Shortly the Doctor and Fitz joined them.

'I'm staying with Miss Bergman,' said Fitz.

Nordenstam pa.s.sed him a mobile phone 'This is my spare. Call me if anything happens. Doctor?'

'I'm going back to the forest,' said the Doctor. 'Do, um, er, a bit of investigation.'

Nordenstam nodded. 'I'll give you a lift.'

They left.

Dr Lindgard bid them a curt but cordial good day, and he left also.

That left Fitz. He smiled at her, sitting down on one of the grey plastic chairs against the wall of the corridor. There was an awkward silence, during which he examined the mobile phone as if he had never seen one before in his life.

She could start a conversation. Ask him what this TARDIS was. Find out about his job with this UNIT. But he didn't matter to her. Just another policeman. She stood up and looked through the gla.s.s at Johan. He hadn't moved, of course. She could go back to the farm but to stay there, listening to Bjorn bemoaning the invasion of his privacy? Or back to her parents? She should at least phone them. But the thought of speaking to her mother again just made her feel tired. No. Her place was here with Johan.

Fitz's voice broke the silence. 'I was there when we found him, you know.'

'I know. Thank you.'

'Don't thank me. If anything, Johan found us.' He told her what had happened, and she listened, appalled.

When he'd finished speaking, Kerstin just stood there, staring at Fitz. His grey eyes and thin nose made him look rather sardonic. Nothing like a policeman at all. 'Who are you?' she whispered. 'Who are you really?'

'Like I said,' said Fitz, his eyes darting from side to side as if seeking a means of escape, 'we are who we say we are. And believe me,' he added quickly, as though trying very hard to maintain her credulity, 'we're used to dealing with things like this.'

She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. 'OK. So, what do you think is going on? Where has Johan been? Is he is he going to be all right?'

He shook his head and said gently, 'I'm sorry, but I don't know.'

Kerstin slumped down into a chair opposite him. 'Well, have you got any theories, then?'

Fitz shrugged. 'I haven't got any theories.'

Kerstin sighed and ran a hand through her hair. 'OK. You're keeping your options open. You're not keeping anything from me, are you?'

He smiled, as if at a private joke. 'No.'

He obviously was and she told him so.

He began to look irritated. 'Well yes, there are some things I am not telling you but they're nothing to do with Johan. As far as what happened to him's concerned, I know about the same as you.'

Kerstin sat back. The chair was uncomfortable, cutting into her back. 'What about the creature that attacked Bjorn?'

He shrugged again. 'All I know is that it's alien.'

Kerstin felt a chill pa.s.s across her shoulders and down her back at the sound of the word. She hadn't really thought about this yet. Alien. She'd never seriously considered such a thing seen films, read novels, entertained the intellectual possibility of life on other planets. But for such a thing to impinge on her ordered, sensible, healthy, sane life? 'I'm having trouble believing all this,' she whispered.

'I did at first, but you get used to it.' She looked into his eyes. They were deadly serious.

'You get used to it,' he said again.

Kerstin looked down at her hands. 'Looks like I'm going to have to.'

'Don't worry,' said Fitz. 'Once the Doctor's on the case, it's as good as solved.'

He didn't sound totally convinced himself, but Kerstin didn't say anything because she wanted it to be true.

The Doctor had a natural sense of direction where the TARDIS was concerned. A feeling for her presence. It was his home, after all, more so than any planet, any Time Lord chapter, any person. He'd been separated from the TARDIS many times, often in seemingly permanent ways. But even when she had been worlds away, or in a different time zone, he'd known she was safe.

This was different. As he plunged through the forest, he couldn't sense the TARDIS at all. The telepathic circuits weren't working. It meant that Fitz couldn't understand the local language, but that was a minor problem. If the telepathic link remained down for too long...

He turned his thoughts to his plan. While examining Johan, the Doctor had taken a blood sample using a tiny cybernetic mosquito. The product of a particularly nasty corporation, it was meant for surrept.i.tiously taking blood samples from potential plague victims on human colony planets in the thirtieth century, so that they could be tagged, traced and eliminated if necessary. A terrible product of a terrible time. The Doctor had acquired one for himself, thinking it would come in handy one day. Now the little metal insect was gorged on Johan's blood. Innumerable strains of alien bacteria could be lurking among its platelets; Johan could be the unwitting spearhead of the alien invasion. If he was, the Doctor would find out in the TARDIS lab.

If the TARDIS was healed.

He arrived at a clearing that looked familiar. Yes, there was the dead alien insect. That meant the TARDIS was around somewhere. Just behind those trees He stopped dead in his tracks. 'Oh, no.'

He ran through the trees, ducking below branches, stepping over clumps of earth. There, where the TARDIS had landed, was a light-grey cube, three metres along each side.

The TARDIS had reverted to its original shape.

The Doctor ran up to it, running his hands over the surface. It was smooth, and cold, and silent. The TARDIS must be so badly damaged that it had diverted all its energy towards healing, even the small amount needed to maintain the outer plasmic sh.e.l.l.

The Doctor stepped back. He felt totally alone. What would he do if the TARDIS was lost? Stay on Earth, he supposed, until he found a way to contact the Time Lords.

'No no no no no, old girl,' he muttered. 'You have to be all right. We've got to find Sam. You can't desert me now.'

He took the key on the chain from around his neck, and walked around the grey cube. There was no keyhole. No way in. She had sealed herself off from him completely.

He took the plastic cube containing the cybernetic mosquito from his pocket and held it up to the light. The tiny creature was hovering in the exact centre of the cube, its wings a blur, its transparent body ruby red with blood. The Doctor sighed and slipped the cube back into his pocket. There was no way he could test the blood now. No way he could tell what was going to happen to Johan. Nothing he could do to help the current situation.

With a last look at the TARDIS, the Doctor turned and set off out of the forest.

Chapter Six.

Isolation The Royal Infirmary in Eskilstuna was a calm, efficient building, two storeys tall. It had an air of self-possessed serenity, like an ocean liner. It looked so seamless and clean, as though it were not constructed from bricks, mortar, sweat and toil but had unfolded itself gently from a prefabricated envelope. Well, for all Fitz knew, it had technology had moved on frighteningly quickly since 1963, he was seeing it all around him.

Fitz slid a packet of Camel cigarettes from his rear pocket. It had been crushed in his fall back at the farm, and the half-dozen cigarettes within had bent and split, the tobacco crumbling over his fingers. d.a.m.n. He could really do with a smoke. That was why he'd come out here. No way could he smoke in a hospital.

Fitz selected the most serviceable-looking Camel and took out his silver lighter. He flicked a flame into life, pale and ghostly in the unrelenting sun. He lit the cigarette, and took a long deep drag, feeling calmer instantly. Sod the damage it was doing to his body. He could almost hear Sam reeling off another gruesome nicotine-related statistic.

Sam.

The nicotine rush turned into a spasm of guilt. Fitz realised he hadn't thought about her for at least an hour. He should be on the case, looking for clues. He should be doing something something, not just looking after Kerstin and waiting for the Doctor.

Maybe he hadn't been thinking about Sam because he was afraid she was dead.

A flicker of light caught his eye. He looked up to see the wide revolving door of the entrance to the hospital lobby swing round and Kerstin step out on to the paving stones. In her white shorts and yellow T shirt, with her tanned skin and blonde hair, she was a striking vision. If circ.u.mstances were different, he might even consider But no. He knew nothing of her. All he knew was that she was a student, and her parents lived in Stockholm; Nordenstam had told him that. A student of what, though? wondered Fitz as she walked towards him, her face averted, arms folded. Physical education, probably. Nothing arty or literary, that was for sure. He felt a little guilty after all, she must be going through h.e.l.l.

Fitz smiled at her, dropping the cigarette to the pavement and stubbing it out with the toe of his boot an automatic reaction, which may not have been necessary, as he had no idea if Kerstin disapproved of smoking. He was still programmed for Sam.

He looked hopefully at her. 'How is he?'

Kerstin's voice was flat and weary. 'No change.'

'The doctor said the sedative wouldn't wear off for a while,' Fitz reminded her.

Kerstin let out a long breath of frustration. 'I don't think he's ever going to wake up.'

They walked around the hospital gardens for a while. There weren't any flower beds, but a lot of neatly tended shrubs and hedges, their leaves pale and brittle-looking. Fitz wished there was something he could say. Kerstin appeared to be deep in thought. She kept looking sideways at him, as if a.s.sessing him.

As they pa.s.sed a bizarre piece of statuary made of corkscrews of metal and gla.s.s, Kerstin asked him, straight out of the blue, what a TARDIS was.

Ah. She must have overheard him talking to the Doctor. Fitz prepared yet another lie, sick of making things up to hide the truth, worried he would say something that would contradict his story. 'It's a code word for our base of operations.'

Kerstin shrugged. 'Another thing. At the farm, when I met you with Nordenstam, you stared at me as though you seemed to know me.'

That one was easy enough. 'Well, you look rather like Sam.'

Kerstin frowned. 'Who's Sam?'

No need to lie here. 'A friend of mine. She's gone missing. Unlike Johan, she hasn't come back yet.'

Kerstin turned to look at him fully, her eyes widening, searching his face. They were bright, sharp, like blue jewels against the nut-brown skin of her face. This close, Fitz could see a light dusting of freckles across her nose and under her eyes. 'Oh, I never realised. Was she your girlfriend?'

Fitz grinned at her directness. 'No. More of a friend.' He remembered Maddie, the last girl he'd been involved with, back in the late sixties. They'd had something, for a while. He briefly wondered what she was doing now, if she was even alive. Perhaps the Doctor would know.

'So you've lost someone too,' mumbled Kerstin, half to herself and half to Fitz. 'That's the way life must be, I suppose. Getting used to loss.'

Fitz opened his mouth to agree, thinking of his mother, how he still hadn't got used to losing her but he didn't want to talk about that, not now. Didn't want to reopen that wound. So they walked on in silence, along the paving stones which led between the low hedges. Beyond the garden, the buildings of Eskilstuna stood drab and grey, crowding like onlookers at a funeral procession.

'You speak English well,' said Fitz, to break the silence.

'I spent a year in England,' said Kerstin, staring into the distance. 'That's where I met my first boyfriend.' She glanced sideways at Fitz. 'You're from England, aren't you?'

'Yes,' said Fitz, not wanting to discuss his origins in too much depth. How could he explain that he was from 1963?

Fitz noticed that Kerstin kept looking back at the hospital building, as though she expected Johan to come running out of the revolving door, arms raised ready to hug her, trailing bedsheets and frantic nurses behind him. Something positive had better happen soon, thought Fitz. They all needed cheering up, even the Doctor.

The Doctor. He'd been gone a long time, hours now. Perhaps the TARDIS was working again and the Doctor was polishing the console and brewing the tea in which case, hooray. Or perhaps he'd gone inside and been sucked out of existence by the glowing whirlpool that had taken Sam away in which case, total b.u.mmer, to say the least.

Either way, it was high time he found out. 'Look,' he said, 'I'd better go and find the Doctor.'

Kerstin turned to look at him, a smile playing on her face, though her eyes still held their distant look. 'You know, I'm having terrible trouble thinking of you as UN officials. You're more like... more like a pair of amateur detectives, b.u.mbling about and getting in everyone's way.'

She had them pretty much pinned down there, thought Fitz. 'Hey, you've stumbled upon our secret modus operandi!'

She laughed, a short, brisk sound, which Fitz was glad to hear, and then her face grew serious. 'See you later?' she said.

Fitz nodded, and watched her turn and walk back into the hospital through the revolving door. He realised he was beginning to fancy her. He smiled. If he'd stayed in 1963 he'd now be old enough to be her grandfather.

He walked to a bench beside a bed of bright-yellow flowers, and took out the mobile phone Nordenstam had given him. It took him a while, but eventually he sussed out how to operate the b.l.o.o.d.y thing. If you pressed the blue menu b.u.t.ton a few times, a list of names came up on the little green screen: Jonsson, Nordenstam, Persson. There was a flashing cursor next to the list, and then if you pressed OK the phone would call the indicated person. Simple trial and error. He could have asked Kerstin but how would that have looked? A UN operative, not knowing how to use a mobile telephone?

He called Nordenstam, the phone burbling in his ear.

'Nordenstam?' came a tiny voice.

'This is Fitz Kreiner.'

'What do you want? I'm rather busy.' Fitz could hear voices in the background.

'I'm looking for the Doctor have you seen him? Do you know where he is?'

A crackling noise drowned out the first part of Nordenstam's reply. 'lutely no idea at all.'

A long-fingered hand plucked the phone from Fitz's and snapped the cover shut.

Fitz almost fell off the bench in surprise. 'Doctor! How did you get here?'

'Public transport,' said the Doctor, looking around himself as if afraid of being watched. 'Highly efficient, clean and reliable. Well, in this country at least.' He sat down on the bench next to Fitz, handed the phone back to him, and let out a long, sighing breath. 'Things are grim.'

This was hardly news to Fitz. 'How's the TARDIS?'

'She's reverted to her original form,' said the Doctor, a forlorn lilt in his voice. 'Using all her power to heal herself. And I'm locked out,' he added, through gritted teeth.

Fitz grinned, putting on an act to try to cheer the Doctor up. The Doctor's bouts of melancholia gave him the creeps. 'I'm sure there's a locksmith in the town who can knock up a spare key, Doctor.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'It's worse than being merely locked out physically. I'm locked out mentally, too. I can't reach the telepathic circuits.' His face drooped in sadness. 'If the bond is broken for too long, the TARDIS will die.'

Fitz didn't know what to say.

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the hum and rumble of the traffic, the sun beating down on them from a clear blue sky. An aeroplane threaded itself through the clouds like a needle. Fitz had a sudden moment of vertigo. Here he was, in 1999 the future. And he had no way of relating it to anything he knew. Was Sweden in 1963 any different from Sweden in 1999? He had no idea. Everything was strange but then it would have been if he'd come here in his own time: it was a foreign country, he was a first-time visitor. He had a sudden urge to see England, to see London. Somewhere he knew, so he could see how much it had changed. Had he lived a normal life, not involving the Doctor or Sam or the TARDIS, he would be in his mid-sixties by now. Would he have changed with the times, or would he still be living in 1963, wallowing in the Good Old Days and bemoaning all the new-fangled technology like Nordenstam's mobile phone?

That would never happen now. Fitz Kreiner would always be an outsider. Just like the Doctor. Where was home now? How could he settle anywhere now? Was the TARDIS home? Were the Doctor and Sam his family? Sam...

He put his head in his hands, suddenly feeling more alone than at any time in his life. Then the Doctor reached into his pocket, took out a little transparent cube and tossed it to Fitz.

Fitz caught it, expecting it to be cold like an ice cube, but it was warm. Inside, there was a little metal insect. 'What's that? Another alien creature?'