"In a worst case scenario..."read the scrap of newspaper blowing in the radioactive wind.

The newspaper blew past devastated buildings and once-solid concrete that had gained the consistency of porridge; past the corpses of those who had believed it would never happen, rumbling, bleached bones, flesh bubbling around them. The tiny fragment blew through the air, twirling around the toe of the boot of a tall, grey-haired man who was surveying the scene with an expression of untold sadness etched into his deep, craggy face. He'd tried to protect these people so much, thrown himself into his 'sentence' with such enthusiasm that now, his captivity over, he had been drawn back to twentieth century Earth with a force stronger than the most powerful force-field. Perhaps that had been the Time Lord's design. Perhaps this self-imposed imprisonment had been what they had wanted for him. At this moment he really couldn't care.

Oh yes, he'd read the newspapers, heard how desperate things had been. All those precious peace conferences Styles had arranged had come to nothing after all. Humans! Unreasoning rage momentarily blocked out his pain. He'd protected them on Earth for six years, protected them from themselves as well as others, and now, at the first chance they got, the first time he and Jo left the planet for more than a few seconds, it happened. They blew themselves up. For a moment the Doctor's rage blanked out the sick horror... but only for a moment. UNIT headquarters? How could one tell? Whole buildings could have been lifted up and thrown for miles by the nuclear blast.

He caught a voice, calm and emotionless, and turned to see Jo standing on the threshold of the TARDIS. She seemed to be chanting. He listened, trying to catch the words. "Mike Yates John Benton Carol Bell Don Campbell Jimmy Turner..." it went on. The Doctor sought for some comforting word, some consolation: but what could he say? He was supposed to stop this sort of thing. Senseless...insane! Blast! He stood there in that wasteland, trying to curse, trying to somehow express what he felt, but it was inexpressible. Jo just stood there, eyes blank, open windows looking on her world which had been destroyed.

*

Jo looked at the Doctor quizzically as he corrected the slight lurch in the ship's motion. Light glowed in the Time Rotor and glinted off what looked oddly like a tear on his lined cheek. It was time. They both knew it. Earth. Not what she'd said...she'd asked, begged to go home hundreds of times in the past, and they'd done so. Not always directly, perhaps, but they'd always gone home. No, it was the way it had been said. They both knew it was nearly time to say goodbye.

She almost felt upset that he was taking it badly. Nothing had been said, after all, but it was time. Time for the fledgling to fly, as he would say. He'd taken a young agent, and taught her all that he could- not all that he knew, certainly, no one in the world, not in any world could do that, but all that was in him that would make her a better person. She sighed. The Doctor looked up, a shining smile cracking his almost severe face into an infectious grin.

"And why so great a sigh, Jo?" He chuckled, twirling her gently in his arms. "You're going home. Earth. No Daleks, no Ogrons, and not a Drashig to be seen."

"Safe?"

"Well...I wouldn't go quite that far."

"The Master?"

"Ooh, somehow I doubt that." He didn't tell her what he'd seen in the Master's mind in that sudden moment of telepathic communication, the surge of empathy that he had shared with his adversary on the Ogron planet. He'd shot the Doctor down in error: then came the surge of fear, concern, pity... No, the Master was going away, going away to think, and it would be a long time, if ever, before they met again. The Doctor rapped a button on the console, grasping three aligned levers in a peculiarly alien gesture- or rather a naturally alien gesture, Jo corrected her subconscious.

He grinned at her again as the familiar wheezing groaning sound signalled their arrival. He'd busied himself at the instruments. Since Jo had known him, he had, on occasion, opened the doors practically before the rotor stopped moving. She suspected that this checking of the atmosphere, like his constant fiddling with the practically automatic controls when he had nothing better to do, was really little more than a nervous tic. She took down her coat from the hat stand, thankful to be free of the unpleasant atmosphere of Spiridon and smiled at the Doctor encouragingly.

"Well?" and there was a hint of challenge in her voice, "Earth, or some planet on the wrong side of the universe?"

"Earth, late twentieth century, London. Home, Miss Grant." He'd beamed like a proud father, Jo remembered, his protégée having fulfilled her task with aplomb. Then he'd tweaked the door control in a manner containing more that a little arrogance.

"Don't get complacent," she'd admonished him, walking to the doorway.

"Jo, stop!" The command had come like the crack of a whip, and there had been no possibility of disobedience. She remembered the Master's hypnotism and saw that, in that moment, she had briefly glimpsed the true alien power inside her friend. She had looked back, to see him, face creased with worry, staring at one of the instruments on the panel.

"What is it?"

"It's my radiation detector... something's wrong. Something's very wrong." Jo had peered at the figures, trying to remember the alien language and measurements.

"But Earth can't be that radioactive...we must have missed."

"No." The Doctor looked at the other controls. "This is Earth. London."

"But how could it be?"

The Doctor had stared at her for a moment, his face as puzzled as her own. Suddenly his expression changed. Jo could still remember it. His face went absolutely white, his eyes widened, and all the camaraderie and bluster suddenly and terrifyingly vanished. She'd seen him frightened before, but this was more. He'd turned the light out and heard his worst fear creeping up behind him in the dark. His lips formed a single word, not a command or exclamation, but a plea, almost a supplication:

"No!"

*

The sand is hurting Jo's eyes now. She knows the anti-radiation drugs from the TARDIS will protect her from any real harm, but the sand stings her eyes none the less. This isn't real, of course. Any minute now the Doctor will turn, dash into the TARDIS and shout out that they made a wrong turning at Jupiter, and everything will be all right again. Except it isn't like that. The Doctor is holding out a piece of paper to her. She takes it. "In a worst case scenario..." she reads, but the rest was destroyed in the blast. She recognises the corner of a masthead symbol, just visible on the charred edge. A fragment of a newspaper, she realises- dated two weeks after she and the Doctor left Earth.

It is real, of course. It isn't real, of course.

It's the Master. He has placed her in some kind of dream world, a terrible hallucination in order to attack the Doctor. Well, now she knows, so now she's in control, she can break out, make the journey back to the real world. Except she can't.

*

He felt pure hatred burning inside himself suddenly. Even if it couldn't be changed, he was going to find the person responsible for this, the one who had let death out of the kennel. His hand tightened around an imaginary pistol. He'd always hated guns, but Lethbridge-Stewart had insisted he know how to use one properly. Lethbridge-Stewart. He had persuaded the Doctor in the end, as usual. He'd simply pointed out that, in the highly unlikely situation of the Doctor actually having to use a gun, he would have a far better chance of wounding rather than killing his target if he knew how to shoot straight. Now Lethbridge-Stewart was gone, one more insufferable military idiot boiled away to nothing in nuclear fire.

He had to find the man responsible for this, find the one who had thrown away 5.5 billion years of planetary evolution for the sake of some trivial military point. When he did find him, the man would learn precisely how each one of his victims had felt, thousands of times over. There was no point. The man was dead. Everyone was dead. He could go back, find the man before he let death fly..... But wouldn't that cause a time paradox? Killing him before he did that which would cause the Doctor to kill him? Didn't the Time Lords have a wider responsibility? He looked back at Jo. She stood there, cold and afraid, and suddenly the fury within him bolted out of a different channel. Hang the laws of time! He remembered Barbara and the Aztecs.

"You cannot rewrite history. Not one line" Suddenly his face twisted with 740 years of bitterness. Damn history, this was more important than history, more important than anything. He wasn't going to rewrite it, he was going to take it by both corners and rip it to shreds. He was going to do anything he had to do to save the Earth.

*

General Michaels walked through the White House, his face set in black fury. The Communists had gone too far this time. A sub-orbital spy plane over the Pentagon itself. He was going to the President. The President was abbout to leave for peace talks in London, but that would have to wait. Peace? The word infuriated Michaels. How could they have peace when the Soviet Bloc existed? The only way forward was on of war, nuclear war, a war which would leave them the victors.

Of course there would be losses, strategic losses. Perhaps only a few Americans would survive... but no Russians would, and they would have won. Michaels wanted war, and now he would have it. It had to be now, though. If this came out while the President was at the conference those British cowards would talk him out of it, a whining little communiqué to the Kremlin, nothing more. No more diplomacy. Nuclear strikes. "War."

He wasn't aware that he'd said it aloud, none the less a voice echoed him from a corner. A tall guy with grey curly hair and a British accent. A chill fear suddenly, and unaccountably, gripped Michael's heart.

"War," the man in the velvet jacket repeated, slowly taking a strange looking gun from his jacket and levelling it at General Michael's chest. "I don't really think we need it."