Romana and the Doctor exchanged a worried glance. They watched as K9 continued to circle about. There was about him an air of forced cheeriness.

'I've never seen him behave like this before,' the Doctor muttered. 'Perhaps I ought to open him up and have a prod.'

'Perhaps,' Romana postulated, 'he's got something to tell us.' She knelt down in front of K9 to stop him circling and said, 'K9, what's the matter?'

The dog's head drooped. 'Cannot answer, Mistress. There is - conflict in my circuits.'

The Doctor knelt down also. 'I'll give you conflict. Spit it out, K9.'

K9 hesitated before replying. 'I am not equipped with salivary mechanisms, Master.' There was an uncomfortable silence. Then he added, 'I am programmed to protect you and the Mistress. This protection extends to your emotional as well as your physical well-being.'

'You don't want to hurt our feelings?' Romana reached out and stroked K9 on the nose.

'Diagnosis sentimentally couched but essentially correct,' K9 said.

'Look, K9,' said the Doctor, 'I know we haven't always seen eye to eye, but whatever you've done you're still my dog, you know. I'm not going to put you out on the step like an empty milk bottle. Just tell me what's the matter and we'll discuss it rationally, eh? No raised voices.'

K9's internal workings chirruped. 'Eighty-three percent probability that you will raise your voice if I reveal my information, Master.

'Promise I won't.'

Romana was getting worried. 'Go on, K9,' she urged. K9 turned away from them, as if he could not bear to hold their gaze.

'I have received a vital communication from the TARDIS computer. We entered conference and decided it was better to withhold our findings from you to avoid distress.'

'I'm ordering you to tell me, K9,' said the Doctor.

K9 beeped.

'There has been a boundary error. The TARDIS has exceeded its parameters and is nearing the Time Spiral. It will be totally destroyed in two minutes relative time.'

'What?' The Doctor leapt up and raced over to him. 'What did you just say?

I hope this isn't a joke, K9. I mean, I hope it is.'

'I have never joked, Master. And you have raised your voice.'

'Of course I've raised my voice. The Time Spiral?' The Doctor clutched a handful of his curly hair.

Romana was trying to digest the implications of K9's news. 'But that's impossible.'

'That's not what you said five minutes ago.' He rubbed his chin. 'But you're right. I mean, the odds against banging up against the Spiral are high enough, but the odds against banging up against the Spiral just after you'd been talking about it for the first time in six hundred years ...' He trailed off and looked again at K9. 'Are you sure?'

K9 took the question as an order to recheck. 'Affirmative, Master. TARDIS will be destroyed in approximately one minute and thirty-five seconds. I advise that you make peace with the universe according to the rites of your belief system.'

Romana reached for the ovoid device. 'Thank goodness we found this in time.' She searched the console for a suitable inlet. It was hard to believe that they were in any danger. The central column was rising and falling noisily but smoothly enough, the ever-present hum of the systems was unaltered in pitch, and all instruments on the console showed no pressing problems.

The Doctor halted her. 'Wait, wait. Think about it. Isn't it more likely just that K9's gone barking mad?'

'I have never barked, Master,' said K9. 'And the TARDIS will be destroyed in one minute and fourteen seconds.'

Romana shook herself from the Doctor's grip. 'We can't take the risk, can we?' Her eyes alighted on a fixture between the demotic winch and the plural astrofier.

Again the Doctor stopped her. 'We don't want to encourage him. He must have overheard us talking and come up with this stunt. If we let him think he's rattled us he'll have us running around after him morning, noon and night. If you ask me, his cortex is on the blink.' He pointed to his own head and made a spiralling motion.

K9 said, 'Destruction in fifty-nine seconds. Fifty-eight, fifty-seven...'

'There, you see, he's developed a death wish. The best way to deal with it is to confront him with reality.' He turned on K9. 'Now listen. We're not going to be destroyed, you know.'

'We are, Master. In fifty-five seconds.'

'No we aren't.'

'Yes we are. The TARDIS will be crushed by the Spiral and scattered to the vortex.'

The Doctor sighed. 'No, K9, it won't.'

Romana observed this exchange with some worry. It did seem more probable that the Doctor would be proved right, but she couldn't shake off her fear. Deciding it would do no harm she started to connect the defence device to the console. It was simply a matter of putting a small probe into the hole.

K9 whirred and ticked. 'You are displaying the reaction known as denial, Master, common among humanoids facing certain death.'

'Don't you diagnose me!' cried the Doctor. 'I'm the sane party, it's you who needs help; all this nonsense about the Time Spi-'

He was interrupted by a shattering crash from somewhere, it seemed, outside the TARDIS, as if a storm was breaking above them. Instantly the lights went out. There was a split second of stillness, the control room illuminated only by K9's eye screen, and then Romana felt the ground shake and quiver beneath her feet.

A moment later the TARDIS was sent spinning violently. She lost her grip on the console and was blown off her feet, to be plastered against one of the far walls, her feet a few inches above the ground, her long fair hair blown out by the sheer force of the attack. There was the sound of a thunderclap.

She heard the Doctor. He was shouting, and couldn't have been more than a few feet away, but his voice sounded cracked and distant, as if he was calling from the far side of a wide valley. 'It's the Time Spiral, Romana!' he called.

'I know!' she called back. All around was chaos. As she watched, the control room was lit by crackling bursts of bright blue light, and she saw K9 spinning desperately on his base in an effort to keep his balance. The Doctor's crates and the rubbish inside were lifted like toys and whirled around crazily. The inner door was slammed open and shut. An insistent pressure battered her temples.

'Did you -' cried the Doctor. His words were s.n.a.t.c.hed away in the shrieking violence. 'Did you... fit that... gadget?'

Romana struggled to recall the moment before the attack. Had she inserted the probe? 'I... I think so...' she called back.

K9's voice, made eerily low by the atmospheric distortion, seemed to boom around them. 'TARDIS... will be destroyed in... forty-three seconds...'

'I don't know if you've... noticed...' the Doctor gasped. 'But it... doesn't appear... to be working...'

Romana realized she was going to spend the final few moments of her life getting angry with the Doctor. 'That's hardly... my fault!'

There was a smashing concussion and the control room suddenly inverted like a fairground centrifuge. She felt herself sliding up to the ceiling, still glued to the wall. Oddly, her main feeling was of regret rather than fear: there was a lot she hoped to do in the next few thousand years.

She heard K9 again. 'Master... Mistress... I have made a study of the...

TARDIS systems... The defence unit will... activate only when the...

materialization process is... instigated...'

'What?' the Doctor bellowed. 'Why didn't you say so earlier? Instigate it!'

Romana felt the world sliding away from her. Her consciousness began to close down, her vision receded, and the voices of her two friends echoed at the end of an infinitely long tunnel. 'Affirma... tive ... Mas...' 'Do it... K9!'

And then, just as she was prepared to face death, there was a fearsome screech of protesting machinery. The TARDIS's old engines made enough of a racket at the best of times. This was ten times worse, a raucous unearthly trumpeting that had all the delicacy on the ear of a fingernail sc.r.a.ping a blackboard. It sounded more organic than mechanical. The glowing instruments under the console's central column glowed fiery red and there was a series of internal explosions from somewhere deep in the TARDIS's workings.

Romana suddenly found herself thrown head first on to the floor. Luckily her arms and legs, spread eagled by the boundary forces, cushioned her fall. Her nose b.u.mped the cool white flooring. A selection of the Doctor's junk rained down on her.

She looked up on a remarkable scene. It was as if nothing had happened.

The lighting had regained its customary brightness, the noise of the storm had snapped off and been replaced by the soothing hum of the environment systems, and the Doctor and K9, who were huddled together in a heap on the other side of the console, looked unscathed. If it hadn't been for the disarray of the Doctor's knick-knacks and the toppled hat stand she might have doubted her memory of the previous two minutes.

'Are you all right?' she called over, picking herself up.

The Doctor uncoiled himself. His hair was standing on end and he wore a startled expression. 'Am I all right? Yes, I think so. I was dreaming. The colours were so bright. And you were there, and so was K9...'

'It wasn't a dream.'

He shook himself and sat up. 'Are you all right, K9?'

The dog lifted his head. 'Define "all right", Master.'

'Ha.' He patted K9 on his ear sensors. 'I think you've just answered the question.'

'Negative, Master, I did n-'

'Oh shut up. How about you, Romana?' he asked, standing up.

She smiled. 'A few bruises, that's all.'

'Good, good. We don't want you regenerating again, do we?' He kicked at the junk strewn across the floor. 'I think I'm going to have to start this from the top.'

Romana guided him gently away. 'Don't you think it's more important to work out why that happened and to make sure it never does again?'

The Doctor seemed to think for a moment. Then he shook his head. 'I shouldn't worry. The odds of going up the Time Spiral twice are -' He broke off and put a hand through his hair. 'Wait a moment. Odds. Random actions.' He snapped his fingers and pointed to a particular instrument on the console, a rectangular gla.s.s box containing a row of winking lights. This was the Randomizer, a unit appended to the navigation systems by the Doctor to throw his enemy the Black Guardian, the most evil being in the cosmos, off his trail. 'I think we ought to disconnect that thing. It's been bad news ever since I wired it up. Keeps landing us in the most dreadful trouble.'

K9 piped up. 'Ninety-three per cent of TARDIS materializations for which I have records previous to the installation of the Randomizer also match that description, Master.'

The Doctor snorted. 'Well, there's trouble, and then there's trouble.' His pointing finger wavered up to the central column. 'Good heavens, it's stopped.'

'We have materialized, Master,' said K9.

'Yes, I know. What I mean is we must have materialized very close to the boundary.' He exchanged a shifty glance with Romana. 'We really shouldn't be here, should we, this far into the future? The Time Lords wouldn't approve.'

Romana checked the panel that gave information on the immediate surroundings. Her trained eye picked out the most relevant details in seconds. 'Right at the end of the Humanian era. After the destruction of Earth.' She smiled. 'We should do our duty and leave right away.'

'Hmm.' The Doctor smiled back, his hand already reaching for the scanner control. 'Not a word to the High Council when you get back to Gallifrey.'

Romana bristled. 'Who said anything about going back?'

But the Doctor's attention was already taken by the screen. The shutters parted to reveal a singularly uninspiring terrain of grey rock and grey sky.

There was an occasional grey puddle. Romana tried to describe it to herself in some more constructive way and failed. Grey summed it all up.

'Hardly worth the candle,' said the Doctor. 'When one's come all this way, one expects something with a bit more. .. well, with a bit more chutzpah chutzpah. It might as well be Eastbourne.'

'Eastbourne?' asked Romana.

'Settlement on planet Earth,' said K9. 'Famed for its fish suppers.'

'Fish suppers?'

The Doctor shushed them both. 'Never mind Eastbourne.' He gestured to the sensor displays. 'The atmosphere's fairly clean, gravity's reasonable. A small amount of natural radiation. I think we should take a little look round.'