Mrs Winfield sighed. 'Bad timing.'

'An occupational hazard,' Trix agreed. She was feeling a bit more settled.

This was a normal kitchen, with a normal person serving her normal coffee, and she was having a chat about human beings.

Every so often a Vore would walk past, stand for a moment staring through the window, then walk off in its strange, lumbering-yet-twitchy way. It wasn't easy to get used to.

'Why did you love him?' Mrs Winfield asked.

Trix hugged her coffee mug while she thought about that. 'Well, it kind of snuck up on me. And him, I think. We were, er, workmates. He's honest.

What you see is what you get with Fitz. No matter what was happening, he was. . . well, he was Fitz.'

'Trust.'

'I trusted him with my life, so often it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. He didn't play games, no hidden agendas or emotional baggage.

Even after everything he's been through.'

191.

'I've had a couple of friends, and their husbands or wives, well, they weren't the people they thought they were. Or they changed for the worse. That wasn't true with Des. It sounds like a criticism to say that someone. . . I can't even think of a nice way to put it. That someone stays the same. Sounds like they're stagnant. Of course Des and I changed over thirty years, but I could rely on him.'

Trix looked around the spotless, barricaded kitchen. 'Can you cope on your own?'

'I keep leaving food out for Binks, the cat, but she hasn't eaten anything. I think the monsters must have got her.'

'Cats sometimes turn up after months. Don't give up hope yet.' Mrs Winfield nodded politely. 'Best to move on, I think.'

Trix had known this woman for ten minutes, and she couldn't yet work out whether she was in a healthy, pragmatic state or in almost psychotic denial of what was happening.

'You still speak about him as though he's alive,' Mrs Winfield noted quietly.

'He's gone.'

Trix started crying then, great uncontrolled sobs that started somewhere in her gut and choked their way up into her mouth, nose and eyes. She felt Mrs Winfield's arms around her, telling her it was all right. She imagined that if Fitz was here he'd be telling her not to cry. If he was here, she wouldn't need to. As she sobbed, she got angry with herself, embarra.s.sed that she couldn't contain herself.

She sat up, took deep breaths. It was several minutes before she was cogent again.

'We're all going to need counselling, aren't we?' Mrs Winfield sighed. She'd been crying herself.

'Who lives next door?' Trix asked, determined to change the subject.

Mrs Winfield told her about the mysterious old author next door, the one who wrote stories. She even managed to fish out one of his old books, the Scope sticker still on it. Science fiction.

'I need to investigate Marnal's house,' Trix said.

'Why?'

'My friend, the Doctor, might be in there, or there could be a clue to where he went after that.'

'Trix, dear, he was probably eaten by the '

'I know what might have happened. But. . .

No. It's the Doctor. He's somewhere else, he's fighting them.'

Mrs Winfield smiled indulgently. Trix was sure she would have done the same if their positions were reversed, and that Mrs Winfield would feel just as patronised.

192.

The air ripped open and the TARDIS fell into it, steam swirling off every surface.

After a moment, the lamp on top stopped flashing and the door opened.

The Doctor stood in the doorway, looked around and then looked down.

'Very uneven terrain, K9. I think you'd better stay inside.' Now, that did did ring a bell. 'Monitor the TARDIS repairs. Help the old girl, if she needs it.' ring a bell. 'Monitor the TARDIS repairs. Help the old girl, if she needs it.'

The Doctor stepped out, closed the door and carefully locked it. A great subterranean chamber complete with stalagmites and stalact.i.tes, arches and chimneys. The air was warm and damp, filled with a deeply unpleasant smell, or mix of smells. There weren't any monsters, not that he could see, but there was little light. A layman might mistake this for a natural landscape, but then people often looked at fields and hedgerows and thought the same. The living rock had been carved and worn down by something with a real sense of purpose. These weren't random channels; these were surface conduits and lateral connectives.

A termite mound or an anthill.

Yes, that was what this reminded him of. He'd seen a termite mound in Africa, once. A spire of mud as tall as a tree, and like a tree extending just as far underground. A community with more citizens than any human city, all living in eusocial harmony. with each other, at any rate. Humans thought the Earth was theirs, but they were recent tenants of a world dominated by gra.s.ses, bacteria, plankton and nematodes. The termites had been around a thousand times longer than humans and there were countless numbers of them never mind population size, by sheer weight they outnumbered people in Africa.

The Doctor had already known from the glimpse of leg that he was dealing with an insect species. Insects the size of men, and social insects by the look of all this. He mustn't fall into the trap of thinking the Vore were exactly like termites, though. He racked his brain for sc.r.a.ps of information he could use.

He needed to get some idea of the layout of the chamber. . . which, now he came to think of it, looked awfully familiar.

The Doctor tried to get a better sense of the place. Far, far away there was sound, like a rushing river. There would have to be water here somewhere, but this could equally well be traffic or. . .

Where exactly was he? The last time he'd checked the instruments the TARDIS had been pretty close to Earth, certainly within the moon's...o...b..t. The gravity here felt natural, and it was substantial. He guessed it was about a sixth of Earth's. About the same as the moon's, but this wasn't the moon.

At some point, while trying to evade the hypers.p.a.ce corridors, he must have fallen into a s.p.a.ce warp. Something had gone very wrong.

193.

He turned on his heel, to head back to the TARDIS and take some more readings.

A monster blocked his way.

The Doctor looked it up and down. 'So you're a Vore? I've heard the expression "time flies", I've never actually met one before. h.e.l.lo.'

Others were crowding around him. The group started moving and, as though he was caught in a stream, the Doctor had little choice but to go with the flow. Within moments he was jostled against Marnal and Rachel, then the three of them were pushed in the same direction, leading out of the chamber.

'Fancy meeting you here,' the Doctor said. 'So, you had a TARDIS of your own tucked away?'

'My TARDIS is here. . . now.'

A couple of the insects jostled them apart.

'Friends of yours?' the Doctor asked.

'We've reached an arrangement.'

The Doctor grinned knowingly. 'One where they give you the TARDIS if you give them me? Are you sure you checked the small print?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well I can't help noticing that the TARDIS is back that way, and we're all being marched off in the other direction.'

'He talked to them, Doctor,' Rachel said.

'Did he, now?' the Doctor replied knowingly.

'We reached terms.'

'Had a chat?'

'That's right.'

'You are aware that most insects are deaf, aren't you, Marnal? BOO!'

Rachel jumped, but not one of the Vore so much as turned its head.

'A lucky guess,' Marnal said, subdued.

'No. I just noticed that the Vore aren't making sounds, but they're clearly communicating. I imagine they're doing it with gestures and. . . ' The Doctor sniffed the air thoughtfully. 'Yes, chemical signals. Interesting.'

Rachel felt a little foolish about all the shouting she'd been doing. She turned on Marnal. 'You said they understood what you were saying.

'We're still here, aren't we?' Marnal reminded her.

The Doctor gave a wicked smile. 'Oh, we're here all right.'

Whoever had barricaded the house wasn't very good at it. Trix had found a small ground-floor window they'd missed, and easily prised it open. Wriggling inside, she found herself in a little downstairs loo. She couldn't hear anyone else in the house, so she made her way round to the nearest door, cleared the 194 fridge that was blocking it out of the way and let Mrs Winfield in. The house was very cold.

'Do you know your way around?' Trix asked.

'I've never been round here before, but all the houses on the street are the same. You know what I mean: unless they've had a conservatory or knocked rooms through.'

Trix could already see this by comparing Mrs Winfield's kitchen with the one she was in now. Next door it was a lot more modern, and light and airy. The kitchen here, apart from the fridge, probably hadn't changed all that much since the Fifties. The cooker looked as though it had been as lovingly maintained as a vintage car; the cupboards had been kept clean, but were stained and faded with use and age.

There was also the distinct smell of old people not the more unpleasant stuff, just the smell of violets and foot powder, dust and polish. For her part, Trix still smelled of cremated monster.

Trix's working a.s.sumption was that there was no one home human or alien but she stayed on the alert. She edged into the large downstairs library, half-expecting an ambush. She had the urge to take someone on. The monsters, the owner of the house, anyone really. She wanted to smash some heads. Take it out on something that deserved it.

'This is a dining room in our house,' Mrs Winfield said, not even whispering.

Trix ignored her. 'He has a lot of books.'

'Like I say, he was an author. He'd need dictionaries and things, wouldn't he?'

Trix was looking over the shelves. It was gloomy in here, and would have been even if the small window hadn't been blocked. It was possible to make out the t.i.tles, though, and the authors' names. After a quick sampling of the other shelves Trix mentally moved the apostrophe.

'They're all by the guy who lived here,' Trix said.

'All of them?'

Mrs Winfield was working through a pile of Interzones Interzones.

'There's some stuff that's a hundred years old, these are from the Eighties.'

Trix nodded, and pulled down the leather-bound volume that looked the most valuable of all the books. 'Are they all first editions?' she asked.

'I don't think they'd be that valuable. I doubt he'd want to sell them.'

Trix occasionally forgot that things could belong to other people.

A pile of books fell over, and the two women huddled up to face whatever had done it. But there was nothing there.

Trix picked out a couple of paperbacks. 'They're all science fiction?'

'I'm not a fan,' Mrs Winfield admitted.

Trix opened the first one, Valley of the Lost Valley of the Lost, and was surprised to see the word 'Tardis' there.

195.

'It's an acronym,' she muttered under her breath.

'An acronym? Is that some science-fiction thing?'

'It doesn't matter.'

The rest of the book was a little more opaque. It was set on an alien planet, and there was some visiting delegation from a Three Minute City, whatever that was. It wasn't the ideal way to discover an exciting new author, but after a couple of skim-read paragraphs Trix wasn't exactly hooked.

There was absolutely no way that the TARDIS reference was a coincidence.

She and Fitz and the Doctor had been led to Earth by someone who knew about the Doctor, knew about at least one of his companions, knew about the TARDIS. Here, there was someone writing about TARDISes and. . .

'Oh my,' Trix said. 'How long has Marnal been living here?'

'A very long time,' Mrs Winfield said. 'As long as anyone can remember.'

These were books about the Doctor's home planet. The one that not even the Doctor knew anything about, the one that had been destroyed leaving few traces. Written over a period of a hundred years, apparently by the same man.