'Oh, he won't be in any position to bother Earth again for decades.'

The Doctor and Miranda drove away, ready for their next adventure.

43.

Chapter Three.

The Time Trap

Rachel swallowed. It was very strange seeing herself as an eleven-year-old.

These days a lot of new parents bought camcorders, so many people would end up with such a window on their past, episodes of their lives recorded as though they were characters in a soap opera, but they'd know they were being watched.

She'd always wondered why she'd been wary of getting a mobile phone.

'That was the man we saw,' Marnal confirmed.

'Do you know he's a Time Lord?'

'Yes. He had two hearts. So. . . he calls himself the Doctor?'

'Do you know him?'

Marnal shook his head. 'There was no reason to think I would know him personally. So, he had a daughter. And he seemed to be trapped on Earth at the time. No TARDIS? And he said something about not having all his memories. Interesting. I will have to do more research.'

'Could you look at anything using that bottle universe?' Rachel asked. Everyone had things they didn't want other people to see. For that matter, everyone had plenty of things they didn't want reminding about.

'Anything,' Marnal said, busy scribbling in a notebook. 'Now I have his trail, I should be able to follow his entire time-stream.'

'It would change the world,' Rachel said. 'To see the past like that. Instead of trying someone in a court you could just play the tape.'

'It doesn't just view the past,' Marnal said offhandedly, 'it shows the present and future too. It's all relative.'

'The future?' she said. She was getting that twitch in her leg that she got when she was really scared. 'I could see my future?'

Marnal turned the notebook over. He'd filled the second half of it with impenetrable equations. 'It's a little more complicated than that. You have free will. If you could see your own future, you could alter it.'

Rachel nodded, a little relieved. 'If I knew I was going to be run over by a bus when I was still a young woman, I could avoid buses for a few years.'

'You could certainly try,' Marnal agreed.

45.'This. . . thing,' she said, waving her hand over the bottle universe. 'It's like magic. Cold fusion and going to other planets? We've at least heard about those. We can't do them yet, but it can't be much longer before we work out how. But. . . this?'

Marnal gave her a condescending smile. 'Your race hasn't even reached Type 1 on the Kardashev scale. It doesn't control the resources of this one planet, let alone a solar system or a galaxy. The Time Lords were the Type 4 civilisation. We had no equals. We controlled the fundamental forces of the entire universe. Nothing could communicate with us on our level. Most races pray to lesser beings than the Time Lords.'

'Yet my planet is still here, and yours isn't,' Rachel said.

Marnal's face seemed to grow dark. 'Indeed.'

'And you really think the Doctor did it?'

'I know it.'

'But he was helping mankind there. Without him, the Network would have conquered the Earth.'

'He was interfering, don't you see that? Breaking the most sacred law of the Time Lords.'

'He saved lives. Including my life.' She hesitated. 'And yours, for that matter. You were on Earth then too.'

'Who is to say the Network shouldn't have conquered this planet? What gives the Doctor the right to pick a side and fight for them?'

'Those aliens would have killed us.'

'No. They wanted you alive. They'd have made you smarter and stronger.

United your species, given them a great purpose, made you part of a vast and ancient civilisation.'

Rachel considered this, then said, 'He saved my planet.'

'And destroyed his own.'

'We don't know that for certain.'

'We know it. We just don't know the exact circ.u.mstances. What I'm interested in is that if the Doctor was telling the Provider the truth, and he really has amnesia, he himself may not know the reasons why he did it himself.'

'Well,' said Rachel, thinking aloud, 'who's to say that the Doctor shouldn't have destroyed Gallifrey? Perhaps he picked the right side and it was meant to be.'

Marnal was clearly angry at the thought. 'No.'

'How can you know?'

'I know. I know what was meant to happen. It wasn't that. With that one act, the Doctor has done untold damage to history.'

Rachel looked over at the bottle universe. 'And now you've picked up his trail again.'

46.'I can track him, yes. I will use this device to find out what I can about him.

He's the enemy, Rachel. We must know our enemy.' Marnal hesitated, then smiled. 'It seems we may be able to know him better than he knows himself.'

'G.o.d, I hate Mars,' Fitz said, not for the first time. 'This is even worse than the last time I was here, when Anji '

'As I said to Dr Johnson, "When one is tired of Mars, one is tired of life",' the Doctor retorted.

'Yeah, shut up, Fitz. This is brilliant!'

Trix was bouncing along in the light gravity. Her catsuit looked great on her. Emma Peel in sequins. Electric-blue wig and lipstick matching her eyes.

Exactly the way a bird from the twenty-first century like Trix should dress, in Fitz's book.

It wasn't, on the other hand, a look that suited Fitz at all.

'It's 2097, Fitz. When in Rome. . . '

'When we were in Rome, Doctor, you wore a toga. Here, though, I notice you've opted for the old frock coat and poncey shirt ensemble. Your normal clothes.'

'What of it?'

'Well, I can't help but notice that you're the only one of us not wearing moon boots and false eyelashes.'

'You look very fetching, Fitz,' Trix a.s.sured him. 'In fact, I really want to take a photo of you.'

She waved the 3-D camera she'd just bought at him.

'Get lost.'

It was the middle of the day, but it was about as warm as a winter's afternoon. The sky was dusty pink. The Doctor stopped in his tracks.

'You'll be inside the dome but I need to be out here. So I need to dress up warm, and you need to dress formally. We know there's going to be an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt on the pope, but we don't know where, or how.'

'That's another thing. It's always that lot these days, every second time we land somewhere. They're always doing the same sort of thing, and you always beat them.'

'Practice makes perfect.'

'Yeah, but it's boring. Who'd want to fight them when we could be taking part in a yacht race across the whole world of Selonart or seeing an astral flower bloom? What about when we fought crystal skeletons across time and s.p.a.ce, defeating them at the end of the universe? I'd watch a movie of that, I'd even read a book about it.'

The Doctor had a serious expression. 'This is a crucial point in Earth's rela-tions with alien species. The very first papal visit to Mars. The pope is going 47 to consecrate the first cathedral here, and anoint the first native Martian arch-bishops, and if she's ext '

The Doctor whirled round. 'I think I heard something. Hang on a second.'

He disappeared over a nearby ridge, but was back within a minute.

'There's only about six hundred of them. You two, get back inside. You know the plan?'

'Yes,' they both chorused.

The Doctor had already hurried away, and the shooting had started '"When you're tired of Mars, you're tired of life",' Trix reminded Fitz.

'Perhaps I am.'

'Tired of life?' she looked suddenly, gratifyingly, concerned. A flying disc screamed overhead, its pilot on fire.

'No. Not life. This life. My life.'

'You're ready to settle down, you mean?' Trix's laugh almost drowned out the sound of the explosion.

'Why not? The two of us.'

She stopped in her tracks. 'Fitz. . . '

The ground shook like an earthquake, breaking an awkward silence.

'I don't mean straight away.'

She looked at him. 'When do you mean, then?'

He had meant straight away, but even as he'd spoken he'd realised it was too much. 'Next time we're on Earth.'

'You think that next time we're back on Earth, we should. . . what?'

A great patch of the night's sky was white, the stars points of black, for a second.

'I don't know,' Fitz admitted. 'We should be normal for a bit. Together.

Make a go of it.'

Trix giggled. 'Settle down on Earth?'

'Earth in the twentieth century,' Fitz clarified. 'I'm not getting stuck in the olden days, or after they drop the Bomb or whatever.'

They laughed.

There was a grating metallic scream, loud but a long way off.

'Early twenty-first. That's where I've got my credit cards.'

'Either way, it's got to be England.'

Bits of metal started raining down.

'The United Kingdom,' Trix said, stepping aside to avoid a falling hemisphere of bonded polycarbide the size of a car.

'It won't happen,' Fitz said. 'We'll spend our whole time in alien galaxies or in the far future.'

They grinned at each other. In the distance, there was a low rumbling explosion.

48.'Did that sound like a flying saucer kerploding to you?' Fitz asked.

Trix checked her watch. 'Four minutes. I think that's a new record.'

'Have you found him again?' Rachel asked. She'd brought Marnal his first coffee of the morning.