WE'RE TAKING A BREAK FROM THE STORY OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL. WE'LL COME BACK TO HER, I PROMISE!


THE DEVICE

The Doctor negotiated that they should be able to shoot the film themselves, that there would be no crew and no director telling them to grunt more or putting nasty (but encouraging) things on the autocue demanding that Martha say them. They were not to be interrupted, or the whole deal was off.

"One thing, though," Donovan said, his finger in the air. "It ain't no good without the money shot, you got it?"

"Money shot, what's that?" asked the Doctor.

"Ugh," Martha groaned. "I'll explain it to you. Just come on." She grabbed his arm and dragged him into a room that she could tell was empty. It had pukey yellowish walls, and the room had been dressed to look like an office. A fern, a big desk, a couple of filing cabinets, a telephone... and of course, that all-important porn staple, the sofa. The camera was on wheels, and the Doctor carried two empty reels of film.

"Okay, I have an idea," Martha said irritatedly. "How about you be the secretary and I'll be the boss. That'll get their attention. Or better yet, I'm the bloody Prime Minister and you're the..."

"Martha, we're not really going to do this," he said. "Do you really think I'd volunteer you for porn without consulting you?"

She exhaled loudly. "Oh, thank God. I thought you'd lost your mind."

"I mean, we can if you want."

"Er, I'd really prefer to do that at the home office. And not on film, thanks."

"It's a date then," he said, laughing.

"How magical."

They sat in the room, trying very hard not to touch anything, first feeding Sally's script into the autocue, and then filming the Doctor's half of the conversation. From beginning to end, it took them thirty minutes. Then, they gave a blank reel to Donovan, letting him assume their sexy office romp was contained thereupon, then took the reel they needed and made to depart.

On the way out, they spied a girl sitting in a chair near the door. She was an attractive brunette, around twenty years old, seemed quite tall, and was most definitely terrified. Something in her eyes caused the Doctor's hearts to break, and he and Martha stopped.

"Hi there," he said, gently. "What are you doing here?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"And how do you feel about that?"

"Bloody fantastic, thanks."

"I can see that. And why are you here if you're so pissed off about it?"

"I, like everyone else who comes into this place, am out of options. I don't know how to do anything else... and it's not quite prostitution, is it?"

All three of them were quiet for a bit, and then the Doctor said, "We're on our way out to lunch. Would you like to join us?"

"What?"

"Lunch. Instead of this. What do you say?"

"Why?"

"I just think you need a friend. Or two, as the case may be. I'm the Doctor, this is Martha. Don't worry, we're safe. We don't do porn."

The girl opened her mouth to protest that they might be pimps or drug dealers or second-hand car salesmen, but then Donovan came out of one of the rooms again. "Are you two still here?" he asked. As the Doctor turned to answer, he spotted the girl on the chair. "Ah, there you are, my girl. Come here."

She stood stiffly and walked slowly toward Donavan. He circled around her, muttering things like, "Oh yeah, you'll do just fine... juuuuust fiiiine." Then he slapped her on the bum and told her she'd be in room two, banging the Hoffman twins, and that she should take off her knickers and wait in the room. "Oh, and by the way, I hope you know how to deep throat for the camera."

When Donavan left, she turned to the Doctor and Martha and said, "Lunch? Really?"

"Absolutely," the Doctor replied, taking her arm hastily.

The three of them trotted out the door together. "Thanks you two. I'm Sally, by the way," she said. "Sally Pfitzinger."

"Really?" Martha said cheerfully. "We have a friend named Sally. Sally Sparrow, she's called."

"Wait, did you say Pfitzinger?" the Doctor asked.

"Yes, I did, why?"

"Are you related to Morton Pfitzinger, the publishing magnate?"

She sighed. "He's my father. He's cut me off. That's why I was... you know." She indicated the door of the seedy building they had just left.

"Why has he cut you off?" Martha wanted to know.

"Because I didn't want to go into publishing like him," she answered. "I wanted to be an actress, but you can see where that got me."

"Why don't you want to be in publishing? It sounds interesting to me," Martha offered.

"I may have to now," Sally said. "But Daddy's getting into movie and television production these days as well. They're predicting that in the next decade, movies and telly will be published just like books, only in a portable audio format, and he wants to get in while there's still so much to learn."

"Well, if you like show business..." Martha said.

"I suppose," Sally sighed. "By the way, er... I don't have any money."

"Don't worry, lunch is on us," the Doctor assured her, putting his hand on the shoulder of a new friend.


"19 November, 2007

"When I went to deliver Kathy's message to her brother, Larry's coworker was watching a film. He was yelling at it, 'Go to the police, you stupid woman! Why does no one just go to the police?' I realised he was absolutely right. I was out of my depth, so I went to the police.

"That's where I ment DI Billy Shipton, an attractive black man, perhaps thirty years old with a Nigerian accent. He had been investigating Wester Drumlins disappearances and he showed me the great collection of cars that had been found parked outside the house, with their owners seeming to have disappeared off the face of the planet. He also showed me the blue police box that had been found there, as well. He had no answers for me, and this meeting only posed more questions. In all of this, he chatted me up for a date, and I gave him my mobile number. A minute or two after I left, I came back because I remembered something I wanted to give him. I went back to the parking garage to find Billy, but I couldn't see him, and the police box was gone. Instead, my mobile phone rang. It was Billy, clearly, but he sounded different. He told me to come find him at a hospice.

"I went, and there was a man who very closely resembled Billy, except he was, I guessed, closer to seventy years old. As with the Kathy incident, I resisted the possibility that he was, in fact, the Billy Shipton I had just met, but he swore to it. He used the same words as Kathy; that he'd taken one breath in 2007, and the next in 1969. He was sick and alone now, and I resigned myself to the strangeness of it. He told me about his wife, coincidentally also called Sally. He confessed that he'd often thought about looking for me before tonight, but that a man who called himself The Doctor warned him that it would tear a hole in the fabric of space and time. This was the first time I heard the Doctor's name.

"He gave me a message from the Doctor, quite simply: Look at the list. I took the list of DVD's which carry the Easter Egg from my pocket, the one Larry had given me. He confessed that he'd ceased to be a police officer in 1969, but instead went into publishing, then video publishing, and then DVD's. I surmised correctly that he had planted the Easter Egg I had seen at Larry's home and shop. He did not tell me what the seventeen DVD's had in common, but later, I worked out that they were the exact seventeen which I own. For the first time, and not for the last, I wondered how the Doctor could know that I had that list. Billy told me that someday I would understand, but that the Doctor had said he, Billy, never would.

"And the eeriest part of Billy Shipton's story ends here. The Doctor told him all those years ago that the night when he and I met for the second time would be evening of Billy's death. He said he had until the rain stopped. And I agreed to stay with him. I held his hand as he went to sleep for the last time ever, and then they took him away. I sat numbly at the window for another hour, and contemplated my life.

"I cannot write anymore. I'm finding it too painful. I shall continue tomorrow."

Martha sat at their little flat later on, reading Sally's narrative regarding Billy Shipton. She was aghast, still, by this whole thing, by the timey-wimeyness of it.

But the good news was that the film reel was done. Now all they had to do was find the man who could plant it.

"Oh my God," she exclaimed suddenly. "Sally Pfitzinger and Billy Shipton! Her father!"

"Hm," he shrugged, looking up from his noisy task. "I guess we'll have to introduce them."

That night, the Doctor had begun raiding the kitchen, making an ungodly racket while Martha was reading.

"What are you doing?" she asked, finally

"I'm trying to find an appropriate mechanical anchor for my Timey-Wimey Detector. Hopefully something with a lot of moving parts, but something that we don't need that badly."

She shrugged and put Sally's narrative aside. She came over to the counter and leaned over. "Need any help?" she asked. His rooting around in the cabinet on the floor reminded her of all the times he'd had his head in the grate of the TARDIS floor.

He stopped for a moment and looked at her. "Check and see if there are any wind-up toys around. Look in that giant box in the storage cupboard."

She went, and soon, she looked just like he did, squatting on the floor, her head inside a door searching for stuff. "Aagh! No way!" he heard her cry out from across the flat.

"What?" he called back. She came and stood over the counter once more. "Did you find a toy?"

"No, but please tell me this isn't what I think it is," she growled, holding up what she'd found.

He looked. "It's not what you think it is. It's a projector, not a camera... it's a projector! Where did you find that?"

"In the storage cupboard, like you said," she told him. "Is it significant?"

"Yes, it's even better than a wind-up toy. Give it to me."

She handed it to him, and right there on the counter, he began performing surgery on the bulky machine. He extracted the moving metal gears that feed the film through the device, including the wires that stick out of it to power it. He borrowed one of the arms and the film reel that happened to be on it. He took the broken wires and twisted them together, sonicked them, and then extracted a large roll of electrical tape seemingly from nowhere. He tied off the wires and set aside all the pieces he needed. He put the rest of the projector back together, then handed it to Martha to put away.

"I can't put it back," she protested. "It's never going to work now!"

"No one has to know that. Do you want to wind up paying for it when we move out?"

"I thought we'd be time-jumping in the TARDIS when we left here," she said, crossing her arms obstinately.

"Oh, just put it back, will you?"

She sighed, but did as he asked. "What else can I do for you, Doctor?" she asked, just a hint of sarcasm creeping into her voice.

"Have we got an ironing board?" he asked, putting on his glasses, preparing to fuse another bundle of wires over the previous bundle. He smirked at her naughtily.

She pushed him playfully sideways. "Cheeky!" she exclaimed.

"Check out that red thing in the cupboard there. Do we need it?"

She extracted a red box that looked very much like a lunchbox. "Erm," she said, looking it over. "I wouldn't think so. It boils an egg."

He looked up over his glasses' rims. "What, people in this decade don't know how to use a pan of boiling water?"

"Well, according to the label, it works in half the time with less mess," she said cheerfully. "I think we can do without it."

"Good, can I have it?"

She handed it to him, and once again, he began to dissect it. He examined all of the parts, and in the end, he left only a green circular thing. He sonicked it, holding the two devices together longer than Martha usually saw him do. Suddenly, they heard a pop come from the refrigerator.

Martha opened the door. Some of the eggs inside had exploded. She laughed. "I think it works."

"Whoa," he said. "This green thing is the actual heating device. It is sensitive to temperature so you don't overcook your egg. I meant to tune it up so it would be sensitive to time energy, since the sonic still carries traces of the TARDIS' energy signature. I guess I ramped up its egg-cooking properties as well!"

For the next several hours, the Doctor worked on the device. It turned out, the projector parts acted as a kind of physical propulsion as friction power so that the device would work without being plugged in. The green thing inside was the actual timey-wimey-sensitive component. Next, he put the kitchen timer on top so that the device would make noise when it detected something, and a stray blue Christmas bulb, which performed the same function (except with light). Finally, he added the telephone receiver, the copper wires of which he fused to the green detector. It gave out an audio pulse that would indicate the closeness of the timey-wimey material.

"How far away will this work?"

"Up to one hundred miles," he mumbled. "Drained the sonic of all its trace time energy from the TARDIS. Let's hope we don't need to do anything like this again."


As always, the Doctor's timing had been impeccable, even if no one else's was. If he had waited one more night to build the Timey-Wimey Detector, they may well have missed Billy Shipton's entrance into 1969 and made their lives so much more difficult for having to chase after him. But, though being interrupted in one's lovemaking by a kitchen timer and a blue light on an egg boiling time-energy detector was a bit less alarming than by psychopathic stone statues, it still wasn't the ideal situation.

Luckily the Doctor's knowledge of all things timey-wimey saved them again.

"Don't stop," he panted, looking up at her as she writhed. "He'll still have temporal goo on him when we're finished."

"Don't say goo while we're doing this," she panted back. "It's a bit of a turn-off."

In lieu of a concession, he said, "Mmm," He closed his eyes, allowing the moment to take him.

His arms were up over his head, crooked at the elbow. Martha leaned forward and put her hands on his forearms. He opened his eyes once more, and she stared into them, their noses less than an inch apart. With a few expert movements, she brought them both to the brink, making his voice crackle with strain. One last thrust and they both went over the top, he in a bottle-rocket explosion, she with a lithe liquid slide.

She collapsed forward, her mouth just a couple of centimetres from his ear. "I love you," she whispered breathlessly. "Shouldn't we go?"

"I love you too," he responded, chest heaving up and down. "And yes."

They threw on some clothes and struck out into the night, stopping only to phone Sally Pfitzinger. The Doctor was listening for traces of timey-wimey through the receiver, and Martha following.