The Day Before the Music Died

“I’ve been drugged,” I told Nyssa and Tegan. The next thing I knew they were all over me, both talking at once, and I couldn’t follow a thing they said. “I’m all right!” I said more loudly than I thought I would, and when they stopped yammering, I repeated, much more softly, “I’m all right!”

Nyssa examined me pore by pore and declared that I “looked perfectly normal except for the dilated pupils and funny smile.”

“Your eyes,” said Tegan, “look spooky.”

I didn’t want to repeat “I’m all right” so I said “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Then what makes you think you’ve been drugged?” asked Nyssa.

“It obviously wasn’t a Mickey Finn, whatever it was,” decided Tegan.

“No, no, nothing to knock me out or harm me. I’m not sure but it’s probably LSD. Maybe psilocybin. It’s not important. It’s not a poison and the point is, since I know I am about to go on a journey…”

“… take a trip, Doctor.” Tegan was trying to hide her grin.

“Right, take a trip, I don’t have to be afraid because I won’t be confused about what is happening to me.”

“Um, Doctor, I don’t think it works that way.”

“Actually, Tegan,” said Nyssa, from the console, “that is how it works, to an extent. Very interesting. But the Doctor does have a better chance of having a positive experience if he goes in fully informed and prepared not to… what does ‘freak out’ mean?”

“Okay,” said Tegan, “but going in prepared is one thing and remembering that you’re tripping is another. We need to take care of him. We can find out who drugged him afterwards.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” mused Nyssa.

“Enough,” said Tegan, “to know that we’re in for at least eight extremely interesting hours.”

We decided that the console room was not a particularly safe location for me to trip, despite its being a familiar and comforting place, because I might forget where we were and step outside into space, or make a rash decision like setting coordinates for a sun or black hole. I say we decided; I was not much involved in that decision, as I was more interested in the way my fingers worked. They stretched out much farther than they ordinarily could. I could almost reach the console from the interior door. This was fairly amusing and I wiggled them happily. “It’s a bit like being in a house of mirrors,” I noted. (Tegan told me later that she flinched at that thought.)

Nyssa got my attention and I smiled at her. “Where is your favorite place in the TARDIS, Doctor?”

I answered without hesitation, “The garden.”

The TARDIS has, on more than one emergent occasion, had to jettison bits and parts of herself. On those occasions, I had no say in which rooms were ejected; it is by happy chance that the garden has always survived. I don’t spend much time there; I almost never have a chance to visit it. “All right,” said Nyssa. “Lead the way.”

The trouble is, I couldn’t remember where the garden was. The TARDIS interior seemed a lot more maze-like than it ordinarily did.

“Don’t look at me,” said Tegan. “I’m done wandering around the depths of this craft unassisted. I nearly went mad the first time.”

“Don’t worry.” Nyssa took my hand. “We’re here for you and we’ll take you to the garden. You’ll be safe there.”

I looked around, suddenly worried. “Daleks?”

“You’re fine,” said Tegan. “You’re tripping.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Do you always smell this good?”

“Yes, I always do, Doctor. Come on.”

As we traversed the winding TARDIS corridors, various details caught my eye that had previously eluded me: the roundels were shiny, like halos. Sometimes I stopped to touch one. I found their texture pleasing, until I discovered that one of them was breathing; then I was disconcerted and didn’t touch them anymore.

Still, I couldn’t resist opening doors as we passed them. One large room was empty except for a Pleyel grand piano and its bench, a small table displaying a tuner and a tea-stained cup on an equally tea-stained saucer, six unmatched chairs lined up into two rows facing the piano, and a crystal chandelier that revolved. I sat down on the piano bench with my back to the piano and stared up at the chandelier. It was hypnotically beautiful. I don’t know how long I sat like that but eventually I realized that my friends were calling me and trying to stir me. I remember silently mouthing “wow” and pointing at the chandelier. Nyssa turned me around to face the piano.

“Does he play?” asked Tegan.

“I don’t know,” admitted Nyssa.

“I play,” I said, and ran my hands over the keys before negotiating a couple of scales and wincing. “It’s been a while since Frédéric and I played duets here. Could you fetch me that tuner please, Aurore.” I guess Nyssa decided she was Aurore, as she brought me the tuner. I propped open the lid and removed the music desk, setting it carefully on the floor. I opened the bench and took out some mutes and a feather duster. With the TARDIS’ help (she has perfect pitch, whereas I only have perfect relative pitch) I tuned that dear piano. I am sure that took at least two hours because at first I was enchanted with the feather duster and crouched down between the piano and the bench to perform an impromptu puppet show with it for my friends, who seemed equally enchanted. When I had finally completed the task, I replaced the desk, closed the lid, sat and played a Chopin impromptu, then sang a few Cole Porter songs for my still-enchanted friends. Finally I bent and kissed middle A, saluted the chandelier and led Tegan and Nyssa out of the room.

The corridors were rippling and constantly changing directions so I squeezed my eyes shut and let Nyssa and Tegan lead me where they would. They spoke reassuringly to me and after a while I opened one eye, saw that the ripple effect had not diminished, but somehow I didn’t mind any longer and gave my friends a hard time looking all around and sometimes walking backwards, trying to see everything. I pointed at whatever I found interesting, which was pretty much everything, and at one point I must have touched my face, because I remember a shocked feeling of loss that all but paralyzed me. I closed my eyes tightly. “Where is it?” I cried.

“Where is what?” asked Nyssa.

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Tegan gripped my right arm and Nyssa gently took the left. I wrenched my arms free and felt my chin and cheeks.

“My beard! Where’s my beard?”

Nyssa whispered, “Is he going to be like this the whole time? You said eight hours… it’s not permanent, is it?”

“No, it shouldn’t be, although Time Lords are different so who knows for sure? Eight hours is average. It could be longer or shorter. Doctor,” she said more loudly, “you didn’t have a beard when I met you and you haven’t had one since either.”

“But you met me when I was a different face. It wasn’t melting then.”

“It’s not melting now, Doctor. You’re fine!”

“You’re tripping,” Nyssa reminded me.

“Oh,” I said, feeling the rest of my face, “the drug thing. Right. I remember now.” Slowly, I opened my eyes. “So my face isn’t melting?” I looked at my friends. “No, yours aren’t either. That’s good. But you’re bleeding, Tegan!” I grabbed her arm, much as she had grabbed mine. “Why are you bleeding?”

Tegan explained, “No, Doctor, I am wearing a dress with red in it. It’s just the color of the dress. I’m not bleeding at all. I’m fine. Nyssa is fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine.”

“And we all scream for ice cream!” I declared, and, tickled with my own cleverness, I laughed until I couldn’t stand, and leaned against a wall, where the roundels were still breathing, so I took a step forward and Nyssa and Tegan caught me before I could hit the floor. “Whoops,” I said, still laughing.

I noticed that Tegan was bleeding several times as we proceeded into the depths of the TARDIS, and each time I was reminded that she was not bleeding, just wearing red, and that I was tripping. Meanwhile the various doors we encountered, all identical in appearance but each different in character (one would beckon, another would warn me off, and yet another would not care at all whether I entered its room or passed it by), were enticing, and I either opened them or asked Tegan or Nyssa to do so if my fingers were acting up again. Most of them were dark, dusty storage rooms, some more inviting than others, depending on which treasures were immediately visible and which were hidden away: for some reason, I preferred to explore and discover rather than be handed an artifact. In one room, under a pile of dog toys (in which K-9 had never shown the least interest) I found a child’s finger-paint kit, and I tucked that into a pocket along with a Frisbee. Tegan found a Simpsons of Piccadilly “Towelling à la Mer” shopping bag and helped me find the finger-paint kit and Frisbee, as I had already forgotten into which pocket I’d deposited them. “We’ll keep all your discoveries here,” she said.

“Why are your feet bleeding?” I asked, trying not to worry, since she was smiling.

“I’m wearing red shoes. You’re tripping.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, now look at this!” I picked up a statuette that had been all but smashed to smithereens. I’d glued endless tiny shards together and managed to reconstruct the precious thing: the image of Hatshepsut, smashed by her nephew, Thutmosis III. “She was the King of Egypt!”

“Queen, you mean.”

“No, Tegan, she was the king. Look, she even has a little beard, false of course.” Tegan seemed fairly impressed by this and carefully placed the statuette into the Simpsons bag.

“Look, Doctor!” Nyssa had found a bokken, a training katana I’d picked up from a pile of refuse on “hard trash” day in a small Kobe neighborhood, two days before the great Hanshin earthquake. I’d carried it around for a while, fancying it an unique walking stick, maybe also fancying myself a unique, silly samurai, but it brought back too many horrific memories of what had happened so soon after its acquisition. Eighteen spans of the Fukae Bridge had collapsed, Hanshin Expressway traffic and all, and some of it had collapsed on me. It sounded like a powerful explosion and I looked up to see cars, metal, concrete, big, heavy stuff falling all around me and right onto me, too. To this day I don’t know how I not only survived but escaped uninjured, unless you count scrapes and bruises. It was like having a shipload of Daleks falling onto my face, and no quieter, either. I could hear it now, in the storage room, along with the screams of everyone around me; indeed the whole city screamed. I covered my head, screaming too, and tried to crawl away, but something stopped me; I was trapped. I fought to get out from under the debris – some debris! Debris is ash, wood chips, table legs. I was trapped under a bridge pier! – and someone held me still so that I couldn’t even try to crawl away. I fought back. “Doctor, look at me. Open your eyes. Look in my eyes. Look, it’s me, Nyssa. It’s all right. Look at me.”

I opened my eyes and saw the dusty floor, and Nyssa’s hands on my face, turning my head to look at her as she climbed off of my back. Tegan was already standing, breathless, backing away. I could turn now and see Nyssa’s worried eyes; her voice was soothing and I listened to it rather than to the din of the disaster. “Nyssa,” I whispered.

“It’s all right. You’re in the TARDIS, Tegan and I are with you, and you’re fine.”

“What happened?”

“You tell us,” said Tegan, coming forward and kneeling next to Nyssa. “We have no idea. You saw a wooden sword and kind of freaked out.”

“Oh,” was all I could think of to say. Then I cried for a while. It felt good. By and by I pulled out my Louis XVI handkerchief and wiped my face. Before I could put it back, Nyssa exclaimed,

“Doctor, that is beautiful! Wherever did you get that?” I handed it to her so she could look more closely. She fingered the embroidery admiringly. “It’s quite old, isn’t it?”

“Not in the grand scheme of things,” I said, “but relative to the lifespan of those who make such things, yes, quite old. I wonder if I could have a cup of tea?” Tegan stood up.

“Will you be okay with him alone?”

“Of course! He’s okay now.”

“All right, then.” Tegan went to the door of the room. “I don’t think I can find my way back to the tea room from here.”

“There is a tea room in the garden too,” I offered, standing up. “And a fountain. And a Venusian magnolia tree.”

“You can’t tell me,” said Tegan, “that any kind of tree whatsoever grows on Venus!”

“No, of course not,” I agreed. “It grew on Gallifrey. It was planted there by an immigrant Venusian, who had what you would call a green thumb, or would have, if he’d had thumbs. If he’d had thumbs he’d have had six. He planted it psychically. Anyway, his landlord irritated him so much that he dug up the tree while it was still quite young, put it in a pot and carried it off to market, where it was bought by a tree abuser….”

“Doctor, are you making this up as you go along?”

“Tegan, that is an unfounded and offensive accusation.” Nyssa looked accusingly at Tegan. “I made it up long ago and refined it over the centuries until it became true.” Nyssa was dumbfounded but Tegan laughed. “Anyway, I liberated the tree from the abuser….”

“You stole it!” declared Tegan.

“Of course. And it’s been thriving in my garden ever since!”

“What were you doing on Gallifrey if you already had the TARDIS and its garden?” Nyssa was still puzzled.

“I was just a teenager, about… oh, 120 years old or so. I lived with… is that a cake?”

Tegan bent to look where I pointed. We’d been walking through the corridors again by now, I had opened yet another door, and this room was tiny. On its gleaming tile floor stood what looked to me like an elaborate birthday cake, with pink icing and eight lit candles, their flames flickering in what couldn’t have been a breeze – perhaps a draught? “I don’t think it’s my birthday,” I mused. “Is it my birthday?”

“It’s a hat box,” said Tegan, picking it up.

“Why are there candles on a hat box?”

Nyssa said, “Those are ribbons.” I looked closely at the box. The ribbons were flickering. Tegan was holding the box with both hands so Nyssa opened it. “See? It opens up. There’s a hat inside.” She drew it out. “Oh, that’s lovely! And bigger than the box! How does that work?”

“It’s bigger on the… um, no wait, smaller on the… the hat is bigger than the box, but the dimensions are… I don’t know. It just is.” Satisfied with my explanation, I took the hat from Nyssa and put it on my head. It was a huge chapeau à la Montgolfier, woven of straw, its linen crown pouffy and plumed, meant to resemble a hot air balloon. It must have looked silly on me; I took it off and plopped it onto Tegan’s head, and I quite expected her to take off and circumnavigate the world in it. Of course petite Tegan was overwhelmed, practically swallowed by the outsized chapeau, and Nyssa seemed torn between the enchantment of the elaborate object and the ridiculousness of it on our friend’s head. She picked it up and put it on her own head, which it swallowed just as handily. I relieved her of it and placed it back into the box in which it could not possibly fit but did. Nyssa took the Simpsons bag from Tegan but the hat box didn’t fit within it, so we left the box behind.

We hadn’t trudged much farther when I suddenly knew exactly where we were. “Follow me!” I cried, bolting, and my friends told me later they had a difficult time keeping up with me, especially considering the twists and turns and even a loop around which I led them, but we did in fact end up at the door to the garden. “We should mark this,” I said.

“No, let’s not do anything rash,” said Tegan, stopping me from taking the Simpson’s bag from Nyssa and extracting the finger paints. “Come on.” She opened the door and we stepped into my beloved garden.

Stepping into my garden is like slipping into your best pair of jeans, full of holes but so comfortable; like your favorite song on the radio in the middle of the night, from a station so far away you can only hear it at night when half the other stations have gone off the air and cause no interference; like lying on your back in the red grass and looking up past glowing mountains at the suns while they toast your skin; like eating ice cream on Korda while a batona bailaora dances on her tile and the bowler smashes the wicket; like holding your newborn for the first time and feeling more connected to another entity than you ever have before. Yes, it’s that good. I felt it. Nyssa and Tegan felt it, I know. Their faces were glowing. I could feel mine glowing too. I was glowing all over. I could smell every flower at once, every tree, every blade of grass, every clover, the fruit on every vine. I ran down a small brick path to the green marble fountain, where I took off my trainers and socks, sat on the fountain’s edge and dipped my feet into its swirling pool. I could feel its spray on my face as it bubbled away. I could see faces in the bubbles, too, not the faces of anyone I knew or ever had known, but strange, friendly faces that popped when the bubbles outgrew themselves, only to be replaced by more bubbles and more faces.

“How in the… how does that work?” asked Tegan, joining me on the edge with her red shoes dangling down into the grass instead of in the fountain pool. She squinted up into the tiny sun beaming down through the meshed glass ceiling from the room just above, which also had precipitation settings and a breeze randomizer. “Never mind; I don’t need to know. It’s incredible!”

Nyssa was in her element; she had been Traken’s garden-tender, after all. “I would love to catalogue all these,” she said. “Next time I’ll bring my notebook.” She set the Simpsons bag on a nearby picnic table, shady under masses of wisteria.

“Doctor,” said Tegan, “that fictional magnolia tree… is it really in this garden?” I assured her that it was, and that it wasn’t fictional at all. “How much of your story was true, then?” I just smiled at her, then stood up in the water and took off my coat and handed it to her. “Oh, no, Doctor, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you?” I had got my jumper halfway off when she grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me out of the fountain. As my arms and head were all caught in the jumper, I was helpless to resist as she dragged me to what turned out (after she helped me the rest of the way off with my jumper) to be the picnic table where Nyssa had left the Simpsons bag. Nyssa came over carrying my shoes and socks and took my coat and jumper from Tegan, folding them up and putting all of it on the opposite bench. Then she arranged the contents of the Simpsons bag in front of me on the table.

“What’s your pleasure, Doctor?”

I bent down and rolled up my trouser legs, almost to my knees. I straightened and took the little figure of Hatshepsut gently in my hands, then strode back to the fountain, stepped over the edge into It and walked through the spray and the bubbles to its centerpiece, placing the little King of Egypt on its rim and making sure the water’s motion wouldn’t knock her over. One of my trouser legs came unrolled and was soaked but I didn’t care. Hatshepsut was safe now.

Tegan kicked off her shoes and came after me before I could sit down in the water. “Come on, Doctor,” was all she said as she led me back to the picnic table, where I sat backwards and watched the fountain blossom and shed, blossom and shed, in a multitude of colors, iridescent in the shifting beams of the TARDIS’ own sun.

“We rescued her,” I explained. “She was being bullied by her sister suns. They were fighting over a planet they had drawn into their orbit, a planet that didn’t really need six suns. Gallifrey makes do with two quite nicely, thank you. It didn’t even need five, the planet the suns had captured, but this one was the smallest and the easiest to bully. Of course I shouldn’t have interfered, but Jo insisted - you know how tenderhearted she is - so I just adopted the poor little sun, as Jo called her, and, well, I was designing this garden here anyway, so the timing was perfect and it all worked out in the end!”

“You adopted a sun….” Tegan was incredulous. Nyssa put her hand on Tegan’s shoulder.

“I think the Doctor can do just about anything!”

“Is it tea-time yet?” I asked, feeling more than a little peckish.

“I’ll go,” Tegan offered, as she had so long ago, was it a year ago or an hour? “You’ll be okay here with him?”

“Yes, you go; I’ll watch him.”

Tegan went off to find the garden’s tea room and Nyssa pointed out that she’d been filling the Simpsons bag as we’d wandered from room to room. The table was resplendent with the treasures she’d laid out. “I found more paints, watercolor paints, very calming, and a few brushes. I brought along a little dish for water.”

I waved in the general direction of the fountain. “We have lots of water.”

“Yes, we do. And look, Doctor, I found a basket with a lid, and when I opened it, there were all these seashells! I’ve never seen so many shells.”

“She sees sea shells….” I trailed off, fascinated by the opalescence of some of the shells. They were just dripping colors, deep and pastel at the same time. “Paradox,” I commented, and then I knew I had to line the shells up along the edge of the table in order not of size but of main color. I began but got as far as two shells, an oyster shell and a conch, stymied by the fact that these shells kept changing colors. “Like confused chameleons,” I said aloud. I leaned one shirt-sleeved elbow on the table, missed and slipped, knocking quite a few shells into the grass. Nyssa let out a yelp but quickly tried to reassure me,

“It’s quite all right, Doctor. Don’t worry. I’ll get them.”

Distraught, I got down in the grass and started picking up what shells I could find, but my fingers would not cooperate and I dropped as many as I collected. Nyssa put the empty basket next to me but held onto the lid. She stood watching me but I barely noticed her as I frantically grabbed at the elusive little things, grabbed at the shifting colors glinting in the grass, then vanishing as another glint popped up.

“Are they important, Doctor?” asked Nyssa. “We can get shells any time we want.”

“Cowry. Snail. Opihi. Conch and shiva. Harps and drupes and triton’s trumpets. All of these little creatures… you know, usually you just find the abandoned shell but the explosion threw living things onto the beach, still in their shells, and they died there. I picked up as many as I could, and I brought them here and put them in the fountain. Some of them lived quite a while. Most died right away; some were gone before I even got them this far. All of them died eventually and I kept the shells.” I looked up at Nyssa. “I went back, you know, back to Pearl Harbor, and found whole beds of shells. Relatives, I guess, in a way, of the ones I tried to save. I couldn’t bring them back, of course.”

Nyssa crouched down beside me. “Why not?”

“I’m not much for rules and regs, you know…”

“Yes, I’ve noticed!”

“… but there is a very good reason it’s illegal to remove shells from Hawaii’s beaches.” Nyssa raised an inquiring eyebrow. “An ocean is a magnificent, fragile thing.” I closed my eyes, remembering. “I couldn’t save the men; they were killed so quickly, except for the ones who burned or drowned. The fish, you should have seen all the fish on the beach, hopeless, dead. But I tried to save this little bit of life.”

Nyssa found every single shell and refilled that basket for me.

When Tegan returned with a tea cart, she found Nyssa and me seated properly at the table, Nyssa reorganizing the treasures, the basket of shells safely back in the Simpsons bag, and me doodling with a red marker pen on the white cotton watercolor paper Nyssa had found during our intramural journey. When I saw the shallow bowl of macarons, the crustless little cucumber sandwiches (I actually like the crusts but still, this was tea!) and the fresh pot of Fortnum & Mason tea, the sugar bowl heaped with sweet white cubes, tongs for the sugar, spoons for the tea, a small brown cow-shaped creamer and some lemon slices, as if we were a party of, well, more than just us three, I actually clapped my hands with delight; my hands missed each other as often as they connected. Tegan poured us all tea and I put two lumps in it instead of milk because the sugar cubes reminded me of something (although I couldn’t think what); I sipped it while it was still really too hot, but I didn’t care.

I popped a whole macaron into my mouth instead of taking a bite out of it, and at that moment I remembered something as vividly as if it had been an important event in my life, but all it was, after all, was a brief stop in 1959 San Francisco, early one morning while my friends were still asleep. I’d been aiming for Buddy Holly’s last performance, at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, planning to surprise Nyssa and Tegan with tickets, but overshot just a tad to the west and too early in the day to boot. Oh, well, I thought, life is like that. I rambled around a bit, just enjoying the cool February air and clearing my head; walking does that for me. By and by I found myself in the mood for a cup of tea and wandered into a cheery little luncheonette. It was fairly empty, with only one booth occupied. The young waitress was reading a paperback until I walked in, the door’s bell jingling to announce me; she looked up, made a good attempt to smile, then resumed her literary pursuits. I sat down at the empty counter and asked her for a cup of tea. She rolled her eyes and got up to pour me some. To my surprise, instead of packets of sugar in a small rack, I found sugar cubes in a cracked sugar bowl, with a small pair of tongs lying on a nearby saucer. I reached for the tongs and one of the four men from the occupied booth stood up and said “Excuse me, sir.” I looked up. He took the sugar bowl to his booth and made something of a show of putting sugar in each of his friends’ cups. I thought that odd but was distracted by the jingle of the bell: another customer? A uniformed policeman.

The waitress went to the end of the counter near the door so the cop didn’t have to walk through the room, and the two spoke quietly by the cash register. Since I couldn’t make out what they were saying I turned my attention back to the occupied table, since I really did want some sugar for my tea. The man who’d taken the sugar bowl was, in fact, returning it now, with only two cubes left, which was fine, since that’s exactly how many lumps I needed. I smiled and nodded, he nodded back and I used the little tongs to drop both cubes into my cup. I sipped my tea and gazed at my reflection in the mirror on the wall opposite the counter.

I had nothing in particular on my mind and a little radio high atop an open cupboard was playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by the Platters, pleasant enough and even a bit nostalgic. In the mirror I could see the men at that one booth silently sipping whatever it was they were drinking – tea, coffee, hot chocolate? No, they would not have added sugar to cocoa. I supposed there was still time to coax the TARDIS into taking me and my friends to Iowa. On the other hand, I had never been to 1950s San Francisco and was wondering whether I should stay, try to locate some beatniks and just hang out. I was also beginning to wonder why the men in the booth kept staring at me, then looking away when they caught me catching them at it. I decided to walk for a bit more. I’d come prepared and had American money on me, since I had planned to buy tickets in Iowa, so I paid for my tea, thanked the waitress (who barely nodded), smiled at the men in the booth and stepped out onto the pavement, pulling my coat closed, as it was still a bit nippy out. After about a half a mile of window shopping I thought my head felt a little strange, couldn’t put my finger on how I felt, exactly, just strange, so I turned to go back to the TARDIS and almost bumped into one of the booth men. We briefly apologized to each other, he went on his way and I went on mine, but as I turned a corner well past the luncheonette I caught a glimpse of him. He was following me.

Nothing looked familiar around me and I was feeling stranger and stranger, not lightheaded, not dizzy, not ill, just… strange. The man followed me almost right up to the TARDIS. I stepped in and found my friends just coming into the console room, surprised that I’d been out.

“Where are we, Doctor?” asked Nyssa, checking the scanner. “Earth again!”

“I’ve been drugged,” I said.

Now I sat at the picnic table, sipping tea and remembering. I looked at my friends and was immediately alarmed because their faces were the faces I was remembering: the men at the booth who had borrowed the sugar bowl, and one of whom had followed me right to the TARDIS door.

“No!” I cried, striking out. I must have hit one of them because he was bleeding all over, as if he’d exploded. Nonetheless, he and the other one grabbed my arms and held me fast. I couldn’t let that happen; what if they gave me something lethal this time? They probably weren’t even human. They were probably shapeshifters. Through how much of space and time had they been tracking me? And now Buddy Holly was going to die, and so was I, without ever seeing him or even communing with my Venusian magnolia tree, and had these villains already killed Tegan and Nyssa? Meanwhile my arms were floating away and everyone was shouting; I was shouting. I don’t think I was shouting actual words, just shouting. I couldn’t understand the other shouts, nor did I care; I just wanted it all to stop: the shouting, the struggling, the bleeding, the solid silver teapot given to me by Catherine of Braganza, turned on its side, all the tea running out and onto the grass with the smashed cups and the toppled macarons, my useless legs, my shoulders aching, my arms flying in the air where I couldn’t reach them, the bubbling fountain roaring like a hungry beast, and then the sensation of being dragged some distance and set down surprisingly gently in the low crotch of a tree. As soon as I smelled that tree I stopped shouting and sat perfectly still between the slender twin trunks.

My eyes were wide open. No one was holding onto me. Nyssa and Tegan were crouching before me, ready to catch me if I fell or tend to me if I was hurt. I wasn’t hurt and I didn’t fall. I slowly wrapped my arms around one of the trunks and pressed my cheek against it, closing my eyes briefly. When I opened them Nyssa and Tegan were still watching me. Tegan was bleeding – no, that’s not right; she was wearing a dress with red in its pattern. I still remembered how I had come to be drugged. What I didn’t know was why… but I had my suspicions. However, I was too exhausted to articulate them. I closed my eyes again, thinking maybe I could sleep, but I could not. My hearts were racing. I breathed in the fragrance of my magnolia tree, the one I’d raised from a pup, the one that stood guard over me now as my friends watched patiently and protectively. I had to tell them what I’d remembered but it could wait. It changed nothing. I opened my eyes and surveyed them with gratitude, the two brave young women who had elected to share so many of my journeys, including this journey through the TARDIS and through myself.

“Doctor?” Nyssa must have noticed that I recognized her. How could she not? She and Tegan had been watching me like mama hawks. They both moved the couple of feet between where they were crouched and where I was perched and, without standing, threw their arms around me in a comforting embrace. I didn’t want to let go of the tree but I did turn and kiss each of them on the cheek. They both blushed; I had never done such a thing before, but at the moment I could think of no better immediate way to express both fondness and… yes, back to gratitude. It is not a terrible feeling to have when it is well directed.

“I can’t get down,” I told them.

Tegan laughed. “It is literally six inches down.” They each took one of my hands and I stepped down.

“Tegan? Nyssa? May I present my friend, Maggie.” I gestured grandly toward the tree.

“How do you do,” said Nyssa.

“Don’t tell me,” said Tegan, “that tree is going to speak to us!”

Nyssa whispered, “I think it speaks to the Doctor.”

“She does indeed,” I beamed. “Today she’s singing!”

“She is singing now?” asked Tegan.

“I don’t hear anything.” Nyssa looked disappointed.

“You don’t?” I was equally disappointed. “Maybe it takes practice, to learn how to listen.”

“What is she singing?”

“Well, Tegan, I don’t think it has a name, and… oh!” I felt myself blanch. “Smoke gets in your eyes.”

“What?” Nyssa looked around for smoke but Tegan frowned, staring at me.

“The Platters? Before my time.”

“We are indeed before your time. Well, before much of your time, anyway.”

“San Francisco, February 2, 1959,” explained Nyssa. “I checked the console. Why are we here?”

“Buddy Holly dies tomorrow. I thought we could go see his last public performance today but the TARDIS…”

“Messed up as usual,” declared Tegan.

“Um, yes. And then I got thirsty.” I started. “Oh, I spilled all the tea!”

“You were thirsty,” Tegan prompted me.

“I’m trying to remember the streets. Nothing stands still in my mind. I mean, nothing ever does anyway but this is… different.” In my memory the streets that had been so pleasant to tread that morning were now flowing like rivers of tar and concrete, and edifices were expanding and contracting as if they couldn’t decide what to be. Every time I tried to reproduce my route it morphed not only into something different but somewhere and somewhen different too: a trek through the Gobi (now that was thirst!) and a treadmill on which I’d been trapped on the planet Ply, as well as an exhausting swim across the Bering Strait (sans witnesses, alas; it had been an escape, not a stunt). “I’ll remember if we go back, if I go back and you come with me.”

“Doctor,” said Nyssa, “you’re safest here. You’re still tripping. Out on the street, anything could happen.”

“It already has,” I reminded her. “And I remembered, too, but so many other images are crowding all that away. It’s very frustrating.”

“Rest, Doctor.” Tegan led me to a nearby bench. “You’re having a bumpy ride. You need to rest.”

“I can’t rest. I need to remember again and this time I need to tell you before I forget again. Take me back to the picnic table. I remembered there.”

“Are you sure?” I nodded. “Okay, but don’t be frightened. It’s just a picnic table. It was just tea. Lovely tea.” As we approached the picnic table I saw the mess I’d made and stopped. “Don’t worry; Nyssa and I will take care of that. It won’t take long.”

“I’ll clean it,” said Nyssa. “Can you bring more tea? And more of those round things too, those were nice!”

“The macarons,” I remembered. “Yes, those are good.”

I sat, Nyssa knelt to rescue the silver teapot and clean up the broken crockery and ruined treats, piling everything onto one end of the table and Tegan rolled the cart off to fetch fresh tea. I drifted somewhat, not thinking of anything in particular, and it was rather a relief after such intense mental energy. I thought I might even sleep, but Tegan returned shortly with more of everything except the sandwiches. There was even another little sugar bowl full of lumps and suddenly I was wide awake. “Two lumps, right, Doc?”

“There were four of them!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, no, Doctor,” said Nyssa, “four lumps will be way too sweet for you.”

“No, no, there were four men, two dark-haired, one brown-haired and one very blond, almost white-haired, and all quite close-cropped too. All in their thirties, I think, or early forties. Four men in the booth. They took my sugar bowl and returned it with just two lumps. That’s how they drugged me.”

“Who were they, Doctor?” Nyssa was astounded.

Tegan was furious. “We should report them, get them arrested!”

I shook my head. “We can’t. I am certain they are CIA. No one is going to arrest the CIA.”

Nyssa looked at us as if we were speaking in code. Tegan caught the look and said “Spooks.”

“Ghosts?”

“Spies.”

“Why are spies after the Doctor? Human spies?”

“Yes,” I said, “all too human. And they’re not after me. Well, I think they are, now actually. One of them followed me. But I don’t think I was targeted personally. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, I walked into theirs.”

“It was a gin joint? Doctor!” Nyssa was shocked.

“It was a luncheonette. Sorry.”

“Nyssa,” said Tegan, “we need to get you to the movies once in a while. Doctor, is there a screening room in the TARDIS? There must be, right?”

“Yes,” I said dreamily, wondering when I would regain something resembling an attention span. “Anyway it’s no use going back. The CIA is invulnerable. I know that around this time they would slip LSD to unsuspecting civilians, all this quite separate from their operation within the military, and then follow them around, observing. The Soviets were experimenting with LSD as a brainwashing drug, and good luck to them trying to get their subjects to concentrate for more than a minute at a time, so the CIA decided to one-up them.”

“What a country.” Tegan was disgusted.

“The UK experimented on unwitting civilians too: nerve gas, plague bacteria – they released bacillus globigii into the tubes! Imagine how many people! Tegan, ask your government some time about black mist at Emu Field.” Tegan cocked her head. “Anyway, those agents wouldn’t just sit there all day… oh wait, maybe they would. Well, one followed me. They could only handle three after that, or maybe four, since the one following me had to stop at the TARDIS door. So if they didn’t lose their subjects, they would still be following them and… oh, what if there is a second shift? So someone might be there but it wouldn’t be the same guys. Maybe it doesn’t matter if they’re the same guys. There was a policeman, too. Maybe he was with them. I think not. I wonder what that waitress was reading? She had one of those things in her hair, what is that called, it looks like a spider web….”

“Hair net,” offered Tegan.

“I am at a disadvantage on Earth,” said Nyssa.

“Anyway I am sure they don’t have macarons. There was a radio, though. ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.’” I poured myself some more tea and then set it down without drinking it. “The power of advertising,” I said.

“What do you mean, Doctor?”

“Oh, Nyssa,” I sighed, “don’t ask hard questions!”

I got up and walked to the garden door. I hadn’t had a chance to visit much of it but I felt well enough, that is used enough to things presenting themselves in strange ways, to try to go back to the console room and back out into 1959 San Francisco, well enough to try to reproduce my route and show my friends where I’d sipped tea, listened to an old song and been dosed unawares with lysergic acid diethylamide.

“Don’t let me wander!” I told my friends, and they didn’t. I did try; I forgot the urgency of my mission every time I saw a door we hadn’t opened on the way to the garden. We took some wrong turns but we kept going up and eventually started to recognize rooms we encountered daily, including our own, and then, at last, the console room. They wouldn’t let me touch the console, though. Nyssa pulled the lever that ostensibly opened the door and Tegan applied her fist to the console surface to complete the process. I laughed and turned to step outside. I stepped into the waiting arms of the man who had followed me from the luncheonette. Some Venusian Aikido set him straight; I was in no mood to be further tampered with. My mood was not heeded; two of his friends had me face-down on the pavement before I could warn my friends, who had followed me out. I tried to yell but while one of my attackers was cuffing my hands behind me, the other had gagged me, with what I couldn’t tell, but it was especially effective by virtue of being saturated in something that sapped both my will to fight and my ability to do so much as flail.

I was dragged a short distance and then flung face-up into the back seat of a car. One assailant sat down to my right and the other to my left, except I was not just between them; I was on them, my head against one man’s thigh and my legs all the way across the lap of the other. “That’s enough,” said the man on my right.

“Is it that new stuff, diazewhatever?”

“Diazepam.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Nah, they’re not letting us use that yet. Soon, I hear. It’s just chlordiazepoxide. Hey, it works!”

The lefthand man took the gag away and asked me if I was enjoying myself, then laughed when I was unable to answer. “Yeah it works but no one can say it.”

“We don’t need to say it. We need it to work.”

“Well, it’s working so far; he won’t be judo-ing for a while. We’ll see what else it does.”

I knew the third guy had to be driving and I heard not a peep from my friends, so I was optimistic that they hadn’t been taken. However would they find me, though? These were not coherent thoughts, of course. One of my hearts was racing and the other was beating only sporadically. My breathing was already suppressed; I slowed it down further. Part of me wondered whether even these goons would know not to give me a stimulant if they thought (correctly, for all I knew) they’d overdosed me with what would soon be known as Librium. Another part of me wondered whether I might regenerate in the back of a moving car. It did occur to me, somewhere in the depths of my wandering, splitting mind, that the reason I wasn’t blindfolded was that I wasn’t expected, in the end, to survive whatever they had in store for me. Was I to be overdosed to death on something or other, or perhaps defenestrated? I wouldn’t be the first, either way.

The car stopped and I was hustled out, into an alley, in through the back door of a building and up some rickety stairs, lots and lots of stairs, into a dark hallway lined with shabby doors, through one of those doors and into what appeared to be a seedy hotel room. I could have walked better on my own but one of the men kept a tight grip on my cuffed hands. The driver had gone off somewhere. The two who remained were the two dark-haired ones from the luncheonette. They sat me down on the bed and one of them pulled up the desk chair and sat on it; the other stood in front of me and just looked at me. I couldn’t read his expression. I could barely think. I tried to remember to observe everything around me but since everything around me was pulsing and melting a bit, it was hard to identify individual features of the room, its contents or its denizens. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror on one of the walls and it scared the daylights out of me.

“All right,” said the shorter of the two men; each was over six feet tall. “Let’s get started. I could use a cup of coffee.” The other man stood up and poured his colleague a cup from the coffee maker on top of the dorm-sized refrigerator in the corner of the room. “Would you like one?” the first man asked me. I stared at him. My hands were still cuffed behind my back; more importantly, as thirsty as I was once more, I didn’t think it would be wise to ingest anything provided by these fellows. They could inject me; they could force something down my throat; they could put the gag back in my mouth, or spread it over my face, and there’d be nothing I could do about it, but I’d be damned if I was going to aid in my own destruction.

Since they hadn’t introduced themselves I dubbed them, in my mind, Tweedle-Dee – that was the shorter one, the joker – and Tweedle-Dum. Dee brought Dum his cup of coffee and stood again in front of me, his eyes burning into mine. There was no depth to his eyes and yet his stare was penetrating deep into my brain. When he finally spoke, his voice seemed to emerge from his eyes. “You’re fine,” he said, and I knew it wasn’t true at all but his saying it instantly created the possibility that it was true; I wanted it to be true. I looked back into his eyes and my mind went blank, ready to be filled with whatever Dee wanted to pour into it. He poured in a question: “How did you find us?”

The funny thing is, my mind went blank often while these guy had me in their control, but the duration of the blankness was negligible. It was as if holes were being poked into my brain but closing up again the way water fills space laterally. “Find you? I was thirsty so I went in.”

“Are you thirsty now?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“But you don’t want any coffee.”

“No.”

“Water?”

“No, thank you.”

“What is that blue box?”

“My TARDIS.”

“That sounds Russian. Is it Russian?”

“No.”

“Is it Chinese?”

“It’s Gallifreyan.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s from Gallifrey.”

“Where’s that?”

“In the Kasterberus Constellation.”

He frowned at me. “I think he’s still affected,” he told Dum, without taking his eyes off mine.

“Unless he’s faking it,” Dum suggested.

“How can he be? He’s doped to the gills!”

I agreed. I was doped to the gills.

“So you’re a Martian, are you?”

“Do I look like a Martian?” I was slightly annoyed. Why do people always ask me that?

“You tell me.”

“I do not look like a Martian. I’m a Time Lord.”

“Oh,” scoffed Dum, “now he’s a lord. This gets better and better. Can’t we just throw him out the window now? We’re not going to get a thing out of him.”

Dee said, “I think the Russians got him first.”

“I just wanted to see Buddy Holly,” I said, unhelpfully as it turns out. “But this isn’t Iowa.”

“The chlorwhatever isn’t supposed to be delivered this way. That’s a bust. He isn’t supposed to be under the influence anymore.”

Dee said, “It is inefficient but it had to be tested. Oh, well. We can inject him and see if that works. He’s pretty useless in this state.”

I didn’t want to be injected and I thought the Librium-soaked gag had been all too efficient; the problem wasn’t its method of delivery but the ridiculousness of the idea that such a drug, or anything other than time itself, could cancel the effects of LSD. Perhaps it could calm someone down who was (in the vernacular I’d so recently learned) freaking out, but stop the trip from happening? The tranquilizer they were testing on me was also a hypnotic agent, which could be of use to them (if only I had any information they wanted) but it was never going to stop the walls from melting. On the other hand, there was a good chance that an overdose of it could kill me. None of this was going through my mind at the moment except that I didn’t want to be injected.

Dee took a step toward me and plucked the celery from my lapel. “Is this a listening device? You must think we’re morons!”

“Yes,” I said, agreeably.

Dum laughed; since he had never smiled in my presence it hadn’t occurred to me that he even could smile, much less laugh. “If there’s a bug in that celery it’s alive!”

Dee took his eyes off me for the first time and tossed my supposed bug to Dum, who happily ripped it apart without finding anything but celery in the celery. “Nothing,” said Dum. “It’s an ordinary vegetable.”

“Then why was he able to lie?”

“I didn’t lie,” I volunteered.

“You said the celery was a listening device.”

“I said that you were morons.” That earned me a slap. So Dee the joker had no sense of humor… and a bit of a temper.

“Inject him,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Dum, but he stood up nonetheless. Dee pushed me backwards onto the bed, my legs still dangling over the edge, my arms pinned. Dum was quiet for a while but I heard soft sounds that meant to me the preparation of an injection solution; that meant I would receive it intravenously rather than in a muscle, as the latter required no mixing. I had put my jumper and coat back on in the garden; of course they’d go for a vein. I didn’t know whether to hope Dum knew what he was doing or hope for an earthquake. The earthquake that came was me being rolled over onto my face so the goons could reach my hands and get a good vein. They had to uncuff me to reach a vein on the back of my hand. That didn’t free me up as immediately as I would have liked, since I was face-down and one of the Tweedles was sitting on my legs. However, Dum did think to check my pulse, and both of my hearts were pumping away. “We definitely should not do this. Either throw him out the window or wait. His pulse is racing. Feel.” Dee felt. “See?”

“This guy’s gonna have a heart attack. We could just leave him here and bail. Who’d know?”

“It’s a shame,” said Dum. “He’s funny. I was kind of looking forward to hearing what nonsense he was going to spew for us. And who wears celery? I think he was already wearing it, before we gave him anything. Some kind of nut. Oh, well.”

“So we close it down and find another dive, maybe use another dope site too.”

“Another room, sure. Another lunch counter, that’s not so easy. Even with three hots a day it’s pretty weird for us to be in that booth all hours. We’ve got a cooperator. A bird in hand.”

“All right,” said Dee, getting off my legs. “It was just a thought. We’d better tell Bill and Kevin.”

“Or,” suggested Dum, “We could salvage this pad by dumping him somewhere.”

“For that matter, we could salvage the whole thing. Listen, let’s say he isn’t having a heart attack, or he is but he survives. He can vomit on the table. I want to know about the blue box and what he was doing in it for hours and hours. If he does die, we dump him by the blue box, someone else finds it and reports it, bingo, we’ve done that part of our job and to hell with lysergic acid.”

Okay, I thought, maybe not a complete moron. I wasn’t going to concede that aloud. I’d pulled a Br’er Rabbit before and it had usually worked; would it work with the CIA? “No, not the blue box!” I moaned, holding my right hand to my left heart. This was risky; they might yet decide to inject me. Success would be risky too; my friends were surely in or near the TARDIS and I couldn’t bear the thought of their coming to harm on my account, especially after how they had protected me from myself, calmed me down, humored me, kept me safe all day. All day? I had no idea what time it was; blackout curtains shaded the infamous threatened window. The room had stopped behaving like a cuboid rubber band. The Tweedles’ voices were echoing less. I was fighting the effects of the tranquilizer but with little success. I was pretty sure that if Dee told me to do something, think something, believe something, I would do, think, believe it.

Then I had the most terrible thought. It had nothing to do with me but it shook me, hard. “What time is it?” I muttered, rolling over onto my back but not yet daring to sit up. “Is Buddy Holly dead?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snorted Dee. “Why would Buddy Holly be dead?”

I shut up. There was no way for me to explain myself. “It’s half past eleven,” said Dum, absently.

I was overwhelmed with grief without even knowing why. I’d never met Buddy Holly, or the Big Bopper, or Ritchie Valens, or pilot Roger Peterson, who’d gone down with them; growing up on Gallifrey I knew nothing of Earth music. Long ago I’d learned of that plane crash the way I’d learned about anything else on Earth: in passing. Why was I crying real tears for Buddy Holly? Maybe it was because shortly the whole world would be doing that too.

The Tweedles apparently thought I was crying at the very thought of being brought back to the dreaded blue box and thus decided that was the right way to proceed. “Bit of a drip, isn’t he?” noted Dum. I didn’t overplay my helplessness much, but a little went a long way, and they didn’t cuff or gag me again. Down we went, seven flights of rickety stairs (this time I counted), outside into the alley, to the car, a black sedan I now barely saw, as the darkness of the night swallowed it up; had the third Tweedle (what would his name be? Dip? Dot? No, either Bill or Kevin!) been sitting there all this time? He had to have been, since if I had gone out the window, Dee and Dum would need to have a getaway car waiting.

In the back seat I was allowed to sit up, again between Dee and Dum; they mostly ignored me and I tried to be as invisible as possible. “Why we couldn’t have been in on Midnight Climax I’ll never know,” complained Dee. “I bet this blue box is just that: a blue box.”

“Well,” teased Dum, “the celery was just celery, so why not?”

I closed my eyes and found myself in real danger of falling asleep. More than once I shook myself to some modicum of consciousness and lifted my head from Dee’s shoulder, which amused Dum (but not Dee). At every traffic light I wanted to bolt; my captors were off guard, after all. I had to remind myself they were taking me home.

By the time we parked in front of the TARDIS, I had something resembling a plan. The three of us (not Kevin/Bill) got out, and for the first time I was patted down, before being allowed to reach into my pocket for the TARDIS key. They followed me in, to the astonishment of Tegan and Nyssa, who had been sleepily monitoring the scanner. They were further astonished when I called out, “Quick, the radio!” (I was unable to turn it on myself; Dee and Dum were holding onto my arms.) Tegan reacted first and tuned past all the static and stopped on a station playing a Rossini overture. “Keep going,” I said. She tuned it past more static to “That’ll Be the Day,” halfway through. “Yes.”

Dee said, “We get it. You like Buddy Holly.” He had recovered faster than his colleague to the obvious change of dimension. Dum’s jaw was still sagging somewhat, his eyes devouring every inch of the console room.

“Nyssa, why don’t you get our guests some tea?”

“Aren’t you going to introduce us?” Tegan proposed.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know their names.” I pulled myself from their now-loose grasp but turned to face them without moving out of reach. “Who are you, exactly?”

“You don’t need to know that,” said Dum, now somewhat recovered but not trying to restrain me.

“Then I shall introduce you in my own fashion. Wait….” The song had stopped. “Shush!”

“This story in from Clear Lake, Iowa, three of the nation’s top rock and roll stars, Ritchie Valens, J.P. ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson and Buddy Holly died today with their pilot in the crash of a chartered plane, following an appearance before one thousand fans in Clear Lake. Last night, they chartered a plane at Mason City Airport and took off at one-fifty a.m. for Fargo, North Dakota….”

Dum was once more astounded. Dee grabbed me by the shoulders, growling, “What did you do to that plane?”

“Don’t be silly. You know where I was all day yesterday.”

He let go of me, confused and angry.

Tegan turned the radio off. “It feels more real, now, somehow,” she said, dry-eyed but subdued. “Why have you brought these hoons in here, then?”

“They brought me in here,” I corrected her. “This is Dee and this is Dum.” They glared at me. “For lack of better appellations.”

Nyssa rolled in a cart much like the one Tegan had found in the garden, laden with tea and tea-enhancers, various sorts of biscuits and little crustless ham-and-cheese finger sandwiches. A small table was already set up in the console room; apparently, my friends had kept vigil for me there all night long. I waved the baffled agents to the table, then stumbled to it myself, adrenaline receding, Librium interceding. I grabbed a few of the sandwiches before they could be interfered with, put them on a saucer and placed that on the console; I hadn’t eaten anything but a couple macarons for what seemed like years: was that only yesterday? Then I grabbed the teapot and served everyone tea, again, taking mine to the console, but not setting it down, instead gulping it, hot as it was, finally quenching that insistent thirst. The agents touched nothing. “Your loss,” I said.

“Russians,” Dee finally said.

“Oh, get over the damned Russians. You’ve got Russians on the brain. I’ve got news for you: I’m just another one of those civilians you doped up without permission. I walked into the place by pure chance and you drugged me. What kind of monsters are you?”

“Why are we treating them like welcome guests?” Nyssa demanded to know. “And what have they done to you, Doctor?” I could tell she wasn’t referring to the trip. “You look awful!”

“I’m all right,” I said, collapsing to the floor. Tegan ran to me. “They drugged me some more. I’ll be fine.” Then I added, “They were going to throw me out of a window.” Tegan turned to scowl at them.

“We weren’t, really,” tried Dee.

“Yes, you were, and you were equally prepared to let me die of a heart attack.”

“You didn’t have a heart attack,” Dum pointed out.

“But you thought I had, or would.” I let Tegan help me up. “You’re armed, aren’t you? We’re not. You could shoot us and your bosses wouldn’t know the difference, or, I am guessing, care, even if they did know. Do you know why we’re not armed?” I didn’t wait for a reply. “Because we’re not… what did you call them, Tegan?”

“Hoons.”

“Hoons. Because we’re not hoons. And we’re also not monsters. We don’t go around hurting people for the hell of it. We don’t go around experimenting on people. We don’t….” I found myself unable to go on. I turned my back on them. Let them shoot me, I thought, irrationally. I just wanted to sleep. “And by the way, I am a Time Lord from Gallifrey, my name is the Doctor, my friends here are Tegan Jovanka from down under and Nyssa of Traken, and we live in a big blue box. See how the CIA treats you when you tell them all that. Tegan, will you see these gentlemen out?”

“I don’t see any gentlemen here,” Tegan growled. She opened the TARDIS door and faced Dee and Dum, who rose and walked slowly toward her. At the door, they turned to look at me. I was still standing, wobbly without Tegan to lean on. Nyssa moved to support me.

Without taking his flat, depthless eyes off me, Dee asked his colleague, “Explain to me why we’re not shooting these people.”

Dum explained: “Because they’re right. We’re hoons, whatever hoons are. We’re monsters. That’s fine. We’re used to that. But… anyway, we just can’t.” He walked out of the TARDIS without looking back. Dee stood and continued to pin me with his eyes. I couldn’t tell you what color they were. I can tell you they knocked me backwards against Nyssa and I would have fallen had she not caught me.

“Stop that,” said Tegan, slapping Dee, hard. He turned his eyes to her but there was no Librium in her system; to her they were just eyes. Dee took her by the shoulders and shook her. I shouted and started toward them but Nyssa was faster. Dee was instantly flat on his back on the TARDIS threshold, his head on the pavement, his feet still inside the TARDIS, until Nyssa grabbed them and flung him out, arse over elbow. I’d made it as far as the door lever, so I used it.

“Let’s get out of here,” I whispered, hanging onto the console as I circled it. “There isn’t an inch of Earth I’d like to see just now.”

I wasn’t lying; I was just mistaken. I set coordinates for a corn field in Iowa, and I took us neither forward nor backward in time. We didn’t even leave the TARDIS; through the scanner, we gazed soberly at a crumpled up little airplane. Then we spun away and left that sad planet to lick its wounds and slowly heal.