Chapter I

"Quaint," said the Doctor, his hands in the pockets of his trench coat, as he gazed around the small quiet town.

Rose looked across the street at the local gas station. The car they were filling up was an old Ford Tudor Sedan. The men in jumpsuits quickly hurried to polish and wipe down the car as it was being filled with gas. "I think we're in the past."

"Looks to be America," said the Doctor as led Rose to a nearby café and crouched at a newspaper vending box. Using his sonic screwdriver, he opened the latch and took out a paper. He stood and looked it over. "November 12, 1955," he read. He scrunched his face with perturbation and handed the paper to Rose. "You're a bit underdressed."

She took the paper and looked down at what she was wearing: a pair of jean shorts and a lime t-shirt. "What's wrong with it?"

"You can see your knees," returned the Doctor. "Come on, there's a frock shop just down the street," he motioned with his head.

"What about you?"

He gave her a cheeky look. "Sorry, mate, but I think I'll stick with the trench coat if it's all the same to you."

She took his arm in hers and they went forward. "I think you'd look cute in a poodle skirt myself."

"That's enough of that," returned the Doctor.

They entered the frock shop and the Doctor waited while Rose perused her options. He looked sideways at the shop's owner. "Women. Take forever to pick out clothes in any era."

She gave him a shove as she walked past him, a purple poodle skirt with a white shirt and purple necktie in her arms. "Come on then."

The Doctor went the counter. "That will be seven dollars," said the man.

"That's right cheap, Doctor," said Rose.

"Inflation," returned the Doctor. "Here you are," he handed some blank papers to the man. "Should all be in order."

The man examined the papers, then put them in his cash register. "Have a good day then."

"You really ought to stop paying for things with psychic paper," Rose reprimanded as they left the shop.

"Wouldn't be safe to use modern American currency anyway, if I had any on me," replied the Doctor. "They'd think it a hoax, with all those funny colors. Better this way. You want to change in the café and I'll order us some lunch?"

Rose nodded and they returned to the building called "Lou's Café." They entered the diner and the Doctor sat at the counter.

"Excuse me," Rose said to the man at the counter. "Do you have a loo?"

"Yes, that's me," returned the man.

Rose hesitated. "Ah ... what's that?" She glanced at the Doctor. "He's a right one. You think he wants me to wee on him?"

"People were kinkier in these days," humored the Doctor.

She looked back to the man. "You're a loo?"

"Yes. Lou Carruthers. I own this diner," answered the man gruffly.

"Oh. That's not what I meant. I meant a loo. You know, a toilet? Someplace to change?" explained Rose.

"You ain't from around here, are ya'?" the man asked, eyeing her quizzically.

She hesitated.

"Uh, no. We're British," intervened the Doctor. "First time to the states."

Lou nodded with understanding. "That explains it. Ain't used to that type of talk in California. Had a fella' in here last week, you'd think he was from another planet. Is wearing life jackets in style over there?"

Rose glanced at the Doctor and shrugged. "Not that I know of."

Lou shook his head. "Kids. You do plan on paying for what you order, right?"

"Oh, yes," grinned the Doctor. "We're loaded." He winked at Rose.

"Right," the man nodded. "There's a restroom in the back by the checkout counter." He pointed with his thumb.

Rose followed his direction and went to the ladies' room to change.

"We'll have two clubs," said the Doctor. "You have those now, don't you? You're not going to carry out two billies, are you?"

Lou gave him an unamused look. "Two club sandwiches. That'll be $2.05."

The Doctor handed him three blank bills. "Keep the change, mate. For being such a good host!"

Rose returned just as Lou was putting the sandwiches down on the counter.

"What do you think?" she asked, twirling in a circle to model off her new outfit.

"It's you," returned the Doctor.

Smiling with satisfaction, Rose sat on the stool next to him and they began to eat.

"What are we going to do next?" Rose asked between bites.

"We might as well have a look around town," said the Doctor. "If the TARDIS reactivates its system I'll know it. Until then, there's no way for us to leave this place."

"Why would the TARDIS turn itself off like that?"

The Doctor's eyes rolled into the back of his head as he became lost in thought.

"Doctor?" Rose interrupted after a few moments of silence.

He shook his head. "Can't tell. Why this place, I don't know. It doesn't make sense. Everything was fixed anyway. We shouldn't be here."

"Doctor, what are you on about?"

He took the final bite of his sandwich. "Done?" he asked. She was only halfway through hers. He put down the napkin that had been on his plate. "Meet you outside when you're finished."

He stood and left the diner. Rose watched him go out the doors, uncertain.

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The Doctor stood at the edge of the walk, looking across at the great clock tower that stood in the middle of the town square, his back to Rose as she emerged from the café. She approached behind him. "You all right?"

"Just thinking."

"What about?"

He looked at her seriously. "Why the TARDIS brought us here. To this date. It wasn't an accident."

"Why? What's so important about this date?"

The Doctor looked at Rose carefully. He opened his mouth, then looked away. "You feel that?"

"Feel what?"

The Doctor ran across the street. Rose, confused, hurried after him. He went down the walk that was on Main Street, opposite the town's line of businesses, Rose following close behind.

Crouching behind a car, he pointed to a canvas-covered vehicle that sat on the side of the road between two street lampposts that currently had a wire suspended between them, reaching up to the top of the town's clock tower. "There! That vehicle's traversed the time barrier."

"What? You mean like time traveled?" Rose screwed her face at him curiously.

The Doctor nodded silently

"How can you tell?" asked Rose.

"It's like a sixth sense for Time Lords," replied the Doctor as they approached the vehicle.

"What? Like gaydar?"

"Something like that. This car is oozing with temporal residue," the Doctor said, bending over and throwing up a flap of the canvas to look at the car underneath. It was made of silver steel, and the Doctor reached forward and pulled open the passenger's side gull wing door.

"That's a DeLorean isn't it? With the funny doors," said Rose.

"Yep," said the Doctor, settling into the passenger's seat to look around. "If you were going to build a time machine into a car this would be a right good choice. Stainless steel can survive the punishment of time travel better than plastic. But from all the Gallifreyan records, no earth creature has ever been able to time travel without alien assistance. Earth technology's never been up to snuff. To get by on earth resources alone, you'd have to basically create a reactor that can run on an extreme power source available on earth, that can charge it - without causing the entire system to explode - and release it to create a temporal vortex. The Time Lords invented that concept, but we were only able to do it because of ability to commune with time and space. If a human were to do it, he'd need some sort of alien intervention. And besides that, these types of machines were disbanded and destroyed throughout the universe by the Time Lords and all knowledge of them completely erased from existence. So how one could get here on earth is beyond me. And the fact that it's here at this exact date is quite troubling."

"Why's that?" asked Rose.

"Damn!" muttered the Doctor. "You see that?" He motioned to a square device that was fixed between the two seats with his sonic screwdriver.

Rose peered into the car. "Yeah."

"That's a flux dispersal unit. I knew it," the Doctor huffed out.

"A flux dispersal unit? What's that?"

The Doctor slid out of the car. "It charges up a large amount of energy and releases it. Its construction is beyond the human mind. I couldn't even begin to describe it to you in a way you'd understand. Nobody from Earth could have made it. So the question is, what bloody alien came to this planet and built it, and why wasn't this machine deconstructed by the Time Lords with all the rest?"

"You're asking me?"

"You don't understand the peril here, Rose," said the Doctor, going around to the rear of the car. He flipped back the canvas and looked at the back, which was fitted with rear exhaust vents and other miscellaneous machinery. "Look at this! A nuclear reactor! A nuclear reactor, Rose! On a car. Bloody hell. That would be about the only power source on Earth capable of achieving time travel."

"That bad?"

"Worse than bad," said the Doctor with annoyance. "The Time Lords developed these machines when they first started experimenting with time travel. The power sources on Gallifrey were stronger, so they were less dangerous than this, but it was the same basic construction. This was before we learned how to grow the TARDIS. We didn't know what we were dealing with.

"Only a few machines were commissioned. A few trial runs were done. Just a few. But it was enough. Enough to anger the Time Gods."

"Time Gods?"

"Well, call them what you want. The Time Cosmos. The space-time continuum. Whatever it is, it wasn't happy. Because these types of machines didn't work with the temporal space. It worked against it. Violently. It literally rips a hole into time-space and causes massive damage. It throws all of time and space into a regular tizzy."

"Tizzy?"

"The tizziest tizzy. The few machines that were constructed were destroyed. Afterwards we were able to develop organic time travel technology."

"The TARDIS."

"Right. The TARDISes work with the time continuum. They peacefully slide in and out of time and space. Very communal. Very hippie-esque. After we learned how to grow the TARDISes, we were able to repair the damage we had done with the original time machines - the TARDIFs."

"TARDIFs?"

"Time And Relative Dimensions in Flux," explained the Doctor. "Once a hole is breached in the time barrier it begins to rip at the fabric of time. But with the TARDISes we were able to close every vortex that we had opened at the instance it was opened. Except one.

"One vortex still remains in time. One rip in the space-time continuum. It only exists for a split second, but it exists. It couldn't be reversed. Because when we tore open that first hole in the time continuum, it opened a nexus point. It's the breach between time and space, the access point to the temporal cosmos, and it can't be undone. Some call it the temporal junction point of the entire space-time continuum. November 12, 1955, 10:04 PM. That's the destination date of the first time machine that ever tore open a hole in the temporal fabric of the universe. That's where the vortex exists."

Rose scrunched her face, then looked up to the clock tower overhead. "That's less than one hour from now."

"Troubling, isn't it?" asked the Doctor. "In one hour that nexus point will exist for a split second. The good thing is that the Time Lords were able to bury it. It can't be accessed by anyone. Unless of course you have a time machine with a flux dispersal unit that can rip open a hole in the fabric of time. And if that hole were ripped open at exactly the same moment that the original vortex was opened, for one brief second access to the time cosmos will be available."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know exactly. But I imagine it can't be good. And it's all a bit too much to be a coincidence."

"So what do we do?"

The Doctor flipped back the canvas and went back to the passenger's side of the DeLorean vehicle. "We do what should have been done in the first place. We decommission this junker to insure the safety of the time continuum. We'll worry about whoever built it afterwards."

The Doctor leaned in and aimed his sonic screwdriver at the device between the two seats. "Let's see if we can't short it out."

"Excuse me," a gruff voice said.

The Doctor slowly sat up and looked out the car's doorway. A man stood before him. He was tall, mid-thirties, with soft blonde hair and a bruise obvious on the right side of his forehead. "Can I help you with something?" the man said, reaching down to take the Doctor's arm.

"You might at that," said the Doctor, standing up to face this new arrival. "Are you the owner of this vehicle?"

"Yes," the man said. "And I've got a very important experiment I'm conducting. So why don't you make trouble somewhere else?"

The man turned to close the gull wing door of the DeLorean.

"So this is your time machine?" asked the Doctor.

The man turned to look at him with surprise. "Time machine? How do you know about that? Who are you?"

"The Doctor," said the Doctor, extending his hand. "And you are?"

The man didn't move to shake the Doctor's hand, eyeing him suspiciously. "Emmett Brown. Doctor Emmett Brown."

"Doctor?" asked Rose with a cheeky smile.

The Doctor and Rose looked at each other knowingly.

"That figures," huffed the Doctor.