Chapter 3.

Atmosphere Normal 'No,' said Bernice. 'I think we'll give it a miss.'

She tucked the leaflet back into its holder. The 'living museum' seemed rather too stilted for her. The idea of trundling around a plastic Oxford in a motorized desk, looking at waxworks while a commentary crackled through a walkman, seemed too much like those which she could visit on colonies in her own 25th century. She was here to see the real Oxford, and said as much to her new friend Tom.

He found this funny. 'The problem is,' he explained, as they strolled through the covered market, 'that it's different things to different people. Like the American couple who collared me once and said, sure, fifteenth-century buildings are beautiful, but where can we find a really old college? So I directed them to St Catz. They deserved it.' Bernice was not to know that St Catherine's College had been founded in the 1960s, and was a glorious example of what should not be done with glass and concrete.

Bernice stood at one of the junctions, taking in the bewildering array of shops overflowing florists, tiny sandwich bars exuding the aroma of real coffee, bookshops. Her eyes alighted on one of the latter. The Doctor had told her possibly in jest that some second-hand book-shops in 20th-century Oxford were dimensionally transcendental, and she was keen to test the theory. She browsed for a while, happy to let Tom chatter, and purchased a Julian Barnes paperback and a battered copy of A.L. Rowse's Oxford in the History of the Nation Oxford in the History of the Nation.

'Of course,' Tom said, 'you have to be here in Trinity term really. That's from April to June. The best thing is to stay up all night and hear the choir sing from Magdalen Tower at dawn. You know Magdalen Tower? Then if you can go to a ball, that's great. Would you like to go to a ball? We had the Episodic Dreamers at ours last year. You could '

'How long have you known the Professor?' Bernice inquired, cutting him off in full flow. She fumbled with unfamiliar money at the till.

'Rafferty?' Tom frowned. 'He's my supervisor. I've been a student of his for five years. Since I was an undergrad. Why do you ask?'

Bernice grinned, without looking at Tom. 'Just curious.'

When they left the shop, neither of them noticed the slim, dark-haired girl in mirrorshades detach herself from behind Marxist Literature and follow them.

Intangible.

Always just beyond perception, a mind even more devious than I had suspected.

Fragments of memory flotsam, falling like blossom on the wine-red ocean. Now, then, and to be, all coalescing. How am I to know? So many thoughts, from one mind. One mind in all those on whom I have fed.

I wait. I grow stronger.

The time rotor had stopped. Moreover, the red glow in the console room was distinctly vermilion now.

Ace strode back into the room. She had changed back into her one-piece combat suit, emblazoned with her personal logo, but she had thrown the leather biker jacket over the top.

'What are you doing doing with the corridors?' she snapped moodily. 'It took me an hour to find my way back. Like playing Tetris in black and white.' with the corridors?' she snapped moodily. 'It took me an hour to find my way back. Like playing Tetris in black and white.'

The Doctor was in the middle of putting his own jacket on. 'You got here,' he said absently, as if it were of little importance, and started to hunt round the console room for his hat.

Ace held up a small gold cylinder. It held a stump of lipstick. 'I got lucky. Sorry about the mess.'

The Doctor glanced up to see what she meant, and Ace thought she detected the ghost of a smile. 'Ah,' he said.

'So where have we ended up?' she asked angrily. 'And why didn't you tell me we were going anywhere? What about Benny?'

He was checking the contents of his pockets. 'To take your questions in reverse order she wants to spend some time in Oxford; you'd find out sooner or later; and where the TARDIS seems to think we have already been.' He began to check the readings on the console. It occurred to Ace that he did not seem to care whether she was there. A problem had seized him, and he was obviously searching for the answer to the exclusion of almost everything else.

'So you mean the fifty-fourth sector and all that? The co-ordinates from the tracer log?'

'Precisely! If you want to find out where you're going, you find out where you're supposed to come from, and if you haven't been there, you go there and work back. Or forward. It's perfectly simple, Romana.'

'You what what? And who's Romana?'

The Doctor paused, looking at Ace no, she realized, looking through through her. 'Did I really say that? Hmm. Atmosphere normal, pressure normal. I think a little exploration is called for.' her. 'Did I really say that? Hmm. Atmosphere normal, pressure normal. I think a little exploration is called for.'

'Why?' Ace was not entirely sure if her question was merely that of a devil's advocate.

The Doctor pulled the door-control. 'We're supposed to have been here. The least I can do is find out what it looks like. You can come if you want.'

She paused only to grab her backpack and to check that her wrist-computer was in place. She smiled at that old friend. It felt like part of her arm, these days.

She found him in semi-darkness, sniffing the air. She did so herself, and found it decidedly musty, but breathable.

'Are you going to tell me exactly what this place is?' she asked in a loud whisper.

A globe the size of a tennis-ball seemed to appear in his hand, bathing them both in scarlet radiance and giving a visibility of about three metres.

'Space Station Q4,' he murmured, 'an Earth survey outpost at the fringes of explored space for the time. The twenty-fourth century,' he added as an afterthought. 'Just before Benny's time, and after the Cyberwars.'

Ace shivered. 'Not much action,' she said. 'Must be Sunday.'

'Or a very quiet Thursday,' answered the Doctor, and began to move forward with the glo-ball. Ace followed. The Doctor had the light, after all.

At the base of the TARDIS, red and green lights crackled in a moving mesh, growing into a swirl of globules.

The light soundlessly resolved itself into a figure, which stood watching the retreating figures of the Doctor and Ace at the end of the corridor.

It was the creature Ace had seen in the TARDIS, only clearer now. About two metres tall, bipedal, suffused with light and flickering as if not quite there, phasing in and out of the present. Armed with a wide-barrelled blaster. Clad in a shining uniform like living metal. Its body seemed to blend seamlessly into its wedge-shaped helmet, which tapered to a futuristic gas-mask. Behind the helmet, two red eyes glowed fiercely with the light of battle.

Watching.

Waiting.

And slowly, rhythmically, breathing.

The sleek oblong of a spacecraft was gradually moving in on the giant X of the abandoned space-station. It moved as silently as a ghost. And emblazoned on its side was the insignia of the Terran Survey Corps.

Four micro-traks and closing.

Ace had seen too much death in the last five years. She liked to think she had come to accept it. There were moments, like now, when she realized that she had not, and that she never would. The thing about the blank eyes of a skeleton, she thought, was that you could not even give them that false peace by closing them.

The Doctor took something from the ragged uniform of the sixth skeleton they had found, the one seated in the command chair. He handed the glo-ball to Ace as he inspected the plastic and metal ID plaque.

'Still legible,' he said quietly. 'Not biodegradable, I'd imagine. Station Supervisor Septimus Ballantyne. Then his service number, and date of birth.'

'Doctor, this is well spooky. They're all dead. Everyone on this station is dead.'

'Of course they are,' he answered angrily. 'I'd estimate those remains to be approximately three hundred years old. Which makes me wonder about this this.' With a startling suddenness, the Doctor's umbrella swung round and tapped the column of the distress console. The hand of the dead Supervisor Ballantyne was firmly clamped over the end of the column.

'He died sending a distress call,' Ace said. She swallowed hard. Somehow, a space-station full of ghosts was among the worst things she could imagine, but there was to be no showing that in front of the Doctor. Not now.

'So they left him there to rot?' The Doctor's tone was sarcastic.

'Bloody hell.' The realization had struck her.

'And take a look at this.' She saw the dim outline of the Doctor's umbrella pointing, and swung the glo-ball round. The light fell upon the two skeletal chess-players. Frozen in time. One moment, forever their deaths. While she was looking away, the Doctor slipped Ballantyne's ID plaque into his pocket.

'It's severely gross, Doctor. Do you think they could have done anything about it?'

The Doctor was surveying the chessboard. 'I fear not. They'd both lost their queens. It would have been stalemate in three moves.' He tapped both kings with the end of his umbrella. They fell, and crumbled into dust.

'Doctor '

'Decay,' he whispered. 'Decay and death. We're dealing with three hundred years that must have passed through this station in a matter of seconds. Or less.'

'So what's it got to do with what happened in the TARDIS?'

'Nothing has happened in the TARDIS. Yet.' He frowned. 'Except those telepathic circuits. The cloister bell, and only in your mind, not mine. Most odd... Someone here has been playing with Time, Ace. Like playing with fire, only worse... you're doing it blind, and you get burnt before you've lit the match. Before you even knew you were going to. It's not just dangerous, Ace. It's madness.'

Ace was involved now, her mind working fast. She wondered, sometimes, if the Doctor knew how much she had learnt from him. She swung the globe back round to illuminate the skeleton of Ballantyne. 'Do you suppose his distress call got through?'

'That depends. One would imagine that if the station aged along with the crew, there'd have been a massive power drain. Perhaps there simply wouldn't have been enough power left to drive a distress beacon.'

The docking tube extended like a feeler from the body of the ship. It touched the fragile skin of the space-station. Contact was made.

In the station control centre, the Doctor and Ace felt the reverberation. Ace looked round in alarm, but the Doctor's eye had been caught by a flashing light on one of the seemingly dead consoles.

'So there is still power,' he said, almost to himself. 'Visitors, Ace. This is not a good place to be. Come on.'

'Where to? Back to the TARDIS?'

'Not until I've found out what's going on here. No, I want to be somewhere where we can see them, and they can't see us. Come on on.'

The ancient doors leading from the control centre creaked open. The gap was too narrow to pass through, and they had to grab one door each and force them by hand for the last metre.

The rusted mechanism screeched in agony, but gave beneath their combined strength. The Doctor mopped his face with his paisley handkerchief. 'Machines,' he said. 'Always back to humans in the end.' He gestured to Ace, and with a resigned smile she lifted the glo-ball to light their way.

As the echo of their hurried footsteps died away, a breeze began to blow through the darkened, high room. It blew the dusty remains of the two kings from the chessboard, and as the dust fell it was caught in an aura of sparkling light. The tatters of the crew's uniforms fluttered like flags before being torn from the bones and thrown across the room. Dust, infused with radiance, swirled like smoke in the darkness.

A figure in a spacesuit, with Terran Survey Corps flashes on the shoulders, extended a hand from the dust. A ghost, reaching for help. Help that was not there.

The hatchway to the airlock thundered upwards until it was flush with the ceiling, and the beams of four infrared scanners cut invisibly into the darkness.

The leading figure checked the readings on its detector, then inclined its head slightly before reaching up to the tinted, globe-shaped helmet it wore. There were two small hisses as the pressure-seals were broken. The leader lifted its helmet off. Cascades of reddish-gold hair fell over the shoulders of her spacesuit. She was no more than twenty-five years old.

'Atmosphere normal,' she said into the com-link at her neck.

Listrelle Quallem, first officer of the Survey Ship Icarus, directed her boarding party to draw their sidearms and to keep detectors on full power. Two life-forms had already been registered, and finding them was only a matter of time.

'Trooper Symdon and I will begin on level thirty and work down. Lieutenant Strakk '

The fair-haired officer at her side nodded and awaited his instructions.

' you and Carden start at level zero and work up. Maintain full radio contact at all times. Understood?'

'Understood, ma'am.'

'Proceed.'

They moved off in separate directions.

After about ten seconds, a grating lifted in the floor and the Doctor and Ace peered cautiously out. Their eyes were beginning to grow accustomed to the gloom.

'You know, I sometimes wonder,' mused the Doctor, 'whether service tunnels were built for the sole purpose of hiding intruders from people.'

'They were speaking English. I mean, real English. Not translated like normal.'

'I'd imagine that must be the investigation team from Earth,' the Doctor confirmed. 'That's all we need now.' He heaved himself back into the corridor, and pulled Ace up after him. 'It's just a question of time before their detectors locate us,' he added.

Ace paused in the act of replacing the hatchway cover. 'So why haven't they already?'

'Pah! Their instruments are primitive devices, primed to home in on cardiological activity.' The Doctor fumbled in his pockets and brought out a small disc of metal with flickering lights inlaid into it. 'Fortunately, they won't be equipped to deal with this. It's programmed to emit random information on the same frequency. Jams their sensors.'

Ace was impressed. 'Can I have one?'

'Possibly,' mumbled the Doctor, and slipped the device back into his pocket.

'So why are they going to find us?'

'It's not an infinitely large station, Ace,' said the Doctor apologetically. 'And besides, we're going to introduce ourselves to them. When I'm ready.'

'There has to be an explanation for this, Symdon.'