The Final Season of Doctor Who

Episode Nine "Spencer and Associates, 13 Matthew Parker Street" Part Two of Two

Act Three

For perhaps fifteen seconds the strange ethereal child-like creatures flew around the basement room, alarming Gwendolyn and disconcerting the Doctor and Romana. Then there was an audio alert: "AUTOMATIC REPAIR IN PROGRESS." The strange selenium tubes reformed and the 'children' rushed back into the sealed ones.

"What was that?!" Gwendolyn wondered. "Why were we attacked by water-babies?"

"They're not water-babies," the Doctor explained. "They're actually MacLaurin Ghosts. Don't worry, they're not actually ghosts. And actually they won't be called that for a millennium or so. How to describe them?" The Doctor noticed a box of documents on a table. "See that box? It has three dimensions: length, breadth and width. Now imagine time as a dimension. Actually, imagine it as a multi-dimensional object. On one axis, we have normal existence, always going in the future. And imagine another axis, where it doesn't matter whether it's past, present or future."

Romana piped up. "Now imagine if you could take the life-forms who lived on that axis, and you can because you just saw them fly around the room, put them in those special selenium tubes, which has very helpful temporal qualities. You could have information from all kinds of time zones."

Gwendolyn thought about this. "Hold on. I spent most of not last week, but the week before, updating estates held in chancery. How were we always able to maximize the investment opportunities before the market fell? I thought it might have something to do with insider trading."

"No," the Doctor clarified. "Your company actually has access to the future. What can you tell me about Mr. Spencer?"

"I haven't seen Mr. Spencer in the three months I've been working here. Only the most important clients see him."

"Have you seen any strange things recently?" Romana asked.

"Actually, I was working late Friday, when the high-level security, not normal security, wanted to stop someone named Montherlant. And they especially didn't want to call the police. He briefly kidnapped me, and then ran down a strange place I've never seen before, called 'The Green Corridor' and then he vanished. I think high-level security is suspicious I saw something. In fact, I'm fairly sure he did, because he ordered me down to this basement room and then locked the door just before you arrived."

"That's enough, Gwendolyn Hall," as Lister entered, pointing a gun at them all. "Well, well. I just thought you were just some unluckily nosy goody-goody, Ms. Hall. But telling secrets to Spencer's most dangerous enemy. That is definitely going to get you killed."

"Lister!" the Doctor said. "So this is where Spencer sent you after you left Red Dwarf."

"Quite. We've updated our files, Doctor. We know more about you than you ever will."

"If your father were here he would tell you to stop Spencer, not help them."

"My father was a stupid slacker."

"Your father was an honorable and courageous man. And your grandfather was better than you'll ever be. Unless you stop what you're doing and help us."

Lister could not hide his contempt. "I heard that you managed to rescue most of Red Dwarf. You found a way to save Yasmin Khan. Everyone except Adam Mitchell. Well, no major loss there." And he aimed his gun precisely at the Doctor.

"Excuse me, are you threatening me with a gun?"

"Of course I am."

"You do realize I'm the Doctor. You do realize this is a sonic screwdriver. Look, not last week but the week before I was fighting Thals, Daleks, the Master, several of your agents, including the King of the Vampires, as well as a Daemon and the Cybermen. You can't intimidate me with a gun." But just then his sonic screwdriver made an anemic drooping sound.

"We know about your screwdriver, and we know how to counter it. Now…" But just then a strange sonic/light blast shoved Lister to the wall. Gwendolyn and the Doctor looked at Romana in surprise.

"What? I can't have my own screwdriver? And improve on it?"

"Wait, he's getting up," Gwendolyn said. "But he was hit so hard!"

"He has a force field to protect him from the blow!" Romana explained. "Let's move while he's still startled." The three quickly rushed out of the room, and raced up the staircase. The Doctor shut a door behind him. "Gwendolyn, I need you to point out a computer," Romana declared.

"Well, I don't really know this part of… Wait! When Lister ordered me down here, I noticed a computer on the way." Gwendolyn quickly directed them to that room. The Doctor barricaded the door, while Romana used her sonic/lasic screwdriver to turn on the computer. "Let's see, hold on. Just a moment." And then Romana managed to pull up a three-dimensional image of the seven stories and various basements of Spencer and Associates. Most of the building was in white, the parts that ordinary employees had access to. But there were portions that were in yellow. The three were able to recognize the basement they were in, as well as where they currently were.

"That's the Green Corridor I saw Friday," Gwendolyn said, pointing at a place two or three floors above them. As she did so that section turned an alarming shade of red. "And this must be the offices of Mr. Spencer," the Doctor, said, pointing to a yellow room at the top. Just then the image flicked off, as did the computer. "The system's on to us," Romana noted. "Let's move."

"Would you like a glass of apfelschorle, Doctor?" Heidegger asked.

"Are you sure you've got the correct person?" Petronella replied.

"I'm sorry, are you not Dr. Petronella Osgood?"

"Oh. Apparently you do."

The trenchcoated man returned pushing a cart. "I imagine Dr. Osgood would prefer a sealed bottle," Heidegger said. Although Petronella was very suspicious, it was a warm day, and the university hardly had air conditioning. She nervously accepted a bottle of apfelschorle, a non-alcoholic apple juice soda, along with a glass. Heidegger already had an opened bottle and poured some, and Petronella warily followed. At a nod from Heidegger the trenchcoated man exited the room.

"Where shall we begin, Doctor?"

"You're Martin Heidegger. You're a Nazi."

"Really? Is that all you can say? You are talking to the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, the leading force behind Existentialism, the key to continental philosophy in your lifetime, and all you're concerned is about the Nazis."

"It's a fairly big question, don't you think?"

"It's a fashionable question. And it is appropriate, for someone with so many scientific degrees, to invoke it to cut off any real intellectual engagement. Just where did you get the supposedly damning information? A chapter in a book you never read because the boyfriend who gave it to you left you two weeks later for another woman? Articles in the New Statesman or the Times Literary Supplement you heard people mention but never actually read yourself? Or perhaps you flipped through a Wikipedia article one day. Wikipedia indeed. Truly the consummation of your hyperscientific world. My country spent centuries creating the proper concepts that would make up real scholarship. And now you rely on a form of audience appreciation more appropriate to cows, ostentatiously referring to its democratic roots, while lacking any connection to the true Volk."

"Excuse me, but did you just kidnap and bring me back in time 87 years just to complain that I don't know enough about you?"

"Now clearly that is not what I have done or why I did it. You are supposed to be a scientist. The Doctor thinks like a scientist. That is why he is going to die. Because he doesn't realize that is not how you think about Being. You are supposed to think like a scientist. But you never do."

Petronella concentrated. She took a sip of the apfelschorle. Then another gulp. "This is some Nazi plot to learn time travel secrets. And you're helping them because you wrote Being and Time."

Heidegger looked at her as if she was unusually stupid. "How did we get the time travel secrets in the first place?"

"You want me to contact the Doctor, but arrange a time before this meeting. Then you catch him and get the technology to arrange this meeting."

"If we had this technology wouldn't you know about it in your present?"

"Wait, it is possible to change the past, and sometimes the Doctor has to be careful about that."

Heidegger, if anything, was even more contemptuous. "I told you to think like a scientist. You're thinking like a scriptwriter. And incidentally, the German Reich does know the difference between Heidegger and Heisenberg. You really are not thinking clearly, Miss Osgood. Instead, I'm going to tell you a story. Once upon a time, it was very cold. It was colder than you can conceive. You think of absolute zero, but that's the wrong comparison. Imagine nothing but snow as far as you could see. Imagine the night longer and darker than you can conceive of. There is no moon. There are no stars. And in this coldness, there is a fire. It is a small fire and it is the only fire that anyone around can see or feel or could ever possibly make. And the only people around have to fight for whatever warmth and whatever crumbs, otherwise they will die. They act very cruelly towards each other. They fight and freeze and whimper and pray for something better. And then one dark night the fire goes out. And then the wolves come and kill every one of them."

"What's going on?" Jack Robertson barked. "I've been locked in my office!"

"Those restrictions have been placed for your own protection, Mr. Spencer," Lister explained coolly. "We face an attack from our deadliest enemy: the Doctor."

"The Doctor! How do you expect to stop him? He's defeated the Daleks at least three dozen times!"

"I assure you we are very close to complete victory. We are waiting for a blossoming, we are waiting for a fruition, we are waiting for the eggshell to crack." What neither man knew was that Romana, the Doctor and Gwendolyn were able to hear all this thanks to Romana's own screwdriver.

"Jack Robertson is Spencer?" the Doctor asked incredulously. "He can't be more than a front."

"Hold on a moment," said Romana. "I have an idea." And she made a few adjustments with her screwdriver. "There. All finished."

"What have you done?" Gwendolyn wondered.

"You know what wifi is?"

"Of course."

"Same idea. Except we can talk to each other when we're not together."

"You know, Romana, if you probe the Tellurian/Codex radio frequency, you can counter what they've done to my screwdriver."

"One thing at a time, Doctor." But then Romana seemed to lose her concentration. For an instant, she appeared about to faint.

"What's wrong?" asked the Doctor.

"I'm not sure. Maybe there's some gas affecting us."

"Hmmm. I'm not feeling anything." Outside the Offices of Spencer and Associates, in the back alley, but a couple of buildings away, the Nun who had espied the Doctor earlier was smiling. She took out a breviary and opened it. But instead of reading Catholic prayers, she was seeing an electronic reference to the exact time and place where Petronella Osgood was in 1935 Freiburg, along with an estimated time she would return.

"Hold on," said Romana. "I can lock the door so Lister can't reach us." And indeed Lister was immediately frustrated when he tried to open the door nearest to him. "If we move this direction we can at least get to 'Spencer,' whoever he may be." And the trio made a few steps before Romana halted. "Oh no."

"What now?" Gwendolyn worried.

"There's another security system. Lister has a way of projecting his thoughts into special entities which he can use to attack people."

"Like androids?" the Doctor suggested.

"While they have the form of androids, they're more like force fields. And the kicker is that they're invisible." Suddenly, an unknown something grabbed the Doctor by his arm and hurled him down the hall. The Doctor painfully landed on the floor, but he still had the self-possession to move out of the way when the Invisible Forcefield leaped across the room to trample him. Romana and Gwendolyn saw the resulting landing upset a table and a nearby painting. Just then they saw Lister enter their floor: he had found a way to reopen the door. Romana found a stairwell and forced Gwendolyn up it. "This way!" They quickly made their way up another floor. And there Gwendolyn found herself right beside the sign: GREEN CORRIDOR. ADMISSION STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

Martin Heidegger continued speaking. "Such is the parable of the fire, the dead volk and the wolves. But there is another ending. That the wolves did not kill the volk, but were in fact its protectors and their only hope. What do you think of that?"

Petronella was quite unconvinced. "I think it's a rotten analogy for the S.S."

"Ah, once more the Nazis. You can't really think of anything else, Miss Osgood. You think my work is nothing more than games of rhetoric, that is it 'malarkey' or 'codswallop' or something even less. What you don't know is that sometimes, occasionally, and at this very moment, Being speaks to me. It enlightens me. It clarifies matters. I know that ten years from now the Reich will be nothing. My country will be in ruins, and the Reich will be loathed for its… peccadillos. And Being tells me more. Much more. Not merely my future, but yours. I don't remember anything between the times Being deigns to speak to me, but I know one thing. That however much I will need to euphemize my current conduct, everything I am doing is right."

"Hold on. You know what's going to happen to Germany."

"I know everything."

"Then you know about the Holocaust. Right this minute it's nothing but an idle fantasy for Hitler. Only a handful of fanatics even imagine what is going to happen. But you know what's going to happen, and you do nothing."

"Such… smugness."

"Smugness? Smugness!?"

"Consider the term 'Holocaust.' It implies a sacral or liturgic quality, which you don't really intend."

"Are you mad?!"

"Still not thinking like a scientist. Many Jews prefer the term 'Shoah,'—annihilation. But you don't really understand that term either."

Petronella tried to collect herself. "This Being. It sounds like a demon."

"Demons, I assure you, do not comment so well on Edmund Husserl. But the pathetic thing isn't that you cannot imagine something worse than Operation Reinhard. It's that you don't understand the irony."

"I want to talk to this Being."

"I can tell the Doctor has not told you about his thoughts on the concept. He's trying to protect you. What you don't appreciate is that so am I. If you're very lucky, you'll never know how. But there is one more thing. You are a spinster without dignity, Petronella Osgood. But consider this. I was baptized a Catholic. I am guilty of many sins. I have committed adultery. So has my wife. But the one thing about grace is that it can be completely unexpected. Good afternoon, Miss Osgood."

And then Petronella found herself hitting the pavement as the chair she was in vanished. "Ow!" She quickly got up and looked around. She was back in London, not near the café where she had been earlier, but in some sort of alley. She quickly took out her phone and turned it on, and confirmed her time and place. "All right, I'm somewhere in the City. I should call the Doctor."

But Petronella did not notice the Nun behind her. Who took out something like an unusual long, thick pen. A single touch of it was enough to shock Petronella unconscious.

Act Four

The Nun bent down to Petronella's prostrate and unconscious form. She smiled, picked her up, and carried her to a corner of one of the buildings near Spencer and Associates where she would not be so conspicuous.

Simultaneously, Gwendolyn and Romana could hear Lister both climbing up the stairs to their floor and talking: "Doctor where have you gone? You seem to have evaded our invisible warrior."

"Romana, what do we do now?" Gwendolyn asked anxiously. But suddenly Romana gave a sharp yell. "Aggh!" and fell to the ground unconscious. Just then, Lister appeared on the same floor. He aimed his gun at Gwendolyn, who raced to the door of the Green Corridor. She opened it and dashed inside.

The door closed behind her, and she found herself in complete darkness. Nervously she tried to find a light switch, while trying to keep moving in case Lister followed her into the Corridor. "Hello? Is there something in here?"

"Gwendolyn?" asked a familiar voice.

"Doctor? Are you in here?"

"No, I'm not here at all. Remember that chatting wifi Romana made? It allows us to communicate while we're in separate rooms. Where are you?"

"I'm in the Green Corridor. It's completely dark."

"Where's Romana?"

"She was right by me, but then she screamed and fell unconscious. And then Lister showed up with a gun, and I dashed in here."

"And he hasn't followed you?"

"Not yet. He's right outside the room, so he could come inside at any moment."

"Ah."

"Is something wrong?"

"Well, one reason he hasn't followed you is maybe because whatever is in the corridor is too dangerous for him to be near."

"Doctor? When Romana showed the plans for this building, do you have an idea of how long this corridor was?"

"Perhaps a hundred feet." There was then a pause. "But it could be longer. It could be quite a bit longer actually."

"I'm not hearing anything in the Corridor. I wish I brought my phone, so I could see what's going… aaah!"

"Gwendolyn, what is it?"

"My feet stumbled against something in the corridor."

"Like a chair or a table?"

"No, I think something closer to ground level. I'm trying to feel it. I'm bending down. It's cloth. Something like that. And something harder."

"Gwendolyn, I need you to listen very carefully. You are in extremely grave danger. You need to get to your feet and run as quickly as you can to the other end of the corridor. Put your arms in front of you and run like hell. I know your instinct is to move cautiously, but trust me, it's better to hurt yourself running against the other door than to stay in the corridor another second." By now the Doctor was on the same floor as the Corridor, but he couldn't see where Lister was.

"All right, Doctor, I'll do it. Hold on…"

"Gwendolyn, please run."

"There's something by my ear."

"Gwendolyn, RUN!"

"It's licking my ear and… AAAAAH!"

The Doctor dashed through the corridor, passed an unconscious Romana, but before he could open the door to the Green Corridor, he heard the lock click and close it.

"She's quite dead," Lister said, standing behind the Doctor.

"I know," the Doctor replied, turning to face Lister.

"We have a standing order to keep you alive, Doctor. That doesn't mean we need all your bones in one piece." And with that the Invisible Forcefield lunged at the Doctor. Lister deftly stepped out of the way, while the Doctor in turn managed to pass him. One could see parts of the Invisible Forcefield as its motions caught the light as it chased the Doctor. Then with a sudden motion it lunged at the Doctor and the two crashed into a storage closet.

Lister, carrying his firearm, then turned to Romana, who was now gaining consciousness. "Interesting. We don't have any standing orders about you. I received an updated file about you a couple of days ago, but not with any imperatives. Pity that I didn't read your file in detail." He aimed his firearm at Romana.

Romana was now more articulate. "I can assure you that your superiors want me alive."

"If it was that important, they would have told me. But then since you are a Time Lord, you won't die from a bullet in the head. You'll just regenerate." And he aimed his firearm at Romana and pulled the trigger.

Or at least he tried to. But he could not complete it. "What the devil?"

"You know the sonic screwdriver doesn't work on wood," said the Doctor behind Lister. Lister turned around to see him. "But it does work on metal. Interesting thing. There's all kind of useful things in your storage room. Amazing, the sort of things you can do with simple cleaning supplies, or basic stationery, that would be able to counter what's hampering my screwdriver. Not to mention the 22nd and 23rd century technology that would also do the same thing."

Lister fruitlessly tried to fire his weapon. Then suddenly he found himself lifted into the air. "Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. I was also able to reprogram your Invisible Forcefield." Lister impotently yelled at the Forcefield. "Put me down you idiot!"

The Doctor managed to pick up Romana. "Can you walk?"

Romana's legs collapsed, and the Doctor had to hold her up again. "Not really."

"What happened to you?"

"I don't know. Where's Gwendolyn?"

The Doctor gestured to the Corridor door. "She's dead. Let's see if we can get to Spencer." The Doctor managed to drag Romana up another staircase, where they encountered a locked door. The Doctor tried to open it with his screwdriver.

"It's not working."

Still suffering from whatever had hurt her, Romana took out her own superior screwdriver. "It's not working either. Whatever Lister knows, the security system is more than capable of protecting itself."

The Doctor moved himself and Romana to the wall. "Just a moment. I think we need some superior force." On the floor below, the Invisible Forcefield tossed Lister down a flight of stairs. Thanks to his force field, the pain was much less than his loss of dignity. The Invisible Forcefield bounded up the stairs to the recalcitrant door in front of the Doctor. It started pummeling the door. And after banging on it four times, it gave way.

"Success!" the Doctor yelled.

"Spencer security systems have been broken. Please take vital measures," a toneless, genderless voice declared.

In Jack Robertson's special chamber, the message was repeated. Robertson took a deep breath. "This had better work." He opened a drawer to his desk and pulled out a revolver. He sat down at his chair, waited two but not three seconds, then fired into his chest.

Outside the Nun walked away from Petronella's still unconscious form. She entered the building adjacent to the one that housed Spencer and Associates and soon found its basement. The basement itself was not very interesting, and was connected to the parking garage. There, the Nun moved to an inconspicuous corner, and tapped on the wall. A secret door opened mechanically, revealing a staircase. The Nun quickly walked down the stairs, as the door closed behind her. She now found herself in a corridor, which connected the building to Spencer and Associates. As she walked her eyes glowed with a strange fire.

"Spencer security systems have been broken. Please take vital measures," the audio system kept repeating. The Doctor dragged Romana with him, and found the door to Robertson's chamber. This time his screwdriver did work and the door opened. Very quickly, he took Romana to a large couch, and plopped her down again, where she fell unconscious. With one move of his screwdriver he was able to lock the door behind him, and with another move he was able to turn off the audio system. He then noticed Robertson in his chair, bleeding from his gunshot wound.

Robertson pointed to a lower drawer of his desk. "Medical supplies," he gasped. The Doctor opened it and took out a number of bandages, cloths, drugs and medicines.

"If I'm lucky, there should be a bullet on the floor behind me," Robertson wheezed. The Doctor noticed not only a bullet hole in the back of Robertson's suit, but also one through his chair, and a spent slug where Robertson indicated it would be. "Robertson, I need to you to put pressure on the chest wound, for just a minute." He moved Robertson's hands to do this properly, then he dashed over to the couch and obtained Romana's screwdriver. He quickly returned, and scanned Robertson with both screwdrivers. "You're very lucky indeed. You don't seem to have damaged any organs. But why did you shoot yourself in the first place?"

"Because they brainwashed me to, obviously."

"If they want you dead, the only way to save yourself is to tell me everything you know."

In a couple of minutes, the Doctor had stopped the bleeding. Using Romana's screwdriver, he laser stitched the wounds and stabilized the situation. "The last time I saw you was the beginning of 2021, when you were the undeserved hero for beating the Daleks. And now you're Spencer?"

"I'm the latest Spencer. There's been a number of them. And there will be more in the future. Shortly after we last met, I was the hero. But it turns out the world's ruling class can be much more cynical and intelligent than people give them credit for. A few days after my 'triumph,' my bank accounts were frozen. Then my secret accounts were. This is the worst time for Chinese-American relations since Eisenhower, but when China suggested that I be assassinated, the Americans didn't have any strong objections.

"Then Spencer and Associates contacted me. I had dealings with them in the past. They offered me this position, the opportunity to regain all my money, and information about every billionaire and power player in the world. At first, all I had to do was confine myself to these rooms or wear a disguise whenever I wanted to go out and enjoy something. And within a year I was as rich as I was before and I knew all the dirty secrets of every conceivable rival in the world.

"But I also knew that Spencer was something more than a very powerful and very secretive English law firm. I realized I was being programmed to kill myself if the security systems were ever breached."

"Montherlant. He was your man?" the Doctor asked.

"Yes. And he was very good. Makes James Bond look like a cheap Scottish punk. From him I learned a lot of things."

"What is your exact position in the firm?"

"I am Spencer. I have absolute authority with all the legal matters, and I review all the intelligence we get about people."

"But who's your superior?"

"That I don't know. But there are… emissaries. They have higher security clearance so Lister knows not to cross them. Meanwhile ordinary security obeys Lister without question."

"Who are the emissaries?"

"One of them is an alien. Short fellow. Purplish. Named Phrropox. There's another one. I think he's an American. He's also short, but a bit taller. Name is Greenman. Have you ever seen 'The Big Bang Theory'?"

"No."

"Never mind then. And there's someone taller. Very gaunt. I think he's Irish. Or at least his name is. He's called Turlough." The Doctor noticeably winced on hearing this, but Robertson was in too much pain to notice. "There are others, but those are the main three. But one of the things Montherlant told me is that they haven't always been the emissaries. There's someone else."

"Who?"

"Photo's in my breast pocket." The Doctor carefully obtained it, and saw what appeared to be a Spencer and Associates function from 1974. "You see that bearded man in the back on the far right? He looks human, but I don't think he is."

"You think correctly, Jack. That's a Logopolitan. A Rogue Logopolitan, since he should be on Logopolis or if elsewhere, only on strict mathematical business. Certainly not at a cocktail party for Edward Heath."

"Montherlant found out that he will appear on Spencer business centuries in the future. At one point he will actually be Spencer. Montherlant couldn't break into the holiest of holies, the future of all the Spencers. He did find out that this Logowhatever was killed by the Weeping Angels. But only after arranging a very nasty surprise for them."

Although neither the Doctor, Robertson nor Lister knew it, the Nun was in a basement of Spencer and Associates. She was in a completely white room. She smiled, her eyes still ablaze, and stared motioning her hands. It appeared that she was playing an invisible keyboard of some sort. But she was actually entering a special code. Suddenly the wall slid open, revealing an elevator car. She continued smiling, and entered it.

Robertson continued. "When I realized I was being programmed to kill myself, I tried to break the programming. But then I realized I couldn't and was probably raising unpleasant suspicions. But then I found a way out. You know Joseph Conrad?"

"We've met on a few occasions."

"When he was a young man, he tried to kill himself. But he managed to shoot himself in such a way that the bullet didn't hit any organs. The same trick appears in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I realized that if I did the same thing, the effort and the shock would overcome the programming. And it worked! Hurts like hell, though!"

"You're more resourceful than I thought you were. What happened to Romana?"

"I have no idea. It could be anything. I don't know anything about security. I'm just the boss."

"What's in the Green Corridor?"

"No idea either. Only Phrropox has access to it."

"That makes sense. Do you know any other non-human members of Spencer?"

"I'm not sure. Turlough and Greenman told me of another member of security. He looks human. I think you can access the hologram of it with your screwdriver, frequency A7236." The Doctor did so and saw a picture of the Gentleman King of the Vampires. Robertson continued. "They made clear to me that this person was never to contact me directly. If he did, it was not only part of a coup, but he would certainly kill me. If he did show up, I was to chat with him politely, silently alert the emissaries. Then at the same time, I was to put on special glasses—" Robertson pointed to a drawer on a filing cabinet near the couch "—press a button that would fill the room with intense light, then run like hell."

The Doctor opened the drawer and took out a pair of very thick glasses. "Good against X-Tonic radiation. Nasty." He put them back and returned to Robertson. "So you can contact the emissaries?"

"No. It's a special system only for that contingency. Otherwise, they will appear from the Munster room."

"The Munster room?"

"Greenman said he had a love for bad sixties sitcoms. Go figure. It's some kind of interdimensional hocus-pocus which means they can access the building, but I can't access them."

"What do you know about Van Statten?"

"Son of a bitch has higher security clearance than me. Aside from that, nothing."

"What do you know about Sarah Jane Smith?"

"The journalist? Didn't she die a decade ago?"

"Last few questions, Robertson. What is Spencer afraid of? Who are their enemies?"

"I get security alerts all the time. Just last week there was a Kroton-Krynoid thing. There's a standing alert about the Cybermen."

"Robertson, I need you to focus. Is there anyone Phrropox, Greenman or Turlough are really scared of?"

"Umm, Weeping Angels maybe? But that could be in the next century."

"Robertson, do you know who the Guest is?"

"There have been coded references to humans."

"No, the Guest is a very powerful cosmic entity. And his real name is…" All this time the secret elevator had been silently rising up to Robertson's chambers. The doors opened behind Robertson and the Doctor without a whisper. Then the Nun leaped out and tackled the Doctor.

Coda

The elevator doors remained open, Robertson fainted, while Romana slowly regained consciousness. The Doctor and the Nun wrestled on the floor, before the Doctor was able to disentangle himself. He got to his feet, and barely avoided a very skillful savate kick from the Nun. He dashed back to the desk, and picked up his screwdriver. The Nun quickly leaped to the desk, and the Doctor dashed away again. They were separated by about ten feet as they looked into each other's eyes.

And then abruptly it was over. The Doctor fired his sonic screwdriver at the Nun, who then fell lifelessly to the floor.

"Doctor, what happened?" Romana asked.

"Hold on. Let me see." The Doctor moved closer to the Nun and directed his screwdriver at her face. Which then ascended a few inches revealing its robotic interior.

"It's some kind of android," Romana declared.

"It's a very sophisticated android." The Doctor used his screwdriver and revealed the Nun's android brain. "Now this is very interesting. It's not simply a sophisticated artificial intelligence. A sentient entity could use this as a body to spy on others. From the sensors that entity could be very close, or very far away indeed, in either space or time. But this is odd." He was able to retract a piece of the brain, showing a wire pulsing with the same red energy that had flowed in the Nun's eyes. "Now this is very strange. There's raw energy flowing through here. I don't think it's part of the system. It actually seems to counter the very structure, like it's trying to commandeer it. What is it?"

The Doctor tried to examine it more closely, and then abruptly vanished. He found himself in darkness, gently falling.

"Uh-oh."

TV Guide preview Episode #10 Stay Together for the Kids

The Doctor finally confronts one of the three final Enemies, while at the same time trying to find his true origin. Meanwhile, Romana and Petronella must combine efforts and time machines in an attempt to rescue him.

TV Guide preview Episode #11 An Ordinary Day in Milton Keynes

The Doctor finally learns his true origin, and then finds himself in a desperate battle. Cybermen, Reapers, the all-Black assassins, Weeping Angels and much, much more combat in both the present and at the end of time. Along with—Rose Tyler?