A very earthlike landscape flashed its greeness before a very earthlike sun which poured its rays around a scattering of very earthlike clouds. A few trees found homes at random spots in a meadow that stretched east and slightly down from the current vantage point. A tree-clad hill north of the valley prevented observers from seeing as far in that direction. Behind stood the cliffs and cracks of a very earthlike mountain.

A boy child crept out from behind one of the cracks and bounded into the meadow. He climbed the third tree he encountered, established a secure position near the trunk, and waited silently. Three girls and another boy about the same age slipped through the same crack about two minutes later. Two girls and the boy scampered around, over and between the rocks, while the remaining girl wandered into the meadow. One of the girls on the rocks, however, spotted the hiding lad first. "I see you, Wayne," she cried out.

Wayne climbed down and followed his playmates behind another crack. A different child emerged about a minute later and the game repeated itself. After several repetitions a man sporting salt and pepper hair and a white beard appeared in the rocks about a hundred meters uphill of the meadow. When the children spotted him they scurried uphill and disappeared through the same crack that had admitted the man to the scene. He followed them out of sight.

Natural silence prevailed as a small rock badger ducked in and out behind the smaller rocks strewn about the hillside. This small mammal disappeared permanently when a strange noise began from an as yet invisible source. A blue square prism about three meters tall appeared gradually between some of the trees in the meadow. When the light on top of this box quit flashing a door in one side opened and a fedora-topped head peeked out.

"There's no place like this on Gallifrey," the head noted before it disappeared.

Inside the TARDIS' control room the primitive time traveller gazed at the monitor screen. "This is not your planet? It is a very beautiful place."

"I'm checking," the Doctor replied as he pecked away at a keyboard. "I've certainly never seen a place on Gallifrey with a landscape like what I just saw outside."

"Perhaps your machine hasn't as much control over destinations as we do," the fur-clad woman suggested.

"The TARDIS is an accurate and sophisticated time-travel device," the Doctor bristled. He patted the console. "Don't mind her, old girl," he soothed. "Sometimes," he admitted, "a malfunction can cause us to miss our destination. But this time," he added, "I think we can blame outside interference." He tapped at a reading on a console monitor. "Someone on Gallifrey doesn't want us to get there just now."

"How can we report our problems?"

"They'll let me back soon enough for that, I'm quite sure," the Doctor assured. "Your people are in no immediate danger. I'm sure Cordar is in custody there, and while it might take them a century or two to sort things out, they're cautious enough they won't allow further harm."

"We don't have a century," Frantec protested.

"Hyperbole," the Doctor explained futilely.

"What?"

"Hyperbole, exaggeration. I overstate the case to make my point."

"That shouldn't be necessary," Frantec decided.

"Maybe not, but many cultures on many worlds have come to expect it."

"Then the universe is truly a strange place," Frantec sighed. She looked back up at the monitor. "So do we try to go someplace else, or do we wait here?"

The Doctor looked at his console. "We probably could go somewhere else, but since someone at Gallifrey is interfering with the TARDIS we probably wouldn't arrive where we intended. Since it looks so nice outside, why don't we spend some of our waiting time here?"

Frantec agreed by skipping out the door as soon as the doctor opened it.

"Mary," Wayne whispered. "is the sine the side opposite over the side adjacent or is it the side opposite over the hypotenuse?"

"Look it up yourself," Mary hissed back.

"It's a waste of time," Wayne responded in a louder whisper. "You could tell me in half a second. By the time I got the book out and found the page a minute or so would have passed."

"And if you hadn't tried to get me to tell you you'd have found the answer by now." Mary had quit whispering and was talking quietly.

"Mary," the white-bearded man spoke, "this is your second warning. If I hear you talking..."

"Wayne was asking me questions when he should have been quiet," Mary interrupted.

"And that is your second demerit today," the man responded, pressing a key on the console in front of him, which caused a second red light to glow beside Mary's name on the electronic register beside the presentation board.

Mary glowered her discontent, but wisely refrained from saying more. Wayne smirked, but only when he was sure the older man wasn't looking. The room fell silent as the two joined their peers in focusing on the tasks presented by the solid state monitors on their desks.

About 20 minutes later the man stood and quietly called for the attention of the fourteen youths in the room. As he spoke he worked controls on his console, causing a complex diagram to appear on the presentation board. "I have just completed arrangements for us to visit the galactic research laboratory. One of the scientists there will explain some of the latest findings and you will be able to communicate with some recently discovered intelligent life in another part of the galaxy."

This announcement caused quite a stir among the students and their teacher waited about half a minute before calling for their silence and continuing. "We will travel by pneumatic tube to the spot below the laboratory, which is about 2000 kilometers away. So that trip will take about a half hour. We will then take the lift to the top level and emerge into one of only five surface constructions on our planet. We will spend about an hour and a half there, which means we will take our lunch while there. Then we will return here and you will have a couple of hours to continue working on this week's projects. Any questions?"

A small girl sitting at the side of the room pressed a control that caused a blue light to shine by her name on the roster. "Mr. Graham," she said when the teacher had recognized her, "will we be able to bring PLDs?"

"You can take personal listening devices for use while you're in the tube," the teacher answered, "but we won't be able to bring them with us to the laboratory. Some of their electronic detection equipment is quite sensitive, and such devices would interfere with it. You can leave them behind at the tube desk when we arrive under the lab."

After some continued discussion the students lined up and followed their teacher out of the room. On their way to the lift they came across a man wearing too much clothing accompanied by a woman wearing too little clothing. Some of the boys tittered and pointed. Mr. Graham accosted the man.

"Sir!" He used the polite word with a certain level of contempt in his voice. "Your recreation may be none of my business, but you should know better than to bring your playmate here," he indicated the woman while refusing to look directly at her, "into the halls so near a school room."

Frantec's face showed her affront at the man's demeanor, but the Doctor held back a hand and restrained her. "My deepest and humblest apologies," he said charmingly. "I was not aware a school room was so near," he added, hoping the statement would sound believable. It didn't. Mr. Graham's glare proved it.

"Come along boys," he orderd his students. "We have people from other planets to talk to."

The Doctor started to respond to this, but the grey-haired man was already ushering his charges away from them. Frantec looked to the Doctor for an explanation.

"Many cultures," he began, "including my own, have this idea that if a woman uncovers more than a small fraction of her skin she is inviting a man's sexual attention."

"Truly strange," Frantec agreed.

"He probably thought you and I were headed toward, or maybe even returning from, a sexual encounter."

Frantec found this idea humorous, so much so that she was still giggling when the Doctor led her through an open door and into an office. This, of course, caused even more disruption when the residents of the room looked up to see who was laughing.

"Can I be of service, sir?" a clerk asked icily.

"Could you tell us where we are?"

"You are on level 58, sector zed-cee by 286."

The Doctor turned partway toward Frantec. "Quite helpful," he mocked. "I knew we'd gone down a lot of levels in the lift." He turned back toward the clerk. "We just arrived on this planet, and came down here from the lift. We'd like to know what planet we're on."

The clerk and her colleagues took their turn laughing. "Funny story, sir," she finally managed to spurt. "If you had managed to get here by spaceship you would have had to know where you were going. But of course your arrival by spaceship would have triggered the security systems. Then we all would have known you were here before you could wander into this office."

"You're sure of that?" the Doctor queried.

"Everybody knows about our comprehensive planetary defense system," said a man who had just emerged from a side room.

"Well, then we haven't just arrived by spaceship." The Doctor addressed this remark to Frantec. She resumed laughing.

"Sir," the newly arrived man said with a growl of authority, "either you and your 'friend' leave and return to your personal quarters or I shall be forced to call in the police."

"Call the police?" The Doctor's flippant tone shocked the man so that he wasn't at all ready for the Docotor's continued discourse. "I'd like it very much if you would. It seems we have a little 'time' on our hands."

Those inhabiting the office had no reason to understand the Doctor's pun and, having already decided he lacked a few mental fasteners ignored the inflection he had given to the word "time." Frantec didn't miss it, and burst into more giggling.

"This way, please," their host motioned authoritatively. He hoped to neutralize the threat of these visitors to the image of his business, though he had little hope they would comply.

The Doctor, however, bowed courteously and held out an arm to escort Frantec before him in the direction the man had indicated. "We appreciate your kind hospitality," he said. Frantec, still giggling managed to blurt, "Thu hu hank hew."

"In jail where he belongs." Kelner responded.

"Jail?" Vorlene parroted.

"He was holding you captive in a way that jepoardized your life," the Castellan explained the legalities.

"What do you mean, he belongs in jail? Does he work there?"

"Cordar belongs in jail because he's a criminal." Kelner continued the legal explanations, failing to read Vorlene's queries accurately.

"What's a criminal, is that someone who works in a jail?"

"We don't force our inmates to work, as some less civilized cultures do," the Castellan bungled on.

"This doesn't make any sense," Vorlene mumbled, shaking her head slightly. One of the guards tapped Kelner on the shoulder and whispered something to him.

"But of course," he said aloud, turning back to Vorlene. "I need to explain a lot of things to you, but I also have a lot of work to do. Why don't you come to my workstation with me? We can talk on the way, you can see a lot about what happens around here, and I'll have a chance to explain things you don't understand."

Vorlene looked warily around her. She decided that she hadn't a lot to fear from anyone who had rescued her from Cordar, and that even if she did, she wasn't in much of a position to do anything about it. The guards stepped aside while she followed the Castellan from the room.

An officer dressed in casual civilian clothing breezed into the room into which the Doctor and Frantec had been almost forcibly escorted over a quarter hour earlier. "We found your 'spaceship,'" he announced jestingly. "Of course, it wouldn't have taken you down the hill, much less through space. You could make everything a lot easier; for you and me both; if you'd just tell me what what in Gallifrey is going on here."

"I'd like very much to know what's going on in Gallifrey," the Doctor responded. "But at the moment that's not possible. Anyway, I think you'd really rather know what's happening here -- wherever "here" is."

"Don't play smart with me!" the officer retorted in a considerably less jesting manner. "It's fine with me if you want to build a rickety wooden box and bring your girlfriend with you to pretend it's a spaceship. But when you start causing the kind of disruption you've caused today you put yourself at the mercy of the authorities. Unless you want even less mercy than has been shown you so far, you should quit playing your game. Now, what sector do you live in?"

The doctor stared impassivly at the officer during this admonition. "I don't live in any sector," he replied calmly.

The officer glared.

"I already told your colleagues I'm not from this planet. Neither is Frantec." The Doctor gestured in his companion's direction. "In fact, we're not even from the same place."

Franted nodded agreement with the Doctor's final comment.

The officer caught himself in the act of hurling even hotter disparagements in the Doctor's direction, paused momentarily, and restarted in a calmer mode. "Let me explain this clearly. One. The device we found on the hillside by the lift exit is NOT a spaceship. It is clearly a stationary device.

"Two. Even if it was, you couldn't have flown it in without generating multiple warnings on our planetary defense systems. Such warnings are immediately broadcast planet-wide. EVERYBODY would know you were coming -- especially those of us in law enforcement.

"Three. I apologise for using such vulgar language with you. However, even if I use it, it's highly inadvisable for you, under investigation for a misdemeanor, to respond in kind."

"Vulgarity?" the Doctor wondered aloud.

"Your flippant use of of the same vulgar word I used could easily be perceived as arrogant."

"You'll have to excuse me," the Doctor explained patiently. "Since I'm not from this planet I'm not aware what words are vulgar and which aren't. Specifically what word did I misuse?"

The officer took a deep breath, deciding to play his suspects' game in the hope of getting more information. "The word... um... Gallifrey." He mumbled his last word quickly.

"That's vulgar? Why?" The Doctor's voice betrayed his vanishing composure.

The officer sighed again. "The residents of that planet have so misused their power and caused so much unnecessary suffering in the whole galaxy that they are universally hated. Every one of the several intelligent residents of planets in this galaxy that we have contacted have told us horror stories about the involvement of... er... Time Lords." The last two words were also mumbled rapidly.

"So," the Doctor mused, nodding knowingly. "My race is widely disliked in these parts." He looked up sharply at his questioner. "It would help a lot if you would tell me where I was."

But the officer ignored his question. "Did you say 'My race'?"

"Yes," the Doctor nodded.

The officer turned abruptly and left the room, slamming the door behind him. The Doctor winced as he looked at Frantec. "I may have gotten us into some real trouble here," he commented.

"You look hungry," Hadrian offered. "Would you like me to get you something?"

"I suppose," Romana agreed wearily.

"What would you like?" Hadrian paused, watching Romana phlegmatically consider his question. "How about a succulent fruit?"

"I'll try it," Romana decided.

Hadrian raised his arms and vanished. Romana eased herself down and stretched out on the grass. Nearby a child frolicked with Mavor in the twilight. As Romana watched, she was startled by a hand on her shoulder.

"Try this," Hadrian said. "It's delicious, and large enough for a whole meal."

Romana turned the two-decimeter wide sphere around in her hands for several seconds before lifting it to her mouth and biting out a small piece. She slurped as the juice ran down her chin.

"It is a bit messy, I'll admit," laughed Hadrian.

Romana finished chewing, swallowed deeply, and wiped her chin on her sleeve. "Not bad," she conceded. "You folks are fascinating," she observed after several more bites.

"How?" Hadrian asked.

"The way you have this planet all figured out." Romana took another bite, savoring it before she continued. "You know where all the best food grows, so you don't do any farming." She saw Hadrian's unasked question and explained. "You don't manipulate soil and plants to make food grow for yourselves."

"Why should we?" the young man queried.

"Many cultures would not survive if they didn't," Romana informed him. "You've found natural sources for all your comfort needs," she continued. "So you don't do any manufacturing. That's where you do a lot of manipulation of resources to make things like our machines. And you are obviously very careful about population control. Without that you wouldn't have survived here anywhere near as long as you have."

Hadrian tilted his head. "Your comments are interesting. I guess we take all those things for granted."

"That's perfectly natural," Romana allowed, as she finished the fruit Hadrian had brought her.

Hadrian stared at her for several seconds, a slight smile twitching the corners of his mouth. "You should probably sleep with the other single young women." He caught himself. "You are single?" he asked hesitantly.

"Yes," she nodded understandingly.

"Over there," he said, pointing through the twilight's thickening light-dark mixture.

Romana looked intently in the direction Hadrian had indicated, saw a group of young women milling about, and started walking in that direction. "Thank you," she said, looking back.

"So when people do things wrong here you lock them up where they can't leave?" Vorlene sought understanding.

"We couldn't let them keep on doing wrong things. More people would get hurt that way," Kelner explained.

"That wouldn't work for us," Vorlene mused. "Any one of us could just leave."

"Just walk through the wall?" It was the Castellan's time to be confused.

"No, leave -- through time -- like this." Vorlene lifted her hands above her head and vanished from Kelner's sight. He stared at the space she had occupied, trying to decide if she was using some sort of invisibility. When, nearly half a minute later, she tapped him on his shoulder from behind him he jumped around, nearly in fright.

"How'd you do that?" he spluttered.

"I traveled a few seconds into the future."

"O. K...." He paused with a finger held parallel to and in front of his lips. "How?"

"I just did it," Vorlene asserted.

"I mean, where's your machine -- how do you transmit your commands to it?"

"Of course. Thitocdor told me. You people can't travel in time without machines."

"Thitocdor?" Kelner wondered.

"I met him on my planet," Vorlene offered. "He wore animal hair, at least that's what he said it was, all over him -- even had something funny on his head...."

"You mean the Doctor," the Castellan interrupted.

Vorlene finally deciphered the combination of article and noun in the stranger's moniker. "What is a doctor?" she asked.

Kelner, also becoming more aware of the difficulties of communicating with someone from a totally alien culture, phrased his answer carefully. "A doctor can be one of several things. Some are specialists in treating disorders of the body." He gestured along his own body. "A doctor can also be anyone who has done an extraordinary amount of study in one field."

"This man who came to my planet, what kind of doctor is he?"

"Neither, actually." The Castellan paused to consider the issue. "I think he has a high level of knowledge in several fields, and I must admit that I'm not aware of any other name for him."

"So he knows a lot about time travel?" Vorlene asked.

"Especially about that," Kelner asserted. "And a lot about electronics, excitonics, plasma physics, mechanical logic, and so on.

"Anyway," he continued, "back to my question about you."

Vorlene broke in before he could continue. "I don't use a machine -- I just travel."

"Can you travel in space as well?"

"Sure," Vorlene said. "If you know of something in another location and tell me where it is, I can get it to prove that to you," she offered.

The Castellan stared at his security console while he thought about this. "Can you read a map?" he asked after several seconds' consideration. He brought a floor plan of the citadel up on his monitor as he spoke.

Vorlene studied the diagram.

"We're right here," Kelner pointed.

"And we came from right here," she concluded, understanding the diagram.

"Over here," he continued, "is where my wife works. "She borrowed a key from me this morning," he held up an electronic key as he spoke, "but she'll be done with it by now." It should be right on her desk.

"Easy," Vorlene declared just before vanishing.

Seargent Cantrell looked up, ready to issue a stern rebuke to the underling who had the audacity to interrupt him without warning. The expression he saw in the face of the underling, however, jelled the words in his mouth, preventing them from exiting. "What is it?" he finally managed to ask.

"Sir," the officer began hesitantly. "The man we picked up with that whore...."

After nearly ten seconds the seargent finally prompted for more, "Yes?"

"He claims he's from, ah, Gallifrey."

Cantrell stood abruptly. "He claims that device we hauled in from the surface is his TARDIS?"

"TARDIS?" the officer queried.

"It's what the Time Lords call their time machines."

"He did claim it was his spaceship."

"That would explain how he arrived without generating an intruder alert. These machines do not exist physically until they arrive at a specific time and location. However," the seargent clarified, "They usually take some unnoticeable or unobtrusive form on arrival, and the box we have is hardly unnoticeable." He walked around his desk, stopped in the doorway and turned around. "Still, I think we should proceed as if our detainee is telling the truth." He turned and left the room, calling behind him as he left, "Come with me."

"What are you going to do?" the officer asked as they walked toward the interview room.

"Try to find out what the Gallifreyans want with us now." Cantrell grabbed the handle of the door to the interview room. "And why they've broken their treaty of non-intervention." He swung the door open, stepped right in front of the Doctor, and glared.

"Nice day out, I hear," the Doctor offered. "At least it looked pretty good, what little of it I saw."

"We don't get out a lot," Cantrell replied. "Atmospheric conditions have nothing to do with our perception of a day's pleasure index. Anyway, I'm not here to exchange pleasantries. I want to know why you came here and why you claim you don't know where you are."

The Doctor stared back, without changing his expression in the slightest.

"Well?" the seargent demanded.

"Oh," the Doctor blurted as if surprised. "You expect me to provide the answers?"

Cantrell took his turn at staring.

"I want to know why I'm here too. As to why I don't know where I am, I only know that I didn't arrive at the location I had planned to reach -- the location to which my navigational equipment was set to take me."

"If you are, as you claim, a Time Lord, I would have difficulty accepting your explanation of navigational error. Maybe you're from some other planet that has recently mastered time travel but not yet perfected the navigational techniques."

"I'm sure," the Doctor replied, "that most Time Lords would have more modern equipment than I have. You can see that even my chameleon circuits don't work like they should. They jammed up a long time ago while I was visiting a planet where such an object would not have been unsual. Anyway, while I was born on Gallifrey I do not live there."

"A freelance Time Lord," Cantrell sneered. "The very worst kind."

The Doctor looked at Frantec as he considered how he would respond to this last challenge.

Lady Byneff, wife of the Castellan, stood from her desk to leave the room. As if her action had triggered it, the image of a woman clad in a minimal amount of animal skins appeard in front of her desk. At least Lady Byneff assumed it was just an image. This idea was shattered when the young woman reached for -- and took -- an electronic key from the desk. Almost instinctively she grabbed for the woman's arm -- and actually took hold of flesh and bone. "What are you up to?" she challenged angrily.

"It's OK," the young woman resonded breezily. "Your husband asked me to do this." She pulled her arm toward herself, attempting to release it from Lady Byneff's grasp.

"I doubt that," the room's usual occupant disagreed. With her free hand she diddled with a keyboard on the desk. Moments later an image of the Castellan's workstation appeared on a monitor. Lady Byneff dragged Vorlene around so she could be seen on Kelner's monitor. "This intruder," she charged, "just tried to make off with your key to the scientific wing."

"You have her?" Kelner responded over the intercom. "Good. Let her bring it back to me."

"What?! You know about this?"

"She's demonstrating her powers for me," the Castellan explained.

"I expect so!" Lady Byneff asserted as she released Vorlene and aborted the intercom connection almost simultaneously. "Of all the nerve!" she mumbled to herself as she watched the young woman vanish from the room.

Green rays of light fondled Romana's face before expending the rest of their energy against the orange grass. The grass expected this -- Romana did not. Her third day on this planet promised to be as unexpected as the rest.

She rolled over and pushed herself up wearily. She wasn't accustomed to sleeping on the ground, and two nights' worth of poor sleep began to tell on her mental and physical powers.

The thought of her physical powers brought to mind her training in bioengineering. She was a member of a highly bioengineered race, she remembered learning in school. Rassilon had introduced a genetic change in each body cell -- a change which allowed them to take themselves (and any other organic matter with them) through time in their machines.

While doing such manipulation, Rassilon considered many other modifications. Some of these he implemented; many others he abandoned. While he left no record of the abandoned modifications, most Gallifreyan scholars consider it a mark of Rassilon's wisdom that he resisted the temptation to make his race invulnerable.

In the interest of the continued advancement of knowledge among his people Rassilon did give them a limited means of defeating death, the now familar bodily regeneration that could occur up to twelve times during a time lord's life. This meant they would face life in as many as thirteen bodies.

Romana recalled her own regeneration. The odd sensations had been made all the more difficult to adjust to by her companion's flippant irascibility. She was glad she stuck with her original choice in the end -- at least she thought she was. Could it be that the Princess's delicate frame left her less able to cope with the rigors of the life she had chosen?

Probably all time lords wrestled with such questions, she decided. She had eleven more chances to get it right. Just do the best she could with the current regeneration. Maybe time would demonstrate she had made the best choice after all -- time relative to her own consciousness, of course.

The other young women around her began to awake. Almost as soon as each awoke she stood and vanished. Romana decided to go find Hadrian. She began to walk in the direction she had left him the night before. But before she reached the spot she discovered she was alone in the meadow with the gorral. The gorral, apparently having learned to take recent, out-of-the-ordinary events in stride, walked over to Romana and rubbed her leg. Impetuously, Romana sat beside it, rubbed its fur briskly, and chattered at it in a most childlike manner.

"Seems awfully chilly this morning," she commented to the animal. To herself she wondered why she hadn't noticed this before. She looked around. While it couldn't be empirically demonstrated, the day didn't seem as bright as it had earlier. Suddenly the cold, dark feeling left.

Hadrian's appearance beside her about that moment startled her quite seriously. "Breakfast?" he asked, holding out some of the berries from around the wiffle ponds. Romana accepted and ate them wordlessly.