Tegan had been in this position before, and no matter how many times she accompanied a shrouded body through a crowd of its former friends and neighbours, she never got used to it. This time, however, it was different; the crowd seemed interested in the body, and the circumstances of its death, but plainly they had lives of their own to get along with -- lives which hadn't come to a screeching halt at the same time as the unfortunate Mr. Murphy's. There would be a time for mourning later, when it was appropriate; for now, they left the body, its bearers, and the strangers found with it, to their own devices. At least this time they hadn't actually been accused of the crime. It made a change.

 "Penny for them," said the Doctor.

 Tegan looked up at him, surprised to realize he'd been watching her. His face was alight with friendly interest, or perhaps that was the sun; but he'd looked like that ever since they first arrived in Paradise. Ever since she'd known him, now she came to think of it. You wondered how he could do it, how he could live through all the horror and death she'd encountered while travelling with him and more besides, and still take such evident pleasure in such plain and simple things. And you could give up your job, your plans for the future, even your life, to travel with him in the hopes of catching even a glimmer of understanding; because it had been so long, so very long, since you'd felt the kind of pleasure, or wonder, that you saw when you looked in his face.

 Perhaps she should tell him that. Perhaps not.

 "It's only just occurred to me," she said instead. "If these are the 70s, this is the first time we've actually been somewhere I've already been ..." She tried to find a way to phrase it. "Somewhere out there, there's a ten-year-old me running around."

 Beside her, Turlough murmured something that sounded like "somewhere quite close, actually," but when she shot a venomous glance in his direction he was staring innocently at the passing townsfolk. "I think I'll go for a walk," he said brightly. "Join you later?"

 "Hm? Yes, good idea," the Doctor said. "You might want to ask around, see if there have been any strange occurrences we should look into. Disappearing farmers, walking corpses, crop circles. The usual."

 Turlough nodded and headed off down the street. Tegan looked at the Doctor. "You're certainly in a chipper mood."

 "And why shouldn't I be?" the Doctor said, sounding slightly wounded. "This place is just what we needed at this point. Apart from the murder," he added, frowning as the bearers entered a small building just ahead. "Somewhere to relax, get our minds off things. Dwellings of simplicity. Rather like Castrovalva, only real. I wonder if that's how the Master managed to escape?"

 "Castrovalva? What about Xeriphas?"

 "Pardon?" The Doctor paused before the building the body had been taken into, and blinked. "Yes. Xeriphas, of course. I was forgetting."

 He frowned. "I wonder why."

 Bill Filer tried to let go of the upholstery. "I've had one of my men posted to town to investigate the disappearances, and he's reported strange movement in Jacob Zook's field recently. The most recent farmer to vanish," he explained. "He heard some weird noises this morning, and described them -- and they sounded a hell of a lot like that telephone box thing of yours. And just a few minutes later, he saw a bunch of Amish, and three people he'd never seen before, carrying a body out of the fields."

 "That's somewhat more obtrusive than I'd expect from the Master," the Doctor mused. "But you're right, it's certainly worth investigating." He wrenched the steering wheel to the side, plunging from the dusty road onto a track through the corn-fields. Bill Filer instinctively leaned into the turn and nearly fell out of the car.

 "Inertial damping systems," his driver pointed out.

 "Fancy," Filer nodded as if he knew what the Doctor was talking about. "You know what I don't get, Doc? Why you'd go to all the trouble of sticking all these alien widgets and doo-dads on a hunk of junk like this car. You know what I could really go for in the department? All this stuff in a nice, big bag baby with shaded windows and customised leather seats ..."

 The Doctor looked askance at him. "And I suppose you'd also like an artificial brain for your car," he said acidly, "and a nice flashing red light so you'd know when it was talking to you. No thank you. Bessie's plain enough for me. This car has *character* --"

 And then his foot came down hard on the brake, and despite himself Filer flung up his hands to brace himself against the dashboard. Bessie screeched to sudden halt just in front of the body lying in the middle of the track.

 It was the body of a tall, youngish man, and unless something drastic had happened to the fashion sense of the local Amish community ... "One of yours, is he?" The Doctor leapt from the car, crossed to the body, knelt down and began feeling for a pulse.

 Filer was close behind him, holding a gun which the Doctor wasn't surprised he hadn't noticed before. He took one look at the body and gasped in shock. "They killed Kenny! You *bastards*!"

 "Poor chap's had it, I'm afraid," the Doctor agreed. He stood up and scanned the fields about him, but saw nothing; a distant scarecrow waved in the breeze, but there was no other sign of movement anywhere. "Whoever did this has long gone."

 "Taking another body with them," Filer said grimly. "That's it, this isn't just a local problem any more. I'll have a full forensics team here before the Master can so much as spit, and if the Amish have a problem with that, then that's their ... What is it?"

 The Doctor was staring at the scarecrow, his eyes wide. "I've just realized something," he said slowly. "There's no breeze."

 He took the device his ally had given him -- and sometimes he didn't have to wonder why his people regarded such things as evil -- and attached it to the back of Jacob Zook's neck. No, he wasn't, it wasn't Jacob Zook any more. (Don't think about it.) The device hummed and there was a barely audible crunching noise as a tiny spike was driven through the body's neck into the spinal column. The body twitched for a moment as the impulses from the controller sought out and reactivated dormant, dying neural pathways.

 He'd been a good man. Anthony had seen him every day, every ordinary, unimportant day; he'd worked hard, risen and slept with the sun, helped his neighbours and loved his family, and how could Anthony convince himself that he deserved murder and worse, this ultimate blasphemy? Anthony forced himself to stop thinking about it; these things were irrelevant. He'd come to bury Jacob, not to praise him. He tapped the control on the back of Zook's neck, and the farmer came to life as if switched on, which was, all things considered, hardly surprising.

 "You have your instructions," Anthony said. It always made him uncomfortable, the blank, empty stare that he got back; but he had to say it. He had to convince himself that he was talking to an ordinary person, and not a manufactured machine.

 So far, he hadn't succeeded.

 The assassin formerly known as Jacob Zook stared blankly into the distance, his mind emptied out and the instructions of a new master implanted in its place.

 Find the Doctor. Kill the Doctor. Destroy his past, erase his present, prevent his future. Nothing else matters. Nothing else matters at all. Nothing else. Nothing.

 If I meet one more gracious, hardworking, utterly unhelpful individual, I'm going to scream, she thought, and struck out for the edge of town, in the unstated hope of finding at least someone who acknowledged that what she was doing was important. The signs of civilisation grew thinner towards the edges of Paradise, and eventually she eached the end of the village, or the end of the cornfields, depending on which way you looked at the divide.

 She stopped near a large barn to get her bearings, realizing that she didn't have much to report back to the Doctor, apart from the fact that life went on. It was nice to know, but not terribly helpful. The only thing for it, she decided firmly, was to try again -- to go back into town and find somebody who *would* answer her questions. There was no need to give up yet; persistence had gotten her her job at UNIT, and persistence would win out here -- or at least she'd be able to face the Doctor and say that she'd tried.

 She turned to retrace her steps back into the village proper, and caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of her eye -- a whisper of movement that almost wasn't there, as if somebody standing in the dark barn doorway had ducked back in to avoid being noticed. Hardly helpful, since it was the movement which had caught her attention in the first place.

 She hesitated, turned around slowly as if surveying the fields, and then pretended to notice the barn for the first time, and wandered casually towards it. There was probably a perfectly innocent explanation for the movement she'd glimpsed, but all the same, it was probably better not to advertise her presence. Jo made an effort not to repeat her mistakes.

 She hesitated in the doorway, peered into the gloom, and stepped cautiously inside.

 Of course, that meant she usually made whole new ones.

 Which wasn't to say that he wouldn't have gone stark staring mad if he'd been placed here instead. It occurred to him that he'd changed from the arrogant, superior -- well, brat, he had to admit he'd been only a few short months ago. He'd heard it said that few things could make you feel as bad as a good example, and the Doctor was a perfect example of that; Turlough had looked into the heart of a crystal bigger than two clenched fists and had seen himself reflected in it. And he hadn't liked what he'd seen at all.

 Perhaps, he thought, he'd travel with the Doctor for a while longer before returning home. After all, it wasn't as if he'd be particularly welcome when he arrived. Perhaps he could convince the Doctor to take him back to Trion some time before, or after, his own time, and --

 But his thoughts of home were interrupted by the sound of a woman screaming, and the scream's abrupt silencing. He instinctively ran (which wasn't surprising) towards the scream (which, on the other hand, was). He was on the outskirts of town by now, and the scream seemed to have come from a large barn near the edge of the cornfields. He ran towards the open doorway, temporarily forgetting that this might not be a terribly good idea; he'd seen enough of the Amish during his stroll to realize that violence was as out of place here as a display of compassion and humour would be in a class back at Brendon, and he assumed, at first, that someone had had an accident.

 Stepping into the barn was like climbing into an oven which had recently been used to bake hay. His eyes began to water, and as he blinked, trying to adjust to the gloom, he made out several hulking figures clustered around a smaller, frailer figure lying prone on the floor. He froze, trying not to make any more noise than he already had. The odds were definitely against him here. Best to slip out quietly and get help, he decided, and sneezed explosively.

 One of the nearest figures whipped around to confront the intruder, and Turlough's arms were rising into an instinctive defensive position when his vision finally cleared, and he realized, with a sudden little shock of self-contempt, that the figure hadn't done anything of the sort. He relaxed and let his hands drop back to his sides. Jumping at shadows, he scolded himself, and self-consciously entered the barn and pushed past the collection of scarecrows to the unconscious woman lying in the middle.

 He leant down by the woman, trying to ignore the sounds of rats scurrying about in the hay around him, and felt for a pulse, as he'd seen the Doctor do once before. It appeared to be weak but steady. Turlough wiped the sweat from his brow and wondered what he should do; he'd heard that you shouldn't move people after an accident, but what kind of accident had it been? She wasn't close enough to the lofts to have fallen. Perhaps she'd tripped over something, and hit her head, but the ground didn't seem to be that hard; unless she'd come running in for some reason, and tripped over ... what? A scarecrow?

 He dismissed that thought as ridiculous. The scarecrows were crowded far too closely together for her to have gotten this far into their midst without running face-first into one. Perhaps she'd heard the rats scuttling, and panicked. Yes, that made sense, especially since, now that his eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom, he couldn't see any rats. In his opinion, that made the scuttling noises a perfect reason to panic. That, and the fact that, what with the heat and the swirling dust in the air, the scarecrows -- and this was plainly ridiculous -- seemed to be crowding in closer.

 He peered closely at the nearest, but it was just a scarecrow, not a human figure in disguise; it might work at a distance, if you weren't looking too closely, but this was definitely nothing more than an old coat stuffed with straw and draped on a wooden cross. There was no way for it to move by itself, even though the shadows seemed more crowded than they had been a moment ago. But that, he realized a moment later, was because there were more shadows than there had been a moment ago, and that was because the barn door was quietly swinging shut by itself. At least, there didn't seem to be anybody closing it. It was hard to make out, because there were two scarecrows standing between him and it. And he was quite, quite certain that they hadn't been there before.

 The unconscious woman moaned quietly, and something rustled in the corner of the barn.

 Don't panic. What would the Doctor do in a situation like this?

 "Everyone here who is a real scarecrow," Turlough said in what he hoped was a challenging tone of voice, "don't raise your hand."

 The door closed.

 "I like being ignored," Tegan said to nobody in particular.

 "Almost got it," the Doctor replied. He carefully held a safety pin in place, holding open the casing of the mind controller, and pulled a tiny screwdriver from his pocket. "We're helping the nice people here with their problem, Tegan. Especially since it seems to be one of our own." He carefully prised open the shell, and winced as the delicate casing snapped beneath his fingers. "And I'd appreciate a little less distraction while I'm trying to investigate."

 "We don't have to investigate," Tegan argued. "If the Master is here, he's probably following you. All you have to do is leave, and you'll get him off these people's backs. And if it isn't him, then whatever's going on they can take care of themselves -- they'd probably prefer to! And if it is something big, won't the ordinary authorities be involved?"

 "I'm sure they will," the Doctor agreed. "UNIT will definitely have taken an interest, and then there's the CIA, the NSA, the MiB ... I even believe America's FBI has a special classification for cases such as these -- ah, here we go." He peered closely at the innards of the mechanism. "Nasty little device," he concluded, "and not entirely what I was expecting. It's rather like the Master's former mind control device, but with some adjustments. It doesn't need a focussed psychic generator on the other end, it's perfectly capable of manipulating the victim's muscles electrochemically ... The victim doesn't even have to be alive for the device to work."

 "You mean we were attacked by a walking corpse? Great. Another one for the scrapbook."

 The Doctor sighed. "There's something obvious I'm overlooking, I'm sure. I can't help but feel as though I've experienced all this before, and yet I can't remember anything of the kind ever happening to me."

 "You forgot that the Master escaped from Castrovalva already."

 "Yes, of course. I'd forgotten that." The Doctor smiled. "I'd forget my own head it if wasn't, erm ..." he trailed off.

 "I still think we should go."

 The Doctor looked calmly at Tegan. "We stay," he said, in his polite, inoffensive, brook-no-argu-ments manner, and leaving somehow became impossible. "In any case," he said, looking back into the workings of the mind controller, "until we know what's happening here, and whether the Master is involved, it probably wouldn't be best to go wandering around by yourself ..." he trailed off again.

 "You let Turlough go," Tegan pointed out.

 The Doctor looked up.

 Tegan felt the first stirrings of unease. It was the empty, blank look in the Doctor's eyes that did it. She'd thought he was busy thinking about something else, as he usually was; the Doctor was usually three steps ahead of whoever he was speaking to, and usually thinking of the fourth step, which tended to give people the impression of someone who'd put his mind down on the table a few minutes ago and was trying to remember where he'd last seen it. But the look in his syes was more, or possibly less, than that. He was looking through her as if she wasn't even there.

 Or as if he wasn't.

 "Who?" he asked.

 TO BE CONTINUED