"Your wife?" the Doctor repeated.
Cutter nodded, staring into the anomaly as he spoke. "England, 1998. December 8, to be exact."
"That's today's date. How'd you know that?" the Doctor asked.
"Because that was the day she disappeared."
The Doctor raised his eyebrows and then proceeded to look awkwardly around the clearing for a few seconds, as though he wasn't sure how to respond. "You didn't say much about her," he said eventually. "Just that she disappeared about eight years back and returned a few months ago to see you."
"Yep," Cutter answered. "She's the only one besides me who knows that the timeline was changed by whatever we did in the Permian." He dropped his gaze from the anomaly, trying to reconcile himself with what they'd just seen. He'd always wondered just how Helen had first stumbled upon the anomalies, and now he knew. She'd been chased by a Gorgonopsid and had had no choice but to run through – he'd watched it pursue her into their clearing and through the anomaly. She been running so fast she hadn't noticed Cutter or the TARDIS. He wondered what he would have done if she had.
"Professor, are you listening to a word I say?"
Cutter shook his head in an attempt to clear it, but it served to effectively answer the Doctor's question as well. "Sorry," he muttered. "What was that?"
"I was saying that I'm going to try to scan the anomaly again," the Doctor repeated. "If I just hold my sonic tightly, I can keep it from being stolen away again, right?"
"Depends how strong you are against a five-Tesla magnetic field," Cutter answered with a small smile.
The Doctor scowled, but moved forward to attempt the scan anyway. He was holding the sonic screwdriver in both hands now and approached the anomaly with tiny steps, shuffling awkwardly forward until he judged he was close enough. "All right," he said, adjusting his grip so that he could hold down the button on the sonic without letting go of it with either hand. "Let's see what you've got..."
He scanned the anomaly for almost ten full seconds before pulling his hands back with a great tug, stumbling comically backwards. When he'd regained his balance, he frowned at the display. "Hm," he said.
"What does that mean?" Cutter asked.
"It means 'hm'," the Doctor replied helpfully, turning his frown on the anomaly. "That didn't do what I was expecting it to do."
"And what was that?"
"Well, it was informative enough," the Doctor began. "According to the sonic, this particular anomaly is a portal in time and space that leads to the year two hundred and seventy five million, four hundred and sixty three thousand, eight hundred and twelve, and a geographical location roughly in the same place as where Africa is now."
"You could've just said Pangaea in the Permian," Cutter told him. "I have been studying zoology and palaeontology for the past eighteen years."
The Doctor held up his hands. "Sorry, sorry. I should know by now not to underestimate professors." Cutter raised his eyebrows, but his unspoken question was not answered. "Anyway, this anomaly has been present in the present – if you'll pardon the pun – for roughly four hours, but it's not the first time it's opened here."
"Won't be the last, either," Cutter pointed out.
"Hm," the Doctor repeated, staring at the anomaly. "As for what the anomaly actually is – well, I don't think it's like the crack in her bedroom wall, which is good."
"Whose bedroom wall?"
"Amy Pond's," said the Doctor offhandedly, and suddenly there was an expression of such sadness on his face that Cutter had to look away. "Mad, impossible Amy Pond," the Doctor whispered, staring over at the TARDIS. "The girl who waited. Twelve years, all for me, and now I can never see her again. She would have loved this. Or maybe hated it. Never was much of a fan of cracks in time."
Cutter waited for the Doctor to emerge from his reverie; it took a long time. "Sorry," the Doctor muttered at last, finally turning back to Cutter and the anomaly.
"It's okay." Cutter dug his hands into his pockets. "Was she your wife?"
"What?" The Doctor stared at him in shock. "No! Ah, actually... I suppose if you wanted to get technical about it, she was my mother-in-law."
Cutter stared at him in return.
"It's complicated," the Doctor said defensively. "I knew her before my wife was born; well, I knew my wife before I knew her, but I also knew her when she was pregnant with my wife. And my wife didn't know me back then. Except she was being trained to kill me. My wife, not my mother-in-law." He flapped his hands as Cutter continued to stare at him. "Complicated!" the Doctor repeated. "We were talking about the anomaly. As I was saying: it doesn't appear to be malicious or sentient, and as far as I can tell there's no alien intervention. That's a problem."
"Alien intervention?"
"Oh, come now, Professor," the Doctor said. "You've been investigating rips in spacetime for months; surely an alien here or there isn't too much more difficult to believe? Besides, I said there wasn't any alien intervention, so if you were travelling with anyone but me, you probably wouldn't get to see one. This anomaly doesn't appear to facilitate interplanetary travel, so we should be safe."
"Right," Cutter managed. "And you said that was a problem because...?"
"Because it means humanity is responsible," the Doctor explained.
"You don't know that," Cutter said.
"Oh, I think I do, Professor." The Doctor tapped his sonic screwdriver. "Trust me, if any form of life aside from humans and dinosaurs had been through that, I'd know about it. As it is, it's only been your wife, me, and our charming Permian friend so far. Not a whiff of any non-Earthen species."
The fact that non-Earthen species even existed was enough to blow Cutter's mind, but he did his best to focus on the situation at hand. "How on Earth did you figure that all out using a screwdriver?"
The Doctor grinned at him. "Well, considering the technology wasn't invented on Earth at all, it wasn't actually that difficult. Simple material scan – there are traces of DNA within the anomaly from exactly one human, one Time Lord, and one dinosaur."
"Time Lord?"
"Ah," said the Doctor. "Yes. That's me."
"What the hell is is a Time Lord?"
The Doctor smiled a little sadly. "We were the rulers of the greatest civilisation in the universe once," he said. "The planet Gallifrey, the pinnacle of learning and knowledge. Of course... that was before the war. I'm the only one left, now."
Cutter stared at him. "So you're an alien."
"Correct. Your very own time-travelling, two-hearted, from-another-planet alien."
Nick Cutter could only shake his head, well and truly beyond being shocked by now. Spacetime anomalies and dinosaurs were one thing; aliens and interplanetary travel were something else entirely. Rather than attempt to apply anything close to logic to this utterly unbelievable situation, Cutter changed the topic to something he understood just a little bit better. "So you were saying before that the anomalies are our fault? That someone somewhere did something to create them?"
"Someone somewhen," the Doctor corrected. "But, yes. Unless I'm very much mistaken, one of your humans is responsible for the appearance of these anomalies. Our next step is to figure out who – and why."
"That's what you were expecting to get from the scan?"
"Yes. I wanted to figure out exactly what the anomaly is – what it's made of, where it came from, why it's there. I got none of that, really." He looked at the screwdriver again. "Couldn't close it either. That's worrying. If the sonic can't do it, I'm not sure what can."
Cutter frowned. "I thought you were the expert in spacetime portals."
"I am." The Doctor shoved the sonic screwdriver back into his pocket and turned back to the TARDIS. "All right. Come on, then."
"Where are we going?" Cutter demanded. There was annoyance in his voice; he was getting sick of trailing after the Doctor with little to no explanation of where (or when) they would end up. Cutter had never been good at following orders – or people.
"Not far," the Doctor said, striding into the police box. "I'm just going to plug the data from the anomaly into the TARDIS and examine it more carefully. Hopefully we can plot some sort of map of similar magnetic field disturbances all over Earth, and maybe figure out when the first anomaly appeared. Then it's only a simple matter of going there, finding out who made it and why, and closing them all down. Plus reversing the changes you made when you messed around in the past, and ensuring that these anomalies never open up again anywhere in the universe."
"You have an unusual definition of 'simple'," Cutter told him.
The Doctor beamed. "I know." He aimed the sonic at a screen in the middle of the TARDIS and pressed the button. Information began to fill the screen, scrolling down in complicated symbols and lines that made no sense to Cutter. "Hm," the Doctor said yet again, leaning close to read it. "All right. This might take a while to download." He turned back to Cutter and clapped his hands together. "In the meantime... fancy some more tea?"
For the second time in a day, Cutter found himself taking tea with a Time Lord. Though, he reflected, if you thought about it, it was only the second time in eight and a half years, and that was only if you were allowed to count backwards. Feeling a headache building behind his eyes, Cutter tested the temperature of the tea dubiously with his finger, but the . "How do you do it?" he burst out.
"Do what?" the Doctor asked, pouring a disproportionately large volume of milk into his cup.
"This." Cutter gestured impatiently around at the TARDIS. "All of it. Keep track of where and when you are. Figure out how you can change things without, you know, changing things. Meddle with time while still managing to stay sane."
The Doctor smiled. "They don't call us Time Lords for nothing. I've had a lot of practice."
"How much practice?" Cutter asked, knowing he'd regret it as soon as he got an answer.
"'Bout twelve hundred years."
Relieved that he hadn't had his cup to his lips when the Doctor spoke, Cutter nevertheless choked a little upon hearing the response. "Right," he managed at last. "That makes me feel much better."
"As it should. I do have experience with this sort of thing, you know."
"You ever make mistakes?" Cutter asked.
The Doctor put his cup quickly back into his saucer, a tremor in his hand causing it to rattle. He regarded Cutter with a serious expression that seemed out of place on his otherwise youthful visage. "Everyone makes mistakes," he said evenly. "Even me."
"Ever erased a woman from time?"
The Doctor didn't flinch. "Once I erased myself from time."
"Evidently you didn't do a very good job."
The Doctor put his cup and saucer aside. "What are you asking, Professor Cutter?" he wanted to know. "Do you not trust me?"
"I trust you," Cutter answered. "I just know that time travel isn't all fun and games."
The Doctor folded his arms. "All right," he said eventually. "No, it's not. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes people get lost. Once, I travelled with a woman – the most important woman in all of creation. In the end I had to wipe all her memories of me. If she saw me in the street, she wouldn't know who I was. If she were allowed to remember, her mind would burn and she would die." Cutter opened his mouth to cut the Doctor off, but he didn't get the chance. "Then," the Doctor went on, his eyes hard but his mind far away, "there was a woman who ended up trapped in a parallel universe. I can never see her again; I didn't even get to say a proper goodbye. And then Amy. She's dead now, but not before her husband was killed several times and their daughter stolen because of me – a daughter whose death I witnessed three hundred years from now, but she doesn't know it yet. So no, Professor Cutter. It's not all fun and games."
Cutter simply nodded as though the Doctor had confirmed a prediction. "So," he said, "you know what it's like to lose a woman you love because of something you've done."
"All too well," the Doctor whispered.
