32.'All the TARDISes would have been lost when Gallifrey was destroyed. They draw their power from Gallifrey itself.' But Marnal clearly wasn't comfortable.

'If they're time machines, could it be from a time before your planet was '

Marnal gave her a withering look. 'Time travel occurs in relative dimensions. Weren't you listening before? A TARDIS can travel into the past and future, but not its own past and future. That would be a theoretical absurdity.'

Rachel glowered at him, but he was completely oblivious.

'Would every single one of your people have been on the planet when it blew up?' she asked instead. 'We know the answer to that: you weren't. So there could have been others.'

Marnal wasn't happy with this line of inquiry. 'There were always renegades and exiles,' he said. 'Right from the earliest days. But not one of. . . them was capable of this. Not one of them would, well, would dare.'

'Perhaps the Doctor wanted revenge on the Time Lords.'

'Perhaps,' Marnal muttered. He turned to Rachel, looking at her properly for the first time since he'd changed his appearance. 'What did you just call him?'

'Forget it.'

'No. What did you just call him?'

'It's silly, OK? But he reminds me of someone I knew, once.'

Marnal was watching her.

'It's not him,' Rachel said, uncertainly. 'How could it be?'

'Where did you see this man?' he asked.

Rachel took a deep breath. She might as well say what had been on her mind.

'There was a girl in my cla.s.s, back in primary school. We were both on the chess team. She was really clever she moved away, down south and we lost touch. Anyway, I think that's her dad. It looks just like him. And her dad called himself "the Doctor".'

Marnal had returned to his book. 'Coincidence,' he said sharply.

'That's what I think. It's just. . . Well, he did have a police box in his garden.'

Marnal looked up.

'Give me the exact time and location,' he ordered, heading back over to the gla.s.s bottle.

Rachel swallowed. 'Well, I'll do my best.'

33.Interlude The Girl Who Was Different A snowy winter's night, in a back street on the edge of the Derbyshire village of Greyfrith.

A tall shape loomed up out of darkness the helmeted figure of a policeman, trudging from his panda car. He moved along the little street to where it ended in a brick wall. He shone his torch onto the barrier. He paused for a moment, listening there seemed to be some kind of electronic hum, like a generator.

It was very faint. Perhaps he was imagining it.

Now, though, he definitely heard something behind him. He turned, and caught the young girl in the torch beam.

She was about ten years old, a very slight figure. She wore a woollen bobble hat, with red curls snaking out from underneath it, but other than that she was in her school uniform a blouse and knee-length skirt. It was far too cold.

And there were no houses around here, she must have walked a long way like that.

'Aren't you frozen?' he asked.

She didn't look it. Someone might have dropped her off here. But why?

The young girl smiled and said something, but so quietly he couldn't hear.

The policeman moved over to her. 'What's your name, miss?' he asked.

She indicated that she wanted to whisper it to him. She was half his height, so he had to bend down to her. As he did so, he gave her an encouraging smile.

'>:-(' she said, before lunging at him, grabbing his throat and crushing his Adam's apple under her thumbs.

The policeman made an attempt to get up, but she was a dead weight around his neck. He tried calling for help, but no sound came out. Now he tried to breathe, but he just couldn't suck air into his lungs the grip around his throat was too tight. He felt himself weaken, saw everything going black.

If he hadn't bent down, he realised, she wouldn't have been able to reach his neck. She was about ten years old.

He was dead before he hit the snow. The girl stood over the body, her Clarks sandal pressed down on his windpipe, for more than a minute just to make sure.

35.They'd gritted the paths around Greyfrith County Primary School, and that had taken all the fun away. Miranda had been hoping she could slide the length of the playground, but its surface was now a dull red-grey mush that was getting into her shoes.

Her friend Rachel was shivering. 'They should let us inside.'

'No one else looks that cold,' Miranda noted. She rarely felt cold herself, but the Doctor, her father, told her she should always be careful to wear a coat, to blend in.

The Doctor had been her father for almost a year. It was the second time she'd been adopted. Her original adoptive parents had been killed in a car accident. She wanted to stay with the Doctor, and the Doctor was keen for her to do so. Even with the backing of her teacher, Mrs Castle, and a number of character references from some of the people the Doctor had met over the years, like Graham Greene and Laurence Olivier, it had taken a long time to become official.

But Miranda always thought of the Doctor as her father.

Like her, he had two hearts. Like her, he would often stare up at the night sky, and feel some strange sense that up there was home and living down here was just a temporary thing.

'What are they playing at?' Rachel asked.

She meant the question literally. Two of the boys, Adrian and Chris, sat next to each other on a step, each with some sort of electronic device in their hands.

Miranda went up to them, but they didn't even look up. They were staring intently into the little screens, their thumbs working away at the b.u.t.tons beneath. Every so often there would be a furtive bleep or buzz. The boys seemed totally absorbed. Their conversation rarely sparkled, but it was usually better than this.

Miranda bent over to get a better look, but all she could see was a set of seemingly random letters, numbers and other symbols. It was like a code of some kind.

'What are those?' she asked.

Adrian looked up, as if it was the first time he'd registered she was there.

'They're giving them out,' he said.

'But what are they?'

'They're giving them out,' Chris echoed. He'd always been one to follow his friend's lead.

It looked like a walkie-talkie, or a toy telephone.

'Can I have a look?'

'Get your own,' Adrian said.

Chris just glared at her. Miranda stepped back.

36.'Where from?'

'New girl.' He pointed to a small redhead in a bobble hat. There were a handful of kids around her, and she had a black bag on her shoulder that was almost the size she was.

'What's her name?' Rachel asked, but the boys were absorbed in the latest craze.

By the end of the day, every kid in the school had one of the electronic devices, and every one of them had ended up as antisocial as Adrian and Chris. During cla.s.ses no one played with their devices, but it was eerily quiet. You could sense the phones there, nested in everyone's schoolbags, waiting for the next break.

As soon as she got home Miranda took hers straight to her father.

He was in his study, filling in forms. He smiled, glad to be able to finish them.

'What have you got there?'

'The latest craze. It's a portable telephone, but it does other stuff.'

He picked it up and weighed it. 'This is a telephone?' He seemed surprised.

He put it next to his own mobile phone, which was about four times its size and weight. It was only now that the two phones were side by side that Miranda realised just how weird hers looked. It was all liquid curves, with a strange pearl-like sheen to its silver casing. The controls were dotted around, not laid out in neat rows. It didn't have an aerial, let alone one you had to pull out.

The Doctor picked up the new phone and turned it over in his hand. 'I don't see how you get into it,' he told her.

'It recharges and repairs itself,' she told him. 'A few people dropped theirs, and they just. . . fixed. You can throw them against walls and run them over with cars and they're fine.'

The Doctor looked impressed, then worried. 'Where did you get this?' he asked.

'They were just handing them out.'

He frowned. 'This is worth hundreds of pounds. Who was handing them out?'

'A girl. She's quiet, but someone else said her dad's just taken over an electronics factory.'

'Provider Electronics? On the Buxton Road?'

'That's right. Was I right to take one?'

The Doctor tapped his lip thoughtfully. 'As I said to King Priam, you should beware of geeks bearing gifts. If only he'd listened. Of course, I also told him not to look a gift horse in the mouth. . . '

37.'Dad. . . ' Miranda said impatiently.

'Did this come with a box or instructions?'

'No. It's meant to be easy to use. I can't get it to work, though.'

'You can't?' He pressed a b.u.t.ton. 'That turns it on, and '

'I know that. But '

'And I place it to my ear and. . . Oh, it's gone dead.'

'That's what I'm saying.'

The Doctor tried again. 'Perhaps I'm pressing the off b.u.t.ton with my ear,'

he suggested. A third attempt yielded the same result. He laid it down on his desk and looked at it for a moment. 'This was free?' he asked.

'Yes,' Miranda told him again.

The Doctor picked up a metal paperweight and smashed it against the telephone, neatly breaking open the casing.

'Dad!' Miranda cried out.

'Merely the first part of my careful scientific investigation,' he a.s.sured her.

He peered down into the ma.s.s of circuits and wires. Something caught his eye. He reached into the jumble with a pair of tweezers.

It was a glowing blue wire, and it wriggled in the grip of the tweezers like a worm.

'It's alive?' Miranda asked.

'No. . . I don't think so. But it's not a product of human technology, either.'

The Doctor dropped the 'worm' back into the ma.s.s of circuits. As he and Miranda watched, wires in the two halves of the telephone started twitching, reaching out for each other. A couple managed to grope blindly across the divide. They latched on to other wires, and started to pull together. Two minutes later, and the phone was back in one piece, and on standby.

'I think I'll pay that factory on Buxton Road a visit,' the Doctor said, quietly.

'I'm coming with you.'

The Doctor hesitated, then nodded.

They had parked close to the factory, then walked the rest of the way. It was in the little industrial estate right at the edge of town and was an old mill building with a slate roof. There was a ten-foot wall all the way around it.

Flecks of soot and dirt had washed into the brown stone over the years.

'I'm amazed no one's noticed that,' the Doctor said, waving his hand towards the factory.

It was dark, but Miranda could see what her father was pointing at: a radio mast, taller than a tree, gleaming silver. It ended in three p.r.o.ngs, making it look like a gigantic trident planted in the ground.