3) Sundry Diversions

Sarah could tell the Doctor was annoyed without even looking at him. His insistent stamp across the TARDIS floor, around the time rotor console, and the rustling of his scarf while it was being thrown dramatically over a shoulder, all conveyed the sense of annoyance.

I know what he's doing, she realised. Waiting for me to ask why he's annoyed. Well, he can wait! If he won't tell me what's wrong in the first place, I am not going to rush in where angels fear to tread.

The Doctor paced a little longer, until his patience ran out and he stopped to look fiercely at Sarah Jane, who was busily writing up hastily-made notes into a coherent outline.

'Outrageous!' he snapped. 'Absolutely outrageous!'

Sarah stopped scribbling with her biro and looked up.

'I don't think so,' she replied, deliberately misinterpreting the Time Lord's comment. 'With D-Notice Committee approval these memoirs might well see the light of day. A little edited, of course.'

The Doctor frowned deeply, aware that Sarah was teasing him.

'That's not what I meant.'

The young journalist's eyes twinkled.

'I know. Look, Doctor, whatever's sent you into a brown study – well, you won't tell me about it or discuss it, so I take refuge in my work, for what it's worth.'

'It's an international best-seller, or it will be,' grumbled the Doctor, doing a little teasing of his own. Seeing Sarah's eyebrows shoot up he hastily backtracked. 'But you never heard me say that!'

Flattered by the anachronistic news, Sarah jumped down from her perch on the Louis XV chair and stood, hands on hips.

'Okay, now I have to ask – whatever is the matter?'

In answer, the Doctor pointed to the time rotor, which had been rising and falling in characteristically wheezy fashion all this time.

'That, Sarah Jane Smith, that is the matter.'

Sarah favoured the time rotor with a long look.

'You're the expert, Doctor, not me, but it seems to be working perfectly.'

'Pah! Perfectly!' snorted the Doctor. 'If it were working perfectly then we'd have landed a good half hour ago,' and he threw his scarf over his shoulder, fished in one of his capacious pockets and produced a small, wrinkled paper bag.

With a touch of worry, Sarah checked her watch. Time, of course, was relative, most especially so in the TARDIS. She had therefore made certain to time her writing – which had begun over an hour ago according to her watch. Yet the Doctor had told her the short hop to Mars in the twenty third century would take twenty minutes, at most.

Sarah had become accustomed to the TARDIS and it's occasional erratic behaviour, which she put down to several things: the machine's quasi-sentient state, the Doctor's incessant tinkering with it and lastly his reluctance to carry out any repairs until forced to. Or at least for this incarnation of the Doctor – the Third Doctor had taken the TARDIS to bits in order to try and regain his knowledge of how it functioned.

Thinking hard, the Doctor chewed on a jelly-baby. Without looking he knew it was a green one – chemical addictive T53 for the colouring. His taste buds interpreted the various flavourings, the gelatine, the dusting of icing sugar, the resistant exterior and pliant interior. Very conducive to forensic thought, chewing a jelly-baby, he had long maintained.

'Is the TARDIS malfunctioning?' asked Sarah, her voice coming from a long way off, or so it seemed to the meditating Doctor.

'Hmm?' he replied. 'Oh. Jelly-baby?' he said, offering the bag. Seeing Sarah's look of concern he abruptly returned to the here-and-now. 'Malfunctioning? No, certainly not. At the moment it is operating under the control of an external influence.' His expression remained annoyed, instead of shading into worried.

'The Time Lords?' guessed Sarah. She'd seen this once before, when they had been involuntarily diverted to Skaro by the Time Lords.

'Very perspicacious. Yes, the Time Lords – those interfering Gallifreyan nincompoops!' replied the Doctor, his voice increasing in volume as he spoke. 'Nincompoops!' he repeated, looking around the TARDIS in a full circle as if for an audience.

'I heard you the first time,' complained Sarah.

'Ah, but you don't know what "nincompoop" means in Old High Gallifreyan!" replied the Doctor, a look of supreme mischief on his face.

Sarah bit the inside of her lip. No, she didn't know, and she didn't want to know. What she did want to know was – where were they going?

'If the Time Lords are steering us, where are we going?'

Her companion gave a shrug.

'I can't tell. Thank's to their meddling, all the TARDIS readings are defaulting to zero. It could be anywhere at any time.'

The time rotor, with a fine sense of drama, settled finally to rest with a resounding thump. Silence hung in the control room. Both occupants looked at each other.

Carefully, the Doctor checked the Absolute Referential Chronometer on his console. It displayed "000000 AD" in proud red numerals. With a sigh, he turned on the external monitor, before checking the Circumlocution Topography display. This displayed "Planet: Unknown Galaxy: Unknown Universe: Unknown Chronoplasty: Unknown"

'Looks like a quarry, or a sandpit,' commented Sarah, looking directly at the monitor. 'Not very promising.'

The Doctor looked keenly at the monitor image. Level sand and gravel, rising in gentle billows.

'Habitable biosphere. Tolerable atmosphere, but a surprisingly high level of hydrocarbons. Odd,' he said to himself, reading off a gauge.

Sarah looked at the screen again. Hydrocarbons – Doctor-speak for petrol fumes, which was odd when you thought about it, since the landscape outside lacked any traffic.

'So we don't know where we are, or when we are, or what we're supposed to be doing?' All she got in reply was a nod whilst the Doctor paced round the TARDIS console, checking dials and gauges and readouts. 'Great!' she said sarcastically. 'I've been diverted from Orly to Charles de Gaulle, and from Heathrow to Birmingham, and got a reason in both cases. Do the Time Lords expect us to guess what to do?'

Stopping the pacing, her companion looked at her with a dark, almost forbidding look.

'Sarah, what do you know about the society of Time Lords?'

'Oh, now you're asking!' replied Sarah, half-amused. 'Not much. They don't like to interfere with other cultures, I remember you telling me that.'

'Very true. Things have to be catastrophically bad for them to interfere directly. Now, why do you think they tolerate a maverick, an exile, a free-booter like myself, hmm?' He softened the inquisitorial tone of his question with a small smile.

The Doctor knew very well why the insular and superior Time Lords on Gallifrey tolerated his temporally-footloose existence; he made an excellent proxy when they needed to meddle in someone else's affairs. Using him, willingly or not, as an agent of intervention meant that they maintained their proud boast of "non-interference". Giving him the minimum amount of information about a situation meant he had to discover the peril himself. Less liability of temporal contamination, the Time Lords would say; less work for themselves, the Doctor would reply.

'Well – because you tend to get into hot water. And that means they don't have to?' ventured Sarah.

'A palpable hit, and close enough,' declared the Doctor. 'Let us see what we have been let in for.'

'K9!' called Sarah, wanting their mobile guardian, sentry, computer and laser along, just in case. 'K9! '

The mechanical dog merely sat on the floor, inert.

'He's not been active for several minutes,' explained the Doctor. 'I rather suspect the Time Lords have deliberately rendered him inoperable.'

Doffing his hat, the Doctor activated the TARDIS doors and stepped outside, gesturing for Sarah to join him.

'Hot,' she said, noticing the baking heat instantly. Her linen dungarees might be a bit warm for this weather. Luckily her tee-shirt was cool enough. The Doctor remained in his coat, hat and scarf, seemingly unaware of the roasting heat.

'Single yellow dwarf,' he said, pointing to the sun. He unrolled a yo-yo and managed a few desultory casts. 'One gee.'

'Earth?' guessed Sarah. The Doctor shrugged his shoulders.

'We don't know that there aren't three suns just below the horizon.'

' "And all around the lone and level sands stretched bare –",' recited Sarah, casting an appreciative eye over the landscape. The terrain consisted of pea gravel and sand, on an underlying rock substrate. No features could be discerned in the hostile vista, which shimmered and danced with heat, casting back the rays of the sun like a crude stone mirror.

'Ozymandias. Shelley. The Lake District. A greater contrast couldn't exist, could it?' asked the Doctor, looking in all directions at the featureless grey-brown nothing that confronted the two travellers. They took a direction at random and began walking, keeping close together for company. Sarah later felt sure that at least an hour had passed, even if her watch insisted that they only left the TARDIS environs five minutes before.

'You said it –' began Sarah, before a gigantic roaring bellow from overhead swamped her words. She threw herself at full length in the dust away from the TARDIS, noticing that the Doctor remained upright for several seconds longer than was sensible or healthy.

The fantastically overbearing sound diminished rapidly, moving off into the distance. Sarah coughed dust from her mouth, brushed it out of her eyes and dragged her fringe back to it's rightful place.

'I have an idea about where we are,' said the Doctor enthusiastically, looking at the skies. 'Although when might be a little more difficult,' he added, sotto voce. The intruding sound-assault of moments before began to increase in volume, approaching from behind the TARDIS, resolving into -

'An aeroplane!' exclaimed Sarah.

A single turbo-prop canvas-over-wood-and-metal-frame aircraft, realised the Doctor. With a camouflage scheme, which indicated military intent. Bulbous nose, indicating radial engine, monoplane, three-blade propellor. Sarah noticed the large white cross painted on the tail, and a curious blue shield design below the cockpit, painted on the fuselage.

The artificial butterfly soared into a loop high above the travellers lying on the ground, turning back onto itself and roaring – Sarah registered that at so negligible a distance the machine really did roar – back again. The Doctor looked at the cockpit, seeing the astonished face of a pilot looking at him for nearly one-third of a second. The man might well be astonished, seeing a London landmark appear from nowhere in the middle of a desert.

'Sarah, we need to move,' he cautioned, stooping to grasp her, painfully, by the elbow. 'Quickly now!' and he exerted a considerable degree of the strength that normally lay dormant. Sarah found herself jerked upright and waltzed off on one leg away from the now far distant TARDIS. Looking backwards, the Doctor hissed a curse in no human language and threw her prone, following the action himself.

Sarah cradled her head in her arms, finding that she could look backwards through the gap. She saw the aeroplane swoop down on the TARDIS, and the flash of twin machine-guns set above the aircraft's nose. A storm of dust and rock rose up about the time machine, with glowing tracers ricocheting away in all directions. Finally, with grand and awful deliberation, a bomb detached itself from the aircraft's belly. It fell with uncanny precision upon the dark blue police-box, resulting in a huge explosion that only cleared after a whole minute.

By then, the aircraft had gone. So had the TARDIS! While Sarah could see the attacking fighter diminishing slowly into the distance, of the time-travel machine there was no trace.

Next to her, the Doctor sat up and stared, aghast, at the crater where the TARDIS had stood. He clapped a hand to his forehead, nearly dislodging his hat.

'Oh no!' he gasped.

"Oh no"? worried Sarah to herself. "Oh no" was not good. The TARDIS, so the Doctor had said – practically boasted, really – was indestructible, certainly invulnerable to attack with any human weapons. It had once taken a direct hit from a V1 without suffering a scratch on it's paintwork, according to Mike Yates, so why did the Doctor seem so worried? And where had it gone?

'I must have left the HADS active,' muttered the Doctor, as much to himself as Sarah. He became aware of a tugging on his sleeve. 'Hmm? Yes?'

Dusty, hot and now worried, Sarah merely glared at her companion.

' "Hostile Action Displacement System",' explained the Doctor. 'Moves the old girl out of any danger she might be in.' Normally a very good idea, enabling the vehicle to avoid danger when he wasn't around to keep an eye on her.

'Oh, very good. Moves to where?'

A slightly crestfallen Doctor rolled his eyes.

'Ah, yes! Where to. A random nearby location.'

Sarah raised her eyebrows. She looked around her, seeing nothing but undisturbed empty desert as far as the eye could range. No familiar blue police box in sight.

'Ah! Yes, I did say "where to", didn't I? There may also be an element of "when" in addition,' added the Doctor breezily.

'Meaning?' asked Sarah, dangerously quiet and calm. The Doctor cast her a sideways glance before replying.

'Well, meaning that there might be a degree of temporal drift. I haven't reset the HADS for several decades, you know, and it may very well throw the TARDIS off by a few months or so,' he blustered.

'So. We may be stuck here for several months? I don't see that being a problem, Doctor,' replied Sarah.

'You don't?' he answered, looking relieved.

'Because without any food, water or shelter we're not going to last more than a day or two!' finished Sarah, fiercely.

She did have a point, thought the Doctor.

'You're forgetting that the Time Lords have diverted us here, Sarah. They have a reason for that, even if we can't see what it might be at present.' Silence fell for a minute while the Doctor turned to look at the desert in all directions. 'And even if the reason quite escapes me, also.'

Sarah mimicked the Doctor's searching, not seeing anything except dust and sand and rock, all hazed and vague-seeming thanks to the ever-present heat. The desert undulated erratically, like the ocean suddenly frozen in one second of time, stretching limitlessly to the horizon. No trees, no houses, no rivers, no animals. Nothing, in all directions. The air lay still and dead, without any movement.

In fact, were they still on Earth? That aircraft might well have been an alien aeroplane. Sarah didn't recognise the markings.

'Do you know where we are, Doctor?' she ventured. 'I mean – is this still Earth?'

The Doctor took off his hat, and dropped it upon her head, making a cautionary gesture.

'No, no, you keep that on. Prevents sunstroke. Here, sit down. Conserve your energy.' He patted the sandy grit next to himself as he settled into a yoga position. 'Is this Earth? I suspect so, Sarah. From the evidence of the TARDIS sensors and what we've seen so far, I think we may have landed in the midst of one of your species' interminable efforts to exterminate itself.'

'War. Even better. Lost in the middle of nowhere, during a war. Doctor, can things get any worse?'

For a rhetorical question, it begged a response. The Doctor responded, pointing northwards. A faint smudge of dark brown discoloured the horizon.

A sandstorm. Not fatal, but hideously uncomfortable and unpleasant, providing they weren't buried by sand.

'I had to ask,' grumbled the young journalist.

'Help may be at hand,' consoled the Doctor. His sharp eyes were focussed on the middle distance, where a plume of dust appeared, moving steadily across the desert floor. The distance was difficult to judge; perhaps a mile away, headed southwards and away from the oncoming storm. Not towards them.

The Doctor rolled his scarf up tightly, keeping one end grasped firmly in his hand, then threw it into the air. Sarah simply stared at this peculiar behaviour, which the Doctor repeated several times. Seemingly pleased by his bizarre action, he beamed at Sarah and sat down next to her.

Less than a minute later the plume of dust had altered course. A small truck was responsible for creating the trail, becoming visible as it came closer.

The Doctor took the vehicle in critically; a half-tonner by the look of it, with a small cargo body behind the open cab. The front windscreen lay folded forward, allowing the driver a clear view. A red and black square had been painted on the driver's mudguard, along with a small black rodent in a white circle. The driver had goggles on, and a dirty handkerchief tied over his lower face. His passenger, naked from the waist up, slapped a battered tin helmet on his sand-dusted hair and stepped onto the running-board as the vehicle slowed to a stop. A rifle dangled in his left hand.

'How perfectly splendid!' enthused the Doctor. 'Hello, chaps. I wonder, would you mind terribly offering us a lift?' he beamed at the two suspicious men with ingenuous charm.

Sarah stood up, removing the Doctor's hat from her head, causing both men opposite to look surprised.

'Bloody hell! Tam, that's a woman!' exclaimed the rifleman. Tam, the driver, pushed his goggles up to reveal incongruously clean eyes and looked Sarah up and down, confirming that the slender "man" in spotless linen clothing was really a woman.

'Don't be rude, Sarah. Introduce yourself,' prompted the Doctor.

'Sarah Jane Smith. Journalist,' blurted Sarah.

'Davey, Davey, man, d'you think these two are all tickety-boo?' asked the driver, in a broad Newcastle accent. 'All alone in the middle of the desert, like.'

Davey scratched his matted hair and looked backwards over his shoulder. The distant brown line on the horizon had become a pronounced darkened smear.

'We haven't got time to stand around and argue. Get in the back, you two. We're taking you to Mersa Martuba.'

The rifle didn't exactly point at either Sarah or the Doctor, but it did emphasise his speech. The Doctor climbed into the rear of the truck, sitting on several dusty wooden crates that had been stacked there. He helped Sarah in and even offered a helping hand to Davey, who ignored it.

'Step on it, Tam. That storm's not hanging about,' he called, sitting by the tailgate and indicating the Doctor with a nod of the head.

'How'd you get out here, in the middle of nowhere, eh?'

The Doctor gave a sad smile.

'Our transport was destroyed. Bombed.'

Davey looked at Sarah for confirmation.

'That's right,' she said, not bothering to go into details about exactly what the "transport" amounted to. 'An aircraft attacked us. We were lucky to get away alive. And that you came along.'

'Oh, aye,' replied Davey. 'It was your signal we spotted. The haze stopped us seeing you. This plane, did it have a blue shield on the side?'

Sarah nodded.

'Chevrons, with lions rampant,' added the Doctor.

Davey swore.

'Hey, Tam! That bugger the Count is back again. These two were shot up by him,' he shouted to the driver, who merely grunted in reply.

'I wonder, could you tell me the date?' asked the Doctor suddenly, in a serious tone. Davey's response was to look suspiciously at him, then lean closer to Sarah.

'Looks like your mate's got a touch of sunstroke, miss,' he stage-whispered. The Doctor favoured him with a radiant smile.

'How d – oh – er, yes, he does seem a bit, ah, distracted,' said Sarah, initially indignant and then realising that a heat-stricken Doctor would be much easier to explain away. She caught her companion's eye, and noticed a twinkle there; clearly he agreed.

The small truck bowled along across the desert floor, frantically outracing the oncoming storm, both heading for Mersa Martuba.

4) The Sinews of War –

To everything there is a season, said Captain Dobie to himself. Ecclesiates, however, did not provide guidance and advice on mysterious and suspicious strangers.

The Captain heaved a dramatic sigh. He looked at the framed photograph of his wife on the grimy desktop, hoped that all was well at home, unconsciously rubbed his sternum and looked at the – call them "detainees" – who stood in front of him.

Corporal Mickleborough had marched the two suspects into the sandbagged mud shack and stated that they had been found out in the desert, alone, sir, with no water or transport, sir, and might they be spies, sir?

The Captain looked at his paperwork with fond appreciation. Why, only four months ago he'd been happily doing paperwork for 4th Corps around Brighton, tabulating march columns. Now he was out in the hideous trackless wastes of North Africa, baking his brains out, likely to be killed at any moment, and now he had to deal with – with –

'Who are you people, exactly?' he asked, fiddling with his moustache. 'No transport, no paperwork, no documents. You could be spies.'

Not that he really believed that. A spy would try to blend in with their background, not stand out like a circus act.

'Our transport was destroyed, bombed. Nothing left. That's why we were out in the middle of the desert,' answered the rather attractive female detainee. Her brunette curls bounced appealingly in front of the captain, who swallowed abruptly, remembered his wife and thought of England.

The gangling male detainee, still wearing a long coat, gave the captain a broad smile. Captain Dobie wasn't fooled; the curly-haired chap had summoned Corporal Mickleborough from across the desert sands by using a vertical flag. He didn't seem dehydrated, or properly suffering from the symptoms of sunstroke. Odd, perhaps, but not mad.

'Quite why the War Office would give a pair of civilians permission to travel into a war zone escapes me.'

He looked at them dispassionately before abruptly exclaiming.

'Good Lord! You're not here for that blithering idiot Templeman, are you!' he grated, his moustache twitching in righteous indignation.

'Ah, Professor Templeman-Schwartz,' said the Doctor in a cunningly-calculated ambiguous tone of voice that could have been either statement or question.

Sarah watched the Captain's face flush in anger. He called Corporal Mickleborough into the sultry office and pointed to the two detainees.

'Take these two and deliver them to Lieutenant Llewellyn. And be quick about it, the storm is nearly here,' he added, looking outside. Once the distracting pair were out of his sight, he calmed down a little, picked up his fountain pen and began annotating his list of salvaged supplies. Silently he cursed that buffoon Templeman, the War Office, Templeman's political connections that allowed him to return out here and little lost sheep in the middle of nowehere.

Corporal Tam Mickleborough escorted the detainees outside, into a silent, baking heat under a brassy sky, the precursor to the approaching sandstorm, which now towered a hundred feet high and only a few hundred yards away.

'Double time!' he called, and led the two across the sands, past crates, boxes and pallets, to a large khaki tent pitched in the lee of giant stack of crates. Eddies of dust and sand began to whip around their ankles.

'Sir – Captain Dobie's ordered that you look after these two. Mates of the Professor,' called the corporal from outside the tent, then sped off to find his own tent.

The tent flap opened and Lieutenant Llewellyn peered out, his peaked cap failing to sit properly on his tousled hair.

'Good Lord!' he exclaimed. 'Civlians?' He cocked his head as the wind began to pick up. 'In here, smartish, chaps – oh!'

Obviously he suddenly recognised Sarah's gender. Once they were safely inside, he hastily tied the tent flap shut.

Sarah cast a sharp eye over the tent, aware before looking of the smell of sweat, soap and tea. The horizontal tentpole brushed the top of the Doctor's hair, reminding her that she still carried his hat.

'I beg my pardon,' said the officer, wearing wrinkled shorts and a khaki shirt open to the navel. He buttoned up the shirt, then put on a pair of incredibly battered sandals. 'There, decent. Now, introductions are in order. You are?'

'I am Doctor John Smith, and this is my travelling companion, Miss Sarah Jane Smith,' intoned the Time Lord, his eyes taking in everything in the tent within the space of a second.

'Lieutenant Roger Llewellyn, Royal Army Service Corps. Well, Doctor, if you and your –' and the lieutenant hesitated fractionally before saying "daughter" or even "wife" – 'companion would care to take a seat? It's not Groppi's or Shepheards, I'm afraid, but it's the best you've got. We won't be moving from here until the storm blows out.'

Sarah perched herself on the edge of a folding canvas chair, having to move a volume of Wordsworth first. The Doctor remained standing, looking keenly at the officer.

'And you know the Professor?' asked Llewellyn, busying himself with a small primus stove. He fished out a set of chipped enamel mugs from underneath his camp bed.

'Ah, yes, Professor Templeman-Schwartz. Author of "Missing Cultures of the Pre-Pharaonic Era",' declaimed the Doctor, in full Shakespearean mode, performing to the tentpole.

'How do you know that!' exclaimed Llewellyn, his head turning rapidly in surprise. 'He hasn't even completed the manuscript yet!'

The Doctor merely gave a toothy grin, one that an observer could interpret in many ways, usually the one they most wanted to interpret.

'Oho, out from Oxford as well, eh,' murmured the officer, focussing on the tea-making ritual. Satisfied that the blackened petrol-tin base serving as a boiler was positioned correctly, he stood up and wagged a finger at the intruding pair.

'The Professor dropped the "Schwartz" part of his name when the war broke out. Didn't think it very apt to be carrying a German surname, especially not given his religion.'

The Doctor gave a rueful sigh.

'Sorry. We have been a little out of time, not quite in touch with events.'

'Is he Jewish?' asked Sarah, her journalistic sense kicking in at the possibility of a human-interest angle.

Llewellyn coughed in embarassment.

'Well only in the sense that his parents were Jewish. He once described the Bible as a – how does it go? -'

' "A collection of piffle wrapped in waffle"!' interrupted the Doctor, proud of having recollected the quote.

'Er – quite. Frankly I'm amazed he bothered to change his surname, because that implied he noticed what was going on in the outside world. The Professor, Miss Smith, is not very worldly.'

Casting a knowing eye at her time-travelling mentor, Sarah nodded wisely.

A companionable silence settled in the tent, in stark contrast to the whooping desert winds outside. Under their impact the tent walls bulged and swayed, sending rills of dust over the floor. Finally, the lieutenant judged his hot water to be hot enough, as steam rose to make a temporary sauna of the tent. He carefully measured out sugar and condensed milk into three of the worn mugs, then poured the boiling water into a decrepit tin teapot. Letting it steep for several minutes longer, he poured liquor into the mugs and offered them to his guests.

Taking the pint mug gingerly, Sarah sniffed and detected a faint odour of chlorine.

No! Not for her. She would gratefully decline when the Doctor refused his mug, too. She turned to look and saw – treachery! – that her companion was eagerly gulping down the witche's brew. With considerable misgiving, she sipped delicately at the muddy concoction, which in fact tasted more like hot ice cream than tea. Losing her disdain, she latched onto the mug and emptied it in minutes, much to the amusement of the Doctor.

'A valuable source of energy, thanks to the sugar, not to mention various proteins and vitamins, thanks to the condensed milk, and in a form that renders highly-chlorinated water potable, when water is at a premium,' he lectured her.

'It's not long-leaf hand-picked Oolong, Miss Smith,' apologised Llewellyn.

'Never you mind!' boomed the Doctor. 'The tea harvest of India guarantees high morale in the Eighth Army!'

Sarah and Roger looked at each other with mutual embarassment at this over-the-top performance, and hence began a process of mutual bonding, which would enhance interaction, fact-finding and general exploration, all of which the Doctor had calculated for in mere seconds. What he wanted to discover was the reason those interfering buffoons on Gallifrey had sent him here. "Here" seemed to be the middle of a desert wilderness, with nothing particularly threatening in terms of malachronism or temporal toxicity. True, large forces of armed homo sapiens were doing their level best to kill each other; which was nothing new and it couldn't be the reason he and Sarah were diverted here.

'What's the "Army Royal Servicers Core"?' asked Sarah with an air of apparent genuine interest. The genuine interest was actually genuine interest, her not having ever come across the term before.

Llewellyn finished his own mug of tea.

'Ah, therein lies a tail. The RASC delivers supplies to the army in the field.' Seeing the disappointment on his listener's face, he carried on to enlarge on his statement. 'This is North Africa, Miss Smith. There's nothing out here but the desert. Everything we need has to be brought in from overseas. Not just men and their equipment but basic things like food and water.'

The Doctor mentally underlined the officer's phrase; there was nothing out here that the Time Lords would want inspected or investigated. Nothing!

Sarah nodded encouragingly, feeling like a reporter egging-on a source for vital information. The officer continued.

'There's no trees, so you can't burn wood for fuel or chop them down for building anything. There's no livestock or cultivated land or even wild berries growing. No towns or cities where you could buy supplies. Just desert. So anything we do out here depends on supplies. And the RASC delivers the supplies.'

Privately, Sarah considered anyone who wanted to fight here to be irredeemably insane. Merely existing seemed difficult enough.

Casting his eyes about the stifling tent interior, the Doctor noticed a newspaper, it's pulp yellowed by sunshine. He pounced on it avidly, reading the date aloud.

"March the First, nineteen forty one.' The main cover photograph showed acres of bombed-out houses, with a caption about "Nazi bombers strike Portsmouth; heavy casualties feared". 'British Expeditionary Force arrives in Greece,' he read again. 'Italians retreating in Eritrea.' That explained why poor old K9 had been immobilised in the TARDIS – you couldn't have an advanced artefact like him wandering about in the 1940's.

Once again, nothing in the headlines or bylines hinting at why they had been diverted. Gradually the Doctor became aware of Llewellyn chatting to Sarah.

' – yes, I travelled into Libya with Bagnold once, down to the sand sea. Most of my time was with the Professor in Egypt, but I was actually out here in Libya before the war broke out. Before Italy declared war, I should say.'

'Italian-occupied Libya?' asked the Doctor, suddenly interested. 'How did you manage that?'

'Oh, it's a long story,' said Roger dismissively. 'In fact the dig we were at isn't far from here. Makan Al-Jinni.'

A hard glitter steeled the Doctor's stare. Unless his intuition and Arabic were wrong, he might have very well discovered why they'd been diverted here in those last three words.

'We're not going anywhere, Lieutenant. And I would like to hear your story.'

'Go on then,' said Roger, a little amused and impressed that anyone wanted to hear about his archaeological adventures. He sat on his camp bed and produced a crumpled packet of cigarettes from a shirt pocket, lighting up.

The story, as he had told them, was complicated. Archaeologists from the University of Ravenna had wanted access to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Since the Fascist Italian withdrawal from the League of Nations, not to mention involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Britain had not seen fit to allow any Italian presence on Egyptian soil. Dead end. Until an aerial photograph taken by Count Emiliano Ricardo of a site in the borderlands of the Saharan sand sea came to Professor Templeman's attention. The photograph merely showed two small black structures protruding above the desert sands.

Inspired by this, the Professor had contacted the University of Lyons and Ravenna, then pestered the British government, and the Egyptian government and Department of Antiquities. His incessant nagging got a result: the British government would allow the Egyptian government to allow Italian archaeologists onto it's territory, to study in the Nile valley. In return the British and French would be allowed to send reciprocal teams to sites in Italian-occupied Libya. The majority of the British and French expedition members went to Leptis Magna; under the aegis of Professor Templeman, a smaller contingent went to the mysterious site at Makan Al-Jinni. Things proceeded slowly, with a lack of hired labour and mysterious disappearances. Then, out of nowhere, the war in Europe suddenly intruded when Italy declared war on France and Great Britain. Roger and the Professor were arrested and imprisoned.

'How can you be here, now, then!' blurted Sarah

'Likewise Professor Templeman,' added the Doctor.

Roger gave a peculiar half-smile.

'Remember those Italians in Egypt? Well, they got arrested too. After a few months we got exchanged for them in Geneva under the care of the Red Cross, which didn't go down well with a few of them.'

Predictably, Sarah rose to the conversational bait.

'Why not! Don't say they didn't want to go home!'

Roger looked at her coolly.

'Miss Smith, I happen to have known Grigorio Baltasar for many years. He lived in Cairo. He stayed there because he hated Mussolini. He spoke better English than most of my soldiers. He wore a Military Medal given to him by General Plumer for his conduct in fighting the Germans in the Great War. He, for one, did not want to go back to Italy!'

Sarah silently gave up on trying to keep track of this war. All she knew of the campaign in North Africa was what her uncles had told her – El Alamein, Rommel and General Bermard Law Montgomery. For a second her eye caught the Doctor's, expressive of intense interest, and she became aware that he didn't feel remotely dismissive of Lieutenant Llewellyn's story.

'Oh, I say, I am sorry,' apologised the young officer. 'Tempers get a bit stretched in the khamseen, you know. Plus we're short-handed. Very short-handed, if the truth be told.' He poked around in the fusty gloom underneath his camp bed, appearing with a bottle of whisky, which he discarded.

'Not suitable for ladies,' he muttered. 'Where's it gone? Damn it, I did have a bottle of crème de menthe somewhere. Gone the way of the labourers, I dare say – aha!' and he brandished a bottle of green liquid aloft with an air of triumph.

Given his delight at finding the bottle, Sarah suffered herself to be poured a glass of the cloying mint liqueur. Personally she detested the stuff, fit only for maiden aunts and hoi-polloi dinner parties, but if it kept their contemporary chrono-contact sweet …

'What was that about the labourers?' asked the Doctor, looking at the cover of another magazine intently.

'Eh? Oh, sorry, would you like a glass? No? The labourers. What was I saying – oh, yes. It's just that we couldn't hire any locals for work at the dig back in 1940. The Bedu and Tuareg wouldn't go near the site, claimed it was haunted or cursed or both. We did get a couple of workers from Benghazi, a right couple of neer-do-wells, doubtless in trouble with the Italian administration. The University of Ravenna chaps were delighted that the Professor and I brought along half a dozen sturdy Egyptian fellows and their overseer.'

For a moment the only sound was that of the storm outside as the officer sipped on a glass of green liqueur.

'Not for long. Every so often one of the labourers would vanish. We finally ended up with only the overseer. Never a trace of the missing men, no food gone, no water, no artefacts. Nothing.'

Llewellyn's face twisted in a rictus when he pronounced the word "artefacts", a connection not lost on the Doctor.

'Surely you must have found something?' he prompted, reading between the lines.

'No, we never did. No artefacts at all. The Professor was convinced our missing labourers went absent with hidden finds, stolen so they could sell them.'

'But you didn't?' asked Sarah, feeling bold in putting the question.

'I didn't,' agreed Roger, slowly. 'Because we simply didn't find any artefacts anywhere on the whole dig. Barring the buildings, there wasn't any trace of human presence anywhere.' He fixed Sarah with a look that dared her to object. 'D'you know how impossible that is?'

'Yes,' replied the Doctor, now feeling more convinced than ever that he'd come across the reason they had been switched here, intead of being allowed to get to Mars in the early twenty-third century. 'The storm is passing,' he added.

The officer stopped to listen, cocking his head to one side. His expression brightened.

'I think you're right, old chap. That's better. Now, did Corporal Mickleborough say you'd been to see Captain Dobie already?'

'Oh yes, we've already seen the Captain. He wasn't exactly happy to see us,' said Sarah.

'Ah, no, perhaps he wouldn't. Worrying about his family back home. The Blitz, you know,' said the officer, looking for matches. 'Plus the disappearances. Funny. Similar thing happened last year to the labourers.'

Once again the Doctor felt the hair-twitching of a hunch being proven correct.

'Is there any chance of being able to get out to your old dig site, Lieutenant?' he asked, casually. Not casually enough to fool Sarah, who recognised the signs of her mentor being on the prowl for information.

'Out to Makan Al-Jinni? Not a great deal,' replied Llewellyn, untying the tent flaps and carefully lifing them to look outside. A gust of dry air and sand blew into the tent around their knees, flushing out the sweaty, humid interior.

'We need to get out to that site, Sarah,' whispered the Doctor. Sarah's reply came in the form of a furrowed brow as Lieutenant Llewellyn strode outside and began tying the tent flaps open.

' "Makan Al-Jinni",' continued the Doctor almost inaudibly. 'It means "The Place of Demons".'