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Borrowed Time by Naomi A. Alderman

1357910 8642

Published in 2011 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

A Random House Group Company

Copyright © Naomi A. Alderman 2011

Naomi A. Alderman has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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This book is for my brother, Eliot Alderman.

Because Doctor Who has always been the

place we share.

And for my cousin Samuel West, whose

request that I should write something for him

to read was where this book began.

'Compound interest is the most powerful force

in the universe.'

Albert Einstein (allegedly)

'Only in mathematics will we find truth.'

Cardinal Borusa

The view on the monitors was dark. Occasionally, a line

of numbers scrolled past, faster than any human eye

could have followed them. But mostly, it was dark. It

was dark, in a sense, all the time. But then, 'all the time'

is a relative concept. A lot can happen in a slice of time

too infinitesimally small to be measured on any human

scale. So, occasionally there was a burst of frenetic

activity. But mainly, it was dark.

The monitors were mounted on the walls of the

large, high room, facing in towards a central well, which

was empty. Well, mostly it was empty. Occasionally, for

an infinitely tiny period of time, it was more full than

would have been possible if some very advanced trans-

dimensional physics weren't being used.

If you'd stood in the middle of that empty central well

for an hour, you would have been fine, on the whole.

Bored, even. You would have stood there staring at the

dark monitors, letting your eyes adjust to the gloom.

You would have looked up at the huge glass domes

still radiating a tiny amount of light, just enough to see

by, and the enormous tall arched windows with their

thousands of individual panes, and the curved marble

walls and ceiling vaulting high above you and you'd

have been impressed by the grandeur of the building

but nothing more. You'd have tried to see out of the

windows which are too tall for anyone of human stature

to see anything from but the stars and the moons. You

might have looked at those three blood-red moons for a

while, appreciatively or apprehensively, depending on

your temperament.

But in that hour, there would have been a single

sliver of time. Let's round it up and say that it would

have been one-hundredth of a second. In that sliver of

time it would have seemed to you that all your senses

were being hammered on at once. That, suddenly, the

lights were too bright and too strangely coloured and

the place was full of steaming, smelly bodies and there

were angry shouting voices in a thousand languages you

couldn't understand, and the monitors were alive with

flickering numbers and letters and an image of a man

in a tweed jacket bound hand and foot, and the thing

would have been so overwhelmingly terrifying that you

would have screamed out.

And found you were screaming in an empty,

dark hall. You would have whirled around, sure that

something terrible had just been done to you. Your

heart would have been pounding, your pupils dilated,

your skin prickling with terror. But the hall would still

have been quiet, and empty, with only the thin grey

light from the globes high above you and the blood-red

moons outside the windows. There would have been

nothing else to see, or touch, and no way to understand

what had just happened to you.

Unless, of course, you'd been able to slow down time.

And then you would have seen something else entirely.

Chapter

l

Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop entered Andrew Brown's

life on possibly the worst morning of his career.

It hadn't been, up to that point, a particularly stellar

career. Andrew Brown wasn't a high-flier, more of a low-

glider. He wasn't a big shot, more of a small fry. He'd

got a good degree from a good university and hadn't

known quite what to do with himself after he left. The

man at the careers service had dipped a digestive biscuit

into his tea and pulled a flyer apparently at random

from a pile next to him.

'Lexington International Bank are holding a

recruitment day next week,' the careers adviser had said,

failing to bite into his biscuit before it disintegrated, and

then failing to catch it before it collapsed soggily onto the

floor. 'Oh damn,' he said, trying to wipe up the mess.

'But I...' Andrew had said.

The careers adviser tried to scrape the biscuit up

with some papers before apparently noticing that they

were important and trying to scrape the biscuit off them

instead. It seemed to Andrew that he'd half-forgotten

him already as he said:

'Try Lexington, blue chip company, good place to

work, worth a go.'

Andrew Brown wondered sometimes if his life

would have been totally different if the biscuit had been

a bourbon instead. They take longer to dissolve in tea.

He tested well, that was the thing. Put him in front of

a problem and he'd try to solve it. Put him in front of an

exam and he'd try to ace it. Put him in front of a ladder

and he'd try to climb it - without necessarily looking

at what that ladder was leaning against or working out

whether he really wanted to be up at the top of it. He'd

sat down in front of the Lexington International Bank

aptitude test and tried hard to solve every question.

He'd worked hard at the corporate recruitment away-

days on building a raft out of tyres and troubleshooting

an imaginary failing business. He got on well with most

people. He was an excellent team player - this had been

noted on the letter Lexington Bank had sent him offering

him a job.

That had been ten years ago, though, and he was

still climbing that ladder. After starting as a graduate

trainee, he now worked at Lexington International Bank

as a financial analyst. Mostly, this meant that he read

about companies, put some numbers about them into

spreadsheets, and made random guesses about whether

they'd make more or less money over the next six months.

He sat in front of a computer for twelve hours a day

trying to impress the people higher up than him so that

they'd advance him one more rung on that imaginary

ladder and give him the money that he'd convinced

himself made it all almost worthwhile. The thing about

the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was

very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so

Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about

whether he really wanted to get to the top of it - and

besides, since so many other people were climbing too,

the view from the top must be worth it.

So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his

heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening

for a position half a rung higher than he already was.

With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a

secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings,

with more senior people, and have the opportunity to

impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again

and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the

whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise

you might notice where you really are.

Today's meeting was particularly important. The

new head of the London office, Vanessa Laing-Randall

would be there. She was notoriously hard to please,

but if he impressed her then his career would take off.

Only one serious rival stood between him and that

promotion: the always aggravatingly well-prepared

Sameera Jenkins. She'd been snapping at his heels all

year, she always had just one more fact at her disposal,

had worked just one extra hour on a project. But he had

her this time, he knew it. No one could have been better

prepared than Andrew Brown. That promotion was his:

he could taste it.

He woke up on the morning of the important meeting

feeling well rested and calm. He could hear birdsong

through his window, the quiet sounds of the suburban

street outside and... wait a minute. Well rested? Calm?

A sudden horrifying terror gripped him.

He sat up and, almost unable to bear it, forced himself

to look at the 5 a.m. alarm he'd set on his mobile phone.

The phone's face was blank. Dead. Had it broken? He

looked again, a terrible hollow feeling opening up in his

stomach. He'd forgotten to plug the charger in. It had

run out of battery. Heart pounding, breathing hard, he

leapt out of bed and dashed out to look at the clock in

the hall. It was 6.45 a.m. Andrew Brown swore loudly,

and at length.

But it was OK, it was all right. He'd intended to get into

the office very early, by 5.45 a.m. to give his presentation

another run-through, to check his photocopies were all

in order. He could leave now, eat his toast on the way to

the station, and be at the office with half an hour to spare

before the 8-30 a.m. meeting. It'd be fine.

He dashed back into his bedroom, stubbing his toe

hard on the bedside table but that didn't matter, no time

to deal with that blinding pain now, and oh God was

his toe bleeding? Should he put a plaster on it? No time,

put on socks, pants, shave quickly, but not too quickly

wouldn't want to turn up with a lacerated face. Right,

OK, shaved, now put on the suit he'd laid out specially

the night before and... what the hell was that?

He blinked at his suit, laid out efficiently on a chair

by his bedside table which now had a spreading water

patch over the trousers. It took him a full thirty-eight

seconds to realise that when he'd stubbed his toe on the

bedside table he'd also knocked over his glass of water,

which had fallen on his trousers.

Could he wear another suit? But this was his best

one, the one his sister Sara said made him look both

dashing and professional. Iron, then. Where did he even

keep the iron? He looked in four different cupboards

and found it. He switched it on. He touched it to see if

it was hot. He burned his hand. He ironed his trousers

until the wet patch disappeared. His phone rang. Had

the meeting started early? Were they calling to find out

where he was? He answered it as he tried, one-handed,

to hop into his trousers.

'Andrew, it's Sara. I know it's early but I knew you'd

be awake.'

'Hi, sis, I'm...' He had half a piece of toast in his

mouth. He had one leg in his trousers, and was gripping

the phone between his ear and his shoulder.

'Yeah, I know, Andrew, I know, you're really busy,

you're running late...'

As he tried to manoeuvre his foot into the trousers,

he lost his balance, collided with the ironing board, the

iron fell off onto the carpet and the phone bounced onto

the floor. He managed to pull his trousers up, pick up

the iron, sustaining another small burn to his hand, do

up his belt and then put the phone back to his ear in time

to hear his sister say:

'So do you have anything to say to me, Andrew?'

'I, um...'

'I'm waiting.'

'I really am very late, actually. I really have to... I'm

really sorry, I have to go.'

'So you don't want to wish me Happy Birthday or

anything?'

'I....' Andrew looked at the place on the carpet

where the hot iron had made a dark burn. He sighed. He

should have remembered. He'd meant to send flowers.

And a card. He'd meant to buy a present.

'I'm sorry, sis, I'm really sorry. Happy Birthday. I'll

make it up to you, OK?'

'Yeah, yeah, sure. And I'll tell your niece and nephew

you'll definitely see them before they're 40, OK?'

He looked at his watch. It was 7.03 a.m. There was

a train at 7.11 a.m. that would get him into the office a

full twenty minutes before the meeting was due to start.

The station was a ten-minute walk away. He ran. After

five minutes, the station was in sight! There was a train

at the platform! The train was early! He put on a burst

of speed. But as he hurtled through the barrier, the train

pulled away from the station. He checked the sign. That

wasn't the 7.11 a.m. It was the delayed 6.48 a.m. The

trains were running twenty minutes late.

He called his office from the payphone at the station,

and tried to make things better. He left messages but no

one picked up. They wouldn't postpone the meeting for

him. When he finally got onto a packed train, his heart

was pounding ceaselessly. He gripped the rail he was

clinging to as if he could make the train go faster just by

mentally commanding it to.

From the station he ran all the way to the office. His

best, ironed suit was sticky with sweat. He realised his

shirt couldn't have dried properly when he last washed

it, because the sweat was making it smell of mildew.

He kept on running. When he saw that the lifts were

jammed, he even ran up the stairs to the seventh floor.

He arrived, sweating and panting, and smelly and with

a stain on his crotch that he realised looked suspiciously

like something wet had been there.

He was just in time to see Sameera Jenkins, flawless,

elegant Sameera, come to the end of her presentation.

To hear the round of applause from his boss, and his

boss's boss and Vanessa Laing-Randall herself. It was all

Andrew Brown could do not to burst into tears.

He did try to give his presentation. Even after they

told him that really the meeting was over. There was

no more time. He persuaded them to give him just five

minutes to show what he'd done.

But he hadn't had enough time to try out his

presentation on the computer in the conference room.

The slides didn't work properly. Where he'd thought

there'd be a chart of Fiscal Growth there was only a note

saying 'Fiscal Growth chart goes here'. Where he'd hoped

for a burst of rousing music to finish off his presentation,

the computer used the wrong sound file and there was

a long loud slow low note. It sounded like a fart. He

felt tears starting in his eyes and thought nothing could

possibly be worse than showing his emotions in front of

all these senior people - not to mention Sameera Jenkins,

smirking like a cat - so he thanked them, in a strained

voice, for their time and walked back to his desk.

He sat at his desk and stared blankly at his rows of

files, seeing nothing but the pitying faces of the people

round that meeting room table.

And then, without his ever subsequently being able to

remember how it had happened, Mr Symington and Mr

Blenkinsop were in his office.

They were two middle-aged white men, dressed in

neat, identical black wool suits and white shirts with

a faint blue pinstripe. One of them wore a dark green

tie, the other wore a dark blue tie. They had the kind

of totally ordinary, clean-shaven, innocuous faces that

you'd forget the moment they left the room. Andrew

Brown hadn't heard them knock, or invited them in. But

he forgot that as soon as they were there. They seemed

like the kind of people you didn't have to invite in. They

probably belonged everywhere.

'Good morning,' said the slightly shorter, thinner

one with the dark green tie. 'I'm Mr Symington. This is

my associate.'

'Good morning to you, Mr Andrew Brown,' said the

slightly taller, stockier man with the dark blue tie, 'I'm

Mr Blenkinsop.'

'Good, er, morning,' said Andrew Brown.

'Although, in fact, we hear you've had a bad morning,

Mr Brown,' said Mr Symington.

'Yes indeed,' said Mr Blenkinsop. 'We're sorry to

mention it, really, sorry to bring it up at all, but you know,

Mr Brown, we all have a bad morning sometimes.'

'Couldn't have put it better myself, Mr Blenkinsop,'

said Mr Symington. 'Bad mornings are a very common

event. That's why the service we offer is so valuable.'

'Service?' Andrew couldn't help himself asking.

'We're glad you asked, Mr Brown, very glad indeed,'

said Mr Symington. 'Aren't we, Mr Blenkinsop?'

'That we are, Mr Symington. Because you see,

we represent a consortium, Mr Brown, that's right, a

consortium of like-minded businesspeople, people with

time, as you might say, on their hands. People who have

more of it than they rightly know what to do with, isn't

that right, Mr Symington?'

'Certainly is, Mr Blenkinsop, it certainly is. Yes,

you see our colleagues - that is to say the consortium

of highly leveraged businesspeople we represent - are

able to make you an offer today which is beyond your

wildest dreams. That's right. Quite literally, beyond

the wildest dream you have ever dreamed, even after

a dinner consisting only of Brie, Camembert and

Wisconsin Sharp Cheddar.'

The two men laughed in perfect unison.

Mr Symington continued: 'How would you feel if you

could get an extra hour any time you liked? That's right,

an extra hour to play golf, to polish up that report for

your boss, to spend time with your girlfriend or indeed

boyfriend - we don't want to appear prejudiced, do we,

Mr Blenkinsop? - or just to sleep late? Think what that

could do for you - an extra hour! Can't you just imagine

it, Mr Blenkinsop?'

'Why, yes I can, Mr Symington. Just think of it.

Every businessman or businesswoman knows that,

sometimes, an hour before breakfast is worth three hours

in the afternoon. Take today, for example. Wouldn't you

happily, eagerly, give up the rest of the day just to have

had two extra hours this morning? Imagine if you could

manage your time like that!' Mr Blenkinsop nudged him

in the ribs sharply. 'There'd be no stopping you climbing

up the career ladder then, would there, Mr Brown?'

Andrew blinked at the two men. There was something

a little odd about their appearance - not their clothes,

which were ordinary, conservative business suits - but

their very being. They were fuzzy at the edges. When

he tried to focus on their faces, they became blurred. It

really was a most disturbing sensation.

'Look,' he said, 'I've got so much work to do, and

the day's gone horribly wrong already. Do you have

something to sell me? A book on time-management, is

that it?'

Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop smiled at each

other and turned back to Andrew.

'Better than that.'

'Far, far better than that.'

'Mr Brown, we can loan you time.'

'That's right, Mr Brown. We can lend you as much

time as you need. As much time as you can handle. As

much time as you could ever desire.'

'We can lend you enough time to get all your

preparation done for this morning's meeting. The time

to spend with friends and family. The time to get ahead

of... what's her name, Mr Blenkinsop?'

'Sameera Jenkins, Mr Symington. Nasty little upstart.

Unlike our friend Mr Brown.'

'Deserves what's coming to her, if you ask me. And

Mr Brown will give it to her. He just needs a little help.

Now of course, Mr Brown, that time will have to be paid

back.'

'At what we think you'll agree,' muttered Mr

Blenkinsop, just a little too fast for Andrew to fully catch,

'is a very reasonable rate of interest.'

'Imagine what it could do for your career. All the

time you want, Mr Brown, at the touch of a button.'

They paused. The men turned to Andrew and looked

at him, as if daring him to call them liars. And suddenly,

Andrew Brown felt very angry. Here he was, on the

worst day of his life, and these two jokers were playing

him for a fool.

'Loan me... What on earth are you talking about?

Look, how did you get in here? Who are you? You'd

better show me some identification, or I'm going to call

security!'

'He doesn't believe us, Mr Symington.'

'They so rarely do, Mr Blenkinsop.'

'I think a demonstration is in order, Mr Symington.'

'Certainly is, Mr Blenkinsop.'

And from his back pocket, Mr Symington produced

his demonstration. And then everything became very

clear indeed to Andrew Brown.

Chapter

2

The sunset, it seemed to Amy, had been going on for about

five hundred years. She stared at it some more. Rory's

arm was around her shoulders, they were snuggled

up together on a picnic blanket. They were on a beach

covered with white-gold sand. Tiny blue-green iridescent

crabs scuttled at the water's edge. Fifty-first-century

Earth had certainly cleaned up since her day - there

was no litter anywhere in sight. Out at sea, a dolphin

occasionally crested the surface of the ocean, leaping for

the pure joy of being alive. The sunset was ochre and

amber, a glorious warm light spreading across the sky

and reflected ripplingly in the water. Even the scent of

the place was gorgeous, all coconut and tropical flowers.

It was, as far as she knew, literally the most romantic

place in space and time. And she was bored.

'How long has this sunset been going on now?'

Rory flinched.

'The whole point is not to think about time, Amy.

Just -' he breathed in deeply and breathed out slowly -

'relax. Drink it in.'

Amy wriggled her shoulders. Stopped staring at the

sunset. Stopped watching the tiny crabs frolicking at her

toes. Turned instead and stared at Rory.

'But seriously,' she said slowly. 'How. Long?'

She stared into his eyes, unblinking. It was a game

they'd played since they were children. Seeing who

could go longest without blinking. She always won.

Rory blinked. He hadn't even been trying.

He looked down at the Super Lucky Romance

Camera: Capture the Moment!™ on the picnic blanket

next to him.

'Um,' he said, 'I think it's been about three hours?

This sunset? About three hours?'

'Three. Hours?!'

Amy stood up and stalked over to the edge of their

Super Lucky Romance Bubble, the place where the air

shimmered slightly. She kicked at it. The Super Lucky

Romance Bubble wobbled, making the view of the

infinitely prolonged sunset wobble too. The Bubble was

about twenty metres wide and about forty metres tall at

its highest point. A lovely large space to play in. If you

weren't already very bored.

'And how much longer is it going on for?'

Rory consulted the Super Lucky Romance Camera.

'Doesn't say. It's... I think it's supposed to be a

surprise?'

Amy let out a growl and flung herself onto her back

on the picnic blanket. Rory stretched out a consoling

hand.

'It's supposed to be romantic... You, me, a single

moment of time prolonged for several hours so we can

fully experience it here in our little bubble... and...

didn't mind so much the other day when we...'

Rory's brain finally got the message to his mouth

that he should Just Stop Talking. Amy looked at Rory's

hand hovering just above her shoulder. He wondered if

she was literally going to bite him.

She sat up.

'No, Rory, I didn't mind it the other day. And it was

interesting when we paused that shoal of flying fish in

mid-flight, and it was exciting when we used it mid

parachute-jump, but I do mind a sunset that goes on for

Three Damn Hours. OK?'

'Yes,' he said, miserably.

The Super Lucky Romance Camera: Capture the

Moment!™ clicked away another minute of perfect,

preserved time. It brought up a little image of its

advertising on its screen. 'Want to make your precious

times last longer? The Super Lucky Romance Camera,

with its patented Time Bubble technology will make

every minute seem like a day! With a guaranteed reliable

Eternity Perpetual cosmic radiation battery, it never

needs to be recharged. Take it to the beach! Underwater

diving! Even to the top of New York's Ascendancy

Tower! It's certified to 2,750 metres above sea level! Your

moments are too precious to slip by. Really experience

them, with the Super Lucky Romance Camera, invented

on Earth in 5044, and now used on over thirty planets,

galaxy-wide. Super Lucky Romance Camera: Capture

the Moment... For Ever.'

Taking a romantic holiday on fifty-first-century

Earth had seemed such a good idea when the Doctor

suggested it. Should give them time to get acquainted

with the future of their species, he'd said, which was

surely the purpose of the whole - he'd waved his hands

abstractly - love business anyway? He had a few things

to do, he'd come and pick them up in... ohhh, three

weeks sound all right?

Three weeks hadn't sounded long enough by half

to Rory - they were on future Earth, on holiday, with

no monsters chasing them. Surely they'd need more

time than that just to get used to driving flying cars

and breathing unpolluted air. Not to mention spending

time with each other, away from the Doctor. So when

the smiling, friendly girl behind the desk - very friendly

indeed, to both him and Amy, that seemed to be the way

here in 5087 - had said there was a way to prolong their

stay as long as they liked, Rory had snapped it up.

That had been six days ago. In external time, that

is. But every time they used the Super Lucky Romance

Camera, it created a time bubble around them. The

way the agent had explained it, time inside the bubble

speeded up, so that relatively, things outside the bubble

seemed slowed down. Hence, skydiving that seemed to

take thirty minutes to reach the ground, scuba diving

for hours with fish that glided past in super-slow speed.

And now, the sunset. The very, very slow sunset.

Amy kicked at the sand while Rory flicked through

the electronic guidebook to Your Vacation on Scenic

Earth they'd given him at the tourist information desk.

The cities of Earth were all documented, the mountains

and lakes and the wonderful smooth beaches of Old

Tokyo. Hmmm. He hadn't spotted this section on

'dangers of the beach' before. He started reading. Eight

tiny crabs ran over his leg.

'Amy...' he said after a few minutes, 'what does that

sign look like to you?'

He pointed at a sign about 200 metres down the

beach. Amy peered at it. There were a few small blob-

like shapes on the animated sign, moving inside a red

circle.

'It'd be a lot easier to see without this bubble in the

way!' She kicked at the bubble again.

'Does it look like... a lot of little crabs, to you?'

'Oh yeah! That's what it is!'

In a hollow place by the end of their picnic blanket,

thirty tiny jewelled crabs were swarming.

Rory showed Amy the page in the guidebook.

'Mutant reproducing crabs,' it said, 'a beautiful but

occasionally tiresome addition to the beach, left over

from rampant genetic engineering in the last century.

The crabs were created to gnaw out the otherwise

indestructible hulks of marine vessels used in the

Fifth World War. They live on silica, which makes the

beach their natural home, and are generally harmless.

However, in an enclosed space, they will begin to

reproduce extremely rapidly, their numbers doubling

every five minutes. It is important not to erect a tent on a

crab nest - if you find that you have done so, dismantle

the tent immediately or risk a nasty bite from a swarm

of the crustaceans.'

As Amy finished reading, Rory pointed to the little

nest of iridescent crabs. They watched it together. Every

now and then one of the crabs would grow an extra

claw, then two claws, then a lump off its body, and then

a whole new crab - conjoined for a second before finally

splitting off.

'They're doubling every five minutes?' asked Amy

Rory nodded.

One of the crabs unfolded the shell on the back of

its body to reveal a pair of wings, like a ladybird's, and

took off into the air.

'They can fly?' said Amy.

As if in answer, six or seven more of the creatures

took off and began to buzz noisily around the time

bubble. One of them hit the edge of the bubble and

immediately split into two crabs.

'When is this bubble going to open?!' shouted Amy.

In the nest at the end of the picnic blanket, fifty

jewelled crabs had become a hundred. Or two hundred.

More were taking off every minute, bumping into the

side, doubling. One of them buzzed towards Amy. She

batted it away with her arm and shouted with pain - it

had left a long laceration.

A swarm was airborne now, flying angrily, buzzing

into the walls of the time bubble.

'Rory!' shouted Amy, above the loud annoyed hum,

'when is it going to open?'

'I don't know!' shouted Rory, as the swarm wheeled

round and headed for them.

Rory picked up the beach umbrella and tried to fend

them off. The sharp, silica-shredding claws, instantly

ripped the top of it to tatters.

Amy rummaged through her beach bag, at last

finding her mobile phone.

'What are you doing?!' Rory shouted.

'I'm calling the Doctor!' said Amy.

'Wait, but... we can...'

The swarm bounced against the side of the bubble

again, doubled again.

He'd been about to say they could work this out

themselves. It was usually his job to convince Amy of

this: she always had some reason to call the Doctor:

they'd lost their way, she was too tired to walk back

down the hill, the planet was being invaded by giant

sponges, the ship was going to explode in an hour....

They had a rule; before she got to call him, they had to

talk about it first. But in a situation like this...

'This is supposed to be our holiday...' was all Rory

managed before the swarm was on him again. He beat

them off as best he could with his beach blanket, but

it got shredded to pieces. Two more doublings, maybe

three, and there wouldn't be a swarm at all any more,

just a bubble filled with angry jewelled crabs with

nothing to eat but them.

'All right! Call him!'

Amy hadn't even had time to dial the number yet, but

there was the sound anyway. It was inside the bubble

with them, reverberating and making the trembling

walls vibrate.

Vworp, vworp, vworp.

'Did you call him?!' shouted Rory.

The swarm was in the space where the sound was

coming from. The crabs confusedly tried to fly upwards

to get away from it.

'Maybe he's got a sensor,' she shouted back, 'that

tells him when I'm really terrified.'

And with a final wheezing groan, the TARDIS

materialised. The swarm of jewelled crabs attacked

its structure with gusto. Rory wondered how many

milliseconds that would keep them occupied.

The door opened.

'Certainly not,' said the Doctor, 'can't go around

measuring people's emotional states, that'd be intrusive.

Not to mention all the electrodes and implants, very

messy. Those things can go badly wrong, remind me

never to tell you about the telepathic hair extensions

that were all the rage on Cerpris Beta just before the total

collapse of their civilisation. Anyway, what was I talking

about? Ah yes, that's right, did you have a good three

weeks, have you picked up your going home presents,

are you ready to leave now?' He suddenly noticed the

iridescent creatures covering the shell of his TARDIS,

making it look like it had been encrusted with bling by

Damian Hirst. 'What are all these crabs? Have you made

new friends?'

'Doctor,' said Amy, and hugged him, 'how did you

know we were in danger?!'

'In danger from these little things?' said the Doctor.

'They only attack if they're in an enclosed space, perfectly

harmless otherwise.' The Doctor reached out to stroke

one of the crabs. It nipped his finger, drawing blood.

'Ow!' he said. He looked up and to the sides. 'Ah,

we are in an enclosed space. Why did you do that? Very

silly of you, didn't you see the warning signs?'

'It... hasn't... been... three... weeks!' said Rory. His

arms were covered with scratches from the crabs, but

he was damned if he was going to give up any of his

precious holiday with Amy.

The Doctor pulled an enormous fob watch from his

pocket. Rather disconcertingly, the words 'Rory and

Amy Pond' were engraved on the back. He consulted

the face.

'Not three weeks, not three weeks? Certainly has

been Rory. Time flies when you're having fun, but yes

it'll be three weeks just exactly -' he paused, looked at

the watch face, waited for a hand to tick over from one

number to the next - 'now! Hope you haven't eaten too

much jelly and ice cream, try not to be sick on the way

home. Well, not home. Probably not. Where shall we go

next? Not Cerpris Beta. Never get a haircut there.'

'Doctor!' shouted Amy, trying to interrupt the flow

of nonsense. 'It really hasn't been three weeks! It's been

six days!'

At that moment, the crabs, apparently deciding en

masse that the TARDIS wasn't edible after all, took off

noisily from its surface.

'Ah, right,' said the Doctor. 'Time to take down your

-' he prodded the side of the bubble - 'whatever this is

and let these poor creatures out.'

'We can't,' shouted Amy over the buzzing. 'We're

stuck in a time bubble!'

She thrust the pink plastic Super Lucky Romance

Camera at the Doctor. He examined it briefly.

'Hmmm, yes. It's only been six days in Earth time,

but in your subjective time... three weeks.'

The swarm doubled, overhead. It seethed and roared

and raised itself up as high as it could in the bubble

and then began to descend, in a noisy, angry, clicking,

crustacean sea of very sharp claws.

The Doctor pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his

pocket and pointed it at the Camera. The Super Lucky

Romance Camera gave a set of musical pings Rory

had never heard it make before. And, all at once, the

time bubble collapsed - and with it the angry swarm

suddenly changed direction, flying skywards, before

spreading out across the whole beach. Only a single,

harmless jewelled crab was left at Amy's feet.

The Doctor tossed the Camera to Rory: 'Keep that.

Useful little thing.'

Rory caught it awkwardly and put it into his pocket.

He muttered to Amy: 'Can we just get on with our

holiday again, now?'

'Oh!' said the Doctor. 'I've brought you a wedding

present. I know it's a bit late, well, you know how it is,

one thing and another, time flies when you're saving a

planet from evil hair extensions.'

'A present?' said Amy. 'For me? I mean...' she

glanced at Rory, 'for us? What is it, Doctor? Is it some

kind of fabulous bit of technology, or an ancient jewel or

a... Oh, I can't wait, what is it?'

'Far, far better,' said the Doctor, with a smug smile.

'In your species' history, it's probably the most valuable

single object there's ever been.'

'What,' said Rory, 'that piece of moon rock they have

in that museum in America?'

'Moon rock, pah! I've got piles of stuff in one of the

TARDIS basements from when I thought I'd lay crazy

paving. No, no, much more expensive than that...'

'The TARDIS has... basements...?'

'Is it the Crown Jewels?' said Amy. 'Did you get us

the Crown Jewels for our wedding?'

'Even better.'

The Doctor vanished momentarily and came back

holding something behind his back. He pulled it out.

'Ta-da!'

It was a plant in a pot. Quite a pretty plant. A tulip

with striped, coloured petals. The pot was quite nice

too. But still. Amy and Rory looked at each other, and

then at the Doctor.

'You brought us a... tulip?' said Rory.

'Doctor, did you just stop off at the local Time Petrol

Station and pick up a potted plant before you got here?'

The Doctor's face crumpled. He looked, momentarily,

very sad and very old.

'Don't you know what this is? Don't you know that,

at the height of its wealth and fame one bulb of this very

rare, very special, practically unique tulip would have

cost more than... what's the name of the place you keep

your outdated mostly ornamental figureheads? The

ones that cost all the money in upkeep?'

'Er, the British Museum?' guessed Rory.

'Buckingham Palace! Yes! One single bulb of this

glorious variegated tulip would have cost more than

Buckingham Palace! Well,' he conceded, 'maybe not that

much, maybe not quite that much but close! Someone

paid two tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese

and twelve fat sheep for this! And the rest!'

Rory and Amy stared at the tulip with a little more

respect but not much more understanding.

'Honestly, don't you know anything about human

history?'

Amy blinked.

'I didn't do History GCSE. I did Spanish instead.'

'Right!' said the Doctor, turning on his heel and

marching into the TARDIS. 'Come with me!'

They followed, bemused, into the TARDIS console

room. Rory brought Amy's beach bag with them. He

had a feeling they wouldn't be coming back.

'Bubbles!' shouted the Doctor. 'It's all about

bubbles!'

'As in...' Rory ventured, 'I'm forever blowing...'

'No, Rory, as in money. The thing your species is

so obsessed with: making it, saving it, borrowing it,

spending it. Because money is the best vehicle ever

invented for greed. Honestly, you know, you really are

all just so irrational. You always want to believe you can

get something for nothing, that there's some kind of

magic power...'

'What, like a raggedy Doctor in a magic box?' said

Amy.

'No, not like that, not like that at all. In fact, I am

going to take you somewhere that you can see how very

not like that it is. Do you see this tulip, Amy?'

Amy looked at the tulip. It was a tulip. It had striped

red and yellow petals with frilly edges and a long green

stem. A tulip.

'Yes.'

'Do you know why this tulip bulb ended up being

worth so much?'

'No.'

'It's because, Amy,' he put his face very close to hers,

'people thought that other people thought it was worth

that much. They thought they could sell it for more

than they bought it for. They thought that the market

for tulip bulbs was so good that prices would keep on

rising for ever.'

'But... it's just a flower.'

'That is exactly the point! The point is, you people

aren't rational about these things. And that's why...' He

typed furiously on a keyboard on the TARDIS console.

'Oh yes, very good, there was an example of just this kind

of thinking in your time! We - he gestured dramatically

- 'are going to see a bank collapse!'

'We're going to a bank?' said Rory.

'Not just any bank,' said the Doctor, throwing a lever

on the TARDIS console. 'We're going to the scene of the

biggest banking collapse your species has ever known!

Lexington International Bank!'

With a flourish so dramatic that it spun him around

in a circle, the Doctor pinged two buttons, wound a

handle and pulled a knob. The central column of the

console began to rise and fall. They were off.

'I suppose the holiday's over then,' said Rory.

Chapter

3

London's Square Mile. Here money is conjured and traded,

here careers are made and broken, this is the beating

heart of capitalism. Along the pavements of the Square

Mile stride purposeful women and men with immaculate

suits and very short lunch breaks. In the offices of the

Square Mile sit people whose days are determined by the

movements of lines on a graph. In the boardrooms of the

Square Mile are debated the mergers and acquisitions,

the divestments and dispensations by which companies

and corporations around the world will grow or be

dismantled: here decisions are made which will result in

a sleepy village turning into a thriving factory town, or a

busy industrial city turning into a wasteland of poverty

and decay. And nowhere do the women and men stride

more purposefully, nowhere are the graphs observed

in more minute detail, nowhere are the boardroom

debates fiercer or more significant than in the offices of

Lexington International Bank.

Here, the atrium is large and the glass sculpture

expressing the motto 'time is money' is enormous. The

receptionists are immaculate in identical uniforms. No

one would think of striding purposefully through the

reception area without carrying a file or two labelled

with names that made it very clear how tremendously

important they were and how extremely hard they were

working.

But nowhere is impregnable. Not even Lexington

International Bank.

In the basement of Lexington, there is a loud and

busy mailroom. And off the mailroom, there is a maze

of dusty corridors and certain damp storerooms which

even the mailroom staff rarely visit. And in one of those

damp storerooms, the one with the broken photocopier

and the plastic mail sacks full of folded up plastic mail

sacks, and the copies of misprinted Annual Reports from

1998, in that farthest storeroom there is a noise.

The noise is vworp, vworp, vworp.

And then, in the farthest storeroom, there is a blue

box with a light on top.

The Doctor opened the TARDIS door and strode out.

'Come on! The air's breathable, the gravity's normal,

just my little joke, the air's full of dust actually and the

gravity's... well, yes the gravity is normal, although...

what are you wearing?'

'Just something I found in the wardrobe room.

Coming to a bank, have to dress the part. Do you like

it?'

Amy gave a twirl. She was wearing a business suit -

a jacket, blouse, short skirt and a pair of glasses.

'But you don't wear glasses,' said the Doctor.

Amy pushed the glasses down her nose slightly and

looked over them at him.

'They're just for effect, Doctor. The effect is: I'm very

smart and know a lot about numbers, OK? Rory's is

worse.'

Rory stumbled out of the TARDIS wearing what was

definitely a suit but was also definitely about four sizes

too big for him. He looked like his mum had given him

his older brother's suit hoping he'd grow into it. If his

older brother had been part ogre.

He looked at the Doctor and rolled his eyes. 'It was

all I could find.'

The Doctor tried to hide his smirk, and turned on his

heel. 'Come along!' he said, 'places to go, people to meet,

history to teach! Now... which way, which way...'

He poked his head out of the door of the storeroom,

looked left and right and marched out, leading Amy and

Rory towards a door opening onto the street outside.

'But,' said Rory, 'isn't this the building? Shouldn't

we go back inside to, you know, be in the building we

came for?'

'Now, now, Rory,' said the Doctor, 'this is Lexington

International Bank! Can't just sneak in the back! Have to

be announced at reception! We have to...'

'Please,' said a voice by their feet. 'Please...'

The Doctor stopped. Looked down. Frowned.

Huddled at the side of the building was an old

woman. She was sitting under a heating vent, where it

was warm. She was wrapped in three or four dirty coats,

although she was wearing a pair of expensive-looking

high-heeled shoes with red soles. She looked so tired,

as though she hadn't slept for days, or weeks. Her long

hair was dirty too, and there was a tattered canvas bag

next to her which she obviously used as a pillow.

She tugged at the Doctor's coat. Rory was already

patting his pockets to find his wallet.

'Please,' she said again, 'can you help me?'

Rory pulled a sheaf of notes out of his wallet and

bent down to give them to her. It was funny how, living

in the TARDIS and travelling with the Doctor, money

began to feel less important, even meaningless. There

were seemingly limitless supplies of all kinds of exotic

alien currencies piled up in some of the TARDIS's

rooms - the Doctor had even told them that one jungle

room populated by small pink snail-like creatures was

actually a functioning economy he'd picked up on the

planet Gigia 8 - but they never found anything much

to spend money on, and the things they did and saw

couldn't have been bought at any price. He'd brought

loads of money, just in case, but now he only carried his

wallet out of habit, and this woman needed its contents

more than he did.

'Here,' he said, 'have this.' He handed her the notes.

She looked at them, puzzled. She was obviously a bit

potty, poor thing.

'Time is money,' she muttered, 'time is money,

money is time, you can give me one but you can't give

the other.'

Amy looked at Rory with respect. She'd mocked him

for bringing along a wallet full of cash. But this was a

good thing to do with it. She kissed him on the side of

his head, then knelt down, and spoke gently: 'How long

have you been here?'

The woman frowned at Amy. 'How long is time?'

she said. 'How long is a day? How long can a day be?

Longer than you think!'

Amy and Rory looked at each other, then back at the

Doctor.

'I don't know how you bear it,' said the Doctor. 'I

don't know how you humans go on bearing this, but

somehow you do. That was kind, Rory. Now come

along, we've got a bank to investigate.'

'Don't go back in there!' the woman shouted. 'Don't

go in there! They'll steal your time! They'll steal it, and

you'll never get it back, not never ever.'

The Doctor spun around and knelt down again.

'What did you say? What was that you said about time?

Say it again, more slowly this time.'

The old woman stared at the Doctor. Her mouth

twisted. She blinked, and scrunched up her face and

grimaced. 'Can't remember,' she said. 'My brain is so

old. Wait!'

She hoisted the canvas bag onto her lap and

rummaged around in it. There was something horrible

in there, possibly a gone-off banana and some extremely

old fish, judging by the smell. At last, she pulled out a

startlingly clean white rectangle of cardboard.

'There!' she said, pressing it into the Doctor's hand.

Then, speaking as if by rote, she said: 'Do take my card,

it has all my contact details and my secretary will be

happy to make an appointment, we're very grateful for

your interest in Lexington International Bank.'

Over the Doctor's head, Amy and Rory looked at

each other. She was clearly doolally. But the Doctor

replied respectfully: 'Thank you Ms, er,' he consulted

the card, 'thank you Nadia Montgomery, Head of

Communications and Marketing, that's quite important,

thank you so much, we'll be in touch! Won't we?'

Oh yes, nodded Rory and Amy, we certainly will.

As they walked around the building to the front

entrance, Amy said: 'What was that about, Doctor?'

'I don't know,' said the Doctor, 'but I have a feeling

we're going to find out.'

'I'm the Doctor,' said the Doctor, leaning over the

polished granite desk and smiling at the receptionist,

'and these are my two charming friends, Rory and Amy.

We're all expected, as I think you'll be able to tell from

our credentials, which are here,' he produced the psychic

paper and held it up in front of the receptionist's face.

'As you can see we have an absolute right to be in this

building and wander around at will, poking our noses

into this, examining that, it's all part of our job as our

paperwork indicates.'

The receptionist examined the paper and smiled.

'Doctor Schmidt,' she said, warmly. 'The efficiency

auditor we've been expecting from Zurich. I'll just call

up to tell Ms Laing-Randall that you're here. I know

she's eager to talk to you. Shell show you around the

building.'

'Yes,' the Doctor leaned back against the desk and

grinned. 'That's exactly right.'

'And this must be your assistant,' the receptionist

smiled, a shade less warmly, at Amy. 'I'll make up

your security passes but...' The Doctor tried to pull

the psychic paper out of the receptionist's hands, but

Lexington International Bank trains its staff extremely

well in security matters, and the receptionist, still smiling

brightly, held on tightly. 'Now, let me see, what does it

say here about you?' she said, staring hard at Rory.

Rory shuffled uncomfortably in his too-large suit. He

didn't look like one of the sharply dressed executives

marching through the lobby in search of new meetings

to conquer, and the receptionist knew it. She stared at

him, then back down at the psychic paper.

'As you'll see,' said the Doctor again, 'like us, he's

perfectly entitled to go wherever he pleases in the

building, talk to anyone... and if I'm Doctor Schmidt,'

he put on a cod Swiss accent, 'ze auditor from Zurich,

can I get avay viz zat accent?'

'Not really, Doctor,' said Amy.

'No, no, didn't think so, didn't think it was a good

idea at all, but really,' he continued to the receptionist,

'if I'm the incredibly un-Swiss Doctor Schmidt and this

is Amy my assistant then Rory must be....'

'Oh yes,' said the receptionist, her face clearing. 'I see

it here now. He's the new mailroom boy.'

'Mailroom...?' spluttered Rory.

'Yes, yes,' said the Doctor, 'very good, you go down

to the mailroom, Rory. I'm sure there'll be lots of useful

things for you to discover. Paperclips, you know, jiffy

bags, important staple guns, you never know what

could be useful.'

Rory tried to protest, but a helpful security guard

was already ushering him through the door marked

'basement'.

'As you can see, Doctor Schmidt,' said Vanessa Laing-

Randall, 'we run a tight ship here.'

'Just call me Doctor, everyone does.'

Ms Laing-Randall, immaculate in an extremely

expensive-looking suit, stretched one manicured hand

out to indicate the glass walls of the internal atrium. She

was a woman with the powerful psychological presence

of a tank, combined with the sleek grooming of a racing

car.

She'd met them in the lobby, followed by her

scurrying assistant Jane Blythe, and had taken them on

a whirlwind tour of the building: trading rooms and

personnel department, management offices, secretaries,

private banking. Amy had the impression that, in spite of

her politeness, Vanessa rather resented their presence.

'You know the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be

giving a speech from this office tomorrow afternoon?

Because we are a model for the industry, a model for

sustainable growth and commitment to our values,' she

was saying to the Doctor. 'I know New York has insisted

on audits; but I really don't think we need it. See that

sculpture?'

They were looking down on the lobby - the building

was circular with a glass roof above the central well.

There was an enormous glass sculpture in the centre,

reaching up to the eighth floor. It looked like several

half-melted candles twisted around each other and

fused together, with tendrils and strands reaching up.

There was a strange flickering light at its heart. It looked

weirdly alive.

'Nice sculpture, yes. Art and money,' said the

Doctor, 'money and art. They've gone together since the

Medici of course. Banking family. Italian renaissance.

Commissioned a lot of art because they thought that was

the only way to save their souls from hell. They thought

that charging compound interest was a terrible sin, you

know. And that God would only forgive them if they

used their money to pay for enormous pieces of religious

art. Piero de Medici died tragically of Urharborean

Plague, but I don't think that was God, more a side effect

of some temporal flux caused by Mandragora. Anyway,

don't need to go on about that, forget I mentioned it

really, what I mean to say is: nice sculpture.'

'That's not just a sculpture,' said Vanessa, 'it's a

mission statement. See, the different strands represent

the different parts of one's life, and here at Lexington

Bank London we believe that each part deserves equal

attention. As part of our work-life balance initiative,

we...'

She droned on. Amy leaned over the balustrade and

looked around the building. Up and down its ten floors,

through all the windows, she could see busy bankers

working like bees, each in their own little cell. Actually,

this place was more like a beehive than anything else.

Every little worker with its own allotted job. And Vanessa

Laing-Randall wasn't a tank or a sports car, she was a

Queen Bee. The whole place was running so efficiently

it was hard to believe what the Doctor had told them:

that the Bank had taken on too much debt, that it would

collapse only a few days from now. 'We won an award

last quarter, you know. For our commitment to giving

our staff time for family activities, for leisure...' Vanessa

Laing-Randall was still giving the Doctor the hard sell.

But maybe she was right. All the workers in the

different offices looked so peaceful. Except. Hmm.

Directly opposite her, in the glass-walled office that

looked out over the central well on the other side, there

was a balding middle-aged man who looked in some

kind of distress. He'd stood up from his computer, both

hands covering his face. A woman ran in from the office

next door. He shouted at her - Amy couldn't hear what

he said - and she backed away quickly. He turned toward

the central well and Amy saw his face. He was middle-

aged, quite nice-looking, but full of anger and fear. In

desperation, it seemed to Amy, he looked down at his

wrist, and what he saw there made him no happier. He

fiddled with whatever-it-was on his wrist.

There was no sound, at least none that carried across

the atrium. It was just that he crumpled suddenly to the

floor and Amy knew, without having to be told, that he

was dead.

Chapter

4

They ran round to the opposite side of the atrium as quickly

as they could. By the time they got there and found the

right office, the man's secretary had already covered his

face with a coat. She was standing, shell-shocked, by the

body.

'Doctor,' hissed Amy, 'I saw something. I don't know

what happened but it was like... he pressed something

on his wrist, a watch maybe, and then he just died.'

'Overwork,' said Vanessa Laing-Randall firmly.

'I'm sad to say Doctor Schmidt that, however much we

encourage our staff to take breaks, sometimes they just

refuse. Isn't that right, Jane?'

Jane Blythe, the assistant, jumped slightly with

surprise at being addressed, but recovered her

composure enough to blurt out, 'Yes, that's right.' She

consulted her smartphone. 'Twenty-three per cent of

our staff refused to use up holiday allowance last year.

Mr...' she clicked a couple of buttons, 'Brian Edelman

here hasn't taken a day's holiday in eighteen months.

That's strictly against our advice, Doctor Schmidt, we've

sent him several emails about it.' She noticed they were

all staring at her. 'That is, sorry, that's what I've got in

my records.'

The Doctor looked down grimly at the dead body.

'Perhaps all those emails got caught in his spam filter.

Vicious things, spam filters. I knew one that became

sentient once: made a killing holding everyone's emails

to ransom. Hmm. Did you say he was looking at his

watch?'

The Doctor knelt down and gently pulled away the

coat to examine the man's wrists. There was no watch

on either of them.

'Well, I thought I saw—'

'You were on the other side of the building, Ms Pond,'

said Vanessa. 'I'm sure it was just a nervous gesture.'

'Yeeeees,' said the Doctor. 'Nervous, yes. I wonder

how a man in his position, so short of time, ever managed

without a watch. Well! In the light of this incident,

Vanessa Laing-Randall, Head of the London Office, I

think my assistant and I will have to stay a bit longer,

conduct a more thorough investigation, wouldn't you

say?'

'Oh but,' Jane consulted her smartphone, 'only half

a day was scheduled in and...' Vanessa scowled at her.

'Yes of course, absolutely, we can arrange that. Sorry.'

Vanessa put an encouraging hand at the Doctor's

back and guided him away from the body of poor Brian

Edelman.

'It's a terribly shocking incident. Nothing like this

has happened before, Doctor Schmidt. Perhaps you'd

like to come out for lunch to get over it? Somewhere

comfortable and... well, the Ivy will always find a table

for me.'

The Doctor spun on his heel, jerking away from

Vanessa's arm.

'Lunch? Lunch is for wimps! I've always wanted to

say that, actually I quite like lunch. But we don't need

lunch, do we Pond?'

'We...'

'That's right! Lunch is for wimps and we are people of

action! So! I think you can go and talk to some managers

on the same level as poor Brian Edelman here. I'm sure

Jane can arrange that, can't you, Jane, don't bother to

answer that, insulting to you to ask really. I think it's

vitally important that Amy find out what pressure those

middle-managers are under and,' he leaned close to

Amy, whispering in her ear so that no one else could hear,

'what kind of watches they wear.' He stood up straight

and spoke more loudly: 'I meanwhile will shadow you,

Vanessa Laing-Randall, because I rather think that you

might be doing something quite interesting. Not to

say... dangerous and immoral.'

Vanessa Laing-Randall blinked. 'I've got a meeting

with clients from PZP Group, if that's what you mean?

I'd hardly call it dangerous.'

'That,' said the Doctor, linking arms with Vanessa,

and leaving Amy with Jane, 'is exactly what I do not

mean! But come along anyway, to the meeting, no time

to lose, eh?'

Down in the mailroom, Rory was also coming face to

face with the harsh realities of City life. Mostly those

realities were: there was too much to do, there was too

little time to do it in, too many people were shouting,

and too many of them were shouting at him.

'Come on, Rory,' someone shouted. 'Shift yourself!

All those parcels on the noon courier to Rome or you'll

be for the chop!'

'Get moving, Rory!' shouted someone else. 'One

thousand reports to deliver to every desk in the building

in the next hour and no one else to do it!'

'Get over here, Rory!' shouted another angry voice.

'These pallets aren't going to unload themselves, you

know!'

Rory sighed. He was in a large basement room with

another ten men, all labelling, packing, chatting to

delivery drivers, filling out forms. He'd thought this was

supposed to be the electronic age but there were still a lot

of non-electronic parcels to be picked up or sent round

the world. This wasn't the kind of excitement he was

used to, travelling with the Doctor. Still, to be honest,

this all felt quite a lot safer than usual. Maybe if he could

just catch up on the backlog of work...

'Shift yourself, Rory. Chancellor of the Exchequer's

giving a speech tomorrow - if we don't get those chairs

up to the ground floor, what's anyone going to sit on?'

There was something odd, though. He'd noticed that

lots of the packages were coming from just one or two

offices. This 'Andrew Brown' was sending out a lot. And

another name kept coming up: 'Sameera Jenkins'.

Dean, the stocky man working next to him and

constantly whistling in a way that Rory was sure

wouldn't get irritating at all if you worked with him for

years, was friendly enough.

'D'you notice,' Rory began, 'how many of these

parcels come from Andrew Brown and...'

'Sameera Jenkins?' said Dean. 'Oi, John. Rory wants

to know why Brown and Jenkins are making ten times

as much work as anyone else in the building.'

John, the short broad-shouldered supervisor,

chuckled.

'You're not the only one, Rory my son.'

John and Dean exchanged a look.

Rory waited for them to say more, but they didn't.

He knew he was on to something. Maybe he, Rory,

could stop this bank collapsing! It wasn't like Amy

saving an entire planet from a plague of killer ladybirds

(she claimed) or the Doctor saving the whole history of

the universe on Tuesday using just a rubber band and

a tin of pineapple rings (he'd idly dropped that into

a conversation, claiming they couldn't remember it

because they'd been caught up in the whole fruit-salad-

implosion too), but hey, it'd be something.

So he listened to the conversation around him,

hoping to pick something up. John and Dean exchanged

gossip about the Bank. Vanessa Laing-Randall, it turned

out, had a hairdresser to blow-dry her hair in her office

twice a day, morning and afternoon. She was ruthlessly

ambitious - had appeared out of nowhere about six

months ago, appointed from Hong Kong the rumour

was - and workload in the London office had increased

steadily since then. Andrew Brown and Sameera Jenkins

were known to be arch rivals for a promotion. For a

while Sameera had been a dead cert, but recently - no

one knew why - Andrew was pulling ahead. Someone

else claimed to know, for certain, that one of the most

senior men in the building had been on two business

trips at the same time - one to Tokyo and one to New

York. And no, he didn't mean 'one after the other' - he'd

had meetings in Tokyo in the morning, then New York

in the afternoon. He must have been on a plane all the

time!

Or, thought Rory, he knew one man who could be in

Tokyo one minute and New York the next. A suspicion

was starting to form in Rory's mind. He couldn't have

said what it was any more clearly than 'something weird

is going on' - but once you've been around 'something

weird' long enough, you start to be able to smell it.

'Does anyone have any idea what's going on with

Andrew Brown and Sameera Jenkins?' Rory said.

John and Dean exchanged one of those meaningful

looks again.

'If you want to know about that,' said John, 'maybe

you need to look in Storeroom F. Just a sec.' The phone

next to John's workstation was ringing. He glanced

down at it. 'What a surprise, his lordship Andrew Brown

on the phone.' He picked up the receiver.

'What's in Storeroom F?' asked Rory. This sounded

like the kind of interesting-if-scary thing that could lead

to an adventure he could impress Amy with.

Dean nudged Bob, the skinny man standing next to

him. 'Our Rory here wants to know about Storeroom F,'

said Dean.

A grin spread across Bob's face. 'As it happens,' he

said, 'I've got some boxes need to go to Storeroom F.

And I need some envelopes from right at the back.'

'It's your lucky day,' said John, finished with his

phone call. 'We don't usually let junior staff in there, do

we?'

Rory could feel his skin prickling with excitement.

There was something in that room, he could feel it.

Til go,' he said quickly. 'You don't need to worry

about me, I'm trustworthy.'

'That is a load,' said John, pulling a key labelled

'Storeroom F' from his pocket and tossing it to Rory, 'off

my mind.'

Rory stood with the trolley full of boxes outside

Storeroom F. The door didn't look any different to

Storerooms A-E and G-J. Except that it was locked. The

others weren't locked - he'd tried some of the handles.

He pulled out the key and unlocked it. As he touched

the handle, he felt something like a tiny electric shock but

softer, not painful. Probably just static electricity, he told

himself. He opened the door. It was dark inside, and the

storeroom seemed to go back a long way. Further than

the others? Hard to know.

He pushed the trolley into the storeroom and reached

for the light switch. As his hand groped, there was that

strange sensation again. Like a tingling. And there was

a sound in the room too, like a low fluttering hum.

With some relief, his hand found the switch. Flicked it.

Nothing happened. Great. No light.

He considered for a moment just unloading the

trolley in the entrance of the room and forgetting about

the envelopes Bob needed. But if he did that they'd

all laugh at him. He pulled his mobile phone out of

his pocket and pointed the faint glow from the screen

around the room. Just enough to see by. He pushed his

trolley a few more paces into Storeroom F. Though he

hadn't touched it, the door slammed shut behind him.

And there was that fluttering sound again, like a sigh.

Rory found he was breathing rapidly. When had that

happened? He wanted to run out of the door and back to

the mailroom where everything was light and cheerful.

He tried to calm down, breathed deeply, forced himself

to scan the room slowly with the faint light from his

mobile phone. It was an ordinary storeroom, just like

the one they'd left the TARDIS in, he told himself. Look,

there was a filing cabinet, there were shelves filled with

boxes of printer paper, and... wait, what was that? It

was the noise again. Like someone riffling through a

phonebook.

He whirled round and pointed his dim light at the

place the noise had come from. Something moved, just

out of his line of vision, he spun round again, now he

couldn't tell which way he'd come into the room and

right by his ear something chuckled, a single, mirthless

laugh.

He let out a yelp, ran blindly forward, tripped

over his own trolley sending boxes flying. The mobile

phone flew out of his hand and clattered to the floor.

He sprawled on the floor. His heart was hammering in

his chest. Something was moving in this room, making

that occasional low fluttering noise. He tried to breathe

more slowly. He looked around, straining his eyes in the

dark to make anything out. He could see the faint glow

of his phone a little way away. He crawled towards it.

Something plucked at his jacket, as if trying to hold him

back. There was the chuckle again, a little further away.

The phone light blinked off.

The room was pitch dark again. He could hear

movement. Slow, steady movement. Like something

blind was groping for him. He reached his hand

forward... and with a flood of gratitude closed it around

his mobile. He turned on the light, swept it in a broad

circle. There was nothing there.

Keeping his back to the wall, he made his way round

slowly to the door. He didn't care about the envelopes.

He didn't care about anything. He just wanted to get

out. He reached down and grasped the handle. Turned

it. The door was locked. His heart started to hammer

again.

He dialled Amy's number.

'Amy,' he hissed, 'you've got to get down here right

now. I'm in Storeroom F. Come quickly. Help me.'

'But I - '

'I'm locked in,' he hissed. 'Help me.'

He swept the light across the room again, and there

was the movement. Something was moving by the far

files. It wasn't a person, although it was person-shaped.

In fact, woman-shaped. In fact, a woman who looked

quite a lot like a younger version of the tramp they'd

met outside the Bank. But he could tell it wasn't a real

person because he could see straight through her. He

felt a prickling all over his body.

The see-through woman walked up to a row of books

on the back wall. Picked one up. Flicked through it,

making a riffling sound. Smiled. And then... vanished.

And reappeared right next to him, giving one short

chuckle. He jumped, yelped, but she didn't notice. She

did the same thing again. Walked to the row of books,

flicked through, disappeared.

And then again. And then again.

It was only when she'd done it four or five times that

Rory remembered that he still had the key to the door in

his pocket and let himself out.

Trembling, Rory stood at his workstation. John, Dean

and Bob were laughing quietly in a corner. In a moment

he'd join them and laugh too about the hilarious joke

they'd played. Find out what they thought was going

on in Storeroom F. But not quite yet. The phone rang, he

answered it unthinkingly.

'Hello! Hello, is that the mailroom? It's Andrew

Brown.'

He didn't have to say. The high-tech phone system

not only brought up Andrew Brown's name on the

screen but also a little picture of him.

'Mailroom,' said Rory.

'Now listen, I'm expecting a very urgent package of

documents to arrive from Stockholm by courier, and its

vital they be brought up as soon as they get here, do you

understand?'

Across the room, another man was shouting at John.

At least, it must have been another man. Surely.

'Do you have a twin brother, Mr Brown?' said Rory.

'What kind of a ridiculous question is that? I've

got one sister if you must know, but I don't see how

that's...'

Rory looked down at the little picture next to the

name 'Andrew Brown' on his phone, and then back

across at the near-hysterical man shouting at Bob.

'And are you wearing a blue tie today, with a...' Rory

squinted... 'a splash of egg on it?'

On the other end of the line there was a silence, and

then: 'Oh god, yes, there is egg on my tie. Thank you so

much for telling me, but how did you...'

Rory stared across the room again and then back

down at the telephone. The man with the yellow splash

of egg on his blue tie was still shouting - something

about a document he needed photocopied urgently

about 'tax implications in Delaware'?

'Oh, no reason,' he muttered. 'No reason at all.'

'I didn't ask the reason, I asked...'

But Rory wasn't listening. As Andrew Brown spoke

into his ear from his office on the fifth floor, he'd become

very sure indeed that Andrew Brown was also standing

across from him in the mailroom. Something weird was,

indeed, going on.

Chapter

5

'Doctor, what are you doing?'

The Doctor paid no attention. While Rory was trying

to get to grips with the challenges of the mailroom, the

Doctor was crouching in the corner of the very large, very

plush conference room, furnished in mahogany with a

carpet so thick that it came over the Doctor's shoes. In

the middle of the room was a huge lacquered wooden

table. The people sitting around the table were watching

with some confusion as the Doctor, sonic screwdriver

and a small black knobbly device in his hand, scanned

along the edge of the carpet, then up the middle of the

windows, then around the drinks cabinet.

'Doctor,' said Vanessa Laing-Randall, 'we're all

waiting to start the meeting so if you.

The Doctor looked at the small black knobbly device,

which beeped rapidly and made a grinding noise. He

raised his eyebrows. 'Tachyon particles! Loads of them.

What year is this again?'

'What...?'

'Yes, what year, hurry please, we haven't got all day

or...' the Doctor shook the small black knobbly device,

'maybe we have... maybe we've got much more time

than we could possibly use. What year did you say this

was?'

'I didn't. It's 2007. But Doctor, we do have to start

this meeting now, you see time is running short and...'

'From the look of these readings, time running short

isn't the problem at all. But now 2007, 2007... that's very

bad news. Shouldn't get this sort of reading unless one

of you has a...' He bent his rubbery face into a grimace,

then a frown. 'But no, couldn't be that, none of you has

enough arms. Excuse me!' he shouted to the puzzled-

looking executives around the boardroom table. 'Any of

you carrying a temporal inhibitor?'

The executives looked at each other, then back at the

Doctor with blank faces.

There was a knock on the door and Vanessa's assistant

Jane rushed in. 'The, um, the people from PZP Group

are here Ms Laing-Randall. Shall I show them in?'

Vanessa pursed her lips. The Doctor was waving his

knobbly black gizmo around in a circle above his head.

'Doctor,' she said, 'can you sit down and be quiet,

just for the next hour, while we win a contract worth

£300m?'

'Oh yes,' said the Doctor thoughtfully, 'time is

money, mustn't forget that.' He sat, suddenly, in one of

the chairs, folded his arms, crossed his legs, in a position

of perfect attention.

'Do you know how this works, Doctor? Perhaps

you'd like me to give you a run-through of exactly what's

going to happen today, and why it's so vitally important

that you don't, erm, spend the meeting crouching on the

floor?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'why don't you tell me all

about money.'

The brief was simple. PZP Group needed a full-service

bank to carry them through the next decade and

beyond. Well, that was the marketing hype. What it

boiled down to were two questions: can you make us

money and can you save us money? PZP Group was an

industrial company - mining bauxite in South America,

processing tungsten in Eastern Europe, constructing

engines in Asia - the kinds of boring, sometimes

dangerous work without which the whole of Western

civilisation would collapse. A big company like that

needed a clever bank full of highly educated and crafty

people to find wonderful ways to raise money for that

new mine in Chile, that new metalworking plant in

India. The question was whether Lexington Bank was

clever enough.

Vanessa introduced the Doctor to the people

around the table. There was Simon, tall, blond, broad-

shouldered senior analyst; Rob, slightly shorter senior

analyst; Audra, curly-haired senior analyst...

'Don't you have any junior analysts?' the Doctor

asked.

'Oh yes, we do,' nodded Audra, seriously, 'but they're

not senior enough to come to this meeting.'

And finally Andrew and Sameera, mid-level

analysts.

'But they're vying for the top spot, aren't you,

Andrew and Sameera?'

Vanessa sounded a bit like a primary school teacher

when she said this. Andrew and Sameera both flinched

slightly, then put their shoulders back and smiled.

'Oh yes,' said Sameera. 'I know I'm very keen to get

that promotion.'

'Yup,' laughed Andrew, a little too heartily. 'And I'm

very keen to stop you.'

They both chuckled, the laughter straining the

corners of their mouths, and Jane Blythe showed in the

clients.

At first, the meeting went well. The clients - three

American businesspeople, two men and a woman -

enjoyed their tea and made the obligatory little joke

about how British people always serve tea. They were

relaxed, leaning back in their chairs, admiring the view

out of the window onto the glass sculpture far below

them.

And the first presentation started pretty well. It

was Andrew Brown's turn to present his strategies for

PZP Group's next big project, a magnesium facility

exporting to Europe. He brought up his colourful

PowerPoint presentation with the pie charts he'd spent

more time than he really should have both composing

and animating. He thought he was holding the room's

attention. But then... one of the American businessmen

passed a note to the woman. She opened it, nodded,

and glanced at the man. Andrew forgot what he was

supposed to say next. He stumbled over his words. He

ground to a halt.

He stared at the note. The American clients stared

at him.

'Is there...' Andrew said at last, 'a problem?'

The American woman smiled very broadly, showing

rows of gleaming white teeth.

'No problem, Mr Brown, you go on.' She paused.

'It's only that when Morgan Stanley gave us their pitch

their analysis was rather more complex? They'd dealt

with the tax implications as well.'

'The tax...?'

'The tax implications in Delaware? Since that's a vital

part of the analysis?'

Andrew Brown turned his rictus grin into a smooth

smile.

'Oh yes,' he said, 'I've actually prepared a document

about that. Just give me a moment and I'll be right back

with it.'

It really was a moment, the clients were most

impressed. He'd barely left the room, couldn't have

had time even to walk down the corridor before he re-

entered clutching a pile of warm, newly photocopied

documents. He handed them out to the Americans.

They flicked through and smiled.

The Doctor looked at Vanessa. 'Very fast, your team,'

he said.

'The most efficient in London,' she smiled back.

Simon was next to pitch. His presentation was efficient

and effective, marred only slightly by the moment when

one of the American men, still faintly smirking, still with

an air of friendship, said, 'You know, when we asked

Merrill Lynch for their views, they had an expert on

International Law standing by.'

'An expert on...' Simon's confidence dribbled away

visibly. 'I think we can...'

'Oh,' said Sameera, 'I've asked our senior in-house

lawyer to wait outside for just this sort of question.' She

stood up and, looking each of the clients directly in the

eye, said, 'I'll just be two minutes.'

She really was just two minutes. Maybe less. As if

she'd stepped into the room next door and then come

straight back, bringing the in-house lawyer with her.

'Thank you,' he said, 'it was so kind of you waiting

all that time with me,' but she shushed him quickly and

the pitch went on. Vanessa gave Sameera an impressed

nod. Andrew Brown shot her a look of pure loathing.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows and said nothing.

Next it was Rob's turn to present his thoughts. Again,

the American clients listened very politely, and it was

only when he'd got to the very end of his presentation

that one of them raised a query.

'But,' said the woman, 'how will technology fit

into this? Will we be able to get updates on the project

delivered remotely, for example? I'd hate,' she laughed,

'not to be able to check in from my smartphone.'

'We all live on our smartphones,' laughed one of the

men, as if this were a hilarious joke.

Spotting Rob's panicky face, Andrew leapt up before

Sameera had the chance.

'I was thinking the same thing!' he half-yelped, 'and

I've prepared a technical demonstration if you'll bear

with me for just a moment.'

It took slightly longer for Andrew Brown to come

back into the room this time. About long enough, the

Doctor estimated, for him to run down to the end of

the corridor, get into the lift, go down one floor and

then come back up. Not long enough for him to have,

oh, let's say, constructed a working prototype of a field

transmitter which would send updates every fifteen

minutes to a specially created application which he'd

somehow also put onto the smartphones of every client

in the room. That would have taken several weeks,

not just a few minutes. Although Andrew Brown was

looking a bit more tired. And hadn't he been...

'Weren't you wearing a blue tie just now, Andrew?

With egg on it?' said the Doctor.

Andrew looked shocked. And frightened. 'I um,' he

muttered, 'was I wearing a...'

'I expect he changed it,' said Vanessa, 'didn't you,

Andrew?'

'Yes,' said Andrew. 'Now let me show you round

this prototype.'

The clients were very impressed. Relaxed, smiling.

It was clear that Lexington Bank really went that extra

mile. Sameera got up to give her presentation. It was

flawless. There were no questions, the clients had no

problems. Her last slide was greeted with a riotous

round of applause from the whole conference room.

'That was just great,' said one of the American men.

'Awesome.' He grinned at his colleagues. 'Best birthday

gift ever.'

Sameera cocked her head to one side. 'It's your

birthday?'

'Yeah,' he replied. 'I don't like to make a big deal out

of it. Shame there's no cake though, huh?' he joked.

'Oh,' said Sameera. 'No, we've got a cake for you!

Just wait here...'

The clients thought she was joking. She wasn't. She

left the room for - the Doctor estimated - 12.8 seconds

and returned with a huge cake iced with the words

'Happy Birthday Greg' on the top.

'We're a full-service bank,' she smiled.

'You certainly are,' said the Doctor.

'It's all down to the excellent time-management

practices I've instituted,' said Vanessa.

'I'm sure it is,' said the Doctor.

And, without warning, he grabbed Vanessa and

dragged her out into the corridor.

'So what is going on here, Vanessa Laing-Randall.

What on earth is going on here, eh?'

Vanessa gave a wide-eyed look of total innocence.

'I don't know what you mean, Doctor. All that's going

on here is excellent business practice at a multinational

bank with wide-ranging capabilities and a versatile

team who...'

'Don't give me that. Something's going on here and

you know exactly what it is.'

'I can promise you, Doctor, I don't.'

Vanessa suddenly became aware that her mousy

assistant Jane had followed them out and was staring

at them with inquisitive eyes. If the Doctor was about to

accuse her of mismanagement, she hardly wanted it to

get around all the secretaries in the building.

'Come with me, Doctor,' she said.

They walked along the corridor. In one of the offices,

a manager was talking to a pair of besuited salesmen.

'That's right, Mr Blenkinsop, as much as you can

use...' one of the salesmen was saying. The Doctor

looked at them curiously.

'Now,' said Vanessa, drawing his attention back to

her, 'what precisely is it you're accusing me of?'

'Where are you from?' said the Doctor.

'Where ami...?'

'Perfectly simple question, you should be able to give

a perfectly simple answer. Where are you from?'

'Chelsea.'

The Doctor took a pace towards Vanessa. She didn't

take a pace back; she was made of sterner stuff.

'No really,' he said very quietly. 'No need to lie, it's

just you and me, no one else can hear, and you know

you can't shock me, no matter what you say. Where are

you from?'

Vanessa took a deep breath. 'Just between us?'

'Goes no further.'

'Can't have it getting out.'

'My lips are sealed.'

'You're right,' said Vanessa. 'I'm not really from

Chelsea. I'm from Luton.'

The Doctor breathed out sharply through his nostrils.

'That's not what I mean and you know it. Vanessa,

Where Is It?'

'Where's what?'

The Doctor stood very close to Vanessa, so close she

could feel his hot breath on her cheek as he whispered.

'Where did you get your grubby little hands on a time

machine? It must be very crude, whatever it is, so who

should I be returning it to?'

Vanessa laughed. 'A time machine! Doctor, don't be

absurd, I know we're efficient but we're hardly.

'All right then, not a time machine, because why

would you stay on this planet if you had one? Big

company like this, someone might have sold you some

black-market technology, calling it...' he waved his

hands in the air, 'a Higgs Diverter?'

Vanessa's face remained blank.

'Chrononillium Mega Condenser? Espedarian Back-

and-Forth? Raston Warrior Glitch technology?'

Vanessa stared him straight in the eye. 'Doctor,' she

said, 'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking

about, but if you're having some kind of fit, maybe you

should lie down.'

The Doctor narrowed his eyes and stared hard into

her face. 'I'm going to find out what you're up to, you

know. Humans using time travel like this - probably

without proper shielding, without training, without any

hint of bureaucracy?! Have you never even heard of the

Blinovitch Limitation Effect?'

'Ahem.' There was a small cough from somewhere

below the Doctor's ranting eyeline. He looked down. It

was Jane, the secretary. She was holding a piece of cake

on a paper plate.

'We thought,' she said, 'you might like some of the

birthday cake?'

The Doctor suddenly beamed warmly. 'Certainly

would, very kind of you, very kind indeed never say no

to a birthday cake - except my own, obviously. If I tried

to have a birthday cake the candles would probably set

the whole planet on fire, I'm sure you understand.'

'Not really,' Vanessa sniffed as the Doctor tried to

cram the whole piece of cake into his mouth in one go.

'Orff Mrrf Gnff,' he said, then chewed hard a few

more times, made an enormous gulping motion and

swallowed the cake. 'I mean, oh my god, this cake is

amazing - I don't know where Sameera got it from, or

should I say "when"? But honestly it's... I have to tell

Amy. May I?'

The Doctor pulled the smartphone from Jane's hand,

and dialled.

'Pond!' he said. 'You have to get up here right now

... Yes, of course it's urgent, why would I call you if it

wasn't urgent? Come up to the tenth floor right now!'

Chapter

6

Down on the fifth floor, while the Doctor was listening to a

pitch meeting and Rory was eavesdropping on mailroom

conversation, Amy was supposed to be 'finding out

stuff'. What 'stuff' that was wasn't quite clear to her,

though.

The Doctor had told her to spend time with Sameera

Jenkins, a middle-ranking middle-manager on the

middle floor of this tall building. But Sameera - a sweet-

faced Asian woman with a Lancashire accent and rock-

hard attitude that totally contradicted the impression

given by her charming smile - didn't want her around.

In fact, Sameera had looked her up and down, said:

'You'd never get away with a skirt that short if you

actually worked here, you know,' and walked out. To a

meeting, she said.

So Amy did the only thing she could do in those

circumstances. She sat in Sameera's chair, checked the

coast was clear, and tried looking through the drawers in

her desk. She knew what she'd seen in Brian Edelman's

office. He'd fiddled with something on his wrist, and

then something very nasty indeed had happened to him.

If she could just find some evidence that Sameera had

one of those bracelets, or whatever, she could take it to

the Doctor, the Doctor could solve the whole mystery in

one mental leap, and they could all go off to somewhere

a bit more interesting than a bank.

The top drawer was open - nothing incriminating in

there though, just stationery and receipts. Amy flicked

through the receipts idly. How weird. Sameera had

bought lunch five times yesterday. At the same sandwich

shop, within about two hours. An eating disorder? She

didn't look like a woman who ate five lunches a day,

but maybe working at a bank was much more energetic

them Amy had thought?

The second drawer was open too. Some extremely

boring-looking reports labelled 'client guides' and

a notepad: Amy looked through the notepad. Every

page was labelled with a different date, and had a list

of meetings and, for no obvious reason Amy could see,

a list of clothing. She looked at today: 'Tuesday, PZP

Group, navy suit, cream blouse, pearl earrings, tiny tea

stain on left cuff.' Sameera was suffering from some

kind of obsessive compulsive disorder.

She tried the third drawer. It was locked. Now, this

was looking up. A locked drawer meant secrets, and

if the Doctor was involved surely they were scary and

exciting secrets, and if they were scary and exciting

secrets then she ought to know what they were.

Amy picked up the letter opener from the top of the

desk and tried wiggling it in between the second drawer

and the third. If she could get the letter opener into the

groove in the bar just above the drawer... She knelt

down to get a better purchase on the slippery handle.

The locking bar was heavy, but for a second she almost

had it, and then the knife slid out with a thunk. Try

again, get a better angle... She bent over...

'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

Amy stood up abruptly, thumping her head on the

desk.

'I...' she said. 'Look, it's not what it looks like.

Amy couldn't help noticing that Sameera was indeed

wearing a navy suit with a cream blouse, pearl earrings

and a tiny tea stain on the left cuff.

'It seems to me it's exactly what it looks like, Miss

Pond. I don't care who you are and I don't care who sent

you, I'm going to call security.'

Sameera reached for the phone. As she stretched out

her hand, Amy saw something on her wrist. It was a

watch - or something like a watch - a thick black cuff

clipped around her arm, with several dials moving at

different speeds on the face. And there was something

strange about it. It looked like its edges were blurred,

as if it was vibrating very fast, or as if it wasn't quite

here at all. Amy knew without a moment's thought that

she was looking at alien technology. She lunged for

Sameera's wrist.

'What's this, Sameera?' she said, 'not something

you'd want your bosses to know about I bet...'

'No!' shouted Sameera.

Amy's hand came down heavily on the watch.

Underneath her palm she felt one of the buttons on

the side of the watch click in. Sameera tried to pull her

off, scrabbling at her hand but Amy held on. They fell

across the desk, tumbling the telephone and a shower

of stationery products to the floor. Sameera's hand

was wriggling. She pushed her other hand hard into

Amy's neck, forcing her down, and then did something

with her leg, taking Amy's knees out from under her.

Amy fell backwards, landing heavily on the floor, and

Sameera wrenched her wrist out of Amy's hand.

Sameera pressed something on her watch and Amy

suddenly felt a moment of tiredness. It was like she got

heavier, just for a moment, or slower somehow, and then

her body compensated and she was back to normal. She

sat up slowly. What she saw frightened her.

It was like there were ghosts in the room - ghosts of

her and of Sameera. Fighting. She could see them, hazy,

half in and half out of reality, slowly moving and talking

and fighting and falling.

'What the hell did you do to me?'

Sameera was staring at her watch. 'No,' she was

saying. 'No, it's out of sync. It's...' She pressed something

else. The ghosts of Sameera and Amy flickered, then

disappeared.

'Do you know karate or something? Because I just

saw...' asked Amy, rubbing the back of her head where

she'd come down hard on the floor. She'd landed next to

the phone. It was off the hook, beeping, and its display

was flashing the time: 1.36 p.m.

There was a ghost phone falling down over it,

tumbling slowly across the room towards where it was

sitting now. Amy put her fingers up and touched the

ghost phone. Her hand went through it. It carried on

falling.

'Six years of judo,' said Sameera distractedly. 'Black

belt. Just a hobby. No, it can't be broken...' She shook the

device on her wrist, and stared at the display. 'It's saying

I took double credit? And paid it back asynchronously?

Oh no it must mean... it must be because.

She pulled Amy roughly to her feet, held on to her

tightly with her left hand and pressed three buttons on

the watch with her right hand, then turned one of the

dials back a quarter turn.

Amy felt a slight rushing sensation, a sort of lightness.

And the telephone clock on the floor read: 1.21 p.m.

'That's better,' said Sameera. 'Back in sync.' And

then, to herself: 'Both of those are on my account, I see.'

She smiled bleakly and raised her eyebrows. 'Well, enjoy

your fifteen minutes. On the house.'

'You're a time traveller,' said Amy.

Sameera sighed. 'Just for work,' she said at last. 'How

did you work it out?'

'I am too,' said Amy. 'Just a hobby.'

Sameera wasn't in any mood to call security any more.

In fact, she seemed to be glad of someone to talk to.

She unlocked her bottom drawer which, to Amy's

annoyance, was just where she kept her sandwiches

and biscuits and offered Amy half of her chicken-and-

rocket-salad-wrap.

'No thanks,' said Amy.

'Don't you find,' said Sameera, taking a bite and

talking through her munches, 'that eating lunch is a real

problem? I mean, when to fit it in? I lose track of how

many hours I've spent, and what I've already eaten, it

all gets out of sync with everyone else. I spend a fortune

on sandwiches.'

Amy shook her head. 'I've never really thought

about it.'

Sameera took another bite of her sandwich. 'I thought

you said you were a time traveller too?'

Amy shrugged. 'I think we use a different method.

But how does your... what is that on your wrist, a time-

travel watch? How does that work? The Doctor's um,

well anyway, I've heard about a thing like a time space-

hopper... Is it like that?'

Sameera, visibly relaxed around Amy now that she

could talk freely, showed her the watch.

'It's really simple,' she said. 'You just turn this dial

here to get more time. Like we just did. Turn it back a

quarter of an hour, we're back a quarter of an hour. It's

like... Oh, you know when the clocks change? It gets to

2 a.m. and everyone puts their clocks back and suddenly

it's 1 a.m. again? It's like that, except it's just for you.'

'And do you always see ghost versions of yourself

when you do that?'

Sameera shook her head and opened up a pot of

yoghurt. 'That was just because you knocked it. Usually

you're very slightly time phased so you can't see yourself.

It's always embarrassing, bumping into yourself. That's

what they say, anyway.'

'They?'

Sameera ignored the question. 'I suppose I ought to

cut back really,' she said, almost to herself. 'But there's

so much to get done - you know the Chancellor's giving

some speech here tomorrow? We've all had to dear our

diaries for that, which has meant triple-meetings today.

Plus it's been hard enough to keep up with work as it

is. There's this bloke, Andrew Brown - we're up for the

same promotion - he's all right, Andrew, nice really, but

I want that job, you know?'

Amy nodded.

'Yeah, so for a while I felt like I was definitely going

to get it, totally certain but these last few weeks he's

been getting ahead of me. I bet he's got one too.'

'One of the... time-travelling watches?' asked Amy.

'Look,' Sameera said through a mouthful of yoghurt,

'if you're a time traveller too, how come you don't know

all this? Who do you borrow your time from?'

'Borrow?' said Amy.

Which was the point at which, several floors below

her, Rory, locked in a storeroom, decided to call for

help.

'Amy,' Rory hissed, 'you've got to get down here right

now. I'm in Storeroom F. Come quickly. Help me.'

'But I - '

'I'm locked in,' he hissed, 'help me.'

And then he was gone.

'I have to go,' she said to Sameera. 'My husband's in

trouble.'

Her phone started ringing again.

'Pond!' said the Doctor. 'You have to get up here

right now!'

'Doctor, I can't, I just promised Rory that I'd go down

and... Is it urgent, Doctor?'

'Yes, of course it's urgent, why would I call you if it

wasn't urgent? Come up to the tenth floor right now!'

The Doctor hung up the phone.

Amy stared at her mobile, a worried frown on her

forehead.

Sameera watched her placidly.

'Tenth floor,' Amy said. 'Got to be the Doctor. I mean,

if he needs me for something really urgent then... But

then, if it were that urgent, would he have had time to

phone? And the Doctor will be fine by himself, but Rory

sounds like he's in danger or locked in at least...'

Sameera finished her yoghurt, threw the pot into the

bin and put her feet up on the desk.

'Sounds to me,' she said, 'as if you could do with

borrowing some time.'

From travelling with the Doctor, Amy was very well

aware of the prohibition on going back endless times to

revisit the same moment in history trying to angle for a

different outcome. Apart from the inherent paradoxes,

there are too many beings, entities and sundry monsters

interested in the kind of weak spot that generates. But

surely, she thought to herself, that kind of thing only

applies to travel in the TARDIS? A little watch seemed,

well, pretty much harmless.

'Totally harmless,' said Mr Symington.

'We have very reliable safeguards,' said Mr

Blenkinsop. 'We'd hate to lose a customer after all!'

Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop laughed in

unison.

They'd arrived, surprisingly quickly, in answer to a

summons from Sameera's watch. And they were thrilled,

delighted, eager - as they constantly told her - to give

her a watch too. There was something a bit weird about

the way they looked. Not just that they were fuzzy at the

edges, but each of them had a strange lump on his back,

under his jacket. Amy kept trying to get a good look at

it, but both resolutely faced towards her, turning as she

turned. And besides, they were much more eager to get

her using a watch.

'So, how does this work again?' asked Amy, still a

little suspicious.

'It's very simple,' said Mr Symington.

'Ludicrously so,' said Mr Blenkinsop.

'A woman of your expertise and intellect will have

no trouble grasping it. We simply lend you time. You

put the watch on like so -' Mr Symington fastened it

round her wrist. It was colder than she'd expected, and

heavier. 'And move this dial back to borrow time. And

of course press this button to pay it back.'

'Pay it back?'

'Well, of course,' Mr Blenkinsop grinned warmly.

'We can't give our time away, after all! Yes, just press

here to pay us back, plus what we think you'll agree is

a very reasonable interest charge, just five minutes per

hour.'

'Per hour,' agreed Mr Symington.

'The time comes off your lifespan, but after all,' Mr

Blenkinsop chuckled, 'are you really going to miss an

extra five minutes?'

'It's the sort of time you might spend watching

advertisements,' said Mr Symington.

'Blowing your nose.'

'Staring into space.'

Amy hesitated. This definitely felt like the kind of

decision she should consult the Doctor about. But if she

went up to talk to the Doctor, she wouldn't be able to

go and help Rory. And she was late for both of them

already. But if she used the watch...

A message came up as if projected by light on the

watch's glass face. It was a long message in very tiny

print, with big print just at the end saying 'IF YOU

ACCEPT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, CLICK

OK.'

'So just press your thumb here and you're all set,'

said Mr Blenkinsop.

'Away you go,' said Mr Symington.

'But what does all this...?' Amy began.

'Oh just do it,' said Sameera. 'No one reads terms

and conditions, do they?'

Amy's phone started to ring again. There were two

calls coming in at once, the Doctor and Rory.

'Oh all right then!' she said, and pressed OK.

Chapter

7

Amy had to admit, it was exciting.

She didn't feel any different, that was the thing. And

it was true, she didn't see any ghost versions of herself,

and there were no weird monsters creeping in the cracks

in time and space. She just... had more time.

She wound the watch back an hour or so. She was

still in Sameera's office. Symington and Blenkinsop

were still with her, although Sameera had gone. The

clock read 1 p.m.

'Miss Jenkins isn't here yet,' said Mr Blenkinsop.

'It's 1 p.m., Miss Pond - lunch hour is just beginning,

and it's yours - all yours.'

Amy frowned at them, still suspicious. 'And you say

when I want to pay it back it's just an extra five minutes'

interest? Five minutes per hour?'

'Per hour,' echoed Mr Symington, 'that's correct.'

'Just check the terms and conditions if you're

uncertain,' said Mr Blenkinsop.

'Now we must be off,' said Mr Symington.

They walked out of the office. Amy followed them

but by the time she looked out into the corridor they

were gone.

Ts it a crime,' said Amy airily, 'to surprise my husband

with a little lunch?'

'No, no,' said Rory, blinking nervously. 'It's just that

I, um, I haven't done anything, have I? This isn't the

prelude to you telling me that I'm not travelling in the

TARDIS any more is it? Oh god, has the Doctor decided

I'm useless, well I am useless, but maybe I'm useless in

that useful sort of way? Bait, maybe? Decoy? Attracting

attention in the wrong direction? Oh god, I'm not going

to have to stay at Lexington Bank for ever, tell me I'm

not?'

Amy, unable to think of any other way to stop Rory's

hysteria, leaned over and kissed him. For a little while

he twitched nervously under her lips, but slowly he

relaxed. She sat back.

'I, um,' he said, and fell silent.

'Here,' she said. 'I brought you a sandwich.'

They were sitting in a little courtyard with a fountain,

screened from the road by a small garden. Amy had

gone to find it, bought the sandwiches, then turned the

watch back again so that she could come and get Rory

barely ten minutes after he phoned her and only just

after he'd realised he could let himself out of Storeroom

F after all.

'Ham and cheese! My favourite!'

Amy smiled. This was good. She'd had time to do

something nice for him. It wasn't a lot, remembering his

favourite sandwich - after all those hundreds of years

he'd looked after her in the Pandorica. She found she

still remembered that - her memories overlaid on the

happier, more real memories. Like a terrible dream, but

one she knew hadn't been a dream at all but another

kind of truth. In another kind of life, this Rory - happily

munching his sandwich, exclaiming with delight at

finding a pear at the bottom of the bag because pears

are his favourite too, and they're so hard to find in a

sandwich shop - in another kind of life, this Rory would

have waited and kept guard for her for two thousand

years.

She hugged his arm and kissed him on the side of his

head as he ate.

'It's because I love you, silly,' she said.

At the end of lunch, Amy dropped Rory back at the

mailroom. She thought about suggesting they just leave

then. After all, the mystery was basically solved, wasn't

it? The reason Rory had seen Andrew Brown in the

mailroom at the same time as he was on the phone was

because he was using the watch. And Brian Edelman?

Well, she hadn't quite worked that out yet - he'd have

had to borrow a lot of time for five extra minutes per

hour to kill him - but maybe it was just like Vanessa had

said: overwork.

Well, she'd go and talk to the Doctor now - that is,

an hour ago - find out what was so urgent, show him

the watch, which would probably clear everything up,

and then they could leave this stupid bank and find

somewhere more exciting to explore.

She stood in the Bank's lobby and turned her watch

back to 1 p.m. Every time she did it, it was a little thrill.

Almost everything stayed the same. A few people

changed position, that was all, but it wasn't jerky or

frightening, just a slow delicious fade-through as

some people faded out and others faded back in. She

wondered what it'd look like to wind it back a really

long way - twenty or thirty years - and see buildings

change. But that'd mean borrowing twenty or thirty

years and paying five minutes for each hour and... well,

she couldn't quite do the maths, but she was sure she

didn't want to end up paying that much interest.

Still, one extra hour couldn't hurt. She turned the

watch back again. Again there was the gorgeous melting

effect as the people from 1 p.m. transformed into the

people from midday. It felt nice physically too - sort

of tingly and energising - like she could feel that extra

hour of time being put back into her body all in one go.

It was like getting an extra hour of sleep, maybe, but all

in one second so you could really feel the benefit.

Without really thinking, she did it again. Whoosh! It

was 11 a.m., just a bit after the time they'd have landed

the TARDIS in the basement. If she got in the lift now,

she could get to the top floor before whatever the Doctor

had been calling her about had even happened. How

impressive would that be?

It was only as she stood in the lift that she started to

wonder if the Doctor would actually be that impressed.

She stared at herself in the lift's mirrored walls and

frowned. There'd probably be a lecture. She could hear it

now. 'Messing about with time travel, Amy.' 'Meddling

with things that you don't understand, Pond.' 'Do you

even know how this watch works?' She rolled her eyes

at herself. The Doctor was such a big geek - he didn't

understand that not everyone wants to take the back off

their computer to find out how it works, most people

just want to use it.

She looked at her reflection. When had her hair got

that long? When had she even last had a haircut? It was

so hard to keep track of these things. And her nails... she

usually did them herself but here in the City there must

be one of those posh nail bars. And she did deserve a

treat... She hit the 'doors open' button and walked back

out into the lobby.

She'd meant to go out, get her hair cut and a manicure,

and then come right back to the Bank. She really had

meant to do that, she reminded herself. The Doctor was

waiting for her. That call had sounded really urgent.

Except, there'd been a queue at the nail bar. And the

hairdresser had given her a head massage which was

so gorgeous she'd completely forgotten the time. And

when she was all done, she'd checked the time and

somehow it was already 1.30 p.m. And she was late to

see the Doctor, again.

She reminded herself it was OK. She could just turn

the watch back another hour, and she'd be back to the

Bank in loads of time. She turned it back. The street

outside the hairdresser shimmered in that beautiful way.

The time came back into her body. She felt incredibly

alive, excited. And that was when she'd had her big

idea.

She wasn't stupid. She added up the number of hours

she'd borrowed already. She reckoned it was about five

hours. So she'd owe Symington and Blenkinsop about

twenty-five minutes off her lifespan. That was no big

deal. In fact, what would be a big deal to her? Not an

hour. Maybe not even a day. A week. She wouldn't like

to end up owing them more than a week. What was she

going to do with a week when she was an old granny

anyway?

So, how many five minutes in a week? She rooted

around in the pockets of her jacket and found an old

envelope and a stub of pencil. The envelope wasn't hers

- it was addressed 'To the Sontaran Ambassador' - she

shrugged. The jacket wasn't hers anyway. She leaned

against the wall and did her sums.

So, she'd owe five minutes per hour she borrowed.

How many five minutes were there in a week? There

were twelve in an hour. So, 12 x 24 hours in a day x 7

days in a week: 2,016. That was how many five-minute

periods she'd be happy to end up paying them. And so

that was how many hours she'd be happy to borrow:

2,016 hours. Eighty-four days. Nearly three months.

That was... exciting.

Of course, she decided, she wouldn't use it all. But

there were so many things she could do with the time!

She checked the time: 1 p.m. again. She was late to

see the Doctor, again. But it was OK. She'd never be late

for anything any more, not really.

She turned the dial on the watch back twenty-four

hours. That was a rush. As she watched, the street

melted glassily into dawn, across the night, backwards,

as the stars rushed across the sky in the wrong direction

and then sunset yesterday, and then yesterday evening

and then yesterday afternoon. The change was smooth

and even, like the day was being poured back. Like time

was being poured back into her. And the way it made

her feel! She hadn't realised how much energy a whole

day was! She felt amazing, like she could do anything.

So she hired a car and drove to Leadworth.

Her parents were thrilled to see her, of course. She

never got enough of that, never ever. Real Mum, and

real Dad. It wasn't that she didn't remember them -

she remembered every moment of her upbringing,

every school play, every Christmas Eve, every scraped

knee and seaside holiday. But she also remembered,

somehow overlaid on top of that, what it had been like

not to have them there at all. What it had been like to

grow up so lonely, only knowing that there ought to be

stars and there were no stars, and that a raggedy man in

a box would come back for her one day.

So there was nothing better, not really, than spending

a night at Mum and Dad's house. Especially a free day,

one she'd just borrowed. They were surprised to see her,

of course, because wasn't she supposed to be on holiday

or something? But she told them there'd been a change

of plan. Just for a day. Her mum made her favourite

roast beef and her dad showed her his plans for the

extension to the garage, and she made them show her

all the photos of her childhood again, every single one,

just so she could reassure herself it was all where she'd

left it.

And she fell asleep under the same old duvet she'd

had when she was a kid, with the old Roman soldier

models under the bed in their same old box. And when

she woke up, the sun was streaming in the window

and it was almost midday. Her parents wouldn't like

that. Not that they'd be angry exactly, just that her dad

would rattle his newspaper and say, 'Up late again, are

we, Amelia? Are you getting enough sleep, girl? That

Rory keeping you awake too late? Do you want me to

have a quiet word?' and the embarrassment would be

so cringingly awful that she might experience a single

moment of not-bliss in her trip home.

She turned the watch dial back. It was 8 a.m. again. A

perfectly respectable time to get up. Plus that gorgeous

feeling of the hours peeling away. Her mum was in the

garden, hanging up the washing. Downstairs she could

hear her dad tinkering with that faulty connection on

the washing machine. Hmmm, actually. Amy turned

the watch back another couple of hours. The nice tingly

feeling washed over her again. She went downstairs

and by the time her mum got up, it was she who'd done

the washing, hung it up, made breakfast (all right, it

was only toast and soft-boiled eggs, but she'd had to

wind time back a few times just to stop them burning

and hard-boiling, and had had to make a quick dash to

the petrol station to buy more eggs), and picked some

flowers from the garden for the living room table. She'd

even found her dad's spanner and tightened up the

loose connection at the back of the washing machine.

She could tell by the looks on her parents' faces that

they were impressed. And surprised. Mainly surprised.

She drove back down to London, smiling all the way.

As she drove, she kept touching the watch. It was so

easy to turn back time. Imagine, she thought, if she did

it now while she was driving, the sun would stay just

where it was. And it'd feel so nice. She reached over and

almost turned the dial when she suddenly wondered

what'd happen if, travelling back in time, she hit another

car on the motorway. Probably not the best idea. She

wondered if they'd mentioned anything about dangers

like that in the terms and conditions she hadn't read and

pulled over to have a look, but she couldn't make them

come up again. Oh well.

Back in London, she planned to go straight to the

Bank and rejoin the Doctor. What had it been he wanted

to talk to her about again? She couldn't quite remember

any more. She suddenly realised why Sameera had had

that notebook with details of what she was wearing

every day in her drawer. It was so easy to forget exactly

the continuity of your days when you could travel back

in time as often as you liked.

And suddenly it struck her. Wearing. She'd left

the business suit she'd found in the TARDIS back in

Leadworth, had come back in her own comfy skirt, boots

and bright red jumper. She couldn't go into a bank like

this! Only one thing for it.

She hit every shop on Oxford Street just as they

opened, five hours earlier. She'd never managed to

go shopping this early before - without the crush of

people, it was just so easy. She turned the watch back

to 9 a.m. after every shop, and kept on and on being

the first customer. Before she knew it, she had armfuls

of bags and was feeling exhausted. Strange - exhausted

and it was only 10 a.m.? Ahhhh, she worked it out. She'd

turned time back so much she'd been awake for nearly

twenty-four hours.

Well, couldn't go and see the Doctor while she was

dropping on her feet. Just one more turn. A good long

one this time, with that wonderful sensation, and it was

last night again. She walked to the nearest, poshest hotel

- an brass signs and polished wood fittings - and using

the credit card she and Rory had agreed was just for

emergencies, just this once, she checked herself in for

the night.

'OK Amy,' she said to herself when she woke up in the

big, soft, plump-pillowed, feather-mattressed bed. 'OK,

get a grip. Time to go back to the Doctor.'

The watch was still on her wrist. She'd tried to take it

off the night before but hadn't been able to manage the

clasp somehow.

Her mind rebelled. She couldn't stop thinking of the

possibilities. She could use the watch to get something

for the Doctor, maybe? What would he like? Or maybe

she could go to Lexington Bank a few days ago and leave

something for him. That'd be hilarious, just the kind of

time-joke he'd like. Or maybe...

She stopped herself. She stared hard at the watch.

This was all a bit too easy, wasn't it? She hadn't seen

Rory in days, it felt like, and she missed him. Where had

all that time gone? She wondered how much time she'd

borrowed. It had all blurred together. She took a piece

of hotel stationery and a pencil from the bedside table

and wrote it all down, as much as she could remember

anyway. The hairdresser, the nails, lunch with Rory,

Leadworth, Oxford Street, last night... It came to about

four days, she thought. Maybe. Ninety-six hours. Five

minutes of interest per hour: 480 minutes of interest in

total. Enough.

She was still late getting to see the Doctor. She walked

from the hotel and misjudged how long it would take.

As she arrived at the Bank, it was 1.20 p.m., and he'd

already called her mobile phone. She hadn't answered.

She thought about turning the watch back so she could

arrive dead on time but she felt a bit sick when she

thought of where the last four days had gone. It had

been so easy. It shouldn't be that easy to spend four

days, surely?

'Pond!' shouted the Doctor as she walked out of

the lift, 'You're late. And you haven't tried any of this

magnificent cake yet, and you haven't...'

He ground to a halt.

He stared at her.

She knew she didn't look any different. Apart from

the haircut and the very slightly different suit but she

didn't think he'd notice that.

The Doctor brought his face very close to hers, then

looked around her, behind her, then caught her wrist

and pushed up her sleeve so he could see the watch.

She didn't know why, but she felt ashamed.

'Oh, Pond,' he said, 'what have you done?'

Chapter

8

'This is bad,' the Doctor said. 'It's very, very bad. I don't

see how it could possibly be any worse. How do you get

this thing off?'

They were standing in the now-empty conference

room. The Doctor was wrestling with the clasps on the

inside of her wrist. They looked as if they'd be easy to

undo, just several interlocking buckles. But for some

reason, his hands slid off every time he tried to open

them.

'Protected!' he shouted. 'Woven into your personal

time stream, the only way to remove it will be to destroy

the central hub where the time is being stored, but

where's the hub, where's the hub?'

'Doctor,' Amy said. 'Doctor, why are you

panicking?'

'Panicking? I'm not panicking! I'm just very calmly,

very rationally, being quite insistent, that we have to get

this thing off you.'

'But why?'

'Do you know what this is? No, of course you don't

why would you, you just let anyone at all put any kind

of temporal engineering device on your wrist I suppose.

You probably do it all the time. This is a Time Harvester

device. It's a parasite. Or, it's a very small element of a

parasitic organism. Leave it on there much longer and

it'll start sucking the time right out of you and you really

wouldn't want that to happen, believe me.'

He was pacing agitatedly, waving his hands in the

air and rubbing his forehead.

'Think, Doctor, think,' he muttered to himself.

'But Doctor, it's OK,' Amy said. 'It hasn't taken any

time away from me.' She took a deep breath. 'In fact,

it's sort of the other way round. It lets me borrow time,

Doctor, as much as I want But' she added hurriedly,

I've only borrowed about four days. The interest is only

about eight hours! It's nothing!'

The Doctor stopped pacing.

He turned towards her.

'Say that again,' he said.

'I've only borrowed four days,' she said.

'The other bit.' His face was very grim.

T h e interest is only...' she slowed down, 'about

eight hours?'

'Did you say interest?'

Amy suddenly felt like crying, and she didn't know

why.

'Yes,' she said, and her voice was very small.

The Doctor rested his forehead on hers, just for a

moment He spoke very quietly.

'Oh, Amy,' he said. It's very bad, and I don't know

how to make it better.'

He pulled at her wrist again, pressed a button or two

on the watch, poked at a little indentation on the face

she'd never noticed before. A display came up, projected

out of the watch into the air in glowing orange letters.

It read: 'BORROWED TIME TOTAL: 4 DAYS, 3

HOURS.'

'See,' said Amy, wriggling her wrist to try to get out

of his grasp, 'that's what I said. Four days. Five minutes

interest on the hour, eight hours total. It's fine! I'll pay it

back now if you just let me press the...'

She reached for the button that Symington and

Blenkinsop had shown her. The 'pay back the time

you've borrowed' button. They'd warned her it might

make her feel a bit tired, all that time coming off her

lifespan in one go, but better that than having the Doctor

fussing over her any more.

'No!' shouted the Doctor and wrenched her wrist

around so she couldn't reach it.

'Ow, you're hurting me!'

'Not as much as it'll hurt if you try to pay that time

back. Look, just look at the interest.'

The display changed.

'INTEREST TERMS: FIVE MINUTES PER HOUR,

PER HOUR.'

'That's what I said,' said Amy.

'No, you said five minutes per hour.'

'That's what it says.'

'No!' the Doctor wheeled round and grabbed a magic

marker from the table. 'It says five minutes per hour, per

hour, totally different thing. If you promise not to touch

that watch I'll explain, do you promise not to touch it?'

'Yes.'

'Right' Look.'

He started to draw on the glass wall overlooking the

atrium.

'Five minutes per hour, right? So you've borrowed

ninety-nine hours, call it a hundred, make the sums

easier, five times one hundred is?'

'Five hundred,' said Amy, somewhat sullenly.

'That means you'd owe 500 minutes' interest yes?'

'Yes.'

'No!'

'No?'

'No, because it's not five minutes per hour, it's five

minutes per hour, every hour.'

'Oh.'

Amy started to have a sinking feeling. The feeling

that she'd done something really stupid.

'Doctor, you mean it's been adding five for every

hour I've borrowed, every hour since I borrowed it?'

'Yes. But I know what you're thinking, Amy.'

'You do?'

'You're thinking, "Five minutes per hour every hour,

that's five times a hundred times a hundred.' He wrote

the sum up on the glass wall. 'Which is?'

He was starting to remind her annoyingly of her old

maths teacher.

'Erm, 50,000? I owe 50,000 minutes?!'

'OK Amy, if only, if only you only owed 50,000

minutes - that'd only be thirty-five days, you could pay

that back now and not really notice, might feel a bit

sleepy, cup of coffee you'd be fine. Amy. They charge

interest on the interest.'

'But it can't be that much more can it Doctor?'

'Can't be that much more? Can't be that much

more? Don't they teach you anything in school? This is

compound interest, interest on the interest.'

He stared at her. She looked back blankly.

'Compound interest, Pond. This is the concept that

built banks and empires. This is what means people

don't pay off their credit cards. This is the concept that

keeps poor people poor and rich people rich on your

benighted, glorious planet. It's... look. See this cake?'

He pointed at the enormous cake in the centre of the

table which now read 'ppy rthday reg'. The people at

the meeting had made a brave attempt to eat it all, but

had barely got through a tenth of it.

Amy nodded. 'Yes, I see the cake. I understand

cake.'

'Right.' The Doctor cut a slice of cake. The chocolate

icing was thick on the top. 'Look at the cake, focus on

the cake. The cake, this yellow part, is the hour of time

you've borrowed. And the icing is the interest. Get it?'

'Yup.'

'OK, so that's after one hour. Now let's borrow

another hour.'

He cut another slice of cake.

'This is your new borrowing. Cake. Plus the interest.

Icing. Plus you owe an extra slice of icing because you've

got two slices of cake, right? Every hour, you have to

pay one slice of icing for every slice of cake you've

borrowed. Two hours, two slices of icing.'

He made a gentle incision on top of the cake and

cut off an extra triangular piece of soft chocolate icing,

leaving the cake partly bald.

'Doctor, you're ruining that cake!'

'We'll get another one. Ten. They're delicious.

Anyway, look.'

He put the icing, wobbling, chocolately, on top of the

second piece of cake.

'Now that's what you owe. Now let's borrow another

hour.'

He cut another slice of cake with icing.

'Now the interest.'

He cut two more pieces of rich brown icing and piled

them on top of the second piece of cake.

'Careful, Doctor,' said Amy, 'that cake's almost more

icing than cake now!'

The Doctor grabbed Amy's shoulders and stared

hard into her eyes.

'That,' he said, 'is precisely the point. Let's borrow

another hour.'

He cut another piece, and cut three more pieces of

icing. He piled up all the extra icing together, with the

icing he'd already cut.

'There's a whole extra piece of cake just made of

icing,' said Amy.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'So now, if you borrow another

piece of cake, how many slices of icing will we have to

take?'

The Doctor cut another piece.

Amy counted the slices of cake. 'There are five pieces

of cake. Five slices of icing.'

'But look at the slice entirely made out of icing.'

'Oh. Right. If that counts as a piece, it's six.'

'So we have to cut an extra slice of icing. Lucky it's

a big cake.'

'But six slices of icing is practically a whole extra

piece. That means that now, every time I borrow another

slice, I end up getting a whole extra slice just made of

icing.' She was feeling queasy.

The Doctor nodded slowly.

'You've almost used up the icing on that cake,' said

Amy. It was true, the cake was almost completely bald.

'The interest goes up much faster than your actual

borrowings. Once an hour, a slice of icing for every hour

you've borrowed.'

'That's a lot of icing.'

'That's how compound interest works. Eventually,

the icing you have to pay on the icing is thousands of

times more than the cake.'

Amy stared at the soft sweet brown mass of icing.

She'd never disliked icing before, but she wasn't sure

she ever wanted to eat it again now.

'So how much time do I owe? With the compound

interest?'

He worked it out for her.

She stared at the number for a long time.

She thought she might faint, or be sick - as if she'd

eaten a roomful of icing.

'You must have made a mistake, Doctor.'

He shook his head.

'But I only borrowed four days, Doctor.'

She kept on staring at the number written on the

wall.

She owed Symington and Blenkinsop ten years.

'Ten. Years.'

'And even if you don't borrow any more, it's going

up by about a year an hour now.'

She didn't scream. She just started clawing and

pawing at the watch. She realised she was shaking.

'Get it off me,' she said, 'get it off, get it off, take it

off my—'

She picked up a bottle opener from the drinks

cabinet, trying to lever the corkscrew under the watch

to prise it off. She was bleeding, but she didn't care. She

just wanted the thing off her wrist.

'Amy, Amy,' the Doctor was trying to stop her, to get

the corkscrew out of her hands before she gouged more

of herself with it.

'Is there a problem?' said Mr Symington, from very

close behind her.

And then she screamed. Shuddered. Turned. There

they were. Suddenly there, from absolutely nowhere.

'We certainly hope there isn't a problem,' said Mr

Blenkinsop.

'We certainly hope you weren't trying to remove our

extremely expensive chronological asset-management

device,' said Mr Symington.

'Because as we're sure you know from your perusal

of our terms and conditions...'

'Your extensive perusal of them, as we advised you

to do...'

'Attempting to remove a Time Harvester watch is a

capital offence.'

'A cap—' Amy managed to squeak.

'Oh yes,' said Mr Symington. 'If you attempt to

remove it, your entire remaining lifespan will be

forfeit.'

'But you wouldn't be trying to cheat on our little

arrangement, would you?'

'A nice girl like you.'

'Oh look, Mr Blenkinsop,' Mr Symington caught

Amy's wrist in his cold, slightly moist hand. His teeth

suddenly looked bigger than she'd remembered. 'These

scratches do seem to indicate that she has been trying.

Bad, bad girl.'

Mr Symington began to smile more and more

broadly.

His jaw hinged back, far wider than any human

person's mouth should have been able to open.

And there were many more teeth in his mouth than

there should have been.

Sharp, pointed teeth. To go with his grey skin.

And Amy realised what the lump on Symington

and Blenkinsop's back was. It was a fin. Like a shark.

Both of them were closing in now, with their shark-like

heads and their fins poking through their suits and their

enormous, red-as-blood teeth.

Amy looked at the Doctor.

The Doctor looked at her.

'Run!' they both shouted in unison.

They ran.

They burst out of the conference room, the Doctor

dragging Amy away from the atrium towards the lifts.

Symington and Blenkinsop were in pursuit, their heads

clearly visible as shark-like now, their mouths open.

No one in any of the other offices noticed them. Amy

realised they must be experiencing the same kind of

time-phasing that meant she hadn't bumped into herself

while using this stupid watch. Even when Symington

jumped over a desk scattering a shower of papers

everywhere, the man behind the desk just calmly picked

them up as if they'd been blown by a breeze. No one else

was going to help them. They were the only people who

could even see what they were running from.

'Stop the lift!' Amy shouted as they rounded the

corner. There was a lift with an open door. They were

going to make it! She felt the hot breath from Mr

Symington on her neck, smelled the disgusting fish-and-

blood aroma, put on an extra burst of speed, dragging

the Doctor behind her. She grabbed some office chairs as

she passed, throwing them behind her to make it harder

for Symington and Blenkinsop to follow.

She glanced back. Symington had tripped!

Blenkinsop roared at her with his shark-head and

dragged Symington to his feet. The Doctor yanked her

arm and she fell forward into the lift, hard against his

body. She jabbed at the lift-close button, Symington and

Blenkinsop were coming and the doors weren't closing

and they were nearly here and no one else could see

them and —

The Doctor aimed his sonic screwdriver at the lift

doors and they closed smoothly.

Just in time. There was a loud BONK and two shark-

nose-shaped dents appeared in the lift door. But they

were on their way down now. It was only then that Amy

noticed they weren't alone in the lift - there was that

man she'd seen earlier, Andrew Brown. He stared at the

shark-nose dents and at the Doctor and Amy.

'Negotiations,' said the Doctor, 'got a bit heated.'

Andrew Brown smiled nervously and got out at the

next floor.

Amy tapped her foot as the lift descended.

'We've got to get Rory,' she said. 'He doesn't know

any of this, he won't be safe.'

The Doctor nodded. 'Get Rory, get back to the

TARDIS, get out of here, work out how to get that thing

off your wrist when we're a thousand years away.'

'Can't they just take the time out of my watch

anyway?' said Amy.

The Doctor clasped Amy's wrist and frowned at the

device, reading through some small print.

'Hmm. Doesn't look like it. Brilliant legalese - a

confiscation of time has to be made in person. And they

seem to keep to their contracts. As long as we keep you

away from them, they can't take your time.'

'They'll be waiting for us downstairs,' said Amy.

'Sure to be,' said the Doctor, 'with all that time at

their disposal.'

'So when we get to the bottom,' said Amy.

The lift pinged. Ground floor. The doors opened.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'When I say run...'

Symington and Blenkinsop were waiting in the

lobby, their grey-skinned toothy heads weaving from

side to side, like carnivorous fish in search of prey. Amy

and the Doctor managed to hide behind a crowd of

people getting out of another lift and for a moment the

two shark-men didn't notice them. When they did, their

heads turned at precisely the same moment, a terrifying

unblinking stare.

'Run!' shouted the Doctor.

He leapt over the waist-high glass security barrier,

Amy followed, screaming at the security guards as they

went:

'He's after me! Help, he's after me!'

The four burly security guards in their black

uniforms immediately looked behind her. The crowd of

people who'd been going about their business stopped

walking and started looking to see what was going on.

It wasn't much, but they made a few more obstacles for

Symington and Blenkinsop to weave round. Amy and

the Doctor ran out of the building. Amy grabbed the

Doctor's hand and dragged him towards the little park

with the fountain where she and Rory had-had / were-

having lunch four-days-ago / right-now.

It was the kind of moment that would have been

funny if she hadn't been in imminent danger. She

couldn't see the other Amy, but the Doctor and Rory

both could. Rory looked at her, and then at his invisible

dining companion.

'Amy?' he said. 'But... Amy?' He raised both hands

in the familiar 'don't hurt me' gesture. 'This is some

time-travel thing, isn't it?'

'Clever,' muttered the Doctor, 'Blinovitch Limitation

limitation. Very clever.'

'Yes, time travel,' shouted Amy. 'No time to explain,

shark-men!'

She grabbed his hand, and they ran.

As they went, she felt her memories changing. Yes,

Rory had suddenly jumped up halfway through lunch

and run away. She'd been annoyed.

They circled round the back of the building. They

hadn't seen Symington and Blenkinsop for a few

minutes. They rested, panting, against the wall.

'Have we lost them, Doctor?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Totally impossible while

you've got that thing on your wrist. If we can just get to

the TARDIS, we might be able to...'

'Did you say shark-men, Amy?' said Rory.

'Yes?' said Amy, trying fruitlessly again to undo the

straps on her watch.

'What, like those?'

From the other end of the long narrow street,

Symington and Blenkinsop had seen them. They started

to run, with great loping strides as if they might never

tire, and with no one to get in their way.

'Come on!' Amy tugged on Rory's arm.

'No, wait,' said Rory, 'I've got an idea.'

'If they catch up to us, they'll kill me!' said Amy.

'Only if they can reach you,' said Rory, and pulled

the pink plastic Super Lucky Romance Camera out of

his pocket.

'Oh,' said Amy, 'oh!'

You were supposed to use the Super Lucky Romance

Camera on yourself, with the lens turned towards you.

But Rory held it the other way round, pointed the lens at

Symington and Blenkinsop who were bearing down on

them, all grey skin and darting black eyes.

'Say cheese,' he said.

He clicked the camera's button.

The time bubble expanded around Symington and

Blenkinsop. They wrestled against it, struggled, gnashed

their teeth and snarled, but the bubble kept on closing

in around them. With a gentle pinging sound it settled

into a bulbous jelly-like sphere around Symington and

Blenkinsop. They were trapped.

'Good thinking, Rory,' said the Doctor, obviously

impressed.

Rory shrugged, but blushed with pleasure.

Amy poked at the bubble. Inside it, Symington and

Blenkinsop looked like they were moving so fast that

they were just a blur of pointed teeth and bloody gums.

'Better hurry along now,' said the Doctor. 'It is a

Romance Surprise, after all. It might let them out after

five minutes.'

Rory nodded and backed away from the time bubble.

He, the Doctor and Amy walked around the corner

towards the basement where they'd left the TARDIS.

They all saw them at the same horrifying moment.

Waiting by the door, were Symington and Blenkinsop.

Across the road were another pair of Symington and

Blenkinsop. Further up the street, towards the main

entrance, there they were again. Looking from side to

side, in search of prey.

'But...' said Rory. He looked at the Doctor. 'Time

travel?'

The Doctor nodded, grim-faced.

'I'm afraid so.'

At the same moment, all three pairs of Symington

and Blenkinsop snapped their heads round to stare at

them. And then they started to run.

Chapter

9

Rory pulled out his camera, but he knew it was probably

hopeless. With so many of the shark-creatures, he'd only

be able to form one time bubble before one of the others

got them.

Amy began to back away. That was OK. If she ran,

that'd give him more time to fend them off. But she

wasn't trying to escape. She'd pulled a spanner out of

her bag - why did she have a spanner in her bag? -

and threw it hard at the nearest Symington, or was it

Blenkinsop? The shark-man cried out. There was a gash

on his face, in the centre of his forehead. He roared in

anger. It hadn't slowed him down at all. All six men

roared louder and advanced again.

For a split second Rory saw that each of the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops now had a red gash in

the centre of their foreheads. That didn't make sense, it

didn't...

And then there was a sudden noise. A bright flash,

like a firework exploding in the street. And the sound

of an old woman shouting. The shark-men all turned to

see what was happening. It was the old woman they'd

met when they first arrived, the tramp with the smelly

old suitcase. She was standing holding her left arm high

in the air, waving it around.

Rory saw that there was a watch on her wrist like

Amy's. Except it was fizzing, like a roman candle, letting

out sparks in intermittent bursts. All the Symingtons

and Blenkinsops turned towards the old woman, like

sharks scenting blood in the water.

'Over here!' she shouted. 'Over here! Come on, you

ugly disgusting lumps, you know you want it!'

She waved her arm above her head and the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops stopped pursuing Amy.

They turned simultaneously, like an army marching in

perfect unison, to run towards the old woman.

'Now!' the Doctor nudged Rory in the ribs. Rory

aimed his camera, finding each set of shark-men in

the viewfinder and dick, dick, dick. The three pairs of

shark-men were frozen in time bubbles.

They all ran towards the old woman, what had her

name been, Nadia Montgomery? The card she'd given

the Doctor had read 'Head of Marketing' - that had

seemed like some kind of weird joke. With everything

they'd seen since they got here, it didn't seem so unlikely

now.

'That was amazing!' said Rory.

Nadia was rubbing at her wrist. She'd looked full of

energy for a minute there, shouting at the monsters, like

a young woman, but now she just looked old. Her wrist

was raw and sore where the watch was rubbing at it.

Amy looked at her own wrist. 'What happened to

yours?'

Nadia rubbed at the sore patch on her wrist. Her

watch sparked and fizzed once, a burst of embers

reddening the skin further up her arm. She grimaced.

'It hurts,' she said. She held out her arm towards

Amy: 'It's broken.'

The Doctor pulled the small black bobbly device

out of his pocket and ran it over Nadia's watch. He

nodded.

'You're right, Nadia. It is broken. And it must hurt.

Look.' He pointed to where a piece of moulding on

the side of Nadia's watch was broken open - that was

the little hole where the sparks came showering out.

'Something went wrong when they made this one.

See the dial?' Amy couldn't quite look at the dial on

Nadia's watch. It was as if she was staring at it through

a camera lens, and someone was changing the focus. For

a moment the dial would be crystal clear, and then it'd

fade into fuzziness again.

'That's why the Symingtons and Blenkinsops can't

see you until you call them, isn't it? They home in on the

watch, and the watch is changing its position in time all

the time.'

Nadia nodded. She looked older now even than five

minutes before.

'The sharks,' she said, 'the sharks can't smell me

unless I bleed into the water.'

'And it's taking time from you and giving it back

randomly.'

Nadia nodded sadly.

'Er, Doctor,' said Rory, 'I think, um...'

He pointed towards one of the bubbles containing a

Symington and Blenkinsop. The bubble was definitely

moving more than the others. That was what was

supposed to happen - when you only had a few minutes

left inside, the time bubble would start to decay. The

roaring gnashing teeth moved faster.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'Quite right, yes absolutely,

must be moving on, well, to the TARDIS I think or...

Nadia, could you do me a favour?'

Nadia looked the Doctor in the eye. She was energetic

again, not a day over 60. Her stare was clear and firm.

'Can you cure me? Can you make this stop, and give

me my time back?'

The Doctor narrowed his mouth. This was obviously

a very hard thing to ask.

'Yes,' he said at last. 'Yes I can.'

'All right then,' she said. 'What can I do for you?'

Nadia didn't like to move from her spot outside the

Bank. When she was feeling more herself, she thought

that this was the only place that she might find out what

had happened to her. And when she was feeling so very

old, she just didn't want to move at all. And she never

went inside. Because that was where she'd put on this

watch that led to all this trouble. And that was where the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops were.

But she stiffened her sinews and straightened her

aching back and, very slowly, creeping very quietly,

made her way in through the basement door. She went

as quickly as she could, keeping ducking out of sight

whenever anyone walked past - no one took any notice

of an old tramp outside, but they'd certainly notice if

one had penetrated the Bank itself. She came to the

door where the Doctor said he wanted her to check. She

opened it very quietly.

Inside the small dusty room were hundreds of

Symingtons and Blenkinsops. They filled up all the

space and the places between the spaces and the space

where there was no space. They were folded over onto

each other in time - her malfunctioning watch let her

see them. There were five or six or seven of them for

every one that would have been visible to anyone else.

But they didn't see her. They were all turned away,

weaving, bobbing their heads, staring at the big blue

police box in the corner.

'That's it then,' said the Doctor. 'Given what Nadia's

told us, we can't go in there. Too dangerous for Amy,

too dangerous all around, especially if they know what

the TARDIS is, especially if they can time travel.'

'But couldn't you...' Rory looked behind him

nervously. They were marching across Paternoster

Square, in front of St Paul's Cathedral. All around them,

men and women in expensive suits were eating pricey

lunches with pale glasses of costly white wine, with no

appearance that anything extremely dangerous was

going on at all. Rory couldn't help feeling that at any

moment an army of Symingtons or Blenkinsops was

going to march down the cathedral steps towards them.

They'd only just got away before that time bubble started

to decay. 'Couldn't you, just, you know, run through,

open the TARDIS, go and pick up Amy, get out?'

The Doctor was walking faster now, his long legs

striding north past identical-looking grey stone office

buildings. Rory glanced into a window. He could

have sworn he saw a Symington in there. Or maybe a

Blenkinsop. Surely he was imagining it.

'No, Rory,' the Doctor shouted. 'You really do need

to get the fundamentals of time travel into your head.

If we run in and try to get to the TARDIS, they only

have to travel back a few minutes to be ready for us.

You really shouldn't do that, of course, goodness knows

what it's doing to the temporal superstructure of this

planet but— Wait, of course. Of course!'

'What's that Doctor?' Amy was striding along

beside the Doctor. Rory didn't understand why, given

that he wasn't any shorter than either of them, but he

was always the one not quite keeping up. He quickened

his pace.

The Doctor stopped suddenly. Rory walked into

him.

'Sorry, sorry,' said Rory, but the Doctor didn't notice.

He smacked his palm against his forehead.

'Of course,' said the Doctor again, spinning on his

heel. 'Of course, time travel!'

Amy and Rory looked at each other in bewilderment

then back at the Doctor.

'Did you see what happened, when you threw that

spanner at one of the Symingtons? No of course you

didn't of course not - you were frightened, you were

running for your life. It was just a split second.'

'I saw,' said Rory. They all suddenly had a wound

on their foreheads.'

'Yes! Brilliant! Why do I always underestimate

you, Rory, you're brilliant! Now, tell me why that

happened.'

'l, um...'

'Yes I see, not quite there yet, well why should you

be? It's because...' the Doctor spread his arms very wide

as if revealing the finale to a magic trick, 'they're all the

same person!'

Amy and Rory looked at each other again. Rory

wondered if Amy had understood what the Doctor was

talking about. He didn't want to admit that he hadn't,

especially if Amy had already got it.

'What are you talking about, Doctor?' asked Amy.

'They're the same creature!' said the Doctor. 'Folded

back on themselves in time. Do you remember how they

all turned their heads to look at us in unison? That's why

they all saw us at the same moment! When one of them

sees, all the rest of them - all the ones that are later in the

timeline, that is - remember seeing.'

'Does that mean,' said Rory, 'that it's very, very bad

if one of them spots us?'

'Yes, Rory,' said the Doctor. 'It's positively

catastrophic!' he spat out gleefully. 'If one of them sees

us then all the others that come later in the time stream

instantly know where we are, because they remember it

in their own past. Clever, isn't it?'

Rory pointed down a little side street off to the

left. He knew he'd been right about what he'd seen in

that office building. Walking almost casually, its head

cocked to one side, baring its diamond-shaped teeth just

a fraction, was a Blenkinsop.

'Run!' shouted the Doctor.

They ran through the streets of the City of London,

along office-building-lined Newgate Street, where

Rory was sure he saw a Symington or a Blenkinsop in

every window, across Holborn Viaduct then, doubling

back, along Smithfield Street and round the medieval

buildings of Cloth Fair and Rising Sun Court.

'Amazing isn't it, the City?' shouted the Doctor.

Rory glanced behind him. The Blenkinsop wasn't

gaining on them, but it wasn't losing much ground

either.

The Doctor wasn't out of breath at all. That's what

you got for having two hearts, Rory guessed.

'All these buildings,' he continued. 'All different

periods of history. Did you know this part of London

has been continually inhabited for more than two

thousand years? No, I suppose not since neither of you

took History. It's up to me to teach you, I suppose. See

that over there?' He pointed to a quite modern-looking

building with leaded windows and cream-coloured

plaster arches at the base. 'Oldest house in London that

is. I was there when they laid the foundation stone.

Really nice bloke - Tom something - shame what

happened with the Alicagorians later. Ah well, at least

the house is still here.'

'All very interesting, Doctor,' Amy panted, 'but

maybe when we're in less danger of being eaten?'

The Doctor was leading them in a wide circle. They

passed more offices and sandwich shops, then took a

sharp right at Barbican station.

'Oh, now I have to show you this,' said the Doctor, as

they ran down another street and came to a small park

screened from the road by trees. 'Postman's Park, have

you been here before? Amazing place! All these plaques,'

he pointed at a row of tiles underneath an awning, are

for ordinary people who sacrificed themselves to help

others.'

He stopped suddenly in front of the memorial.

'Amazing,' he said. 'You get so little time, and yet

you use it to help other people.'

'Yes this is all interesting,' said Rory, 'but Doctor,

shark-men are coming!'

Three Symingtons and a Blenkinsop rounded the

corner, teeth bared, eyes rolling.

'Oh... yes,' said the Doctor. 'Well, now we're not

anywhere too crowded...'

He grabbed Amy's wrist and aimed the sonic

screwdriver at it.

'Er, what are you doing, Doctor?' asked Amy.

'Voiding the warranty.'

He pressed three buttons on Amy's watch in quick

succession, and aimed another burst of his sonic

screwdriver. The watch let off a burst of sparks, which

travelled upwards into the air. As Rory watched, the

sparks turned, directing themselves back in the direction

of the Bank. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops stopped

dead in their tracks, looked around in puzzlement, then,

as if in answer to a call from behind them, all turned

around and ran purposefully in the opposite direction,

away from the Doctor, Rory and Amy.

'Are we safe now, Doctor?' asked Amy.

The Doctor opened his eyes very wide. 'No,' he said,

'not at all. We're not going to be safe until the very last

one, or in fact the very first one of those creatures is off

your world. But if you mean "Are they going to try to

kill us in the next twenty minutes?" safe, then yes, we're

safe.'

'So, um,' said Amy, staring at her watch, which had

a couple of residual sparks adhering to the face, 'what

did you do?'

'I did to your watch in a controlled way what

happened to Nadia's in an uncontrolled way, do you

see?'

'No.'

'No reason you should, very complicated temporal

physics, have I mentioned I'm a genius? I'll try to make

it very simple. A bit of your time is now back at the

Bank, so that is where the Symingtons and Blenkinsops

will think you are, at least for a while. Now do you

understand?'

'No.'

'We're safe for the moment,' said the Doctor, speaking

very slowly 'but we have to identify whichever one is

first in the time loop possibly by some kind of regressive

-temporal analysis to prevent the spread of the Time

Harvester watches in the first place, plus we need to

find the containment device where they're storing the

time - very tricky business, time storage, get one of

your parameters wrong and your storage tank will age

ten million years overnight - we'll need to find it and

deactivate it. Do you understand that?'

'Do you mean' said Amy, 'that we have to get rid of

the shark-men and get everyone's time back?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, pouting a little.

'That,' said Amy, 'I can get behind.'

Chapter

10

'Firstly,' said the Doctor, 'we need a friend in the Bank.'

'What about Nadia?' said Amy, 'she can go in there

for us any time, look around, find things out.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'She's too unstable,

temporally. We've seen her age and get younger

by twenty years in thirty seconds. Plus she's doing

something important for me back there already.'

Rory and Amy exchanged a look.

'You didn't tell us that Nadia was doing anything

important?'

'She's keeping an eye on the TARDIS. Most important

thing of all. Anyway, we need someone who can go

into the Bank without arousing anyone's suspicion -

Symington, Blenkinsop or human - and look at files,

find out what's going on and who first brought those

watches to the Bank.'

'What about—' began Rory.

'Just a moment, Rory, I'm thinking. We need someone

who's heavily involved in this already, who might have

borrowed more than they realise...'

'But I was going to s a y - ' said Rory.

'Just a minute, Rory, I have to think this through.

We need someone we can trust, just an ordinary bloke,

an everyday, normal person who's in over their head,

and—'

'Andrew Brown!' shouted Rory.

'Calm down, Rory, no need to shout.'

'Andrew Brown,' said Rory again, a shade more

calmly. 'He's borrowed loads of time. I've seen him in

three different places at the same time in the Bank. He's

probably up to his neck in debt and...'

'Well, why didn't you say so? Come on, let's go and

find him. At home's best. We don't want to go back to

the Bank for the moment.'

'But how will we know where he lives, Doctor?' asked

Amy. She scratched at the watch strap on her wrist. It

was beginning to irritate her skin, just like Nadia's did.

'Directory enquiries,' said the Doctor.

Nadia dragged her bag along the storeroom corridors,

looking for somewhere quiet to wait. The TARDIS was

back in one of the large unused basement rooms at the

end of the corridor. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops

were fascinated by it, but none of their clawing and

pawing was getting them in. Still, she needed to make

sure they didn't try anything more extreme - the

Doctor had told her that the TARDIS's Hostile Action

Displacement System would stop them actually

getting in, but would also mean the whole box moved

somewhere else - and he preferred not to have to go

hunting for it. 'Very boring,' he said, 'not to mention

incredibly embarrassing. Like losing your car in a car

park. If I remembered to set it.'

So, she had a watching brief. She could do that.

She pulled her bag into a storeroom whose door was

unexpectedly propped open by an overturned mailroom

trolley, wedged the door slightly open with a few files

and sat in the dark. Once an hour, she'd venture out to

see if anything had happened to the TARDIS. Other than

that, she'd wait.

The Doctor was trying to remember a number.

'112358e963i? Or did it have something to do with

Pi?'

'If you want directory enquiries, Doctor,' said

Amy, 'there are loads of numbers. They all start 118

something.'

'That's not what I mean, not what I mean at all,'

snapped the Doctor, 'there's a new galactic system that's

just been introduced, trial run, fun to give it a go, let's

have your phone.'

Amy, with a dubious expression, handed him her

mobile phone. He dialled about 25 numbers and made

a series of high-pitched whines into the handset. Amy

raised an eyebrow.

'It's connecting! I'll put it on speakerphone! Isn't this

fun?'

'Galactic Enquiries,' said a woman with a low

buzzing voice, 'which name do you require?'

'What was the name again, Rory?' said the Doctor.

'Um, Andrew Brown. London,' said Rory.

'Searching for you.'

'There are going to be loads of Andrew Browns,

though, aren't there?' said Rory.

'Don't worry,' whispered the Doctor, 'they've got

a system for dealing with it! That's what they say,

anyway.'

'I've found 2,361 Andrew Browns living in the Greater

London area,' the voice said smoothly, 'including

several species and organisations with similar names,

for example the Ah N'Drubrn Clan of Warrior Molluscs

currently residing in the Thames and the End, Rue, Burn

Doomsday Cult intending to destroy the city in a little

over 271 days from now.'

'I told you she wouldn't be able to— wait, what was

that? Destroy the city?'

'Well come back for them later, Rory. Or, hmm,

actually I think I've dealt with them earlier. Later. I

will have dealt with them earlier later already. Why

don't human languages have tenses for these things?

If we were speaking Old High Gallifreyan, you'd have

understood me before I started talking. Tell me,' he

addressed the woman on the phone, 'what is the best

way to find the Andrew Brown we're looking for?'

'I will ask you a few brief questions,' she said, 'to

find your party. Is your party human?'

The Doctor turned to Rory. 'Is he human?'

Rory raised both eyebrows.

'Yup, human, yup.'

'Male or female?'

The Doctor looked at Rory. Rory looked back.

'Male,' said the Doctor.

'Hmmm.' The woman paused. 'Brown hair, brown

eyes, bit of a bump on his nose?'

'Umm,' said Rory, 'not a bump exactly but his nose

is quite...'

'Quite a long nose?'

'Yes!' said Rory.

'And does he have an air of vague discomfort? As if

he were...'

'As if he's constantly late for something! Yes!' shouted

Rory.

'I've narrowed it down to fifteen possibilities for you.

Is he a fan of snooker, do you know?'

'No idea.'

'Is his mother's name Margaret?'

'How am I supposed to know these things?' Rory

said. 'I know where he works if that helps: Lexington

Bank.'

'Sorry, we don't hold that information.'

Rory rolled his eyes.

The Doctor whispered, 'I did hear the system was at

a very experimental stage...'

'Now this is a bit of a long shot,' said the woman on

the phone, 'but does he have a stain on his tie today?'

'Yes!' said Rory. 'Yes, it's—'

'Custard?'

Egg!'

'Very good,' said the buzzing woman. 'I've got your

man. Displaying his address for you now.'

The screen flashed up a message and then went

dark.

'She didn't even wish us a nice day,' said the

Doctor.

'How do we know hell even be here, Doctor?' said Amy.

'It is a workday, after all.'

They were walking down a suburban street in North

London, looking for Andrew Brown's flat. It was late

afternoon. Amy wondered idly how many times she'd

lived this particular hour already. She felt that she'd

seen the sun getting low on the horizon surrounded by

pink-streaked clouds like that quite a few times now.

'Yeah,' said Rory, 'even if he's been using the watch

a lot to get ahead at work, surely he'd only use it when

he's actually at the office.'

'Yeah,' said Amy, 'no one would be so stupid as to

use something like that for fun, would they?'

Rory didn't know what she'd done. There hadn't

been any point telling him. The Doctor would fix it and

then it'd all be fine and there'd be no reason for him ever

to know.

They rounded the comer. Amy's voice dwindled to

nothing.

'Yeah,' said Rory, 'I think he's here.'

There was no need for them to wonder which was

Andrew Brown's flat. He was everywhere on it, and in

it. There was an Andrew Brown on a ladder painting the

window frames. And an Andrew Brown trimming the

hedge. An Andrew Brown was taking out the rubbish,

and another Andrew Brown was cleaning the car. Inside

the ground floor flat, they could see an Andrew Brown

talking on the phone. And one cooking in the kitchen.

And another working at the computer. And another

playing a video game. One was just walking up the path

to the front door as another was coming out in a rush.

They were all going about their business apparently

totally unaware of the others' presences, but managing

never quite to bump into each other, as if they were in a

well-choreographed ballet.

'How do his neighbours not notice?' muttered Amy.

She was thinking of her parents' house in Leadworth.

There was something really horrible about the way the

house covered in Andrew Browns looked. As if he'd

stopped being a person and was more like an infestation.

She hated the idea that she'd made her parents' house

look like that. That she was doing it right now, at the

same time that she was here.

'Oh, British people are very polite, you know. Don't

upset the neighbours, don't complain if they make lots

of noise, try not to notice if they're clearly travelling in

time. Stiff upper lip, Pond! Excuse me?'

Several of the Andrew Browns turned round at the

same time. Amy wondered if they now all remembered

seeing the Doctor at various different points across the

past few days. It must get boring, mustn't it? It had

been quite fun while she'd been living the same day

over and over, but now she came to think of it... didn't

Andrew Brown want to see what was going to happen

tomorrow?

The Andrew Brown washing the car squinted at

them, then his face cleared into a smile: 'Hang on, I

know you from the Bank, don't I? Doctor Schmidt? The

expert from Zurich? How can I help you?'

The Andrew Browns went back to what they were

doing.

'Clever,' said the Doctor. 'You must be the earliest,

am I right? So the others remember that you talked to

me, so they don't have to talk to you.'

'I'm sorry, I don't quite understand,' said Andrew.

'Ah yes,' said the Doctor. 'Tricky thing, time travel.

Especially if you're not biologically designed for it. I

expect they've got some gizmo in that device on your

wrist so you don't have to worry about it yourself. I

tried something like that myself once with the TARDIS

psychic circuits when I kept bumping into myself - got

into a terrible mess, no one could see my reflection for

weeks, gave the people of Transylvania quite a fright.

Let me just take a look.'

The Doctor lunged for Andrew's wrist, all floppy

limbs and clownish gestures and nonsense-talking.

Andrew, more amused than frightened, let him look.

The Doctor held Andrew's watch up to his ear, then

held the wrist between thumb and forefinger.

'How much have you borrowed, Andrew?'

'Excuse me?'

'We haven't got time for this, Andrew, at least you

certainly haven't. Mr Symington and Mr Blenkinsop,

how much time have you borrowed from them?'

'I, um, I don't know what you're talking about.'

'I think you do, Andrew, I think you really do. How

much time have you borrowed? It's important. Really,

really important.'

Andrew ran a hand through his hair. He stared at the

Doctor and then glanced at Amy who smiled winningly.

Andrew smiled back. He took a deep breath. 'A few

days? Not more than a week. And I try to pay it back

when I can, only...'

'Yes, it feels nasty to pay it back, nice to borrow it,

totally understand. I think you've borrowed more than

you reckon, Andrew.'

'Well, I, er, I don't know, maybe ten days? A couple

of weeks?'

'I think it's more than that, Andrew.'

The Doctor whipped the sonic screwdriver out of his

pocket and made a few passes with it over the watch.

'Nothing in my right hand, nothing in my left hand...

well, all right, a sonic screwdriver in my left hand.

And... alakazam!'

A glowing display hovered in the air in front of the

watch, just like the one the Doctor had made appear

from Amy's watch in the boardroom.

'Wow,' said Rory.

'Oh,' said Amy. 'That's...'

'BORROWED TIME TOTAL SINCE LAST

REPAYMENT: 9 DAYS, 1 HOUR. INTEREST TERMS:

5 MINUTES PER HOUR, PER HOUR. TOTAL TIME

OWED: 55,000 YEARS.'

Andrew Brown sat down with a plonk on his

driveway. All the other Andrew Browns around the

house vanished, one after the other. The window frame

went back to being unpainted, the cooking smells

vanished from the kitchen.

'Ah, I see you'll decide not to borrow any more, very

wise given you owe them more than the lifespan of five

hundred people. Hang on.' The Doctor cocked his head

to one side. 'You owe them more than you can possibly

pay back...'

'I think that's obvious, Doctor.' Amy crouched down

and put a hand on Andrew's shoulder. 'It's going to be

OK,' she told him. 'The Doctor will figure it out.'

'No, but,' the Doctor was emphatic, 'he owes more

than he can ever possibly pay back. They've lent him

more than he could ever, ever pay back. That's...'

'It's criminal, Doctor,' said Amy, her eyes suddenly

wet with tears.

'It's interesting,' said the Doctor. 'Very interesting...

It almost suggests that—'

'But I don't understand,' Andrew interrupted. 'Surely

there should be some warning system? Something to tell

me when I'd...' An angry look came over his face. 'Look,

how do I know you're even telling the truth? I don't

know what you did to my watch, this could all be lies! I

only borrowed a few days!'

' If you don't believe me,' said the Doctor nonchalantly,

'just pay it back. They've loaned you more than you

could ever, ever pay back that's very—'

'No!' shouted Amy. She turned Andrew's face to

look at her. 'I know it sounds bad, and I know it sounds

crazy,' she said, 'but you can trust the Doctor, just not

when he's...' she looked up at the Doctor who was

muttering numbers under his breath, apparently doing

mental arithmetic, 'just not when he's distracted, OK?

But you can trust him. We'll figure this out.'

'I don't see why I should believe any of this,' Andrew

said again. 'It sounds made up.'

'Denial,' said the Doctor. 'Classic, my old friend Siggy

Freud used to tell me that all the time. "Veil, Doctor,"

he'd say, "ven confronted vis ze unbelievable, ze human

brain goes into shock!'"

Amy held Andrew Brown's hand. 'You have to

believe us,' she said. 'We're telling the truth.'

Andrew stood up shakily. 'If you're telling the truth,'

he said, 'then if I instruct the watch to pay back one per

cent of one per cent of what I owe, I should pay back,

what, five years?'

'Five and a half,' said the Doctor.

'Right then,' said Andrew. He brought up a menu on

the watch and clicked a button.

'Make sure you get the decimal point in the right

place,' said the Doctor.

Andrew moved a dial fractionally, and pressed

another button.

He sank to his knees with a groan.

A streak of grey appeared in his hair, and wrinkles

deepened on his forehead.

He looked at himself in his car's wing mirror.

Rory and Amy watched him, not daring to speak.

Even the Doctor was paying attention now.

'My god,' said Andrew. His voice was a croak. 'I'm...

you're right. But... everyone's using the watches.' He

looked up in horror. 'How can we stop this?'

'That, Andrew, is where you come in,' said the

Doctor, helping him to his feet with an arm. 'And don't

worry, you don't have to call me God.'

Chapter

1 1

It's a lot to take in, that's all I'm saying.' Andrew Brown

was sitting in an armchair in his living room with his

head in his hands. Amy nodded sympathetically.

'So there are... aliens?' asked Andrew.

'What did you—' began Rory. 'I mean, sorry, but

who did you think had given you a watch that lets you

travel in time?'

Andrew shrugged. 'I thought maybe some...

government programme? Military technology?

Something Russian? Maybe what they're doing with the

Large Hadron Collider.'

'You'd need a very large collider indeed to even start

to find the particles that can do what that watch can do,'

said the Doctor acidly.

Andrew looked up at the three people gathered

around him. 'And you're all... aliens?'

Rory shook his head vigorously. 'No, no, definitely

not, only one of us is an alien and you see...'

Andrew pointed at Amy. 'So you're the alien!'

'I know she can seem a bit strange at times Amy

raised her eyebrows and gave the Doctor a very hard

stare - 'but no. Look. It doesn't matter who's an alien,

who's not an alien, who happens to have two hearts

and who'd prefer that they were not revealed to the

authorities...' The Doctor knelt down in front of Andrew.

'What matters is, we need your help. The Symingtons

and Blenkinsops—'

'The aliens,' said Andrew.

'Yes, the aliens. The other aliens. The Symington and

Blenkinsop aliens are doing something with all the time

they're siphoning off people. I've done all the checking

I can without access to my TAR- without my proper

equipment, and I don't think they're taking it off-planet.

Which would make sense. Very volatile substance, time.

Hard to transport. So they must be storing it somewhere

on Earth. Probably very nearby. Probably, we think,

somewhere in the Bank!'

'So we think you can help us.' Amy flared her nostrils

and gave Andrew a look somewhere between seduction

and interrogation.

'We need you to look around the Bank,' continued

the Doctor, 'for a storage system. It'd be pretty large,

probably central, and...'

'No,' said Andrew.

'No?' said the Doctor, 'I don't think that you quite

understand the gravity of the situation. This isn't some

kind of worldwide banking crisis, you know, there's not

going to be any bailout this time.'

'I mean, no, it's not in the Bank,' said Andrew. 'I

think I know where it is.'

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops were on the move in

Lexington Bank's basement. They'd tried prising the

door open in the usual ways, and with some unusual

devices Nadia had never seen before. Now they were

muttering about 'talking to the head'.

It was strange to walk among them and not be

seen. She'd realised maybe a month earlier that they

sometimes couldn't see her. One of the Symingtons had

tripped over her, grazed his forehead - she'd seen a

similar graze on the heads of several others for a couple

of days afterwards - and looked round, unable to see

what he'd fallen over. The effect only lasted for a few

seconds, then the watch did something and he saw her

again, snarled, walked on. It had been lasting longer

and longer, recently.

But this feeling was new - seeking them out. And

observing them, trying to get to know them. They didn't

talk much, that was peculiar. When they did, it was

almost interchangeable which of them spoke. It wasn't

just that they finished each other's sentences; sometimes

they took only a few words each in an emerging thought,

or seemed to be having half the conversation almost

telepathically.

'We should,' said one.

'Yes, possibly,' said another.

'Bring it, then,' said a third, 'and we'll...'

'Be able to break into the machine,' finished a

fourth.

Nadia, in the centre, unseen, listened and waited.

Andrew flipped through another folder. There were

nine or ten of them stacked up around him: large lever-

arch document folders, filled with paper printouts.

'You see, I've been using all my extra time wisely,'

said Andrew.

'Yeah,' said Rory, 'all 55,000 years of it. That was a

wise choice. Didn't you want to do anything else with

your life but work, mate?'

Andrew looked at Rory. He had had dreams once,

he was sure of it. Not just things that let him relax after

a day's work, but interests, hobbies, passions. Bands he

wanted to see play so much it ached. Music he wanted

to make himself. There was a guitar in the loft, and he'd

always thought... well, he wasn't much of a musician

himself, but he'd enjoyed teaching other people to play

and... it was a really long time ago now.

He shrugged. 'I don't know,' he said.

Amy tried to look interested in the folders. 'I'm sure it

seemed like a good idea at the time, didn't it, Andrew?'

'I shouldn't really have done it, but I've taken a look

through the earning and spending reports - I was going

to suggest where we could tighten up our budget, you

see.'

'Oh yes, that is a good use of 55,000 years,' said

Rory.

'Ah! Here it is!'

Andrew triumphantly tore a sheet out of his folder.

It was an invoice from a company called Little Green

Storage for £454,909.

'There's one of those every month,' said Andrew.

'They're paid out of an anonymous account run by

a non-existent department. I was going to look into it

when I had more...'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'I think you've had quite

enough time for now, Andrew. But this is very good

news, looks very likely this is our place.'

Amy took the piece of paper out of Andrew's hands

and read it. 'But that address can't be right, Doctor.'

'And why's that?'

'Because,' said Amy, 'there is no self-storage at the

Millennium Dome.'

'Shows what you know!'

They'd taken a cab over the Thames to the Millennium

Dome. It was evening - Amy thought she must only

have lived through this night once before, maybe twice,

it was so hard to remember. They'd walked past the

main entrance to the Dome, past the flashing lights and

the huge awnings advertising the next big artists due

to play gigs at the venue, round along a path that led

them out by the river. It was quiet here, and the lights

of the financial district skyscrapers were beautiful for

being so distant and abstract. Each lit office was just an

illuminated brick in the vast walls. Amy wondered what

someone from another planet would make of a view like

this - even she found it alien.

'What's that, Doctor?'

The Doctor pointed triumphantly to a small door

half-concealed behind one of the many struts and sails

of the Dome's structure. 'No self-storage at the Dome!

What do you know?'

The door was very small. It wasn't even as tall as

Andrew Brown, and he was the shortest of them. It

looked like a piece of chipboard, badly painted with

some khaki-green paint. There was no handle, just a

cheap-looking brass lock. Next to the door was a buzzer,

and above the buzzer was taped a piece of cardboard

with the words 'Little Green Storage' written on it in

black biro.

'I don't think this can be right, Doctor,' said Rory.

'It doesn't look like a half-a-million-pounds-a-month

storage centre,' said Andrew.

The Doctor looked at them both and rolled his eyes.

He rang the buzzer.

They waited.

On the Thames, a couple of passenger boats cruised

past. The river plashed softly. A car honked its horn

somewhere back near the car parks.

Rory, Amy and Andrew looked at each other.

The Doctor looked at them. 'Well, I, er...'

The door opened, just a fraction. Inside was pitch-

dark, it was impossible to see anything beyond the

doorframe.

'Yes?' said a low voice like the creaking of an old

hinge.

'Ah, hello,' said the Doctor, pulling out his psychic

paper. 'I'm the Doctor, and these are my friends Rory,

Amy and Andrew, and I was wondering if I could...'

'Ah yes,' croaked the voice, quietly. 'Doctor. How

wonderful to see you again, and you're wearing a

different body, I notice. How you do keep up with

fashion. It suits you very well.'

'I, um, yeeees,' said the Doctor.

'Do come in. I imagine you'll be wanting to visit

your storage locker. The contents are quite safe, I assure

you.'

The door swung more widely open. The space

beyond was still impenetrably black.

'Doctor...?' said Amy, in a warning tone.

'It's perfectly safe,' said the Doctor, ducking his head

to go through the door, 'probably.'

Andrew glanced at the watch on his wrist, shrugged

and followed him. Rory and Amy looked at each other.

'After you,' said Amy.

Rory glared at her.

'I'm sure there's nothing to be frightened of,' said

Amy.

'Then why don't you go... Oh, never mind. I don't

see how they can store anything in there anyway, it can

only be some backstage cupboards but...'

Rory stepped through the door.

Amy heard his voice as if it was coming from a great

distance away saying, very faintly: 'Wow.'

She bent down and walked through the door. And

on the other side was the world.

In Lexington Bank, a Symington had brought something

into the storeroom where the TARDIS was parked. It

was a glimmering thing, half concealed in the palm of

his hand. Nadia couldn't quite see what it was until he

placed it with surprising gentle grace on the TARDIS

door.

It looked like a small glass half-sphere - about the

size of a watch face, but bulging out in the middle. In

the centre of it there was a tiny flickering motion, like a

beating heart. And the beating was speeding up, faster

and faster.

'I very much doubt any door can withstand the blast,'

said a Symington.

'That amount of time concentrated in one place?'

chuckled a Blenkinsop.

And Nadia knew exactly what the glass half-sphere

was. A time bomb.

As Amy got her bearings back, she stopped feeling quite

so dizzy. She managed to open her eyes for more than a

fraction of a second and had to admit that it wasn't quite

a whole world. But it was still pretty vast.

She was standing on a gantry, holding very tightly

to the cold metal rail in front of her. The gantry led back

to a small door, but it looked like the door was about

half a mile away, and she didn't see how she could have

got here from there in one step. But the more important

problem, the thing she just couldn't get her mind away

from was that the gantry was made of a metal grille,

through which she could see straight down. And the

drop went down for about two hundred floors.

Amy -held on to the rail as if it was the only friend

she'd ever had. She tried to breathe deeply. Her knees

felt like water. She didn't understand. She wasn't usually

afraid of heights.

A quiet croaking voice from behind her said: 'Ah

yes, Doctor, I'm afraid the spatial shift does take some

humans that way. You should have warned me that

your companions were, ahem, delicate.'

'I'm. Not. Delicate,' muttered Amy through gritted

teeth. 'I just don't want to look down, that's all.'

She felt Rory's warm hand close around her cold

white knuckles.

'You can do it,' he whispered.

And she found that this infuriated her more than

anything else. She shifted her hand away from Rory's,

set her jaw, made sure her other hand was holding the

rail extra tightly, and forced herself to open her eyes and

look around properly.

'Wow,' she said.

Her head was still swimming, her knees were still

more fluid than she usually liked them, she still thought

she might buckle to the floor at any moment, but if she

kept concentrating on how very solid the rail was under

her hand she could look at the view.

They were suspended on the gantry in the middle of

a vast circular bowl dug into the ground. It was the same

shape as the Millennium Dome, like the exact mirror

reflection of the Dome, dug into the ground. But bigger

- much, much bigger. It looked like this space was about

a hundred times larger than the volume of the Dome.

And down as far as she could see the bowl was lined

with lit walkways and numbered compartments.

'As you can see,' creaked the voice close to her left

ear now, 'our facility is quite extensive. Well, ahem, it is

extensive and we are quite reduced.'

She risked turning her head to look at the creature

producing the voice. She didn't know what she'd

expected. Some kind of toad maybe, from the croaking

voice, or a sixty-a-day smoker. Instead, it was a small

floating humanoid figure, about half a metre tall, wearing

a black cowled robe and boots. It had a face a bit like a

child's - big eyes and a button nose - but very white skin,

almost pale blue. It was absolutely genderless - Amy had

no way of working out whether it was male or female,

and given the number of species she'd met which had

only one gender, or three or, in one very complicated

case, seventy-two separate genders, there was no reason

she expected to tell. And it was carrying a cane with a

blue ball on the end, although what it needed a cane for

when it could clearly fly wasn't immediately clear.

'Welcome to Little Green Storage - the name is just our

joke, you see - your repository for all your unnecessary

accoutrements during your holiday on Planet Earth,

the most frequently attacked, colonised, exploited and

enslaved planet in the five galaxies! Better watch out!'

'The, ah, the Yomalet-Ram, did I pronounce that

right, terrible with names,' began the Doctor - the

Yomalet-Ram nodded politely - 'was just telling us

how this facility works. Fascinating. See that up there?'

He pointed up to the ceiling, an interlocking web of

fine threads which looked like the bottom of a huge

trampoline slung across the space. 'Up there is the

Millennium Dome, suspended using several million

superconducting filaments. Clever, eh?'

'That's the Millennium Dome?' said Amy. 'But the

Dome's not that big, that must be five miles across!

More!' She started to feel dizzy and sick - she'd thought

looking down was bad but looking up was somehow

even worse.

'Ah, well, you see, ah. That's the clever part, that's

the part the Yomalet-Ram was alluding to, weren't

you, Yomalet-Ram, when you said that we were quite

reduced. We're under the Millennium Dome, but when

we came through that door -' he pointed way back along

the gantry to the door at the far end - 'we were shrunk!

Down to about, what did you say?'

'Seven point five per cent of your original size,' said

the Yomalet-Ram, pleasantly. 'We've found, over various

planets and life forms, that any more compression can

lead to permanent tissue damage.'

'Clever, very clever. That's why you've got a touch of

vertigo, Amy - your brain's having to calibrate a whole

new set of spatial parameters. And it's only 7.5 per cent

of its original size! Isn't that amazing!'

Amy rather wished the Doctor hadn't told her any of

that. She realised that she'd half known it instinctively

since she came through the door - that's why looking

up was even worse than looking down - something

felt very wrong. She stared very firmly at the rail that

she was holding and her hands on it. She noticed a

small cockroach crawling along the gantry by her foot.

Strangely, this made her feel calmer - just the familiarity

of seeing a normal, good old Earth cockroach felt like

something safe to cling to.

'Can I go now, Doctor?'

The Doctor frowned. 'I think that's probably not

a good idea. Stick together, we won't have to be here

for long. Yomalet-Ram, I don't suppose you've got any

anti-nausea pills Amy could take, something to ease the

discomfort?'

The Doctor reached out to touch the Yomalet-Ram's

coat. There was something odd about the gesture, but

Amy couldn't work out what it was.

The Yomalet-Ram shook its head sadly and moved

out of the Doctor's reach. 'We find that the worst of

the symptoms pass away after a few minutes,' it said.

'Perhaps if you'd care to inspect the contents of your

own storage container, the young lady might find the

view a little less intimidating?'

The Doctor nodded. 'Good idea, good idea indeed.

Take us to my storage container.'

The Yomalet-Ram smiled thinly. It was not a

comforting smile or one with a great deal of warmth

behind it. 'I'm sure you remember the protocol,

Doctor.'

'Oh, ah, yes, the protocol, of course the protocol, yes

silly of me, sorry. Just remind me?'

'I cannot accompany you to your storage container,

Doctor. You must input your unique identification

number onto the pad.' The Yomalet-Ram pointed its

cane towards a numbered keypad welded to the rail,

which Amy wasn't at all sure had been there until he

pointed to it. 'The system will do the rest. Provided, of

course, aheheheh, that you have the right palm print. As

I'm sure you do.'

'Oh yes, all comes back to me now, silly thing -

change of bodies, rattles the memories. Lose my own

head if it weren't screwed on.'

The Yomalet-Ram smiled even more disconcertingly,

if that was possible, made a tapping gesture with its cane

and vanished. They were alone on the gantry.

'Do you... know that alien?' said Rory.

The Doctor shook his head. 'Not yet, definitely not

yet, probably will sometime in the future. Hmmm... If I

had to choose a unique code then there's really only one

number I would have chosen...'

His hand hovered over the numbered keypad, which,

when Amy looked, contained about twenty different

digits only some of which she recognised.

'I wonder if I should just see if I've left anything for

me. It's just the kind of thing I might do.' He frowned.

'But then, of course, it might not have been me at all.

Lots of people going around the universe pretending to

be me. Or I might have left a practical joke for me, that's

just the kind of thing I might be going to be the sort of

person to do, too...'

He chewed his upper lip thoughtfully, staring at the

keypad.

'Doctor,' said Rory at last. 'Shouldn't we, you know,

go and find the Lexington Bank storage locker? The one

they're paying £454,909 a month for?'

'Mmmm?' said the Doctor.

'You remember, Doctor, that's why we're here?'

'What? Oh yes, good idea. Andrew, have you got

that invoice?'

Andrew Brown - who, Amy was irritated to

notice, wasn't suffering any ill effects at all from the

miniaturisation process - pulled the paper from his

pocket and unfolded it. Along the top, under the name

of the Bank, was a long string of numbers and symbols.

'Very good!' said the Doctor. 'Well remembered! OK,

let's just type in the number and—'

'Wait, Doctor,' said Rory. 'How are we going to get

into the locker? They said we'd need a palm print?'

'Quite right, Rory, well need a palmprint, and that

would be a terrible problem if -' the Doctor fished

around in his jacket and produced a slim silver object

like a long thin fish that wiggled slightly when he

touched it with his index finger - 'if I hadn't picked

the Yomalet-Ram's pocket for the master key when he

wasn't looking. Come on!'

He turned back to the keyboard and punched in the

number.

Chapter

12

There was a horrible whooshing sensation. Amy noticed the

feeling - and how nauseatingly awful it was - before she

realised what was happening, which was that the gantry

they were standing on was falling, very fast, towards the

centre of the basin.

She tried not to scream but didn't quite manage it.

The Doctor was holding on to the rail, the wind

blowing through his hair, grinning. 'Nothing to worry

about!' he shouted. 'Perfectly safe! Controlled freefall

with inertial compensators, look!'

He pointed behind them. And she saw that the gantry

hadn't actually broken off, leaving them falling into the

miles of empty air. They were still attached to the outer

edge of the basin, it was just that they were being swept

down past the two hundred storeys of stacked storage

containers, each with its own individual door. They

started to slow as she watched. The flat bottom of the

basin was still rushing towards them but it felt less like

a terrifying fall and more like a ride now she knew they

were safe. The gantry lurched suddenly to the side and

zoomed them around the outside of the basin.

It stopped abruptly, facing a bank of forty or fifty

doors. Above the whole bank of doors was the long

number from the invoice. On each door was a metal

plate with a space for a hand print, as well as several

spaces for tentacle, pseudopod, leaf, paw and various

unidentifiable appendage-prints.

'But which one is it?' said Andrew.

'Perhaps you're just supposed to know which one's

yours,' said Rory. 'Like added security?'

'Right!' said the Doctor. 'Shall we take a look in a

few?'

'Can we do that, Doctor?' said Rory. 'I mean, isn't it

a bit... immoral? Looking at people's stuff?'

'Oh, I don't know, Rory, you'd be surprised what

useful, not to say universe-saving things you can find

out by taking a quick rummage through people's

possessions. Don't worry, well put everything back

where we found it.' He pulled the little silver fish-key

out of his pocket and walked over to the first door.

'Better let me go first. You never know, there might be

some kind of defence system.'

Ignoring the handprint space, he placed the master

key close to the door. It wriggled and flowed outward,

filling one of the handprints with its silvery liquid self.

The door clicked and unlocked. As the Doctor began

to gingerly open it, a flurry of snow blew outwards and

landed at his feet. Amy saw another cockroach scuttling

through the snow.

'Hmm,' said the Doctor. He poked his head round

the door. A snowball came sailing above his head and

crashed into the gantry's safety rail. There was a sound

of hoof beats and a hunting horn. He hurriedly closed

the door and peeled the key off the lock.

'Definitely not that one,' he said, striding over to the

next door.

'Was that...?' began Rory.

'No, Rory. That was absolutely not Narnia. Where do

you get these ridiculous ideas from? Next!'

Nadia tried pulling the glass bomb off the door, but it

wouldn't budge. And every time she came close to it, it

set some weird mechanism off in her own watch - she

could feel herself starting to age again as she grappled

with it.

There had to be another way, though. She looked

at the faces of the Symingtons and Blenkinsops - their

rapt, worshipful expressions. She'd seen bankers look

like that when they contemplated an enormous trade.

What was in this box that they wanted so much?

'There's a displacement system,' said a Symington.

'No matter,' said a Blenkinsop. 'Our device will

radiate back in time. It won't escape.'

Nadia knew, with complete conviction, that it would

be a bad idea for the Symingtons and Blenkinsops to get

their hands on anything they wanted so much.

The slow ticking sped up. There must be something

that she could do. And then she realised.

There were a lot of doors. Amy rapidly began to lose

count of how many they'd checked, although she knew

she'd never be able to forget some of the contents. There

was the room apparently filled with soap bubbles, and

another completely full of string-like yellow roots, as if

of a vast tree somewhere else entirely. One, when the

Doctor opened the door gingerly, blew wide open. The

storage container was totally empty but there was a

huge gale coming from it, without any apparent source

at all. The wind was so strong that it knocked Andrew

clean over, and it took all four of them to slam the door

closed again.

After a few doors, the Doctor became more cavalier

and let them try some. Amy got a room full of mirrors

which reflected her back to herself with differences

which were at first subtle and then, as she looked, became

more and more obvious. There was a reflection in which

she was older, with a wise and kind expression, as if

she knew a thing or two. There was one where she was

scarred and dirty and far too thin. There was one where

she was fighting off monsters - they were just off the

edge of the mirror, she only saw the odd spider-like leg

come into view - like a superhero. And another where

she was tinkering with a piece of machinery that she

knew instantly was alien technology - she was expertly

wielding a white-beamed sonic screwdriver with five

split beams. Amy took a step towards her reflections.

'Best not look too long,' the Doctor closed the door in

front of her. 'Enough to enjoy in this dimension without

getting confused by all the others. And just think,' he

said, 'to some of those people, Leadworth would look

incredibly exotic!'

Amy stood and stared at that door for a bit, while

Andrew found a room staging live re-runs of I Love

Lucy, and Rory got one made of mucus.

Mostly, though, the rooms were full of alien

technology. There were ray guns and missiles, there

were drifts of what the Doctor told them were computers

the size of Amy's thumbnail, and transmat stations and

purple-striped telepathy hats. 'Definitely not cool,' said

the Doctor.

They found quite a few spaceships. 'Makes sense,'

said the Doctor, 'parking in London's a nightmare. And

have you seen the fines they give?'

One room looked disturbingly familiar. In the centre,

there was a six-sided console, half finished with wires

coming out of it and some parts completely missing.

A glass time-rotor in the middle of the console looked

wrong somehow - lop-sided and fuzzy. Several red-

metal robot men were working on the console with

soldering irons and yellow laser cutters, some of them

consulting a book which looked as if it had been burned

and retrieved, half-charred, from a fire.

When the door opened, the robots turned to look

at the Doctor with what Rory could have sworn was a

guilty expression.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'Don't think I can't see what

you're up to.' He closed the door and muttered, 'Note to

self: must come back and destroy that later.'

And then there was the room with all the shelves.

The Doctor opened the door. The huge room beyond

extended back about fifty metres and was about ten

metres tall. Floor to ceiling, it was lined with shelves.

And on each shelf was a green glass box, about the size

of a house brick. Each brick was labelled, and inside

each one there was the faintest trace of movement.

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'I think we've found it.'

*

Amy followed the Doctor into the storage unit. It was

quite beautiful. The rows of green glass bricks shimmered

with a faint internal light - it was like standing inside a

cabinet made of ice with fading sunlight tricking in from

the outside. In the centre of the room was something that

looked a bit like a dentist's chair with a restraint around

the waist and a monitoring screen next to the head. The

Doctor touched the screen.

'Nasty,' he said. 'Time Harvesting chair, very hard

to get out of, you never have any time to make your

escape.'

He ducked his head down to look under the seat,

blinked a couple of times in a puzzled way.

'Interesting,' he said. 'Interesting.'

Amy ran her fingertips along a row of bricks.

'Be careful with those,' said the Doctor, standing up.

'Each one of them's a person.'

Amy looked more closely at the glass boxes. The

label on the front of each one was someone's name. She

glanced at a few: 'Ismael Habibi', 'Dr P. McCormick',

'Emma Taylor', 'Alexandra Li', 'Philip Doyley', 'Benny

Har-Even', 'Sydney Jane'.

'But there are thousands here, Doctor,' she said.

'Hundreds of thousands. More people than work in the

Bank, definitely.'

'I think it's spread out from the Bank,' said Rory,

pointing to one of the glass blocks.

Amy looked over his shoulder. 'But that's... isn't she

in the Cabinet?'

Rory nodded.

'Look over here,' said Amy. 'He was on X-Factor,

wasn't he?'

All around the room the little bricks shimmered,

each one with its faint, almost indistinguishable tiny

movement at the centre, like a transparent creature's

minute heartbeat.

'So these are... the stores?' asked Amy. 'This is

where they're keeping the time they've taken from

everyone? They transfer it here from the watches, like,

wirelessly? Like the internet? So if we broke all these

blocks, everyone would get their time back?'

'Hmm,' said the Doctor. 'Hmm.'

'What?' asked Rory.

The Doctor closed his eyes and stretched out his

arms to the side. His fingers were moving as if he were

touching the glass bricks, but he wasn't near them. He

went very quiet and still. He murmured something

under his breath. He snapped his eyes open.

'No,' he said. 'Makes no sense. The thing is, Rory,

you see, the thing is, time is a very volatile substance.

Very dangerous to store, very hard to use, very hard

even to keep track of. I mean, how do you have the time

to work out how much time someone has borrowed, do

you see what I mean?'

Rory shook his head. The Doctor ignored him.

'And they're doing something a lot more difficult than

just storing. You're rather lucky, Rory, that you've got

someone here whose physiology makes him sensitive

to ebbs and flows in time, don't know what you would

have done without me.'

Amy rolled her eyes. She looked around for Andrew

and saw that he was reading his way along the names

on the glass blocks, examining the tiny movement deep

inside them. She noticed a cockroach crawling along

one of the rows of bricks. It was quite a big one, about

as long as her thumb. Amazing, she thought, they get

everywhere.

'So you see,' the Doctor was saying, 'if this room

were filled with all the time that they've taken from

everyone, I'd be able to feel it. These are more like...

the accounts. Each one protected, sheltered by these

containers from the flow of time so that they can keep

accurate records. Villains, Rory, real villains always like

to feel that they're doing things by the book. They want

records of exactly how wrong they've been. I remember

Al Capone telling me that once. Or was it Genghis Khan?

But there's something else.' The Doctor waved his arms

at the walls of green-blue-grey glass. 'This is all very...

showy... even for time-storage standards. It's almost

-as if they want to... show them off? Or maybe even...'

He spoke more quietly, asking the question to himself

rather than anyone else, 'sell them on? But that trade's

been dormant since the Time War, it's...'

'So these are just... everyone's bank statements?'

interrupted Amy.

The Doctor spun on his heel, took a deep breath and

said: 'Bit more complicated than that, bit more difficult

to arrange when you're talking about time. But basically,

yes.'

Amy shrugged, 'Isn't it the same then, Doctor? If we

destroy them all, no one will owe anything any more.

End of story.'

'Or if we destroy them all, everyone will instantly

pay back whatever they owe right now.'

'Oh,' said Amy. 'Right.'

'Or nothing will happen, or they'll destroy the

universe. Hard to tell without knowing what's going on

inside them.' He shrugged. 'But they're so pretty, aren't

they... I wonder who they expect to see them...' He

drifted off again.

Andrew Brown had been quiet for a long time. He

was standing in front of one of the shelves of glass

bricks, staring at one particular block, gazing at the tiny

beating heart.

Rory went over to him, looked over his shoulder.

The brick Andrew was staring at was labelled with

his own name: Andrew Brown, Lexington Bank.

Rory put his hand on Andrew's shoulder. 'Oh, mate,'

he said. 'Oh, I'm sorry, that's—'

Andrew shrugged the arm off. 'I did it to myself,' he

muttered softly. 'No one else to blame.' He reached out

and picked up the brick, held it in his two hands. 'No

one else to blame,' he said again.

Rory stood silently by his side, watching a really

massive cockroach - about as long as his index finger -

scuttle across the floor.

'So what should we do now, Doctor? If we're not

going to just -' Amy motioned punching one of the glass

bricks - 'smash them all?'

The Doctor bent over slightly to examine one of the

blocks. The name on it was Lee Frakes, Wandsworth,

London. Inside, there was the same light as all the others,

the same faintly flickering movement.

'Doctor...' said Rory.

'Just a moment, Rory,' said the Doctor. 'Look at this,

Amy, do you see that?'

Amy looked at what the Doctor was pointing at.

There was a faint hairline crack all the way around the

glass brick, near the top. Now that she was looking, Amy

saw that all the bricks had a similar faint line around

them.

'Is that... a lid?'

'Only one way to find out.' He reached out gingerly

and tried to lift the lid off. It wouldn't come.

'Doctor...?' said Rory again.

'Not now, Rory,' said the Doctor. 'I'm trying a very

delicate manoeuvre here...' He aimed his screwdriver at

the crack. Nothing happened.

'Doctor,' said Rory. 'There's a... cockroach.'

'I've seen them, Rory,' said Amy. 'They're everywhere.

Just don't fuss at it and nothing will...'

'I don't think... I don't think you've seen one like

this...'

Amy heard a chitinous clicking from behind her.

She'd never heard a cockroach click before. She turned

her head very slowly.

Beside Rory was a cockroach.

It was about the size of a kitten, but several million

times less cute.

And it was growing as she watched.

'Doctor...' she said. 'Doctor...'

'Hang on.' He was holding his sonic screwdriver in

his teeth, aiming it at the glass box, while trying to lift

the top part of it up.

The cockroach clicked its mouthparts. It waved its

long antennae. They were as thick as a pencil now, about

a metre long and, like the rest of it, growing.

'Doctor...' said Amy again.

'Hang on a minute, this thing just won't...'

'This is more important, Doctor!'

The Doctor looked up. He saw the cockroach.

'Ah,' he said, 'yes, I thought that might happen.

Automatic defence system set up by the very wise and

prudent Yomalet-Ram.'

'All very interesting, Doctor, but - cockroach!'

shouted Amy, backing away. She thought of picking up

one of the glass bricks and hurling it at the insect, but

remembered what the Doctor had said about destroying

the whole universe and thought better of it.

'Probably not actually just a cockroach?' said the

Doctor, backing away too, keeping Amy, Rory and

Andrew behind him as they slowly moved out of the

storage unit. The cockroach was the size of a Labrador

now, but a lot less friendly. 'You see how it's not

damaging any of the stored items?' The cockroach was

feeling its way towards them, brushing its antennae

softly along the shelves. 'But it knows we're intruders.

Genius! Probably at least genetically modified, maybe

some kind of mind-control chip embedded in it, very

clever. Do you see?' He stopped moving momentarily

and turned round to face Amy. 'Actually the cockroach

is just reverting to normal size, whereas we're still tiny,

probably takes a lot less energy than actually creating an

enormous cockroach. It's very clever.'

'Doctor!' Amy screamed, the cockroach was almost

on him, its mandibles opening and closing, showing

their serrated edges, its horrible little head-legs reaching

for them.

'Right, yes,' said the Doctor, 'out!'

Chapter

13

They ran back out onto the gantry. Andrew had grabbed the

block with his name on it as they left and clutched it to

his chest. The cockroach was following them, dribbling

a yellowish liquid.

'Oh, that's new,' said the Doctor. 'That must be some

kind of modification. How fascinating. Just a moment.'

He rooted around in his pockets, found a notebook, a

gobstopper, a ball of string and finally a handkerchief.

He rolled the handkerchief up and threw it at the giant

cockroach. A little of the yellow fluid splashed onto the

fabric and it dissolved with an acid hiss.

'Hmm,' said the Doctor. 'Clever!'

'Never mind about that, Doctor, let's just get out of

here!' screamed Amy.

She started randomly punching numbers into the

keypad. The gantry lurched first to the right, then up,

then rapidly down again. The movement made the

cockroach skitter from side to side. A few drops of its

acid saliva dripped onto Rory's coat, which immediately

started to hiss and blacken. He pulled it off and threw

it to the floor where the yellow acid continued to eat

away at it.

'Don't. Do. That. Again!' shouted Rory.

'All right! So what do we do?'

The Doctor examined the keypad frowning. 'There

must be a way to make it go back up to the entrance,

there must be a...'

The cockroach advanced slowly, but inexorably.

'Wait,' said Rory. 'We're all right! I know what to

do!' He rummaged in the partially dissolved coat at his

feet and pulled the fully intact Super Lucky Romance

Camera from his pocket.

'We just need to trap it, and we're OK!' he shouted.

The cockroach was advancing on them. Amy noticed

that there were another three or four tiny cockroaches

on the gantry. They were just ordinary size, but she

didn't trust them to stay that way. The giant cockroach

moved closer. One of its antennae brushed her sleeve.

She shuddered uncontrollably.

'Now!' she shouted.

Rory clicked the Super Lucky Romance Camera

button. There was a whirring noise. A small bubble

appeared around the cockroach. It probed the bubble

with its antennae and the wobbling exterior popped

with a faint sighing sound. Rory stared at the cockroach.

He shook the camera. He tried again. Nothing happened

at all. The screen on the back of the camera displayed

a message: 'LOW POWER, PLEASE TO RECHARGE

BATTERIES FOR MORE LUCKY ROMANCE

MOMENTS.'

'Low battery!' shouted Rory at the camera. ' Low

battery? You're supposed to be a fifty-first-century

piece of technology! You're supposed to have a cosmic

radiation battery that picks up the background energy

of the universe!' He looked at Amy, panic rising in

his voice. 'It's not supposed to be able to run out of

battery!'

The cockroach was feeling for Amy with its antennae.

She shuddered again, looked the thing in the face and

shouted: 'I've stomped your cousins into mush!'

She dived forward and kicked the cockroach hard in

the mouthparts. The sole of her boot hissed at the contact

with the acid. The cockroach fell back off the gantry, but

flipped in mid air and clung on to a doorway ten floors

below them. It began to crawl back up towards them.

And it wasn't alone. From the bottom of the basin, more

cockroaches were coming. Some were smaller, some

were bigger. There was one cockroach slowly lumbering

up the side of the basin which was the size of a Mini.

'Doctor!' screamed Amy. 'They're coming!'

'Right, no choice!' shouted the Doctor. 'Come here.

We're going to look in my storage locker!'

He pressed a series of numbers into the keypad

far too quickly for Amy to see what they were. With a

dreadful lurch, the gantry swung round, but instead

of swooping up and away from the approaching giant

cockroaches, it started to descend towards the centre.

Nadia had never even used her own watch that much -

she felt pretty aggrieved about that. She knew for a fact

that the Head of Human Resources had borrowed weeks

at a time - once he'd done it to go skiing with his family

the same week the legal department were downsized.

And since it had started going wrong she hadn't dared

to borrow any more time. But, well, it was worth a try

She ran back to Storeroom F. She didn't want to be

around the Symingtons and Blenkinsops when she tried

it - that really might make them notice her. She fixed her

watch with a steely stare, willing it not to go on the fritz

while she was trying this. It rewarded her with a tiny

shower of sparks. Right.

She turned the dial back an hour. She looked around.

Nothing had changed, but the clock on the wall read an

hour earlier. She chuckled softly. It had worked. She

looked around. Something heavy would come in handy,

but there wasn't much in this storeroom. She noticed

the telephone directories on the shelf on the far wall.

She walked over and picked one up, riffling the pages,

lief ting it in her hand to feel the weight. Smiled. Yes, this

would do. She walked back to the storeroom with the

TARDIS in it.

She didn't notice the echo she left, rippling backwards

in time from her broken watch.

They were lucky the gantry moved so quickly. Even

with the scuttling pace of the roaches, they swung round

too fast for the creatures to quite keep up. But, Amy

realised, if they had to try another fifty doors they'd be

sunk. There was no way that they'd be able to fend the

cockroaches off for long enough. She could feel where

the sole of her boot she'd kicked the first one with was

now much thinner than the other - paper thin. They

only had seven boots left between them. Not enough.

But when the gantry lurched to a halt, there was only

one door. They all ran to it. It was large and black and

had the words ' Don't Come In Here - Seriously' painted on

the front in white paint. There was a single handprint-

shaped pad on the door where the lock should have

been.

The gantry started to rock. Underneath it, they could

see through the grille, the cockroaches were climbing up

the supporting struts, waving their vast antennae and

drooling their foul yellow liquid.

The Doctor was running his fingers along the

paintwork on the front of the door. 'I wouldn't warn

myself unless there was a good reason,' he muttered.

'But then since I knew I was going to be here why

would I take a unit at all if I didn't want me to come in?

Puzzling, very puzzling.'

'They're coming!' shouted Amy. The car-sized

cockroach had crested the top of the gantry and was

putting its hairy articulated legs very carefully down

onto the platform across from them. It wasn't hurrying.

It had all the time in the world.

The Doctor looked round. 'Hmmm,' he said. 'Yes,

good point well made'. He pressed his hand into the

palm-shaped space.

The door opened. There was darkness behind it.

The cockroaches were swarming across the gantry now.

Amy, Rory and Andrew were trying to kick at them, but

they were encroaching ever nearer nonetheless.

'Come on!' said the Doctor, walking into the

darkness.

Rory and Andrew followed without hesitation.

Amy, thinking of the vertigo she'd experienced on the

roof, lingered for a moment. But only a moment. In a

choice between vertigo and giant cockroaches, there was

no comparison. She walked through the door, bracing

herself for whatever weirdness lay beyond.

'Oh,' said Amy.

The four of them were crammed into a tiny vestibule

the size of a small lift. There was another locked door in

front of them, with another hand-recognition plate on

the front of it. There was barely any room to move at all

in the little cubicle. A groping antenna started feeling

its way round the door they'd just come through. Amy

slammed that door. The space got a little tighter. They

were safe, but they couldn't stay here very long.

'Go on then, Doctor,' said Amy. 'Open the next

door.'

The Doctor wormed his arm up from where it was

pressed between him and Andrew and pressed the palm

of his hand to the plate on the door.

Nothing happened

He stared at his hand, shook it vigorously and tried

again.

A little window opened in the front of the door, with

a message on a dot-matrix screen: 'I DON'T THINK

YOU SHOULD COME IN HERE.'

The Doctor kept his hand pressed to the panel.

The message changed. 'YOU REALLY SHOULDN'T

BE HERE YET AT ALL.'

The Doctor waited.

The message changed again. 'OH, ALL RIGHT.

HAVE THESE. BUT REALLY, DON'T COME IN.'

A drawer pushed out from the middle of the door,

hitting Rory in the solar plexus. Inside it were an

enormous aerosol can, about as long as the Doctor's

forearm, and what looked like a magazine article and

a couple of batteries in a sealed freezer bag. The Doctor

took them out and the drawer closed.

'Honestly,' said the Doctor, 'my other selves can be so

patronising. Do this, go there, be careful not to destroy

the whole of space and time.'

'But does that mean that some future version of you

has been here?' said Rory.

'When you travel in time as much as I do,' said the

Doctor, 'you learn not to ask questions of yourself. Only

leads to trouble. Anyway, look what we have here!'

He thrust the magazine article and batteries in the

bag into his jacket pocket and held up the aerosol can.

It was labelled 'Super Zap Cockroach Spray. Made on

Kotorsk-Bejal, the fun-loving planet where the roaches

are three metres tall!' There was a picture of a man -

wearing jeans and a T-shirt, perfectly normal-looking in

every way apart from having seven arms - holding the

spray up to a cockroach towering above him.

'A... bug spray?' said Amy, unconvinced.

'There are planets with... giant cockroaches?' said

Rory, wondering whether the Doctor would have to

visit one some time soon to pick up the spray.

'You're really an... alien?' said Andrew.

They all looked at him.

'I thought maybe you were joking,' he said,

plaintively.

Nadia was there, this time, before the Symington put

the bomb on the TARDIS door. She saw the wave of

expectation again as he arrived, watched the glimmering

thing in his hand as he reached for the door and -

WHAM! - hit him sharply on the back of the hand with

her hefty telephone directory.

The bomb fell to the floor. The Symingtons and

Blenkinsops pushed against each other, trying to grab

it, but Nadia was quicker. As she picked it up, she felt

the effect on her watch again, the pull tugging the time

out of her. Was this what it was supposed to do to the

TARDIS?

Her watch fizzed and hissed. The Symingtons and

Blenkinsops looked towards her, puzzled. She wouldn't

have a chance if they saw her now. And the bomb was

ticking fast. It was pulling strangely towards her watch

now - as if they were both magnetised. She stopped

trying to pull them apart. Better whatever was going

to happen should happen to her, not to the TARDIS.

Anything to stop the Symingtons and Blenkinsops

getting in.

She smashed the bomb onto her watch, just as the

ticking grew so fast that it was just a line of noise, a

white flash inside the device.

Nadia's watch blew sparks and showers of glass dust.

She wondered, her mind wandering already, whether

it was the watch's broken state which had saved her.

Her hands wrinkled. Her back bowed. The Symingtons

and Blenkinsops backed away nervously from the time

machine which seemed to have more tricks up its sleeve

than they could hope to understand.

And Nadia crawled out into the corridor. Her watch's

face was flashing up random numbers. Some of it was

hanging off by a few wires. But the thing still wouldn't

come off. And she was still ageing.

Confused, and so old now, much older than she'd

ever been before, she crawled half-conscious back to her

station outside the Bank by the warm air vents.

'How are we going to get out, though?' Rory

whispered.

They could hear the cockroaches scuttling all over

the door.

'If we try to get one, the rest of them will get us,'

whispered Amy.

Andrew slowly rolled up his left sleeve. 'Give me the

spray,' he said.

'No,' said Amy. 'Andrew, you can't. You already owe

them so much, you...'

'Hey, on top of 55,000 years, what's another few

years? Give me the spray.'

The Doctor passed it to him.

'Right,' said Andrew.

They watched him do it. Holding the spray, he

opened the door and began spritzing the contents all

around him with his left hand, while simultaneously

turning back the watch with his right hand. Another

Andrew appeared next to them, spray in hand,

attacking the cockroaches in a different direction. And

another, and another, each one yelling a battle cry and

running through the cracked-open door spraying giant-

insecticide as fast as they could.

After a few seconds, Amy, Rory and the Doctor saw

that there was no yellow fluid trickling down the inside

of the door and ventured out behind the Andrews.

There were ten of them, spraying the insects, which

were rolling over, choking, kicking their head-legs. They

turned to Amy, grinning, pointing at her wrist.

'Want to join in?' one of them said, proffering a spray

can at her.

Amy shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'I think I've

borrowed enough already.' She couldn't meet Rory's

eyes.

The Andrews shrugged. 'Suit yourself.' He went

back to spraying the bugs with more glee than Amy had

ever seen on his face.

When the last one was gone, the platform, as if on

command, started to glide smoothly up the side of the

upside-down Dome towards the exit level. The Yomalet-

Ram was waiting for them, hovering in mid air, when

they got there.

'Ah, Doctor,' it said, with all appearance of courtesy.

'I can't tell you how glad I am you survived. Of course,

"I knew you would. But you know how these things

are. I have certain contractual obligations to protect the

property in my care. I can't call off the roaches for just

anyone. No matter how... aheheh... lucrative a client'

The Doctor nodded. 'Time to go now.'

The Yomalet-Ram made a sweeping motion with his

hand to indicate the exit door. 'The tissue decompressor

will have stored your bio-imprint to a 99.99999 per cent

accuracy. You may find the odd, aheh, hair on your head

in the wrong place.'

Amy looked at the Doctor.

'Let's go,' said the Doctor.

'Oh, before you do,' said the Yomalet-Ram, 'do take

my card. I know you'll have a use for it In the past.'

The Yomalet-Ram smiled properly for the first time

since they'd met it Its teeth were small and pointed. Its

smile was not a comforting tiling.

The Doctor glanced at the card and thrust it into his

pocket. 'I rather hope I find another way,' he said.

'Oh, I know,' said the Yomalet-Ram. 'But you

won't.'

It was dawn when they left the Little Green Storage. Amy

didn't quite know how that'd happened. She knew they'd

been in there a while, but it had felt like a few hours, not

a whole night. The Doctor muttered something about

compression causing temporal distortions, what with

matter being the same as energy, but it went over her

head. She found a scrubby patch of grass to sit on. She'd

rarely felt so glad to see daylight.

Rory came and sat down next to her. He took her left

hand in his and rolled up the sleeve.

'I saw you had one of these,' he said, 'but I didn't

think you'd... But you have, haven't you?'

Amy nodded.

Rory put his arm around her. She didn't resist. He

rested his head on her shoulder.

'Oh, Amy,' he said. 'Why?'

She moved awkwardly. 'I wanted to be in two places

at once,' she said. 'I wanted to try to make everyone

happy. To be a daughter and a wife and a friend and...

and me.'

'How much did you borrow?'

'It doesn't matter,' she said. 'Too much and not

enough.'

A little distance away, the Doctor was leaning against

the fence watching dawn break over the Thames.

Andrew stood next to him, the empty aerosol can

of bug spray under one arm, the glass brick he'd taken

from the store sticking out of his jacket pocket.

'Did we find out anything useful, Doctor?' said

Andrew.

'In the storage container?' The Doctor shrugged.

'No, not particularly. We know where they're keeping

the records, but we have no idea where the central time

store is, or how to disable it. We don't even know who

let them into the Bank in the first place.'

Andrew stared at the glass brick, the one with his

name written on the front. 'Might there be an answer

in here?'

The Doctor took it from his hand and looked at the

hairline crack along the side. 'If I could get inside it to

take a look at the mechanism, maybe.'

Andrew Brown looked at the glass box with his name

"on. 'I owe them 55,000 years?' he said.

The Doctor nodded.

'And lots of other people do too? And probably even

more than I owe?'

The Doctor nodded again.

'And if we find out who's responsible and where

they're storing the time, maybe we can get everyone's

time back and none of this will have happened?'

'Maybe,' said the Doctor.

'And the information in here could help you find

out?' said Andrew.

'Could be,' said the Doctor. 'No guarantees.'

Andrew Brown hefted the glass brick in his hand,

as if trying to decide how much it weighed. Feeling the

value of every borrowed hour, everything he'd signed

away without really realising how much he was giving

up. The weight of a life.

He raised his arm high. He was going to drop the

block to the stone path, to shatter into tens of thousands

of tiny gleaming shards.

'No!' shouted Rory, jumping up to grab his arm,

wrestling the glass slab from him.

'It's the only way,' said Andrew. 'I made my own

decisions, I have to take the consequences.'

'No,' said Rory, turning the brick over. 'Not yet.

Look.'

On the base of the brick, embossed into the glass, in

very tiny letters which looked darker green against the

pale material, were the words 'PRIVATE PROPERTY.

IF FOUND, RETURN TO THE OFFICE OF VANESSA

LAING-RANDALL, LEXINGTON BANK.'

Chapter

14

'So we do have to go back to the Bank,' said Amy. She

scratched at the watch on her left wrist. The skin around

it was getting quite sore from all her worrying at it.

'Not you,' said Rory. 'We want to keep you well away

from those Symingtons and Blenkinsops.'

'None of us can go there,' said the Doctor. 'They know

us now. We won't be able to sneak around. Unless...'

'Unless?' said Amy hopefully.

'Hmmm,' said the Doctor. 'We need to find Nadia

Montgomery again. I need to take another look at her

watch. But Andrew, we need you.'

Andrew nodded. 'I need to tell the others what's

going on.'

'Well, that,' said the Doctor. 'But also to find out

what's going on in Vanessa Laing-Randall's office...'

Nadia drifted in time. Sometimes she was young again,

so young that she felt well and strong. But those were

only moments. There, and then gone. Sometimes she

wondered if she simply imagined them. Perhaps the

dream of being young was a delusion of being old. And

her memory was so fragmented. She had no memory of

growing old, but perhaps that was part of her madness

too. She tried to figure it out herself, over and over,

muttering her calculations, reminding herself that she

was not, she was not, she was not crazy.

She never wandered far from the Bank, was never

able to. But sometimes kind people helped her. Like

the kind young man who took her by the arm and said,

'Nadia? Is that you? Nadia, Head of Marketing?'

She almost recognised him, just for a moment.

'Andrew?' she said, but then the memory faded.

He took her to Temple Gardens, where a green baize

lawn led down almost to the Thames, as if someone had

laid out a carpet. There were three nice young people

waiting for her there with a thermos flask filled with hot

chocolate and cheese sandwiches.

'That shoe needs resoling,' said Nadia to Amy.

She'd told them what she'd done - as best as she was

able. They were grateful, if a bit confused. She couldn't

tell it quite right, everything was muddled. Shoes,

though, still made sense.

Amy looked at the underside of her boot where the

sole was paper thin. 'Yeah well,' she said. We're all a bit

the worse for wear, eh?'

The Doctor was fiddling with Nadia's watch. The

thing let out sparks from time to time, and sometimes it

vibrated so quickly that it seemed to almost vanish for

a moment.

'What are you doing, Doctor?' asked Amy. I thought

you already got my watch to mimic Nadia's?'

in

'Mimic it, yes, yes that's right,' muttered the Doctor,

holding his sonic screwdriver in his mouth while he

tried to insert the end of a paperclip into the crack in

Nadia's watch. 'But what this watch does isn't the only

important thing about it.'

Amy and Rory exchanged a look - the look that said

'Yes, he may be a Time Lord, last of his kind, travelling

the length of time and space and being pretty sexy with

it, but I almost never understand what he's going on

about and nor do you.'

'Aha!' The watch spurted a thin stream of silver

sparks, and then stopped.

'Hmm, maybe not.' The Doctor removed his

screwdriver from his mouth. This made him at least ten

per cent more comprehensible. 'The thing is, all those

Symingtons and Blenkinsops are the same creature,

right? At different points in its time stream.'

'Yup,' said Rory. He'd definitely understood that

part. Probably.

'So the reason that they ignore Nadia's watch isn't

just because it often makes her invisible to them. It's also

that they know it belongs to her.'

'Huh?' said Amy.

'They ignore her because they know her watch is

broken. If we can get the field of her watch to extend to

cover us, they'll ignore us, too.'

Nadia's watch spurted out a puff of black gas. The

Doctor waved it away, coughing. Nadia became rapidly

younger, de-ageing by about ten years in a heartbeat,

her wrinkles smoothing out, her hair becoming thicker,

her back unbending.

'Hmm,' said the Doctor. 'I didn't mean to do that.

Not quite there yet.'

Andrew walked towards Sameera's office. She was

behind her desk, tapping away at what he was sure was

yet another perfect presentation that would make his

efforts look like a schoolboy's homework. And, out of

the corner of his eye, he saw her again, at the far end of

the corridor, carrying some paperwork. How had he not

noticed long before that she was in several places at once?

That lots of people in the Bank were? Perhaps because

that's how they were all supposed to be. Everyone in

the building was supposed to give the illusion that they

could be in nine different places at the same time, that

they could do fifty hours' work in five, that nothing was

ever too much. Everyone was supposed to pretend that

the Bank was the most important thing in their lives

and they always gave a mathematically impossible 110

per cent. 'He'd thought he was the only one who was

struggling. But now he looked he saw that half the

people working on this floor had tell-tale bumps under

their sleeves on the left-hand side.

'You missed the meeting,' Sameera said as he walked

into her office.

'The... meeting?' It felt like a hundred years since he'd

last been in this building. Or even fifty-five thousand.

'There was a meeting you were supposed to be at

this afternoon. Don't worry, I covered for you.'

'How much time did you have to borrow to do that?'

said Andrew.

Sameera looked at him, considering. Then she

shrugged. 'Nothing I can't pay back.'

'Oh, really?' said Andrew. 'You think so? Let me tell

you something about their accounting system.'

Nadia was 50 now, and crying. The Doctor just looked

embarrassed. Rory fished a handful of paper napkins

from the sandwich bag and gave them to her.

'It's always worst when I'm younger,' she sobbed

into the tissues. 'When I'm old, I forget everything. I

don't know there's anything to be upset about. But then,

when I'm a bit younger, I remember.'

Amy patted her on the back and looked glumly at

her own watch.

'I'm only 40,' Nadia wailed. 'I thought there was time

for everything. Time to meet someone and settle down,

maybe even have a family. And now look at me.'

'There could still be...' Amy couldn't even finish the

sentence. Nadia was getting older again in front of her

eyes.

The Doctor was still tinkering with Nadia's watch. At

last, there was a fizz of orange sparks which surrounded

them all - Amy and Rory and the Doctor too - and then

slowly faded away to nothing. Nothing except that,

when Rory looked at his arm side-on he could see a faint

glow still surrounding him.

'There, got it!' said the Doctor. 'Of course, that does

mean that... hmmm... and well need a...'

Nadia stared at him, tears wet on her cheeks.

'The Doctor will fix everything,' Amy said to Nadia.

'He always, always finds a way to fix it.'

Nadia shrugged. 'What's he going to do, change the

past?'

'You'd be surprised,' said Amy.

'I just can't stop thinking of everything I've lost,' said

Nadia. 'AH the places I wanted to visit that I'll never see,

all the things I wanted to do with my life... the children

I'll never have...'

The Doctor turned his head sharply and looked at her.

'The children you'll never... Yes, that's very interesting.

Very interesting indeed.'

Sameera sat back in her chair with a heavy thud.

'I did know,' she said, 'about the compound interest.

I've tried to be careful.'

'You have been careful,' said Andrew. 'More than

me, anyway.'

The Doctor had shown him the trick to making the

watches show how much time you owed in total. The

display of Sameera's account hung in the air, glowing

orange.

'BORROWED TIME TOTAL SINCE LAST

REPAYMENT: 5 DAYS, 5 HOURS. INTEREST TERMS:

5 MINUTES PER HOUR, PER HOUR. TOTAL TIME

OWED: 35 YEARS.'

'It's not your fault,' said Andrew softly. He'd never

thought he'd feel sorry for Sameera, or even imagined

they'd have much in common. In this building, where

getting ahead was all that mattered, she'd always seemed

like the enemy.

'I tried always to pay it back after a few hours, I knew

the interest would pile up otherwise,' Sameera said. 'It's

just, with this big new deal on and...'

Andrew nodded. 'We did this to each other,' he said.

'All those meetings where I felt like you'd be one step

ahead.'

'But I wasn't!' Sameera said. 'Sometimes I had to

leave to go to the loo to borrow the time so I could come

back looking prepared!'

'I did the same thing,' said Andrew.

Sameera nodded. 'All those presentations where

I kept trying to be just a bit better than you. All those

client meetings where I just had to pull one more thing

out of the bag...' She sighed and stared out of her office

window at the glass atrium sculpture. 'We did this to

each other. And now we've got to fix it.'

Amy patted Nadia's hand helplessly. She was about 60

now, still getting older.

'I don't know how to stabilise her,' said the Doctor.

'The only way is to get that watch off her.'

'This could happen to me too, couldn't it, Doctor?'

'Oh I think that's very unlikely,' the Doctor said,

without much conviction. He shrugged. 'To be honest,

I rather think we have something else to worry about.

Show me your camera again, Rory.'

Rory pulled the useless Super Lucky Romance

Camera out of his pocket. All it would do now was

present increasingly pleading messages on its digital

screen: 'NEW CHARGING IS REQUIRED. NO MORE

LUCKY ROMANCE MOMENTS UNTIL CHARGING.

PLEASE TO RECHARGE!'

'It used to have infinite battery life, didn't it?'

'That's what they told me when I bought it,' said

Rory.

The Doctor rooted around in his pockets. At last he

found the bag that he'd left for himself in the storage

unit. He held it up. It was plastic bag with the magazine

article and a couple of batteries inside. Across the top of

the bag, underneath the zip-lock strip, were the words

'Time proof to a depth of 40,000 years.'

'It's a time-bag,' said the Doctor. 'Like a freezer

bag, only more useful. Prevents the contents from

being affected by the passage of time or - and this is

crucial, pay attention - or by ripples in the space-time

continuum.'

'Ripples in the...'

'If I put you in this bag, Rory, sealed it and then went

into the past and killed your grandfather, as long as

you were still in the bag you'd be OK. Of course, then

you'd have to live the rest of your life in a plastic bag,

but there are worse things. There's a planet near Ursa

Minor where they all have to live inside the stomach of

a giant spinefish. The smell alone... So, could be worse,

Rory, think of the upside! Where was I?'

'A time-bag,' said Rory.

'Ah, yes, quite right. So this is a time-bag. While the

article is in here, it's protected from other changes in

time. When we take it out, it won't be any more.'

'And then what'll happen?'

'I don't... know. Interesting, isn't it? Go on, have a

read.'

Rory looked at the article in the bag. It was a short

news piece, ripped from a paper magazine dated to the

year 5013. 'Do they still have paper magazines in the

fifty-first century?' he asked, puzzled.

'Some people still like them,' said the Doctor. 'It's

probably edible paper, rich in vitamins and flavoured

with the saliva of whoever wrote it. There's a bit of a

fashion for that for a while.'

Rory wrinkled his face in disgust.

'As if Big Brother is any more normal. Just read the

article.'

Rory read.

It was an article about a prize being awarded to

the inventor of 'cosmic radiation power'. Professor

Henrietta Nwokolo had been honoured, the article

said, for the amazing innovations made by her and her

team at Aberdeen University. The writer was full of

praise for the amazing new power source. The article

went on to say that teams in Japan and Australia had

also been working on similar devices, but their versions

were slower, and experienced sudden battery depletion.

Underneath the article was an advert for Rory's Super

Lucky Romance Camera mentioning the Super Infinite

Cosmic Battery.

'OK...' said Rory. 'What does this tell us?'

'No idea,' said the Doctor.

'And what's going to happen if we take it out of the

bag?'

'I don't know. Let's try!'

The Doctor unfastened the zip-lock. There was a

hiss, and a strange kind of movement on the page of

the article, like the letters rearranging themselves as

Rory watched. He pulled the article out and looked at

it. It wasn't much different. A bit shorter. It still started

the same way: 'Team working on Cosmic Radiation

Power awarded Buffett Prize' - but now the inventor

was different, a professor at Tokyo University. And

the praise for the invention was more measured - the

technology wasn't perfect, there were sudden battery

depletions to contend with, but nonetheless it was a real

step forward.

The Doctor tipped the batteries out of the bag into

his hand.

'I think you'll find those will re-power your camera,

Rory,' he said, 'but maybe not for long, so be careful

when you use them.'

Rory nodded, and slipped the batteries into his

pocket. He stared at the magazine. 'But why did the

article change, Doctor? I don't get it.'

The Doctor stared at the page. 'I do,' he said.

'What does it mean?'

'It means,' he said, 'that the people who made the

breakthrough in that camera's technology never existed.

They were never born. Your planet is losing its future.

Piece by piece, the people are going.'

Sameera and Andrew were knocking on doors. It wasn't

hard to work out who was using the watches, when they

asked themselves. Who had suddenly had a burst of

productivity over the past few months? Who had got in

earlier than everyone else, left after everyone had gone

home, but still wasn't divorced? Who had they been

absolutely sure they'd seen on the fifth floor and then,

moments later, spotted walking out of the building?

Andrew went to talk to a woman, Dorotea Kemal,

who worked on the Scandinavian desk. He knew he'd

seen her in the office working late on the very same

night that he'd passed her laughing and joking with

friends in a restaurant when he'd gone for a walk round

the block. Sameera decided to approach Dan Logovik -

an Australian in-house editor in his mid thirties who'd

recently started to produce a huge volume of extra

work.

Sameera bumped into Dan as he was leaving his

office.

'Sorry,' she said.

'Sorry for what?' said the Dan who was sitting at

his desk. She spotted another one across the atrium, his

burly frame bent forward, eagerly talking to a senior

saleswoman. How had they all got so careless so quickly?

And how had none of the people in charge spotted it and

stopped them? It was as if the higher-ups didn't want to

know. As long as they kept making money for the Bank,

that was all anyone cared about.

'Dan,' she said, 'I have to talk to you, it's really

important.'

Dan's phone rang. She noticed him instinctively

reach for his watch, stop himself, pause.

'Sameera, great to see you, brilliant, but listen I've

got to take this phone call. Could you wait outside for

a moment?'

She stood outside and waited. If he borrowed another

few minutes to get that phone call on the first ring, so

what? After a little while Dan popped his head round

the door - he had that look she recognised, flushed with

a combination of pride and worry.

'They've asked me to work on GCXP Holdings! I'm

moving into analysis!' he said. 'It's the break I've been

waiting for. I'll really be able to show them what I can

do!'

Sameera nodded. 'We really need to talk, though,

Dan, it's really...'

He grinned. 'My wife's going to be so proud,' he

said. 'I can't wait to tell her. Look, let's have a chat. Just

wait a second, there's something I've been meaning to

do and I really don't want to put it off any longer.'

Sameera thought he was going to phone his wife. She

watched through the office window as he crossed the

room and sat down at the desk. It took her a moment

to realise that he wasn't picking up the phone, he was

moving a dial on his watch.

'No!' she shouted. She opened the door, burst into

the room.

But it was too late.

Excited and proud, Dan had evidently decided to

pay back all the time he owed.

He fell, quite peacefully, forward onto his desk, his

face a mass of wrinkles and his body a light, frail husk.

Sameera checked for a pulse, but it was as if he'd

been dead for twenty years.

Chapter

15

'We're going to have to take her with us, wherever we go,'

whispered the Doctor. 'It's the only way, for now.'

'How far do you think they've spread, Doctor?' Amy

whispered.

They were loitering by the entrance to Bart's Hospital,

waiting for their moment.

'In space or in time?' whispered the Doctor. 'What

about that one?'

He pointed to an elderly man being wheeled in

through the doors in a wheelchair.

'We can't steal it from under him, Doctor, can we?

Anyway, what do you mean space or time?'

'The more time they gather,' he muttered, 'the more

fluid they become in time. The further back they'll be

able to go. Soon we won't even have had time to hear of

them. What about her?'

A pregnant woman in a wheelchair seemed about to

get out of it and walk into the hospital but then let out a

loud groan of pain and sank back in and allowed herself

to be pushed through the doors.

'No good. Couldn't we just use the TARDIS, to go

back before that?'

'Not if the timeline's already been rewritten,' said the

Doctor. "The TARDIS won't keep travelling back to an

altered point in time, safety features. What about this?'

A nurse wheeled a woman with a broken leg through

the door; he waited while her boyfriend helped her

hobble into the waiting taxi. He turned round, pushed

the chair back through the automatic doors and left it

parked by the wall.

'Perfect,' said Amy. 'Come on.'

They marched towards the chair, both reaching for

the handles at the same moment.

'I thought you were going to be the patient,' said

Amy tetchily, trying to push the Doctor away from the

handles.

'Have you never heard my name, Pond? I am never the

patient, I am always the Doctor,' said the Doctor.

Their scuffle made some of the people waiting

patiently in A&E look over at them.

'Doctor, just sit in the chair and let's go. There's

clearly nothing wrong with me.'

'There's clearly nothing wrong with me.'

'Is there a problem here?'

A security guard had walked over very casually. Amy

and the Doctor were both quite tall, but this man was

taller still and quite a lot broader than either of them. He

looked like he had balls of muscle in unexpected places

like the tops of his shoulders and the backs of his arms.

'No problem,' said the Doctor. 'I'm the Doctor and

my patient here—'

Amy reached into the Doctor's jacket pocket and

pulled out the psychic paper. She flashed it in front of

the security guard. 'I'm Dr Pond,' she said, 'and this

man is my patient.'

'No,' said the Doctor, 'I'm the Doctor and—'

'I'm afraid this man is a danger to himself,' Amy

said. 'He's suffering from a delusion that he's a Doctor.

I just need to get him into this wheelchair and take him

to my... clinic.'

The security guard looked between them and then

at the ID badge 'Dr Pond' was holding in her hand. His

eyes locked on to it - that, he seemed to be thinking, was

at least comforting, familiar, certain.

'What I don't understand,' said Rory, undoing the

buckles, 'is why they tied him down.'

'It was for his own protection, wasn't it, Doctor?' said

Amy, removing the blankets swaddling the Doctor's

legs. He was seated in a very comfortable wheelchair.

One of the ones with special Velcro restraints on the

arms and legs and a nice tight seatbelt over his middle.

The Doctor glared at her. 'I could have got away. I

didn't have to let them do it. I chose to because I, you

see, am the bigger man.'

'Whatever you say, Doctor,' said Amy, helping him

out and helping Nadia sit down on the comfortable

padded seat. 'Whatever you say.'

Sameera and Andrew watched while the medical

technicians prepared to take Dan's body away.

'How many people do you think have died here in

the past six months?' Sameera asked.

Andrew stretched awkwardly. 'Let's see, there was

Brian Edelman, and Sara Hu, and that woman Linda

from human resources and—'

'Do you remember Nadia Montgomery? Used to be

Head of Marketing? Just disappeared one day?'

'Hmm, yeah, if you count all the people who

disappeared...'

They stood in silence for a while as the people from

the hospital loaded the sad frail body onto the wheeled

stretcher.

'Maybe nine or ten? In the past six months?' Andrew

said at last.

'That's quite a lot, isn't it? Even for an office this size,

it's quite a lot.'

Andrew nodded.

The struts of the wheeled stretcher clicked into place.

They stood aside as the body in its bag was rolled out of

the room.

'Even one person dying in the office should have made

us think about what we were doing,' said Sameera.

'We never thought about it in the years before all

this, like all those times someone had a heart attack, do

you remember? Remember Bob Leith?'

'Those weren't heart attacks, they were heart

events.'

'He had four though. All at the office. Before his wife

made him retire.'

Across the atrium, the lift dinged. They were taking

Dan away.

'We have to find out what's going on,' said Sameera.

'Before this happens to anyone else.'

*

Pushing Nadia in her wheelchair, it was easy to sneak

in the back entrance of the Bank. They settled down in

an empty meeting room, planned to wait there until

Andrew and Sameera reported back.

Rory switched on the television to watch the news.

No reports of aliens, of course. No sudden mass deaths

or sudden rapid ageing all across London, that was

good. But there was something...

'Doctor,' he said, 'look at that newsreader's arm.'

He was right: there, under the jacket of the man

reading the news, was the tell-tale bump.

They watched the rest of the news in a sort of dazed

horror. The watches weren't just in the UK. They saw

one on the wrist of the mayor of a South American town,

who was talking about how he managed to stay one step

ahead of violent gangs. A surgeon in Oregon describing

her invention of a life-saving new procedure which

had to be administered within minutes of injury was

wearing one. A team of scientists in Iceland who'd made

a breakthrough in geothermal energy all had them on,

not even covered by a sleeve.

'It's all good news, though, Doctor,' said Rory. 'Look

at everything that's been done.'

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'You can do a lot of brilliant

things with extra time. You can do a lot of brilliant things

with a fourth arm, too - doesn't mean it's a good idea to

grow one, even if you are on a planet where it's all the

rage. I should have remembered that, very hard to get

your suits re-tailored for a fourth arm... Where was I?'

'But if w e - '

'Rory. That's the trouble with borrowing. It makes

everything look good. No one wants to see what's going

on underneath because the surface is just so shiny. But

there's no point - he rounded on Rory, his eyebrows

raised, his arms flailing - 'there's no point making

everything shiny, if your whole species is going to die

out the moment they call in those debts, is there?'

Amy nodded slowly. 'We have to find a way to warn

them,' she said. 'And I think I know when well have the

perfect opportunity.'

A Symington and Blenkinsop pair was walking along

the corridor. Andrew and Sameera watched them

from behind the potted plants on the tenth floor. They

marched, in perfect unison, at an even, steady pace, like

the ticking of a watch.

'Why did we never think of seeing where they went

before?' asked Sameera.

'We were too busy competing with each other,' said

Andrew. 'Didn't have any attention for anything else. I

bet if aliens had announced they were going to blow up

the planet, we would just have carried on working.'

Sameera grinned. 'We'd have issued competing

memos on it.'

'Both of us trying to make a more complete analysis

of alien life than the other,' said Andrew, smiling.

'In the hope that one of the aliens would promote

us!' said Sameera.

Andrew laughed and then shushed himself.

Symington and Blenkinsop knocked in unison on

the door of Vanessa Laing-Randall, head of the London

office. They didn't wait for a response but walked

straight in.

Sameera and Andrew waited for a long time to see if

they'd come out again.

'What's happened to them?' hissed Sameera at last.

'Long meeting?'

'They never take that long selling anything to anyone.

What do you think they're doing in there?'

'Well, if Laing-Randall's really their boss...'

'She did arrive at the same time that all this weird

stuff started happening.'

'You mean, our amazing 300 per cent increase in

productivity?'

'Yeah,' said Sameera. 'You know who'd know?'

'Who's that?'

'Come on,' said Sameera, leaving the cover of the pot

plants and walking towards Vanessa's office.

Jane Blythe sat behind the most efficiently organised

desk Sameera had ever seen. The pens were perfectly

lined up on a side return, with a mosaic of sticky notes

in different colours in tessellated order. There was a

wall calendar behind her on which each event had

been typed on a label-maker. The pins on the pinboard

were arranged by colour. Nonetheless, Jane Blythe was

distraught.

'I'm so glad someone's finally asked me about those

weird men,' she said, on the verge of tears. Her shoulders

shook in her business suit jacket and the pearls around

her neck trembled.

'They come in here, they go into Vanessa's office -'

she pointed to the door at the far end of her own office

- 'and they never come out! I don't understand it. And

then they come in again, and again, and again.'

Sameera and Andrew nodded sympathetically. It

hadn't taken much to get Jane to talk to them; it was as if

she'd been waiting for someone to share her fears with.

'Have you ever seen what they do in there?' asked

Andrew.

Jane shook her head. 'I'm under strict orders from

Vanessa never to go into the office when she's not

there... She's very serious about it. I've never had a boss

like her before. All the other executives I've worked

for liked it when I rearranged their offices, you know

-' she motioned to her obsessive-compulsive stationery

arrangement - 'neatly. And answered their letters, and

dealt with their appointment diaries...'

"There's something in there she doesn't want you

to see, obviously,' said Sameera. 'We're going to take a

look.'

The door wasn't locked, that was the odd thing.

Vanessa Laing-Randall had obviously thought that her

strict instructions to her assistant were enough to keep

her out. And there was no one in the office at all.

'Where did they go?' asked Sameera.

Jane Blythe, hovering nervously at the door, said, 'I

never know. They never come out.'

'Maybe,' Andrew muttered to Sameera, too low for

Jane to be able to hear, 'they travel back in time instead.

That's why we didn't see them. They left before we

arrived.'

Andrew and Sameera checked through Vanessa's

filing cabinet and laptop quickly. There wasn't anything

obvious, no files labelled 'Top Secret Evil Alien Plans'

or even 'What I Plan To Do With Everyone's Time Once

I've Collected All Of It'. There was a locked door at the

far side of her office, though.

'What's through here?' asked Sameera.

Jane was standing just over the threshold, clearly

terrified to be in the room without permission. 'I, um,

I... I'm not allowed in there.'

'Come on, Jane, surely you know where she keeps

the key? PAs know more than their bosses, we all know

that,' said Andrew.

Jane hunched her shoulders with anxiety. 'Did you...

I mean... um, have you spoken to anyone else about

this?'

'A few of us have talked about it,' said Andrew,

hunting through Vanessa's desk drawers for a key.

'And do any of you know what's going on?' Jane's

voice was high-pitched with nerves.

'There's this one guy,' said Andrew distractedly,

trying to peer behind a cabinet. 'The Doctor? He seems

to know most about it all. Keeps going on about aliens,

if you can believe it.'

Jane giggled nervously. She obviously didn't believe

it at all. Then she said, 'Oh,' very quietly. And then

again, louder. 'Oh.' With a jangle of terror in her voice.

Andrew and Sameera looked up.

Standing behind her were a Symington and

Blenkinsop.

'Oh dear,' said Mr Symington.

'Well said,' said Mr Blenkinsop.

'I do believe that these young people...'

'So young, so naive, so full of promise.'

'Indeed, Mr Blenkinsop, indeed, I do believe that

these naive young people are attempting to steal private

property.'

'To gain access without permission.'

'A serious crime.'

'And as they well know,' said Mr Symington,

'committing any such crime will cause the immediate

withdrawal of all loaned time.'

'What a terrible, terrible shame,' said Mr Blenkinsop,

opening his shark mouth very wide.

Chapter

16

Jane Blythe acted more quickly than Sameera or Andrew

would have believed possible. Seeing the hideous

transforming faces of Symington and Blenkinsop behind

her, she jumped forward into Vanessa Laing-Randall's

office and slammed the door hard behind her. She

locked it and turned round, staring wildly at Sameera

and Andrew.

'Oh,' she said. 'Oh.' Her eyes rolled back, and she

crumpled to the floor.

Something crashed into the door. Symington and

Blenkinsop were trying to get in. They were charging

into the door, banging into it, trying again and again

and again.

Sameera patted Jane's face gently. Jane's eyelids

flickered.

'Are you all right?' asked Sameera.

Jane opened her eyes slowly. 'Those really are...

aliens, aren't they?' she said.

Sameera nodded.

'Before I fainted, I thought they were turning into

sharks. Were they turning into sharks?'

Sameera shrugged. 'Maybe not actual sharks? Maybe

just that they look a bit like sharks? I guess nature finds

the same useful patterns in a lot of different places.' She

paused. 'Aliens,' she said to herself.

'And... Vanessa has something to do with them?'

'We think she's their boss,' said Andrew.

Jane blinked very rapidly.

'I know it's a shock,' said Sameera quietly, 'but we

have to find some way out of here. They're going to get

in eventually.'

'No.' Jane shook her head slowly. 'It makes sense.

Ever since Vanessa took over running the London office,

these terrible things have started happening. Like... have

you noticed how sometimes you see the same person

in two places at the same time?' She laughed slightly

hysterically. 'I thought I was going mad.'

'We've seen it, too,' said Sameera. 'Everyone's seen

it, they've just been ignoring it because it was easier

than trying to work out what's going on.'

'You know...' said Jane, slowly, 'Vanessa always

keeps the key to that door...' She nodded towards the

door at the back of the room. 'She always keeps that

door locked, always has the key with her. But once I saw

it open - I wasn't supposed to be here, I was working

late. And it was full of... I think it was full of green glass

bricks? Isn't that weird?'

Sameera and Andrew exchanged a look.

'Not weird at all,' said Sameera. 'Not even a tiny

bit weird. We need to let Amy and her friends know,

though.'

'I've called Amy and the Doctor,' said Andrew.

'They're on their way. They might get here in time to

help us.'

'The doctor?' said Jane weakly. 'Do I need a doctor?'

'No, he's... Well...' Andrew looked at Sameera.

'Yeah, we think he's an alien as well, to be honest. He

seems to know a lot about time travel.'

'Amy said they travel in time with him,' said

Sameera.

'Yeah, they seemed to know everything about what's

going on here. Talked about "Time Harvesters"...'

Jane's eyes opened very wide.

The banging at the door halted for a few seconds.

They stared suspiciously at the door, wondering if the

Symington and Blenkinsop had given up. But then it

resumed. There was longer between each bang but the

sounds were louder. They were taking run-ups.

'Why do you think they haven't just come back in

time to get here before us?' Andrew murmured, eyeing

the door.

Jane said, 'I heard Vanessa say to one of them once

that the office was... shielded? Is that the word? Because

of the storage dangers?'

Sameera nodded. 'That makes sense. Still, they'll get

in here soon enough.'

Jane looked at them both. 'You trust him, this Doctor?

You trust him with your life?'

Andrew looked at Sameera. She had a funny half-

smile on her face. He'd seen it on her in meetings when

she knew she had the winning argument and was just

waiting for her moment to use it. He hadn't realised

how well he knew her face until just then.

'Well,' said Sameera, 'I trust him a hell of a lot more

than I trust most of the people who work in this bank.'

'Can he save us?' said Jane. 'The Bank? Or the world?

If you get to him and tell him what you know about

Vanessa, will he be able to save us?'

Andrew opened his mouth and closed it again. In

his work at the Bank, his job had always been to talk

everything up, to say that things were going to be better

than they really were. But he was never going to do that

again.

'I don't know,' he said at last, 'but I don't think

anyone else can do it.'

'You're going to bring him here?' Jane asked.

'He's on his way,' said Sameera.

'OK then,' said Jane.

Above her head, there were two almighty bangs as

Symington and Blenkinsop took another run-up. The

wood around the lock was starting to splinter.

'We don't have much time,' she said, 'but I know

what to do.'

Nadia's watch was sparking purple and green. She

stared at it. She was getting younger now, younger

by the minute, by the second, she could feel it. It had

happened so many times before, but each time, in each

direction, it felt sickeningly wrong.

Rory was pulling her wheelchair into the goods lift at

Lexington Bank. A wheel had stuck, she was bumping in

her seat. The motion was doing something to the watch,

something in it was jogging loose she could feel it and

with it...

'Doctor!' she said, and her voice was higher than she'd

expected, and lighter. 'Doctor, something's happening!'

'Right,' said the Doctor. 'Let's see if we can do

something about that.'

He tinkered with her watch again with his little pen-

like laser device. He rattled her wrist, then gave it one

extra burst. She felt another lurch begin in her cells.

'Good,' he said. 'That ought to... Hmmm. That

wasn't supposed to happen.'

'Doctor, she's—' began Rory.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'I can see that.'

'What's happened?' said Nadia, and her voice was so

high-pitched and childlike that it startled her.

'You're um...' began Amy, wrinkling her brow, 'I

don't know how to tell you this but you're, um...'

'You're about 10,' said the Doctor. 'Well have to fix

it, but not right now. Come on, at least we can leave the

wheelchair.'

They set off at a sprint up the stairs. And Nadia, more

full of energy at least than she'd been for years, began to

run with them.

In the outer office, Symington and Blenkinsop roared at

each other with their shark faces. They could feel that

the door was starting to give way. They were exultant.

They would have been infinitely patient; if the door had

taken ten years to break down they would have given

the time to it, but the moment of triumph was near.

They sniffed the air with their blunt noses and scented

blood. They charged again, running towards the door,

heads down, noses forward. Three or four more good

runs would do it.

They ran and braced their heads for the impact and

hurtled forward, but when the blow came the door was

a lot more yielding than they'd expected. It crumpled

forward, giving no resistance. It had been unlocked

from the inside. The door burst open, half off its hinges.

Behind the desk, at the far end of the room, Jane Blythe

was sitting, smiling faintly.

Symington and Blenkinsop crashed through into the

room, stumbling and dazed. They focused on Jane and

advanced, roaring. Behind them, Andrew and Sameera

quietly tiptoed through the open door, into the outer

office. Symington and Blenkinsop's faces morphed back

into their polite, deadly human forms. They advanced

on Jane.

'You have concealed wanton criminals,' said Mr

Blenkinsop.

'Come now,' said Mr Symington, 'tell us where

you've hidden them.'

'I'm afraid that we shall have to take matters into our

own hands,' said Mr Blenkinsop.

'We have no other choice,' said Mr Symington,

tipping his head to the side like a predator eyeing its

prey.

'We usually try to be polite.'

'Courteous.'

'We go out of our way. But in a case like this.

'I'm afraid,' said Mr Symington, 'that the gloves are

off.' His skin turned greyer and greyer.

'We have to go back and help,' whispered Sameera

as Andrew dragged her past Jane's neatly ordered post-

it notes towards the door of the outer office.

'There's nothing we can do,' whispered Andrew.

'We have to find the Doctor and tell him what's going

on here.'

'But we—'

There was a piercing scream from the inner office.

'They're going to kill her! And she never even had

one of the watches!'

'There's nothing we can do,' said Andrew. 'If we go

back, they'll kill us too. Come on, before they find us!'

He put his arm around her shoulders and half-led,

half-dragged her to the lift. And behind them there was

a sound of screaming, eventually overwhelmed by the

noise of crunching bones.

In the library of Lexington Bank's London office,

workmen had set up a podium for the Chancellor of

the Exchequer's visit. Chairs were lined up in rows.

Beautifully bound presentation copies of the Bank's

annual report were on each chair - someone had worked

several nights at once to get those done in time. Television

cameras were there too, trained on the podium where

the Chancellor would deliver his speech. And behind

the stage, an urgent whispered conversation was taking

place.

'It was horrible,' said Sameera. 'We could hear them

eating her.'

'How can they do that, Doctor?' asked Andrew. 'I

thought they had to work according to contracts? If you

never borrowed from them, they couldn't touch you. I

thought... I thought it was all our fault.'

Sameera caught his hand and squeezed it for a

moment.

'Sounds like they've changed the way they operate,'

said the Doctor. 'Plus, have you noticed that none of

them are anywhere about?'

'Yeah, we noticed,' said Andrew. 'We expected they'd

follow us, thought we'd be on the run like all of you.'

He looked around. The thin orange glowing-pencil

line was drawn around the Doctor, Rory and Amy from

Nadia's watch. Sameera and Andrew had taken the

change in Nadia quite well, considering.

'You brought a child with you... to a bank full of

aliens?' Sameera had asked.

'I'm not a child, I'm the Head of Marketing,' Nadia

had said, and Sameera had stared at her, then shrugged,

deciding to accept it.

'Do you think they're planning something, Doctor?'

asked Rory.

The Doctor shrugged.

'Probably. They've probably already planned

something.'

He peeped round the black material forming the

backdrop of the stage.

The television crew were testing their equipment.

'One two, one two,' said a woman into a microphone.

'Did you pick that up OK, Steve?'

The Doctor turned his attention to the centre of the

atrium, with its great twisted-glass sculpture. He stared

up at it.

'So we all know what we're here to do, right?' said

Amy.

Rory nodded. 'We have to let the world know what's

going on, before everyone's wearing those watches.'

Lexington Bank employees started to file into the

hall. The place was going to be packed. No one would

be able to tell who was supposed to be here and who

wasn't.

'Time for our cue, then,' said Andrew.

'Let's go,' said Sameera, and they walked towards

their positions near to the podium.

From the other side of the fabric backdrop, two men

in smart suits listened to the conversation, watched

Andrew and Sameera walk in and take up their seats on

the aisle in front of the stage.

'How very interesting, don't you think, Mr

Symington?'

'A conversation with an invisible entity.'

'Partially visible, Mr Symington, partially visible.'

'Quite so. Intermittently perceptible, intermittently

quite vanished.'

'Curious.' Mr Blenkinsop tipped his head to the side.

'Do you think that this could have anything to do with

this Doctor, of whom we have heard so much?'

'So much, Mr Blenkinsop, but not nearly enough.'

'I certainly think we need to hear a great deal more

about him.'

'And to see him. Really to come to understand him.'

'Indeed. My guess is that he will make a very valuable

acquaintance for us.'

'Very valuable indeed,' said Mr Symington, smiling.

Chapter

17

As his car drove past St Paul's Cathedral, the Chancellor of

the Exchequer was running through his final notes. It

had been a good year so far, broadly speaking. After the

first six months of 2007, the economy was booming, the

City was doing well, and Lexington Bank was a model

of efficiency and work-life balance. The Chancellor was

pleased. The Bank would be the perfect place, and this

the perfect time, for a speech about Britain's sustainable

economic future and the end of the cycle of boom and

bust. He checked the time with his aide. They were a

couple of minutes ahead of schedule. Marvellous. An

hour to deliver the speech now, after that a meeting with

the Prime Minister, then an early dinner before tackling

some of those red boxes. Plus, his wife had mentioned

some wonderful watch she'd picked up that she was

longing to show him that evening.

The car pulled up outside the back entrance of

Lexington Bank. The Senior Vice-President of the London

office was there to greet him - Vanessa Laing-Randall

had unfortunately been called away on urgent business.

But everything else was running like clockwork. A brief

set of handshakes. A photoshoot with the Bank's in-

house photographer. A few moments behind the curtain

at the back of the stage to make sure his notes were in

the right order and wonder, very briefly, who that odd

man in the tweed jacket was. And then an arm at his

elbow, a muttered 'This way, Chancellor, don't trip on

the cable,' and the bright lights of the TV cameras and a

speech to deliver.

Loitering by the television cameras - and flirting idly

with the cameramen - Amy waited for the red light

that meant 'live' to go on. The Doctor had told her she

could get a few metres away from Nadia without the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops being able to see her, but

not much further than that. It was all right - she didn't

have to go far, and she'd worked out what she was going

to do.

The light went red. The cameraman cocked his finger

by his ear and pointed to the Chancellor at the podium.

It was only live on the Parliamentary News channel, but

as soon as they'd heard what Amy had to say, the story

would be all around the world.

'I'm delighted,' the Chancellor was saying, 'to speak

today at Lexington Bank, a model of how banks across

the world should run their business and a symbol of what

makes London the greatest financial centre on Earth. The

commitment shown by Lexington to employee welfare,

and the value it generates for the economy.

Amy suddenly broke away from the cameraman and

sprinted down the main aisle. No one tried to stop her

- all the dignitaries and senior bank officials in the aisle

seats were too puzzled by what was happening to react

quickly enough. The Chancellor stumbled slightly in his

speech but gamely tried to continue as Amy leapt up in

front of him at the podium.

'The City of London is the great powerhouse of our

economy,' he read, 'and as such it is fitting that...'

'It's all lies!' shouted Amy. 'Aliens have taken over -

they're giving out watches like these,' she rolled up her

sleeve to show the watch.

'Get her down!' shouted someone. 'Security!'

Two besuited men who'd been standing quietly

behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer took him gently

by the elbows and guided him out through the curtain

to the waiting limousine - they'd been well briefed

for events like this. The cameraman was looking for

instruction from a producer standing by. Amy realised

that to the millions of people watching the television

right now she must sound insane.

'Look!' she said.

Nadia was lurking at the side of the stage. Amy

hauled the 10-year-old girl out in front of the lights.

Two security guards were thundering across the atrium

towards the gathered visitors. Rory and Andrew

stepped out smartly to head them off. Andrew tripped

one up with a chair, Rory started shouting at the other

one about something happening behind him - enough

to confuse them for a moment.

'Nadia, tell them what happened to you!'

Nadia looked straight into the eye of the camera. She

pulled down her sleeve so that her blistered arm with the

sparks still flying out of the watch were clearly visible.

'Six months ago,' she said, 'I was 40 years old. But I

was stupid. I borrowed time using this device. Look at

me now.' She shook her wrist angrily. 'Just look at me.'

They never knew whether it was the shaking that

had done it, or whether the watch, always fragile and

malfunctioning, was never going to last much longer.

But as Nadia shook her hand at the camera, as the

security guards reached up to pull Amy from behind the

podium, Nadia's watch gave out a final spurt of sparks,

made a gentle sighing noise and a series of short clicks.

Its face went dead. Nadia stared at it with horror.

The thin protective orange shield around Amy

collapsed. All around the atrium, and in all the

offices looking out onto it, dozens of heads turned

instantly towards Amy. They were all Symingtons and

Blenkinsops. Like predators scenting blood, their faces

turned towards her - blank, unsmiling, with very sharp

teeth indeed.

Sameera could see what was happening. She watched

the Symingtons and Blenkinsops approaching Amy,

who was blinded by the TV lighting.

There were only seconds left. This was the last

opportunity to show the world, and Sameera was going

to take it. She ran up onto the podium.

'Look!' she said into the TV camera. 'If you don't

believe her, watch this. I'm going to pay back the time

I've borrowed - just watch!'

Sameera looked into the lens of the camera, a

measured and thoughtful look. She brought her watch

up in front of her face. She pressed the payment button.

She felt thirty-five years heap upon her body, all the

accumulated damage of that amount of time, all the sore

joints and the stiffened sinews and the aching muscles

and the thousand different tiny pains one learns to live

with over the years, all of them descending on her in

one cataclysmic moment. She would have screamed,

but she didn't have the strength in her. She noticed her

wrinkled hands as she clung to the podium for support.

She kept looking at the camera.

'This is what they've done,' she said. 'And now

they're coming for us.'

It was instinct, it seemed. Not calculated, not well

thought out. It was the instinct of a cat unable to stop

itself twitching towards the cotton reel on a string.

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops began to run, loping

towards Amy in a single amalgamating pack, a body of

animals scenting the hot sharp smell of fear. The security

guards were helpless now, washed away by the tide of

Symingtons and Blenkinsops.

Amy backed away, pulling Nadia with her, back

behind the curtain, as Rory on one side of the podium

and Andrew and Sameera on the other side tried to

fight off the business-suited men closing in from all

directions. Behind the curtain, Amy found the Doctor

using his sonic screwdriver on the scaffolding structure

holding the curtain in place.

'That was very good, Pond, very succinct, warning

the nation, very direct I thought, you could go into

politics maybe, if the whole... professional kisser thing

doesn't work out.'

'Doctor, they're coming!'

'I know,' he said nonchalantly. 'You push over there,

I'll push here.'

He indicated a spot at the far end of the scaffolding.

Amy leaned on the weak point and pushed with all her

might. The Doctor heaved too, and the whole structure

toppled gracefully forward, carrying the billowing black

fabric down. It fell onto nine or ten of the approaching

shark-men. Amy could see them struggling under the

swathes of cloth.

But more were coming. Rory was ready with his

camera, trying to get them as they came through the

door, and the resulting bubbles full of Symingtons and

Blenkinsops blocked the entrance a bit, but of course

the bubbles popped unexpectedly, and there were more

coming, always more and more.

Andrew and Sameera were fighting hand to hand.

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops weren't hard to take

down, weren't particularly tough. They threw chairs

and lighting equipment at them, trying constantly to

keep them back. Sameera was weaker now than she had

been, but still summoned the strength to hurl a piece

of camera equipment at an approaching Symington.

She hit it in the mouth, and immediately half the other

Symingtons in the room had bloody lips and a chipped

tooth. Sameera stared for a moment before she got it.

'If you hurt one, they all get hurt!' she shouted.

Rory kicked viciously at the knee of the Blenkinsop

advancing on him. Several of the other Blenkinsops

started to limp with varying degrees of severity.

Sameera stamped on the toes of the one nearest to

her, and several others winced.

But there were too many of them, they were coming

too quickly, they were attacking from all directions and

seemed increasingly able to predict what would happen

before it happened.

'They're remembering!' shouted the Doctor, as one

of the Blenkinsops perfectly dodged a large piece of

expensive-looking video equipment Rory had thrown

at it, and the Symington behind him caught it and threw

it back.

'Look! Look at those ones at the edges!'

There were two Symingtons and Blenkinsops

standing around the sides of the library. They looked

less battle-weary than the others - their clothes were

immaculate, there were no scratches on their faces. All

the others were becoming increasingly bruised and

battered from the fight, but the ones at the edges were

fine.

'They're the earliest ones!' shouted the Doctor.

'Whatever they see, all the others remember!'

He feinted jumping to the left, behind a bookcase,

but instead jumped up onto the desk.

'Target those ones with your camera, Rory! That'll

slow them down!'

Rory turned the camera towards the Symingtons

and Blenkinsops at the edge. But as he looked, the

screen started to flash. 'WARNING,' it said, 'ONLY

ONE LUCKY ROMANCE MOMENT REMAINING.

CHOOSE CAREFULLY YOUR SWEETHEART TIMES!'

He hesitated, looking around for where he could get

the most Symingtons and Blenkinsops in one camera

bubble. And was this even the best moment to use it, he

asked himself. Mightn't they have more urgent need for

it later? So hard to know...

They knew he'd hesitate, of course, they'd seen him do

it already. And when he paused for a moment, staring at

the back of his camera, three Blenkinsops leapt forward,

pushed Rory to the ground, and grabbed Amy.

Amy struggled, screaming and kicking under the

grip of the Blenkinsop who was holding her. Its mouth

peeled back. Far too wide, far wider than any head

should be able to open. The enormous mouth began to

lower over Amy's shoulder.

'No!' shouted Rory.

A Symington put a hand on Rory's shoulder. How

had they all got so close, so quickly?

'The terms of her contract are very clear,' said Mr

Symington. 'She agreed to the contract. The terms must

be fulfilled.' He pulled Amy's wrist out and tapped at

her watch. The illuminated display flashed in the air:

'BORROWED TIME TOTAL: 21 YEARS, 1 MONTH, 16

DAYS.'

'But, but... contracts can be renegotiated.' Rory's

speech was choked. He took a deep breath. 'Take me

instead.'

The Blenkinsop looked at Rory, a sullen unblinking

expression on its shark-face.

'Rory, no,' said Amy.

'We're married,' said Rory, softly, as though she

were the only other person in the room. 'Your debts are

my debts.' He stared at the Blenkinsop. 'Her debts are

my debts. Take me.'

'No, Rory,' said Amy. 'You can't... you can't... It's

twenty years of your life, Rory, you can't...'

He shrugged and managed a lopsided smile. 'You've

always liked an older man -' he indicated the Doctor

with a tip of his head - 'you might even like me better

twenty years older.'

Blenkinsop looked between Rory and Amy. Its

teeth retracted, its head became more human. 'This

transaction is legal according to the stipulations in the

terms and conditions,' it said.

Rory held out his arm. The Blenkinsop let Amy go.

It walked towards Rory, hands reaching out. Rory took

a deep breath. Twenty years paid off all in one go was

going to hurt. He closed his eyes. He didn't see the

Doctor step deftly in front of him.

'I don't think so,' said the Doctor to the Blenkinsop.

'Doctor,' said Rory. 'There's nothing you can do,

we'll work something out, they can't take it from Amy,

she's...'

'I think you'll find,' said the Doctor to the Blenkinsop,

'that your boss won't be interested in these small fry

any more, when you tell her...' He took a deep breath.

'When you mention to her that I'm familiar with the

Time Market.'

And all the noise of fighting fell away, and all the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops were still and silent. And

the lift doors binged.

Vanessa Laing-Randall stalked out of the elevator.

'What the hell is going on here?' she shouted. 'Who

are all these people? And, might I add, who are you,

Doctor? I just had a phone call from the Doctor Schmidt

we were expecting from Zurich - he's been unavoidably

detained. So who the hell are you, and what are you

doing in my bank?'

'We know what you've been doing!' Rory shouted

at Vanessa. 'We know everything about the watches,

lending time, your loan sharks! We know everything,

and we're going to stop you!'

Vanessa looked at Rory with a mixture of anger

and bewilderment. 'I have literally no idea what you're

babbling about,' she said.

'We know why the office's work productivity has

increased 300 per cent since you got here,' shouted

Andrew.

Vanessa looked, if anything, even more confused.

'I'm a highly efficient manager,' she said. 'Operational

savings, cost analysis, motivation. The raft of measures

I've introduced mean that—'

'There's no use lying any more!' said Sameera,

'Everyone can see what you've done to me.'

Vanessa blinked. 'Done to you? I don't even know

you. I don't have any idea what you're talking about.'

The Doctor looked at Vanessa. 'No,' he said. 'I know

you don't.'

He took a step towards the lift that Vanessa had

walked out of. Its doors were still open. There was

someone in there, someone small and quiet just waiting,

half hidden in the lift.

'But you do, don't you, Jane?' he shouted.

Jane Blythe, the personal assistant, stepped out of the

shadows.

'I did wonder,' she said, 'how long it would take you

to work that one out.'

Chapter

18

Vanessa stared at Jane, her loyal assistant, the woman who'd

worked tirelessly to help her rise to the top. She thought

of all the times she'd been stumped for the perfect idea

for a pitch only to find that Jane had happened to collate

all the relevant documents for her in good time. Of how

Jane seemed able to do five days' work in an afternoon.

Of how tireless she was, how dedicated.

'Jane,' she said, 'what is going on? Do you know

these people? Is this some kind of management training

exercise I don't understand?'

'Oh, do shut up,' spat Jane.

Vanessa, who had never been spoken to like that in

her life, shut up.

'You can let them all go now,' said the Doctor, gently.

'You and I could just talk about what you're doing here -

necessary business practices I'm sure - and your sharks,'

he motioned with his head toward the creature holding

Amy, 'could stand down.'

'Oh, Doctor,' said Jane. 'You really haven't the

faintest idea what's going on here, have you? You're as

foolish as Vanessa.'

'How dare you—' began Vanessa.

'Did you really think it was all you?' said Jane. 'Your

leadership, your motivation, your clever little time-

saving tips? Emails about updating your to-do list while

brushing your teeth? Tricks for managing effective

meetings?'

'I've been highly praised by head office for my

motivational techniques. I—'

'You know nothing. Less than nothing. Did you

really think that your motivational techniques could

make people do ten days' work in an afternoon? Did

you really imagine that you were the magic factor that turned this office into a productivity machine in six

months?'

Vanessa really had thought so. 'Yes,' she said. 'I...'

And then she couldn't think of anything to follow it up

with, so she shut up again.

'You are without doubt,' Jane said, 'one of the most

self-satisfied, wilfully blind, arrogant, greedy people it

has ever been my great delight to parasitise. You have

been the perfect cover for me, and now I don't need you

any more.'

'Now just wait a second!' said Vanessa.

'You don't have to do this!' shouted the Doctor.

'Oh, Doctor,' said Jane. 'I don't have to. But I want

to.'

One of the Symingtons put its hand very politely

on Vanessa shoulder. Its jaws were slightly open, its

triangular teeth visible.

'You can't... you can't do anything to me,' said

Vanessa. 'I never wore one of these watches.'

'But you saw people wearing them, didn't you?' said

Jane. 'You saw and you said nothing, and you didn't

want to know. No one ever wants to know how the

money is made, only that they're making more.'

'But I... you can't do anything to me without a

contract.'

Jane smiled, thinly, and withdrew a slim document

from her jacket pocket. 'Did you ever think to read all

the correspondence I asked you to sign? Did you ever

stop to look at the little "sign here" flags and wonder

what you were agreeing to?'

She unfolded the paper. It was headed 'Contract

for the transfer of time,' and Vanessa Laing-Randall's

signature was clear at the bottom.

Vanessa started to squirm in the Symington's grasp.

'You can't!' she said. 'Not after everything I've done

for you, not after we rose to the top together. You can't

forget all that and—'

'Jane, don't do it this way,' said the Doctor.

'Don't-'

'Unless you want it to be Amy instead, Doctor, you'll

keep your mouth shut,' said Jane. 'You never had the

slightest idea what was going on,' she said to Vanessa,

as the Symington's shark teeth closed on Vanessa's

shoulder and her skin began to wrinkle. 'After all, a

good PA always knows more than her boss.'

Vanessa's screams rose higher and thinner, turned

into a little wailing squeak and then, as her desiccated

body twitched under the Symington's bite, into a tiny

sigh. The husk fell to the floor, light and dry as sand.

There was a long silence in the atrium.

At last, Sameera said: 'You tricked us. We tried to

help you, and you tricked us.'

'Oh, you do catch on fast,' said Jane.

'You can't win!' shouted Sameera. 'Everyone in the

world has seen this broadcast! Everyone knows what

you're doing now - no one will borrow any more time

from you.'

Jane looked at Sameera's wrinkled face. 'Time hasn't

been kind to you, my dear.'

Andrew put his arm around Sameera's shoulders.

'You can't fool anyone now,' he said. 'This broadcast

has gone worldwide.'

Jane shook her head. 'Oh,' she said, 'I'm afraid not.

You see, one or two of us heard what you were about to

do. We blocked the transmission. The only people who

saw your noble gesture were the people in this building.

You can't stop me that way, I'm afraid. We will always

be one step ahead of you. Time travel - makes plots so

very difficult to foil.'

Andrew stood with his arms around Sameera as she

stared ahead, blinking hard to keep the tears back.

'Now, Doctor.' Jane smiled thinly. 'What was that

you were saying to my esteemed colleagues here about

the Time Market?'

'Do you really mean "colleagues"? It's just that I was

beginning to suspect that...'

'You're very perspicacious.'

'You're all the same organism, aren't you? Head and

tails, or rather in your case tail and heads. Are you the

earliest?'

Jane smiled. The Symingtons and Blenkinsops smiled

too, unnerving grins breaking out on a hundred scarred

and bruised faces.

Too, too clever. I shall be delighted to discover

exactly where you found all this out... and then go back

in time to make sure you never find it out in the first

place. Yes, I'm the first. These are all my... what can I

call us?'

Tendrils?' volunteered a Symington.

'Fronds?' suggested a Blenkinsop.

'Appendages?' offered another.

'Excrescences?' said yet another.

'Something like that,' said Jane, patting a Symington

gently on the arm. 'I am a tree trunk and these are the

branches. Aren't they lovely? Back and forth, back and

forth in time, constantly growing and expanding, each

new one remembering everything the previous ones

have experienced. Does it get boring, dears?'

'Not at all,' smiled the Symington, 'we all work

together for the good of the team, wasn't that Vanessa

Laing-Randall's motto?'

'Quite right. We're all,' said Jane, 'exceptionally good

team players. Now, back to that delicious thing you

mentioned earlier, Doctor.'

Treacle tart? Did I say treacle tart? I can't remember

if I did, though treacle tarts are delicious. Nice sculpture

you've got there,' said the Doctor, staring at the glass

shape in the atrium. 'I've kept on wondering what it was

about it that appealed to me so much, and now I think

I begin to understand. Because you haven't actually

called in much of the time you're owed, have you? You

haven't—'

A Blenkinsop grabbed Amy's left arm and twisted it

behind her back until she screamed out.

Time Market,' said Jane again. 'Do go on, I have all

the time in the world.'

The Doctor stared at Jane. He turned to look at Rory,

still brandishing his camera, and Amy struggling in the

Blenkinsop's grip.

'Rory, Amy,' he said. 'You know I trust you

implicitly.'

'Doctor?' said Rory, in a worried tone.

'If I tell you what I know, Jane,' said the Doctor, 'will

you forgive Amy's debt? Will you let her go free?'

'Well that depends, Doctor, on what you've got

to tell. After all, she has racked up quite substantial

borrowings.' Jane tapped on her smartphone and drew

in breath sharply over her teeth. 'Twenty-five years,

goodness me. Do you think you could pay that off for

her, Doctor?'

The Doctor shrugged. 'If I promise to pay it off and

tell you what I know, will you let her go?'

Jane shrugged. 'I don't see why not. Now tell me.'

'First let her go.'

The Blenkinsop holding Amy dragged her over to

the Doctor and held out her watch arm to him.

'To indicate that you are paying off this being's time

debts and agree to assume those debts yourself, press

here.'

A button on the watch illuminated.

'Careful, Doctor,' said Jane. 'Twenty-five years all in

one go can smart, you know.'

The Doctor looked Jane directly in the eye and

pressed the button.

Amy's watch strap undid itself.

The watch fell to the floor, the glass face shattered on

the marble tiles.

The Doctor didn't flinch.

'But you...' Jane blinked, unsure of herself for the

first time since she'd revealed herself. She took a pace

towards him. 'You didn't age.'

The Doctor looked uncomfortable. He said nothing.

Amy wondered if he'd revealed too much.

All the Symingtons and Blenkinsops were staring

at the Doctor now. Rory noticed that all of them were

breathing in unison. In and out, in and out. Chests rising

and falling, breathing fast with excitement.

Jane walked up to the Doctor, touched the cuff of

his sleeve, the back of his hand with a light, reverent

gesture.

'It can't be. They told me all of you were gone,' she

said. 'They swore there were none left and never would

be or would have been, ever again.'

'Hey,' said the Doctor, snatching his hand away,

'don't paw. And don't believe everything you hear.'

'You're a...'

The Doctor shrugged. 'Yeah, I know. Unicom.'

Jane's voice was a dazed whisper. 'Time Lord. I did

not think to live so long.'

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops rearranged themselves

on the floor of the building. It wasn't that they moved. It

was more that they had suddenly always been in these

new positions. Across the exits, flanking Jane, all of

them facing the Doctor, as if they couldn't bear to look

at anything else.

Doctor, what's going on?' asked Amy.

The Doctor smiled at her. 'I think our friend the

Time Harvester here has just worked out how to make a

killing on the market.'

'A mere formality, Doctor,' said Jane. 'You and I both

understand that no physical prison can hold you. It

would be as if a two-dimensional creature drew a circle

around your feet and imagined that it had trapped

you.'

'Oh, I wouldn't say that,' said the Doctor. 'All depends

an what kind of locks they put on.'

'But you...'

The Doctor sighed 'Come on, then. Enough of the

standing around gawping. I'm not a circus freak. Let's

see... I don't know, will you let Andrew here go if I wear

one of your watches?'

'You would wear... I don't understand.'

'Can't see how to make it any simpler. Andrew owes

you a notional 55,000 years, probably gone up a bit in

the past few hours actually, how long has it been since

we checked Andrew? Five hours? Maybe you owe them

100,000 years, these things mount up quickly. So let's

say, you put a watch on me, tap directly into my time

stream, and in exchange you forgive Andrew his debt?

And then well talk about the rest of the human race -

obviously I'm not going to undervalue myself.'

'I...' Jane opened and closed her mouth a couple of

times, then motioned to a Symington, who, very gently

and cautiously, as if expecting some kind of trap, took

a watch from his pocket and fastened it around the

Doctor's wrist Andrew's watch strap unfastened itself-

he just managed to catch it before it hit the floor.

'I'll take that I think, Andrew,' said the Doctor, and

put Andrew's discarded watch around his right wrist.

'Doctor, what are you doing?' muttered Amy.

The Doctor shrugged. 'At least you're all free now.

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops can't do anything

to you at all now you don't owe them time. Well, they

can attack you, but they can't just suddenly take away

all your time. And...' the Doctor motioned to the huge

glass sculpture and dropped his voice very low, so that

only Amy could hear 'and I suspect that may be what

Sameera would call a liquidity fund. You can work

out the rest I don't know what you'll do without me,

Amy,' he said, raising his voice again, 'but I know that

whatever it is, it'll be smashing.'

A Symington and a Blenkinsop put a cold hand on

each of the Doctor's shoulders.

'You really must come with us now, Doctor,' said

Jane. 'I know some people who'll be very excited to see

you.'

Amy had felt broken-hearted before. Miserable, even

depressed. But there was no feeling she could imagine

worse than the desolate hollowness of watching Jane

and her Symington-and-Blenkinsop army lead the

Doctor away across the atrium.

'Where do you think they're taking him?' muttered

Rory.

Amy shrugged.

At the far end of the atrium, a Blenkinsop patted

the Doctor down with surprising courtesy. Blenkinsop

removed several objects from the Doctor's pockets

and put them on the floor. He turned back to Jane and

nodded.

Amy had expected the escort party to turn out

into the street, or perhaps summon a spaceship or

something. But, she realised, she'd been thinking three-

dimensionally again - an annoying habit of her brain. As

they reached the far side of the building, Jane turned a

dial on the Doctor's watch, and they all just vanished. In

the spot where they'd been was just a small heap of the

Doctor's belongings - an apple, some string, a swanee

whistle and the sonic screwdriver.

'Doesn't matter where they're taking him,' said Amy,

staring down at the sad little heap. 'I think the important

question is: "When?"'

The building was all but deserted now. The street had

been cordoned off by the police, who were interviewing

the security guards, the people responsible for the

outside broadcast and senior staff. No one was

bothering about anyone junior - a lot of people had

left. Even if Sameera's self-sacrificing act had only been

broadcast to the televisions in conference rooms around

the building, it had been enough for everyone who'd

borrowed time to understand that something bad was

going on. And almost everyone who hadn't borrowed

any still understood that there'd been a massive fight at

the Chancellor's speech, and that this probably meant

that no one would notice if they sneaked off a bit early to

deal with something vital like spending time with their

children, sleeping for more than four consecutive hours

or seeing someone about those recurrent chest pains.

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops seemed mostly

to have gone too - apart from a few dozen stationed at

key points around the building, Amy, Rory, Sameera

and Andrew found that they could walk the halls

mostly without being disturbed. But instead they sat in

Andrew's office disconsolately.

'He's given us a mission,' said Amy.

'He could be dead,' said Rory.

'He's not dead,' said Amy.

'He could be...'

'I'd know,' said Amy. 'If he was dead, I'd know. OK?

And he's not.'

Andrew looked out of his window at the glass

sculpture in the atrium.

'So we're supposed to, what, destroy some advanced

alien technology?' said Andrew. Amy noticed that

Andrew's hand was still casually resting on Sameera's

shoulder. Even though she was about 65 now - that was

some kind of friendship.

'And what good is it going to do? She's got the

Doctor,' said Rory.

Amy shrugged.

'The Doctor said something about a "liquidity fund",'

she said, 'but I don't know what that is.'

Andrew and Sameera looked at each other.

'A... liquidity fund...' murmured Andrew.

'It makes sense,' said Sameera.

'What is it?' said Rory.

'No, look,' said Sameera. 'Jane hasn't called in all

the debts yet, right? Most people are still wearing the

watches and walking around perfectly normally. They

might owe 55,000 years -' Andrew grimaced - 'but so

far they haven't had to repay a minute, right?'

'Right.'

'So it's like she kind of "has" that time - in the sense

that people owe it to her - but she can't use it because

she hasn't actually taken it. It's sort of... frozen. Solid.

Can't move like a liquid.'

'Right!' said Amy, finally understanding. 'So how is

she moving through time? How are the Symingtons and

Blenkinsops able to fold back on themselves in time?

She can't be doing all that with the few accounts she's

called in.'

'She must have some time stored up already,'

said Andrew. 'Maybe she had it before, maybe she's

borrowed it from somewhere else, some kind of Time

Market? It doesn't matter - the point is she needs a pool

of time that she can actually use. Which is a liquidity

fund.'

'So if we smashed it...' said Amy, 'I don't know how,

well work that out, but if we smashed it somehow...'

'It wouldn't affect the fact that loads of people still

owe her time,' said Sameera.

'But it could cause her some problems moving around,

might get rid of a few Symingtons and Blenkinsops

even,' said Andrew.

'A liquidity crisis,' said Sameera, 'can be very nasty.'

'But seriously, it's going to be protected, isn't it?'

said Rory.

Sameera nodded. 'He's got a point. It is advanced

technology.'

'Really advanced,' said Andrew. 'We don't

understand how any of the bits of it work.'

'What's that on your desk?' said Amy.

Andrew glanced over to his desk. His beloved eBook

reader was sitting in its protective sleeve on top of a pile

of papers. He'd saved up for that reader and the envious

looks it got from other commuters gave him great joy.

'My eBook reader?' he said.

'Do you know how it works?' said Amy.

'I... um... it's a computer? And a touchscreen?'

'But you don't know how any of the bits of it work,

not on the inside?'

Andrew shook his head.

'But that's different, that's...'

Amy reached over and grabbed the eBook reader.

She held it above her head with both hands and before

any of the others had time to react, she brought it down

hard on the edge of the desk.

There was a loud crunching bang. The screen

smashed into crazed fragments. Tiny pieces of glass

flew across the desk. Amy flipped the reader back

over in her hands. The screen was half-detached in one

corner. It was totally destroyed. Andrew stared at her

with disbelieving wide eyes.

'Just because you don't know how something

works,' she said, 'doesn't mean you can't break it. And

don't look at me like that,' she said to Andrew. 'You

borrowed 55,000 years from some aliens. That reader

was just collateral damage. Come on, let's go and break

some glass.'

Chapter

19

The view on the monitors was dark. Occasionally, a line

of numbers scrolled past, faster than any human eye

could have followed them. But mostly, it was dark. It

was dark, in a sense, all the time. But then, 'all the time'

is a relative concept. A lot can happen in a slice of time

too infinitesimally small to be measured on any human

scale. So, occasionally there was a burst of frenetic

activity. But mostly, it was dark.

The monitors were set up around a central well, which

was empty. Well, mostly it was empty. Occasionally, for

an infinitely tiny period of time, it was more full than

would have been possible if some very advanced trans-

dimensional physics weren't being used.

Officially, no one had stood in that hall - with its

huge glass domes radiating a tiny amount of light, and

the enormous tall arched windows with their view of

three blood-red moons - for a very long time. Everything

that had ever happened there had happened in the past.

There were occasional checks and monitors to make

sure that remained the case. A cordon in time had been

placed around it.

But time travel is sadly far more complicated than

that, and even the Shadow Proclamation had failed

fully to understand what a very clever team of experts

with extremely advanced degrees were able to do by

repackaging time. A vast amount of time engineering and

accountancy had gone into making sure that everything

that would ever happen here stayed in the past.

Once you can slow down time, almost anything is

possible.

The market was due to be open between 24:26:95:01:03

and 24:26:95:01:04, Galactic Standard time. This meant a

certain amount of preparation. For subjective days, the

participants had been arriving or setting up their remote

links. The market operators - strictly hush-hush, there

was nothing remotely legal about this operation - had

been setting up the rules of operation. They'd taken

their time over it. At least two additional milliseconds

on either side of the market open window. They'd heard

there was something special coming in. They'd wanted

to make a fuss.

So, at the appointed moment, there was a raised

platform made of glass in the centre of the trading floor.

And around the raised platform were rows and rows of

glass bricks, each one with a warm beating movement at

its centre. The ripple of owed time slowly accumulating.

Most of the beings in this room could read a glass brick as

easily as Andrew Brown could have read a newspaper.

These blocks read very well indeed. There was time to

be made here, they could feel it. And that was before the

star attraction was shown to the crowd.

On the raised platform was a thin glass sheet. A

screen, viewable from both sides. And, in the brief

millisecond that the whole place became alive with

traders, the screen flickered into life. And all the little

screens around the outside turned on too. They all

showed the same image, broadcast from a storage room

under the Millennium Dome in London, Earth. It was a

man, fastened to a time-harvesting device, held at the

throat and the wrists and the ankles. The room drew a

quick, sharp breath. Some of them had enough residual

instinct to know what they were looking at before the

voice came over the speakers and told them.

'This,' said the voice of the thing that had called itself

Jane Blythe, 'is the last of the Time Lords.'

Her face came into view at the edge of the screen, a

thin smile on her lips.

'The very last Time Lord to survive the Time War,'

she said. 'What am I bid?'

And then a great clamour rose up from the creatures

in the pit, a sort of wailing, aching, sobbing shout,

something between grief and desire and mad excited

hysteria. And the trading began.

There was an inevitable flurry of early bids. That was

only natural. It wasn't even clear whether Jane Blythe

wanted to sell the Time Lord, but a good round of early

bidding would give a rough idea of what buyers were

willing to pay for him - an estimate of value. They

settled at around five inhabited galaxies - about fifteen

sextillion lives - before anyone even bothered to ask the

obvious questions.

'What's the mileage of this Time Lord? How do we

even know he is one?' came the message over the wires

from several of the highest bidders at once.

It was unlikely that anyone would try to cheat the

market - the penalties were too severe, the price exacted,

in both directions in time, too high for many to try. But a

Time Lord? One slightly used Time Lord? The possible

rewards might be enough to make someone young

enough and stupid enough give it a go.

'How did you find him?' they said.

'What did you pay for him?' one asked.

'Where can we get another one?' someone joked.

And eventually an Old Member of the market,

someone who remembered how it had been long ago

asked a question. This member could still recall when the

market had sold regenerations piled high like apples on

a grocer's stall, when renegade Time Lords - and there

had been a few - had risked a great deal to purchase

dirty time in this highly respectable chamber. This Old

Member typed a request into a keypad with a yellowed

claw. It flashed up on the screen for all to see.

'Let the Time Lord speak,' it said.

This was extremely irregular. This was a market on

which lives were bought and sold, yes, but amalgamated,

in great slices, as if they'd been pressed together and

turned into a pate. No one wanted to see the individual

people who made up those slices of life-terrine. No one

wanted to hear them speak. Imagine if they objected! Of

course, they should have done that before they agreed to

sign whatever contract it had been to borrow whatever

they'd borrowed at the expense of their very lives. No

one whose life was traded on this market ever addressed

the trading floor.

But this was a unique situation. A convocation was

held, instantly, between a dozen different time-traders,

the grand old beings of the market. And it was agreed.

In this case - and seeing that the Time Harvester in

question was using the Time Lord as collateral for her

various borrowings even now - it seemed the most

sensible course of action. The message was relayed.

'The Time Lord will speak.'

Some things are obvious when you think of them. So

obvious that the moment you've thought them, it's hard

to imagine how you managed not to see them before.

Like seeing a face in the pattern of the curtains, like

finding out you've been mispronouncing a word all

your life. Like imagining that house prices will go on

rising for ever, and basing all your financial calculations

on that. Some vulnerabilities are invisible until you see

them, and once you see them you can't begin to imagine

how the people in charge haven't seen them too. You

can't believe that they haven't already taken action to

prevent anyone exploiting them. Some weaknesses in

the system are so big that once you notice them, you

can't see anything else.

'They must have thought of this,' said Andrew,

grappling with a metal handle already slippery from

sweat. 'They'll have put up a force field or something'.

'Put your back into it,' said Amy. She was directing

operations, which Andrew noticed meant that she

wasn't actually doing any of the lifting. Even Sameera

and 10-year-old Nadia were carrying a couple of metal

drawers each. 'We've got to get it done fast or they'll all

see us and come back to now and stop us.'

'But,' said Rory, heaving on the rope he'd nicked

from the mailroom and slung around the filing cabinet,

'as they're not here, doesn't that mean they definitely

don't come and stop us?'

Amy gave him one of her devastating wide-eyed

hard stares. 'Doesn't work like that,' she said, 'and you

know it. If they come back, well just have two memories

of right now. Or something. And anyway, they might be

back at any time, so heave!'

There was no way to get to the glass sculpture from

below, that was certain. Nadia had gone to check it out.

A ring of Symingtons and Blenkinsops surrounded

the sculpture, weaving and shifting like fish in water,

blending into each other and re-separating again and

again. But the sculpture reached its icy glass fingers up

all the way to the eighth floor through the central atrium

of the building. All the offices looked out onto it. And

on the tenth floor - the executives' floor, abandoned

now by all the staff - there was a huge round balcony

looking down past all the floors onto the sculpture. An

unguarded balcony with a waist-high rail.

Amy had stood at that rail when she'd seen Brian

Edelman collapse. She'd looked down onto the sculpture,

seen the tiny flickering movement at the centre of it.

She'd wondered even then why no one had ever thrown

a brick down on it. She just had that kind of brain.

'How much further?' panted Rory.

Amy squinted down the corridor, pouting.

'Maybe another six metres?'

Rory and Andrew groaned in unison.

'You can do it!' said Sameera, lending her muscles

to give the filing cabinet another heave. They'd picked

the biggest, heaviest one they could find. It'd be great at

smashing stuff - not so easy to move, though.

'Come on,' said Nadia, 'or they'll find us!'

'Oh dear,' said Mr Blenkinsop, very softly, just

behind her.

The conversation, of course, was not like a normal

conversation. No creature that can travel in time would

ever negotiate in a normal way. Why would you, when

you can travel forwards to see what position the other

side is going to negotiate from, and backwards to pre-

empt them?

Questions were put, via the system. They were

deemed unsuitable. They were changed, in the past,

to something more satisfactory. Jane scrutinised the

Doctor's answers, blocked him from replying in ways

she thought would be unsatisfactory. They tried again.

And again. And again. The same tiny piece of time - ask

a question, get an answer - over and over again.

'Don't you get bored,' asked the Doctor, 'of trying

to engineer one perfect moment in time? Can't you just

wait and see what happens, like everyone else does?'

Jane shrugged. 'Time Lords always did abdicate their

responsibility for almost everything. Why is it that you

keep on pretending to be normal?'

'Not pretend,' said the Doctor. 'I've never pretended.

Almost everyone in the universe lives forwards. One

thing, then the next, then the next. No second chances,

no revisiting. Always onwards. It's better, in the end.

Something has to die for something new to be able to

live. Like regeneration. How long have you been living

this same old looped existence?'

She made her demand again: 'Prove to us that you're

a Time Lord.'

'Shan't,' he said.

She went back and tried again.

They were surrounded, suddenly, by ever-multiplying

Symingtons and Blenkinsops. The creatures were

muttering to each other, some entirely human, some

entirely shark, some between one state and the other.

'I do think,' said a Symington, 'that attempts to

destroy private property must constitute a breach of

contract.'

'And even if not,' said a Blenkinsop, 'we must do our

civic duty.'

Amy looked round wildly. They were advancing up

the corridor behind them and from both sides. They'd bo

on them in seconds.

'Rory! Throw me the camera!' shouted Amy. 'We

haven't got any time!'

'There are too many of them!' shouted Rory. 'And

there's only one picture left!'

Amy stared hard at him. 'I've got an idea.'

He threw her the camera, kicking a Symington hard

in the shins as he did.

Amy grabbed the camera, but didn't point it towards

the attacking Symingtons and Blenkinsops. She pointed

it at herself, and at Rory, and at Andrew and Sameera

and Nadia, and the filing cabinet. And she clicked the

button, but she didn't release it. Instead, holding it

down, she ran.

She ran forward, towards the rail around the balcony,

not daring to look behind her to see if what she'd done

was working. When she reached the balcony she held

the camera out as far as she could over the rail and then

dropped it. It hung in midair, suspended by its own

Lucky Romance Time Bubble. She looked back. It had

worked.

Instead of a spherical bubble, the camera had created

a long wobbling tube, stretching from where Rory,

Nadia, Andrew and Sameera were standing with the

filing cabinet all the way to the balcony and over the rail

so that the camera was hanging directly above the glass

sculpture.

Outside the bubble, the Symingtons and Blenkinsops

were gnashing their teeth in slow-motion fury. Of

course, thought Amy, the camera prolonged moments,

so things outside seemed to be slowed down. To the

Symingtons and Blenkinsops they'd look as if they were

working at a furious pace.

Rory and Andrew looked at the bubble-tunnel

around them.

'Wow,' said Rory. 'That is clever.'

'Amazing,' said Nadia, poking at the bubble with her

foot, then her hand, then her tongue.

'I didn't know it'd work,' said Amy.

'Is that... alien technology again?' said Andrew.

'Nah,' said Amy. 'Earth, fifty-first century. Come on,

put your back into it, it could collapse at any moment!'

'You've borrowed heavily from the market, haven't you?'

said the Doctor in one of those many conversations that

never happened.

Jane shrugged. 'Leverage. Now I've got you, I'll make

it all back and more.'

'That's how you can do all your time tricks. The time

of everyone on Earth wouldn't have been enough to

bring both of us back here. You've borrowed more time

than those watch-contracts are actually worth.'

'Things are worth what people are willing to pay for

them. Right now, the members of this market are willing

to pay a lot for those contracts, and for you.'

The Doctor smiled and said nothing. They went back

and Jane tried again.

In fact, there were three subjective hours before the

camera's final time bubble collapsed. Enough time for

Rory to start complaining, complain at full volume, and

then get bored with complaining, that she'd made them

drag the filing cabinet so fast. Enough time for Nadia

to start amusing herself making paper chains with the

contents of some of the files and then wonder out loud

whether she'd have done it anyway or whether her brain

was regressing. Enough time for Andrew and Sameera

to have a long quiet chat which Rory did his best to make

sure Amy didn't listen to by complaining loudly at her.

Enough time, most importantly, for them to manoeuvre

the filing cabinet over the guard-rail so that it hung in

mid air above the very fragile-looking glass sculpture.

They thought about trying to get the camera back.

It hung just out of reach, producing occasional cheerful

'Super Lucky Romance Days!' messages on its screen

and even playing a little tune which Amy was sure it had

never done before - perhaps it was a feature introduced

to distract from its short battery life. But they decided

it was too dangerous to crawl out along the jelly-tube

to fetch it. What if the force field collapsed just as they

were suspended above the drop down to the ground

floor?

'If cameras had feelings,' said Amy, 'I expect it'd be

pleased to go out doing its duty for the future of Earth.'

When the bubble started to disintegrate, it seemed to

happen both incredibly slowly and also too fast to take

in.

They were looking at the Symingtons and Blenkinsops

through the bubble-wall, watching their hypnotic slow-

motion movement as if they were in an aquarium, or a

shark cage.

'They're quite interesting, when you're not fleeing for

your life,' said Rory, 'have you seen how they develop

gills as they're changing into a shark head but they never

need to be in water. Do you think—'

'Super Lucky Romance Moment almost over!'

announced the camera in a cheery voice. 'Put pants on!'

'Did that always have a voice?' said Amy.

'Did it just say, "Put pants on"?' said Rory.

And then the wobbling orange mass surrounding

them started to shimmer and decay, and the slow-motion

shark-men outside started to speed up to real time and

with a faint pop the bubble burst and the camera and

the filing cabinet started to fall and the Symingtons and

Blenkinsops were on them with a roar as loud as the

ocean.

Everything happened at once.

Playing its happy little Lucky Romance Song, the

camera tumbled down ten storeys of Lexington Bank,

clattering against the side of the glass sculpture in

honour of work-life balance before smashing on the

marble of the ground floor into a thousand sprockets

and tiny gears which UNIT would subsequently spend

eighteen fruitless months trying to reconstruct.

A Symington and a Blenkinsop grabbed Amy. They

held her down on the floor.

You've been a great deal of trouble to us, Ms Pond,'

said one.

'But you won't be any trouble any more,' said the

other.

And Amy struggled and kicked and screamed and

fought as Mr Blenkinsop brought his face down towards

her and began to bite into her arm, taking great gulps of

something that she realised now was more precious to

her than blood and she felt herself getting weaker and

saw the world growing darker. She cried for help, but

Rory and Andrew and Sameera and even Nadia were

also shark food now.

And very slowly, the filing cabinet poised on the

edge of the rail teetered and overbalanced and fell. A

dozen Symingtons and Blenkinsops tried to stop it but

whatever they tried there just wasn't enough time. It

rotated as it tumbled and the sharp corner of its top hit

the glass sculpture first putting a large crack in it. The

filing cabinet bounced a little and came down with the

full force of its long flat side on the top of one of the

melted-wax-like fingers of the sculpture, crashing down

into the centre of the thing, sending huge viciously sharp

fragments of glass flying into the windows of the offices

around it. And the cabinet fell forward, into the heart

of the sculpture, utterly crushing the small flickering

light at the centre of it releasing a bolt of warm energy

which blew out all the windows on the ground floor and

made each of the 326 people left in the building about 17

months younger.

There was a sound like a million cardboard boxes

being suddenly flattened. A loud, dull crump.

And all the Symingtons and all the Blenkinsops

feeding off Rory and Amy and Nadia and Andrew and

Sameera suddenly disappeared. As if they had never

been there to begin with.

And, on the thin glass screen on top of that dais in the

domed room, Jane stumbled. Under the implacable gaze

of the blood-red moons, she blinked and stuttered and

couldn't quite gather her thoughts. It was time.

'Traders of the Time Market,' said the Doctor on the

screen to the eager jostling crowd.

Jane tried to pull herself back together, to go back to

a point in time when she could stop him saying it. But

she didn't have enough spare time capacity. She barely

had enough to maintain her escape route, let alone the

intricate time-doublings she usually operated in. She

was singular, moving forward through time. Always

onwards, no going back. The feeling made her gasp.

'Traders of the Time Market your attention please,'

said the Doctor. 'I don't know what this woman has told

you, but I would like to state very plainly that I am not

a Time Lord.' He paused, smiled slightly: 'I don't even

know what a Time Lord is.'

There was dead silence on the trading floor.

'He's lying!' Jane managed to croak out.

'I'm not, you know. In fact, she's the one who's lying

and I can prove it. Take a look at the other wares she's

got for sale on this market. Take a good look. See those

glass bricks?'

There were glass bricks piled up around the Doctor.

Some had been transported to the trading floor itself,

some were in further storage compartments, and the

traders could glance through the aggregated accounts

of them on their video screens. The collective total was

considerable.

'They look pretty impressive, don't they? Very healthy

profits, almost no risk of any of the loans defaulting -

she's going to be raking in time on those. But let's take

a look at the account of... oh, I don't know, how about

this watch that I happen to have in my pocket here,

recording the debt of one Andrew Brown. He owes,

what, 100,000 years?'

The Doctor held the watch up so they could all see its

face. He was right, of course.

'That's not an unusual debt, I think you'll agree, not

in the accounts Jane's been trading.'

The traders looked at their screens. One hundred

thousand years was a hefty debt - but it was only

about ten per cent of what Jane stated in her briefing

documents was a normal human lifespan. The humans

would have no trouble repaying - and if they did, the

owner of the contract could always foreclose on their

life. It was purely a business transaction, all very simple

and above board.

'Now check your information systems.'

'No!' shouted Jane. 'No, don't! He's lying, don't listen

to him, he's trying to distract you so he can get away.'

'Check your information systems,' the Doctor

repeated. 'I know you tap into all the classified networks.

Check what a normal human lifespan is.'

There was a moment's pause while a thousand claws

and tentacles and pseudopods tapped on their screens

for the information.

There was another pause while they tried to

understand what they were reading.

And, as they understood the absolute worthlessness

of the assets Jane had been trading on the market, there

was a rising cacophony of shouting voices calling out.

'Sell! Sell! Sell!'

Chapter

20

There hadn't been a run on a Time Market trader for as long

as the longest memory on the floor of the exchange.

None of them knew quite what would happen. Jane's

worth on the market dipped lower and lower. The

contracts she'd aggregated for sale became worthless,

less than worthless - traders were paying other traders

to take them off their hands, frightened of what might

happen if they were still holding them when the day's

trading came to an end.

But there was a protocol, of a sort. There came a

moment - an elongated moment, of course, the whole

thing had taken less than a second - where she could no

longer honour her obligations to the market. Where her

value on the market was so low that she could no longer

even maintain the basic time-travel capacities to continue

to trade. Where her whole self started to unravel as the

things that she'd done ceased to have been done, and

the Doctor saw that at the far end of the long storage

unit some of the glass bricks were starting to disappear.

The Symingtons and Blenkinsops who had put those

watches onto those wrists had never now existed. Time

was undoing itself.

Jane saw the dissolution too. She begged, via the

screen, for trading to be halted, for the traders to believe

her that yes, she had lied about the Earth lifespan, but

she had a Time Lord here, a real Time Lord, probably the

last one left alive, with a TARDIS of his own, and, if only

she could get him to open it, she'd have access to all the

time, all the time that there ever was or would ever have

been - if they'd only just stop and listen, just listen.

But it was too late. The panic was spreading through

the market, wild and unreasoning. If Jane had lied to

them, if they'd believed her, if they hadn't spotted the

fraud, what other lies might they have believed? Which

others of these solid-gold assets were actually just

pretty sparkling sand? They tried to sell, but no one

was buying; they tried to call in old debts, but suddenly

encountered doubt about whether the debt was worth

as much as they'd thought.

And then, somehow, the Time Lord was free.

No one knew how it had happened. Someone said

they thought they'd seen him shift one of his hands

under the harvesting chair to find a small pen-like

device concealed beneath the seat. But that was clearly

impossible - he couldn't have hidden anything there

himself, the place was well guarded. And as everyone

else had been paying far more attention to their rapidly

diminishing fortunes, the question of how he'd got free

was never answered to anyone's satisfaction.

But free he was. Jane herself was barely able to

move. She kept flickering in and out of time, growing

fainter as her ability to manipulate time decreased. As

the Doctor watched, she flicked out of existence in that

room altogether. Just as if she'd never been able to be

there at all.

The Doctor looked at the screen showing the chaos

on the trading floor. He cleared his throat.

'Hello,' he said. 'I'm the Doctor. I'm here to help.'

And silence spread across the Time Market.

'I wouldn't usually,' he said. 'Usually I'd leave you to

stew in your own juices - those of you who have juices,

wouldn't want to insult any gaseous life forms, you

know what I mean. Usually, I'd walk away. I've started

doing that more since the Time War. Walking away. And

we all know whose dirty little trade kept that war going

when it should have encompassed far fewer aeons,

don't we?' His voice was very low. 'We all know why

your disgusting business was outlawed by the Shadow

Proclamation centuries before it began.'

There was a brief muttering at this, a slight hint of

protest. The Doctor spoke over it.

'But it so happens,' he said, 'that the lives of a planet I

rather care about are mixed up in all this. So. I don't care

if every single one of you goes to the wall. Send each

other Time-rupt for all I care. But before you do, who'd

like to sell me their remaining Earth time contracts for,

let's say, one second a decade?'

The pause was shorter than it is possible to measure

without a timepiece far in advance of Earth technology

before the floods of offers to sell came in. And the Doctor

was soon the proud owner of the few remaining glass

bricks in the storage unit.

*

No one at Lexington Bank knew how the sculpture had

been broken. To be honest, none of the senior executives

quite knew who'd put it there to begin with. Some of

them had hazy memories of something - more like

dreams than memories really - echoes of something that

might have happened, but which seemed so improbable

that it wasn't worth mentioning at all.

Police officers arrived very quickly at the scene

of the damage, roped it off in the name of something

called Torch wood. Those officers then had a prolonged

argument with soldiers from something called UNIT,

who arrived twenty minutes later and claimed that

they'd been instructed by the Prime Minister, acting

on information provided by the Chancellor of the

Exchequer, to take control of the area.

The senior staff at Lexington Bank decided that the

best idea was to call it a suspected gas leak, which had

caused both the explosion and the strange memories

many of them had of the few days before the blast.

Everyone in the office would have a week off, to recover,

they announced.

Even those few who could remember - those who

were still wearing time-harvester watches after the

sculpture smashed - found that they could take the

watches off now. That the faces read CONTRACT

VOIDED'. That no matter how they fiddled with them,

they'd only say that or, with a lot of tinkering, the words

'THE OWNER OF YOUR CONTRACT, "DOCTOR OF

GALLIFREY", HAS CANCELLED YOUR DEBT would

flash up once before disappearing for ever.

On the top floor of the building, in an abandoned

office filled with a shower of multicoloured post-it

notes, five people were sitting. Two of them were a

young married couple, one a man in his thirties, another

a woman in her sixties, along with a 10-year-old girl.

They had the look of people who'd slept on the floor for

a night or two.

'It's been two days,' said Rory. 'We can't live here on

sandwiches for ever.'

'You're welcome to come and stay with me,' said

Andrew, 'just until we work out what to do.'

Amy shook her head. 'The TARDIS is here. He's

coming back here. I know he is. Look what it said on all

the watches of those people in your departments. He's

coming back.'

'What if he can't?' said Rory. 'What if he's stuck on

another planet or something. Look, it could be worse -

we could be stuck on another planet! At least it's Earth.

All right, well overlap with ourselves for a while, but it's

fine... I don't think we should stay here much longer.'

Nadia kicked at some papers. She wasn't 10. She

knew she wasn't 10. But her brain was working a bit like

a 10-year-old brain, and she found herself getting bored

more often with these stupid conversations.

'What am I going to do?' she said. 'I'll have to go

through adolescence all over again.'

At the door, there was the sound of someone clearing

his throat.

'Sorry I'm late,' said the Doctor. 'Lost track of time.'

Mostly, there were hugs.

At one point, Amy did say: 'What took you so

long?'

'Took me so long? Jane took me back more than five

years, and broadcast an image of me several thousand

years further back than that - I've had to wait around

for all of you, passing time by defeating a few plots to

destroy mankind but mostly waiting for all this to blow

over,' said the Doctor. 'What took you so long?'

'Time travel,' said Rory 'It's confusing, isn't it?'

And after they'd each told their stories there was

only one thing left to deal with. The Doctor had a leather

holdall with him. He put it onto the desk that had once

belonged to Jane Blythe and looked at the hopeful faces

of Sameera and Nadia.

'I can't give you any extra time, Sameera,' said the

Doctor sadly. 'When you paid it back to Jane, she took it

all, and it's gone.'

'Oh,' said Sameera. She hadn't known until he said

it that she'd been hoping so certainly - that she hadn't

allowed herself to think otherwise - that this Doctor

would be able to fix everything. And now, what, she

was really 65 now?

The Doctor sighed. 'Those contracts really were

watertight. They even managed to add on extra interest

after you thought you'd paid it all back - interest

accrued on the interest yet to accrue. According to this,'

he produced a glass brick labelled Sameera Jenkins from

his leather holdall, 'you still owe ten years.'

Sameera looked at the brick, with its faintly glowing

motion at the centre. The Doctor placed another one

next to it labelled Nadia Montgomery.

'And as for you, Nadia,' he said, that broken watch of

yours has done some very weird things to the contract. It

seems to think you're owed another thirty years. Which

would take you back to before you were born.'

Nadia stuck her lower lip out petulantly. 'So you

can't do anything? I'll have to go through puberty again?

And try to explain to my parents why I'm 10 years old

now?'

The Doctor chewed his top lip. 'There is one thing,'

he said.

He looked at the two bricks, side by side. Then he

touched the tops of them and, very gently, lifted off

their glass lids. He grinned.

'Turns out,' he said, 'only the owner can open them.

Clever, eh?'

He reached inside both bricks and pulled out the

contents.

They were flowing liquid glass spheres, each covered

in some strange moving writing, each beating softly like

a heart.

'Records of time. Time out of time, very hard to do.

Wouldn't touch them if I were you,' he said as Amy

reached out a finger towards one. 'Might get a nasty

time-burn.'

He stared at the spheres, one in his right hand, the

other in his left.

'This one says you owe ten years, he nodded at

Sameera's sphere on the right, 'and this one says you're

owed thirty, so how about if we...' he crossed his hands

over, 'presto chango! Where's a fez at a time like this?'

He dropped each sphere into the other brick very

delicately, and popped the lids back on.

'Show me your watches, he said, and Nadia and

Sameera held out their hands. The Doctor took both

their wrists, winked, and pressed the same button on

each at the same moment.

There was a sort of sighing sound. Both of the beating

hearts of the glass blocks dissolved. And, without any

fuss. Sameera was suddenly 35 again, and Nadia was 20.

'You'll have a bit of trouble explaining that,' the

Doctor said to Nadia. 'A 40-year-old with the body of

a 20-year-old. I suggest you say you went to a very

exclusive clinic in Zurich.'

Nadia looked at her reflection in the office window.

She grinned.

'I tell you what I think,' she said. 'I think the London

office needs a new Head of Operations, someone who

really knows the business. I think I'm the right woman

for the job.'

'Just watch out for the credit crunch,' said Amy.

'The... what's that?' said Nadia.

'Oh, nothing,' said the Doctor. 'If anyone knows how

to manage boom and bust, it'll be you.'

In the basement, Sameera and Andrew hugged the

Doctor, Rory and Amy and watched them walk into the

TARDIS.

'Is that really a spaceship?' said Andrew.

Sameera squeezed his hand. 'They're time-travelling

aliens, why wouldn't their space ship look like a police

box?' she said.

'We're not aliens!' protested Rory.

'No, Rory only you are an alien,' said the Doctor, as

the TARDIS door closed.

There was a vworp, vworp, vworp sound, and

Sameera and Andrew were alone in Lexington Bank's

sub basement.

'What do you want to do now?' said Sameera.

Andrew shrugged.

'We could go for that promotion again, I suppose.'

Sameera looked at him, smiled and raised an

eyebrow.

'What, endless competition against each other?

Sounds great fun if we're all out of walls for us to bash

our heads against.'

Andrew smiled. 'What do you really want, Sameera?'

he said.

She took a deep breath, looked around her. 'I know it

sounds stupid,' she said, 'but I've always really wanted

to run a deli. One of those places where you can get

anything. In a seaside town maybe. I know it'd be hard

work but it'd also be real, do you know what I mean?

Making something real, feeding people, sending them

away happy. Something a bit useful in the world.'

Andrew nodded slowly.

'What about you?' she said.

'I always wanted to be a teacher,' he said at last,

'maybe teach music. Or science. I wanted to train after

university but my results were good and my parents said

I should talk to the careers adviser about my options

and he told me to go for Lexington's and the money was

so good that...'

'Yeah,' she said, 'I know. You got stuck. Just one more

promotion, just one more round of bonuses. Me too.'

'So,' he said.

'So,' she said.

And he put his arm around her shoulders and kissed

her lightly on the lips. And together they walked out of

Lexington Bank for ever.

*

Like most thieves, the traders of the Time Market did

have a sense of honour. Of a sort. They vowed solemnly

to track down what had happened to the remainder of

Jane Blythe in time and space. It was impossible that she'd

vanished entirely - the traces of her existence proved

that she had once existed, and if she'd once existed there

was no reason to think she didn't still exist.

The Doctor had made them promise to find her.

But, bureaucracy being what it is, the business proved

arduous, time-consuming and ultimately fruitless. She

was gone from the Time Market, they knew that. But

any good Time Harvester will leave themselves just a

little time in reserve. Just enough to start up in business

again, somewhen else.

It was the sad conclusion of the Committee for

Restoration of the Time Market, therefore, that it was

impossible to track the harvester Jane Blythe. They found

it unlikely, they said, that she would have been able

to leave Earth. A close eye should be kept on the time

streams of Earth for this reason, and they recommended

the establishment of a Monitoring Team, whenever

funds should be sufficient to do so.

They sent a copy of this report, as promised, to the

Doctor's last known address - a storage facility under

the Millennium Dome in London, Earth and, feeling that

they had done all they could, went back to business.

In about 1985, just a year before the Big Bang changed

the regulation of the London stock market and paved the

way for the creation of previously unimaginable fortunes

among the bankers of the City, the TARDIS materialised

behind an abandoned warehouse on the Isle of Dogs,

London. Elsewhere, the Doctor was in Foreman's Yard,

76 Totters Lane, dealing with some unfinished business.

Once you can travel in time, being in two places at once

is inevitable. And no business is ever finished.

The TARDIS door opened.

'So did we stop Lexington Bank collapsing?' Rory

was asking.

'No,' said the Doctor. 'We just saved the Earth. The

Bank will still crumble, but Nadia Montgomery will be

able to rescue some of the business from the ashes. She's

a smart woman.'

'And what about.

'Just wait there for a moment,' the Doctor called back

into the TARDIS. 'I'll only be a minute.' He stepped

out.

The morning was bright and clear. The Doctor

stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled a tune he'd

learned a few centuries before as he sauntered towards a

small door set into a warehouse wall. There was a piece

of cardboard taped above a buzzer with a few words

scribbled on it in black biro. The Doctor rang the bell

and waited. Eventually, the door opened just a crack.

'Good to see you again,' said the Doctor.

'And you, Doctor,' said a smooth voice.

'Or do I mean, of course, good to meet you for the

first time? Always get confused about those two.'

'It is all one. I let myself know you'd be coming,' said

the voice.

'Did you let yourself know what I'd want too?' said

the Doctor. 'I always seem to forget to give myself all the

details, terrible habit, must try to keep a diary again.'

'You have an item you'd like me to secrete among

another client's belongings?'

The Doctor pulled a slim pen-like package from his

pocket and handed it into the darkness.

'I'll be delighted,' said the voice.

'Did we agree some sort of... payment?' said the

Doctor.

'Oh Doctor,' laughed the voice. 'You do continue to

amuse. Please, think nothing of it. I'm assured that at

a certain point you will become a very valuable client

indeed.'

'Right,' said the Doctor. 'That's... hmmm, that's...

Right. Disturbing. Yes, best not to ask too many

questions.'

From the darkness, there was a low and not entirely

friendly chuckle before the warehouse door gently

closed.

The Doctor started to walk back towards the

TARDIS. He stopped, turned around, stared at the

closed warehouse door. Took a pace or two toward it.

Stopped. Stuck his hands in his pockets. Wrinkled his

brow. Turned back and walked into the TARDIS.

Epilogue

Heemstede, The Netherlands, 2636

Marieke Jansen tore off her headscarf and ran her hands

through her hair in frustration. She stared at the young

boy who had brought her the news. It was too late in the

season for this.

'What do you mean,' she said, 'no planters?'

The little boy wiped his dirty face with his dirtier

hand.

'It's Mr Van Aerdenhout,' he said. 'He's hired all the

men in the village for double wages.'

Van Aerdenhout. She should have known. He didn't

need all those men; he'd probably hired them just to

stop her getting her crop in the ground in the precious

few perfect weeks.

Marieke and her husband had borrowed as many

guilder as they could lay their hands on for the cargo of

tulip bulbs. If they bloomed, if they produced offsets,

this time next year they'd be able to sell the crop for fifty

times what they'd paid for it. But only if the bulbs were

planted in time. God in Heaven!

The boy was still waiting, winkling something

unspeakable out of his nose with a grimy finger. She

threw a stuiver to him, and he caught the coin handily,

grinning as he left.

'I bet you wish there were ten of you!' he called back

to her.

She did. She could get all those bulbs into the ground

herself, if she had the time. It wasn't a hard job, just a

long one, and needed to be done quickly.

There was a quiet cough from behind her.

She'd been sure no one was there, but when she

turned round two men were standing on the porch of

her farmhouse. They were well-dressed in long sober

black coats with slashed sleeves letting the white shirt

underneath show through, heeled black boots with

bows on the front. They wore loose ruffs at their throats

and neat pointed beards, every inch the gentlemen of

finance.

'We hear you have a problem, Mrs Jansen,' said the

first. 'You need more time.'

'Yes,' said the second. 'And my colleague Mr

Hoogeveen and I hate to hear of a woman in need of

more time when we can so easily assist.'

'Yes, my colleague Mr Verspronck and I have a little

proposition for you, Mrs Jansen.'

'One we think you'll find it hard to refuse.'

'Hard even to think of refusing.'

'Hard,' said Mr Verspronck, 'even to imagine

thinking of refusing.'

They laughed, in unison.

Mr Hoogeveen pulled a large pocket watch from his

coat and held it out to Marieke.

'Now,' said Mr Hoogeveen, 'this is all very simple to

understand...'