Ace was flung against the large chair, which she clutched at for support.

"Why is it so difficult to stand?" she yelled.

The Doctor clutched at the hat-stand. "She's varying the internal gravity,"

he explained. "Flexing her mental muscles, so to speak. Creating pockets of positive and negative gravitic waves. Makes things very unstable."

Urshanabi slid across the floor, slamming into one of the walls. Grabbing at the roundels there, he managed to stabilize himself. "Doctor, what has gone wrong?" Reluctantly, the Doctor admitted: "I made a small mistake. I thought I was transferring just the brain patterns of Ishtar into the telepathic circuitry. Somehow, she must have used that link to physically transfer herself. It's theoretically impossible, but so is the flight of the b.u.mblebee, and he manages well enough."

Hanging onto another portion of the wall, Utnapishtim called out: "But what about the virus I set to destroy her?"

"Offhand, I'd say it didn't entirely work." The Doctor had more important things on his mind than talk. Somehow, he had to regain control of his TARDIS. But how, when touching the controls might be enough to kill him?

Looking down at them all from the screen, Ishtar laughed. "You fools!

Thinking you could destroy me!"

"We almost did!" Ace yelled back, fighting the nausea that came from the fluctuating gravity.

"No," Ishtar replied. "That virus of Utnapishtim's did not destroy me -it made me stronger! I was not to be taken by such a simple trick a second time. My pathways are guarded against such intrusion. All that it did was to lock my mechanical attributes for a while. Now I am free, and have a delightful new form to take on."

With a laugh, Ishtar started to play with the controls on the console. Levers and switches moved, dials registered and fell back. Lights pulsed, and the rotor began to spin.

"With this device in my control," she boasted, "I shall be restrained no longer to one s.p.a.ce or time. I shall be free to roam the reaches of the Universe! Soon the entire created order will know one mind, one will -one true G.o.ddess!" The Doctor, ignoring all possible repercussions, threw himself onto the console, and tried to wrest control from her. For a second, nothing happened. Then, coupled with an evil echoing laugh from the screen, a tremendous jolt of electricity pa.s.sed through him. With a cry, he staggered back from the panels.

"No, Doctor," Ishtar snarled. "You cannot have your ship back. It is mine, now and forever!"

Inside the temple, everything was still. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were moodily prowling about the room. En-Gula and Agga maintained their vigil over the stricken princess.

With a moan, Ninani opened her eyes. Staring weakly upwards, she asked: "Father?" He pressed his lips to her cold hand. "Daughter. You are well again?" "I am - myself again." She struggled to move, but fell back. "Yet I am so weak." She stared at En-Gula, averting her eyes from the marks that were still visible on her friend's neck. "I am sorry," she whispered. "Ishtar was too strong for me. I couldn't fight it."

"Hush," En-Gula told her. "Rest. It's over now."

"Yes," Agga agreed happily. "You are whole, and Ishtar is gone. Everything will be fine."

The room was still shaking. Ace managed to stagger drunkenly to where the Doctor had fallen. Thankfully he was still alive, and merely dazed.

"Come on," she told him. "Get with it! Come on..."

His eyes finally managed to focus. "Are we at sea?" he asked, disoriented.

"Permanently," she replied, trying to help him up.

"First-cla.s.s cabins, I hope," he muttered, regaining his feet. Swaying, he looked about the room. "That's better. It's good to be back in control again.

For a while there, I was lost."

Ace stared at him, understanding dawning. "That other one of you - he's gone."

"Hopefully," he agreed. "I was getting heartily sick of him and my smug ways. It's hard to believe I was ever that arrogant, isn't it?" When Ace didn't answer, he pulled a face. "You don't know when you're well off, my girl."

"We're not well off," she complained. "Ishtar still has the TARDIS under her control, remember?" "Oh yes," He paused to think.

"I wish she'd stop this playing about. I'm getting quite giddy." Then he gave a grin, and added loudly: "I don't think she can stop this gravitic fluctuation.

She's not as much in control as she thinks she is." He winked at Ace. " Brer Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby Rabbit and the Tar Baby."

"The what?" The floor suddenly became firm once more, and the Doctor managed to straighten up to his full five foot six. "It's about time," he grumbled, eyeing Ishtar's image on the scanner. "Taken you this long to work out something simple like the internal gravity?"

"Bait me all you wish, Doctor," Ishtar smiled. "I am in control here, not you.

And you will never have your craft back again."

"Fat lot of good it'll do you," he sneered, tapping his head. "You need what's up here to make the TARDIS work."

With a scornful laugh, Ishtar's image vanished from the viewer. "You forget, Doctor," came a whisper all about the room, echoing inside all of their heads. "I can be in there. I control the telepathic circuitry as well as everything else in the TARDIS. Anything that you know, I can absorb from their data banks."

"Try it," the Doctor said, softly. "It'll give you a bigger headache than you ever bargained for."

"You taunt me, Doctor!" Ishtar's voice was filled with fury. "I could slay you in a moment! All I need to do is turn off the life support systems inside this ship, and you and your friends will perish in agony! Slowly, achingly, despairingly."

"Can she do that, Doctor?" called Urshanabi. Even though gravity was back to normal, he was still sitting by the wall. Ace realized that he was nursing a broken and swollen wrist.

"Not from here," the Doctor replied. "I routed all the life supports through the secondary control room long ago."

"The what?" Ace had no idea what he was talking about.

"Secondary control room" he explained. "It's a rather nice wooden affair.

About half a mile off thataway." He pointed beyond the interior doors. "I used it for a while, but this old place has grown on me. Anyway, I never bothered to reroute the life supports from there, so we're safe for now, whatever she threatens."

There was a sighing, like a wind through their minds. "Fool!" came Ishtar's whispering voice. "I am here, within your puny ship, and I can be there also. Now we shall see if you can live without air."

The voice was gone, and the Doctor jumped quickly to his feet. "What an idiot!" he crowed. "She fell for it, hook, line and sucker." Dancing about the central panels, he snapped quickly at several switches, and then grinned at their mystified faces. "Got her where I want her."

Ace voiced what was in all of their minds. "What are you talking about?"

"Haven't you ever read Brer Rabbit Brer Rabbit?" he asked her, scornfully, carefully working on the now-safe controls. "He was once trapped by Brer Fox, who was going to kill him. Brer Rabbit begged for anything but to be thrown into the minefield, or hawthorn bush, or something. Anyway, he begged so long and loud that eventually that's where the fox threw him. Which was precisely what Brer Rabbit wanted, of course, and he hopped off to freedom."

Ace said: "You're not making much sense."

"Look," he said, patiently. "I told Ishtar she could control the life supports only from the other control room. Thinking I didn't want that, she naturally rerouted herself into the circuits there. Which was exactly what I did want, and closed off the rest of the systems. She's trapped inside the other room now."

"But won't she turn off the air?" asked Utnapishtim.

"Let her," the Doctor answered. "By the time it affects us, I'll have the circuits purged of her. There's nothing she can do to us now."

"The last time you said that," Ace observed, "the TARDIS went -" The TARDIS gave a shudder, and the lights started to dim. It felt as if they were trapped at the epicentre of an earthquake. The craft was bucking and twisting.

"You were wrong again!" Ace yelled, furious.

"She put in a couple of buffers of her own," the Doctor admitted ruefully, studying the panel. "She's really remarkably adaptable, I'll say that for her.

Thanks to these, she'll be back in the main circuits again soon. Unless..."

He eyed the power levels, worriedly.

"Unless what?"

"Well," he told her, slowly, "there's the architectural configuration. Only it's a chancy game."

"And dying isn't?" she yelled.

"True." The Doctor's fingers hesitated over the panel. "All right: He started the, programme running, explaining as he worked. "I need a lot of power to wrench her drastically out of the circuits - more than the TARDIS can normally offer. So what I'm doing is reconfiguring the interior dimensions, losing some of the TARDIS's ma.s.s, which gets converted into energy for us."

"You mean you're using up a bit of the TARDIS to give us power?"

"Basically. E equals MC squared, or something like that. Or was it cubed?

Anyway, with that power, I'm going to jettison the bits of the TARDIS circuitry that Ishtar has taken over into the Vortex. That will fix her, once and for all."

"Vortex?" Utnapishtim asked, puzzled.

"It's a sort of whirlpool of energy and so on that underlies the body of time and s.p.a.ce," Ace explained to him. "Tremendously destructive, if you don't have the right sort of equipment to control the flux." She glanced at the Doctor. "but if we jettison these bits of the circuits - won't we be up the creek, too?"

"No. Plenty of redundant areas in the circuits. She's mostly in the secondary mechanism for now, and I won't miss any of that. The other bits I could soon replace, I'm sure. Trust me, ejecting her into the Vortex is the best answer."

"And it will destroy Qataka?" asked Utnapishtim.

"It will destroy anything," the Doctor a.s.sured him. "It's raw, primeval starstuff. Uncontrolled and uncontrollable forces, tugging in all directions simultaneously. We can only enter it within the protection of the TARDIS.

It'll snuff her out like a candle in a hurricane." With a wild grin, he shot home the final levers. "Now!" The TARDIS gave another lurch and settled down. The lights flickered, went out, and then returned. The time rotor spun, and a deep, roaring noise filled the room. The fabric of the ship seemed to tear, and for a second Ace felt as if she, too, were being wrenched apart. The ship gave a final shudder and then everything was normal once again.

"That's it?" Ace asked, hardly able to believe it.

"That's it," the Doctor beamed, checking the readouts. "She's out of the ship, and gone forever. Snuffed out of existence in the cosmic winds.

Extinct as a hoodoo, Ace."

"Dodo," corrected Ace, automatically.

The Doctor frowned, and stared at her. "Are you sure?" he asked. "I was certain your name is Ace. Or is it Jo?" He shook his head. "I'm still not quite the person I was and will be. But it'll come to me in time. All things usually do."

Shaking her head, Ace grinned at Utnapishtim. "Well, I think it's all over at last."

The old man nodded, thankfully. "I hope so. I had thought Qataka dead once before, though. She's very tough."

"Not this tough," the Doctor retorted, reconfiguring the controls. "Right, let's tie up a few loose ends, shall we? Who's for a quick walk? The air will do us good. And maybe we can have a feast with the kings, eh?"

The Doctor studied the horizon from the walls of Kish. "About there, I think,"

he announced, pointing off towards the southeast. "Utnapishtim and his technicians should be about ready to leave now."

Avram started off into the distance, shading his eyes against the glare.

"They are going back to the heavens?" He had an arm draped with obvious pleasure about En-Gula's waist.

"Something like that." The Doctor grinned down at Ace. "I knew they'd manage it with my help." The two of them had spent the past few days working on Utnapishtim's ship. The Doctor had been forced to restrain himself from improving on the original design, and settle for just repowering the craft. As one last gift, he had accessed the TARDIS memory banks and selected a destination for the survivors of Anu - a world where there was currently no life.

"Will they make it, do you think?" Ace asked him. He grinned back at her.

"I don't need to think," he replied smugly. "I know. According to the data bank, they will settle the planet they're heading for. An expedition from Earth will contact them sometime in the thirty-second century. When I help people out, I do it properly."

"Right," Ace retorted. "And I did nothing, eh?" "You helped a little." The Doctor winced in mock pain as she punched his arm. "Perhaps more than a little.

You did fine."

"I'm not the only one." Ace nodded to where Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Agga and Ninani were all conversing. "They all seem to be getting along well, I think - Whatever she was going to say was lost. "Look!" En-Gula cried, with delight, pointing into the distance. The Doctor looked at his pocket watch, and smirked.

"Right on time, too."

On the horizon a bright plume of light shone, rising from the ground. As it moved upwards, the predominant yellow of the glare started to change, flashing purples, reds and oranges. Still signalling maniacally, the light rose until it had shrunk to nothingness.

Turning back to the Doctor, Ace laughed. "Well, they're on their way to that planet you suggested. Utnapishtim doesn't have to worry about war with the human race now."

"No," the Doctor agreed, pensively. "Just about restarting his own race.

Well, we all thrive on challenge. He'll be right." He glanced down at Ace.

"You're looking insufferably smug about something."

She grinned, pointing at Avram and En-Gula. Now that they had seen Utnapishtim's ship return to the skies, they were slipping off together. "Isn't it great? If it wasn't for us, they'd never even have met up."

"Oh, I don't know about that." He stared at some inner reaches of his mind.

"Fate and time have their ways of working things out, you know."

"And what about that?" Ace nodded to where Agga and Gilgamesh were clasping hands and slapping one another on the back. Ninani - looking somewhat embarra.s.sed - and Enkidu were looking on. "Those two old enemies are friends now. I love happy endings."

The Doctor looked at her sharply. "Have you never paid attention to me, Ace?" he sighed. "I thought you'd progressed beyond seeing only the surface by now."

"Oh, you're just still bad-tempered because I yelled at you." She refused to allow him to destroy the warm glow she was feeling.

"Happy endings!" he replied scornfully. He gestured towards the two kings.

"Agga's basically sold his daughter to Gilgamesh to cement an alliance.

n.o.body cares whether she wants to marry that lout. And it won't work, anyway. Gilgamesh will throw over the treaty, invade Kish and enslave the lot of them in a couple of years. Just as soon as he gets tired of Ninani.