It was not like any other time the Doctor had suffered pain before. This was pure agony she was experiencing on a second-hand basis, through his scream. Already she could feel the sound etching itself into her memory to cause a stinging to her heart for minutes, hours, days or weeks to come.
Sarah threw herself at the door, tore at the handles of the police box and pounded at the windows with all of her strength. "Doctor!", she yelled at the top of her lungs, "DOCTOR!"
But for a response, all that she got was the whooshing and wheezing of the TARDIS. The sound was moving back and forth – ellipsing, as the Doctor once described it – which caused it to appear all wrong. Even his trusty time machine was rejecting the Master's orders as it seemed, although what Sarah heard might have just been a side effect of the damages.
The door handles slipped through her hands. Blue paint and the wood beneath turned invisible and beyond the police box, a small village appeared in the distance.
"DOCTOR!", Sarah shouted still. "No! NO! NO! COME BACK AT ONCE!"
She would not let the Master have things his way. Not as long as she was around. But what could she do? The TARDIS disappeared before her eyes, and was just gone. All that was left was an imprint in the soft grass to attest that the time machine had ever been there.
Defiantly, Sarah decided that they were not beaten yet. There, just a mile or so away laid a village. She could phone up the Brigadier and get UNIT to help. If she was unable to find the TARDIS by herself, then with combined forces they would be able to track it down!
Holding onto that thought with all of her will, she began to run towards the houses. The cold weather and her wet feet did not matter at a time when Sarah Jane had to save Earth's greatest hero.
After running for minutes and minutes, a panting young woman finally made it to the village. But just as she arrived at to the first house she could get to, a farm house, it became quickly apparent to her that – once again – the Doctor had misjudged their current location. This was not Cornwall! This was France! Some tiny village inhabited by more cows than people, hopefully anywhere near Calais at least – but Sarah had yet to ask the locals. Which she had to do with her best, almost non-existent French skills, of course.
She eventually ended up playing charades with the farm owner in order to get her request across, and somehow managed to get his allowance to use his telephone, from which she then contacted UNIT headquarters. With a lot of nervous stammering and hasty explanations, she gave Brigadier Lethbridge-Steward the most important key points to what had just happened: That the Master had invaded the TARDIS and went off with the Doctor in captivity, possibly to destroy him.
Although the young reporter emphasised that he had to act with the greatest of haste, the Brigadier remained relatively calm. He had to, because he was a military leader, but Sarah was not sure that he quite understood the situation in the same way as she did. In her head, she could still hear the echo of the Doctor's scream and she was terrified by all the implications. Only once the Brigadier had assured her that he would assemble a search party right away and that he would sent someone to pick her up from her undesired landing point, Sarah felt a slight relief. But her best comfort right now were still the last words of her lost friend. He had said that the Master would not make it far, because of the power failure; Because the TARDIS was damaged. A search party would be able to find him then, surely. There was plenty of hope to cling on to, Sarah reminded herself.
After several hours of nervous waiting at the farmer's house, the UNIT helicopter finally arrived. It was a small one, if not the one which was owned by the Brigadier privately. As Sarah ran out to meet the two-man crew, she was greeted by a familiar face, namely the face of the recently promoted Warrant Officer John Benton – or just Benton, as everyone called him.
When she asked him what he was doing here, in the sense of why he would have volunteered to fly out and get her, Benton told her the following: "Well, Miss.", he had said with a smile, "The Brig reckoned you would like someone to talk to, so he tried to ring up Lieutenant Sullivan. But Sullivan's still in Devesham at the Space Defence Station, see? So he got me instead. I hope that's all right with you, Miss."
"Harry or not; I'm still glad to see you.", she had answered. It was just so good to know that she was back home – on Earth, in the 1970s – after god knows how long she had been lost in time and space with only the Doctor for company. After a short and polite good-bye to the French farmer, they set off for the UNIT headquarters near London. The flight was not pleasant, but mind you, it was more pleasant than some of the other rides Sarah had been a passenger on during her travels. At least, since Benton was with her, she could attempt to get some of her worries off her mind. Through the internal communication in the helicopter, Sarah attempted to discuss with him the Brigadier's strategy of finding the Doctor.
However, at some point, Benton argued that the Brigadier's search party had a small chance of success only, because the Doctor's craft did not only move through space, but through time as well. It could end up anywhere, any time. And UNIT's forces – even if you counted the ones not stationed in England – were not enough to search the entire planet, even less so if they had to look into the past and the future as well.
Sarah realized that he was not entirely wrong; Almost every time the Doctor had landed them in the wrong place at the wrong time, he had called it a slight overshoot – because he made such understatements on a regular basis. So what had he meant when he said that the Master would not make it "far"? Just how far was that? Miles? Light years? Decades, Aeons? Honestly, she did not know. But the conversation with Benton only encouraged her to find better reasons for her hope to cling on to. The past was not unknown to them, because a lot of it was written in history and the Doctor left traces where ever he went, as small as they might be. And although it was true that UNIT could not cover an entire planet, well, maybe they might not need to, either. If they could just spread the word and tell everyone to keep an eye out, someone was bound to notice, right?. And as for the future, that happened all by itself and as long as they would not give up to look for their favourite alien on Earth, they would find him. One day.
"Oh, I do hope you're right, Miss Smith.", Benton had agreed then, after her long-winded explanation of possible solutions. "But rest assured that we will all give our best efforts to find him. For all I know, Earth would not be around any more if it wasn't for the Doc." That was true. So very true. UNIT was there to do just that, to protect the Earth from alien threats. But there was just no professional like the Doctor.
By the time Sarah Jane made it back to the London HQ, she was not feeling quite as frightened any more thanks to the consolation of Benton's words. Maybe he was but a simple solider, but his heart was in the right place. One thing she could not say about most military types. And even though the Brigadier was a friend of hers, his stuck up, logical attitude had made her cross on more than one occasion. Luckily, however, not today.
Once Sarah had delivered a full and detailed description of how the Master had invaded the TARDIS and left her stranded on the French coast, the Brigadier's reaction was just the same as Benton's. Although he agreed with her that they should do everything in their power to help the man they owed so much, he was sceptical about the success of this operation. "Has it ever occurred to you, Miss Smith, that he might force the Doctor to regenerate after all?", he had asked Sarah with a heavy sigh, "How shall we foresee who or what he will turn into this time?"
"Well, if he has regenerated, he will find us by himself sooner or later! He ought to have learned by now that the people at UNIT are his friends!", she had claimed, and then continued to explain her own strategy just like she had thought it up and presented it to Benton earlier. And after all, the Brigadier's scepticism was not great enough for him to disagree with her. Even though it might not have always been a particularly deep friendship that had connected him and the Doctor, the military leader was just as obliged to do everything he could to find and save him as was Sarah.
Together they decided, apart from the search party, to assemble a team of journalists to hit the archive records, newspaper clippings, and just about anything that could reveal to them not only the present, but the past as well. Naturally, Sarah-Jane would be part of this team of journalists. No one was better fitted to cover England than she was, and finally, her connections to the big publishing houses would come in handy again, too...