DOCTOR WHO series characters and concepts copyright BBC tv

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 "We can't jump from one timestream to another, but we can travel along yours!" the Abbot explained. "The TARDIS is in direct connection with your timestream, and your timestream is in direct connection with the Doctor's. We can travel along your timestream and arrive just before the timestorm that brought you here before."

 "Back in Clacktown," Grace added.

 "Exactly!"

 The Abbot manipulated the controls of his TARDIS, and then stood back in shock.

 "It isn't possible," the Time Lord breathed. "Grace, according to this you have no timestream."

 ***

 The barbarian Chattermalian, Blastock, pounding at the TARDIS door, was joined by three of his fellows. "Keownar went in here! Loads of them!" he told them.

 "It's too small!" said Folintarc, one of the new arrivals. "They must have gone further down the alley! This way!" he shouted. Blastock, even having witnessed a dozen people entering the blue box, was persuaded.

 ***

 Septimus burst into the Abbott's cloister in the Irish abbey, following the Abbott and what looked like a wench in trousers. There weren't any barbarians there to kill, no matter how hard he looked.

 Flavius followed him in a moment later. He scanned the room as Septimus had. "[Didn't you follow someone in here?]" he asked Septimus in Latin.

 "[Yes,]" said Septimus. "[There's no way out, but they're gone.]"

 "[What's that?]" Flavius said. He picked up a scroll from the floor.

 "[Careful!]" said Septimus. "[It must be the Christian spell they used to disappear!]"

 "Huh," said Flavius. "[Maybe Porcellus can make something of it then. Let's go, all the monks are dead.]"

 They left the room, Flavius carrying the Abbot's TARDIS.

 ***

 The Doctor, the students, and the Clacktownians watched the four Chattermalians disappear from the TARDIS scanner monitor down the alley. The Doctor turned a few dials. Aimed now at the street outside the alley, the scanner showed that Clacktown peace officers and emergency medical personnel had arrived on the scene.

 "All right, all right, nothing more to see," the Doctor said. Playing up to him, first Crispin and then Anna and Stuart helped him shoo the Clacktownians out of the TARDIS, where the local professionals could deal with their reactions to the inexplicable attack.

 *That being done,* the Doctor thought, *I must find the explanation.*

 ***

 Grace's shivers had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the Abbott's TARDIS. "How can I have no timestream? That would have to mean ... that I don't exist."

 "And yet you do exist," the Abbott reassured her, obviously trying to cut off that line of thought as counterproductive and a distraction. "The effect must be tied to whatever has happened to break up the Time Vortex."

 "'Break up'?" said Grace. She was having difficulty concentrating. "I thought you said the Time Vortex is gone."

 "I explained this," the Abbott said shortly. He looked up at her, and immediately adopted a more patient tone. Grace decided she must really look pretty crappy. "The Vortex consists of the timestreams of everyone who exists in spacetime. It's been broken up into its individual timestreams, and doesn't exist as a whole right now. So my TARDIS is grounded - and so are all other time capsules throughout time and space.

 "The times/places where the timestreams have fallen against each other are the timestorms we're experiencing, such as the ones that brought you and those Romans to my monastery. They'll be happening all over spacetime. Let's take another tack at the problem. Do you have any idea what caused all this?"

 Grace told the Abbott about the sudden appearance of an Earth college science lecture hall as a room of the Doctor's TARDIS, occupied by three students and an old woman in a coma. Crispin, the ringleader of the three, had said that the events were caused by his destruction of a device that the old woman had been using to make herself young again. "He didn't get any chance to go into details before the TARDIS was forced down at Clacktown, where the timestorm happened that brought me here."

 "Forced down," nodded the Abbott. "More like run aground, like a toy boat in a bathtub that's draining. And how did the Doctor contrive all this?"

 "He didn't," said Grace. "He was as surprised as I was."

 "He can be very obscure and disingenuous when it suits him," said the Abbott.

 "He's always very clear with me," Grace defended the Doctor stoutly. "Well," she went on in a lower voice, "at least, he has been since I killed him on the operating table because I wouldn't listen to what he tried to tell me."

 "Oh, so he's regenerated again," mused the Abbott. "Well, that might make a difference." He paused in thought a moment, then returned his attention to the matter at hand. "He's still the Doctor though, and that tells us something."

 "What's that?"

 "That he'll be trying to find *you*. We only need to let him. You see," the Abbott said, leaving his console and moving to a tea service, "I spoke too quickly earlier. You don't have your own timestream, which is what I was looking for. But I find you're not actually lacking one."

 "Then what ..."

 "Your timestream," said the Abbott, bringing her a nice cup of tea, "has been exchanged for that of the Doctor's TARDIS."

 ***

 "Professor Givenchy's vortex is *gone*?" Stuart said.

 "It's not her vortex," said the Doctor. "It's the fifth dimension of space and time, the discovery of which makes time capsule technology possible."

 "A whole dimension," Crispin said. "I destroyed a whole dimension." Stuart and Anna were beginning to adjust to the situation now, but for Crispin reaction seemed to be setting in.

 "It's not gone, it's just fallen apart a bit," said the Doctor. "Your Professor Givenchy ought not to have been fooling with it."

 "How are we going to get Grace back?" Anna asked.

 "I'm getting some very odd readings," said the Doctor. "Grace and the TARDIS have a link, you see. I thought perhaps the TARDIS could trace her timeline to take us where she is."

 "That won't work?" Stuart asked.

 The Doctor nodded. "Because there's another anomaly. According to these readings, the TARDIS now has Grace's timestream."

 "Well ..." Stuart said hesitantly. "Maybe if you look for the TARDIS's timestream, you'll find Grace."

 The Doctor beamed at him. "My thoughts exactly!" He punched Stuart lightly in the arm. "Then I may be able to maneuver the TARDIS to her. Now while I'm about this, why don't you three go collect for me as much of the pieces from Professor Givenchy's device as you can carry here at once, all right?"

 ***

 In the lecture hall Crispin, Stuart and Anna gathered pieces of Professor Givenchy's device. Stuart and Anna worked near each other, smiling whenever they accidentally touched hands. Crispin pursued the task listlessly and with little concentration. Finally he plopped into one of the seats in the remaining auditorium section of the lecture hall. "I shouldn't have done it," he said. "I shouldn't have destroyed the machine. Maybe the whole of reality could have been snuffed out."

 "It's not your fault, Crispin," said Stuart. He and Anna took seats each on the other side of him. "You had no way of knowing what could have happened."

 "It's her fault," said Anna. "She should've had better security if it was so dangerous. What was it doing in the lecture hall instead of the lab anyway?"

 Crispin shut his eyes and leaned his head back. "I guess you're right." He opened his eyes. "Hey look! You can see the sky through the glass dome now, like you could see the Vortex before the TARDIS landed."

 "Wow," said Anna, as she and Stuart looked. "Sure have an Earthlike sky here on ... what was the name of the planet?"

 "Click-Clack, something," Stuart said.

 "Clacktown is the city we're in," Crispin said. He sounded quite like his usual self again. "The Doctor said the nation is called Keownar, but he didn't say what planet it is. But if it's an atmosphere we can breathe, and with a sun similar to ours, it stands to reason the sky'd look like ours, wouldn't it?"

 "Well," said Stuart, "let's get back to work."

 Crispin suggested that they try to collect at least a portion of each different material or component they thought they could identify, and in this way they quickly filled their pockets and arms. They exited the lecture hall just in time to miss the sight of the Chattermalian soldiers climbing on to the glass dome.

 ***

 The Abbott leapt on a flashing console indicator. "It's a contact!" he said.

 "It must be the Doctor," said Grace. She spoke from certain knowledge rather than deduction or mere hope; even the mere receipt of the contact had abated her withdrawal symptoms noticeably. The contact had to be from the Doctor's TARDIS.

 "It's too weak for temporal relocation. It's an audiovideo signal!" The Abbott pulled the scanner monitor around so that Grace could see it from the chair where she was sitting.

 "Grace! ...Abacus!" The Doctor grew in the Abbott's scanner screen as he approached the video pickup in his own TARDIS. His smile for the Abbott was, if possible, wider than his smile for Grace.

 The Abbott returned the smile with sincere if more reserved enthusiasm. "Well, you're much more outgoing since your last change. But I've asked you not to call me by that diminutive."

 "Sorry, sorry. Grace," said the Doctor, "you couldn't have been in better hands."

 "I fear I must agree," said the Abbott, "at least relatively speaking." Creeping into his voice was the anger Grace had heard when the Abbott had spoken previously of the destruction of Skaro. "What exactly is the matter with Time, Doctor?"

 "You don't think that I --" the Doctor started. "Oh, come on!"

 "Well, what am I to think? You're the meddler!" said the Abbott. "I grant your intentions are good, but in the end you're no better than the Master or the Rani."

 "I preserve the Web of Time!" the Doctor said, entreatingly. The Abbott's opinion seemed to matter to him. "Where the Web is broken I repair it."

 "What a ludicrous proposition," the Abbott snorted.

 "What *is* a planet's true history?" the Doctor demanded. "It's the history formed by the free will of the people who live it, without oppression from outside by either physical or temporal means. I eliminate oppression! and then I step out of the way."

 "What of the free will of the oppressors?" the Abbott said.

 "Then what of the free will of time travelers?" the Doctor countered.

 "Action in time travel obviates free will by obviating causality." The Abbott's voice had the tone of a quotation.

 "Fine," said the Doctor, smiling suddenly. He dropped himself in a nearby chair. "Then let us leave be this trouble with the Vortex, and there will be no more time travel."

 "This is an entirely different matter!" said the Abbott, outraged.

 "Oh it always is, when any Time Lord but *me* wants to put a hand in."

 "All right!" The Abbott literally threw up his hands. "If you didn't cause this situation, what did?"

 "Finally a sensible question," said the Doctor, leaping out of the chair and charging to the three students, who'd just re-entered laden down with bits of Professor Givenchy's device. He grabbed a charred piece of bioelectronics from Anna, and displayed it to the Abbott and Grace. "It was caused by the device this came from -- a primitive chronon-separator."

 "But that's too horrible to think about," said the Abbott. "You couldn't build an interface governor with Earth technology. If there was no interface governor, then eventually ..."

 "... the chaotic forces of the Vortex would leak into the other four dimensions," said the Doctor.

 "*That's* just a theory," said the Abbott automatically.

 "Not any more, I'd say," said the Doctor. "You're stuck still in your academic world, my friend, even if you have left the Academy behind.

 "Now -- what can we do about it?"

 ***

 "What is this place!" Folintarc demanded of the TARDIS walls. He, Blastock, Turncwart and Salistinog had been wandering endless hallways since they'd broken through the glass dome over what had looked like a small house, seeing marvels but no living thing besides each other.

 "It's some sort of Keownarish black magic," said Turncwart.

 "We'll never find our way out," said Blastock.

 "The spell'll be broken," said Turncwart, "when I run the Keownar wizard through!"

 ***

 On Gallifrey, Lady President Romana walked into the Temporal Control Center with Castellan Andred in tow. Every station was properly manned, the monitor personnel all alert and in spotless Temporal Control uniforms. And every screen was blank, every indicator dead.

 "Lady President," the Chief Monitor bowed.

 "Summary," Romana demanded. She knew the man to be terribly long-winded if permitted to be.

 "The Time Vortex is shattered," the Chief Monitor reported. "There are timestorms all through spacetime. Areas of temporal grace are immune to them, of course."

 "I see," said Romana.

 After a moment, the Chief Monitor asked, "What shall we do, Lady President?"

 "Try to get through to the Doctor," said Romana.

 ***

 "Come on, come on, come on!" Drax pumped a crank extending from under the console of his TARDIS. He tried to ignore the sounds of the first age Skaro City central square filling with Daleks on his scanner monitor. If his TARDIS had not been stalled, or if that view were not the realtime audiovisual link from just outside it -- if either of these condition hadn't obtained, he could have ignored the noise. But under the circumstances it was awfully distracting.

 "Oi!" Drax gave the crank one last, fruitless turn and collapsed on the floor. "I'm a goner, if I don't get help." He grabbed the edge of the console with both hands and pulled himself up until he was nose-level with it, like Kilroy. "Mebbe I could get in touch with ol' Thete..."

 ***

 The Rani slammed her open palm on the unresponsive control console. "Nothing! I can't get this useless box to move an inch."

 The Rani had her issues with the reality forced on her by the universe, but she knew how to deal with it. If the functionality of her time capsule was beyond her capability to restore, then she needed to get hold of someone who could. Someone who was expert at milking performance out of the balkiest TARDIS circuitry ever known to Time Lord.

 The Doctor.

 ***

 Cho-Je's eyes shot open, his meditative trance disrupted. The Time Vortex had been shattered -- he could feel it. How could this be? There'd be repercussions throughout spacetime -- there could be deterioration of the continuum itself, the remaining four dimensions --

 Cho-Je's contemplative nature settled back into control of him, and he re-entered his trance, allowing for the new condition. He sought out the time-streams of those he knew and loved best, and noted that they were converging. After review of the holistic nature of the situation, he decided that his own intervention wasn't necessary at this point, and most likely would not be.

 He turned his attention to his original intended meditation topic.

 ***

 Susan Foreman Campbell stumbled and dropped all the apples she was carrying.

 "Mom?" said Ian. "Are you all right?" He set down his bushel while Susan settled herself on one of the benches peppered throughout the orchard, her hand to her head.

 "Yes," said Susan distractedly. "Just a twinge of cosmic angst."

 Normally either of the children would roll their eyes and go their own way when Susan said something like that. Ian's continued attention told Susan she looked as bad as she felt, or worse. "Should I call Dad?"

 "Couldn't hurt," said Susan, mostly because it would leave her alone for a moment. Ian obediently set off through the apple trees to find David.

 Something was setting off her time senses, something serious. But she wasn't capable of doing anything about it. She would just have to bear up under it until it was over.

 By the time Ian had brought David and Barbara back, she was smiling, even through the ache. It had occurred to her that, whatever it was, her Grandfather was undoubtedly in the middle of it.

 ***

 The next time it was supposed to be on his own terms. No Cheetah People, no farcical Dalek trial, no Key to Time quest or vampirism. He'd risen above all those obstructions and had set plans in motion for final, total vengeance. And now all the plans had to be scrapped, the timing entirely botched by this sudden crisis.

 Worst of all, he had now exhausted all his own physical and intellectual resources on the crisis, and accomplished nothing. There was no one he could turn to for help.

 No one would help *him* -- except, maybe, his nemesis.

 The Master set about trying to trace the Doctor's timestream.

 ***

 Ysabelle Givenchy gave a start and woke up.

 Her vision was blurry. She felt weak and achy. She felt worse than she'd ever felt before.

 No ... no, that's not true. She'd felt like this ... when?

 Before the Accident.

 She sat up in the bed where she found herself. She fought a wave of dizziness to climb out of the bed, searching for a mirror.

 Before the Accident! Before she'd erased all the traces of the eighty-two year old woman she'd become in eighty-two years, and regained her youth -- the body she was meant to have -- through her own intelligence.

 She paid no attention to the unrecognized scientific devices she was scattering across the room in her feverish search.

 What had happened? Another accident! She had managed to recreate her results, on a guinea pig. She had been just about to try it on one of those kids who'd set all her test animals free, when one of them -

 There was a hand mirror! She grabbed it and looked in it, and she screamed.

 It was her old face. It was her *old* face, her eighty-two-year-old face. Tears ran down its cheeks. Those kids would pay for this, after - after she got back to her machine and made herself young again! She'd done it once, she'd do it again, and then those kids would be in for -

 She looked at the mirror again. Not at the reflection in it, the hand mirror itself. It was a beautiful mirror, with Gallifreyan scrollwork around the edges and on the handle -

 She knew this hand mirror.

 It was the Doctor's hand mirror.

 She looked around her, at the walls, at the roundels, at the unnamable equipment she'd disturbed. She was in the TARDIS again.

 ***

 "Doctor," Grace asked suddenly, "was it necessary to destroy Skaro?"

 The Doctor's teleconference with the Abbott had quickly elevated to the upper reaches of higher temporal mechanics, beyond the comprehension of the four young 21st century Earth people. The Time Lords had quickly determined that there would be no dematerialization of any time capsules until the Vortex had been at least partially restored. InterTARDIS communication should be possible, as long as the intended recipient's timestream had been located.

 The Time Lords each noted having experienced a timestorm which transported a squad of invading soldiers approximately a millennium forward, and mutually reserved judgment on whether that was a coincidence. Neither spoke of the swapping of timestreams between Grace and the TARDIS, though both knew; Grace somehow didn't feel like mentioning it either.

 Each was unable to think of a possible course of action to be taken with his own equipment, so the Doctor and the Abbott were now each taking inventory of the other's TARDIS through the comm link in search of inspiration. Grace recognized it for the attempt at last-ditch brainstorming that it was.

 Crispin, Stuart and Anna had dropped off to sleep in the Doctor's chairs. Undoubtedly because the contact between the two TARDISes had at least partially restored her link with the Doctor's, Grace was feeling better. Better enough for her mind to wander back over her conversation with the Abbott when they'd met. That's why she'd asked the Doctor, "Doctor, was it necessary to destroy Skaro?"

 The Doctor continued to pore over his readouts, expressing no surprise that she should be familiar with the incident when he had never discussed it with her. "I thought so at the time, and still do. There were ramifications to the entire incident that would not have been obvious --" He looked up at the video pickup in his TARDIS, directing a pointed glance at the Abbott "-- to the distant observer." Back at his work, he added, "I can go over them with you another time if you like but I'm rather busy just at the moment."

 Grace didn't respond for awhile. She still had an uneasy feeling, even though she was satisfied with the Doctor's response. *Well,* she asked herself, *is it really another question that makes me feel this way?*

 "Doctor," she said, "why did you come back, and ask me a second time to go with you?"

 The Doctor looked up at her this time. "Well, because I wanted you to come." He had a puzzled expression, as if he didn't understand why she should have to ask.

 "When we first met you said I have a future on Earth, in my old life. 'You'll do great things, Grace,' you said."

 "Oh, Grace," said the Doctor, turning to her on the monitor screen with that easy smile of his. "I can have you back there the moment you left, no matter how long you're with me. You know that. You needed the vacation and I needed the company."

 That was true enough. Grace had been jobhunting unsuccessfully for weeks when the Doctor had come back; and he had greeted her with the effusiveness of the new bachelor or widower. But now Grace looked at him with narrowed eyes. "You've figured out that there's something I have to learn from you first, haven't you?"

 The Doctor only smiled wider and said, "I can't tell you."

 "I'm sick of your 'I can't tell yous'!" Grace exploded, rising from her chair. "Why did you bring it up if you can't talk about it?"

 "Grace! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" The Doctor ran right up to his scanner pickup, a look of concern on his face. "You're absolutely right. I shouldn't have said anything to you. I wasn't myself then, quite; I was still partly the other fellow."

 "And what is that supposed to mean?" Grace retorted, certain this was meant as further obfuscation.

 The Doctor fidgeted where he stood, clasping clasping and unclasping his hands.

 "In my last life, I had ..." He groped for vocabulary. "... holistic perceptions of the universe to a degree rare even for a Time Lord. I did a great deal of good, though our friend the Abbott would dispute me on that." The Abbott looked up briefly but forbore commenting.

 Now the Doctor lowered his eyes from Grace's. "But while I was at it I sometimes forgot that the universe exists for the people in it, not the other way around. One person in particular ..." He didn't finish that thought; but he looked up again and reached for the screen, as if to take her hands in his despite the distance between them in time and space.

 "Perhaps in some kind of subconscious response to this, in *this* life my time senses tend to focus on individuals -- on you, or Gareth at the museum, or that barmaid in Boston. It's a fine line I walk when I speak of such things. And I stepped over it at your house before my full memory returned. For reason upon reason upon reason, I cannot and will not make it any worse -- for your sake, and the universe's.

 "Can you accept that?"

 What had impressed Grace about the Doctor, from that first moment in the hospital elevator, was the purity of his emotions - not purity necessarily in the sense of innocence, but of undilutedness. When he was amused, he was amused and nothing else. When he was angry, that was all he was. And right now he was simply the unhappiest person she had ever seen.

 "Well," she started; but just then, on the Abbott's scanner monitor, the signal began breaking up.

 "Doctor, I'm losing your telemetry," the Abbott called at the same time. Grace could feel it now; she turned back to her chair and sank into it.

 "Yes, it's going on this end too." The Doctor was back at his console in a flash. "I've got another, terribly powerful signal coming in," he said as the reception deteriorated, "it's drowning yours out. I'll call you back!"

 Grace wasn't entirely sure, what with the poor picture and the sudden renewal of her withdrawal symptoms with the loss of contact; but it seemed as if, just before they lost the Doctor, she saw four large men burst into the Doctor's console room from the interior door, and charge the Doctor and the three students with swords.

 To Be Continued...