Pearl

by genesssa

The TARDIS team follow a weak distress signal from planet to planet, encountering both danger and aid among the clouds of Pfilt, a population in danger of extinction on the previously presumed mythical Pearl and the little girl who called out for help and started them on this journey, in 1959 Philadelphia, Earth. Prequel to "Korda."

PEARL

"The Doctor is the cleverest person I have ever known."

Nyssa agreed, "I've never met anyone like him. Only my father was as intelligent, and I admit it was a completely different kind of intelligence."

"He has a good heart," Tegan continued.

"Two, actually."

"You know what I mean. Anyway, he is obviously extremely compassionate, caring…."

"He cares about us. He protects us."

"Are you kidding? He saves worlds! Planets! How many times has he saved the Earth alone?" Tegan sighed. Nyssa closed the roundel whose contents she had been studying and looked at her friend. Tegan looked down, gently kicking the TARDIS wall.

"But…?"

"Well, has he ever given you a hug when you were low?"

"Why would he?" Nyssa was genuinely baffled.

"No reason. He's not even human. It's probably normal for a Time Lord. I don't know what I'm wingeing about. Don't mind me."

I silently backed away, then turned and moved swiftly from corridor to corridor, without a care where I was going. I hadn't meant to eavesdrop but once I'd realized I was the subject of my two companions' conversation I couldn't help myself. Now I was sorry I hadn't interrupted them or walked away sooner. Their brief conversation disturbed me at a time I couldn't afford to be disturbed. The TARDIS had been picking up weird murmuring signals for six days and we had been chasing those signals, only to have them move. They moved from planet to planet, from galaxy to galaxy, sometimes weaker, sometimes stronger, always just as we were about to close in. I needed to focus. Someone, somewhere, needed help, or perhaps it was a trap, but to what purpose?

No, I couldn't afford to be distracted. Surely my friends had meant no harm. Somehow, though, I couldn't set it aside.

That must be why I missed the most important signal of all.

The very first time we got the signal, not even a clear distress call, just a kind of odd blip, we did materialize and step outside to check things out. We suited up: no Goldilocks, this. We looked around but there was nothing, just rock and a thin veneer of what looked like gold but almost certainly wasn't. My sonic screwdriver would have come in handy. Oh, well. Unless a flea existed under the radar, so to speak, there was no life on that planet, for which we hadn't even got a name. When we returned to the TARDIS, the signal was even weaker and indicated a planet that did have a name: Pfilt. There was definitely life there.

"I feel like Gulliver!" Tegan declared, eliciting a confused look from Nyssa. A tree trunk the size of the Louvre was almost flush against the TARDIS door. We squeezed ourselves out and laboriously along it, not at all sure it would ever open out into the air, and indeed when it did open out it was into a whale-sized clearing surrounded by more bark.

"We'll never find our way back if we proceed," I decided.

Nyssa said, thoughtfully, "We don't even know if these tree things have tree-tops. Maybe there are dwellings or other populated structures or spaces up there."

"Right!" Tegan got it. "Maybe we are going in the wrong direction!"

"Along the wrong plane," I agreed, and we all looked up. The canopy was too big and too distant to make out.

"These tree things are organic," continued Nyssa. "They're breathing." Tegan and I agreed that we had felt that as we inched along. "If they have language, the TARDIS will translate, right?" I assured her that this was so. "I mean if they use language. They could be quiet for any number of reasons: they're sleeping, they're afraid of us, they have nothing to say, they are planning to attack us…."

"Attack!" Tegan shuddered.

"That isn't likely," I reassured her. "Anyway, Nyssa is right. No one is trying to communicate with us at the moment. That doesn't mean they can't, or that they won't, if and when they're ready. Meanwhile, we are clueless."

Nyssa, always intuitive, placed both hands on the exposed surface of the "tree thing," as she put it, and felt it with her palms and fingers. It breathed harder. I could see it inhale and exhale. Nyssa slowly stroked it, and it opened, what, a mouth? A pocket? "A lift!" I decided and stepped in. My friends gasped. "It's safe, see? No teeth! I've not been swallowed or chewed! And it smells like…" I struggled briefly to figure out exactly what the scent was. "Licorice!"

Tegan took a sniff and a tentative step into the gap. Standing beside me, she looked out at Nyssa and shrugged. Nyssa shrugged back and stepped in too. With a slight lurch, whatever it was we were standing on rose… and rose, and rose. Holding hands, as no protecting screen or door had closed in front of us, we were lifted for a full three minutes and then, with an even slighter lurch, we came to a halt. Nyssa looked a bit greenish; as it turned out, she disliked the smell of licorice.

No one came to greet us. I peered out and saw big, fluffy orange clouds. Letting go of my friends' hands, I rummaged through my pockets for something to sacrifice to the cause; I was not about to endanger my cricket ball, newly acquired to replace one I'd recently used as a weapon. Finally I dug up a jelly baby, long overlooked and certainly stale by now, and tossed it out onto a cloud. It bobbed there, but only slightly. If weight were not an issue, we could walk as if on a soft mattress. But was weight an issue? I stuck out a foot. Nyssa and Tegan both gasped. I pushed down with my toe, then my heel. Each time, I sank in about half an inch. I closed my eyes and stepped all the way out and, as the gasps turned to screams, I sank two inches and stopped. I opened my eyes, turned, smiled at my frightened companions… and immediately wobbled, lost my balance and found myself lying flat on my back, four inches into that fluffy orange cloud, which hadn't enough resistance for me to roll over. I was as helpless as a turtle on its back. Worse, Nyssa and Tegan were laughing hysterically.

"Don't mind me." They each took one of my feet and unceremoniously dragged me back into the lift, where I was able to sit up. They were still chuckling softly and my pride, I admit, was smarting. Then suddenly I saw it from their point of view and laughed my ass off too. That set them off all over again. We sat in the hollow center of a humongous tree, a mile up among gelatinous orange clouds, not even yet considering how we would get back down, much less how best to proceed with the tracking of dim, variable distress signals, and let tears of laughter roll down our cheeks until we were limp and silly.

"Now what," Tegan finally said.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Let me think."

Nyssa said what I should have been thinking: "When we were all in here, that's when it started up. We're all in here now and it's not starting down. So how do we get down?"

"We could all go out and come back in," I offered.

"Oh right," Tegan sputtered, "Look, I used to like bouncy houses. Turbulence never bothered me. This is different. If we all go out and fall down, who is going to drag us back? What do we do then, spend the rest of our lives lying on a cloud?"

"What if," I started, slowly, "I went back out, but crawling? I could try to turn around. If I can't, you can pull me back in. If I can, you lot can come crawling out too, and then we crawl back in. What do you say?"

"I'll go first," said Nyssa. I opened my mouth to protest but was preempted. "I am the lightest, the easiest to pull back. Tegan should follow me. You're the strongest, Doctor. You can most easily pull us back. You come out only if we can move around on our own." I couldn't argue with that.

Nyssa knelt down and put her hands onto the nearest bit of cloud, exclaiming wordlessly as they sank in. Once she had determined that the sinking was minimal, she crawled out, then slowly turned around and faced us. She moved to the side so Tegan could crawl out. Tegan turned too, and moved to make room for me. I hesitated. As humorous as my plight may have looked, it had felt pretty awful. I didn't fancy an instant replay.

"All right," I breathed. "Here goes." I crawled out onto the cloud, leaving the lift empty. I found that I could move, if I didn't hurry. It felt odd and downright disconcerting to have nothing to grip, like crawling on foam-covered ice, but not cold. "Now the big question is, should we explore or go back into the lift and see if it takes us down, after which we still have no idea why we came here at all."

I could hear Tegan turn slowly to face the endless, featureless expanse of orange clouds. "Explore what, Doctor? We might have to crawl for miles, and then we would not be able to orient ourselves and come back to the lift, much less to the TARDIS. We could be lost forever." She sounded genuinely frightened, and when I looked over at her I saw that her face reflected that fear, which was not, after all, unreasonable. I thought then that maybe we should indeed turn back. Perhaps the TARDIS was even now receiving a nice, strong signal from the edge of the Whirlpool Galaxy, or barely a blip from a stranded life capsule near the edge of the Sombrero. Then I pulled my knees under me and sat up.

I hadn't meant to sit up; I suppose I had been distracted by my efforts to justify turning my back on a recognizable cry for help. However it happened, I did sit up, and fall seven feet to the next stratum. As dazed as I was, I noticed that these clouds were purple, offered much more resistance than their upstairs neighbors, and, well, weren't all that cloud-like. I would've been more conscious, too, of the figures bending over me, and the sensation of being carried a long distance, but I was rather deeply immersed in the process of passing out.

Although I will never know for sure, I suspect that at least as much of my incapacitation was due to the deliberate application of a soporific gas as to the impact of my fall. I awoke hungover but otherwise unharmed, loosely bound to the glass figure of an animal I did not recognize, definitely not humanoid. It vaguely resembled a deer, if a deer had quills instead of a smooth skin. The rope around my wrist was long enough to afford me a safe distance from those quills, and it was also tied with a simple box knot; a toddler could have untied it, so I didn't. It wasn't really in my way and I didn't feel like moving at any rate. I was also afraid of what might happen if I sat up again, and suddenly I realized that the rope was there to protect me from another tumble, not to prevent my escape.

The sculpture turned to me and spoke. "You must learn to crawl," it said, in a jingly sort of voice, like a finger on a glass harmonica. Was this an aftereffect of whatever had knocked me out? It felt real enough, but then, it would, wouldn't it?

"Yes, I must," I agreed. "By the way, my name is the Doctor. How do you do?"

The glass figure, suppler than I could have imagined, shook the rope from its hoof so I untied my wrist. "You must crawl to the palace." Upon perceiving that I was taking this to be excellent advice rather than a command, he added, "You must humble yourself."

"Which direction is the palace," I asked, trying to sound humble.

"Figure it out." Glass, supple and snarky to boot! Who'd have thought it. I looked around and all the purple looked the same. At second glance I saw the merest of changes to the skyline, if it could be called that, an impossible distance away. I began to crawl, and then I stopped on a dime; I was now just awake enough to remember I had friends I had left behind, friends who would be worried about me and about whom I was now worried. What could I do? I crawled until I couldn't feel my knees and then I kept crawling anyway, and the whole time, all I could think about was how worried about me Nyssa and Tegan would be, and what kind of trouble they might have encountered without me to protect them.

Eventually I found myself unable to crawl anymore and let myself lie flat on the purple cloud. It did support me, but I felt deflated and defeated. I had been crawling with my eyes closed anyway; I let my head tilt to one side and pressed my cheek into what little fluff there was, and let myself drift.

When I awoke, unrefreshed and troubled, I opened my eyes and saw a cream-colored structure before me that could only have been the palace I sought. It was smaller than I had expected, but lovely, made of some soft material I could not identify – again, my sonic screwdriver would have helped – and architecturally at once alien and inevitable, as all art must be. It was proportioned for someone of my species, not, for example, a species adapted to museum-sized trees. I could not be the first such to visit here. I almost sat up again, caught myself, crawled toward the palace, and, having almost reached it, dragged my elbow into something, maybe a post, and pulled away from it, not quite sitting up but apparently close enough: down I hurtled, this time farther than before, to a cloudy greenish surface that was decidedly less kindly than its purple predecessor.

Why could I not have been knocked out, as I was when I really didn't need to be? I heard bones break before I felt anything, tiny little sounds, really, but one hears one's own bones (and voice, for that matter) through one's bones, not just ears. There was no anesthetic gas to help me out; if I was less than alert, it's because everything that came after was filtered through a thick layer of pain. People came running out of a palace similar to the one to which I'd been crawling, and when I say "people," I mean obviously organic, more or less humanoid, and in this case as concerned for my well-being as if I were kith and kin. Two of them picked me up and arranged me on a stretcher. That hurt. They carried me as gently as possible through a short portico that involved a step up (that hurt too) and then a step down (again that hurt) and into the palace, where I was ported through so many corridors I imagined for a moment I was back in the TARDIS, although these corridors were straight, had no roundels and were as creamy in hue as the palace exterior. I ended up still on the stretcher but atop a long table, in a small, well-lit room. When the soft green overhead lamp flickered on I realized how low that ceiling was; the normal lights were extinguished, the green lamp began to descend almost immediately, and I was overwhelmed with an atypical claustrophobia and may have cried out.

"Doctor!" came Tegan's voice, not far away, and that calmed me down a bit.

"Tegan! Nyssa!" I called out, trying to recognize my own voice, some stranger's voice, I thought, not mine, so weak and frightened. How could I subject my friends to that voice? They needed to know I could protect them. Well, maybe it was I who needed to know that.

"We're here, Doctor! Lie still! You're going to be fine!" I doubted that I was going to be fine, but I obediently lay still.

The light intensified and I blinked. It intensified further and I closed my eyes against it. Then it enveloped my body and squeezed. How can light squeeze? This light did. It squeezed my broken bones back together and it squeezed the pain right out of me. True, I had a little trouble breathing for a moment, but that passed. The green light let go of me and was retracted back to its initial position at the still-low ceiling. It dimmed, and the ordinary light returned. I could see those changes through my closed eyelids, which I then slowly opened to find Nyssa and Tegan right by my side. They were actually holding my hands but I could barely feel that. Instead, I felt all my muscles relax as I was overtaken by a lovely sleep.

"How did you get down here? Did you fall too?"

"No," said Nyssa, "but apparently it's quite common. How you do depends on where you land. You got lucky."

"Well," I admitted, "I am now." But for a mild all-over stiffness I was, as Nyssa had assured me, fine, and so were my friends, who had decided to crawl on, found an upper level of the palace, asked for help and instead been referred down to the servants' quarters, where the buzz was that yet another level down another stranger – me – was being treated. The palace had stairs! We still appeared to be trapped in a strange, cloudy world, but we were enjoying tea, of all things, with friendly locals, some of whom had saved my life. I felt confident that these people could and would help us find the TARDIS but first I wanted to know who had sent the distress call, and why.

"I am afraid we cannot say who or why," confessed one of the two beings who had carried me to safety and since introduced himself as Dinsov. "I feel sure it was one of us, but we have a policy of strict secrecy among us." He blinked all three of his golden eyes sympathetically. "Most of us were indentured up on purple and escaped down here; a few came from other levels and some escaped farther down. We don't know what became of them. It is possible that someone devised a means of communicating beyond our little world…"

"Big world, I'd say," Tegan interjected.

"… our big world," smiled our erstwhile host. "The fewer of us who know the details, the fewer recaptured brethren can betray us."

"So you do need help."

"Well," said Dinsov, after some thought, "although we all hail from elsewhere, and some would gladly return home, we have made a life for ourselves here on green, where we have established aid for the injured and the unwell, as well as a comfortable living environment. Thus most of us need no aid at this time."

"How do we get down?" I thought Tegan was jumping the gun a bit, but she added "And how far down would the other settlement be?"

"I heard," said Dinsov, "that there might be one on fuschia."

"How far down is that?"

"Well, no one from there has ever come up, to my knowledge. I just heard there might be one."

"Do the stairs go all the way down?" asked Nyssa.

"I don't think anyone knows that either, but the distance would be prohibitive and there could be hostiles on some levels. We are all stumbling around in the dark. I suppose that is why so many of us choose to remain here, where it is peaceful and, as I say, comfortable… and where you would, of course, also be welcome." Dinsov looked slightly confused by our somewhat alarmed expressions. "Have I said something wrong?"

"Oh," I said, lightly, "no, it's just that we have people to see, things to do…." Then I added, more seriously, "We really need to track down that distress call. If we can help, we should."

"I understand," said Dinsov.

I took his hand. "I do want to thank you for saving my life, you know." Dinsov blushed blue (his lightly furred skin was naturally deep pink; the blush must have been the result of an alkaline inrush). "There was someone else, too. Can you please convey my thanks?"

"You may thank her yourself." I looked around and eventually caught a glimmer of light reflecting off of a translucent figure with four arms, one of which floated upwards into a gesture resembling a salute. I could not make out her features.

"Thank you," I replied, and the glimmer moved as if her head had nodded in my direction.

"We don't know her name," said Dinsov. "We call her Fandy, just to call her something. She is used to that. You see, she doesn't speak. She is telepathic, but only with others of her kind and, in a limited way, with the Spikers on purple. They coexist up there… sort of."

"How 'sort of' is 'sort of'? Could someone up there have needed help?"

Dinsov shook his head. "The two species have a complicated relationship but I can't imagine either of them calling for outside help."

"Then," I said, "we go down."

Stairs may be hard on the knees but at least we were no longer crawling. We were accompanied by Dinsov's sister, Adinsov, who resembled him quite closely, except for her three silver eyes. She descended ahead of us and sometimes we worked hard to keep up (or down) with her. After three hours nonstop the three of us sat down and Adinsov, who had kept going, turned back and waited patiently for us to breathe normally. Had we known that the next level down was only another half hour's trot we might have soldiered on but Adinsov was neither chatty nor, despite her natural pace, impatient.

Alone, we would never have recognized the exit, as, according to Tegan and Nyssa, this was not as easy to recognize as green's. Adinsov recognized it in what looked to us like a plain, unbroken cream-colored wall that buckled under a gentle touch. Apparently it buckled more, or differently from, or emitting a different tone than the rest of the wall. Adinsov flat-handed the exit, much as Nyssa had before stroking the tree thing, and it opened as the tree thing had. We walked into what appeared to be another lift, but once we were all in, it went nowhere. Adinsov placed her palm on the opposite wall and it opened into a wide hallway, which, once we had traversed it, emptied out onto a huge expanse of steel-gray cloud. When Adinsov stepped confidently out onto it and we cautiously followed suit, there was no give to it. Had I fallen from green through to gray, I would not be here to tell this tale.

We didn't explore the level. Once outside the palace, Adinsov turned to face it, so we did too. It looked the same as it had on green: soft, creamy, beautiful. Upon exiting we had bypassed the main entrance so we reentered through its portico and found ourselves surrounded by excited residents; our arrival had been anticipated and we were honored guests. We collapsed on divans, unmindful of their exotic construction, meant to accommodate bodies unlike our own, and were brought equally exotic refreshments, and plied with questions we were too exhausted to answer, had we even known the answers. My last thought before my chin hit my chest was that I was spending more time on this planet asleep than awake. At the moment, I didn't mind.

"Ow, my head!" Tegan was bleary-eyed and grumpy. "Where's the ute that ran me over? I'll murder it."

Nyssa was still curled up on a divan but her eyes were half-open; Tegan's complaint had awakened her. I had slept sitting up and was thinking, this time there is no doubt about it; we've been drugged. I looked around and saw that our slumber'd had an appreciative audience and our awakening was a positive show-stopper. Our audience was making loud chirping noises and I swear they were smiling, although on some facial configurations it was hard to tell. How many intelligent life forms did this fuzzy, frustrating planet support, anyway? Then I remembered: visitors invariably got shunted to the servants' quarters and indentured. This planet must be on a well-traveled path, I thought, to entangle so many tourists, lost souls and explorers. That thought complicated any further thoughts. Should we be concentrating on escaping, exploring for a year or two (an increasingly likely minimum time frame for discovering why we were here to begin with) or (Rassilon forbid) nation-building?

Adinsov was not in the room. Were we guests, captives, neither but on our own? Ah, there she was, coming in from outside, smoothing her fur as she ushered in two squat, scaly reptilian-looking people with opposable thumbs and pleasant faces. One was green and the other was a shade of cream that blended quite nicely with the walls of the palace; Adinsov introduced them as, respectively, Mar and Tar.

Mar got right down to business. "Two sleeps ago we received a signal we did not understand, from a source we could not identify. We recorded it. Would you like to experience it?"

Nyssa was now awake and sitting up. I raised an eyebrow to her and to Tegan, who was still holding her head. They both nodded assent. "Yes," I said. "Yes, please."

Tegan yelped. Nyssa's eyes were suddenly huge. I barely had time to absorb that as I was suddenly receiving the same signal we had chased to Philt, only louder and more distinct. It was a wordless series of tones that rose and fell, conveying urgency, The frantic nature of the signal was alarming enough, but the fact that it filled my entire being, its vibrations causing me to vibrate uncontrollably along with it, was almost intolerable. The signal gripped me – and presumably my friends as well – for four torturous minutes, and then instead of releasing us, it repeated. I tried to bear it. I wanted to get it right, to understand. When it began its third iteration I screamed, "Stop! Stop!" It stopped. I fell, gasping, to the cream-hued floor. I could hear Tegan sobbing. Nyssa moaned softly. I looked over at them, then up at my still-smiling hosts, at inscrutable Adinsov, and finally at Mar, who had blanched to a light chartreuse. Tar had either left or blended completely into the tableau.

I didn't mean to whisper but a whisper was the best my voice could manage at the moment. "Could you tell if it originated on Philt?"

"We are sure it did not," said Mar, sympathetically.

"Would it be possible to let me experience it again without letting my friends do so? May I do it alone?" I couldn't believe I was saying this. I did not want to receive the signal again, alone or otherwise, but I had to. Tegan and Nyssa did not need to suffer again. I could not do that to them.

Tar must have been in the room, because Mar appeared to consult with a wall before replying. "Yes, but… the shared experience is milder." My jaw dropped.

"Doctor, don't!" Tegan was horrified.

"Doctor, you can't!" cried Nyssa. "We can't lose you! Let me do it!"

At this Tegan jumped up and grabbed her friend's shoulders. "You can't! Oh no, Nyssa, you can't!" She hugged Nyssa tightly and sobbed. "Doctor, no one should do it. Just leave it. Please!"

"I can't." It pained me to see the two of them so distraught; their distress tore at my throat. "Someone is trying so hard to get help…."

"Does it have to be you?"

"Yes, Tegan. It has to be me."

"Why?"

I couldn't answer that. I turned back to Mar. "I must do this alone, but I need a few moments to prepare." I was not asking for time to steel myself against the experience itself. I needed to decide where to put my focus each time – yes, I would let the signal repeat if necessary, and I had no doubt it would be necessary – in order to identify its source. Even the tiniest clue might be important. A clue as to how to recognize a clue would have helped. I closed my eyes and tried to relive the content and the background. Where should I pay the most attention? Could I collect any of this and store it in my mind without being shattered? When I felt that an eternity had passed without progress, I opened my eyes and told Mar to repeat the playback. Then I closed my eyes, braced myself… and forced myself to stop bracing myself, stop resisting.

I had been warned; I had expected this time to be worse. It was so much worse that I couldn't concentrate on it at all. All I could do was let it roar through me, pummel me, tear me up and scatter me like confetti. Focus? Forget focus! I think I was seizing. I know I was almost immediately on the floor. My tongue and cheek were sore, later, so I am pretty sure I bit them. Four minutes having passed, the signal restarted, and recognizing this, I somehow forced myself to wander through it, as if it were a tunnel, or an air duct, or a speeding train, or a carnival. It wasn't language; it was matter. It was dance, a terrible dance. It was a digestive process. It was a magnet and it was pulling me apart. It was a billboard in Times Square: HELP! It was coming from… from….

I never asked for it to stop. Tegan made Mar stop. I don't know what she said or did to him but he stopped it. For a long while I lay shuddering. Nyssa tried to wrap me in a blanket but contact with me hurt her. She lay it carefully over me but I shook it off. No one could touch me. I had to remember. I knew where the signal was from but it was already slipping away. I couldn't forget, I mustn't forget. Say it out loud now, maybe someone will hear me. It was from… from….

I wept tears. It was gone. It was lost. I would never remember. It had all been for nothing.

"Pearl," said Nyssa.

That's right! I remembered again. I must have said it aloud. The signal was sent from the planet Pearl, in a nameless, unnumbered galaxy. I'd heard of Pearl and half-dismissed it as legend. Legend or no, someone there was begging for help loudly enough for equipment on Philt to register and for the TARDIS to perceive as well. The TARDIS! We had to get back to her!

Have you ever been pulled in a sleigh across a steel gray cloud by a pair of civilized, tech-savvy reptiles? It beats crawling.

When we got back to the tree, if it was the same tree, Nyssa was the one who stroked it, opening the lift. We thanked Mar and Tar, who expressed concern for my state of mind; I reassured them and the three of us stepped into the lift. It didn't move. Tegan and Nyssa were darting twinkly glances between them and, when they thought I wasn't looking, at me. I wondered what was going on, until Tegan said, "Go on, Nyssa!" and Nyssa knelt and stroked the floor of the lift. Down we shuttled, a little faster than we liked but glad to be on our way off of Philt. We reached the level we thought and hoped was where we had started. Then we were spoilt for choices: which narrow passage would lead us back to the TARDIS and which would lead us astray?

"I wish I had a better sense of direction," I sighed.

"Mine is pretty good, actually," said Tegan, choosing a lane and squeezing into it. Nyssa and I followed. This time we were hyperaware of the tree's breathing. It quickened as we progressed. The tree was practically gasping. By the time we could see the TARDIS – what a beautiful sight! - waiting where we had left her, the tree was wheezing like an asthmatic.

"What do we do?" whispered Nyssa.

"This tree is as alive and sentient as anyone we met up in the clouds," I said, without knowing at all how to help. "I wish it could tell us what it needs."

Tegan said, "Maybe it can." Nyssa and I looked at her. She addressed the tree. "What do you need? Tell us! Let us help you!"

Nyssa placed her palms on the tree. Its breathing calmed minimally. She stroked it gently. It seemed to sigh. Then I was struck by a thought I couldn't believe we hadn't had before: there were two sides to this tight passage. Was the other side part of the same tree, or a separate tree? It didn't seem to be breathing abnormally. "Hello," I said, placing my hand on it. Nothing happened… except that the other tree's breathing quickened. Then the tree I was touching seemed to hold its breath. Insight hit me like a rush of adrenaline. "Tegan! Nyssa! Help me here!" I pulled the TARDIS key from my coat pocket and let us all into our home, our beautiful blue living time/space caravan. It would be so easy just to take off now, dematerialize, set coordinates for Pearl or for anywhere away from Pfilt…. so easy, and impossible. "What have we got for digging?"

"Digging? Like a shovel?" Tegan brightened. "I saw one just the other… oh, my god, how long have we been here, anyway? Um, just the other week. Now where did I see that?"

"The library," Nyssa remembered. Tegan ran off to fetch it.

"Why is there a shovel in the library? Never mind. Just hurry!"

I was already outside waiting when Tegan handed me the shovel through the TARDIS door. I turned and started digging in the narrow space between the trees. The ground was dry but soft, not sandy, nor like clay. It was easy to move. I didn't have to dig far before I found parallel roots running along the narrow gap. From them emanated the distinct odor of licorice. I stopped digging down and started digging along between the roots. Tegan and Nyssa came out and gawped at me but I had no time to explain. I followed the gap a few yards, digging awkwardly, as there was barely room for me, much less me and a shovel, and then I found it: the parallel roots turned toward one another and would have met but for a small white stone that kept them apart.

"Aha!" I pronounced. I bent down and removed the stone, brushed the dirt off of it and chucked it into my pocket. The roots that had been separated by that stone stirred. I backed up and stared. The roots moved together and were entwined. From each tree emanated a sigh of joy.

"They're in love!" exclaimed Tegan.

Walking backwards toward the TARDIS, I carefully covered the roots back up. They were safe now. "Goodbye," I said, softly, and followed Nyssa and Tegan into the TARDIS.

No sooner had we closed the TARDIS door than the weak signal we now knew was from Pearl pulsed at us. I leaned the shovel against the hat rack and set our coordinates for a planet that, had you asked me a few days ago, I would have told you probably didn't exist.

We were on Pearl in a flash but we didn't want to go outside right away. The view on the scanner didn't exactly entice us – for one thing, it was dark, and for another, it appeared to be a huge stretch of nothing, the middle of nowhere – but that wasn't it. It's just that we'd been away so long and our sojourn on Philt had been at best so full of uncertainty and at worst, well…. We were emotionally and mentally exhausted. The distress call was coming in full strength. There was no time for even a short nap. We hesitated a full 15 minutes before setting foot on Pearl, unsuited.

Once we were outside, we realized that the landscape was not as empty as it had looked on the scanner. It was nighttime, which is the perpetual state of mythical Pearl, and in the clear green night sky three moons hovered brightly. Scattered sparingly among the sparse spurts of vegetation in the dust were small blockhouses. "Underground," I said. "They live underground."

"Who?" Nyssa and Tegan inquired as one.

"Whoever needs our help." I strode ahead to the nearest blockhouse, a few yards away. "Wait here."

The door creaked as it opened. There was light inside.

"Ah," I said, waving my friends into the blockhouse. "They don't want to live in the dark. I thought it probably wasn't the atmosphere, although its being fine for us doesn't make it fine for anyone else." There was barely room for the three of us unless one stood on the trap door with the silver metal handle. We stood clear as best we could as I knelt and tugged at the handle. It was stuck. No one had been in or out this way for a long time. "Maybe one of the other entrances has more use." None of us was eager for another trek, especially more than breathing distance from the TARDIS, so I tugged again, and then tried wiggling the handle. It came off in my hand. I sighed. "Let's try the next one over. It's not all that far." We reluctantly left the lighted structure and trudged a few yards in the darkness to the next blockhouse.

This one was effectively sealed off by virtue of having no door handle into the little building. Off we repaired, several more yards away from the TARDIS.

"Third time lucky!" exclaimed Tegan, triumphantly, when we entered the next blockhouse and she easily lifted the trap door. She stepped aside, though, for me to go down first. This I did, and was gratified to find the stairway on which I found myself as well lit as its protective structure. Tegan followed me and Nyssa followed us; I am sure were were all thinking about a quite different stairway, and unconsciously bracing ourselves for a long haul, but this one consisted of no more than a flight and a half and emptied out into what appeared to be a shabby banquet hall or grand lunchroom, in full use by a couple dozen humans… or humanoids… or androids. I could not tell which and it didn't matter. They looked up from their meals and smiled or gazed curiously at us.

"Hello," I smiled. "I'm the Doctor. This is Tegan and this is Nyssa. Did someone here call for help?"

A woman stood up and bowed, then came quickly to my side, took my elbow and led me to one of the four long tables at which most of the rest were seated; some were carrying food to those tables or empty dishes from them. I motioned for Nyssa and Tegan to follow and we all sat where the woman bade us sit: on a long damask-upholstered bench at one of the gleaming wooden tables. Two young men brought us plates heaped with food that smelled wonderful despite not resembling anything we, or at least I, had ever seen before. My friends looked hesitant to partake of these delicacies, but after I took a bite they tucked in.

As we ate, a particularly dark-skinned man with particularly light blond hair, close-cropped above a particularly high brow, sat down between me and Nyssa and for about 20 seconds just stared intently at me. Then he calmly said, "We have been waiting for you for six years."

That took me aback. "How? We only got your signal, what, three days ago? Six?" I raised an eyebrow at Nyssa, who shrugged, and Tegan, who shook her head. "We came as soon as we could!" Then I realized that I didn't know the date on this planet, or for that matter during our visit to Philt. I also didn't know how "Soon" was irrelevant. "May I ask your name?"

"Egg Collector."

"Egg Collector? Sorry about our timing. Now that we are here, do you still need our help? Are we too late? What can we do for you?"

"We received and relayed a distress call six years ago. We heard it at regular intervals and then it stopped." Egg Collector stood up, so we did too. "We did preserve it. Would you like to hear it?"

"No!" shrieked my friends.

"Of course," I said, simultaneously. Egg Collector looked confused. "That's a yes."

Following Egg Collector, I tried to calm Nyssa and Tegan by explaining that the signal was extremely unlikely to be streamed through us. "We'll just see the blips and hear the sounds on some kind of equipment. It will be fine. Don't worry." To Egg Collector I said, "Are all the underground units the same?"

"In basic design, yes," he said, leading us through rooms that led one to the other, like train cars, rather than needing a connecting hallway. Several rooms were obviously bedrooms, others were nurseries or playrooms, and we saw two hydroponic gardens. After passing through an office, we ended up in another office, staring at a curious tangle of electronic equipment that apparently functioned as a transceiver, for Egg Collector was already revving it up. "This," he said, We bent over a screen embedded in a dusty counter to watch the visuals as the message played out loud. It was, of course, nothing like what we had experienced on Philt. It was just beeps and boops. Egg Collector translated for us: "Help."

"Can you tell where it's from?" I asked.

"Earth," said Egg Collector, as if he knew the place. "Would you like the coordinates?" I nodded. "Forty north, seventy-five point one west."

"That's Philadelphia!" I exclaimed.

Tegan demanded, "How in the world do you know that?"

"I may have a lousy sense of direction," I explained, "but I have been to Philadelphia." I sighed. "But when is this signal? From when?"

Egg Collector shook his head. "Six years ago for us. For Earth, who knows?"

"The TARDIS will know," asserted Nyssa. "We should go back."

Egg Collector began to lead us back the way we had come but a well aged woman burst into the office from a door we hadn't seen and grabbed him by both hands, tears flooding her eyes. "Egglu," she sobbed, as I made a mental note to call him that at least once before we parted. "Franlu is dead!"

Egglu turned to us. "Please come!" He followed the woman out of the hitherto unseen door and we in turn followed them through rooms we hadn't seen either, and then to our surprise into a corridor, the first such we had encountered. The corridor was straight and bare and must have bypassed several blockhouses, as it was quite long. We proceeded rapidly, in silence but for the occasional sob from the woman to whom we had not been introduced. Her skin was moderately mauve, her hair iron gray, her height, as was Egglu's, unremarkable. Their distress was clear. I hoped I could help but was fairly sure I could not bring anyone back from the dead.

At last we arrived in a hydroponic garden, not unlike the others we had seen except that this one was planted with the "three sisters": tall ears of corn, wandering vines of squash and bean stalks climbing up the straight corn. I expected Franlu to be somewhere in the room but we went through without stopping, into another garden, then out a side door into a nursery. There we saw cribs, bassinets, comfortable-looking chairs, toys dominating the floor and amid them an infant, quite clearly dead. Nyssa dropped down and reached out to the child. I stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "Don't touch," I said, softly. She sat back on her haunches and stared mournfully at the small corpse. Tegan stood behind me with her fingers folded together, just below her lips, her eyes huge with tears. "May I?" Egglu nodded. I knelt next to Nyssa and gently examined Franlu. There wasn't so much as a bruise on her. I looked up at the woman. "Is she… pardon me, we have not been introduced. I am the Doctor."

"Bean Tender."

"Bean Tender, is this your child?" She shook her head. "I mean your grandchild?" She shook her head again. "Yours, Egg Collector?" This was no time to be indulging my amusement at his nickname. Egglu shook his head as well. He was clearly shocked and upset at the infant's death, as who wouldn't be? "I assume you have physicians here." He nodded. "So many questions, in no particular order! To whom does this child belong?"

"All of us," said Bean Tender. "Her parents moved to another hub."

"Without their child?" Something in the pit of my stomach told me not to explore the half-memory that was stirring there. I pushed it away. "All right, she was a communal child. Understood. Have you any idea how she died?" I touched the child's face. It was clean, unmarked, at peace. "Wait… is this the first child to die? I mean recently, like this?"

Bean Tender and Egglu both slowly shook their heads.

"Right. Well, that doesn't mean you have a serial child-killer on your hands. There could be another explanation."

Suddenly Nyssa stood up. "Where are all the other babies?" I looked around. There were six cribs, all empty.

"Which one is Franlu's?" asked Tegan.

"Frangipani." Upon our quizzical looks Bean Tender added, "All babies get flower names which they keep until they earn their job names. There is a ceremony." She showed Tegan Franlu's crib. Then she addressed Nyssa. "The babies are on their scheduled walk. That is how Franlu was discovered, when Future Tender came to walk them."

"Future Tender," I repeated, "very good. Yes, very appropriate. Um, how many babies have you lost, then? Mysteriously, I mean."

"It is not mysterious," said Bean Tender, emphatically. "It is Honey Gatherer."

"If you know who the killer is, why not apprehend him? Why is he allowed to keep killing babies?"

Egg Collector explained: "Honey Gatherer has been dead for eight months. We have lost four children in the last three weeks."

The physician showed up then, and was introduced as Body Healer. She examined Franlu, then scooped her up and carried her out of the room without comment.

"Please explain," I said sharply. "Tell me you don't expect me to believe a ghost killed that little girl."

"How else?" asked Bean Tender.

"And you, Egg Collector; do you believe the children were killed by a ghost?"

"Not any ghost," said Egglu. "Honey Gatherer was also an apiarist. We have no apiary now. He had no apprentice, no successor. We desperately need bees. We have a few in the gardens but they are dying out. The gardens are doing poorly."

"How is this killing infants?"

"I don't know. But we have no other answers."

I had no answer to this so I turned to see how my friends were taking it. Tegan was silent. Nyssa, however, had a request to make.

"Will there be a postmortem?"

"Of course," said Egglu.

"I would like to observe, please." Nyssa's request was granted and Bean Tender led her off to join Body Healer, who would presumably deliver the perfect little corpse to Bodies Detective. Nyssa has a tender heart but despite her youth she is an intuitive and talented scientist. If there was anything to observe in the postmortem, she would observe it.

"Tegan," I said suddenly, "would you mind terribly if I joined Nyssa at the postmortem? Will you be okay for an hour or two without us?"

Egglu offered, "I would be happy to show Teganlu to a comfortable place where she could rest and wait for her companions." Tegan and I both smiled at the "lu," obviously a term of endearment, and I chuckled inwardly at being called her companion, although technically, I suppose I am, am I not?

Egglu led Tegan off and I stood for a moment looking at all the empty cribs. Then I stepped through the door through which I'd seen Nyssa and Bean Tender leave, and found myself in a bedroom. I chose a door at random and realized that I was utterly lost. It was odd not to meet other people no matter how many rooms I randomly entered and exited, and I passed through quite a few. Where was everyone, anyway? And where was I?

All right, I wasn't going to get to watch the autopsy. I wasn't going to find anyone to lead me out of the maze of interconnected rooms. Someone who knew the lay of the land would come looking for me by and by. Meanwhile, I wasn't about to stand about doing nothing, so I decided to enjoy a little random exploration. Instead of rushing through rooms looking for anything or anyone, I began to indulge my natural curiosity and pay attention to everything I saw.

A kitchen had only two uncracked cups out of 24. Only four cups were exact matches. Every cup was blue.

Two rooms, not connected to one another, had no clear purpose. One was messy and the other was empty. The empty room was dusty and I sneezed twice.

A small exercise room had two stationary bikes – well, not quite bikes but close enough. There was a mat on the floor and a selection of hand weights and one barbell. On a whim I lay on the mat and hefted the barbell a few times. I sat up and saw, in the corner, a machine whose purpose I could not determine, nor its operation. There was a seat and more handles than anyone here had hands, as well as pedals that outnumbered feet. I sat in the seat and chose a pair of pedals on which to rest my shoes. They vibrated slightly. Then I tried out the various grips. None of them actually moved anything, even though the machine looked as if it might have moving parts. Perhaps they had all been locked in place. I tried squeezing one of the handles. Suddenly the machine emitted a low hum and started slowly repositioning all of its parts. I quickly moved my right hand off its grip but my left was already squeezed between two moving plates and my legs were being twisted rather unnaturally.

I had one arm free but had no idea what to do with it. I couldn't stop any of the machine's parts from completing whatever circuits they'd begun, regardless of whether they crushed me along the way. At least the seat remained stationary; the back rest, however, was tilting back at an alarming angle. "Hello," I called out. "Is anyone about? I could use some assistance!" I flailed my right arm to no effect and then suddenly a handle veered within reach and I grabbed it, gripped it tightly, squeezing it and then pulling my hand back before it could become trapped as securely as my left. The machine ground to a halt. It didn't release me but at least it was no longer twisting me. I was still lying back at an impossible angle, blood rushing to my head, making it throb.

I couldn't see my left hand or the configuration that had it trapped, nor could I reach it with my right, but I was able to wiggle my fingers enough to determine in which direction to try to work it free. Knowing that and effecting its freedom were two different things. I slowly worked my hand in what I hoped was the right direction. After a long, frustrating struggle I was able to scrape it free, and it fell limply back onto my chest. I massaged it with my right hand, then just lay with my head hanging backwards and breathed as deeply as I could. It was time to try to sit up so I could see how badly the rest of me was twisted.

"One," I said aloud. "Two. Three!" I pushed upwards with my chest and managed something that didn't much resemble a crunch. I knew I was fit but being twisted from the hips down was defeating my efforts. I reached up to see what I could grasp without accidentally restarting the machine, but from my position I couldn't reach far. I reached out to the sides instead and this was more productive; I could hold onto what I found and pull myself partway up. By sliding my hands, one at a time, up the machine, I managed to sit, more or less. Had I let go I'd have fallen back again and likely hit my head, into the bargain. I hung on, but that meant I hadn't got the use of my hands to try to free my legs. At least I could see the situation a bit better from this position. My left leg was pinned under my right, which was in turn pinned by the machine, and my whole lower body was twisted to the left.

Maybe I could slide my left buttock back a little (my right buttock was being lifted by the twisting of my hip). I didn't get far but it helped. Now I had some wiggle-room on the right. I tried to draw my right leg out from under the machine. No go. All right, how about trying to draw my left leg out from under my right? The best I could do was to bend it at the knee but if I pulled it to the left it hit part of the machine. I used my arms to lift myself very slightly and pull myself to the right. Now my left leg had another inch. I twisted my whole body to the left and my left leg came almost completely free. That loosened the machine's grip on my right leg but I was afraid I would move so suddenly that my hands would be pulled off of the machine and I would fall backwards again. I had to risk it, though. I lifted myself up again and at the same time pulled my butt backwards. My hip straightened. I sat up. I slid painfully out of the machine, onto the floor, where I lay panting and wondering how much time had passed, and whether anyone was looking for me yet. When it became clear that no one was, or at least no one was on the verge of finding me, I put my hands behind my head and did a few sit-ups, just because I could. Then I stood up, stretched and moved on.

I found myself in a flower garden and what the bees therein lacked in numbers they made up for in size. They were the size of mice and their buzzing was accordingly augmented. The garden was noisy with them. They seemed not to mind me, and I have never minded bees, so, still a little breathless, I greeted them and opened another door.

As long as I wandered from room to room I knew I was in the same settlement, but that last door had taken me into another hallway. If I followed that hallway I would never be found. I turned back, said "Pardon me" to a bee, tried a new door and stood face to face with the ghost of Honey Gatherer.

I knew he was Honey Gatherer because he wore a bee veil, what looked suspiciously like a hazmat suit and big gardening gloves. He also had a big bee in one glove and two more on his left shoulder. He didn't look especially ghostly, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. "Hello," I said, as cheerfully as I could. "Honey Gatherer, I presume? Nice to meet you. I'm the Doctor."

In response he threw the bee in his glove at my face. I flinched and closed my eyes. The bee flew straight through me. I opened my eyes again and saw Honey Gatherer looming an inch before me, twice the size he had been a moment ago. It was disconcerting but illuminating, although the bee had already proven what I suspected.

"You're a hologram!" I was rather delighted. "… or the local equivalent," I added, for accuracy's sake. "Who is projecting you, and why?"

Honey Gatherer fizzled and vanished. I was left in the room, the nature of which I had not yet noticed, wondering how a hologram could harm anyone, child or otherwise. I looked around. It was a completely empty room, not the first I'd seen but I could have sworn there had been something other than Honey Gatherer in the room – a chair, a picture on the wall, a rug – but maybe whatever I had thought I'd seen had also been holographic. Before I had time to process this fully I heard distant voices and turned toward them.

"Doctor? Doctor!"

"I'm here!" I shouted.

"Doctor!"

"Here! Here!"

Tegan and Egglu found me at last, and I was glad to be found. I'd had enough of exploring for the moment. Then I looked from Tegan to Egglu and back again and saw them release each other's hands. None of my business of course but I couldn't help smiling. "Nyssa isn't back yet," said Tegan. "We wanted to find you first but we're on our way to the mortuary. You'll pardon me if I wait outside. I promise not to wander off," she added, pointedly.

"Before we wander off," I said, putting a hand out toward the two of them, "what room is this?"

Egglu said, "It used to be storage. Now it is not in use. Why do you ask?"

"I saw Honey Gatherer here."

"What?" Tegan was astonished. Egglu frowned.

"He's not a ghost, you know. He's a hologram. Who is doing that? Do you know? Who is controlling the hologram? And how are they getting the image from a dead man? And why?" Egglu turned and left the room. Tegan and I followed. He walked slowly, not running away from us. He led us to the mortuary, motioned me in but stayed in the connecting room (a sort of spa) with Tegan. Nyssa and Bodies Detective were just washing up. The child was nowhere to be seen. "How did it go?" Nyssa turned and saw me.

"Oh Doctor, it was so interesting and so sad! Poor little Frangipani! She was in perfect condition except for a bleed in the brain."

"A fall?" I hesitated. "A thorough shake?"

"Who would do that?" Nyssa was horrified.

"I don't know," I said, thoughtfully, "but definitely not a ghost or a hologram." Upon her quizzical look I briefly filled her and Bodies Detective in, leaving out my adventure with the exercise machine.

I finally thought to introduce myself to the medical examiner, who took my hand in her mauve one – was she related to Bean Tender? - and kissed it before letting it go. "She did that to me, too," smiled Nyssa; I guess I had blushed.

"Tegan is waiting for us," I remembered. We went back out the way I had entered and interrupted Tegan and Egglu in a kiss. Nyssa's hand sprang to her mouth to stifle a laugh and I turned away, amused but also a little embarrassed. Without looking, I said, "I have a question or two, Egglu, if that's all right." When I looked back Egglu and Tegan were two feet apart. Nyssa was still trying not to laugh.

"Yes?" said Egglu.

"Apart from everyone's natural sadness, what are the consequences of the death of a child on Pearl?"

"We wouldn't know about other settlements but in this one, Climdos, which has an alliance with ours, Climfa and one other ally, Climgrad, we are struggling to keep our populations thriving and every child lost is a setback to our survival."

"I see," I said. "Would any unallied settlements try to sabotage yours? Is there a lot of competition going on?"

Egglu shook his head. "The alliances are not for competition or conflict. They are for convenience. No one settlement has everything it needs. It usually takes three or four to do things properly. For example, Climdos, which was not established as a medical facility, just happens to have the right people and equipment to function as one, for all three of us. That being said, most of the eggs are kept in cold storage at Climgrad. We had a few in storage at Climfa but they were destroyed." He sighed. "By rights I should move to Climgrad but most of my friends and family are at Climfa."

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. I had just assumed that a community that had an egg collector raised some kind of livestock that produced eggs, for food. Come to think of it, I had seen produce but not livestock. "In vitro fertilization," I said." Egglu nodded. Then, with a start, I added, "Honey Gatherer!" Nyssa got it right away. Tegan looked puzzled and then she got it too, and it was her turn to blush. "But Honey Gatherer has no successor. You are in danger of extinction."

Tegan asked, "Don't you guys have babies the usual way, then? I mean, IVF is certainly helpful, but folks have been making babies the usual way a lot longer!"

"Oh," said Egglu, soberly, "we enjoy sex but we can't make babies the usual way. There is a missing enzyme. We add the enzyme during the fertilization process. We can produce it easily in a test tube but our bodies can't produce it. We have lost that ability over the generations."

"So all your babies are test-tube babies," said Tegan. "Okay. I understand now."

"There's nothing wrong with that," I told her, perhaps more harshly than I had intended. Maybe I was just imagining a judgmental tone in her voice, because she looked hurt at my tone, which I immediately softened. "But if babies are dying, these settlements are indeed in danger of extinction. Egglu, is there anyone who would benefit from your extinction?"

"We have no enemies," Egglu insisted. "Everyone is very much invested in everyone else's survival."

"Well," I reminded him, "from a survival standpoint alone, never mind the emotional aspect, four babies are a lot to lose in a short period of time in a community of two dozen."

"Yes," was all Egglu said.

On our way back to Climfa's dining hall, we stopped at the nursery and met Future Tender and made silly faces and sounds at all the infants. It occurred to me to ask, "Surely there are children as well as infants?"

"Not at the moment" was Egglu's reply.

After the evening meal, Nyssa and Tegan were shown to a room to share for the night and I had one of my own. Lying on a decent mattress with plump pillows and a handmade duvet, I found myself wide awake, staring at the ceiling. We could have slept in our own beds; the TARDIS was not far off. We did need to track down that call for help, after all. We knew where but not when. We needed to get moving. That's not what was keeping my eyes wide open, though. I was trying to figure out the connection between a fertility program on hold because its only expert had died, a hologram of that expert controlled by an anonymous person of unclear intent, and infants dying of a brain hemorrhage. None of it made any sense. What was I missing?

Eventually my mind wandered, my body relaxed and I was almost asleep. I rolled over to the wall, onto my right side, not my left as I more often did, and my eyes flew open. My knowledge of human bodies, already limited, might not be useful here. I have a right heart and a left heart. Humans tends to carry their lone such organ on the left, although exceptions have been known. I had missed the postmortem; I hadn't a clue as to the internal construction of the Pearlians, or even whether the people I had met were the only species, intelligent or otherwise, on the entire planet. Maybe other cultures existed which did not rely on underground facilities. Maybe twice a year it rained cows. What assumptions I'd been making! Mythical Pearl hadn't even supported humanoids; it was full of dragons and other such wonders. In fact, I'd forgotten all about the mythical Pearl once we had arrived on the real one – a small planet, but then so is Earth, and look how big that small planet is.

The only element of this whole puzzle that pointed to there being an actual villain was the hologram of Honey Gatherer, and any connection between that element and the conclusion that children were being murdered was tenuous at best. I rolled away from the wall, sat up on the edge of the bed, mindless that I was dumping a tangle of bedclothes on the floor, stood up in the nightdress I had been given and, without bothering to change into my own suit, there neatly laid out upon a rocking chair, I went to the door. I said "the" door; it was but "a" door and I had no recollection of where my room was in relation to anything else in Climfa. I did change into my own clothes then, and as I did so, I remembered that Tegan had said "the usual way." Egglu hadn't blinked; in fact he had mentioned sex. But was sex defined the same way on Pearl as it was on Tegan's world? "A kiss is still a kiss," I murmured, remembering a lovely Earth story Tegan might be too young to remember. All right, I decided, adjusting my coat collar and making a mental note to ask Egglu for a fresh stalk of celery. It was time to get good and lost again.

Naturally, as soon as I decided to get lost I couldn't. The room into which mine let out was the one shared by Tegan and Nyssa. I hadn't meant to awaken them but there they were, rubbing their eyes and looking blearily up at me. Tegan sat up. "What's wrong, Doctor?" Nyssa slowly rested her feet on the little rug by her bed and wrapped her duvet around her.

"Nothing, nothing," I hastily assured them. "Just passing through." I started toward another door.

"Are you sure there is nothing you need, Doctor?" Nyssa stood up, the duvet still around her.

"I didn't mean to wake you. I am awfully sorry."

"I was having a bad dream," said Nyssa. "I am glad you woke me."

I hesitated. "I wonder if we could talk about that autopsy, then."

"Sure," she said. She gave Tegan a little wave so I did too, and we both went through the door for which I'd been heading. It led to a small lounge, with a sofa, so we sat side by side on the sofa, me fully dressed and Nyssa wrapped in her duvet so that I couldn't see what she had on under it at all. (I make note of it now; it barely registered at the time.) "What do you need to know, Doctor?"

"I'm not sure," I admitted. "Just… I know the bleed was all you found that was a possible cause of death, but what about the rest? Stuff that isn't an injury or sign of illness but might be unusual, or different from your anatomy, or mine, or Tegan's?"

Nyssa thought. "Apart from your having two hearts and being able to regenerate, I don't know much about your anatomy, Doctor." I thought I saw her blush; I might have been mistaken. "I am also not well conversant with the difference, apart from size, between adult and infantile anatomy. I am afraid I might not be of much help."

"Were lab samples taken? Blood and that?"

"Yes, of course."

"Okay, we will have to ask to see results. Did Bodies Detective say how long that would take?" Nyssa shook her head. "We should get going but I can't leave this."

"I know, Doctor." Nyssa touched my hand as she opened the door. I could see Tegan still sitting up. "I need to sleep some more. I'll see you in the morning." She closed the door, leaving me alone in the little lounge.

"Unless I get lost again," I said, to no one, but before I could proceed to get lost, Bean Tender came in and slapped something onto my neck. I started to protest but then realized that I now somehow knew the layout of the entire settlement, as well as of its two allies. "Thank you," I said, instead of what I'd been about to say.

"I thought you might need this," said Bean Tender. "In fact, I just assumed you had one. I apologize for not checking."

"Thank you," I repeated, feeling my neck; there was nothing to feel, as whatever it was had dissolved and become a part of me. Then I asked, "Can we talk?" Beanlu and I repaired to the sofa. "Tell me all about Honey Gatherer. When he was alive, I mean. You knew him, right? This is a small community. Everyone knows everyone, right?"

Beanlu nodded. "Yes, I knew him well. He gave me my baby."

This startled me. "He's the father?" I didn't want to assume that marriage or its equivalent was the custom on Pearl.

"No!" she laughed. "Egglu collected my eggs and Honeylu gathered honey and when we had made an embryo and it was fine, he put that inside me and I had a baby."

"What happened to your baby?"

"She grew up and moved to another settlement. She said there is no future in Climfa, after her baby died."

"Franlu was your granddaughter!"

"No, Columbinelu. She died a week before Franlu."

I was silent for a moment, then asked, "Were all the infants who died female?"

"Yes," said Beanlu. Her eyes were clear and dry. I don't know what I would have done had she been crying; I was glad she wasn't.

"And they were all fertilized outside the body?"

"That is our way."

"Tell me more about Honeylu. What kind of man was he?"

"He was an impatient man," said Beanlu. "He always wanted things to be just right. He sulked when he made mistakes, as we all do."

"Sulk?"

"No, make mistakes. He was forgiving of others and not of himself." She paused. "I loved him."

Very softly I asked, "Did he love you?"

She shook her head. I looked down, sorry I had asked. "He was… busy. He was worried about extinction. I understood. I didn't bother him."

"How did he die?"

Beanlu stood up and walked away; I thought she was offended and leaving the room, but she stopped a few steps from the sofa. Her back still to me, she said, "He couldn't forgive himself." Then she did leave the room.

I had to digest this. If I understood correctly, Honeylu, who had made some kind of error, had killed himself. What error could have been so unforgivable? I decided to ask Bodies Detective… now that I knew the way.

Bodies Detective wasn't in the mortuary but the door was unlocked. (In fact I had not yet encountered a locked door.) I let myself in and looked around. I had no desire to check out any bodies but I did open the top drawer of a filing cabinet and peer in, then start looking with a purpose. I didn't find a folder on Honeylu until halfway through the third drawer down. I pulled it out and looked around for a chair. As there wasn't one, I sat on a cold examining table and bent over the file. Honeylu had drunk an intoxicating beverage, perhaps similar to mead, as it was sweetened with honey, and had infused that beverage with a generous serving of an enzyme that by itself would not have harmed anyone; it was an enzyme produced by sperm to allow it to fertilize an egg. How toxic could that be, even in high doses? Yet it had killed him.

I now knew where to find Honeylu's laboratory so I navigated my way there next. The lab was in disorder and strewn with paper, in and out of file folders. There were no fewer than six file cabinets and half of them had their drawers gaping. The floor was slippery with paper. I started there, hunching down and gathering everything into a loose bundle and plopping it down on what little surface space I could free by bundling more papers, without regard for whether they were related or even marked. Where should I begin? I picked a paper at random and began to read. As I read, I sorted. As I sorted, I read.

Nyssa found me asleep on the floor between two huge piles of paper, with some scraps under me and some stuck to my hair. Tegan came in hesitantly (until she saw that there was nothing frightening in the room) as I was awakening and said I looked like an Albert Anker painting she had seen in a book as a child. Nyssa said I just looked like a scarecrow. Tegan tried to describe the painting and why I reminded her of it. I sat up and patiently tolerated being discussed as if I were not there as best I could and then I interrupted: "Nyssa, would you mind taking a look at these?" I withdrew several sheets of paper from my breast pocket and held them up. She took them and read them almost as rapidly as I had. A frown formed on her brow and then her eyes widened and she looked down at me in complete understanding. "Explain it to me."

"Hyaluronidase. That's what Honey Gatherer was experimenting with. It's an enzyme. It is found in white blood cells and in a lot of diseases, because it penetrates connective tissue so easily. It is also contained in sperm because that helps it penetrate and fertilize an egg. Honey Gatherer was worried about the low fertility rate in such a small community, the small success rate, really. Also how slow the whole process was. He wanted to make it work faster and better. Hyaluronidase doesn't affect the embryo at all. It makes the embryo possible but that's all. Very safe. Since it is found in so many kinds of cells it's easy to acquire and I guess Honey Gatherer found it easy to synthesize, too. So he was doing that." She referred to another page. "But he changed it. He was trying to make it more aggressive. It looks as if he was trying to make it easier to have twins, too. Anyway, when he made it more aggressive, he also made it less safe. It did its job but also then affected the embryo, and that made a lot of them unstable. They seemed okay, they got implanted, and then the mothers miscarried."

"What about the brain bleeds," asked Tegan, who appeared to be following some of this, at least.

"He stopped using it but the mothers who had miscarried and tried again miscarried again. Apparently, the aggressive enzyme had penetrated not just individual eggs but the mothers' ovaries. Honey Gatherer had done the opposite of what he intended and made extinction more likely instead of less. But he tried one more time. He took the aggressive enzyme and modified it with a substance that he hoped would strengthen a fetus' chance of survival. It worked." She stopped.

I had stood up by now and had my back to Nyssa, my eyes closed to help me listen better. I had understood some of what I'd read, certainly enough to know which papers were important enough to set aside, but for most of the formulae I needed Nyssa. The next part, though, I had understood all too well. When she stopped, I continued for her. "It worked but not well enough. There was another baby girl who hemorrhaged and either Bodies Detective didn't catch it or she covered it up. But Honeylu knew."

"So now what?" asked Tegan. "How can they recover? Will they really become extinct? Is all this now hereditary?"

"I don't know, Tegan. I really don't know. Boys seem not to be affected."

Nyssa asked, "How many settlements are there on Pearl?" I confessed that I hadn't asked. "I am guessing there are a lot. Climfu will need a lot of outside help. The settlements will have to cooperate more."

"Yes," I agreed, "a population exchange seems to be in order."

It took a while to explain it all to Egglu. "Poor Honeylu," he said. "He tried to save us." Then he sighed, "I suppose I shall have to be a kind of emissary, as I will be out of a job here until we get this straightened out." He took Tegan's hands in his. "I shall miss you, Teganlu."

"I'll miss you too, Egglu." They embraced and then Tegan kissed him with a fervor that surprised him even more than it surprised me and Nyssa. He shook my hand and kissed Nyssa's, then came up the stairs with us and watched us exit into the darkness of Pearl. In mere minutes we were back in the TARDIS.

Nyssa and Tegan went off to freshen up but I stayed in the console room and tried to find the signal that had come from Philadelphia. It would do us no good to get there any time other than that of the signal's origination. Nothing was coming through.

Something was nagging at me and I couldn't think what it could be. Then I realized that I still had a paper from Honeylu's room, tucked into my breast pocket. I'd meant to show that to my companions and to Bean Tender, to whom we hadn't even said our goodbyes. I left the console room with a mind to freshen up, myself, and along the way chanced to overhear Tegan asking Nyssa if I had ever hugged her. I forgot all about freshening up, all about sharing the information I had discovered, even all about the distress call. I really don't know why it affected me so strongly. It was a perfectly innocent conversation.

I walked around a bit and then returned to the console room, where that signal was now audible and visible. I amplified it, slowed it down, sped it up, separated tracks, blocked out background noise, blocked out the main signal and amplified background noise, did everything but stand on my head to get a date out of it. For a moment I actually considered standing on my head.

Tegan and Nyssa entered the room together and saw my frantic operations. Tegan stopped me. "Doctor," she said, "allow me." Somewhat amused, I stepped back. Tegan made a fist and gave the console a mighty thwack. The signal shifted briefly into white noise and then came in full strength.

"Let's set the coordinates while the setting is good," I said, but my poor joke was rewarded with blank stares "Let's leave the date to the TARDIS." We dematerialized – we'd still been sitting on Pearl – and materialized within seconds, on a street corner, in front of a small general store with a sign above the window reading "Morley's." The console display read 1959. It all looked harmless enough. We stepped out.

It was a sunny, windy early spring day. A breeze snatched the hat off my head and I snatched it right back, folded it up and tucked it into my breast pocket, which reminded me that I still had not shown that paper to my friends. Rather a large number of slightly overdressed children ranging, I'd say, from five to 13 were playing hopscotch on the sidewalk across the street, riding their trikes and bikes both on the sidewalks and in the streets, pushing each other around everywhere, clinging to the hand of a harried adult, or just walking alone. Actually, only one was walking alone, a skinny girl with huge glasses. She was the youngest child in view and I wondered why she was allowed to be out and about alone.

Nyssa and Tegan had already gone into Morley's so I went in as well, to find Tegan trying to explain to Nyssa what a pickle barrel was. There were more children at the counter, exchanging their grubby pennies for candy cigarettes, buttons of colored sugar stuck to ticker tape, peanut-shaped marshmallows, little wax bottles with syrup inside, long strings of licorice (which reminded me of something but I couldn't quite remember what), red hots and jawbreakers. From behind the counter, an elderly black gentleman with snow-white hair and an apron to match was sneaking a few extra candies to the kids who had the fewest pennies. I assumed this was Morley. There was an even more elderly white guy behind another counter set back a little on the other side of the shop, which was no bigger than a 1980s gas station convenience store, which this did not resemble. I heard a customer call out "Thanks, Sam," as she left, through the jingling door.

Nyssa was intrigued by the penny candy but none of us had so much as a penny on us. It occurred to me how rarely we needed any kind of currency in our travels. All over Earth it was a distinct disadvantage to be skint. Back in the TARDIS I did have a little treasure chest of sorts in one of the store rooms, and in that chest I kept, among other things, a piggy bank half full of Earth coins from various countries (and eras). One of the Roman coins could fetch a fortune at auction, or even in a pawn shop, as they were new when I acquired them. I had no intention of selling anything from my treasure chest but I thought I might dip into the piggy bank if I could find therein enough American coins, excluding half-cents of course. "Wait here," I called to my friends, and left the shop, whereupon I saw that the TARDIS we had left on the corner was attracting quite a bit of attention. A policeman was trying to break into it, and his nervous-looking partner had his Smith and Wesson pointed at the door.

"What in the world is that?" I asked no one in particular.

The nervous cop swung his revolver around toward me and I put my arms up and backed off. He lowered the gun right away and I put my arms back down. "Stand back, sir," he said unnecessarily.

"I was just curious," I shrugged, and bumped into Tegan and Nyssa as I turned to go back into Morley's. "Didn't I tell you to wait inside?"

"Why so grumpy?" Tegan was still holding her hand out, offering me a licorice shoestring. "Look what Mr. Morley gave me!"

I glanced at Nyssa, whose cheek was swollen. "'aw 'eaker," she explained.

"Wasn't that nice of him? This one is yours!" I took my gift without looking and thought, I am only trying to protect them. They must think me a terrible bully. I glanced back at the TARDIS and the two officers.

"Come on," I said, hastening past my companions, who hesitated only a moment before following me. Then I slowed down and assumed a casual pace, causing Nyssa to walk into me and Tegan to walk into Nyssa. We made it to the next corner without incident and we all looked up at the street signs to see where we were.

"Why," exclaimed Nyssa, "we're on Pearl Street!"

"Wow!" was all Tegan could say.

"That explains a lot," I said, not at all sure exactly what it explained. "Now, we have to figure out how to get back into the TARDIS, which is currently surrounded by the law." I thought I was exaggerating – two confused cops do not "surrounded" make – but when we had gone around the block we found the TARDIS had a police tape around it and four state troopers had taken over its surveillance. "Now what?"

Tegan and Nyssa decided that Tegan's short skirt might provoke the police unnecessarily so Nyssa approached one of the troopers and asked politely what the big blue box thing was. Was it a new kind of police station? It did say "Police" on it, after all.

"We're on top of it, Miss," said the oldest trooper.

The youngest trooper said to another, "I still say it's the strikers."

"Which ones?" asked the other.

"Does it matter?"

The silent policeman looked Nyssa up and down until she withdrew, and there we stood, behind the TARDIS with no way to get in.

From behind us came a commotion that drew not only our attention but that of the troopers. Two teens, one black, one white, were roaring at one another as they knocked each other about, landing only every third punch but putting on a fierce show nonetheless. The troopers came running, almost knocking us down, and the two pugilists split up and ran. The troopers split up too, to chase the kids, and the three of us hastened to the TARDIS door, stretching the police tape to slip in. When we got the door closed and stood laughing breathlessly around the console we noticed that someone else had slipped in too and was giggling along with us: the skinny little girl with the big glasses.

"Hello," I said, squatting down to look the little girl in the eye. "I'm the Doctor."

"I know," she said, still giggling. I sat back on my haunches and stared at her, thoroughly astonished. Well, I shouldn't have been, should I?

"Did you call me?" But Tegan's challenge was louder:

"Who are you?"

Nyssa's query was softer, and nearly simultaneous: "How did you call us?"

The little girl looked at each of us, and decided to answer Nyssa. "I don't know. I just did. And you came!"

The three of us blurted out our questions at once, as before:

"How old are you?" (from Tegan)

"What's your name?" (from me)

"Did you just think us here?" I told you, Nyssa is intuitive.

The little girl said "My name is Carly Kahn, I am six and a half and this is the first time I ever thought someone here." We just stared. "I try to think people here all the time. This is the first time it ever worked."

"How come you thought us here, Carly?" I asked. "Do you need our help with something?"

"Tell me it's not homework," said Tegan.

"She's only six," I reminded her.

"And a half," Carly corrected me.

"And a half." I thought she didn't even look six yet, but I am out of my depth judging ages anyway. I measure mine in centuries.

"I have piano lessons twice a week and I am in the second grade and I do have homework but today is Saturday. I did my homework last night. I can do my homework by myself. It's easy."

"Carly," I said, softly and slowly, "what do you need our help with?"

"I don't want to die."

Now we were all on the floor, eye to eye with Carly. "Are you ill?" I asked. She shook her head. "Is someone hurting you?" Again, she shook her head, no, but her eyes had narrowed. "Are you sure?"

"Well," she admitted, "Glennie, but he just gives me noogies." Tegan explained "noogies" to Nyssa sotto voce and I asked her to repeat it, as I was not familiar with the term; she demonstrated on my head and I winced. Carly laughed. "Yeah, but Glennie hits me really hard."

"No need to demonstrate further," I advised Tegan. "Carly, why do you think you're going to die?"

"Gwen says I'm going to die."

"Who is Gwen?"

"She's my best friend. She has red hair." Carly was looking around the console room, as if for the first time. "This place is nifty!"

"Carly, I have to go get something. I'll be right back." I was thinking of my piggy bank.

"Me too," said Nyssa, disappearing into the TARDIS proper.

"Tegan will stay here with you. Honest, we'll be right back."

Bypassing the trunk in the console room, I went straight to the store room where I thought I'd left my treasure box, one of many I admit, but I had not touched this particular one for at least a decade. Of course it wasn't there. Okay, wrong store room. I knew where to find another nearby and headed toward it. There were two identical doors side by side and for a moment I was confused. I didn't remember such a configuration in the TARDIS. I decided to open the right-hand door and reached for the handle, then on a whim opened the left instead. That was the right room. There was my treasure chest, dusty, shabby under the dust too, and unlocked, the way I always left it. This was not my only treasure chest, of course. It was, specifically, my Earth treasure chest. I found the piggy bank right away and took it out, but set it aside and briefly toyed with my other treasures. There were two cricket balls in there. I'd forgotten, and gone out of my way to acquire the one in my pocket. There were two tulip bulbs wrapped in wax paper. My fingers touched something unfamiliar at the bottom of the chest. I dug it out. It was the crankshaft of a Model T. Ah yes. It made me smile and I held it for a while before replacing it. Finally, I pulled the rubber plug at the piggy bank's belly and sorted through the coins that came tumbling out. I ignored nickels and dimes and filled my pockets with pennies, quarters, half dollars and silver dollars, checking carefully that none was dated later than 1959. I plugged piggy back up and replaced it in the treasure chest, then remembered that I had a wallet somewhere with paper money in it. It wasn't in the chest. It wasn't sitting out on any of the sparse furniture. There was a bookcase with only three books in it, none of them in English. I picked up the first one and flipped through its worn pages. It was a children's book, in Alzarian. I put it back and picked up the next one; as soon as I opened it, a wad of bills tumbled out into my hand. I closed and replaced the book, flipped through the bills to make sure they were American (they were) and stuffed them into the pocket with the coins.

I left the room and took two steps before turning back and staring at the right-hand door. Curiosity will one day be my downfall. I opened the door and stared into total darkness. I felt for the light button and palmed it on. The room flickered into brightness and I could see a single object in the center of an empty room that I felt sure hadn't existed until today. The single object turned and blinked at me. It was a glass deer with porcupine spikes.

"Pardon me," I said, closed the door firmly and walked rather rapidly back to the control room, my mind racing.

Nyssa, who had changed into a maroon swing dress, had returned with a yellow and orange teddy bear for Carly. "It was under Adric's pillow," she confessed. "He swore me to secrecy about it but I guess it doesn't matter now." Carly was hugging the bear and chattering to Tegan about something that had Tegan in stitches.

"We have a problem," I told Nyssa, then more loudly, to all, "I think Carly must go home and have… what time is it, anyway? Maybe dinner?"

"Lunch," said Carly. She didn't seem eager to leave. I glanced at the scanner; the troopers hadn't returned. I opened the door and walked her to it.

"Do you live around here?" I couldn't imagine she didn't; who would let a child that age wander far from home?

"I live upstairs," said Carly.

"Upstairs?"

"Upstairs from the store. My daddy is the butcher in Morley's."

"Sam," I said.

"Yeah, his name is Sam. Mr. Morley lives next door." She stepped outside and waved at me. "Thank you, Doctor!"

When I went back to close the door I found that Tegan had left the console room. "You were right, Doctor," said Nyssa. "I told Tegan to go find a longer dress." She looked me up and down. "I think you'll be okay if you just take off your coat." I did so, hanging it on the hat rack, and she nodded approvingly. Then I quickly put it back on, emptied all of its contents into my trouser pockets and removed the coat once more. Then a horrible thought struck me.

"Wait," I cried, dropping my coat onto the floor. "Tegan is back there alone?" Before Nyssa could respond, I was running. "Wait here!" I shouted, knowing full well that this particular instruction had never been obeyed and was not likely to be obeyed now. She was right behind me when I ran into Tegan in an otherwise empty hallway.

"What's going on?" asked Tegan, now clad in more modest attire that she later told me consisted of a long-sleeved red jersey and a black A-line skirt. Both she and Nyssa had opted for flat shoes. (Time travelers, it turns out, spend a lot of time running.)

"The TARDIS has been breached." I explained as briefly as possible and then we ran. We were outside the TARDIS. We entered Morley's once more and approached the candy counter. "Excuse me, sir," I began. Morley looked at me in some surprise. "Can you tell me where we might find a nearby hotel or boarding house that isn't too expensive?" In truth I had no idea how much money I had on me.

"Yes, sir, I do, as a matter of fact," said Mr. Morley. "I'll show you when Sam comes back from lunch.

Within the hour, I had paid a week's rent in advance for the entire downstairs of the townhome owned by Mr. Morley;, who lived upstairs; it had recently been divided into two residences and Mr. Morley had been putting on the finishing touches to the part he had intended to rent out. It was already furnished and just needed a lick of paint; I told him not to worry about that. We had come along at just the right time.

"I guess we'll need to shop for some food," said Tegan, opening empty cabinets as Nyssa peered into the empty refrigerator.

"Well," said Nyssa, "I guess we know where to do that!"

"First," I said, "please sit down. We have to talk." We all sat down at a small yellow formica kitchen table and they looked expectantly up at me. "You know why we have to stay here?"

"We can't go back into the TARDIS," said Nyssa, "because that Spiker is there."

"How did it get there?" asked Tegan. "Is there only one? Just because you saw one that doesn't mean there's only one." How had I not thought of that? I must have blanched because she reached over and took my hand. "We're with you, Doctor." Nyssa nodded and put her hand over Tegan's.

"No," I said, firmly, not withdrawing my hand. "No, I can't allow that. I have to do this alone."

"Why?" cried Tegan. "Why do you have to do everything alone?"

"I'm responsible for you," I began, but Nyssa interrupted me.

"Doctor, we're responsible for you, too."

This took me so far off guard that I couldn't speak. I withdrew my hand from theirs and stood up, knocking my chair over; walked sideways a few steps, and then tried not to look as if I were fleeing as I fled to the room we had decided would be my bedroom. There was a low bureau with a frameless mirror above it. I bent to put my hands on the bureau, first flat, then clenched, and looked up at my reflection. I let my eyes unfocus on purpose; sometimes if you do that, you can see a different person who is also you. Relaxing my hand and fixing a loose gaze upon my image, I allowed myself to go into a trance. I repeated a kind of mantra: I am the Doctor. I am responsible. I am the Doctor. I am responsible. I am the Doctor….

I'd forgotten to close the door. They found me sitting cross-legged on the floor with my forehead pressed against the bureau, my hands on top of my head. I was okay. I was just thinking. I almost had it. I was sure I would get it. I stood up quickly, spun to face them, put my hands out to reassure them, closed my eyes until the room stopped spinning, opened them again and smiled. I don't think it was my best smile; my friends still looked frightened. "I'm fine," I said. "I'm fine."

We sat back down at the kitchen table and brainstormed. We had lots of questions and no answers but we would have to make up answers in order to act at all; otherwise, we would be paralyzed.

Was the Spiker I'd found the only one in the TARDIS?

How had it gotten into the TARDIS? And why?

Was it really in the TARDIS or was it some kind of projection?

Could it travel from room to room? Could it leave the TARDIS on its own?

What were its capabilities? Could it harm any of us?

How long would a search of the TARDIS take and how best could we coordinate our efforts if all three of us worked together – or should I insist upon going in alone?

What would happen to Carly if it took us a long time to find the Spiker? What would happen to her if we didn't find it?

If we found the Spiker, what could we do? Should we eject it and if so, how, and where? Wouldn't setting a Spiker loose on Earth create a new crisis? What about multiple Spikers? Or did it (or they) have a message for us, possibly even need our help? If it claimed to need our help, could that claim be a trap? If it wasn't a trap, then what?

If there were multiple Spikers in the TARDIS was this the end of our time/space travels? For that matter, could a single Spiker effect this?

We all agreed that aspirin should be on our shopping list.

The broken police tape still flapped around the TARDIS but no troopers, local cops or other figures of authority were in sight. We stared at the door for a while. Finally Tegan said, "We could go shopping first. I could use that aspirin."

"That presumes we're coming back," said Nyssa.

"Well," said Tegan, "if we don't, it won't matter whether we went shopping or not, right?" She added, to me, "You said you have money now? What'd you do, rob a bank?"

"Sort of," I said, jingling a pocket. "Okay, let's shop." We entered Morley's, assured Mr. Morley that we were happy with our new digs and began to load up on staples: eggs, milk, tea (Tegan wanted coffee), fresh vegetables (I picked a sturdy stalk of celery to replace my wilting boutonniere), a few winesap apples, a loaf of marble rye, portions of filleted flounder, chicken breasts and ground beef (Sam was helpful here), some sliced provolone and a pickle from the barrel for each of us. On the way to the counter I saw a packet of safety pins, a ball of strong twine and that much-requested bottle of aspirin. I added these to the order. While Mr. Morley was ringing all this up, Tegan slapped jars of peanut butter and strawberry jelly onto the counter and Nyssa asked politely for another jawbreaker. We thanked our new landlord and carried our bags next door, where we found Carly and a redheaded girl (certainly Gwen) who looked to be about nine, waiting for us by our door, inside the entry hall by the stairs that led up to Mr. Morley's home. "Oh no," I groaned, under my breath. "Hi Carly," I said aloud. "You must be Gwen," I greeted the older girl.

"How do you do," said Gwen, holding out her hand. Each of us in turn took and shook that hand and Gwen nodded gravely, although she also had a little smile for us. "Yes, I'm Gwen."

The five of us went into the apartment and the children helped Nyssa and Tegan put all the food away. I tried to think how I was going to explain to the children that they could not enter the TARDIS and that we might be going away and were not sure how soon we'd be back. This is not at all what I had planned – not that I'd yet formed a firm plan but whatever it would have been it wouldn't have involved abandoning the little girl who didn't want to die, and the mysterious child who'd told her she would.

The groceries being stored and the aspirin being consumed (I declined), we all repaired to the sitting room, where the children sat on the uncarpeted wooden floor, my companions shared a worn but serviceable blue sofa and I occupied a delightful maple rocking chair with red plaid cushions.

I got right to the point… or one of the points. "So, Gwen, tell me about your idea that Carly is going to die. What's that all about?"

"You told him!"

"I magicked him here so it's okay to tell him."

"What about them?"

"I magicked them too."

After this exchange, Gwen seemed satisfied and told me, "No one else knows about this. Not my mom and dad, not Carly's dad, not her grandfather…"

"… not even my piano teacher and not Ernie either."

"Who's Ernie?" I interjected.

"He walks me to his house. His mom is my piano teacher. He's a big boy. He's almost 11."

"Okay," I said. "So we are the only ones who know. But we really don't know. Can you tell us about it?"

Gwen said, "I have dreams where Carly dies."

"Dreams?" said Tegan, doubtfully.

"Yeah, when I sleep and awake-dreams too. Everybody thinks I'm stupid because sometimes I don't answer when they talk, but that's because I am having an awake-dream. It's not a daydream, either. It's like a real dream. It's so scary!"

"I imagine so," I said. "Can you tell us about these dreams?"

"I don't think you're stupid," whispered Carly. "You're my best friend."

The children embraced briefly and then Gwen's face went blank. I stopped rocking and looked at her closely. "Gwen?"

"I think she's having an awake-dream," explained Carly.

"Don't touch her!" Tegan had half-risen to go to the child. She sat back down.

Gwen remained perfectly still, seated on the floor, her face quite blank, her breathing even but a bit slow, for several minutes. If she was frightened, her fear did not show on her face or in her posture. Then something materialized in front of her. Carly screamed and leapt back. I caught her and swung her away from the Spiker that had been inches from her, its quills brushing her clothing. Nyssa and Tegan were already on their feet. Nyssa grabbed Carly from me, Tegan picked up still-dreaming Gwen in her arms, and together they whisked the children out of the room and out of the apartment. The Spiker made a move after them and I yelled "No!" and blocked its way. It shot a quill at me and it struck me in my right thigh. I was determined not to fall, even though my leg was no longer supporting me. I landed on one knee but pushed myself back up and was able to grab a cushion from the rocking chair and smack the Spiker, hard. It didn't shatter, and I didn't know whether to be glad or unhappy about that, but I didn't wait to analyze my feelings; I took the other cushion and smacked it again on a still-prickly side. The pillows stuck to it and seemed to immobilize it at least partially. There were still exposed quills and I was out of cushions. Nyssa had returned, alone, and, seeing all this, now ran into her bedroom and fetched a couple of pillows, which I used to blunt all the quills. Her next stop was the kitchen; she brought me a butcher's knife, which I accepted, but instead of using it, I addressed the Spiker: "What do you want? Why are you here?"

I knew it could speak but instead it roared. It charged me impotently and roared again. I just pushed it back. Then I got behind it and pushed it to the door, out into the entryway, out of the house and onto the sidewalk. I grabbed a cushion, careful not to pull it off of those frightful quills. I am quite capable of roaring and I roared at it now: "Don't make me use this! Go back to Philt now and stay there! Leave these children alone and leave my TARDIS alone!" There was, of course, nowhere for me to use that knife, but there was some traffic on Pearl Street. I dropped the knife. "Shall we see how glass holds up under impact?"

"She called me here!" it roared back. I let go of the cushion and backed up.

"Do you know who I am?"

"You are an escaped slave and you will be returned and punished!"

"I am the Doctor and you will go home empty-handed and count yourself lucky!" With another great roar the Spiker pushed a cushion off of itself and shot a quill at me, but the cushion had weakened it and the quill fell at my feet. I picked up the cushion and used it as a shield as I rushed the Spiker, but my leg gave out at last and I missed. dropping the cushion. The Spiker simply walked into me, then, trying to impale me. I grabbed a quill in each hand and pushed, to no good effect, so I tried pulling. One quill came off in my hand and the Spiker shrieked. The other quill slipped through my fingers and caught me at the top of my shoulder. Suddenly I was a pin cushion, but the Spiker was weakening by the moment and nothing penetrated too deeply. It was like being stung by nettles: it hurt like hell but the only real injury was to my thigh, which, to my surprise, still had a quill sticking out of it. I pulled the quill out and threw it like a dart at the Spiker, chipping its nose. It rushed me again, I was hit this time, full on, and it was my turn to shriek. It kicked me a bit but at close range the kicks were feeble. I felt someone grab my legs from behind and tried to free myself so that I could pick up the plaid cushion and wedge it between myself and the Spiker, but I was unable to do any of that.

"Go away! Go back! I don't want you!" Carly was screaming at the Spiker and trying to pull me free of it, but at first I thought she meant me. I was so stunned that I stopped struggling for an instant. By the time I realized what she had meant, the three of us – Carly, the Spiker and I – were on the purple stratum of Philt.

The Spiker was not injured badly but was too weak to do more than hold me pinned to it. I knew that if I struggled I would fall as I had before and this time my injuries could prove fatal – and Carly, too, would be hurt. On the other hand, if the Spiker released me, the result could be exactly the same. I felt Carly's arms let go of my legs and I cried "No!" Then I felt a body supporting me from behind while four translucent hands separated me from one quill at a time, until I was no longer attached in any way to the Spiker. The two translucent beings set me down on all fours, next to Carly, There followed a long period of silence, during which I knew that these members of Fanty's species and the Spiker were communicating telepathically.

At last, one of the translucent beings pantomimed that I should climb onto its back, as onto a hobby horse, but I only understood when the other one communicated likewise to Carly, who got it and climbed on. Our liberators skimmed across the cloud, carrying us directly to the palace, through the portico and into a reception area, where we were able to stand up safely. I leaned against a cream-hued wall, and Carly came and leaned against me. Beings of a variety of species were being processed and led away, and eventually it was our turn. We were measured, weighed, peered at and poked at; someone who resembled Mar and Tar clipped our fingernails and toenails (we were left barefoot, which made me mad, because I had really liked those shoes) and then led us off to what appeared to be a kind of dormitory. We found cots next to each other and sat on them, looking around in a bit of a daze. Carly was too overcome to speak and I was exhausted, so I got her to lie down, tucked her in and then did what I seemed so often compelled to do on that planet: I slept.

In the morning I awoke to a clamor of languages. Although I am, if I may boast, an accomplished linguist, I only understood a few of the tongues I heard that morning. I thought it wisest not to let on quite yet that I understood anything at all, but I overheard snatches of information that might come in useful later – alas, nothing about the location of a stairway, a plot to escape or anything immediately useful beyond "Quiet, here they come" and "Watch out for the new ones," meaning me and Carly.

Carly was awake and crying into her pillow. I said her name softly and in the next instant she was in my arms and I was holding her as tightly as if she were my own child. When everyone else got up quickly and stood silently in front of their cots I did likewise, and Carly followed suit. As far as I could tell, she was the only child in the room. Moments later there were no children at all in the room, as she was whisked away by two translucent Quadribras, as I called them in my mind. I tried to protest but was firmly restrained until Carly had vanished.

We were subjected to a head count. (Beings with more than one head still counted as one.) Then I was whisked out of the room too, down some hallways and out to the back garden of the palace, a huge area already being worked by about 50 beings who had opposable thumbs for holding tools, or claws for turning soil. There was no orange cloud cover above us, just a red sky dominated by a blue sun that burned our skins and dehydrated us all quickly. We were boiling in 20 one-acre raised gardening lots with tall fences around them and bridges between them with low guard rails, so no one risked falling (or escaping) to another stratum, except, I observed to my horror, by being pushed or thrown from one of the bridges. I was burdened with a backpack containing a huge jug of water (from which I was forbidden to drink), and given a soil pH reader; had instructions shouted at me in a language I legitimately didn't understand; and was left to my work, which I did understand: I was to start in one corner of the lot located in the corresponding corner of the same garden, test the soil's acidity or alkalinity every few feet until that lot had been thoroughly tested, then cross the bridge to the next lot, until all 20 acres of the palace garden had been tested. If soil was too dry to test I was to add water to it before testing it, from the jug in the backpack. I was to mark my findings in a notebook with two pages ruled in columns and rows for each lot. Of course the writing system on Philt was completely unknown to me, but I figured it out by perusing what had already been written (a month ago). I'm not a bad cryptographer and I am a fast learner, especially of languages.

I'm also not averse to an honest day's labor if I can do it alone and be left alone to work out how to rescue a kidnapped child, my friends stranded on Earth (and 1959 Philadelphia at that), my TARDIS likewise stranded and myself, stranded in servitude (to give it a kind name) on this oppressive planet. However, I was not left alone. I was stopped to have my notebook checked so often that I thought it would have been quicker and more efficient for the checkers to do the soil-testing themselves. I concluded that efficiency was not as important to them as ensuring that we were all too exhausted to contemplate escaping.

By mid-day the heat was unbearable and we were herded, single file, back inside the palace and into a small room with a water trough the length of one wall. From this we were to drink like animals. Balls of some substance akin to sticky rice were thrown at us, and only those who caught one ate, so there were scuffles for the rice balls and scuffles for a spot at the trough. I drank from my hands and never got quite enough, but I did rub a little water on my face. By the time I had decided to stick my face in the trough like everyone else, it was time to go back outside to work, and I hadn't managed to score a rice ball.

I did get to cross one of the bridges into the next raised bed. Stopping in the middle of it, I looked down at the green cloud layer and wondered if it would be worth it to jump. No, if I did that, I would never find Carly; I'd probably be killed anyway. Someone pushed me forward and I moved on to the next bed.

There was no evening meal. A being with three claws was asleep in the cot next to mine, where Carly should have been. (No: Carly should have been with her father and grandfather in Philadelphia.) There was no lights-out per se, as the lights stayed on all night, but there was an enforced bedtime. We slept in our clothes. When we were awakened for the head count, I found that I had absorbed some of the languages around me, at least to a small extent. That's how, on the way out to work, I understood what I overheard: a little girl had been declared a princess the day before and set up in luxury. A palace required a princess. The little girl was uncooperative. That's all I could glean but my mind was all over the place on this. Carly was alive. Carly was in danger. I was hungry, thirsty, dizzy and slightly feverish from dehydration, and now adding "find a way up" to my disorganized and largely impossible to-do list.

The third being who checked my notebook was angered by my having miswritten a number. I'd crossed it out right away and written it correctly, and initialed the correction, but that was not acceptable and I was backhanded. I assumed complete humility. If I fought back, Carly was lost forever. I tested the soil.

At the break I stuck my face right in the trough and gulped down an ocean. Then I caught myself a rice ball and gobbled it down before anyone could imagine appropriating it. As soon as I'd swallowed the last morsel, I had my face back in the trough. I lifted it only to breathe. Then I stared at the wall. There was a gap between the trough and the wall that could accommodate a smaller man than I, but probably not me. I put my hands on the rim of the trough as if to duck down and drink again, only instead of drinking I pulled slowly on the end closest to the garden. Aware that our break was nearly up, I slid my hands down the rim of the trough and pulled, slid some more and pulled, until I had reached the other end. Then I slipped behind the trough and flattened myself as best I could, hoping I was really out of view and not just fooling myself.

When I thought the room was empty again, I stood up and made for the door through which the rice balls had been delivered, opposite the door to the garden. I cracked it open, saw no one on the other side, eased myself through, heard footsteps and hid under a staircase, not a secret one going down but an ostentatious one leading only upward. The footsteps faded away and I was up those stairs in a flash.

If I had not been so single-minded in my purpose I might have allowed myself to be dazzled, for the upper palace was indeed dazzling. The cream-colored walls were jewel-encrusted. The molding was gilt. The ceiling would have rendered Michelangelo Othello-jealous. The grand hall in which I found myself, unpopulated at the moment (or I'd have been done for), had no doors, just wide arched doorways on both sides through which other grand rooms beckoned, and a huge glass window opposite the stairway, across the hall. On the right I saw Spikers in the next room. I had never seen more than one at a time and from my (extremely vulnerable) vantage point I couldn't tell them apart anyway, although I hoped the one I'd battled, if it was present, would be displaying some broken quills. The room on the left appeared to be empty but of course I couldn't see more than the arched doorway revealed. I bent over and did a low sprint to the window. From there, looking down, I could see part of the garden in which I'd been laboring. I'd left my testing kit by the water trough but I still wore my backpack, so I wriggled out of it and took out the jug within, unscrewed the cap and raised it to my lips. I should have sipped; I gulped… and spat out the horrid stuff. It was acidic, like tonic water. I rubbed my dirty bare feet in it and suddenly realized that I had to have left a pretty clear trail of footprints up the stairs and across the room. I could only assume I'd left them in the break room and between there and the stairway as well. Why had no one found me yet? I dried my feet as best I could on the cream-colored floor and, leaving both pack and jug behind, tiptoed, holding onto the wall, whose jewels were big enough to make good grips, around to the door that looked safe.

It wasn't. Through the door I could see a throne, two Quadribras attendants, kneeling and bowing so that their foreheads touched the floor; between them, someone resembling Mar, shackled and barefoot but standing calmly; a richly dressed woman whose species I hadn't see before but who looked about as human as anyone I had met on Philt, and, on the throne, Carly, being berated by that woman in hushed tones in a language I was still struggling to learn. I could understand "I am afraid of what they might do to you," and "You need to try or we are both as good as dead," and "They are only Argogs; they can't actually feel any pain." She was offering a mother-of-pearl-handled whip to Carly, who refused it.

"You can't make me," said Carly. "I want to go home." She was wearing so many layers of clothing, even richer in texture and embellishment than the attire of the woman offering the whip, that she could barely move. She looked as hot as I felt.

I walked straight up to the woman and took her by the wrist, flashed her as bright a smile as I could manage, and said, "Hello. I'm the Doctor. I'll just take that, if you please."

"Doctor!" cried Carly, trying to slide off of the throne.

I had grabbed the wrong wrist and the whip rose to strike but I twisted the wrist I did hold, and the whip hand faltered. After a brief struggle I managed to secure the whip and fling it across the room. I slung Carly over my shoulder like a sack – no time for niceties – and tugged on the calm Argog's chains. "Come on!" I urged him, racing toward the grand stairway, and down. He didn't need to be told twice. When we got to the bottom, we were met by the guard who had backhanded me and two of his colleagues. One of them took Carly from me and the other threw the hapless reptile to the ground, kicked him once, hauled him back up to his feet and marched him out to the garden. My guard did the same to me, shackled me about the neck with a thick iron collar and long chain, pulled me to my feet and hustled me out to the garden too. Carly's captor stepped ahead of us and within moments we were all on the bridge. "No," I cried, but it was too late. Carly screamed as she was tossed over the side like so much refuse. Her murderer turned and strutted back into the lot. The Argog broke free of his guard and jumped. Before I could even fully process that, I felt a yank on my neck and realized that I was not simply going to be pitched off of the bridge. My guard intended to hang me with that chain. Maybe Carly and the reptile had survived. I certainly wouldn't.

I body-slammed my guard, tore the chain from his hands and swung it at him. He went down. I swung at the other guard and missed but he fled anyway. I wrapped the chain around my waist so it wouldn't be caught on anything, climbed over the railing and jumped.

Landing face down I got a mouthful of green foam, and the wind was knocked out of me, but I got right up, looked around, saw people helping Carly and the Argog leave the elaborate landing field, a 30-acre mattress-thing topped with a substance that most resembled airplane foam. Observing this I wobbled, fell down laughing and let myself be helped off the field, into the green level palace. Dinsov and Adinsov were there to greet me but to their surprise I couldn't understand them and they couldn't understand me; the TARDIS was on Earth, just a tad too far away to translate. Well, we didn't have to explain chains, did we? Carly was clinging to me in an instant and the Argog was in a daze; as far as he had been concerned he'd been leaping to his death, and here he was alive. Dinsov sent a Quadribras off on a mission that became clear when she returned with bolt-cutters, which Dinsov expertly used to free us.

"Water," I said to Dinsov, pantomiming a drink. He understood and had water brought. I drank it standing, and Adinsov took my hand and led me into a chamber that had seating. Carly was not to be separated from me and no one objected when she sat with me. Without being asked, Adinsov brought her something that resembled milk, and after a sip, Carly approvingly drank it down. I was trying to remember whether or not I had been drugged here upon my last visit when Carly's head drooped against my arm. "Here we go again," I said, nodding too.

Well, one doesn't really need shoes on a cloud, but I did miss mine. I had half a mind to go back up and try to fetch them, but of course that would have been ridiculous. Adinsov was happy to take me and the uncharacteristically quiet Carly down to the next level, since I didn't remember where the stairway was in relation to where we'd landed. When we arrived, Mar and Tar greeted us excitedly, and to my great satisfaction I was able to practice my language skills on them, since Argog was one of those I had been trying to learn.

"So good to view you another time," I tried, eliciting a smile from Mar; Tar had of course faded back into the wall. "This be Carly."

"You are making very strange noises," said Carly.

"We are lost to be here and didn't arrive by will," I explained. "Pardon my bad language. I am yet education."

"We understand fine," said Mar. "You are here without your magic box. We will make you very comfortable here."

I translated for Carly and she said, "But I want to go home!"

"I know, honey." I was not used to calling people "honey" but she just seemed so sad. I thought then of the sheet of paper in the breast pocket of my coat, which I'd left lying on the console room floor. I hoped Nyssa and Tegan were waiting for me in the TARDIS but thought they probably were in our humble apartment downstairs from Mr. Morley. Had a week passed on Earth? A year? I hadn't left them any money. I was starting to feel more sorry for myself than for Carly at that point, when she said, suddenly,

"I can try to think Miss TARDIS here."

"Really?" I hadn't thought of that (and I had never heard her called "Miss" TARDIS before), but the TARDIS is, in fact, a living entity. Maybe… just maybe…. I quickly translated for the puzzled Mar. "My friend minds that she would call my boat with her brain." It took Mar a while to convert that into a sensible sentence, and then he brightened.

"Can we help in any way?"

"Carly, is there anything that makes thinking something somewhere easier? How do you usually do it?"

"Well," said Carly, "It doesn't usually work. It only worked when I magicked you. I guess when I told that pointy thing to go away, we all went away together. But that doesn't count."

"No," I agreed, "we definitely don't want to do that again." I tried, "When you magicked me, what were you doing?"

Carly thought. "I think I was just walking."

"I saw you walking."

"I played with Gwen and then I walked around the block and my legs were walking all by themselves. I like to do that. I think and walk. Sometimes I sing."

"Were you singing when you magicked me?"

Carly thought hard. "Um, I think so."

"What were you singing?"

"I don't want to tell you! You'll laugh at me!"

"No, I won't. I promise."

"Yes, you will!"

I took a moment to tell Mar what was going on. He smiled and left us alone.

"Come on, Carly."

She whispered, "Purple People Eater."

I was all prepared to have a hard time not laughing but I had never heard of that song so it was easy to keep my promise. "Carly, can you sing it for me?"

She looked doubtful. "I don't know all the words. I make up the words or I go 'la la la' and stuff."

"That's okay," I reassured her. "Okay, Carly, let's go to the big hall where there's lots of room for you to walk."

"Can't we just go outside?"

"No, you mustn't. It's really dangerous to go outside. I'll just ask Mar to direct us to the big hall. Mar? Oh, he left. Tar, are you there?" Tar moved away from the wall and became visible. "Tar, acceptable to view you! Are you skilled to push us to the bigger room?"

When Tar stopped laughing he said that if I decided to stay on Philt, he would teach me Argog. He reached down a cream-colored flipper/hand and took Carly's. She looked up at me. I nodded encouragingly. She went with him and I followed.

It only took a few minutes to navigate the corridors of the palace to the great hall, from which I could see its portico and beyond that the steel gray surface of the stratum. Tar released Carly's hand and settled against a wall, effectively vanishing.

"Carly," I said, squatting down as I had when we'd first met, "Will you try to think the… Miss TARDIS here, the way you thought me to you? Can you show me what you were doing when you thought me down to Earth?"

Carly started walking, at first in a small circle in the middle of the great hall, and then to a wall, which she followed, tracing and retracing the perimeter of the room, at first self-consciously and then relaxing into her own rhythm, seeming to forget I was there. She sometimes skipped but mostly walked, often silent, sometimes murmuring to herself; I couldn't make out what she was saying. After her third go-round she started humming. Soon I could make out a jaunty tune and, by and by, "It was a la la mm mm flying purple people eater, mm mm, da da flying purple people eater…."

I was beginning to think Carly's efforts and my hopes were all for naught when I heard the whir and groan of "Miss" TARDIS responding to the little girl's call. I ran to Carly, grabbed her and swung her around before putting her gently down again and running to that daft old box, reaching into my pocket…. No! My pockets had been emptied by my captors. I had no TARDIS key. Had I given a spare to Tegan or not? I couldn't remember. Anyway, Tegan and Nyssa were back on Earth. The TARDIS was here and I couldn't get in. Carly and I were trapped on that planet of clouds after all.

The prospect of spending the rest of my lives here was depressing enough, although my exile on Earth had not always been a picnic either, and here I already had friends… and some justice to serve if possible. I could make a difference here, I rationalized. But Carly! Her father and grandfather would never know what had happened to her. She had never signed up for this. She was six, for heaven's sake. ("… and a half," I corrected myself.) I was now completely responsible for her, in loco parentis. Apparently I wasn't too good at that: Nyssa was orphaned all over again, and Tegan was as stranded as I, albeit on her own planet, misplaced in time.

Then it struck me: that brief, innocent conversation I had overheard had been nagging at my subconscious ever after. I had half-formulated a resolution to comfort them, each of them, both of them, the next time they were feeling "low," as Tegan had put it. Surely that was not a difficult thing to do. Well, they must be feeling pretty low right now, and where was I? I would never get to bestow so much as a comforting hug. They'd never see me again, nor I them.

Carly was so thrilled with her success that she was yelling "Yay!" and bouncing around the room, impatient for me to open up the TARDIS. How could I tell her that she had succeeded but I had failed?

"Doctor?" The TARDIS doors opened and out flew my friends, for whom I was responsible and who were responsible for me.

"Nyssa!" I cried. "Tegan!" I collected them both at once in my arms and squeezed. I think Nyssa actually squeaked. "I am so sorry, my dearest friends! I didn't mean to abandon you!"

Nyssa was confused. "But you didn't, Doctor. You were only gone an hour."

Tegan dangled the TARDIS key in front of me; she had put it on a keychain that boasted an airplane charm. "Here, Doctor."

I shook my head. "You keep that, Tegan. I'll have the TARDIS make up another… two others," I added, looking at Nyssa. "Come on, Carly! Let's take you home!"

Nyssa stocked up on jawbreakers at Morley's before we left. Tegan had a thing for those pickles. I spent all my pennies treating the neighborhood kids to whatever penny candy they wanted, and I paid Mr. Morley for an extra week even though we were vacating the apartment. After a tearful reunion with her father and grandfather, who'd had no idea she'd been gone, Carly went looking for Gwen. She wasn't in our flat. She wasn't at home. She hadn't been home but everyone had assumed she was with Carly.

"When you and that thing disappeared, Gwen was so freaked out," said Tegan, "she ran right out into the street and almost got hit by a taxicab. She was out of our sight before we could react. I mean, we were still trying to believe that thing had taken you!"

"She summoned it," said Nyssa.

"Yes, she did," I said, "and when Carly told it to go away, it had to go. Unfortunately it took us both with it. For you it's been an hour and for us it was days. I thought I'd never see you lot again…." I was unable to speak for a moment.

"Doctor?" Carly was back. "Can that monster come back and get us?"

"I don't know," I said, honestly. "I hope not but I don't know. I wish we could find Gwen and see she's all right." I thought for a moment. "Is there a place you two go a lot, a special place you like?"

The four of us set off down the street. Along the way we ran into kids and adults who said they'd seen some kind of monster attacking me but when they told the police they were laughed at and disbelieved. I shrugged and smiled and murmured something about practicing for a play. I am sure they remained unconvinced but I was unwilling to stop and make up anything better. We had to find Gwen.

We found her easily at a small nearby playground; Carly knew where to look. Gwen was immediately visible, perched atop a jungle gym, swinging her legs and whistling a tune I didn't recognize. She saw us, smiled and waved but made no move to come down. Carly scampered up pretty quickly. I practically flew up the bars and settled on one facing the children, who were holding hands. Not consciously imitating Gwen, I swung my legs too, until I caught her staring at my bare feet. "They took his shoes," explained Carly.

"They?"

"Bad people."

"So that was pretty scary," I said, Gwen nodded. "I was scared too." At this Gwen looked more serious but somehow not especially traumatized. "I wouldn't want to see that spiky thing ever again. Do you think you might?"

"Definitely not," said Gwen. "Never again."

"How do you know?"

"I know." I am sure I looked as uncertain as I felt, for she continued, "I have been having awake dreams since I was six years old. Even when I'm not in the middle of having one I can feel it coming, even if it doesn't come for a day, or a week. I can still feel it. I feel it all the time, waiting to come out. Then it comes out but no one can see it but me. Then it goes away. I mean did. It went away."

"I'm sorry," was all I could say.

"But today everyone could see it and it kidnapped you and Carly. Is it kidnapping if a monster does it? I made that happen and I don't know how I did it."

I looked around at the playground. The jungle gym wasn't very high; I could see the playground and indeed the surrounding streets were not packed but dotted with happy humans who had been on the same planet, and would remain on the same planet, for their whole lives, and never even realize they were trapped. Or perhaps they weren't trapped at all – just happy. "Maybe," I said, "That Spiker was trying to come here and it made you bring him. The Spiker made it happen, not you."

"I think I made it happen, too, but I won't anymore. I can't feel it now. I hope I never feel it again. I feel different now. It came out and it went away. You and Carly came back and it didn't."

Carly let go her friend's hand and came around to my side. "Doctor," she said, "I thought you here and you came. I think people here all the time. They never come. You came."

"Yes, of course," I said, automatically.

"But they hurt you."

"Well, you didn't hurt me."

"I can't explain it," she said, upset.

I insisted, "You're doing great. You're just wrong is all." She looked about to cry. I think she thought I didn't believe her. "I mean, well, two things. First of all, we had a choice. We heard your call and we decided to come. You called us but you didn't magic us. Okay?" She nodded slowly. "By the way, your signal bounced a lot. It took a long time to find you, but we did, because we wanted to. Second thing, I am not sure whether the Spiker was after you or after me. It doesn't matter. The important thing is, he can't come back. And the third thing is…."

She shouted, "You said two things!"

"Three now! The third thing is that you got us back home. You got me my TARDIS back. Thank you!"

"Hey guys!" called Tegan. "Everything okay up there? Are you ever coming down?"

"What," I protested, "down to Earth?"

"You're welcome," said Carly, simply.

About a week later, TARDIS time, I had a sudden, inexplicable, most irritating craving for a pickle-barrel pickle. The craving passed but it made me think about Mr. Morley's shop and how kind he had been. We found out, as we were making our farewells, that Carly's father, Sam, had been the owner of the shop but had spent every last dime trying to save his wife, Carly's mother, who was dying of cancer. The medical bills had broken him, and he had lost his wife anyway. He was about to lose the shop as well, and his home upstairs from it, but his lone employee, Mr. Morley, had bought it from him, let him keep his home and his dignity, and kept him on as the butcher. So, I thought, we were not the only recipients of Mr. Morley's kindness.

Not long after that, we were drifting along without a destination because we were in the process of choosing one. Nyssa wanted to hike across the Marla Savanna on the planet Juso, to study its wildlife from a psychogenetic perspective. I pointed out to her that Northwestern Jusoans considered Southeast Jusoans to be a kind of wildlife, and hunted them. Marla was right smack in the center. All right, she grudgingly agreed, would I please tell her where she could immerse herself in such studies without being caught in, for example, a civil war. I was having trouble finding one for her. I favored a visit to the annual Batona match on the planet Korda. Batona is a cross between cricket and flamenco. I suppose I should mention that by "annual" the Kordans mean the equivalent of 24 times per Earth year. Tegan couldn't think of anywhere she wanted to go; she wanted to stay in the TARDIS. When I pressed her for a "fun" destination, she was annoyed and hid in her room. That night, on the way back from returning all the currency in my pocket to the right store room (there was only one door now) I found Tegan in Adric's room, sitting at his desk, crying.

It would have been stupid to ask her what was wrong. I could see what was wrong. What could I do about it? I couldn't bring Adric back to life.

"Hello, Doctor," said Tegan, without looking up.

'Can I help?" I asked.

She looked up and half-smiled. "No, thank you, Doctor." She stood up. "I suppose I could use some tea."

"Shall I bring you some tea?"

"No," she sighed, coming to the door. "I like the way I make it." She smiled all the way this time and added, "Why don't you join me, Doctor?"

She had regained her composure. I was glad she didn't need my help, not because I would have been reluctant to help her, far from it, but because I didn't know how to make right what she was sad about.

We brought our tea into the console room and stood sipping it, not talking much, not talking about anything of importance at all. Tegan put her empty cup and saucer down on the console. "Good night, Doctor," she said. "Thanks for putting up with me." She turned to go.

I put my cup and saucer down on the console too, and my cup wasn't even empty. What a bad example I was setting! "Tegan?" I'm not usually thick. I am, in fact, quite clever most of the time.

She turned back, looking as weary as I had ever seen her. I went to her and bent to embrace her. At first she didn't react. Then I thought she might even be shrinking away from me. At last, though, she kind of melted into the hug and sobbed in my arms.

After a while she sniffled a bit, broke free and stepped back to smile up at me. "Love those new shoes, Doctor!"

"I'm still breaking them in," I admitted.

"Good night, Doclu."

Now alone in the console room, I noticed that my hat wasn't on the hat rack. "Oh no," I muttered. Had I lost my hat on Philt as well? Then I remembered I had tucked it into my breast pocket, reached in and withdrew it, unfolding it, shaking it a bit (something fell out) and returning it to its accustomed spot on the hat rack. I stooped to pick up whatever had fallen from the hat; it was the paper from Pearl, the one I hadn't had a chance to show my companions and which then had – forgivably, I thought - slipped my mind. I unfolded it, smoothed it out (for it had been well crumpled when I found it) and read it, for only the second time.

What was I to do with this missive? I knew that Honeylu had not intended to deliver it; he had crumpled it up and discarded it.. Nonetheless I felt that Beanlu had a right to see it. I would ask Nyssa and Tegan in the morning what they thought, but I had a feeling that before we explored any savannas or cheered for any batona teams, we were going to make a side trip to Melissa Majoria to recruit some bees on our way to Clinfa, on Pearl, to see our friends.

I patted the console, then thought to clear those cups and saucers away before any mishaps could occur. As I carried them out of the console room I called out, softly, "Good night, Miss TARDIS."