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**TIME AND THE CAMPIONS** *Episode Three: Sweet Danger* >"Can't lose it now!" cried the Trader, barrelling through the door >before it had quite closed after Eighth. > >"It's all right," Carrie threw over her shoulder, following him. >"We seem to be in the nick of -- " The blue door shut behind her. > >The seconds stretched by in agonising cliffhanginess. As the >seconds settled down happily into becoming even more disturbing >minutes, Sixth started forward determinedly. > >The TARDIS did its wheezy Eeyore impression, committed blue disco >light, and buggered off in the now classical manner. === Fifth looked drunk. Or, Eighth thought, just possibly he looked more like a fellow who's recently sworn off the sauce, and is seeing the world with fresh eyes and a waking mind for the first time in too long. In the TARDIS console room, he stood with the unmistakable stance that meant 'at home'. Amanda held herself up like a front-parlour stranger at a funeral, her eyes bright and solicitous upon him. As Eighth crashed in upon the painful scene, she rounded upon him with evident relief. "Couldn't wait, eh?" she said lightly. "Well, I'm sure you'll be gratified to find yourself in the right. Two hearts is the least of it. I suppose it would really have to be..." Fifth looked pained. He wore his face differently to Albert Campion's: more expansively, less vaguely, and yet somehow appallingly less *lived-in*. Eighth, who remembered suffering Campion syndrome after his own fashion, was glad to see this -- but it stung his eyesockets. "Now, Amanda..." Trader Grey and Carrie came barrelling through the door, practically knocking over Eighth in the process. "Trouble?" Eighth surmised helpfully. "Indeed," said the Trader, still shaking with relieved reaction. "Lady Amanda, you remember when I lent you my Delethi penknife during the scavenger hunt? It's got that special attachment on it for helping old ladies across the road, and I nearly forgot -- " "Oh, dear," said Amanda seriously. "I wonder if I mightn't have left that in Ned." She began ferociously rummaging through her pockets. "What is this about?" Fifth demanded of Eighth. "It's just that we didn't tell you," Eighth flapped urgently. "It's rare and dangerous enough for two of us to meet inside continuity; but you MUST not meet your own self, or the balloon's up for certain..." "I *know* that." Eighth was amazed at how waspish that particular tone sounded, all these centuries later now that he was on the wrong end of it. "But we didn't know how well this would work; and if while you were still dazed, you'd decided to get things done quickly -- " It did not seem the right moment to go into just what ideas the company outside had been imputing to him. "Just a moment," said Carrie, very carefully. "What *is* the program here, exactly?" The Tradesome Twosome were swiftly brought up to speed on the time- loop plan, mostly by Eighth. A short, fraught silence ensued. "I don't think much of that!" the Trader concluded. "Yes, well, imagine how I feel about it!" the soon-to-be-surplus Fifth Doctor invited bitterly. "But it becomes clearer with every passing minute that there really isn't any other way." He stumped across to the console. "And since we now have a TARDIS pilot other than myself, and the pair of chronic meddlers who kicked this whole sorry affair off, we might as well -- " "Wait!" Eighth yelped. Fifth slammed home the dematerialisation switch. "I'd drop it," Amanda advised her husband's Byronic successor unemotionally. "It never does any good." The TARDIS materialised in a white gazebo. The sweet light of high English spring glowed through the viewscreens. "Now," reasoned Fifth chillily, "if you can only think of a way to smuggle yourselves into the fancy dress party without being noticed, our troubles are -- " He took a deep breath. "Over, I suppose." "That," said Amanda, her face clenched and streaked with quick, rogue tears, "won't be much of a trick, will it?" She gestured hopelessly at the eccentrically garbed crew. He reached down to her. His voice was kind, final, and incurably remote. "Brave heart, Amaaaaaaaaaaaargh!" He fell forward, owing to the butt of the Trader's DeLameter connecting suddenly and firmly with his head. Had not Amanda immediately reacted to catch her toppling husband, it would have gone ill with Trader Grey indeed at her hands. Instead, it was the tigerish rush of the Eighth Doctor that slammed He Who Strikes up against the roundelled wall with something very nearly approaching prejudice. "That," fumed Eighth, pinning his otherself's assailant by the throat and glaring straight into his face, "was the most cowardly, spiteful, despicable pieOuwwwww!" At this point he was interrupted by a shrewd double blow from Carrie, who had stepped up behind him and boxed his ears, with Paul Leonard's _The Turing Test_ in her right hand and Uncle Tezza's _Endgame_ in her left. The howling cognitive dissonance between the two combined with the shame of his behaviour during that Campionoid period of his own, to render Eighth harmlessly but most consummately unconscious. Amanda, seeing the way the tide was turning, had gone straight inside Fifth's jacket for the pistol which Campion always carried on serious business. The pistol, what is more, which the Doctor would not under any circumstances be caught dead packing. Discovering this too late, she scuttled backwards and threatened the turncoats with something resembling a super-high-tech plastic Swiss Army knife, which had been lurking in the gunless jacket. The short implement she had out was savagely edgy and pointy, and if it was the one intended for helping old ladies across the road, it is unlikely that the manner of assistance implied would have been especially welcome. "I see," she said levelly. "Somehow I completely ignored all the evidence, and thought you were the proper article. I'd just like to suggest that I've nothing to lose, and you'd be far better leaving him alone and going off about your filthy business. That looks rather out of my hands, now." "I'm sorry about that," said the Trader, sounding only marginally so. "I really did just come back for the knife. But this idea of tying your husband off in a time loop cries out to Calliope for a thumping -- not to mention an author ex machina..." Carrie nodded. "He's hardly likely to be thinking straight, just now. And Eighth is -- well, he's been in a position where he had to do something nastier to save the Universe." Her nose wrinkled critically. "I don't think it's refined his character particularly. He deserves what I did to him, for being prepared to go along with this!" "Which is just as well," finished the Trader, "since we'd have stood less than no chance unless we'd got the drop on them. Your Doctor will just have to pass on martyrdom, this time round!" "I see," said Amanda. She was alive with sudden hope, but neither her eyes nor the knifepoint dropped. "Do you actually know what you're doing, or are you being romantic about this? I'm agin that, you know." "Square dealing will find a way," Trader Grey pontificated, "and indeed, it already has, albeit several of the petty details reside only on the purely instinctual level of my teeming creative brain, weaving in and out in the delicate and deadly sword-dance into which temporal plotting ever draws -- " " -- But not in mine," Carrie cut in hastily. "We have the timeloop still possible as an absolute, last-chance fallback, if it does turn out to be that or the Universe. What I'd rather do is reconcile the timelines. If we knock out the Doctor from the party and leave *him* to become your Albert, there's still a way out. If getting hit in your caper, and then finding the TARDIS during the Spamplot, resets his memories -- *that's* why he doesn't come back to you afterwards!" "I just can't believe any other explanation for that," the Trader muttered. "Even he can't be *that* stupid!" "It must all get lost when his old identity floods back," Carrie agreed. "And so he pilots his way back to his last stop, and takes up his life where the mainstream of it broke off, because that's the only sensible thing for him to do. Nyssa and the others have all their canonical experiences -- and his memories of you are buried deep, until I accidentally -- " "Door," said Amanda succinctly. "I'll look after himselves. Do hurry, won't you?" "We're gone," asserted the Trader, swooshing grandly towards the door. Whereupon, very shortly, an Author ex machina he was indeed. "It's simplicity itself," he chuckled to Carrie, as they made their way through the alfresco fancy-dress caperings towards the stately pile. "The very weft of local causality will be working in our favour. What could possibly go wrong now?" His Muse considered this question briefly. "Gross authorial incompetence and insufficient understanding of the Whoniverse; leading to romantic tragedy, paradoxical horror, and/or the return of Nyarlathotep to existence and mastery of local continuity -- all of which will be due to our arrant hubris!" "Yes, but apart from that?" "Oh, apart from that," Carrie agreed, "nothing could go wrong with it at all!" Intro - Part One - Part Two - Part Four - Part Five - Part Six
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