When the Doctor and Reg entered the warehouse, they heard a loud voice with a northern accent jabbering excitedly in the back room.
"Is it the Master?" whispered Reg.
The Doctor listened for a moment. "No," he said, with noticeable relief.
Reg continued to walk towards the door.
"Hollis, wait," the Doctor whispered loudly.
"But I thought—"
"Shhh!"
"Right, then," the voice said, "you're taken care of, the Master's gone for good, I've saved the world again, and we've still got time to drop in on your mum. But honestly, what she don't know won't hurt her, so I say we go and have ourselves a bag of chips on the canal. What do you say to that? Fantastic or what?"
"Not bad for an old bloke in a young bloke's body," said another voice, then added, "Well, youngish!"
The Doctor smiled to himself. "Something to look forward to," he explained to Reg, who didn't understand.
A door clicked shut in the other room. Then there was a blue flashing light and the sound of a noisy engine that gradually faded to nothing.
"We can go in now," said the Doctor.
Reg cleared his throat. "Doctor? Am I to gather from that conversation that the Master has been suitably taken care of?"
"That's right."
"So we don't have to search for him anymore?"
"I shouldn't think we'd find him now even if we tried."
The Doctor made a beeline for the blue police box at the far end of the room. "Still in one piece, my dear old thing?" he said to it, and patted it affectionately.
Reg was left to toy with a piece of charcoaled plastic on what remained of the recursion loop generator.
"How disappointing," he said, wiping the soot from his fingers. "Now I'll never know if I was right."
