Since everyone had lain down where they had stood and thus were scattered about, the giant dragged everyone to one wall and lined us up like merchandise. I tried in vain to think of something clever to do. Then I remembered I had an alarm clock in my pocket. I reached surreptitiously into that pocket and withdrew the alarm clock, quickly hiding it under my chest, as I lay face down like everyone else, facing the wall. Slowly I dragged it up to my face to observe the time. It didn't matter whether the time was accurate; what mattered was the interval between that moment and the moment I wanted the alarm to go off. I wasn't sure it was a good idea; the robbers might think the tellers had set off an alarm, and shoot them. On the other hand, there were only two of them, and I knew that such a diversion might provide me with the element of surprise that would allow me to overpower the smaller man, or at least disarm him. The giant would be a problem. I'd left the Azmilon in the TARDIS and wouldn't have used it in front of all these people anyway. I turned my head slowly to see who was to my right. It was Mr. Garcia. I looked to my left and saw the banker with the Princess Diana haircut. She was crying. The bank manager, whom I had seen for a moment bringing money to a teller, was on the other side of her; he was smiling but stopped when he saw me looking at him. I turned my face back down to the clock and tried to set the alarm to go off in five minutes. It took me two minutes to achieve this without being seen. I slid it backwards toward the center of the lobby but it didn't slide quite that far. It was sitting out in the open where anyone could see it, but closer to me than to anyone else; it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out whose clock it was if it was spotted before it went off.

I whispered to Mr. Garcia: "When you hear an alarm, crawl into that cubicle and hide."

"Are you nuts?" he whispered back.

I started to draw my legs under me, placing my hands on the wall to push myself up when the time came, but I had to place them low, which didn't afford me much leverage. Mr. Garcia, observing me, shook his head but did likewise. The alarm went off and all hell broke loose. I broke loose too. I leapt up and to my dismay found not the smaller man but the giant aiming his Glock at me. I ducked and dove at his legs, swinging my arms up to knock the weapon upward, as it had followed me down. Of course this effort landed me flat on my face. My assault on his legs hadn't even toppled him, nor had my swing dislodged the Glock from his grip, but at least he hadn't shot me. I grabbed his legs, trying to pull him down, again to no avail. He simply kicked me twice in the face, then reversed his hold on the gun and thwacked me on the back of my head. The alarm clock echoed in my head, then faded away to nothing at all.

I wasn't out long. I came to in time to see the smaller robber's face as Mr. Smith pulled the balaclava up to his eyebrows; the robber pulled the balaclava back down, grabbed Mr. Smith by the shoulders, slammed him against a counter and pistol-whipped him. The giant already had two heavy sacks, presumably of money, and now pulled his partner off of Mr. Smith, handed him the sacks and said "Come on." They rapidly crossed the bank lobby but I was lying in their way, in a small pool of blood. Instead of stepping over me or going around, the giant hoisted me up (a dreadful deja vu made me shudder) and carried me out of the bank as if I were just another sack of money. I let myself go limp – or maybe I am fooling myself that I had a choice in the matter – until we got outside. A black four-door Chevette now waited at the curb. The smaller robber opened the back door, threw the moneybags onto the back seat, then stepped aside so the giant could toss me in after them, but I scrambled over the bags, opened the other door and tumbled out into the street. A Harley Davidson screeched to a halt, an inch from my head. I got up, threw myself onto the bike, behind the driver and yelled,

"Go!"

The driver didn't need to be told twice. Off we zoomed, away from the bank but also away from the TARDIS. The Chevette followed us, but my driver made an illegal U-turn and passed it in the other direction, then turned right, drove three blocks, turned left and proceeded to get us good and lost. We pulled into a parking lot behind a video rental shop and parked. The driver pulled off her helmet, letting a mass of chestnut hair fall down around her shoulders, "So what happened to your face?" she asked.

I felt my face. "Pretty much everything," I replied.

For once my friends had stayed put when asked to do so. That meant they both saw me dismount a Harley and receive a pretty intense kiss from a stunning brunette. They must have seen me wince, too; they learned why after Tina zoomed off and I entered the TARDIS.

"Oh my God, what happened, Doctor?" Tegan reached out to touch my face and then thought better of it.

"Does it hurt?" asked Nyssa.

"Yes," I said, closing the door and starting to set coordinates. "I was at the bank, in the bank robbery." It was actually getting more and more difficult to speak as various parts of my face were starting to swell. "Tell you later." The time rotor started rising and falling, and suddenly I just had to sit down. There was a chair on the other side of the room but that seemed awfully far away so I sat down hard on the floor. The fresh autumn air and the exhilarating ride, not to mention the need to hang onto Tina's waist, had kept me alert, but now, trying to process the last half hour, I felt positively fuzzy. I was aware of Nyssa's daubing at my face with a wet cloth, then with some kind of antiseptic that stung. Then for a time I was blind because Nyssa had placed a cool, damp cloth over my eyes, and Tegan was gently holding the cloth in place, alternately murmuring comforting sounds at me and promising impossibly gruesome torments to whoever had done this to me (and she had identified the responsible party with unsurprising accuracy). When we landed I removed the cloth and handed it to Tegan, opened my eyes, allowed my friends to help me to my feet, checked the settings and looked at the scanner. We had landed in the front garden of a farmhouse. I felt sure we had arrived at Lisa's family home in the late spring of 1983.

Family. It occurred to me that I didn't know Lisa's family name. I didn't see her car in the double driveway, Was I too early or had she been delayed, and how should I address whoever answered the door?

I expressed my concerns to Nyssa and Tegan. Tegan said, "I'm more worried about how they're going to react to your face.

"Is it that bad?"

"Not the best."

"Does it still hurt?" asked Nyssa.

"Not as much as my brain. I suppose we could just wait for Lisa and Mr. Garcia and hope Lisa's family doesn't look out the window." My friends were agreeable to that but I didn't like my own idea. "Maybe," I said, "she called ahead to tell them about us."

"Maybe," said Tegan, "there was a problem. Let's say the cops come when she calls and they find two guys unconscious. What's the first thing they're gonna ask? Who did this, right? So what are they going to say? 'The Doctor and his friends but, oh, they're not here now'? What will the cops think?"

"Good point," I said, rather startled by all that. "I've left them in a bind. What have I done?" I sighed. "Poor TARDIS, More short hops.:

"Poor us," said Tegan. "We don't know when or where we'll end up."