A woman said, quietly, 'You sound as if you doubt your Endless State.'

Another said,'Why are you here if you're not a believer?'

The large man who had eaten the wafer gazed at her with limpid eyes. The eyes were half closed. There was no pain on his face as he sank to his knees and curled up on the wet gra.s.s, as if to sleep.

Sam began to shake.

The people moved closer, slowly, almost un.o.btrusively, drifting as their prayers had drifted across the wet gra.s.s. All except the very large man and a few others she now realised also remained motionless on the gra.s.s.

Sam blinked. She was surrounded. There was nowhere to run. The air in her suit was gone. These people... what did they want with her?

'We can help you,' said the woman.

'If you'll let us,' said a teenage boy.

'All you have to do is believe.'

'Believe in what?' Sam pointed at the motionless form of the large man. 'Having a snooze while your city falls down around your ears?'

The woman bestowed upon Sam an utterly beautiful smile.'Oh my poor child. He's not asleep. He's Endless.' The word was said with a reverence that made Sam think it could not possibly be uttered with a small 'e'.

A man said loudly, 'If you do not want to be Endless you should not be here. Our State is our choice.You choose to live in a prison. We choose to free ourselves from that prison. Now the time is right to attain our Endless State.'

The capital letters again. Sam felt herself shaking. Her foot slipped on the gra.s.s. She turned, half fell, found herself on her knees as the crowd finally reached her, hands reaching out to touch her, but gently, caressingly, the voices a gestalt sigh.

'- help you, we can -'

'- must have come here for a reason, why else -'

'- attain your Endless State if you only -'

'- just don't know it yet -'

'- let us help you -'

'- trust us -'

'- let us -'

'No! ' Father Denadi's voice was a quiet thunder in the garden. He stepped between Sam and the crowd.'I did not bring her here to force her but to educate her.' He looked at Sam. 'To save her.'

Sam glanced at the figure of the large man curled up asleep on the gra.s.s. No, she finally realised, not asleep. Something far worse. Far, far worse. 'You're mad. You killed that man. You gave him something to eat and now look at him, just look at him ! He's just... lying there... in the wet... he doesn't... he's not... not even...'

breathing he's not '... going to move if... when the rescue ships come.'

Father Denadi held out his hands comfortingly. Sam shied away from them. "The rescue ships have already gone.' Sam gaped. "There were twenty-five million people on this moon. How many ships do you suppose they would need to move us all?'

'Surely there must be...' Sam tailed off helplessly. 'I mean, they wouldn't just abandon you... I mean, they wouldn't, would they? People just don't do that...' She looked around uncertainly as her words trailed away. 'Do they?'

"The disasters continue on other worlds in our system. Belannia VI and Belannia VIII. Our resources are limited. The Hanakoi will not help. The Hoth are meditating. Meanwhile our Sign has come. The Message.' Father Denadi pointed up out of the transparent roof of the garden. Sam followed his pointing finger. She looked past the swaying branches of the willows. He seemed to be pointing at the Belannian sun, which was flickering as it edged around the disc of Belannia VI. No, not flickering, she realised suddenly. Stars don't flicker . Not unless they're quasars or binaries or - - unless they were unstable in some way.

Some way that was causing the destruction she had seen.

What was it with suns these days? She thought of the near-disasters Ja.n.u.s had brought about, and wondered if the Belannian sun was being manipulated in the same way.

And what the h.e.l.l can I do about it even if it is? she thought.

Father Denadi said quietly,'Behold the sun, Bel, is our Sign. Our inescapable Message. It is our time now. And yours. Join with us. Embrace your Endless State.'

'No! You are wrong! '

The voice was deep, the effect on the congregation dial of nails sc.r.a.ped across a board. The man who stepped from the crowd must once have been horribly burnt. His skin held the faint sheen of scar tissue, his eyes the terrible brightness of obsession. 'You do not understand. You are misguided. The girl is right. n.o.body has to die. I, Saketh, was once a believer. I listened to the teachings, and the words were more than comfort to me. But that was before I found the Trudi, The Trudi is not Endless in the way you think. I know. For...' He hesitated, his eyes lost in distant memories of pain and revelation. When he continued his voice was dusted with ecstasy. 'I have attained my Endless State. I have attained it here, inLife '

The crowd murmured angrily at his words.

'He mocks us!'

'Blasphemer!'

'Attain the Endless State? In Life? Impossible!'

'Mummy, he used the D-word!'

Sam stared around her wildly.'You're all mad!' she cried."There are ships at the s.p.a.ceport. In a city this size there must be!'

Father Denadi said brusquely, "The s.p.a.ceport is unreachable without s.p.a.cesuits. Most here do not have them. Those that do do not have enough air.' Turning his attention to the newcomer, he added,'Brother Saketh, you came to me not two months ago and swore that your time had come and you would attain your Endless State.'

'And I have!'

'Do not lie to me brother! Denadi's voice was a roar. "The Endless State is unattainable in Life. The Scriptures tell us it is so. "First shall there be freedom from the prison of life, then shall come the attainment of Endlessness."'

'And so it is.' Saketh's eyes shone with religious fervour. 'The difference is only in emphasis. I have died, and returned. Now I am Endless!' He looked wildly from person to person, marched right up to Father Denadi and thrust his scarred face into that of the priest.'I shall prove it to you!'

And he turned, thrusting his way through the crowd, elbowing people aside as he walked through the trees towards the nearest wall. The wall was transparent - Sam could see the archway of an emergency airlock set into it. Saketh opened the inner door and stepped in. The crowd had fallen silent, waiting.

A child said, 'Daddy, what -' and was impatiently shushed.

Father Denadi made the Sign of the Ankh and sighed. 'Saketh will attain his Endless State.'

Sam gazed at the priest in horror.'He's not wearing a s.p.a.cesuit! You saw those people we pa.s.sed! He'll die!' Father Denadi gazed levelly at her.'He will become Endless.' Sam felt something snap in her head. 'That's a load of c.r.a.p!' She ran clumsily in her s.p.a.cesuit towards the airlock. She banged on the wall. Saketh turned to her and smiled. His face was torn and ugly, yet somehow peaceful, even... beautiful? The shock of the expression drove Sam back from the wall.

And then Saketh opened the outer airlock door and stepped out on to the airless surface. He fell.

Sam covered her eyes. Tried not to imagine what was happening to his eyes and lungs and blood vessels, his skin, his ears, hismind .

There was a moment of silence and then she heard a loud gasp from the congregation behind her. She turned, opened her eyes. As one, they were staring past her, out of the garden. Some of the children were pointing. She turned back to the wall.

On the surface - theairless surface - of Belannia VTs moon, Saketh was standing up .

He turned, his face creased with pain. She could see bruises erupting through the newly healed skin of his face and hands. He lifted the hands, turned them, examined them, found them good. He held them out to her, to all of them, a silent messiah, inexplicably, impossibly alive in a landscape that clearly held only death for anyone else.

Saketh opened the airlock and came back in. He was shaking, clearly racked with pain. The bruising alone, indication of internal injuries, must have been excruciating. But why wasn't he dead?

Sam got no answer to this question, though she could see his bruises shifting and fading, inexplicably quickly.

The people were looking at Saketh with silent, stunned awe. Father Denadi was all but forgotten.'I offer you myself. I offer you life,' he was saying.

When Saketh spoke, his voice was the grinding rattle of broken machinery. He turned to Denadi and took the wafers he had been handing out to the crowd.'We all know what these wafers contain.'

The listeners sighed. Sam looked at the very large man still lying on the ground. Someone said, "They contain our Choice. The attainment of our Eternal State.'

Saketh hissed,'No! They contain poison. Those that eat of this bread will attain nothing but death.'

If anyone else had been speaking this would have been too much for the crowd. Saketh held them, however, with his bruised face and bloodshot eyes.

And then he ate a wafer.

They waited.

His face twisted slightly, then returned to its bruised placidity. He did not fall.

The crowd sighed.

He took a number of the wafers, placed them briefly into his mouth and then restacked them in his palm. 'I have eaten the bread and still I live!' He licked cracked lips, continued in a hushed voice,'I have trans.m.u.ted death to life.' His voice rose to a crescendo as he added, 'Whomsoever follows me and eats of my flesh will live for ever. They will have their Eternal State while in this life - and life itself will no longer be a prison! ' He glanced at Father Denadi, who was on his knees, eyes jammed shut, praying devoutly. 'I shall not lie to you. It will hurt.' His eyes closed momentarily, lost in memories, 'Oh yes, more than you can imagine... but... follow me and I will save you all.'

He fell silent and waited. Then a child stepped forward, wrenching itself free of its parent to run to Saketh.'Want to live!' said the child. 'Scared. Want to go home now!' Hesitantly the parents followed. Saketh offered them the wafers and they took them.

'No!' Father Denadi was on his feet, moving, swiping the wafers from their hands and crushing them in a fist, his voice loud and righteous in the shocked stillness. 'He has corrupted the attainment of your Endless State. If you eat of his bread you will be d.a.m.ned to h.e.l.l!'

The parents looked at Father Denadi as the child stumbled back, clutching at its mother in fear.

'You see what you do to them? How you frighten them?' Saketh's voice was calm, the previous raspiness fading even as Sam thought to listen for it. Father Denadi stopped. He looked at the people. They were scared. Of him. He turned, his face flushed with shame. He looked around slowly. No one would meet his gaze. He knew what they wanted and he could not give it to them. Shoulders slumped, he moved slowly off into the trees. Sam heard him praying there like a big old bear grumbling tiredly to itself.

The parents returned their attention to Saketh. He offered them more wafers. They took one each, gave one to their child. They put them into their mouths and swallowed.

Saketh's voice rose in exultation.'From this moment on, cities, moons, planets are as nothing. You cannot die. Vacuum, radiation, poison - none of these can affect your Endless State. You will live for ever. The universe is your home! '

The crowd surged toward Saketh, who raised his bruised arms to bestow a benediction upon them. Sam shuddered. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself it had all been a trick, an elaborate hoax, she could not escape the feeling she had just seen something being born, something that would change everything. She was terrified, sweating, sick to her stomach with the sudden emotion churning in the garden. She backed slowly away as the crowd swelled around Saketh. She turned, rubbing her eyes as if to keep tears from her face.

A few moments later the airlock cycled several times. Sam was alone in the garden.

No, she suddenly remembered - not alone after all. She began to follow the sound of Father Denadi's prayers into the rustling depths of the trees, her feet moving uncertainly upon the still-shaking, increasingly unstable ground.

The Doctor stood upon the lava shield of the young volcano watching people chopping trees with desperate abandon. He studied the beach, which lay perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and reformulated his previous definition of the area - as a collection of various geological formations concealing numerous species of biological life a.s.saulted continuously by liquid in a high-energy state - to include the additional but highly important phrase: a.s.saulted by fragments of lunar debris in a high-energy state.

He wondered if Sam would be pleased by the more precise definition.

He thought possibly not. Especially since she had been on the moon in question. He thought about this for another few moments, wondering eventually why he was not more upset. Sentimentality. He'd always subscribed to it in the past. He cared about his compan-his friends, didn't he? Why did it seem so easy, then, sometimes, to put the emotion aside? To put her aside? He shook his head. Humans could do it. He noticed that they seemed to do it more often the older they got. Was he getting old? Was he becoming more human? Absorbing their mores and morals by some kind of osmosis?

There was no answer of course. At least none of either a definite or comforting nature. If Sam was dead... at least it had probably been quick. At least, hehoped it had been quick... The thought of her suffering...

He shook his head again, this time to dislodge some fairly unpleasant images.

He looked more closely at the beach. The three sections of the medical frigate lay like beached whales upon the sh.o.r.e. A hundred or so people were siting or standing nearby. Behind them the ocean rolled away to a grey and listless horizon. Clouds were gathering there in a rolling front, obscuring the sun - which, he had been aware for some time, was fluctuating in brightness in the slightly disconcerting way in which normal main-sequence stars generally don't.

He wondered vaguely if the TARDIS had got a bee in her bonnet about wayward suns at the moment. As she got older, she seemed to be getting more eccentric. Or perhaps it was deliberate. Perhaps the more he tried to be the aimless wanderer, the more she was gently a.s.serting herself, working to her own agenda.

He frowned. That bothered him a little.

The rest of the refugees were working in the forests covering the lower slopes of the volcano. They were chopping trees and they were doing it at his suggestion. Trees made good rafts. Rafts might save them all from the tsunami he knew was coming.

He shielded his eyes as more burning debris dropped through the roiling cloud layer and smashed into the ocean. Belannia VI was a large world, twice as big as Sam's Earth, but it was considerably less dense, and with lower gravity. The movement of the ocean was slower, dreamier, but nonetheless just as deadly. The Doctor had been watching rock fall out of the sky for several hours. The last piece to survive re-entry had been large -dangerously large. He'd made what he thought was a fairly accurate guess of its trajectory and ma.s.s and then, with a charming smile to allay the fears of the refugees, suggested that they might like to begin chopping down the trees.

That had been an hour ago. Then the sky had been brilliant with sun, filled with little fluffy clouds, swimmingly hazy mirages of other nearby atolls and the blankly incurious cries of sea birds who by then were beginning to get used to the idea of a s.p.a.ceship lying wrecked on their island. Now the birds had prudently flown away while the sun glimmered only fitfully through a sky the colour of welded metal, hard and grey with little coloured bits dancing around on the edges of his vision. The little coloured bits were the most worrying. They gave a very firm indication of the water content in the sky, the water content being indicative of light refraction. And there were rather a lot of little coloured bits. And they were getting closer.

There was a lot of water heading towards the island. Several million tons. A tsunami.

You can't throw chunks of moon at a planet, no matter the size, without its having some effect on the local geography.

The Doctor checked his pocket watch. He flipped open the lid, smiled dreamily at the bright musical chime from within, then snapped it shut. He hopped from rock to rock, bouncing around the lava shield, encouraging the cutters to work harder and helping those moving the logs to drag them with even greater speed down to the beach.

At the beach Captain Bellis was supervising the unsnapping of the medical frigate's three remaining lifeboats. One was already on the sh.o.r.e, one was being hoisted clear of the wreckage and a third was still jammed inside a buckled section of hull. Moving straight to the beached lifeboat, the Doctor rubbed his hands together with glee.

Surgeon Major Conaway stopped him a few yards from the hull. 'Thinking of leaving us? I wouldn't blame you. But the lifeboat will only take fifty or so people. How do you choose who will stay and who will go?'

The Doctor cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist about to perform a particularly tricky recital. 'Hm. Logical a.s.sumption under the circ.u.mstances, if a bit cynical. But, all things being equal, we're not going to leave anyone behind.'

'How are you going to get lifeboats with s.p.a.ce for a hundred and fifty people to hold ten times that number?'

The Doctor examined the engine cowling of the lifeboat, c.o.c.ked his head, considered, thumped the release and then stood clear as the hatch cover opened.'Have you ever heard the phrase, "If the mountain won't come to Mahomet"?'

'So?'

The Doctor ducked into the engine compartment. 'Well, that was a saying coined by a man who clearly had no understanding of gravitational-transference engineering.' Conaway blinked. The Doctor popped his head out again and grinned at her.'How would you like to a.s.sist me in a different kind of operation?' The childlike excitement in his voice suggested to the surgeon major that it wasn't a question of life and death, more a kind of invitation to dance.

Conaway found herself smiling. Which was utterly insane considering their predicament, and what she thought of this amazingly bizarre man and the incredibly irresponsible thing she was about to do. 'All right,' she said with a mystifying lack of hesitation.

'Wonderful, wonderful. Now I don't know about you but I like a little music while I work. Do you know the Kyrie from Faure's Requiem ?' He rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a battered old harmonica and, pausing only to grab the lifeboat toolkit, dived head first back into the engine compartment.

The Doctor's plan was interrupted first when the third lifeboat fell on Captain Bellis while it was being hoisted free of the wrecked ship.

The Doctor had got as far as disa.s.sembling the engine mounting and ordering the laying out in rows of the hundred or so tree trunks which were the first to arrive on the beach. When the winch arm broke the Doctor did not wait for the scream before patting Conaway on the shoulder and taking the toolkit from her.

'They're going to need you,' he said sombrely.