Gooshie had nearly completed his task when the Doctor burst into the Control Room and gave him a quick grin. "What are you up to?" he asked as he spun on his heels in a circle, looking around with interest.
"I…." Gooshie looked down at the papers in front of him. "Admiral Calavicci requested I double-check our filed records with past accounts of Sam's leaps."
"He wanted to try for a paper record on this leap, then, because of the inhibitor my other self put in," the Doctor translated as he pulled out his sonic screwdriver and used it to gain access to Ziggy's interior.
Gooshie felt it would be wise not to admit that this was true.
"Do you know," the Doctor continued cheerily, "what the chances are that if I don't use the intermediate chronon strands to directly send the reverberation back, but rather piggyback it on the peripheral temporal threads in the interior of the dimensional chronon strands, that I'll be able to prove myself wrong?"
"N-no, Dr. Smith."
"Ziggy?"
The parallel-hybrid computer was silent for a moment. "Your query," came the reply at last, "is rhetorical."
"Well, I wouldn't have minded if you'd tried answering," the Doctor said, his voice still slightly muffled. "Ziggy, do you mind redirecting some of these currents? I'm liable to shock myself if you do that again."
"The current processes cannot be interrupted." The computer sounded smug.
"Oh, come on, you know that's not true," the Doctor scolded. "I mean, you'd think you were monitoring for…for…." He trailed off.
"Affirmative, Doctor."
"You're checking the fluctuations! Why didn't I realize it before?" Gooshie heard frantic scrabbling, and sure enough, the Doctor emerged. "Ziggy, let me see your readouts." The Doctor pulled himself up to the nearest screen and began hitting keys, searching for a particular piece of information.
This, of course, horrified Gooshie, who had been told in no uncertain words by Al not to let the Doctor so much as touch Ziggy, at least not without supervision. "Dr. Smith," Gooshie began hesitantly, "I have to ask that you—"
"Ow!" The Doctor jerked his hand back from the control panel. "You shocked me!" He looked accusingly at Ziggy.
"I'd warned you, Doctor."
The Doctor frowned, sucking his injured fingers. "It wasn't me you'd warned, and I expect you know that. Besides, I was just trying to see what you'd found out."
"You should have asked nicely instead of trying to slip past my defences."
"Fine. Consider this me asking you nicely."
"Say please."
"I ought to reprogram you," the Doctor muttered. "Please." There was a delay, as if the computer was—rightly—questioning his sincerity, but in the end Ziggy obediently displayed the data, leaving the Doctor to mutter something about stubborn, egotistical parallel-hybrid computers.
"Dr. Smith, what are you looking for?" Gooshie asked.
The Doctor held up a hand. "Shsh. Just a tic." He continued to examine Ziggy's data. "Ah, there it is," he crowed. "Oh, yes! Right there!" He looked back at Gooshie, pointing at the screen. "See that? That little deviation in the temporal radiation field? That has coordinates. Which means, if the other readings tell me what I think they're going to tell me…." He grinned and disappeared back into the hole he'd created.
For Gooshie, this was entirely too similar to the circumstances of the last conversation he'd had when he'd been alone in the Control Room with the Doctor. In other words, he had no control over it. "Dr. Smith," he began again, "I must insist that you—"
"Yes! Oh, I'm good." There were a few seconds of whining from what Gooshie remembered was the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, alternated with the sure sounds of tampering that made Gooshie wonder if he shouldn't try to drag the Doctor away from the computer. Before he was forced to seriously consider this option, however, the Doctor reappeared, grinning from ear to ear. "See, if I tried it his way, what he was thinking, it wouldn't work, but I'm not; I'm going about a different route, one he didn't even see." His expression sobered for a moment. "Not even when…." The Doctor shook his head. "I mean, still a bit tricky, but not impossible. Not for me."
Gooshie blinked, and he finally realized what the Doctor was talking about. "The splintering?" he guessed.
"Yup. Sorted the parallels already." Seeing Gooshie's surprised face, the Doctor started, "I just nipped back and fixed up a few things, tipped off—" He broke off when Gooshie's confusion grew. "You don't remember—? Oh. Right. Sorry. Just…bit scatterbrained. No wonder I had so much trouble trying to dig up any proper information on the parallels from here. You lot only remember what happened once they were spliced together. And now that it's been done, you don't even remember that anything was off, just like when Sam changes history and leaps!" The Doctor scrambled to his feet, fitting the panel he'd removed back into place. Ignoring Gooshie's tentative questions, he barrelled on, "Ziggy, I need you to correlate the—"
"Doctor!" Al was standing just inside the Control Room, and he didn't look pleased. Gooshie hadn't heard the door over the Doctor's rambling. "You've done more than your share of damage already, so would you mind not ordering—?"
"Sorry, Al. Special case." Turning back to Ziggy, the Doctor continued, "Correlate the readings I just programmed in and cross-reference them with the anomaly you found in the temporal radiation field. I'm going to need you to use that analysis to determine the frequency at which the ions in the Waiting Room will need to be resonated. I'd do it myself, but I'm going to be a bit busy."
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Al demanded.
"Fixing something Sam couldn't," the Doctor replied. "But I've been good, haven't I? I didn't even try to destroy your records. Which is saying something, because underneath Ziggy, I could have done everything from shorting out the circuits beneath those poorly placed papers of yours to setting off the sprinklers."
Al rounded on Gooshie now. "You let him tamper with Ziggy?"
"Well, Admiral, I—"
"Aw, it's not his fault. Didn't give him much choice. Look at it this way; you can go tell Donna that Sam's going to be perfectly safe, just like I promised." He flashed Al a grin. "Ziggy, I'm going to move the TARDIS to the Waiting Room, so disregard the disturbances you pick up. And tell me when you've found that frequency, will you?"
"Of course, Doctor." To Gooshie, the fact that Ziggy was answering the Doctor in the same tone of voice she usually reserved for Admiral Calavicci was worrying. As was the Doctor's nearly-forgotten threat of reprogramming her, because however short a time it took the Doctor to do whatever he did, Gooshie was fairly sure it would take him a good three days to sort it out—at best.
On the upside, things would soon be back to normal.
After all, the Doctor would have no reason to stick around the Project once he'd sorted out this splintering mess.
Unless…unless they could convince him to fix the retrieval system, seeing as the Doctor was using Ziggy, and therefore their resources at the Project, to help him. And one good turn, he had been taught, deserves another. And he believed it.
The Doctor felt the slight shift that signalled the coming of the TARDIS before he heard it materialize. He opened his eyes, feeling a bit of hope flare up. He didn't have the heart to suppress it. He wanted to hope that his other self was the bearer of good news, not…not the bringer of….
The door on the ship opened, and his other self bounded out, grinning. "I think I can do it," he announced. "Granted, the process might knock me out, and I'll probably come to with a killer headache back in my TARDIS after Sam's leaped out, and I'll have to give up a bit of artron energy and possibly a year or two off my life, not to mention twisting off some chronon strands and potentially damaging a neuron or two, but that's better than the pain and suffering you'd feel if you shattered, so I'd say it's worth the trade."
"What are you trying to do?" the Doctor demanded, feeling the energy build in the room. He licked his lips tentatively, tasting the changes in the air. "Building up to a particular ionic frequency resonance for—?"
"Magnification," the other Doctor stated simply. He went on to explain his plan, and the Doctor's eyebrows raised and then drew together.
"But that's impossible!" the Doctor exclaimed. "You can't—"
"Initial fracture sealing."
"But that wouldn't—"
"With the reverberation realigning the fracture around the anomaly."
That…made sense. A lot of sense, actually. Why hadn't he thought of— Sam. "You used part of Sam to help you figure that out, didn't you? When he leaped into you, you used what he left behind?"
His counterpart grinned. "Oh yes!" he enthused. "Though," he allowed, "when I saw you, I wasn't sure it would work any more. But then I checked Ziggy. Donna had her monitoring the fluctuations, did you know that? And you turned up. At the point that the first crack appeared. So I could pinpoint you. I mean, looking at the readings caught in your inhibitor, it wouldn't have worked. But those just showed me the boundaries. If that's what's blocked, I needed to take the only path that wasn't. Which I am."
The Doctor smiled at him. "Thank you," he said. "I…I know what you're giving up for this."
"Oh, it's not much, considering," his counterpart waved it off. "All I'm doing is saving my own skin. I mean, I like this body. It'd be nice to keep it in once piece as long as possible." His grin faded slightly. "You know as well as I do that if you splinter once and survive, you're more likely to splinter again. Because you're never fully stable after that. So I'd rather not run the risk that I don't carry something out exactly as you did. I'd rather make sure you stick around to show as proof that I will. Because even if I don't agree with all the decisions you've made now, I think I'll understand them, and I think I'll make the same ones."
The Doctor uncurled himself and stretched carefully out on the table, trying to remain as straight as possible. The process would, if successful—and he was hoping it would be successful, since his other self seemed to have accounted for all the variables—very likely drain him, possibly causing him to lose consciousness, too. Trying to hold together all the pieces was bad enough. The equivalent of having them welded together wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park.
"Ready?" the other Doctor asked, grinning at him. "She's set," he added, nodding to the TARDIS, "and the ion density for the magnification seems to have reached its saturation point, so we don't have any reason to delay."
No, they didn't. And the longer they waited, the less likely it would work. Even seconds counted now, scraping along his mind as they did, grating at him. The Doctor took a slow, careful breath, and grinned at his counterpart. "Allons-y!"
His other self mirrored his grin. "Molto bene!" he exclaimed in turn, activating the control he'd pulled out of his pocket a moment before.
The Waiting Room pulsed with energy for a moment, and then the room went black as the sudden surge frazzled Ziggy's circuits.