Wash

"....and, 23rdly -- Out There, 

in The Space-Time Vortex,
'Time', and 'Distance' 

have No Meaning...."

 

“We’re going,” he said excitedly, and shivered with energy.

  “Where? How?” said Arthur.

  “I don’t know,” said Ford, “but I just feel that The Time is Right. Things are Going to Happen. We’re on Our Way.”

  He lowered his voice to a whisper.

  “I have detected,” he said, “disturbances in The Wash.”

  He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like The Wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.

  Arthur asked him to repeat what he had just said because he hadn’t quite understood his meaning. Ford repeated it.

  “The Wash?” said Arthur.

  “The Space-Time Wash,” said Ford and, as The Wind blew briefly past at that moment, he bared his teeth into it.

  Arthur nodded, and then cleared his throat.

  “Are we talking about,” he asked cautiously, “some sort of Vogon laundromat, or what are we talking about?”

  “Eddies,” said Ford, “in the Space-Time continuum.”

  “Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he. Is he.” He pushed his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and looked knowledgeably into the distance.

  “What?” said Ford.

  “Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?” Ford looked angrily at him. “Will you listen?” he snapped.

  “I have been listening,” said Arthur, “but I’m not sure it’s helped.”

  Ford grasped him by the lapels of his dressing gown and spoke to him as slowly and distinctly and patiently as if he were somebody from the telephone company accounts department.

  “There seem …” he said, “to be some pools …” he said, “of instability … he said, “in the fabric …” he said.

  Arthur looked foolishly at the cloth of his dressing gown where Ford was holding it. Ford swept on before Arthur could turn the foolish look into a foolish remark.

  “ … in the fabric of space-time,” he said.

  “Ah, that,” said Arthur.

  “Yes, that,” confirmed Ford.

  They stood there alone on a hill on prehistoric Earth and stared each other resolutely in the face.

  “And it’s done what?” said Arthur.

  “It,” said Ford, “has developed pools of instability.”

  “Has it,” said Arthur, his eyes not wavering for a moment.

  “It has,” said Ford, with a similar degree of ocular immobility.

  “Good,” said Arthur.

  “See?” said Ford.

  “No,” said Arthur.

  There was a quiet pause.

  “The difficulty with this conversation,” said Arthur after a sort of ponderous look had crawled slowly across his face like a mountaineer negotiating a tricky outcrop, “is that it’s very different from most of the ones I’ve had of late. Which, as I explained, have mostly been with trees. They weren’t like this. Except perhaps some of the ones I’ve had with elms that sometimes got a bit bogged down.”

  “Arthur,” said Ford.

  “Hello? Yes?” said Arthur.

  “Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.”

  “Ah, well, I’m not sure I believe that.”

  They sat down and composed their thoughts.

  Ford got out his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was making vague humming noises and a tiny light on it was flickering faintly.

  “Flat battery?” said Arthur.

  “No,” said Ford, “there is a moving disturbance in the fabric of space-time, an eddy, a pool of instability, and it’s somewhere in our vicinity.”

  “Where?”

  Ford moved the device in a slow, lightly bobbing semicircle. Suddenly the light flashed.

  “There!” said Ford, shooting out his arm; “there, behind that sofa!”

  Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.

  “Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”

  “I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”

  “And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

  “Arthur!” shouted Ford at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It’s been washed up out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!”

  He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.

  “Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.

  With a whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leaped down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

  They careened wildly through the grass, leaping, laughing, shouting instructions to each other to head the thing off this way or that way. The sun shone dreamily on the swaying grass, tiny field animals scattered crazily in their wake.

  Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

  The sofa bobbed this way and that and seemed simultaneously to be as solid as the trees as it drifted past some of them and hazy as a billowing dream as it floated like a ghost through others.

  Ford and Arthur pounded chaotically after it, but it dodged and weaved as if following its own complex mathematical topography, which it was. Still they pursued, still it danced and spun, and suddenly turned and dipped as if crossing the lip of a catastrophe graph, and they were practically on top of it. With a heave and a shout they leaped on it, the sun winked out, they fell through a sickening nothingness and emerged unexpectedly in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground, St. John’s Wood, London, toward the end of the last Test Match of the Australian series in the year 198-, with England only needing twenty-eight runs to win.

  Important Fact from Galactic History, Number One : (reproduced from the Siderial Daily Mentioner’s Book of Popular Galactic History)
  The night sky over the planet Krikkit is the least interesting sight in the entire Universe.

The Rubik’s Cube

“It was only Hallorann 

who saw the final thing, 

and he never spoke of it. 

From the window of the Presidential Suite 

he thought he saw a huge dark shape issue, 

blotting out the snowfield behind it. 

For a moment it assumed the 

shape of a huge, obscene manta, 

and then the wind seemed to catch it, to tear it and shred it 

like old dark paper. 

It fragmented, was caught in a 

whirling eddy of smoke, 

and a moment later it was gone 

as if it had never been. 

But in those few seconds as it whirled blackly, dancing like negative motes of light, 

he remembered something 

from his childhood … 

fifty years ago, or more. 

He and his brother had come upon 

a huge nest of ground wasps 

just north of their farm. 

It had been tucked into a hollow between the earth and an old lightning-blasted tree. 

His brother had had 

a big old n•ggerchaser 

in the band of his hat, 

saved all the way from 

the Fourth of July. 

He had lighted it and 

tossed it at the nest. 

It had exploded with a loud bang, 

and an angry, rising hum—

almost a low shriek—

had risen from the blasted nest. 

They had run away as if demons had been at their heels. 

In a way, Hallorann supposed that demons had been. 

And looking back over his shoulder, as 

he was now, he had on that day seen 

a large dark cloud of hornets 

rising in the hot air, swirling together, 

breaking apart, looking for 

whatever enemy had done this 

to Their Home so that They—

the single group intelligence—

could sting it to death.

“We can also control Time 

in a comics universe. 

We can stop on page 12 

and look back to page 5 

to check a story point 

we missed. 

The characters themselves 

continue to act out their own dramas 

in the same linear sequence, 

oblivious to our shifting perspective. 

They can go back in time only with 

the help of supermachines, like 

The Flash’s cosmic treadmill.

“When I was halfway through 

the seven-year process 

of writing The Invisibles, 

I found several characters 

actively resisting directions 

I’d planned for them. 

It was a disorienting, fascinating

experience, and I eventually had to 

give in and let The Story lead me 

to places I might not 

have chosen to go.”

IN 1961 JULIUS Schwartz hit upon a way of resurrecting the old DC trademarks that his new generation of heroes had supplanted. Editorial offices at the publishing giant were all rivals, which is why their universe came together more by accident than design, unlike Marvel’s meticulously constructed interconnected world. While the other DC editors held on to their trademark characters, Julie’s office specialized in assembling the streamlined beginnings of a shared universe where all the DC superheroes were friends and partners.

  By spreading a given brand across multiple versions of a character designed to appeal to different sections of his audience, Julie had invented a trick that would be adopted as the industry standard. Schwartz was a world builder, and, under his guidance, the DC universe became part of a “multiverse,” in which an infinite number of alternate Earths occupied the same space as our own, each vibrating out of phase with the others so that they could never meet. The idea of infinite worlds, each with its own history and its own superheroes, was intoxicating and gave DC an even more expansive canvas.

  In the story “Flash of Two Worlds,” police scientist Barry Allen was shown reading an old comic about the Flash adventures of Jay Garrick. In Allen’s world (soon to be known as Earth-1), Garrick was a fictional comics character who inspired Allen’s choice of a superhero identity when he too became the Flash, the Fastest Man Alive. Not only did this confirm that Barry was a comics fan like his readers, it enmeshed the character and his audience in a complex meta-story that would eerily mimic the large-scale structures of our universe, as they’re currently being debated by cosmologists.

  By spinning fast enough to alter the pitch at which his molecules vibrated, Barry Allen discovered he could cross over to a second Earth. Here twenty years had passed for the wartime champions of the Justice Society, so that Jay Garrick was middle aged and married to his Golden Age sweetheart, Joan. It took the arrival of Barry Allen and the machinations of a trio of Golden Age criminals to bring Jay out of retirement. The way was paved for the return of Doctors Fate and Mid-Nite, Wildcat, Sandman, and Hourman. The vanished heroes of the Golden Age were duly resurrected as denizens of the newly christened Earth-2, but there were even more Earths—as many as imagination could conceive. On some of these worlds, the familiar superheroes had evil counterparts like the Crime Syndicate of America. On Earth-X lived DC’s recently acquired stable of Quality Comics characters locked in a decades-long battle with an unbeatable mechanized Hitler.

  As a child, I loved to angle two bathroom mirrors so that I could look down a virtual corridor into the infinity of reflections that lay in either direction. I imagined that those distant versions of myself, glimpsed at the far end of the receding stack, were inhabitants of parallel worlds, peering back down the hall of faces at me. Alternate realities were as easy as that; they were waiting for us in our bathrooms.

  There were inevitably philosophical ramifications for the reader. If Barry lived on a world where Jay was fictional, and we lived in a world where Barry was fictional, did that mean we, as readers, were also part of Schwartz’s elegant multiversal architecture? It did indeed, and it was soon revealed that we all lived on Earth-Prime. Julius Schwartz even met the Flash on several occasions in print, and in one story, two young writers named Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin wrote themselves into a Justice League adventure involving Earth-Prime. Bates became an insane villain and immediately donned a garish costume with cape, boots, and overpants, while adding a new twist to the standard superhero look with his long hair, beard, and glasses. When the clean-cut Maggin joined the Justice League in a search for the rogue Bates, this Schwartz-edited adventure pushed the Earth-Prime idea as far as it could go. Or so it seemed.

 

By the 1980s, as comics became more realistic, or at least more like Hollywood’s version of realism, the idea of parallel worlds was declared too outlandish and prepubescent—as well as too forgiving of any ludicrous story turn. Batman could be shot dead, only for a last page to reveal that he was really the middle-aged Earth-2 Batman or even the evil Earth-3 Batman/Owlman, and it’s true that many writers used the parallel Earths not to create a sense of wonder and possibility but to justify some overcooked twist in an undercooked story.

  Then, in the intervening years, something became apparent to our cosmologists.

  The Multiverse was Real.

  Flash Fact: Our universe is one of many, grown inside some unimaginable amniotic hypertime. It may even all be hologram, projected onto a flat mega-membrane, which is, in turn, embedded, along with many others like it, within a higher dimensional space some scientists have dubbed “The Bulk.” In the brane model of the multiverse, all history is spread as thin as emulsion on a celestial tissue that floats in some immense, Brahmanic ocean of … meta-stuff. Got all that?

  If cosmologists are right about this (and I’d dearly love to hope they are), the superheroes, as usual, have been here already.

  It will take a long time for these new maps of existence to instill themselves in the culture at large, but it will happen. It’s fun to imagine what our world might be like when theories of simultaneous time, parallel worlds, and holographic branes in hyperspace are taught to schoolchildren as the accepted facts of nature they will be.

  I’ve always imagined that the structure and underlying patterns of the universe would most likely be repeated across every aspect of its disposition, including the lowliest superhero comic books. If our universe is some kind of hologram, it would make sense for the same patterns to turn up on all scales, from the infinitesimal to the unimaginably vast, like the spirals that coil through our DNA and our galaxies, and track the vast Coriolis of some Prime Movement.

  If a comic-book universe were a scaled-down representation of the kind of reality we all inhabit, we might expect it to behave in certain ways. It would have a beginning and an end: a big bang and a heat death. It would be populated with life-forms capable of replicating themselves through time.

  And in place of time, comic-book universes offer something called “continuity.”

  Continuity is an emergent phenomenon, at first recognized by Gardner Fox, Julius Schwartz, and Stan Lee as a kind of imaginative real estate that would turn mere comic books into chronicles of alternate histories. DC’s incoherent origins formed an archipelago of island concepts that were slowly bolted together to create a mega-continuity involving multiple parallel worlds that could not only make sense of pre–Silver Age versions of characters like the Flash, but also fit new acquisitions from defunct companies into a framework that made Marvel’s universe look provincial. Marvel improved on the formula by taking us on human journeys that could last as long as our own lives—eternally recurring soap operas—where everything changed but always wound up in the same place; where Aunt May was always on the verge of another heart attack, and Peter Parker couldn’t get a break from J. Jonah Jameson, his editor at the New York newspaper the Daily Bugle.

  “IT IS NOT TOO FAR-FETCHED TO PREDICT THAT SOME DAY OUR VERY OWN PLANET MAY BE PEOPLED ENTIRELY BY SUPERMEN!” Joe Shuster assured us back in 1938, but comic-book reality predicts developments in our own in many other ways.

  What we construct in our imaginations, we have a knack of building or discovering. We may not have flying men or invulnerable women racing among us, but we now have access to supertechnologies that once existed only in comic-book stories.

  “Mother Boxes,” empathic personal computers like the ones in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World story cycle, are already here in embryonic form. Is the soothing contact offered by the Mother Box so different from the instant connection that a cell phone provides? Twenty-four-hour access to friends, family, and the buzz of constant social exchange can make us feel cocooned and safe in a reportedly hostile world. In many cases, Mother herself can be summoned on the Box.

  Metron was Kirby’s avatar of ruthless, questing intellect, whose Mobius Chair twisted through time and space to make him the god of couch potatoes, surfing channels, gathering information, without ever leaving the comfort of his armchair. Metron’s magic furniture seems less a wonder of supertechnology than a fact of daily life. As Kirby tried to tell us in his book of the same name, we are the new gods, just as we are the old ones, too.

  There is already technology that allows people to drive remote-controlled cars with their minds. What’s to stop someone becoming Auto-Man, the Human Car? Secretly, he sits in his room, munching Maltesers at his computer screen, while he listlessly pilots his incredible RV supercar around town to save lives and fight the crime that ordinary police cars just aren’t fast enough to handle.

  In so many ways, we’re already superhuman. Being extraordinary is so much a part of our heritage as human beings that we often overlook what we’ve done and how very unique it all is. We have made machines to extend our physical reach and the reach of our senses, allowing us to peer into the depths of space and outer time. Our cameras and receivers allow us to see across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. We can slow down, freeze, and accelerate time on our screens. We can study and manipulate microscopic worlds, print our names on single atoms, analyze soil on Mars, and observe the rings of Saturn at close range. Our voices and our photographic records of everything we’ve seen are carried at the speed of light on an expanding bubble of radio, into the infinite. Television broadcasts of the first moon landing are still traveling, growing fainter as the waves spread out. If you had a powerful enough receiver and a TV on a planet forty light-years from here, you could watch Neil Armstrong take his first step on mankind’s behalf and hear our silly, hopeful summer 1969 songs.

  Our space machines are the remote physical tendrils of our species launched across gulfs of nothing to land on other worlds or to travel, gathering data until the signal fades, or until there’s no one left to listen. These ultimate extensions of human senses thread our awareness into the absolute freezing dark 10.518 billion miles from where you’re sitting. As I write, that’s how far Voyager 1, humanity’s farthest-reaching finger, has extended. Launched in 1977, it remains connected to its home world by radio and by the silver thread of its passage through time from launchpad to interstellar void. Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that’s so big we forget it’s there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to fish. We are cells in the body of a singular three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.

  The superheroes may have their greatest value in a future where real superhuman beings are searching for role models. When the superhumans of tomorrow step dripping from their tanks, they could do much worse than to look to Superman for guidance. Superhero comics may yet find a purpose all along as the social realist fiction of tomorrow.

  Superhero science has taught me this: Entire universes fit comfortably inside our skulls. Not just one or two but endless universes can be packed into that dark, wet, and bony hollow without breaking it open from the inside. The space in our heads will stretch to accommodate them all. The real doorway to the fifth dimension was always right here. Inside. That infinite interior space contains all the divine, the alien, and the unworldly we’ll ever need.

  To find out what higher dimensions might look like, all we have to do is study the relationship between our 3-D world and the 2-D comics. A 4-D creature could look “down” on us through our walls, our clothes, even our skeletons. Our world would be a Cubist X-ray, and perhaps even our thoughts might be laid bare to their gaze.

  As comics readers gazing down from a higher dimension perpendicular to the page surface, we can actually peer inside characters’ thoughts with balloons or captions that provide running commentary. We can also control time in a comics universe. We can stop on page 12 and look back to page 5 to check a story point we missed. 

The characters themselves continue to act out their own dramas in the same linear sequence, oblivious to our shifting perspective. 

They can go back in time only with the help of supermachines, like the Flash’s cosmic treadmill, but we can look at 1938 Superman next to 1999 Superman without colliding the two stories anywhere but in our heads.

  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could send drawn versions of themselves into the created world of Fantastic Four, and those little drawings of Stan and Jack were like angels, UFOs, avatars from a higher universe, entering a world they’d made to interact with its inhabitants. They created, as I came to call them, “fiction suits,” like space suits for sending yourself into stories. The comics page depicted the flow of a different kind of digital time, expressed in discrete images, each of which captured a single visual moment and usually a snippet of audio time in the form of a balloon-dialogue exchange. The comics page, like the movie screen, took us through a story in a straight, linear progression from past read to present reading and future completion, but the comics page was a more personal and intimate interface than the cinema screen. It lacked the intimidating luster of the movies, and the images could be slowed down, rewound, fast-forwarded, and studied in detail. They could even be copied, traced, or improved upon, making this an ideal DIY medium for the imaginative and reasonably gifted. The pace of a film or television show was dictated by its director. The comics allowed its reader to direct his or her own experience of the story.

  And now there were two healthy universes living and growing inside our own. The DC universe was a series of islands separated for years, suddenly discovering one another and setting up trade routes. And there was Marvel’s beautifully orchestrated growth and development. Two living virtual worlds had been grown and nurtured inside conventional space-time. These were not like closed continua with beginnings, middles, and ends; the fictional “universe” ran on certain repeating rules but could essentially change and develop beyond the intention of its creators. It was an evolving, learning, cybernetic system that could reproduce itself into the future using new generations of creators who would be attracted like worker bees to serve and renew the universe.

  Just as generations of aboriginal artists have taken it upon themselves to repaint the totems, so too does the enchanted environment of the comic-book dreamtime replicate itself through time. A superhero universe will change in order to remain viable and stay alive. As long as the signs stay constant—the trademark S shields and spiderweb patterns, and the copyrighted hero names—everything else can bend and adapt to the tune of the times.

  These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music. This meant interesting work could be done by writers and artists who knew what they were getting into and were happy to add their own little square to a vast patchwork quilt of stories that would outlast their lives. In return for higher page rates and royalties, of course. The parasitic relationship of universe to creator that saw the rebellions of people like Siegel and Shuster or Jack Kirby had become a little more symbiotic; following changes in the business in the eighties, creative people adding to the DC or Marvel universe would be ripped off with a little more reward on the back end.

  In this respect, a thriving fictional universe simulates the behavior of a “real” organism, but only as far as you wish to follow me down this path of conjecture.

  Nevertheless, human beings had built working parallel realities. Given market value as corporate trademarks, the inhabitants of these functioning microcosms could be self-sustaining and outlast their creators. New trademarks could be grown in the concept farms of fictional universes under the auspices of the corporate concerns that kept them under control, maintaining, trimming, and looking after their burgeoning gardens of newsprint and ink. Most important, they had acolytes: priests in the form of creative types such as artists who would grow up with a strange desire to draw Superman in motion and writers who would form early bonds that encouraged them to devote their talents to putting words in the mouths of characters they’d grown up with. These creative people would sustain the likes of Spider-Man, dripping their blood and sweat into the ink to give their lives to him. Batman could regularly feed on energy that kept him vital for another ten or fifteen years until the next transfusion of meaning.

  Emergence is a simple idea. The Universe is the way it is because it grew that way. It emerged piece by piece, like a jigsaw solving itself over billions of years of trial and error. When atoms stuck together, they naturally formed molecules. Molecules naturally grouped into compounds. People naturally formed tribal associations that made them look much bigger to predators from a distance, and as a result of clumping together and swapping experiences, they naturally developed specialization and created a shared culture or collective higher intelligence.

  Everybody’s heard writers talk about a moment in the process of writing a novel or story when “it was as if the characters took over.” I can confirm from my own experience that immersion in stories and characters does reach a point where the fiction appears to take on a life of its own. 

When a character becomes sufficiently fleshed out and complex, he or she can often cause the author to abandon original well-laid plans in favor of new plotlines based on a better understanding of the character’s motivations. When I was halfway through the seven-year process of writing The Invisibles, I found several characters actively resisting directions I’d planned for them. It was a disorienting, fascinating experience, and I eventually had to give in and let the story lead me to places I might not have chosen to go. How could a story come to life? It seemed ridiculous, but it occurred to me that perhaps, like a beehive or a sponge colony, I’d put enough information into my model world to trigger emergent complexity.

  I wondered if ficto-scientists of the future might finally locate this theoretical point where A Story becomes sufficiently complex to begin its own form of calculation, and even to become in some way self-aware. Perhaps that had already happened.

  If this was true of The Invisibles, then might it not apply more so to the truly epic, long-running superhero universes? Marvel and DC have roots that run seventy years deep. Could they actually have a kind of elementary awareness, a set of programs that define their rules and maintain their basic shapes while allowing for development, complexity, and, potentially, some kind of rudimentary consciousness?

  I imagined a sentient paper universe and decided I would try to contact it.

The Way to Shada

[Command ship]

(A big red and orange spaceship 

complete with landing deck. 

The Tardis materialises inside. 

The sphere leads Skagra and Romana 

out into a corridor.)

ROMANA: Where are we? 

SKAGRA: 

On my command ship. 

ROMANA: 

And what are you hoping to command? 

SKAGRA: 

More than you can possibly imagine. 

ROMANA: 

I have a very vivid imagination. 

SKAGRA: 

So have I. 

(Something approaches, viewing them through a red filter.)

KRARG: 

Welcome Back, My Lord.

[Spacecraft]

(The Doctor is playing with his yo-yo.)

PARSONS: 

So where's he taken 

Your TARDIS? 

DOCTOR: 

Or when. 

PARSONS: 

What? 

DOCTOR: 

Time machine. 

PARSONS: 

Ah, yes. He took Romana because 

she can operate it for him? 

DOCTOR: 

So can he. He's got a copy of My Mind 

in that sphere of his. 

Everything I know is at his disposal. 

PARSONS: 

Then why did he take her with him? 

DOCTOR: 

Well, probably wants someone to show off too. 

PARSONS: 

There's one thing he doesn't know. 

DOCTOR: 

What? 

PARSONS: 

You're Still Alive. 

DOCTOR: 

Shush, shush, shush, shush. 

I'm Dead, remember. 

PARSONS: (sotto) 

Doctor, why doesn't The Ship know that?

DOCTOR: (sotto) 

It's only programmed to obey instructions, 

not to think about them. Blind Logic. 

It Serves Skagra and doesn't 

think beyond that. 

PARSONS: (sotto) 

Does it know where Skagra's gone? 

DOCTOR: 

Ship! Speaking to You as the late lamented enemy 

of Your Lord Skagra, I Command You 

to tell me where he has gone. 

SHIP: 

I Do Not Have That Information.

[Command ship]

(Skagra snaps his fingers and the sphere settles on a pillar.)

ROMANA: 

Why don't you tell me? 

Why won't you just say what 

you're trying to do? 

(Skagra looks out of a big window.)

SKAGRA: 

Tell me what you see. 

ROMANA: 

Stars. 

SKAGRA: 

What are they doing? 

ROMANA: 

Doing? 

SKAGRA: 

Yes. 

ROMANA: 

Well, they're just there. 

They're --

SKAGRA: 

Exactly. Spinning uselessly through The Void. 

And around them, billions of people 

spinning uselessly through their lives. 

ROMANA: 

Says who?

SKAGRA: 

I say. 

ROMANA: 

And who are you? 

SKAGRA: 

What I am now is Not Important. 

But what I, what We all shall become... 

ROMANA: 

What do you --

SKAGRA: 

Shush. Look. 

(He opens his hands.)

ROMANA: 

What? 

SKAGRA: 

What do you see? 

ROMANA: 

Nothing. 

SKAGRA: 

Billions of atoms spinning at random, 

expending energy, running down, 

achieving nothing. 

Entropy, like the stars. 

But what is the one thing that 

stands against Entropy, 

against random decay? Life. 

(indicating himself)

See how the atoms are arranged here? 

They have Meaning, Purpose. 

And what more Meaning and Purpose 

than in here. (his head) 

You do not understand Me. 

Your Mind is too limited. 

My Krargs. They shall be The Servants 

of The New Generation. 

ROMANA: 

New Generation? New people?

SKAGRA: 

Not new people. 

A new Person.

[Krarg generator room]

(They enter a vapour-filled room.)

ROMANA: 

What? 

SKAGRA: 

Shush. 

(Skagra activates A Machine, and a new Krarg is created. Giant shaggy alien red yeti with post-it notes instead of fur, pretty much.) 

KRARG: 

What is Your Command, O Master?

[Spacecraft]

(The Doctor is working inside some panelling.)

PARSONS: 

So it's Back to Square One, then. 

DOCTOR: That's it! Ow! Ouch! 

PARSONS: 

What? 

DOCTOR: 

Square One. That's where we've got to go 

if we want to find out what Skagra's up to. 

Once we know that, we know 

where to find him. 

Ship, I order you to take us to where your lord Skagra last came before arriving here. 
SHIP: Your order does not conflict with my programmed instructions. I will activate launch procedures. Launch procedures activated. Launch procedures activated. Launch procedures activated. 
(Somewhere, more Krarg are created. Skagra's ship becomes visible once it is airborne and zooms off into space.) 
DOCTOR: Ship, how long will the journey take? 
SHIP: Thirty nine astro-siderial days. 
DOCTOR: What? That's neary three months. 
SHIP: At maximum drive. We have many hundreds of light years to cover. 
PARSONS: Hundreds of light years in three months? That's incredible. 
DOCTOR: Yes, incredibly slow. Stop. 
SHIP: Repeat, please. 
DOCTOR: I said, stop. Halt. (Juddering halt knocks Parsons off his feet.) 
PARSONS: Oh, what are you doing? 
DOCTOR: Ship, I'm now going to introduce you to a few new concepts. Now listen very carefully. Reverse the polarity of your main drive feed. Right? 
SHIP: Accomplished. 
DOCTOR: Regrade your de-ossilation diagetic synthesisers by ten points. 
SHIP: Warning. Drive will explode in twelve seconds. Eleven. Ten. 
DOCTOR: Did I say ten points? Sorry, minus ten points. 
SHIP: Accomplished. 
DOCTOR: Realign your maxivectal meter on drag so they cross-connect with your radial bicentric arrows. 
SHIP: Accomplished. 
DOCTOR: Good. Now, this is the easy bit. 
(More Krargs emerge.)
PARSONS: What have you done? 
DOCTOR: I've constructed a primitive dimensional stabiliser by remote control. The journey will now only take a couple of minutes to anywhere. 
SHIP: Doctor, you are extremely ingenious, for a dead man. 
DOCTOR: Oh, well, let's not harp on that aspect too much, shall we? 
(A familiar sound is heard as the ship dematerialises.)

[Prof. Chronotis' rooms]

(Clare lies unconscious on the carpet as the lights on the control panel continue to blink. She starts to wake up, bumps her head on the underside of an occasional table, then gets up and sits on a chair. Chronotis pops up from behind the back of the chair next to her, wearing a nightcap and gown. Clare jumps out of her skin) 
CHRONOTIS: What have you done to my machine? 
(He switches off the console, and the vague background humming stops.) 
CHRONOTIS: Tea? 
(Chronotis goes into the kitchen and comes straight out with the tea tray.) 
CLARE: May I ask who you are? 
CHRONOTIS: I was, I am, I will be, Professor Chronotis. Oh dear. We Gallifreyans have never managed to come up with a satisfactory form of grammar to cover these situations. 
CLARE: Look, I don't understand what's happening. What situation? 
CHRONOTIS: (sitting) Timelessness. Standing obliquely to the time fields. 
CLARE: Is that what we're doing? 
CHRONOTIS: Oh yes, and very grateful I am to you for arranging it. 
CLARE: Me? But all I did was just press a button and 
CHRONOTIS: Yes, I know. A very ancient Tardis, this. I rescued it literally from the scrap heaps. I'm not allowed have one really, you know. Still, just as well though, isn't it, otherwise I'd be dead still. 
CLARE: Still dead? 
CHRONOTIS: Oh, yes. Yes, I've been killed. Only your timely mishandling of this machine meant that you tangled with my time fields at the critical moment. You're not following me, are you? 
CLARE: Er, no. 
CHRONOTIS: Good. Think of me as a paradox in an anomaly and get on with your tea. 
CLARE: Oh, yes. 
CHRONOTIS: We must find Skagra. 
CLARE: Yes. 
CHRONOTIS: He has the book. 
CLARE: Ah! 
CHRONOTIS: You know about it? 
CLARE: Well, I sort of 
CHRONOTIS: It's a very dangerous book and I have been very careless. It is the key to Shada. 
CLARE: Oh. 
CHRONOTIS: The ancient prison planet of the Time Lords. They have been induced to forget about it.
CLARE: I see. 
CHRONOTIS: If Skagra is meddling with mind transference, mind control, he's only going to Shada for one particular reason and it is imperative that he be stopped. 
CLARE: Yes! Er, why? What on Earth's there? 
CHRONOTIS: It's not a matter of what, it's a matter of who.

[Command ship]

(An image of what the Doctor saw on the pages of the book is on a wall screen, projected by the sphere.) 

ROMANA: 

What's so important about the book? 

SKAGRA: 

It is The Ancient Law of Gallifrey. 

ROMANA: 

So? 

SKAGRA: 

So, what does a Gallifreyan Judge 

say when passing sentence? 

ROMANA: 

Er, 'We but administer. You are imprisoned not by this court but by the power of the Law. It is not -- '

SKAGRA: 

The Power of The Law. 

It used to be quite literally true.

 

ROMANA: 

What? You think that book is some sort of key to --

SKAGRA: 

The key with which the Time Lords used 

to imprison its most feared criminals. 

Criminals such as... 

He doesn't know. He doesn't know the code. 

ROMANA: 

I'm glad you realised that. 

It's about Time. 

SKAGRA: 

Time. Time. About Time. 

Yes, of course. I should have seen that. 

A Gallifreyan code would have 

to include the dimension of Time. 

(to the sphere) 

Stop. Find me the Doctor's last reference to Time.

[Spacecraft]

DOCTOR: Oh, come on, ship. What's taking you so long? 

SHIP: Estimated docking time, two minutes. 

DOCTOR: Hurry up. 

(A Krarg appears in the doorway behind them.) 

KRARG: Who are you? 

PARSONS: Doctor! 

DOCTOR: Ah, hello there. 

PARSONS: (sotto) What is it? 

DOCTOR: (sotto) I don't know. 

KRARG: You are intruders. 

DOCTOR: Well actually, I'm dead, and this is Bristol. 

PARSONS: Chris. 

KRARG: You trespass on my lord's ship. You shall die. 

DOCTOR: K9! 

(K9 fires his laser.) 

PARSONS: What on Earth is it? 

DOCTOR: What's Earth got to do with it? Looks like some sort of crystalline structure. 

SHIP: Preparing to dock. 

DOCTOR: You go ahead. Don't mind us. 

(The spacecraft materialises inside the shuttle bay.)

[FSAS Space Station - outside the shuttlebay]

(The place has gotten dark and dirty since we were last here. The Computer is still repeating the message from the top of the story.) 

COMPUTER: This is a recorded message. The Foundation for the Study of Advanced Sciences is under strict quarantine. Do not approach. Do not approach. Everything is under our control. 

PARSONS [OC]: Where is this place? 

DOCTOR [OC] How should I know? 

PARSONS [OC]: Big, isn't it? 

DOCTOR [OC]: I wonder where everybody's got to? 

(They come out of the shuttle bay.)

PARSONS: I don't know. 

DOCTOR: Neither do I. 

PARSONS: And I don't believe that we travelled hundreds of light years. 

DOCTOR: Why not? 

PARSONS: You cannot travel faster than light. Einstein. 

DOCTOR: What? Do you understand Einstein? 

PARSONS: Yes. 

DOCTOR: What? And quantum theory? 

PARSONS: Yes. 

DOCTOR: What? And Planck? 

PARSONS: Yes. 

DOCTOR: What? And Newton? 

PARSONS: Yes. 

DOCTOR: What? And Schoenberg? 

PARSONS: Of course. 

DOCTOR: You've got a lot to unlearn. Ah. 

(The Doctor spots the letters IASS ASD on a plaque on the wall.) 

DOCTOR: Institute for Advanced Science Studies. 

PARSONS: ASD Advanced State of Decay? 

DOCTOR: Shush. 

PARSONS: What? 

DOCTOR: Shush. Did you hear something? 

PARSONS: No. 

DOCTOR: Shush.

[FSAS Space Station]

(They enter the room from the first scene in the story.) 

DOCTOR: Ah ha! Think Tank. Quite interesting. 

(The Doctor turns off the broadcast.) 

PARSONS: Quite interesting? This is fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Do you mean to say that all this means something to you? 

DOCTOR: Oh yes! It's all terrible simple. You see, when ah!

(Then they see the five remaining men huddled together, all terribly hairy and with very long nails now.)

[Tardis]

(Skagra is reading the book as the time rotor goes up and down. Romana enters.)

SKAGRA: 

Keep back. 

(The sphere pins her to the doors. She notices that the time rotor stops when Skagra ceases to turn pages. Then he notices it too.)

SKAGRA: 

Exactly. Time runs backwards over the book. 

As I turn the pages within the time field of this machine, 

the machine operates. 

Turning the last page will take us to Shada.

[Command ship]

(Skagra hands Romana over to a Krarg.) 
SKAGRA: I have broken the code. 

KRARG: We can repair it, my lord. 

SKAGRA: Fool. Make all preparations for the entry into Shada. You are about to meet one of the greatest and most powerful criminals in all history. 
ROMANA: Salyavin. 
SKAGRA: A man the Time Lords chose to forget.

[FSAS Space Station]

PARSONS: Who are they? What are they, Doctor? 

DOCTOR: Victims of Skagra's brain drain. Their intellectual powers have been stolen. But their memory patterns might remain. Yes. 

(The Doctor sits in one of the central seats.) 

PARSONS: But if only they could tell us what happened to them. 

DOCTOR: Yes. What? 

PARSONS: If only they could tell us what happened to them. 

DOCTOR: Bristol? 

PARSONS: Yes? 

DOCTOR: Bristol, I'd like you to do something for me. 

PARSONS: Certainly. 

DOCTOR: It won't be pleasant. 

PARSONS: Oh. 

(Meanwhile, K9 is still holding the Krarg at bay with a continuous laser beam.) 

(The Doctor places one of the brain-drained men on a seat. Parsons is sitting on another one.) 

DOCTOR: Easy, easy. There, there. Bristol? 

PARSONS: Yes? 

DOCTOR: I'm going to allow this man access to your intelligence reserves. 

PARSONS: Oh. 

DOCTOR: It's all right, it's only temporary. But it might just allow him to function. 

PARSONS: I just hope you know what you're doing. 

DOCTOR: So do I. So do I. Now, take a deep breath. 

(The Doctor goes to the free-standing console and adjusts the controls, then goes to a wall panel and cranks up the power. The pyramid between the seats begins to twinkle, and Parson's head is pulled back between the receptors. The Doctor checks the lifesigns of the man, who then touches his head, making him jump.) 

CALDERA: Skagra! 

(K9 continues to hold the Krarg, but it is getting stronger.)

CALDERA: Who are you? 

DOCTOR: The Doctor. 

CALDERA: What are you doing here? 

DOCTOR: Who are you? 

CALDERA: My name is Caldera. 

DOCTOR: What? Not A St John De Caldera? 

(pronounced a singe on de caldera...) 

CALDERA: The same? 

DOCTOR: The neurologist. 

CALDERA: Yes. 

DOCTOR: It's a pleasure to meet you, sir. One of the great intellects of your generation. 

CALDERA: So are we all. 

DOCTOR: What? 

CALDERA: There's A S T Thira, the psychologist. G V Centauri, the parametricist. L D Ia, the biologist. R A F Akrotiri. 

DOCTOR: Some of the greatest intellects in the universe. 

CALDERA: And Doctor Skagra. 

DOCTOR: Skagra? 

CALDERA: Geneticist, and astro-engineer. 

DOCTOR: What? 

CALDERA: And cyberneticist, and neurostructuralist, and moral theologian. 

DOCTOR: Yes, and too clever by seven-eighths. Who is he? Where does he come from? 

CALDERA: We don't know. 

DOCTOR: What? 

CALDERA: But he was very impressive. He offered very handsome fees, so we agreed. 

DOCTOR: To do what? 

CALDERA: Don't you see? The Think Tank was his idea. He set it up. 

DOCTOR: He did? To do what? 

CALDERA: The pooling of intellectual resources by electronic mind transference. 

DOCTOR: What? 

CALDERA: He conceived it on the grand scale. Just how grand, we didn't realise. Not at first, not until after we had built the sphere, and by then it was too late. 

DOCTOR: Why? What happened? 

CALDERA: He stole our brains! He stole our brains. 

DOCTOR: Easy, easy. 

CALDERA: Stole. 

DOCTOR: Easy. Shush, shush, shush. 

CALDERA: The whole of humanity. 

DOCTOR: What? The whole of humanity? 

CALDERA: The whole! But he needed 

DOCTOR: What did he need? 

CALDERA: One mind.

DOCTOR: Which mind? 

CALDERA: One unique mind. 

DOCTOR: What mind? 

CALDERA: A man called 

DOCTOR: What was he called? 

CALDERA: A man called 

DOCTOR: What was he called? 

CALDERA: Salyavin! 

DOCTOR: Salyavin? 

(K9 runs out of power and backs out of the spacecraft, followed by the lumbering Krarg.) 

DOCTOR: Bristol? Bristol? Are you all right? 

PARSONS: I feel marvellous! 

DOCTOR: Good, good, it'll pass. You're fit. 

PARSONS: What did you find out? 

DOCTOR: Not much. Not enough to locate Skagra, just enough to frighten me out of my wits. 

K9: Master! 

DOCTOR: K9! Why aren't you back at 

(The Krarg is behind K9, it's upper torso and head glowing red hot. It fires energy bolts at the cowering scientists.) 

DOCTOR: K9, try and keep it back. 

K9: Power supply at danger level. 

(The Doctor tries to creep past, towards the members of the Think Tank. The Krarg raises its arm.) 

PARSONS: Doctor, look out! 

(The Doctor avoids the blast and rejoins Parsons. The Krarg advances on them.)

Part Five

[FSAS Space Station]

DOCTOR: Bristol? 

PARSONS: Yes? 

DOCTOR: You still feeling marvellous? 

PARSONS: Yes. 

DOCTOR: Right. Give me ten seconds. 

PARSONS: What? 

(The Doctor goes round the back of Parsons to the cowering Think Tank. Parsons takes up a boxing pose.) 

PARSONS: Well, come on then! Well, come on! 

(The Krarg turns away from him and hits the sparkling pyramid.) 

PARSONS: Doctor, it's going to blow up! 

(The Doctor stands in front of the scientists as the Krarg advances on them. Smoke starts to fill the room. Parsons runs behind the Krarg and out into the corridor, where he grabs a dangling power cable, then goes back in. K9 leaves. Parsons drags the Doctor out of the room.)

[FSAS Space Station - outside the shuttlebay]

DOCTOR: It's jammed! 

(The Krarg attacks the scientists. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver, and the door rises. The Doctor, Parsons and K9 get underneath it just as the Krarg arrives on the scene. The door closes in front of it. The spacecraft dematerialises and the space station goes KaBOOM!!)

[Spacecraft]

DOCTOR: Good ship, good ship. Good, you're learning. Which is more than we're doing. 
PARSONS: What do you mean? 
DOCTOR: Well, we're still no nearer to finding Skagra or Romana. 
PARSONS: What do you think we should do? 
DOCTOR: I don't know. 
PARSONS: Well, try looking on the bright side. At least we're
DOCTOR: I am looking on the bright side, and it's dark, very dark. Now listen to me, ship. I'm going to ask you once again. Where is your lord Skagra? 
SHIP: He did not reveal his destination. 
PARSONS: But you must have some idea? 
SHIP: I am a computer. I do not have ideas. I obey instructions. 
DOCTOR: So you've no idea where he's gone. 
SHIP: I do not. 
DOCTOR: Bah. Doesn't he have a home to go to? 
SHIP: Yes. 
DOCTOR: He has? 
SHIP: Correct. 
DOCTOR: Well, then why didn't you tell me? 
SHIP: I have orders not to. 
DOCTOR: But, will you please take us there? 
SHIP: The order conflicts with my programmed instructions. 
DOCTOR: Well, just you tell it not to worry. I'm sure your lord Skagra will be very anxious to pay his last respects to me. 
SHIP: I obey. 
DOCTOR: I do hate computers. They're so literal minded. Aren't you, K9? 
K9: Affirmative, master.

[Prof. Chronotis' rooms]

(Chronotis is dressed to go out, and he and Clare are working on components from his Tardis mechanism.) 

CLARE: Oh. Look, I don't even know what I'm meant to be doing. 

CHRONOTIS: We must get this old perambulator moving again. 

CLARE: Well, it certainly moved when I touched it. 

CHRONOTIS: Oh, a spasm, a mere spasm. I just hope it wasn't a dying spasm, because it has left us jammed between two irrational time interfaces. Time is moving away from us. If we do manage to disentangle ourselves, I'll just have to be careful, otherwise I shall cease to exist again. 

CLARE: Oh. Really? 

CHRONOTIS: Now do as I do. 

CLARE: What's that? 

CHRONOTIS: Forget about it. 

CLARE: Oh, Professor, that's easier said than done. Who is this, er, Salyavin person? 

CHRONOTIS: Salyavin? He was a criminal. His exploits have been wildly exaggerated. He was a hotheaded, brilliant young man with a peculiar talent. I can't fix this. 

CLARE: Can I help? 

CHRONOTIS: Difficult, very difficult. To repair an interfacial resonator requires two operations which must be performed absolutely simultaneously. And to be honest, my dear, I don't think you have the knowledge. 

CLARE: So we're stuck. 

CHRONOTIS: Yes. 

CLARE: Well, I can learn, you know. I'm very quick. 

(Chronotis fetches a large wrench from the kitchen.) 

CLARE: What's the matter? 

CHRONOTIS: Listen to me. Listen to me very carefully. What I am about to do, you are never to speak of, and this is the only time I will ever do it. 

CLARE: What are you talking about? 

CHRONOTIS: Do I have your promise? 

CLARE: Well, what are you going to do to me? 

CHRONOTIS: Do I have your promise? 

CLARE: Yes, yes, all right. 

CHRONOTIS: What is that piece of equipment you have in your hand? 

CLARE: I have absolutely no idea. 

CHRONOTIS: Good. 

(Chronotis puts down the wrench and takes off his spectacles. His eyes glow as he stares hard into Clare's eyes.) 

CHRONOTIS: Now, what is that piece of equipment? 

CLARE: This? Er, it's a conceptual geometer relay, with an agronomic trigger, a totally defunct field separator. But it doesn't matter. We can dispense with it if we can get that interfacial resonator working again. 

CHRONOTIS: Splendid! 

CLARE: Well, let's do that then, shall we?

[Command ship]

(The spacecraft materialises on the hangar deck right next to another identical spacecraft. Lots of Krarg are still being made here.) SKAGRA: Well? 
KRARG: We have a full complement, my lord. 
SKAGRA: Good. Then we can begin. 
(The Krarg leave. A finger taps Romana on the shoulder and she gasps.) 
DOCTOR: I wish you wouldn't do that. 
ROMANA: How did you get here? 
DOCTOR: These kind people brought me. 
SKAGRA: Doctor. 
DOCTOR: Ah, hello there. 
SKAGRA: I am a little surprised to find you here. 
DOCTOR: Your ship was a little surprised 
SKAGRA: Oh, you stole my ship. 
DOCTOR: Only after you stole mine. Ah, there she is. I hope you've been looking after her. If you've been over-revving her... 
SKAGRA: I'm curious to know how you survived the attentions of my sphere. 
DOCTOR: Well, it only looks for what it expects to find. I made it look for the wrong things. 
SKAGRA: If you've come here in the hope of interfering with my great purpose. 
DOCTOR: Great purpose? Great purpose? Ha! 
SKAGRA: The very greatest purpose, Doctor. 
DOCTOR: You want to take over the universe, don't you. I've met your sort before. Any moment now a mad gleam will come into one of your eyes and you'll start shouting, the universe shall be mine. 
SKAGRA: How naive, Doctor. How pathetically limited your vision must be. 
DOCTOR: Limited? 
SKAGRA: Take over the universe? How childish. Who could possibly want to take over the universe? 
DOCTOR: Exactly. That's what I keep telling people. It's a troublesome place, difficult to administer. And as a piece of real estate, it's worthless, because by definition there'd be no one to sell it to. 
SKAGRA: Such visions are for infants. My purpose will fulfil the natural evolutionary goal of all life. 
DOCTOR: Oh yes? 
SKAGRA: With the aid of these spheres, I shall make the whole of creation merge into one single mind, one god-like entity. 
DOCTOR: You will? 
SKAGRA: The universe, Doctor, shall not, as you so crudely put it, be mine. The universe shall be me. 
DOCTOR: Ah. Have you discussed this with anyone? I mean, why don't you send one of your rocky pals off to make some tea and we can sit down and chew on a macaroon. 
SKAGRA: Doctor, your inane whitterings do not interest me. This will happen. It will start within hours. And once it has started, nothing you or anyone else can do will stop it. Take them away. They bore me. 
(Krargs bear down. The Doctor taps one.) 
DOCTOR: Jink! 
(He grabs Parsons and runs.)
SKAGRA: Kill them. 
(K9 follows the Doctor, but Romana is held fast.) 
ROMANA: What's a jink?

[Command ship corridor]

(The Doctor, Parsons and K9 hide in an alcove as the Krarg lumber past.)
DOCTOR: Clever jink that, don't you think? I made them think I was trying to get to the Tardis. 
PARSONS: What were you trying to do? 
DOCTOR: Get to the Tardis. 
PARSONS: Doctor, that man must be mad, mustn't he? 
DOCTOR: Oh, madness, sanity, it's all a matter of opinion. 
PARSONS: And what's your opinion? 
DOCTOR: He's as mad as a hatter. They've gone. Right, back the way we came. Quietly. 
(Further on they hear a stuttering sound.)
DOCTOR: Shush. 
PARSONS: (sotto) What? 
DOCTOR: That. 
PARSONS: Your Tardis. Surprised you can hear it from here. 
DOCTOR: There's something odd about it. Come on. 
(A Krarg fires a bolt that just misses Parson's head.) 
DOCTOR: Run! 
PARSONS: It's a dead end. 
DOCTOR: Then we're trapped. 
(A wooden door with a brass knob is against a wall.)
PARSONS: This wasn't here before. 
DOCTOR: Get in!

[Prof. Chronotis' rooms]

(The door bursts open and the Doctor and Parsons run in from the Carrier corridor and slam it shut again. They quietly congratulate each other then turn to see where they are. Their jaws hit the floor with a loud Thud!) 

PARSONS: Keightley! 

CLARE: Chris? 

CHRONOTIS: Cup of tea? 

DOCTOR: Tea? (Shortly afterwards, the chasing Krarg has moved off and the Doctor is sitting at the control panel.) 

CHRONOTIS: Doctor, how do you like my Tardis? 

DOCTOR: Oh, ace. Ace. 

CHRONOTIS: It's strictly unofficial. I'm not really allowed to have one. 

DOCTOR: Yes, and what better way to hide it than by living in it, you old sly boots. 

CLARE: What are you doing here? 

PARSONS: How am I'm suppose to know. Yeah, and what's the Professor's room doing here? 

CLARE: Oh, you may well ask. But ask the Professor. 

CHRONOTIS: Doctor, where is Skagra? 

DOCTOR: Shush. Not so loud. He's just outside. 

CHRONOTIS: Oh. 

DOCTOR: He's got Romana, he's got the Tardis, he's got the book. I thought you were dead, Professor. 

CHRONOTIS: Yes, so did I. 

DOCTOR: Did you really? 

CHRONOTIS: Listen, Doctor, if Skagra has the Tardis and the book, he can get to Shada. 

DOCTOR: Shada? Shada? 

CHRONOTIS: Yes, the Time Lords' prison planet. You've probably forgotten about it. 

DOCTOR: I never forget anything. I never forget. Well, that's right. I have forgotten. The Time Lords' prison planet. Now why would I have forgotten? Got it. Of course! Salyavin was imprisoned on Shada. Yes. Ask me who Salyavin is. 

CLARE: Oh, now he was a great criminal imprisoned centuries ago by the Time Lords. 

DOCTOR: A great criminal. Unique mental powers. He had the ability to project his mind into other minds, completely take them over, didn't he, Professor? 

PARSONS: That's what Skagra's doing? 

DOCTOR: Oh no, no, no, no, no. Quite the opposite. Skagra had the capacity to take minds out of people, but he can't put minds back into them. That's why he needs Salyavin in the sphere, and that's why he's going to Shada. 

PARSONS: Of course! 

CHRONOTIS: Doctor! He must not get there.

[Tardis]

(Skagra allows the pages of the book to turn over one at a time, as the time rotor moves.) 


SKAGRA: 

The key turns slowly in the lock. 

The Door to Shada opens.