Well, actually, that was what I was hoping you'd be able to help me out with. I haven't the faintest, to be perfectly honest with you."

Cutter stared at him.

"It's not my fault!" the Doctor protested, holding up his hands defensively. "You're the anomaly expert. I just travel through space and time, looking for things to do."

"So you don't have any idea about what to do next?"

"Well, of course I've got ideas. I just thought I'd ask, you know. Help you to feel included." Looking rather insulted, the Doctor crossed the room to the console in the centre and began to pull complicated-looking levers and type commands into the keyboard. Cutter looked on with an unimpressed expression.

There was a strange noise and suddenly the whole of the TARDIS lurched, causing Cutter to stagger. He managed to grab hold of the nearest bannister and avoid falling over, but only just. Straightening up, he caught the Doctor's amused smirk and answered it with a frown. "Where are we going?" Cutter yelled over the noise.

"Good question!" the Doctor replied. "I've plugged in the data for that key frequency you mentioned, as well as any large magnetic field disturbances, in a timeframe spanning the last hundred years and a spaceframe restricted to England."

"Spaceframe?"

"Yes. I want to see an anomaly, and I figured it'd be sensible to start somewhere nearby."

Cutter frowned. "I thought I told you everything I knew."

"You did, dear Professor, but nothing beats seeing things with your own eyes." As the TARDIS began to settle into its new location, the Doctor pulled a screen down from the top of the command console. "Now, now... when are we?" He pressed a few buttons. "Aha! England, 1998. Excellent. I do love it when the parameters I set actually work." He patted the screen affectionately before turning and striding confidently towards the door. "Come on, then!" he called to Cutter over his shoulder. "We haven't got all of time... well, I suppose that's not strictly true, but there's no sense in taking forever to get started, is there?"

Cutter pushed away from the bannister with a sigh and followed.

The Doctor flung the TARDIS door open with a flourish and stepped out. "Ta-da!" he said triumphantly. "Welcome to... hm." He walked a few steps forward and twirled around, taking in their new location. "Well, I'm not exactly sure where this is, but – aha!"

His attention was summarily distracted by the shimmering white light in the centre of the clearing into which they'd stepped. The anomaly was hovering calmly in midair as though it had been waiting for them. If they had landed anywhere else, Cutter would also have been distracted by the sight. As it was, he was too busy staring around the clearing itself.

"This is the Forest of Dean," he said.


"What was that?" the Doctor asked, pulling his gaze away from the anomaly in front of him.

Cutter gestured around the trees. "The Forest of Dean," he repeated. Though it was late in the evening and the clearing was lit only by moon and stars, he recognised this place far too well. Here was where he had entered an anomaly for the first time... and here was where he had left Claudia Brown with false promises – It's gonna be fine and I'll see you soon – and had lost her to a new timeline and a changed world.

"Oh." The Doctor, who had been told about both of these events, understood. "Right. Well." He looked back at the anomaly, as though he couldn't think of anything else to say. "S'pose this is as good a place to start as any, then, eh?" He whipped out his sonic screwdriver and approached the anomaly cautiously, as though he were expecting it to bite him. When he was about a metre away, he held out the screwdriver in preparation to scan.

"Careful –" Cutter began.

The screwdriver was pulled from the Doctor's hand into the anomaly.

"I did tell you to be careful," Cutter said.

The Doctor turned his disbelieving gaze on Cutter. "I heard what you said! That doesn't – I mean – how –"

"Anomalies cause a powerful magnetic field," the professor answered mildly, struggling to keep a straight face. "I did mention it. Your screwdriver apparently has enough metallic components to be affected."

The Doctor's face was rapidly turning red, though whether from anger or embarrassment Cutter couldn't tell. He also seemed incapable of speech. "I – that's – but – oh, blast it!" He stamped his foot and Cutter lost it, dissolving into laughter. "It's not funny!" the Doctor shouted. "That's my sonic screwdriver that's gone through there!"

"Yes it is," Cutter gasped over his laughter, though it was not clear to which part of the Doctor's sentence he was referring.

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, turned in a circle, and straightened his bow tie. "Fine," he said at last, facing the anomaly straight on. "Fine. I'm just going to march through there and get it back."

That put an end to Cutter's laughter. "Don't do that."

"Well, I have to!" the Doctor answered. "It's my screwdriver."

"You can't," Cutter replied. "That anomaly leads to the Permian Era, in which all manner of dangerous creatures live. Even if you aren't eaten by a Gorgonopsid, you could meddle with the past somehow and change something in the present."

"Oh, please," the other man scoffed. "I'm the Doctor. I think I know how to avoid changing things in the present... unlike some people."

"Don't you dare," Cutter snapped, taking a step towards him. "Don't you think for one second that any part of that was intentional. If I could take it all back right now, I'd do it in a second. I'd never go through an anomaly again if it meant reversing the changes and getting her back. I lie awake at night, hating myself for not listening to her when she told me not to go. There's nothing I regret more in my life than stepping through that anomaly and losing her."

As quickly as it had begun, his emotional tirade was over. He'd risen a finger to point accusingly at the Doctor; he quickly let it fall, embarrassed at himself. The Doctor, though, didn't laugh or mock him. He simply nodded slowly, an expression of such sympathy on his face that Cutter had to turn away. "I believe you," he said. "Listen, Professor Cutter. I try to help people. I try to fix things. I'm the Doctor; that's my job. Sometimes... some things can't be fixed. But I'll do everything I can to get her back for you."

Cutter nodded.

"First step, though," the Doctor continued, "is getting my screwdriver back. Won't be a minute!" And before Cutter could say anything more, he'd darted through the anomaly and disappeared from sight.


The first thing the Doctor noticed was that the Permian Era was hot. The sand he'd stumbled onto had been heated by the bright sun overhead and was reradiating its warmth with an unpleasant vigour. Though it was late in the evening back in the present, it felt like the middle of the day in the Permian. There were a few trees dotted around the landscape, but they weren't large enough to provide any sort of shelter or shade. The Doctor loosened his bow tie a little and threw his jacket over one arm before beginning the search for his sonic screwdriver.

The Doctor usually prided himself on being a very truthful person, but there was one thing that he lied about often, and that was how long it would be before he returned. Though he'd promised Cutter he wouldn't be a minute, the Doctor quickly realised that it was going to take much longer than a minute to find a single sonic screwdriver buried in several hundreds of square kilometres of sand. "This is ridiculous," he grumbled, feeling the sweat trickle down his neck as he continued to dig. "How can one screwdriver have managed to completely bury itself?" he asked nobody in particular. "Unless there was a sandstorm within the last fifteen minutes. Oh, I probably shouldn't have said that out loud. Tempting fate and all th – aha!" At last, he bent down and extracted the screwdriver triumphantly from the sand. "There you are. Naughty screwdriver. Promise me you'll never do that –"

He was interrupted midsentence by a furious roar.

"That," he said after a moment, "was a dinosaur."

The strangest thing was, it hadn't sounded like it came from anywhere around him. Rather, it had sounded as though it came from the anomaly itself – from the other side.

"Oh, no," the Doctor groaned. He backed away from the anomaly a few paces, just to be safe. There were several seconds of silence, and then the anomaly pulsed and something charged through.

It was not, however, a dinosaur. It was a woman running flat-out, sweat on her face and dirt on her jeans. She didn't stop or turn around, so she didn't notice the Doctor as she continued her frantic sprint, putting as much distance between herself and the anomaly as she could. The Doctor decided that was a good idea, and he backed up a little more, his gaze darting between the fleeing woman and the anomaly.

A minute later it pulsed a second time, and then came the dinosaur.

It was bigger than a rhinoceros and built like a tank, with two sabre teeth protruding from its enormous mouth. The Doctor held his breath as the huge creature shook its head, roared again, and charged off in pursuit of the woman. He thought about running after them both, but the woman was far away by now, and there wasn't much a Doctor and his screwdriver could do against a dinosaur. Besides, it could have wreaked havoc in the present before returning. His heart lurched as he remembered Cutter and his TARDIS on the other side. Clutching the sonic screwdriver tightly in his hands, the Doctor stepped back through the anomaly and into the Forest of Dean.


Night had fallen, and the Doctor had to squint while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was a few moments before he spotted the TARDIS; its blue coat blended in fairly well with the shadows and the trees. He ran over to it and zapped it with his screwdriver to make sure that it hadn't suffered any injury at the hands – or claws – of the dinosaur. "There's a girl," he said, patting her fondly. "I'm glad to see you're safe."

"I was worried about you, too," Cutter murmured sarcastically from somewhere to the Doctor's left. "That was a Gorgonopsid. Permian Era predator. If it had caught you, you wouldn't have stood a chance. Even with your fancy screwdriver."

The Doctor nodded, slipping the sonic into his pocket. "It wasn't chasing me, though," he said. "It was after –"

"A woman, I know," Cutter answered. "I saw her too. She didn't notice me or the box. Too busy running for her life."

"Brown hair," the Doctor offered. "Jeans. Khaki jacket."

Cutter smiled. "I saw," he said. "That was my wife, Helen."