Lady Byneff punched another code into her communication monitor. A female face appeared over the words "Public Register Video".

"Can I help you," the remote voice asked.

"This is Lady Byneff. You might be interested in what's happening just now in the Castellan's office. People should know what kind of man seeks the presidency."

"Are you sure about this?" the reporter queried.

"I may be ambitious," Lady Byneff retorted, "but my ambition and my tolerance are both limited."

"Sounds interesting," the reporter replied as she rang off.

"Perhaps if I showed you inside my TARDIS you'd be sure I was telling the truth," the Doctor suggested. "I assume you have it near here."

Sergeant Cantrell decided quite rapidly this was a great idea. He led the Doctor and his companion through several doors in enough different directions to confuse an experienced cartographer. Soon the three stood in front of the blue square prism. The Doctor lifted a key from his pocket (without the usual fumbling around) inserted it in the proper slot, pushed the door open and held his arm out, inviting the sergeant to enter.

"After you," Cantrell ordered. The Doctor acceeded without argument.

Cantrell stepped inside behind the Doctor, took about a half a second to look around him, and abruptly left. The Doctor followed, closing the door behind him. The sergeant stared at Frantec for several seconds, slowly turned, and faced the Doctor.

"So, 'Doctor'," he began, squeezing sarcasm out of the name like toothpaste from a tube. "Why have the, ah, time lords sent you here?" He again said the two words indicating the Doctor's race quietly and quickly. The Doctor opened his mouth to explain, but Cantrell interrupted before any sounds came out. "No, no, don't tell me. I'm in over my head. I'm sending you right to the top."

The policeman led the two time travellers back through the maze of doors and halls. "I don't even want to know why a time lady would be dressed like this," he said along the way, indicating Frantec.

The Doctor responded as Cantrell ushered them back into the interview room. "She's not from Gallifrey, and she's not a time lady in the sense that I'm a time lord."

"Be quiet, will you," the sergeant growled.

"Shall I show him?" Frantec asked. Her companion nodded. She lifted her arms and vanished from the policeman's sight. He slammed the door, screamed a stream of oaths that included several derogatory references to Gallifrey and its residents, and concluded the speech with the words, "I don't want to know -- I don't even want to know!"

Vorlene handed the key to Kelner. "Is your wife always so impolite?"

The Castellan, still deep in contemplation of this evidence of such unusual natural ability, ignored the question for several seconds. Vorlene, still pressing for an answer, stepped closer. Jolted by this sudden contact, Kelner spun around saying, "You probably startled her."

His move startled Vorlene, who lost her balance and fell into his lap. He reached around to grab her so she wouldn't fall to the floor. He felt the body relax in his arms. "Now, now," he said, "you really should get up."

The young time traveler sat up on the Castellan's lap, sighed, and stood up. A beep from the console warned that an existing communication connection was waiting for attention. Kelner looked at his monitor to see the same face his wife had seen moments earlier.

"You opened the connection at your end," the woman said. "The origin of the call was clearly displayed before you opened the connection. I have every legal right to publish the scene I just recorded."

An understanding of what had just occurred slowly penetrated Kelner's consciousness. "Vorlene must have bumped the button when she fell," he finally managed to protest.

"Fell?" the woman asked skeptically.

"Just leave me alone; I have work to do," the Castellan grouched as he broke the connection.

Sudden inspiration struck. "Rodan's just getting off duty," he suggeted to his visitor. "Maybe she could take you to her quarters and fill you in on what life here at the citadel is like." He punched a communication code into his terminal. The faces of Rodan and her replacement appeared on his monitor.

"I have a visitor here from another planet," the Castellan explained. "She really needs a lot of help understanding our life here. As you can understand, I'm quite busy at the moment. Could you serve as her host? I could probably arrange some time off so you'll be able to do the task better."

Rodan and her colleague could see Vorlene behind Kelner. "Certainly," Rodan replied pleasantly. As soon as the connection had been broken she turned to her replacement. "A half-dressed woman from another culture. Romana was here two days ago. What other evidence do we need that the Doctor is involved?"

The woman taking her place at the security console nodded. Vorlene, having decided to take a literally pedestrian means of travelling the short distance from the Castellan's office to the security monitoring bay, walked through the door just then. "Rodan?" she assumed.

"Follow me," Rodan commanded, passing briskly out the door. Vorlene complied, though Rodan's colleague thought she followed more closely than Rodan had intended.

"Doctor," Regent Fergus welcomed expansively.

The Doctor stared intently at his host, seeking details from the face, the name, the situation, anything that would help him link this man to a memory.

The Regent thought quickly, looking for an appropriately obscure prod. "Legislative librarian," he prompted.

"Looking for legal precedent to allow regulation of core cooling technology," the Doctor recalled after a few more moments of searching long-closed mental cupboards. "So we're on Darmellon," he concluded.

"You mean nobody told you?"

"They were too busy telling me I couldn't have arrived by spaceship and that I therefore already knew where I was."

"My people aren't accostomed to alien visitors. We have only recently developed the ability to communicate with the residents of other planets in the galaxy. Actually, it's probably better that they didn't think you were alien. In that case they may have adopted a violent response." The Regent stood to match his visitor's stance.

"My officers told me about an underdressed woman. Is that the same companion you had with you last time?" Fergus asked.

"No," the Doctor said, stretching the word across two full seconds. "You're remembering Leela. Anyway, the woman with me now is not a companion in the usual sense. I currently travel with a time lady."

"Married now?"

"Did that already in my first body." The Doctor went on to explain about Romana, Frantec, and Frantec's planet of origin.

Fergus turned and walked toward a wall monitor as he pondered the Doctor's information. "So the time lords have primitive cousins," Fergus concluded.

"In a manner of speaking," the Doctor clarified. "The high council may not yet know of their existence. But the fact that my attempt to reach Gallifrey was interrupted, probably by a highly-placed time lord, suggests they know something is up. But since I'm not there I don't know what they do or do not know, or what objection they have to my presence."

"So what do you plan to do while here?"

"Romana and I were planning on a vacation. The only problem is that I'm also fleeing the Black Guardian and put a randomizer on my TARDIS' navigational controls. Makes it difficult to follow me around if even I don't know where we're headed. So we couldn't plan on a vacation, only hope to take one when we happened upon a suitable planet. Besides, Romana's not with me." The Doctor stopped abruptly with this last sentence and his eyes seemed to disappear behind blinds of intense concentration.

Fergus sensed the tension and guessed a lot about his visitor's dilemma. "You fear the Black Guardian may be able to trace Romana to this planet of time nomads."

"Time nomads," the Doctor mused. "I like the term. I think I'll use it to refer to them." An upward twinge at the corners of the Doctor's mouth conveyed his gratitude to the Regent. The look failed to erase the serious concern still registered there. "The appearance of the cube forced me to override the randomizer so I could get to Gallifrey and, since then, back to the time nomads' planet."

"It sounds like a trap to me," Fergus mused.

"Of course!" the Doctor exclaimed, turning on his host in a manner that, for anyone else, would have been rude in the extreme. "The Black Guardian set this up knowing that, sooner or later I'd have to do something about the cube and override the randomizer. And I've left Romana and the time nomads at his mercy." The tone of this last sentence betrayed the Doctor's sense of failure.

"Can't you go back to help them?" the Regent wondered aloud.

"Whoever it is on Gallifrey that has blocked my arrival may have inadvertently also prevented my return to the time nomads' planet. The High Council can be quite predictable, and this is an eventuality the Black Guardian probably counted on when he set his trap." The Doctor sagged with fresh fatigue onto a bench at the far edge of the throne room.

Fergus sat beside him. "Why don't you leave Frantec here and at least try." he suggested. "The Black Guardian may not be aware she's with you, and at least one member of her race would be preserved should you fail, be that forbidden by the White Guardian."

A nanoglimmer of hope sparkled at the back of the Doctor's eyes when he lifted his head to respond. "Let me at least get her dressed in something more appropriate for your world," he said.

"You'll do it, then?" the Regent queried, his tones revealing he expected an affirmative response.

"It would be irresponsible of me not to at least attempt to atone for my carelessness."

"Send her here when she's ready," Fergus ordered in the tones he usually reserved for issuing royal proclamations. He tapped a wall panel, calling back his attending guards. "Have the Doctor and his companion escorted to his TARDIS," he commanded when they had arrived. "Wait there until the lady comes back out. Bring her here."

"I wish I had a way to take you with me," Hadrian said, glancing around the empty meadow. "There are things I must attend to with the rest of the tribe, but I don't feel good about leaving you here."

"Don't worry so much about me," Romana soothed. "Night before last I spent the night stranded near a desert stream probably fifteen or twenty thousand kilometers away from here."

"Our people rarely spend time alone," Hadrian volunteered. "You never know what unexpected danger might present itself."

"Really," Romana remonstrated, "while it's not a reflection on you or your tribe, I would like to have a little time to myself anyway." She thought briefly of the issues she had to think through, issues that would make no sense to her host. "There are things I need to think through carefully."