'Disaster flies at you,' said Sabbath, 'and then, suddenly, it swerves aside. As if it encountered a force field.'

'Well, it didn't.' The Doctor finished lacing his shoes and stood up. 'And anyway, you're wrong. I don't always escape disaster. Sometimes...' He faltered. 'Sometimes...'

Sabbath watched him keenly. 'What?'

A blank, almost frightened look, had crept into the Doctor's eyes. He shook his head abruptly, and the expression was gone. 'You're simply wrong, that's all. Fairy tales and myths, that's what those stories are. Things that happened to others of my kind, already exaggerated, applied to me. We both know exactly how unreliable those legends are. There aren't even primary texts, just fifth-and sixth-hand accounts in histories of actual, non-legendary civilisations. You might just as accurately say that I'm the model for Tom Thumb.'

Sabbath got to his feet. 'You seem agitated.'

'Well, of course I'm agitated. The universe is about to end and we're wasting time discussing old wives' tales.'

'A few minutes ago you were content merely to wait for Chiltern to come to us.'

'And you pointed out that it's possible he has some other hiding place. I want to go back to the TARDIS and see if I can modify my sensors to find the machine even in its off-state. Probably I can't, but it's worth trying. You should do the same with your equipment on the Jonah Jonah. Just in case.'

'So you'll return to London.'

'Yes.'

Sabbath regarded him, black eyes expressionless. 'Doctor,' he said softly, 'is there something you're not telling me?'

'Nuts,' said the Doctor. 'Caught out again. Yes, I confess: I know where the machine really is and I plan to keep the fun of destroying it all for myself. You don't get to play.'

Sabbath flushed. 'Your frivolity verges on the idiotic.'

'Unlike your pomposity, which has left the verge and jumped right to the centre.'

'Want me to hold your coats?' said Fitz, jauntily emerging from the trees.

They turned, and Fitz was suddenly cautious. He could feel the exhausted anger coming off each man, and though he couldn't conceive of their actually coming to blows, the last thing he wanted was to be around any sort of altercation they would would engage in. He didn't even want to imagine it. engage in. He didn't even want to imagine it.

'Anj is right behind me,' he said casually. 'And Miss Kelly's around somewhere. We've pretty much combed the area. Guess Chiltern isn't here yet.'

'No,' said the Doctor. He shoved his hands in his pockets and toed a pebble into the stream. Sabbath turned and stepped back up on to the bank. Fitz smiled brightly.

'So,' he said, 'what's the plan?'

'I used to like trains,' said Anji.

The Doctor smiled, but she didn't think he'd really heard her. His eyes had that thinking-ofsomething-else vagueness and he was rolling half a crown back and forth between his fingers across the back of his hand. She watched this for a few seconds.

'You should have been a magician.'

'Maybe I was.' He pocketed the coin. 'Maybe I will be.' He glanced out of the compartment window, but night had fallen and there was nothing to see except the reflection of the three of them, floating outside on the darkness: he and Anji sitting beside each other, Fitz asleep on the seat across from them. The Doctor seemed mesmerised by this simple illusion. 'Do you think I'm lucky?'

'Lucky?'

'Unusually lucky. Coincidences. Last minute escapes. Things like that.'

Anji considered the question.

'Well,' she said doubtfully, 'I suppose you do have an awfully high survival rate considering the situations you throw yourself into '

' but I'd say, from what I've seen anyway, that it's something else.' He looked at her sharply. 'Something else that's odd, I mean.'

'What?'

His intense gaze unnerved her; she wasn't used to this sort of focus from him. 'Uh, well, it's hard to put into words.' She turned away from his eyes, her own gaze falling on Fitz, sleeping peacefully, his mouth slightly open. She wished he were awake to help her out here. She was certain he'd noticed the same... what was it, exactly? 'When we arrive somewhere,' she said carefully, feeling her way, 'often it's as if everything there the place we've come to, I mean was suspended, in a state of balance, waiting to tip one way or another, or maybe just waiting to tip, full stop. And then you enter the equation, and it tips. As if your arrival somehow completed a process. Like you were a fate or something. Catalytic,' she said triumphantly. 'That's the word.'

'The wave function collapses,' he said tonelessly. She looked at him again. His eyes were hooded and his face very still. 'The cat lives or dies.'

He'd lost her. 'I suppose so.' He suddenly struck her as smaller, and very young. 'How are you feeling?'

'Sorry?'

'I mean, after...'

'Oh, that. I'm fine.'

He didn't look fine. He looked worn and ill. Like a man who'd nearly died the night before. Cut the 'nearly'.

'You've got to stop doing that,' she said, a little more shakily than she meant to. He raised his eyes.

'I'm sorry.' He sounded sincere.

'You can't just keep on...'

'Risking my life?'

'Grinding me up like that. It's horrible. I I don't know you're going to come round. We have to watch you, me and Fitz, lying there looking like you're in agony. You don't know what it's like. You don't know you're going to come round. We have to watch you, me and Fitz, lying there looking like you're in agony. You don't know what it's like. You don't don't,' she insisted, though he hadn't tried to say anything. She felt tears at the edge of her eyes and squeezed them shut angrily.

'You're sick of this sort of life,' he said quietly, 'aren't you?'

She rubbed her eyes with her sleeve. 'I'm just tired.'

'No. You never chose it. You've always wanted to get home.'

'Well, that might be a moot point now, mightn't it?' To her embarrassment, she sniffed loudly. 'I mean, if time explodes or the universe uncurls or whatever's going to happen.'

He shifted uncomfortably, crossing his arms and looking at his feet.

'Sabbath could have at least given us a ride in that timesub of his,' she added, a bit sulkily.

'No, he was right. It was important for someone always to be at the site.'

'It would only have taken five minutes.' He didn't respond. 'What can you do in London, anyway? Is there really something in the TARDIS that will help?'

'Probably not. I had another reason for wanting to get back.'

'What?'

'I'd like to fetch that mirror.'

'Scale's?'

'Yes. I wasn't worried about it when I thought we were going to find the machine quickly. But now I don't like the idea of its drifting around loose. I want to take it to the TARDIS.'

'And smash it, right?'

'Mm.' The Doctor tapped a foot thoughtfully. 'That's going to be a bit of a problem, I think. It's not glass. I'd be very surprised if it's any substance that can be broken with a simple blow, and it could be impervious to material force altogether.'

'Then what can you do?'

'I imagine a confluence of certain energies could shatter it. The question is, which ones? I'll need to run tests.'

'Tests...?' she said uncertainly.

He smiled. 'Oh, there won't be any danger. Not in the vortex. Anyway, that's not an immediate issue. I'd just like to get it out of that exhibit at the carnival.'

'Mm. Sabbath doesn't know about this extra mirror, does he?'

'Well... no.'

'Plan to tell him about it?'

'There's not really any reason to.'

Fitz opened his eyes and looked around sleepily. 'Everything still here, I see. So far so good. You know, I'm kind of getting used to the idea that I'm going to twist out of existence any second now. I suppose you get used to anything, after a while, just to keep the blood vessels in your brain from popping.'

'Are you always this chatty when you first wake up?' said Anji. Fitz smirked.

'One way to find out.'

'Eew,' she said, imitating a thirteen-year old. 'As if if.'

'You know, "The universe is going to blow up" has got to be the most persuasive pick-up line in the history of everything.'

'Well, you can spend your last hours finding out if that's so.'

The Doctor was regarding them with benign tolerance, like a parent watching quarrelling siblings. Fitz thought he shouldn't have been quite so calm. Running in frantic circles and waving his arms would have been more appropriate. On the other hand, that wouldn't actually help any more than just sitting there.

'I suppose it's a good sign that you're not leaping about in panic.'

'I never leap about in panic. I tend to hold my head and stamp my feet.'

'Yeah, but you're not. Are you exercising incredible self-control, or are you really not worried?'

The Doctor moved his shoulders in something that wasn't quite a shrug. 'We're doing everything we can.'

This didn't really answer Fitz's question, but he let it pass.

'The only danger,' said Anji, 'is if this third Chiltern has another place to go. And that doesn't seem likely.'

'No it doesn't,' the Doctor agreed. 'He was a prisoner in the house on Dartmoor, which rather diminished his opportunities for finding hideaways.'

'You never saw him there, did you?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'It was dark. You've seen as much of him as I have.'

'He looked like...' Fitz thought back on his brief shocked glimpse of the horseman in the glare of the Jonah Jonah's lights, 'I don't know what...' he finished weakly.

'What happened to him?' said Anji. 'What went wrong?'

The Doctor looked out the window at the night rushing past. 'I don't know.'

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor went straight to the computer screen attached to the sensors and began fiddling with different settings, calling up readings and printing out graphs, none of which appeared to satisfy him. Fitz watched him, slightly tranced from tiredness but, after his nap on the train, wide awake. After muttering that she was not, not not, going to be asleep when the universe ended, Anji had more or less passed out on the sitting-room settee. The Doctor, in contrast, seemed keyed up, almost in a hurry.

'Fitz ' he said, pausing for a screen to come up, then stopped. He punched a few buttons. 'Last night ' he began again.

'It's all right.'

'I wasn't '

'Forget it,' Fitz said. 'You were right to get rid of me. If I'd known what you were planning I'd have killed you.'

The Doctor smiled. 'I had to go there,' he said, still apologetic.

'I know. Bloody shame if it was a wasted trip.'

The Doctor shut his eyes briefly. 'Yes.'

Put my foot in it there, Fitz winced. What could that journey possibly, even impossibly, have been like? And to take it again after that first, involuntary, hideous one he thought of the Doctor in the white bed in the Liverpool hospital, screaming when he had no breath to scream with.

'So,' he said quickly, 'what are you going to do if you get a signal on that?'

'Contact Sabbath immediately.'

'How? By pager?'

'An equivalent.' The Doctor laid something that did indeed look very like a pager beside the keyboard. 'He'll do the same when Chiltern shows up there.'

'And we'll charge over?'

'He may be able to handle it himself.' The Doctor narrowed his eyes at the screen, then sat back. 'All right.'