"White" you think as you consider this room. Six white walls bearing closely-spaced inset circles about half a meter across surround it. A white hexagonal console stands in the center of a white floor. You aren't able to make out a ceiling because you see only a source of soft, white light.

As you pause to consider the console you start thinking that it would take a lot of training to operate it. Multiple gauges, buttons, keyboards and monitors decorate each of its six sides. In the center a clear cylinder rises and falls in a rhythm that seems to accompany a distant hum.

Though you haven't noticed her yet, a woman stands at one of the console's keyboards. She seems to have blended in with the whiteness of the room. Not that she or her clothes are at all white, but straight, light-colored hair hanging like open curtains beside an almost pale face do little to darken the room. You would guess she was in her twenties (you'd be right only if you meant her hundred twenties).

Suddenly a door you haven't noticed yet opens in one of the six walls. A man struggles, back first, through this doorway, dragging a maroon, imitation-leather recliner. The woman speaks. "What is that...?"

"It's a recliner," the man interrupts as he stands and faces her. You'd think the room was plenty warm, but this man wears a long brown coat and a multi-colored scarf that would have taken a machine some time to knit. He reaches into a pocket of the coat, pulls out a small white paper bag, takes something out of it, and puts it in his mouth. Wordlessly he holds the bag out to the woman, who ignores it and contines the conversation.

"I KNOW that, Doctor," she replied, a little impatience sharpening the tone of her voice. "I wish you'd let me finish sentences. I was about to say, 'What is that FOR?'"

"To sit in." The Doctor's patient tone suggested he was too magnanimous to let the woman's irritability bother him in the least. This only made her angrier. "You see, Romana, we still have several minutes left in this journey, and I plan to enjoy them from this comfortable location. Anyway, I might want to spend part of our vacation in the TARDIS and if so I want to be comfortable."

"You get lazier every day." Scorn joined impatience in honing her tone. "Maybe you should install controls in the arms of that ugly...." She paused, trying to think of a suitably derogatory synonym for recliner, "...that ugly couch of indolence."

"Two good ideas in one sentence! Your time in my presence has done you some good after all." The Doctor's voice masked the condecension inherent in his words. "I think I WILL call this the 'Couch of Indolence'. And what better time to install controls in the arms than right now?" The Doctor looked at Romana, hoping she might agree with him. She refused to look back.

The Doctor had just started toward the door when a warning tone interrupted Romana's sullen silence. Both turned immediately to the control panel. "That's the unauthorized entry warning," the Doctor noted. "But nobody has entered the TARDIS." Romana opened her mouth to chide the Doctor for wasting so much breath on stating the obvious when he turned on her. "What were the time flux readings?"

Romana stared back blankly, shocked by her companion's unnatural outburst of anger.

"You weren't watching them like I asked, were you?"

"I was, too!" Romana finally found her spunk.

"Then what were they?"

"The readings were perfectly normal."

"So the only other way to set off the unauthorized entry alarm is to enter the TARDIS -- and nobody has done that!" The Doctor again stated the obvious.

"I know that!"

The two stopped, puzzled by their own emotions. "So, what happened?" the Doctor finally asked, meekly.

"Searching the TARDIS might give us a clue," Romana suggested. She stepped aside to allow the Doctor access to one of the keyboards. He pecked away for a moment.

Both of them looked at the monitor. They looked at each other. They looked back at the indicators. "How could something that big have gotten into that storeroom?" Romana voiced the question they both had.

"We'll just have to go see what's there. Come along," the Doctor ordered. The time lords left through the door that had admitted the recliner only moments earlier.

Behind a monitor that showed a rocky, lifeless landscape a head bobbed impatiently. "It should be there already," a high-pitched male voice complained. A hand began punching buttons. The scene on the monitor faded out and rows of numbers and mathematical symbols replaced it. The hand reached up to trace through the numbers.

"Its path was intercepted," the voice concluded. Disbelief pushed its pitch even higher. "But that would have taken some sort of time barrier, something like the wall of a time machine. There shouldn't be anything like that out there."

The hand dropped back to a row of buttons which it began punching furiously. Numbers alternated with strange graphic diagrams in hopping across the monitor. "What?" the voice exclaimed. "So there was a time machine there. But who would have one in that sector?"

Footsteps clicked across the floor. The sound of a drawer sliding in and out on worn bearings replaced the clicking momentarily, and the footsteps returned. A pile of computer blocks dropped onto the workshelf in front of the monitor. The hands sorted through them, selected one to insert in one of three nearby slots, and punched more buttons. A single alpha-numeric line of code appeared on the screen.

The hands selected another block, placed it in a different slot and pressed a few more buttons. The space below the single line filled with data. The voice muttered some of the specially coded data, but stumbled on the line "...special presidential designation -- TOP SECRET."

"But with the upcoming transition there is no Lord President," the voice suggested. "The only presidential designations not lifted for the transition ...." Sudden understanding rose in the voice's owner like a sneeze, interrupting this sentence. "Not HIM!!" it fairly screamed. Now the hands grabbed frantically at the computer blocks throwing them against a laboratory partition. Three blocks were thrust with nearly thrice the necessary force into the newly cleared slots. The hands then punched a number of buttons before they grabbed for a set of dual joysticks set on perpendicular planes that formed an upside down "V" relative to the desktop.

The monitor divided vertically into two sections, one blank, the other filled with rows of numbers. The numbers scrolled rapidly across the screen as the hands manipulated the joysticks. Moments later the image of a blue square prism with windows faded onto the blank section of the screen and grew until it filled it. The box would have suggested an out-of-date phone booth to an American, a Briton would readily recognize it as an antiquated police call box.

The woman stirred in her sleep. A drop of rain popped open against her cheek, spreading coolness. She sat up suddenly. Long, wavy, brown hair flowed from her forehead along each cheek and down well below her shoulders. A short-sleeved garment of animal skins covered her body from just below her neck to just above her knees. The color of the furs matched that of her hair so closely one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended.

She looked toward the sky. A light blue moon huddled close to the horizon directly in front of her, and a shower of green light rose from the same horizon about 160 degrees to her right. She rolled away from it as two more drops attacked her, one near her elbow, another on her leg. "Rain," she mumbled. "It rains every morning here. I knew that." She shook her head as if upset with herself.

She got lightly to her feet, walked over to a nearby hedge and began to pick berries and put them in a leather bag hung over her shoulder. She worked at this for only a minute. Then she turned to face the moon, stretched with her arms in a wide V over her head, and faded away. A few moments later a wet, scaly animal waddled clumsily over the woman's footprints, pursuing its path to a nearby, weed-infested pond.