'No need,' snapped the Doctor. 'It's surprising what one can find if one knows where to look in here. Now that is interesting.'

'What?'

The Doctor's head shook slightly from side to side. 'I've found the data trail from my most recent previous visit. But someone's been covering over my tracks. No, no ...' He shook his chestnut curls in an irritated gesture of dismissal. 'No, someone's tracing my tracks. No!' His voice was a shout.

'Doctor?'

His voice was a whisper now, as though he was worried about being overheard. "There's someone in here already. I'm not sure if it's the effect of the Faction virus, but I can sense something else. Someone else. Someone alive.'

Fitz stared at Tarra, his mind still churning. Gallifrey. The Time Lords. He was lost Gawd knew where on the one planet that the Doctor was trying to avoid at all costs.

Even in the poor light of the oddshaped corridor, Fitz could see that Tarra still had a vacant look in her eyes, as though she was focusing on something in the far, far distance, and was hardly aware that he was there. So it was a surprise when she interrupted his thoughts. "They know we're here.'

'Er ...' said Fitz. Yeah, that's cool, guy. Smooth. Stay calm. Don't talk about Time Lords.

'Er ... what's this "we", anyway? You're the one with your head in the box.'

Tarra's head swivelled towards him, her beautiful brown eyes bright but unfocussed. "They know we are in this part of the building. I ... . Wait ...' Her eyes closed, and her face seemed to crumple into a scowl. "This isn't just a record of the Doctor: he's actually in the Matrix.

He's here!'

Fitz wanted to ask if the Doctor was OK, but held himself back just in time.

'Well,' grinned Tarra, her eyes still closed, the eyeballs sliding beneath the lids. Her eyelids scrunched into tight creases. 'I think I'll just erase the Doctor's record.'

'Is that wise?' Fitz gasped.

'Wise or not, it's done. Now let's get out of here before they trace us.'

She fiddled with her odd, ivory control device.

Fitz nearly leapt out of his skin when a hissing roar came from the corridor behind them.

He'd already thrown up his hands in surrender, whacking them painfully against the corridor ceiling, before he realised that it was another Transtube screeching reluctantly to a halt.

'How do you do that?" he asked her feebly.

Tarra brushed past him, stepping into the Transtube. 'Does it matter? Now we have what we came for, Fitz.' She held up the ivory box, her arm waving at him.

The Transtube rocked as it gathered speed. 'I have the securelyheld bioextract. It's what we need for the ritual this evening.'

'What about the Doctor?' asked Fitz. 'What will happen now you've erased his record?'

He studied Tarra for a reaction, but there was none. She said, 'I've done more than merely erase his record.'

'How can there be anything alive in there with the Doctor?' asked Mali.

'Of course,' Klenchron told her sarcastically. 'He can identify one other live user among the billions of other dead minds in there. I think not.'

'Shut up,' hissed the Doctor, and then reeled off a string of Gallifreyan numbers and sigils, for all the world as if he was singing a song.

Mali snapped her fingers. 'Hey, those sound like coordinates. Klenchron, check them out.

Give them to us again, Doctor.'

He sang them once more.

Klenchron's communicator flickered as the result appeared almost immediately. 'Local,' he said urgently, his thin lips twitching beneath his bulbous nose. 'Somewhere in the old quarters ...' He started to bark a series of commands into his communicator.

'Quiet!' snapped the Doctor.

Mali squeezed his nerveless arm. 'Whoever it is can't hear us.'

'Curses!' spat the Doctor. 'Whoever it is can certainly hear me! It's coming ...'

His body began to shake, as though he was having a seizure. The connections started to shake loose. He convulsed again, and his eyes snapped wide open.

For a moment, Mali thought she saw fear and loathing and madness swirling in the dark pupils within their brightblue irises.

The Doctor sat up abruptly. 'Run,' he said quietly.

He tried to stand up, but his weak legs buckled.

'Run,' he said again, more distinctly, an insistent, commanding note entering his voice.

Mali was helping him to his feet when the Matrix console beside them exploded into shards.

Chapter Thirteen.

Edifice

'Stop fussing,' said the Doctor. He did a swift inventory of his injuries. Nothing major. Not much minor, apart from some bruising. No broken bones that he could detect, let's just check ... yes, hipbone still connected to the thighbone, thighbone still in loose proximity to the yes, hipbone still connected to the thighbone, thighbone still in loose proximity to the kneebone ...

Mali continued to dab at his forehead with a damp cloth. 'Stop fussing yourself,' she said.

'Or I'll ask them to keep you here for another few days.'

The Doctor sat bolt upright in the hospital bed. He stared at the door, wondering whether he could struggle past Mali. Out into the corridor, towards the ... .

Towards the what? He had no idea where here was. Or where it went. The hospital room connected to the corridor, the corridor connected to ...?

Hospital. Even the word made his hearts palpitate. He had to get out of here.

'You know, I feel a great deal better.'

'Let me be the judge of that,' said Mali, easing him back against his pillow.

The Doctor pushed himself into a sitting position again. 'And you have a medical degree, of course,' he sneered, 'you're an expert -'

'Yes,' she replied simply, pushing him back again.

'I must've missed that detail.' He struggled again. 'I'm a doctor too, you know.'

'You're the Doctor,' replied Mali obstinately. 'And that's an honorary title, as you well know, Doctor.'

'Well, I've been dumped out of the Matrix by better people in the past, you know.'

'And doubtless you've been in bigger temporal explosions.'

He scowled at her. 'As a matter of fact, yes.'

'Better people than whom?'

The Doctor slumped into his pillow. 'I'm really not sure. I didn't get a look at her ... Aha!

Her! Well, that's a start, isn't it?'

Mali studied his reaction. 'We found where the Matrix was being tapped. Some access tunnel in the ancient foundations of the Capitol, with none of the security of the newer buildings.

Whoever it was knew what they were doing. Knew what she was doing, it seems.'

The Doctor slid out of bed, and started looking around his room. 'Where are my shoes? Oh look, someone has kindly cleaned my clothes. Pity about the marks on the coat. You know, just before I was thrown out of the Matrix, I saw whoevershewas remove a securely coded bioextract.' He balanced on one foot as he tried to put his shoe on. Now, he considered his trousers, which were freshly laundered and draped over the back of a nearby chair.

Mali stared at him with impatience. After watching him try, and fail, to pull his trousers on over his shoes, she said, 'What was the stolen bioextract?'

The Doctor hopped on to the bed again. He took off the shoes, placed them on the bed, seized the trousers, and leapt into them. 'It was the bioextract of a former president called Greyjan.'

'Greyjan?' Mali could hear the surprise in her own voice.

'Yes, why? Is it important?' asked the Doctor, hopping about as he struggled to pull up his beige trousers. 'Who was Greyjan?'

'He was Gallifrey's briefestserving President. Ruled for only three years.'

The Doctor stopped struggling for a moment. 'That rings a bell. I think I may have heard about Greyjan somewhere ... Have you seen my shoes about? I'm not sure that Ah, yes, I think these are the ones.' He paused. 'Mali, you seem to be remarkably well informed about this particular dead president.'

'Greyjan's something of a cult figure at the moment.'

'Popular?'

'No, I mean as in a religious cult. He's one of the more widespread current superstitions on Gallifrey.

'Since when were you all so superstitious?'

'Please, Doctor, finish getting dressed.'

The Doctor started lacing up his shoes. 'Why is Greyjan a cult figure?'

'Perhaps because he only became President by chance, after the two other candidates withdrew unexpectedly. Maybe that appeals to people who feel dispossessed? Certainly, no one had expected Greyjan to become President, not even Greyjan himself. He'd always been more absorbed by his own researches.'

'Oh dear,' said the Doctor, sitting down heavily on his bed.

'What's the matter?' asked Mali. 'Are those the wrong shoes after all?'

'No, no, these fit perfectly,' said the Doctor. 'I've just remembered something rather significant about Greyjan's researches.'

The gloom seemed to pervade the room even more. Evening was drawing in again, but Fitz had expected that seeing the shabby dwelling in some kind of daylight would rob the place of the oppressive feeling that had permeated it on his unexpected arrival. It didn't. It wasn't seedy or sad or in any way reassuringly familiar. There was a dark sense of foreboding as Fitz and Tarra went in.

Or maybe that was just him, Fitz thought. Everything Tarra had told him about this socalled practical joke was spooking him. He tried to think back to the impromptu seance he'd once organised for a hippy chick called Eleanor, to convince himself that this was the same kind of puton. But he'd been with the Doctor too much now, been away from Earth too long, to be deluded by that. When you've seen plantcreatures and faeries, it's not too much of a leap of faith to start believing that a goodlooking woman and her two wacko friends might bring someone back from the dead.

Tarra was busy getting things ready for the forthcoming seance. Fitz remembered something she'd told him on their journey, something that had rung a bell in his mind. 'What did you mean about chaos theory?'

Tarra barely paused from her bustling about the dusty room. 'Greyjan's own researches, before he became President, convinced him that there was a law like chaos theory which governs paradox. He concluded that the fabric of the universe itself on some level was in essence a commodity that could bend to accommodate time and its impossibilities.'

'So he used that when he was President, right?'

'No, he died after only three years in office. The shortest period of any Time Lord President.

It was rumoured that he took his own life no one was sure at the time. What is certain was that his sciences were declared outlawed and arcane.'

'Not,' said a new voice/that anything as trivial as that will stop us from using them.'

It was Kellen, Fitz saw. Large as life and twice as ugly.

'Tonight, Greyjan's Presidency will resume. Tonight the great Sage of Paradox will be reborn!'

'Don't be dreary, Doctor. Why would anyone want to liberate Greyjan's bioextract from the Matrix?' Romana pared one of her nails, giving it twice the attention she seemed to be affording to the Doctor.

Mali stood by calmly, but the Doctor hopped angrily from foot to foot.

'And do stop that; said Romana testily. 'I hate it when visitors crush the pile in my carpet.'

The Doctor thumped across the floor of the Presidential suite, and stood so close to Romana that their noses almost touched. 'Why worry about your decor when you should be worrying about the future of this planet?'