Ace felt herself shoved roughly to one side. She hit the floor, with the sounds of Quallem's panic echoing in her ears.

When she rolled over, she saw the Doctor, his arms spread wide, advancing on the growing cloud of lights as if welcoming them.

It took less than a second. The cloud swooped, and swallowed the Doctor up.

In the fading glare, Ace saw the doors juddering open once more. And then she found herself being hauled to her feet, with Quallem's gun tight against her jawbone.

Chapter 6.

Communication Breakdown 'It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, rather than theories to suit facts.'Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia A Scandal in Bohemia

Tom skidded to a halt in the Porter's Lodge, and slammed his hands down on the reception desk to stop himself from falling over.

'Harry, I need to find Professor Rafferty,' he said breathlessly, as Bernice followed him into the Lodge at a rather more sedate pace.

Harry liked the leisurely life. A job as an Oxford porter suited him these days it was nice and sedate after his time in the police force, and you got a bit of respect, too. He liked the way the gates were shut at midnight on the dot, because it appealed to his sense of order, and he liked being able to tell people not to walk on the grass. The hours were good, and everybody knew your name. He often thought that if it wasn't for the students, the job would be pretty much all he wanted. Harry sighed, put his newspaper down and looked up at Tom. 'Raining out, is it?' he asked, looking pointedly at the drips that were falling on his key-allocation list.

'If you could be so kind,' said Bernice with a flattering smile, and trod on Tom's foot, 'we would be so very grateful.'

Harry cleared his throat and perked up a little. He was never one to offend a true lady. 'Professor Rafferty should be in his rooms, miss,' he said. 'He headed there about fifteen minutes ago. Oh, he's got a visitor, though.'

'Visitor?' Bernice wondered to herself if the Doctor and Ace had come back already, and did not chide herself for the disappointment she felt.

'A young lady. Pretty thing, she was. In a black dress. Didn't say a word, though Hey, not so fast! You'll slip over!'

Harry shrugged, and reached for his newspaper again. He perched his glasses on his nose and settled back to continue the article he had been reading.

The page was blank.

He stared uncomprehendingly at the whiteness for a few seconds, then flicked through the rest of the newspaper with mounting astonishment. There was nothing in it. The words he had been reading not two minutes ago seemed to have vanished. What he was holding looked like no more than a wad of chip-paper.

'Well, I'll be '

He put the paper down and hurriedly tapped out a number on the internal phone.

'Bill? Yeah, listen, it's Harry here. St Matthew's. You got a moment to come round here? I've got something to show you...'

There was no answer from Rafferty's office, so Bernice tried the door. The oak-panelled study was just as they had left it, and there was no sign of Rafferty.

'I don't believe this,' said Bernice. She looked at Tom, who now appeared even more worried than before.

'This isn't like the Professor,' he said. 'I don't like it one bit.'

'You think he's in trouble,' Bernice murmured. 'No such thing as a quiet life, is there? I thought Oxford was supposed to be a sedate place. Next year I'll try the Lebanon for my holidays.' She was aware that her flippancy was not getting them anywhere, and Tom was hopping from one foot to another like an agitated schoolboy. 'All right,' she said. 'Calm down. We'll find him. Does he have other rooms anywhere in the university?'

'Of course his Faculty office. But that's out east, at Cowley '

'Come on, then. Let's get cracking.'

They turned together, and saw it at the same time.

In the doorway, a hovering whirlpool of green and red globules of light was slowly coming into being. There was a noise, a scurrying, twittering noise like hundreds of creatures.

They backed away in horror.

'That's it!' Tom hissed, his eyes open wide in horror. 'That's the sound I heard earlier!'

Bernice touched his elbow gently. 'The Doctor always says,' she whispered, keeping her eyes on the entity, 'that if you show that you mean no harm yourself, then you won't come to any.'

The whirlpool pulsed with brighter light. Like whispers on a vast auditorium, the sound grew, and the spiralling lights began to advance on them.

'On the other hand,' Bernice added, 'even the Doctor talks rubbish sometimes...'

'What are we going to do?'

Not for the first time, Bernice Summerfield realized that she was in a position where her combat skills were not going to be much use. For one thing, she was not armed, and for another, the nebulous invader did not look as if it could be overpowered by the martial arts. They were up against the bookshelves.

'Which floor are we on?' she asked.

'Second.'

'Oh, well. There goes another great idea.' She was scrabbling behind her, and pulled something out. The book was bound in maroon cloth and had the author's name embossed in gold.

Crackling, the energy bore down on them. It filled the room with unnatural light and squealed and chattered like a cloud of birds. A wind blew papers from the desk, scattering them like leaves.

'Do you like Henry James?' asked Bernice.

'No.'

'Good.' She flung the book. 'Fetch, boy. Fetch Fetch!'

The entity fell upon the pages with a roar of triumph. The Portrait of a Lady The Portrait of a Lady flared red as it was consumed, and then there was emptiness and silence. flared red as it was consumed, and then there was emptiness and silence.

Bernice and Tom, scarcely able to believe they were alive, lifted their eyes. The Professor's papers were scattered across the carpet, and the entity had gone. 'It worked,' breathed Bernice. 'And who said all art was useless?'

Tom, who was still shaking, lowered himself into Rafferty's chair. 'It was a trap. That thing wanted to kill us.' He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. 'I don't feel at all well.'

'Don't be so feeble. The galaxy has far worse things in it. No, I think,' Bernice said, tapping her chin with one finger, 'that it was some sort of warning.' She knelt down and examined the carpet, picking at threads as if looking for something. 'If you want to make yourself useful,' she added, 'you could try getting the Professor on the phone.'

Tom seemed to jerk back to reality, and tottered rather uncertainly over to the telephone. 'Do you do this sort of thing every day?' he asked.

Carden had been with Terrin's crew for two years. He had been in the team that had rescued three trapped palaeontologists on the colony of Ephros, and he remembered the mission now as he picked his way through the ravaged lower decks. The men had been on a month-long mission, but a rockfall had extended it to six weeks before anyone thought to send in a rescue squad. The Icarus Icarus team had had seven days with oxygen-masks and no natural light until they had finally homed in on the life-traces in the Belvedere Cavern, the deepest and most enormous of the halls. Its huge, motionless lake reflected phosphorescence and glittering rock formations, watchful like sentries. The team, led by Cheynor, had only found one of the scientists, and he was incoherent, unable to provide any details of how he had survived, let alone any clue to the whereabouts of his colleagues. team had had seven days with oxygen-masks and no natural light until they had finally homed in on the life-traces in the Belvedere Cavern, the deepest and most enormous of the halls. Its huge, motionless lake reflected phosphorescence and glittering rock formations, watchful like sentries. The team, led by Cheynor, had only found one of the scientists, and he was incoherent, unable to provide any details of how he had survived, let alone any clue to the whereabouts of his colleagues.

Captain Terrin, Carden remembered, had sent the amphiboid to scour the caves and drag the lake, and he and Symdon had been on the team. The old first officer, Kenley, had been in charge. It had taken another twenty-four hours of mindless tedium, of waiting for the radar to detect something in the apparently bottomless water. Then, finally, they found what they were looking for, what they had been dreading. As the infra-red camera homed in on the two floating bodies it became apparent that they had been lashed together with the palaeontologists' standard-issue cable. They also saw what Carden would never forget, the tattered flesh hanging like shreds of chicken-meat on a bone, the stubby limbs and the savage rips in the men's chests.

Afterwards they had been ordered to keep their silence about the exact condition of the bodies. Carden did not know what had gone into Kenley's report, but it did not take long to prove the case beyond doubt. They needed a spectrographic DNA analysis of the third palaeontologist's knife, of the skin under his fingernails, and of the enamel on his teeth.

The condemned man was transported to Station B5 to await trial. Carden had heard and he was willing to believe it was not an apocryphal story that for his last meal before the passing of his sentence (life on a penal colony) the man had requested two rare steaks. He wondered, now, whether this assignment would replace that of the murdered palaeontologists as the spectre that haunted his nightmares.

His infra-scanner picked out a grin. His heart skipped a beat as he passed the immobile skeleton, slumped like so many against the corridor wall. Only the upper half of the body could be seen, the lower ribs and pelvis resting on a fine dust which had presumably been the legs.

He moved on, hearing the floor creak beneath his boots, feeling the straining girders. He wondered how old they were now, and if they would hold.

The loudest sound in the corridor was his own breathing. So when the scream came he was in no doubt about it.

For several seconds he could not move his legs. The visible darkness seemed to crawl from corners towards him and he felt a trickle of sweat escape past his deodorizer implant.

His heart pounding, he flipped open his communicator. 'Symdon, location please?'

The static and feedback were louder than he had ever heard them before.

'Symdon, respond!'

There was something slithering up the corridor behind him.

He knew that without turning round.

Now he moved. Something propelled him, a primal urge, a human instinct for survival. He hit the next section at a run, and his infra-scanner picked out a black metal door ahead of him, patches of rust splashed like blood on its surface. Behind him, there was a sound like the rustle of bats' wings. He thumped the door-control without even thinking where it might lead. And there, in the gloom, he caught the flash of a silver star on a white-pressure suit. The protective uniform of a Survey Corps trooper. Relief washed through Carden like alcohol, but still the adrenalin was kicking him into action.

His call to Symdon stuck in his throat as he saw exactly what he was facing.

Carden had a brief blurred image of a creature so twisted and shrivelled, so near death that it hardly looked human. The eyes were those of his friend Jed Symdon, but the skin, brittle as dried leaves, was tearing on the skull as the figure toppled forward. The hands, claws like knives protruding from mushy flesh, clutched at Carden's uniform.

In a haze of green, it was the last sight that Trooper Carden ever saw.

Headphones clattered on to the console and the TechnOp leapt to his feet.

Thirty faces turned in the orange light of the Icarus Icarus' bridge to look at the man, including those of Captain Terrin and Second Officer Cheynor.

'Massive feedback, sir,' mumbled the man, somewhat sheepishly.

'Captain,' called the tracker TechnOp from his glassdomed console. 'I've lost the traces.'

'What?' Terrin hurried over.

'All the links are down, sir. I can't get anything.'

'And nothing on audio,' said Cheynor bitterly. He met his captain's hunted expression, saw the strain even in the orange-edged shadows.

Terrin carefully put the headphones to one ear. He nodded, and looked at Cheynor. 'Some sort of massive disturbance from Q4,' he hazarded.

'That was our last contact. Sir, that means we've lost all communication with the group.'

The captain was already heading for the exit. 'Get me two guards,' he said, 'I'm going in there.'

James Rafferty had had many unusual visitors to tea in his oak-panelled study in the Faculty, indeed he had tutored several of them. He found this girl Amanda more polite than most, and if she was a little unsettling, he decided, it was only because of the aura of cool, deadly beauty which she exuded. That, and her unwillingness to remove her sunglasses. He found that looking at his own reflection every time he spoke to her put him at quite a disadvantage. His hands were steady when he poured her tea, though, and he gave her a winsome smile as he passed a plate of scones.

Amanda, comfortable in the armchair, crossed her black-stockinged legs with a quiet swish that did nothing for Professor Rafferty's blood-pressure. She held up one white palm to refuse the scones, but took the cup of tea.

'Thank you very much, Professor. It's kind of you to entertain me.'

'I gathered it was for my own benefit, young lady. We don't often find visitors examining our lawn, and it's been a long time since anyone told me they had interesting information for me.' Rafferty sighed, pressed his fingertips together and fixed his gaze on one corner of his Renoir print. 'I'm usually the one giving the information, you see. Giving it and not being believed, in the normal run of things.'

Amanda's reaction was to sip her tea, almost mechanically. There might have been a hint of a smile on her blue-painted lips, but it was difficult to tell.

Rafferty lowered his glasses on his nose and leaned forward, intertwining his fingers. It was a stance that he had used many times to warn undergraduates of the imminent approach of a Very Serious Question, but it seemed to have little effect on the girl.

'Tell me, Miss, ah '

'Amanda.'

'Ah, yes. You said. Amanda. Are you a student here?'

'Just passing through.'

There was something about the girl's voice, Rafferty thought. Some of the young women who came to him to read chapters of their astrophysics dissertations had voices that were strained, blackened by coffee and smoke, voices with a tainted purity like crumpled sheets. But Amanda's gained its lived-in resonance from something more intangible. It sounded... tensile tensile.

'And what was it you wanted to talk to me about?' asked the Professor, taking a gulp of tea to lubricate his dry throat.

Amanda placed her teacup on the table beside her. 'Professor, an area of one hundred and fifty-four square centimetres on the lawn of your college is currently being subjected to a controlled temporal implosion. The forces involved must be utilizing loop systems of dimensional engineering that do not exist on this planet at this time.'

Rafferty was silent. He blinked once.

'I thought,' Amanda continued, 'that you found such anomalies a challenge.'

The Professor smiled and reached for his telephone. 'I'll call the head gardener, if you're concerned,' he said airily. 'Have him roll it out.'

'Professor Rafferty!'

The effect of her voice was astonishing. It was like a physical force slamming the receiver back down and twisting his head to look at her blank eyes. When she continued, her tones were softer.

'Don't play the foolish Earthling with me, Rafferty. You can't pretend not to understand. Not the Professor of Extra-Terrestrial Studies at Oxford University.'