Part Two

Romana woke up. She had spent the night in a closet in a cave. She had at least the privilege of being able to sleep on a cot with a blanket, so it had not been an entirely uncivilized evening.

Eventually, a man unlocked the door to her closet and motioned for her to come out. "Let's go," he said.

Romana sat up. "Why have you taken me prisoner?"

"We saw the time wave readings when your craft arrived. It's unlike anything we've ever seen before. We'll want to ask you a few questions."

"All right. Ask your questions and then let me go!"

The man shook his head. "After we have breakfast. Come on..." he gestured for her to follow him.

"How very civil of you," she observed. "What's your name?" she went on, anxious to at least bond with someone on some level and thus have them recognize her as a person to be respected.

"Pellar Krono."

"I see. My name is Romana. So where are we?"

"Well, if you come out of there, I'll show you," he said with some exasperation creeping into his voice.

She followed him out into a vast cave system. It was huge, and it had been retrofitted to house about a hundred people along with their equipment and living supplies. There were cots, a dining area, crates of supplies, and sanitary booths. And in one far corner was a computer work area with computer screens and other high-tech equipment Romana couldn't quite make out from so far away.

He led her to the makeshift dining area where about twenty other people were eating at the tables.

He opened a pot on the stove and ladled out a sort of stew for Romana and himself. He then led her over to a table where they joined the other diners.

"You seem to be in hiding," Romana observed, accepting her bowl of breakfast stew.

"Not only geographically. We're not even in the same time period as the government against whom we're rebelling." Pellar went on, "And we're all armed, by the way. So if you try to escape..." he shook his head slowly. "You won't make it."

Romana picked up a spoon and began eating. It was some of the most awful stew she had eve had. But she needed the nourishment.

A woman sat down next to Pellar. She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Good morning, dear."

"Good morning."

The woman turned to Romana, "Hello. I'm Cass."

"This is the prisoner we captured," Pellar said to the woman, who flinched back her hand she was about to use to shake Romana's.

Romana replied, "I don't see why we can't still be civil about all this." She turned back to the woman, "My name is Romana. Your husband?" Romana inquired, gesturing with her head.

"Yes."

"You missed all the fun, dear," Cass said to Pellar. "There were some ghosts here in the base last night."

"Ghosts? What do you mean?"

"I mean that Cray thought she saw a sort of ghostly person walk straight through a wall. I was on guard duty, so I had to check it out."

"What did you find?"

She shrugged, "Well, nothing."

"I thought you said it was fun," Pellar said.

"It was fun. Nothing else ever happens around here. Anyway, we had a bit of a laugh about it afterward." Cass turned to Romana, "Pellar's trouble is he has no sense of humor."

Romana nodded knowingly. "Ah, the difficult life or a rebel."

"We're freedom fighters," Pellar said. "Ever since the government discovered time travel. They've been acting as terrorists. They abduct people and then just make them disappear into other times. I lost my brother to them. One day he was there, the next... just gone."

"I see."

"We've stolen two of their time mobiles. We lost one. Our pilot and the craft disappeared into time, and we have no idea where or when. We still have the other one, and we've used it a few times. We understand the basics of time travel and we can detect time mobiles, and when you and your friend arrived, it was race to beat the government to you." He sat back and smiled smugly, "And we won."

"I expect this government, to whom you're objecting, has kidnapped the Doctor. So it sounds to me as though it's a tie."

He shook his head with a smile Romana did not like. "We not only got you. But we captured your time mobile as well."

The TARDIS!? They had the TARDIS!? That did change things.

#

After having just arrived at the Temporal Affairs facility, Lendo Tempo led the Doctor to her office. She was pleasantly surprised to find her office exactly where she had left it the last time she was there. She sat down behind her desk and gestured to the chair opposite. The Doctor sat down. "Oh, thank you," he said with a smile. And then he noticed the small animal in the carrying case on the desk, "And who's this little chap?"

"Oh, I don't know. Snuffyface or something like that." She turned to glance at it. But the fleemer that had been there the previous day was now gone! In its place was a wumble! Wumbles were much less agile ground animals, while fleemers were semi-arboreal and much thinner.

"You don't know?" the Doctor asked.

"What?" Did this strange man know something about the changes? "Don't I know what?"

"His name? Isn't he yours?"

"Oh... uh, not really. I'm afraid that I just sort of inherited him recently. Long story."

"Well, now, what is it you do here, Miss Tempo," the Doctor asked.

"Well, as I said, this is Temporal Affairs," she said. And she said it as though that would explain everything.

"Is it really? Temporal Affairs. My, my. And what do you do here?"

Lendo scrutinized the Doctor a moment. Finally she decided that it would simply be best to explain everything, and to encourage him to do the same. "We are responsible for all temporal expeditions here on Tempus Omega. You see, here at Temporal Affairs, we make alterations to time. We prevent wars. We arrest criminals who have gone uncaptured. We also provide a very unique personal service. We recognize that everybody has some sort of skill. Everybody. Usually it's for something that is contemporary. But sometimes it's for an invention that hasn't happened yet. And sometimes someone with a particular skill was simply born too early or in some cases too late to take full advantage of their talents. It's our job to keep track of, well, all the people who end badly, really. And then we help them out by putting them into the era where they will shine the best."

"Whether they want it or not?" the Doctor asked.

"Of course, they want it. Everyone has the potential to do either well, or badly. To be a hero or a crook. We can monitor the public and find those individuals who don't quite fit in. People who will end up committing suicide, or turning to crime. We can then find where these people will best be placed that suits their abilities, and then put them there before they go bad. That man in the portrait behind me, Doran Kessler, was originally a politician of the very worst kind." The Doctor looked at the large oil painting dominating the wall. It was a man, sitting in what obviously meant to be a powerful pose. It was the sort of pose that any pompous, self-important man would think projected power and confidence. Lendo went on, "He was originally self-serving. Never spoke a true word. Ignored good advice from experts because his own ego wouldn't let him accept the idea that anyone was cleverer than he was. He caused wars and suffering on a massive scale. Anyway, we went back, abducted the stinker as an infant, and we put him in a situation where he was subjected to all the things he foisted upon the masses. As a result of this, he became angry at injustice. He was taught to understand the values of honesty and selfless devotion to the greater good. And eventually, after growing up with all that as his new background, he became one of the greatest leaders our planet has ever seen."

"That's all well and good," the Doctor said. "But if you do this over and over, as you clearly have, you risk permanently damaging the time continuum."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you can nudge time gently, here and there. But significant changes to time such as you're describing actually cause damage, temporal distortions. And if you do it too many times, it can have disastrous consequences."

"And you know all this for a fact, do you?"

The Doctor paused, thought about it, and then said, "Yes."

Lendo nodded.

A man popped his head in the doorway. "Lendo, did you prepare that report on..." he looked hesitantly at the Doctor, then back at Lendo, "... on that thing?"

"I thought we agreed that Ollie was going to do it?"

"What?" asked the man, leaning over the table, clearly very confused by what Lendo had just said.

"Didn't we?" Lendo asked.

"No. Lendo, we've had this conversation. I said you should do it, and it should be ready by mid day today."

Lendo thought about this. None of this rang a bell with her at all. "As I remember the conversation, I said Ollie would be much better at planning that sort of thing, and you agreed."

The man looked worried. "Okay, Lendo... who is Ollie?" the man finally asked.

"What do you mean? Ollie. Short guy. Always making faces behind people's back." The man continued to stare blankly at Lendo. "You don't remember Ollie?" The man shook his head. Lendo nodded. "It's happened again. And it's happening more often."

"Looks like it."

"All right," Lendo finally said. "I'll get that report ready later today."

The man nodded his thanks and then left.

"Problems?" the Doctor asked.

Lendo paused. She scrutinized the Doctor. She finally decided to accept that, whoever this man was, he did know a thing or two about time. "Unfortunately," she finally said, "we can confirm some of what you say." She gestured to the doorway where the other man had just been. "Not only has this sort of thing been happening, but our equipment and time mobiles have been experiencing more and more trouble over the last couple of years. But it's been increasing almost exponentially. These last few days have been the worst of all. We now need about three times the temporal thrust to move through time than when this whole thing started."

"It's called temporal corrosion," the Doctor confirmed.

"Okay. But is there some way to repair the damage?"

"No," the Doctor said, drawing out the word for several seconds as he shook his head slowly. "The only thing you can do is stop making changes to time. Allow your world to progress naturally. And in a couple of centuries, you'll have moved beyond the damage that you've caused. Now of course most people would assume that the only way to prevent it would be by going back in time and stopping it being done in the first place. But they would be wrong."

"Oh, really? And why is that?" Lendo asked suspiciously, suddenly not sure anymore how much to trust this man.

"Don't tell me you've tried just that?" the Doctor asked, shocked at the constant stupidity of primitive people playing with a dangerous new technology as though it were a toy.

Lendo sighed, " No. But the subject has come up."

The Doctor leaned in closely and said very seriously, "Unfortunately that would be such a monumental change, it would be an attempt to erase all the alternate timelines you've created here. It would cause far, far more damage than it could ever have fixed."

"I see," Lendo nodded somewhat vacantly, clearly not entirely convinced.

"Lendo, tell me you're not planning anything like that."

"Well, we were. One of our agents, a man named Pellar Krono was the main proponent of that idea. But he's disappeared. Completely. Now, we still have records of him, and we all remember him, so he wasn't just erased from time. So we think he's joined the rebel movement."

"Rebel movement?"

"Yes. We suspect they're the ones who have taken your companion."

"Ah," the Doctor nodded. "And I can see that you've done quite a bit of time traveling yourself."

"Can you?" Lendo said defensively.

"Well, if you don't make certain safeguards, you can suffer from temporal psychosis. And it's just that you seem to be in the early stages yourself."

That got her attention. Again, she gestured to the open doorway, "You mean like that thing that just happened? Inconsistent memories, that sort of thing?"

"Well, let me put it this way. If you want to drive someone mad, the best way would be to go back into their past over and over again, changing their personal time so that their memories change again and again. They end up experiencing different, alternating pasts every few minutes. Soon they don't know what's real and what's not."

There was a long pause as Lendo sat quietly and absorbed what the Doctor had just told her. Finally she spoke again, "Yes, you could be right. It's been happening more often recently. And not just with me. Other people have reported remembering things that clearly never happened. Memories of children they never had, family members who don't exist, visiting places that just aren't there. I myself can clearly remember my son's tenth birthday. My husband and I took him to Calgalia, the seaside town." She looked off into space, haunted and empty. "And of course the thing is, I don't have a son. But I can see him. I remember him. I remember his favorite song. His favorite bed-time book. And now there's no trace of him. There are no pictures of him. His things aren't there."

"That's the Omega effect. As soon as we started early time travel experiments on my planet, the same thing happened to us. On Earth, they used to call it the Mandela effect. People were popping in and out of separate timelines and only some of them suspected what was going on.

"And then there's the problem with your vehicles," the Doctor went on. "The flow of chronons around your planet has thinned. You've torn a series of paths in it. And if the chronons aren't there, your ships cannot travel through them."

"Doctor, if you're right... that's a lot of trouble we've got."

"Yes."

#

Pellar stood on guard duty by the main entrance of the rebel cave system. It was late and he was tired. So when he saw himself come through the front entrance, he was not sure what he was seeing. He blinked a few times to make sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him. And still his other self was there, coming through the main entrance! Only this wasn't a vague, ghostly image of some kind. And he was definitely wide awake. And then the second Pellar also froze as he saw the first one standing there on guard duty. They stared at one another, neither knowing quite what to do. This was real. This was happening. The Pellar who was on guard duty felt suddenly light-headed... and then lost consciousness...

#

"You all right?"

Pellar opened his eyes. He was lying on the cave floor. His relief was standing over him. She was a tall, thin woman with a severely short haircut. "Are you all right!?" his relief repeated. "What happened?"

"I… I don't really know." Pellar looked at his watch, but hadn't been sure of the time when he had passed out. He looked at the cave entrance, finding that the other version of himself was no longer there. He looked around the cave. Everything was in place. But there was no other Pellar.

"I saw… I don't know what I saw."

"You've been pushing yourself. I think you just need some extra sleep. Go on. It's my turn on guard duty anyway."

The woman helped Pellar to his feet. "Thank you."

Pellar made his way to the area with all the cots. His wife was sound asleep. He was starting to think that he just ought to resign himself to the temporal insanity that was everywhere these days. But for right now he needed sleep. He climbed into the cot next to his wife's and closed his eyes.

#

Lendo Tempo brought the Doctor into the monitoring room. It was the large room they had passed earlier with about a hundred monitor stations and technicians observing and recording different events in different times. The room was dark with most of the light coming from the monitor screens.

"Aside from monitoring historical events, we are also using sensors that can detect fluctuations in the spacetime continuum."

"Yes," the Doctor said, hands in pockets. He looked over the shoulder of one of the technicians. "But did you know that the tracker system could be refined by about fifty percent."

"Really? Is that just bluster, or could you show us how it's done?"

"Oh, it would be a matter of two minutes."

"Two minutes?"

"Well... one minute and ffity-five seconds."

The technicians in the immediate area all looked to Lendo. She shrugged. "All right, Doctor. Give it a try." She then tapped one of the technicians on the shoulder. He then got up and let the Doctor sit in his seat. "But if you break anything, I will be very angry."

The Doctor began typing on the keyboard. Very quickly. And after exactly one minute and forty-eight seconds, the screen showed them a rotating two-dimensional representation of five dimensional spacetime. "And from here," the Doctor explained. "We can zoom in, observe who's coming and who's going through space and time." Most of the people in the room had gathered around at that point, eager to see what the Doctor had done. There were surprised looks, wide eyes, and smiles spreading out amongst his audience.

"Doctor, this is incredible," Lendo said.

The Doctor thought to himself for a moment, before finally agreeing, "Yes. Yes, it is. Isn't it?"

The Doctor then took a few minutes to explain to the crowd of technicians how his alterations worked. Afterward, he got to his feet and joined Lendo again.

"Well done," Lendo said. "That's really going to help."

She quietly mulled something over in her head. Then she finally said, "Actually, there's something I've been putting off that we should discuss."

"Yes?"

"Come with me." She led the Doctor down the corridor to their sickbay. And lying there in the bed was the other Doctor. The one who had just appeared in the corridor. And he was still completely unconscious.

The Doctor who had just come into the room with Lendo stepped forward slowly. "Well, there's something you don't see every day."

"Is this you? Is this something you remember? Or is this maybe in your future?"

"Well, I think I know someone who can help us." The Doctor leaned over his sleeping self, reached out a hand and lightly touched the hand of his double. "Time to wake up," he whispered.

The Doctor in the bed suddenly opened his eyes wide! He looked up at the other Doctor standing over him. He smiled, "Hello, Doctor."

The one standing up smiled back, "Hello, Doctor. How are you feeling?"

"Oh, good, good. Can't complain."

Both Doctors turned to look at Lendo, who still didn't know what to make of this. "What the hell is happening to this universe?" she said.

#

Romana stood facing five seated rebel leaders, including Pellar Krono. "First off, thank you for letting me stand," she said, in an attempt to undermine their attempt to make her feel uncomfortable. "I was getting very annoyed with having to sit on that cot in my cell."

"Your time mobile is not like ours, is it?" one of them asked.

"Oh, I wouldn't think so. For starters, it's not a time mobile. It's a Time and Relative Dimension in Space machine. Or TARDIS."

"We have been making plans to take time travel from the government. But our only time mobile is now almost incapable of traversing the time stream."

Romana winced, "That's not quite the correct terminology, but I understand what you mean."

"So how does this TARDIS of yours work, exactly?"

"Oh, you'd have to ask the Doctor that. I'm just a passenger."

"So you don't know how to fly your own ship?"

"I expect I could work it out."

"And could you get past the damaged part of the time stream?"

"In theory. My TARDIS doesn't actually move through time, you see. It dematerializes from the spacetime continuum completely, it moves through the vortex, and then rematerializes in whatever time and place we program her. Now, during the actual dematerialization and rematerialization process, we could get… stuck in the mud, so to speak."

"Really? And how many can fit inside? It doesn't look very big."

"Oh, well, the TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental, you see."

"You mean it's bigger on the inside?"

"Yes."

Pellar, sitting at the table with the others, nodded, deep in thought. "Where are you from?" he asked.

"Oh, just think of me as a traveler."

"A traveler from the future?"

Romana didn't want to give anything away. So at this point she simply smiled sweetly.

#

Lendo stepped into the main Temporal Affairs laboratory followed by both Doctors. The one that had been asleep in their sickbay now had his coat and scarf back on, and so it was impossible to tell them apart.

The room they entered was about fifty feet in diameter. This room was filled with scientists engrossed in their advanced scientific equipment covered in flashing lights and monitor screens.

Lendo's boss was there. He was the same one who had popped his head into Lendo's office earlier. He looked up to see the two identical men standing with Lendo and then stepped forward to greet them. "I see you've woken up," he said, his eyes darting back and forth between the two Time Lords. "My name is Zarwin Waqti. I'm the one who's charge around here."

"Well, that's a big job," one of the Doctors said. "How do you do? I say, I like this room." Hands in pockets, both Doctors began looking over shoulders to see what went on in this control room.

"Um, yes, yes..." Waqti had to take a moment to get over the surprise of seeing two different versions of the same person. "Anyway, we're experimenting with finding a less destructive means of time travel."

"Let me ask you this," one of the Doctors said, returning to face Lendo and Waqti. "How many temporal expeditions are going on daily?"

"Twenty-thirty..."

"What!? Mr. Waqti, this has to stop!"

"Doctor..." But then suddenly an alarm cut him off. Several scientists working on a long control panel against a large glass wall worked to get control of their experiment. Beyond the large glass wall was a room containing a two-story, cylindrical chronon accelerator covered in dials and pulsating lights. Both Dotors raced over to join the scientists at the control panel.

"We can't stop the anti-chronon leak!" one of them shouted.

They looked through the safety glass. There was indeed a puncture of some kind in the giant machine in the next room, through which a steady spray of glowing blue steam sprayed out.

"It has to be patched," one of the Doctors said. And before anyone could stop him, he opened a adjacent safety door and darted inside the room, slamming the door shot behind him.

"Shut it down!" Tempo shouted to anyone who would listen.

"We can't!" one of the scientists replied. "The machine itself is damaged. There's a physical puncture that we can't fix from out there." He pointed through the protective glass, "That man in there is our only chance."

Waqti interfered at this point, "Why aren't you going in there to help him?"

"He's being physically bombarded with anti-chronons. He should be moving backwards through time. But somehow, he's still in there."

They all watched the Doctor in the next room as he grabbed a bent mental panel and fought to push it back into place. Finally he did it. The blue steam stopped shooting out.

And when the steam cleared... the Doctor was suddenly gone!