'Really?' He smiled at her. 'I think it's rather reassuring.'

'Doctor, for once, please look on the dark side. If these people, beings, whatever, wished you well, they'd have introduced themselves. They want you kept safe for them them.'

'To use me against my will to further their sinister machinations? Bit melodramatic, don't you think?'

'Your life life is melodramatic. And more than a bit!' is melodramatic. And more than a bit!'

'So,' Fitz broke in, 'how does your heart help Sabbath?'

The Doctor sighed, more angrily than tiredly. 'It's complicated. Essentially, it gives him some of the physical advantages that apparently were bred into my people over millennia, of time travel.'

'And it's working all right?'

'I dare say there've been some surprises.'

'What do you mean?'

'For one thing, the only reason I wasn't killed in Liverpool is because one of my hearts was still beating.'

'Huh?' said Fitz.

Anji frowned: 'Still beating?'

'Still beating. Just not in my my body.' body.'

'Christ!' said Fitz. Anji looked sick. 'You mean he... I thought you meant he was just using it as some weird biological navigating tool.'

'He is. Only hooked up to him instead of his ship.'

'Oh God,' muttered Anji. 'Oh God. I think I... How can you possibly have anything more to do with him?'

'You're missing the upside,' said the Doctor patiently. 'It's the reason I'm alive.' He watched as they struggled with the idea. 'I owe him my life.'

'By accident!' Anji insisted.

'Alive is alive.'

Fitz rose and went over to the liquor cabinet. 'Anj?'

'Scotch, please,' she said faintly. The Doctor reached for the teapot. 'What happened to you in Liverpool?' she asked, unable to stay with the present subject. 'I'll never believe you had that clumsy accident.'

'No,' the Doctor admitted, pouring himself the last of the tea. 'Someone tried to kill me. Several someones, actually.'

Fitz groaned. 'Might have known. Someone's always always trying to kill you.' trying to kill you.'

'Yes. I arouse hostility. Funny, isn't it? I have such nice manners.'

'Why?' said Anji.

'I must have been well brought up.'

'Why,' she said with overelaborate patience, 'did someone try to kill you?'

'And who was it?' added Fitz, returning and handing Anji her drink. She noticed his was already half gone.

'The magician, Octave. I wanted to help him, but I think he found my knowing his secret too frightening to deal with.'

'You said "several someones",' said Anji.

'Well, that was his secret. He was several people.'

Fitz frowned. 'You mean like those split personalities you were talking about?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'That's several personalities in one body. This is one personality in several bodies.'

'One personality...' Anji felt something creep along her spine. 'That's not... How did he get that way?'

'That's what I need to find out.'

'Hang on,' said Fitz. 'You're not going to go see him again?'

'I have to know what happened.'

'You don't even know he's connected with this time problem.'

'Oh he is.'

'Well, you're not going alone!'

The Doctor smiled. 'All right then,' he said, so agreeably that Anji could only think that, of course, if he wanted to slip away from them he could and would do it in a minute. He wriggled down into the pillows. 'Now, tell me what's been happening. Have you heard from Chiltern?'

'No,' said Anji.

He frowned slightly. 'That's odd.'

'We haven't been to see him or Miss Jane,' she said. 'We didn't want to leave while you were, uh...'

'Yes, I understand. Anything else? Anything unusual at all?'

They looked at each other doubtfully.

'Well,' said Fitz, 'there was that telescope thingy at the funfair.'

'That was odd,' she agreed.

'In what way?'

'It was this little room,' said Fitz, 'with six '

'No, eight.'

' eight sides and this mirror table in the centre, and there was this sort of, more of a periscope thingy, actually, and it '

'It caught moving images from outside the room and projected them on to the table surface.' The Doctor had momentarily seemed interested, but now he shrugged. 'A camera obscura.'

'What's that?'

'A Victorian amusement based on the physical principle that if you let light through a pinhole into a dark room it will project an inverted image from outside on to the wall. The pinhole and lens that turns the image right side up again are in what you called the periscope, and the table top serves as a screen. They were quite an attraction before the age of motion pictures.'

'What does the name mean?' said Anji. ' "Hidden Chamber"?'

'Well, "Lightless Chamber" maybe. It's usually just translated "Dark Room". As an experiment in optics it predates the camera, and you can see how the name was transferred '

'Hang on,' said Fitz, not keen for a lecture on the history of the camera that he probably wouldn't follow half of anyway. 'It wasn't exactly like that. We were seeing marshy fields, and some cottages. So it wasn't showing us what was outside '

' because outside was the fair,' finished the Doctor. 'Right.' He sat up. 'Let's go.'

'There seem to be at least two manifestations of the time problem showing up in human beings,' the Doctor said in the cab. 'The first is that people with certain forms of psychosis have developed abnormally sensitive temporal perception.'

'Like Miss Jane seeing the future,' said Fitz. 'So she's bonkers?'

'Well,' the Doctor's tone became slightly acerbic, 'that somewhat oversimplifies it. Certainly, her mind doesn't work in the ordinary way.'

'Well, how does it work, then? Isn't there a bunch of her?'

'Not really. More as if the core personality shattered, and then new persons grew around each fragment. She's one being, but fractured so that she can't ever exist altogether in the present one or another of the personalities will always be "out", and the others suppressed.'

'And what's the second manifestation?' said Anji.

'Octave's an example of that, and as I said, he's just the opposite. He's been fractured so that he exists physically in simultaneous multiple presents.'

'How?'

'I suspect a time-travel experiment went wrong.'

'You mean he broke up when he tried to use a time machine?' said Fitz. 'What was he trying to do travel to a lot of different times all at once?'

'And where'd it come from?' said Anji.

'I don't know,' the Doctor sighed. 'I don't know what Octave was attempting, and I don't know where the machine came from. There didn't used...' He shut his eyes and passed his hand over them, as if he had a sudden headache. 'It wasn't always like this,' he muttered. 'Time travel used to be restricted.'

'By whom?' said Anji.

The Doctor didn't open his eyes. His face looked blank and lost. 'I don't remember.' And he was silent the rest of the way to the Crystal Palace.

In fact, Anji discovered when they got there and she tugged his sleeve, he'd fallen asleep. He woke up bright-eyed 'Are we there? I love funfairs!' and hopped enthusiastically out of the cab. Talk about your mood swings, she thought, following. Chiltern should study him him. Maybe it wasn't just that being unstable made you more sensitive to time, maybe it worked the other way round too, and being sensitive to time, let alone travelling in it, made you unstable. Oh, that was silly. She wasn't unstable. Was she? And what about Fitz? She glanced at Fitz, shambling along uncomfortably in his Victorian suit, and decided maybe it would be better just to abandon this line of thought.

The Black Chamber of Secrets was shut up, with a sign on the door announcing it wouldn't open for an hour. 'Oh, too bad,' the Doctor said unconvincingly. He clapped his hands together and gazed around. 'Where's the roundabout?'

They located and rode the roundabout. Also the merry-goround, the swan boat ride, the balloon ascent, a rickety rail contraption called The Whip Of Doom, the sailing ships, and a gondola-car switchback. They looked for a while for a helter-skelter till the Doctor remembered it wouldn't be invented till 1905.

'No dodgems yet either,' he said mournfully. 'Not till the 'twenties.'

'And none of those turn-youupside-down thingies,' said Fitz in the same tone.

Anji, who had had quite enough whirling, steered them back towards Scale's exhibit. Approaching from a new direction, they passed a showfront right beside the Black Chamber of Secrets that she hadn't noticed earlier, and for a second she was brought up short by the paintings in exceptionally vivid colours of grotesque human figures a man with only half a torso, a bearded figure in a gown, an armless, legless creature puffing on a hookah, like a parody of the Caterpillar in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. The signs proclaimed NATURE'S T TRAGIC A AND M MYSTERIOUS A ACCIDENTS and S and SIGHTS T TERRIBLE A AND W WONDERFUL. Anji looked away angrily. 'How can anyone stare at those poor people? It's patronising and rude and cruel.'

'They have to earn their living,' said the Doctor mildly. 'If the Victorian public were more delicate about these things, the poor freaks would be doomed to the workhouse.'

'I don't like being stared at because I'm different.' don't like being stared at because I'm different.'

'But you never control the situation. These folk do. They make the public pay to, literally, patronise them.'

'Looks like Scale's back,' said Fitz, a bit apprehensively. Sure enough, the dissipated proprietor was once again slouched in his chair by the open door. The Doctor examined him for a moment before approaching. As they came over, Scale straightened up and attempted a welcoming smile. 'Wonders inside. Impossible visions of the unexpected. The laws of time themselves ' He squinted at Fitz and Anji. 'Seen you before, haven't I?'

'We told our mate how great it was,' said Fitz hurriedly. 'He couldn't wait.'

Scale looked the Doctor up and down. 'Quite the toff, ain't you? No offence, sir,' he added hastily, remembering that these were potential paying customers.

'None taken,' said the Doctor. Anji noticed that this courtesy gave him, another black mark with Scale. She suddenly didn't want to go back inside the dark little room, no matter what new sights appeared on the mirrored table.

'I'll stay out here, if you don't mind,' she murmured. 'I need the air.'

'Well, suit yourself,' said Scale rudely. 'It's not as if I run this place to make a living.' He was only slightly mollified when the Doctor put an extra coin in his hand. 'Come in, then.' He stood aside ungraciously.

'So what's on today?' said Fitz as Scale turned down the lamp. 'Any hunters or cows?'

'We'll see,' Scale said sullenly. The Doctor had gone right to the table and was looking at the scene it showed with interest, though when Fitz joined him, there was nothing in particular to see, just the same cottages and marshy area.

'Where did you get this?'

Scale's eyes darted from one to the other of them uneasily. 'It were mine,' he said aggrievedly. 'I come by it honest.'

'Yes, yes, I'm sure you did. But where?'

'I had it off an old Eye-talian carny man. He said it were Swiss.' The Doctor snorted. 'That's what he said!'

'It's no more Swiss than I am. Tell me,' the Doctor turned his pale eyes on Scale, 'where's the rest of it?'

Scale's face hardened. 'How'd you know there were more of it?'

'You said something yesterday about having most of it stolen,' said Fitz.

'I did.' Scale was suddenly lachrymose. 'It's robbed I was.'

'Where?' said the Doctor.