Scenes from a Time Travelling Life
by Nope (LJ | e-mail | comment)
Art by attempt-unique (LJ | e-mail | comment) and Neth Dugan (LJ | e-mail | comment)
PART TWO: MARTHA
Gasping, Martha Milligan jerked awake.
The room was dark and quiet, save for the faint ebb and flow of distant traffic. The clock blinked at her, over and over, turning five-ten in the morning into five-eleven. She rolled over onto her back, panting a little, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She had been with the Doctor -- no, she had been dreaming she was with the Doctor, and there had been something... It was already fading, certainties leaking away, details blurring. Everything melting away. She blinked at the ceiling to clear her eyes.
An arm draped itself across her waist. The light from the alarm clock glinted off the wedding ring, and she turned her head to see Tom looking sleepily at her from the next pillow.
"Bad dream?"
"Yeah." She frowned. "No." She rolled towards him with a little half-shrug. "Just weird. It was... Do you ever have those dreams where, when you wake up, you're not sure if it was a dream or a memory?"
Tom considered this, and then shook his head, smiling a little. "Never."
"I could go off you," Martha said, but she smiled, and his smile grew.
"No, you couldn't." His hand traced her side, coming to rest against her hip, warm, solid and comforting, giving her space but being there for her too.
"No," she agreed. "I couldn't."
"Sleep more," he said. "Doctor's orders."
Martha lifted her head to check the clock on his side of the bed rather than rolling over again. "No point. I have to get up for work in an hour. Less."
"Tell them I kept you on Brazilian time." His thumb drew lazy circles on her skin.
Martha let out a soft laugh. "That might have worked last week, when you first got home. They'll never buy it."
"What's that saying about military intelligence?" Tom said. Martha mock glared. He just smirked. "And those names! UNIT. Touchwood. It's a psychologist's wet dream."
Martha smacked his shoulder, grinning. "It's Torchwood; although, no, yeah, Touchwood is pretty accurate."
"But they don't need you for an hour?" He gave her a suggestive look.
"Forty-five minutes," Martha said, but she slid in closer, lifting a hand to brush the hair back from his forehead and trail a finger against his beard.
"There's this ache I've been meaning to mention," Tom said, making Martha laugh. "I think I need some hands-on medicine, Doctor Jones..."
They pleasurably wasted more than an hour in bed and then ended up sharing a shower in a way that necessitated another rather colder shower afterwards. While Martha rushed about the flat they shared, getting ready, Tom sauntered around wearing only a pair of boxers, making her coffee and then a packed lunch he insisted she take with her. Most places she worked these days had cafeterias, mess halls, or whatever, but it was common for her to get involved and forget to leave her desk or bench for hours at a go.
"You know if I forget to go and have lunch, I'm going to forget I have lunch with me, right?" she asked, grinning at him as she unlocked her car.
Tom answered with a blown kiss. "Drive safe. No speeding!"
"Hey! You're the one who made me late!" Martha grinned at him, half-exasperated, half-amused. "You are so in for it when I get home, mister."
"Looking forward to it," he yelled after her.
She laughed and waved, pulling away smoothly and accelerating down the road. The outside of the car was a common, unremarkable Ford, but UNIT had gotten paranoid ever since the ATMOS debacle, and the insides were all custom made and fitted by trusted personnel. Among other things, it meant the car constantly broadcast its position to UNIT HQ and had a good built in communications system. Not universal roaming on a super-phone good, but the best human reverse-engineered alien technology could supply. On the upside, it meant she was always a button away from back-up and, on the down-side, it meant they could work out she was the closest doctor to a scene, call her up half-way to work and redirect her.
Commuter traffic was already filling the streets, backlogged by a broken down car, but she managed to weave her way across back roads and side streets. Less than ten minutes after the call, she pulled up to the front of an old Victorian house that served as an off-base dormitory for college-age recruits to UNIT's UK science division. Martha herself had stayed here some time before, cramming medicine for nineteen hours a day while Colonel Mace pushed for early exam admission. It hadn't been horrible, exactly, just extremely draining, and she'd left fully intending never to see the place again.
Really, she mused as she got out of the car, thoughts like that were just asking for things like this.
Hefting her medical gear, Martha reached for the doorbell, but the door opened before her hand got there, revealing Captain Price, who sighed in relief. "Oh, thank god! I thought they'd send me Sullivan. I really don't care who his uncle is; the kid's a useless berk. Come on, we're up on the first floor."
"So what is it?" Martha asked, following her towards the stairs. "Another stressed student's prank gone horribly wrong?"
"You tell me. The housekeeper came in with milk and the morning papers at her usual time, leaves them in the kitchen and comes upstairs to check on the lads -- we have four in right now, nabbed a couple out from under the noses of Porton Down -- and found them like this." Captain Price pushed open a door at the top of stairs that Martha remembered as leading to a communal lounge. "That was almost forty minutes ago now. We didn't want to move them until you said we could."
She stepped out of the way to allow Martha in first. The room was the same shape Martha remembered, but that was all it had going for it. The television and sofas had gone. For that matter, so had the curtains and the carpet. Arranged across the middle of the room were four old cast-iron bathtubs, each one filled to the brim with ice, each one occupied by a naked student, propped up so their heads were just out of the water. A couple of paramedics stood over them.
"Are they dead?" Martha asked, hurrying over.
"Heavily sedated," said one of the paramedics, a balding middle-aged man.
"We think so, anyway," added his companion, a younger woman with chestnut hair pulled back in an austere bun. Their badges identified them as Brown and Chavez respectively. "Slow pupil response, steady but weak pulses."
"They have to be suffering hypothermia," Martha said, kneeling by the first tub. A mobile phone rested in the soap-tray. "Why on Earth wouldn't you move them?"
She reached for the occupant, a mop-haired young man in his early twenties with morning stubble, expecting to feel cold, clammy skin. The neck was damp enough, what with having come up out of the bath, but warm under her fingers, which was -- well, you learned quickly not to say impossible in this job, but certainly implausible, even if the bodies had been placed in the tub only seconds before they were found. Martha looked at the paramedics for confirmation and got matching nods.
"That," said Brown. "And there's something else--"
"They were all left with phones," Captain Price put in. "One per tub, each with the number for emergency services pre-selected."
"We think, well." Chavez glanced at her partner, then back again. "I mean, you hear about this sort of thing, don't you?"
"What sort of thing?" Martha asked absently, pulling her penlight out and carefully pulling the man's eyelid back, checking pupil reaction. She looked back when Chavez didn't answer, then at the left phone, and then back at the ice. "Oh, you have got be kidding!"
Pulling her sleeves up, she carefully worked an arm under the body, biting back a curse at the cold. Even deep under the water, the body was warm. She trailed her hand down it (him, she reminded herself, this is a person), searching. There was a raised vertical ridge above the hip just where she didn't want to find one, a recently sutured wound. It would leave quite a scar -- but then, you needed a bit of room to remove someone's kidney cleanly.
"This has to be a hoax," Martha said. "People don't steal organs -- and if they did, they wouldn't bother with just one."
"People may not," Captain Price started and then, with a quick look at the paramedics, asked "Recommendation?" instead.
"Help me lift this one out," Martha decided. There was a blanket in her kit, which she quickly rolled out. "If his condition doesn't deteriorate, we'll retrieve the others; you have transport?"
"We've an ambulance parked out back," Brown said, coming to help her with the arms. "It'll be a bit of a squeeze, but we can carry all four. What do we do if they need the cold? We can't risk them going into convulsions and shock mid-transit."
"If we can't move him, we'll move the baths," Martha said, looking at Captain Price for confirmation. Price nodded, moving to take the man's feet with Chavez. "On three, then. One, two--"
They heaved together, ice and water rushing everywhere as they lifted, carrying the man to the blanket and laying him down.
"There seem to be no physiological reactions to the cold whatsoever," Martha said, amazed. "No skin discoloration in the extremities. If he wasn't wet, you couldn't believe he had been in the bath at all." She grabbed her stethoscope and checked the man's heartbeat, listened to his lungs, which sounded clear. "Breathing is clear and unimpeded." She rapped the man's knee, watched him twitch. "Autonomic reflexes seem normal." That portable ultrasound she hadn't picked up would have been handy right now. "Can you lift him?"
"Yeah." Brown and Chavez did, turning the man onto his side.
"Looks like surgery to me," Price said. "Something thin and sharp did that. I'd say razor if it's not a scalpel."
"Seen a lot of knife wounds?" Martha asked as they turned the man flat again.
"My fair share. How long before we're sure he's okay to move?"
"Medically sure, I'd say never, unless we could get more equipment in here, do a proper scan. For going on with--" She touched his neck again. "Pulse doesn't seem to be changing. His breathing is staying regular. Give it a few minutes."
"I'll fetch the stretcher up," Chavez said, standing.
"I'll call ahead. We have private wards locked off at Heartswood, just down in Chiswick," Captain Price said.
Martha nodded. The whole thing felt off, somehow. She felt like she should be urgently rushing to do something, but all four students actually seemed in relatively stable condition. In, point of fact, much better condition than they should be. Why the phones? What good would they have done? It felt... Contrived. Like a set-up, a hoax, a prank.
"I'm going to take a quick look around," she decided, standing abruptly. "Keep an eye on these."
Brown nodded. "Yes, ma'am."
To her disquiet, a search of the rooms revealed nothing of interest. Everything looked in place. There wasn't anything unusual in the medicine cupboard (a few Lemsips, some Advil, and a half-empty and out of date bottle of cough syrup) or in the trash. Ready-meals filled the fridge and freezer, microwavable crap instead of real food, but she'd lived like that too. There was no sign of the missing furniture, or of any sedatives. If the students were hoaxing them, they had hidden their tracks well.
Giving it up as a lost cause, she helped the others get the other three students out of the baths and all four of them down the ambulance. Making certain they secured the patients as best they could be in an ambulance really only designed for two, Martha left them to go ahead, promising to follow on in her own car.
Out of earshot of the other two, Captain Price said, "We need to be sure this isn't some extra-terrestrial hazing prank. Experimentation on humans and other animals isn't unknown after all, and heaven alone knows what social cues they might have misinterpreted from all those procedurals we're casually beaming into space. This could be an episode of Law and Order: Mars for all I know."
"This isn't the Ice Warriors' style," Martha said, but she agreed to check them over and report. Price intended to have a forensic team run over the house; she'd already called them in.
The ambulance pulled away, and Martha said her goodbyes, hurrying to her car, not wanting traffic to delay her too much. She was in the driver seat, turning the keys, when her mobile trilled, startling her into banging her knees on the dash. Cursing under her breath, she tugged it out and was lifting it to pick up the call when she had the sudden overwhelming certainty that it was coming from the house behind her, from one of those phones on the baths.
They're still here, she thought wildly. They're in the house with us!
Except she wasn't in the house, she was in the car and, anyway, that was stupid. Who was still there? Really. The phone trilled again and her heart jumped. Deliberately she pressed the connect button.
"Hello?"
There was a hiss. A crackle of static. Something that might have been her name at a distance.
"Hello?" Martha repeated. Before she could stop herself, she asked, "Is there anybody there?"
"It's me," said Tom, sounding tinny and far away. "I was checking you got to work okay. Where are you? The reception is crap."
Martha sighed in relief and then pretended she hadn't, because she was a doctor and she had travelled in space and time and spooking herself was definitely not the sort of thing she did. "I'm headed into Heartswood."
"What are you doing in Chiswick?" Tom asked and then, before she could speak, answered himself. "Never mind, UNIT business. Bad?"
"I don't know yet," she answered honestly. "I have to go; I'll call you."
"I'll get dinner in. Something we can reheat if aliens invade and you come home late." She could hear him grinning. "Oh, hey, some woman called for you, only she didn't say who she was, or what she wanted, or leave a message."
Martha snorted. "Well, thanks for that."
Tom laughed. "See you tonight. Love you."
"Love you too," she said, and he hung up. Martha went to do the same and her phone crackled. Static. Just static.
Damn it, he'd made her late again!
Heartswood had been in Chiswick since the 1850s, an ugly, grey stone building squatting in the shadows of Turnham Green. In 1944 it had received a glancing blow from a V-2 rocket which had quite possibly been the last time anyone tried to refurbish the place. Being gloomy and oppressive, full of tight corridors and unexpected rooms with too small windows -- all very dramatic -- some bright spark had thought to make it part of the National Health Mental Trust and UNIT had promptly co-opted it as somewhere to stash patients whose talk of aliens would be taken in stride as the ramblings of challenged people.
Refusing to be cowed by a building when she'd laughed in the Master's face, Martha held her head high as she strode through the perpetual twilight of Heartswood's car park. Her security card got her through reception, into the lifts, and then into the ward. After that, routine took over, moving the patients into beds, hooking them up to monitors, drawing blood for testing, doing a proper ultrasound to assess internal damage and confirm the missing organs and so on. X-Rays showed nothing she hadn't expected but the EEG proved oddly active. Finding the administrator, she talked him into letting her have half-an-hour on the MRI for comprehensive brain scans, to the annoyance of the neurology department who sent up a doctor to watch over her.
"Department politics," the man -- fifties, a military cut to his short brown hair, gold-wire framed glasses perched on his prominent nose, identified by his security badge as S. Khan -- assured her. "You won't know I'm here."
"Okay," Martha said, activating the scanner.
"Quiet as a mouse," he added, watching the screens for a moment, before leaning over her. "Hang on; you must have set it up wrong."
"No, that's just..."
They both looked at the screen, and then stood up to peer through the observation window at the supine form.
"Are you sure he's unconscious?" Khan asked.
"I was," Martha said, staring at the scanner data again. "It's like... I don't know what it's like. This is definitely motor control, right?"
Khan nodded. "He should be twitching like anything. Yet not even REM. Look, here, and here. That's optical." He tapped the screen with his pen. "And there, in the temporal lobe; all lit up like crazy when they should be practically black."
"The pontine tegmentum too. Sleep paralysis?" Martha suggested. "If he was really vividly dreaming... I need to get the medical histories, see if there's any history of narcolepsy."
"I don't think narcolepsy would explain these readings."
"It's like he's trapped in a state of hypnagogia," Martha said. "Neither awake nor asleep, but right there on the edge between."
Khan considered. "Have you had blood work done? I've actually seen very slightly similar reactions in people given strong doses of things like DMT."
"I sent samples downstairs to the lab, but they haven't come back with the results," Martha said absently, tapping keys to send the machine back for another, deeper pass.
"I can keep on here if you want to chase them," Khan offered. Off her look, he added, "Seriously, this is fascinating. I'll hold the room for you and everything."
"Won't you get in trouble?"
He chuckled. "I'll just blame you."
"Oh, cheers." She smiled anyway, standing to let him at the controls. "I'll be right back."
The lab was in the basement and contained only one technician amidst the equipment, jumping from machine to machine and barely looking up long enough to acknowledge Martha's presence. Keeping out of the way, Martha tracked down the reports on the blood she'd sent down and did the last few unfinished tests herself in a far corner of the lab. The results were not promising. There were signs of massive levels of neurotransmitters, which were interesting, but no traces of any of the common sedatives or psychotropic drugs. Of course, the initial drug could have been metabolised and something else could be keeping the patients sedated but it did Martha no good either way.
Her mobile buzzed, and she quickly turned it off, knowing it could affect the equipment. The technician started giving her dirty looks. Martha grabbed up all her papers and with a quick word of apology headed out. She read over the reports as she climbed the stairs to the ground floor landing. Too many of the results were too normal, lacking any post-surgery artefacts, which was a bloody neat trick.
She reached for the left door; the right swung open and a woman breezed through. Martha caught a flash of blonde hair before a shoulder knocked into her, papers going everywhere, tumbling at her feet and through the doors.
"Oi!" she called. "Watch it!"
There was no reply, just the clack of high-heels racing away up the stairs.
"The nerve of some people," Martha muttered, picking the closest papers up.
The woman had seemed vaguely familiar, hospital staff perhaps. The urge to chase after her, or report her to admin, was strong, but also petty; there was no need to take her frustrations at medical oddities out on strangers.
Pushing through the doors, she reached down for the next dropped paper, and all the lights went out, plunging her into semi-darkness. She blinked, trying to adjust her eyes to the dim grey light from the distant front doors. Before she'd taken another step, they came back up again, blazing brighter than before. When she threw up a hand to protect her eyes from the glare, her papers went flying again.
"Blimey!" said a young voice off to her left. "Oh, my head!"
The light slowly returned to normal and Martha, blinking away after images, made out a teenager in red and black robes rubbing at a mass of mousey-brown hair.
"Alright?" she asked, ducking to grab her papers again.
"Huh?" He stared at her, and then abruptly bounded over, grabbing up papers as well. "Yes, sorry, here; these are yours, then?"
"Thanks." They soon collected the rest and she stood, taking the ones he offered and adding them to her pile. This close, she realised that the boy, too, looked familiar. A little younger, maybe, and the hair darker, but the same eyes. Except that was ridiculous, because it had been eighty odd years (objectively speaking) since she'd seen-- "Tim?"
"Is that right?" he asked, confusing her before she realised he was looking over her shoulder at the clock-calendar above the reception desk.
"I think so," Martha said, hefting the papers one-handed, so she could check her watch. She was running a couple of minutes slow, but near enough. "Are you--?"
When she looked up again, it was to find the boy already half-way to the exit.
"Sorry," he called back, "but I'm really early!" The doors banged open and closed and he was gone.
"Right, then," Martha said. That had been weird. And possibly she had just let one of the mental patients run out because, seriously, who wore robes in this day and age? She made a mental note to ask somebody -- the receptionist appeared to have vanished -- and headed back up the stairs.
Puzzling over a notation in the corner of one of the pages (3W:⊥∀3) she pushed open the door to the MRI control room with her shoulder, calling out "I'm back."
There was no reply. The lights were dim, though there was a bright blue glow coming from the testing chamber, through the observation window and the half-open interior door. Dropping the papers on the desk, she crossed to the window. Doctor Khan was inside with her back to her. She raised her hand to knock on the glass and stopped before she did. The bed of the MRI was empty. The student was in the corner. Standing in the corner, with his back to her.
The blue glow got brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again. It wasn't regular, like a pulse, but there was a pattern to it, a cadence, almost familiar.
Backing away from the window, Martha crossed to the test chamber door as quietly as she could and pulled it gently shut. Something banged against it hard and she yelped, slamming the bolt closed. The bang came again, then silence. She edged away, following the wall, and stretched out her fingers to turn the intercom on.
"Doctor Khan?" she called. "Can you hear me? Is everything okay?"
There was no response. There was nothing. It felt like she'd stumbled out of a medical drama into a slasher movie. Any minute now, someone was going to say something stupid like 'I'll be right back'. Which she already had. Oh, god. Get a grip, Martha!
"Doctor?" she asked again, edging around more. The intercom crackled, and she jerked her hand back at the sudden spark of static, taking a stumbled step away, bringing her back in front of the window. She whirled.
Khan and the student were both there, pressed against the glass, their eyes open and rolled back. Their jaws dropped, letting out a dry, rustling, hissing sound, like a last breath escaping from a newly made corpse.
Martha's nerve broke and she sprinted for the door, hearing them start to beat on the window behind her. The corridor blurred by and she stumbled out into the stairwell, wanting nothing more than to go down, knowing she had to go up. There were three more students in the beds or, worse, up walking around. They were her responsibility.
She climbed the stairs quickly, taking them in twos, and pushed her way through the doors at the next landing. The lights were out in the corridor (of course) and the grimy glow from the slits of windows barely gave her a view of her own feet. She walked slowly up it, trailing a hand against the wall to count the doors as she passed. Two. Three. Four. (Were those new footsteps or just hers, echoing back at her in the tight space?) Five. Six. Seven.
There was an empty space where eight should have been and Martha fell in, bouncing off the doorframe. She caught it before she could go over completely, pulling herself back upright. The lights flickered and caught for a moment. All the students were up. They were facing away from her, except the lights flickered, and they somehow weren't. Their eyes were rolled up, their mouths open. The rustling, whispering sound crawled out of their throats like dusty insects, buzzing all around her. She backed away, and they came shuffling, shambling forward.
Everything has a rational explanation, she told her self. Everything. Zombies, vampires, and ghosts are just stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the unknown. Do something!
"Hello? Can you understand me?" She found herself out in the corridor. "I need you to all lie down in the beds. Can you hear me?"
They came on, and she dodged forward, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut, only then noticing that the lock required a key. The door rattled. A hand smacked against the small glass window in it.
"Stay," she yelled, doing the exact opposite, and bolted back down the corridor, bouncing off the walls before she crashed through the door and back into the stairwell.
Something buzzed. For a moment, Martha expected the lights to go again, but it was coming from her pocket. She reached in and pulled out her mobile. The screen was dark. Still, the phone buzzed again.
"But I turned you off!" she told it. It just buzzed. Martha cautiously pressed the button and raised it to her ear. "H-hello?"
A burst of static became the rustling noise and she yelped and dropped the phone. It clattered against the railing, falling back towards her. It beeped when it hit the ground, then again, a staccato pattern. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. She kicked out, sending it skidding between the railing bars, tumbling out into open space and down, chiming all the way. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih-bih-bum. Bih-bih--
A door below crashed open. Something banged against the door beside her.
She went up the stairs again, as fast as she could, and across a couple of landings without slowing. The next door she took, meaning to cross into the residency block and take the other stairwell down. It was dark inside; she fumbled to her side, fingers finding a fire extinguisher and no light switch. There was an emergency lever, though, and she pulled that.
Alarms started wailing, above and below her, and emergency strip-lights lit up all down the corridor, revealing Brown and Chavez standing about halfway down it.
"Am I glad to see you!" Martha called, hurrying towards them. They didn't move. She slowed, feeling something twist in her gut. "Brown? Chavez?"
Their faces were in shadow.
Martha stopped, started backing up. "This is mad."
There was a dry chuckle. "We're all mad here," Brown said, except it didn't sound like him at all.
"Didn't you know?" Chavez asked, but it was the same voice as Brown's coming from her throat.
They both suddenly came forward, a shambling charge, but Martha snatched up the extinguisher, pulling the safety cord free in the same move, swinging it towards them as she squeezed the handles. Foam burst from the nozzle, driving them back. Martha backed through the door and then slammed it, jamming the canister against it. She took the stairs again, going up though she was running out of building.
Should have gone down in the first place, she told herself. Think! Fire! There was an emergency stairwell down the outside of the building, for use in fire. Yes!
Brown and Chavez broke out onto the stair below her. Below them, Khan and the students were coming up. Martha lengthened her stride, glad she'd kept in shape after the year that never was, pushing her way up the stairs and through the last door. She needed a window, something she could see out of and find where the fire escape was. Trying each door as she came to it, she ducked her head in. The first two were useless, and while the view was clear from the third, there was no sign of her exit. Leaving that side as bust, she started up the next.
One door jiggled under her hand. Another push and it slipped open an inch before catching. Martha put her shoulder to it and heaved and it burst inwards. She caught a glimpse of rolled up eyes, ducked automatically; hands swiped over her head and she threw herself back into the corridor. It was the bloody receptionist. That just wasn't fair.
Neither was Brown breaking into the other end of the corridor, the gang pushing in behind him. Instinct got her feet moving before her brain could. There was no way forward or back, but there were still doors, and she threw herself at one. It opened. She slammed it behind her, grabbing a chair and wedging it in place, then grabbing one of the wheeled beds, kicking the brake off, and shoving it up against the door as well. Only then did she turn around to check where she had holed herself up in, and gasped in shock.
Occupying the far corner of the room was a big blue Police box.
Martha darted across the room and banged on the door. To her delight, it opened. Beaming, she bounded inside, calling out, "Doctor! You have no idea how happy I am to see--"
The person wearing the familiar coat wasn't the Doctor she knew. For one thing, the Doctor wasn't female, and he was probably a good few inches taller, and a pale, ridiculously skinny thing, whereas this was a healthily solid South Asian looking woman. The light brown overcoat didn't really go with the cream linen pantsuit worn beneath it.
"--you," Martha finished.
"Martha Jones!" The woman beamed at her. "How lovely to see you again! It's me! The Doctor!"
"Doctor who?" said Martha. The woman nodded. Martha stared. "Oh, you're kidding me. Don't be ridiculous."
"I regenerated!"
"I can see that," Martha said. "You're a woman!"
"Am I?" She looked down. "Goodness gracious me, so I am! Hah!"
"...right," said Martha, coming up to the console. "Look, the thing is, there are these people outside, right, who are sort of... Well, they're zombies. I think it might be some kind of parasite, because I was assuming something was taken out of them, but maybe something was put in or someone infected them with something or, I don't know. But we have to do something!"
"Well, of course we do! There are ruptures in space-time, holes in the very fabric of Creation! Horrible things are leaking in from terrible places, and we need to plug them up! Hand me that hammer."
Bemused, Martha did.
"Massive temporal experiments started for good reasons have gone hideously wrong, as these things do, and so we must fix it! Preferably without regenerating again, I'm running out of these things and I'm still not ginger. Terrible!" She whacked the console with the hammer and the time rotor began to rise and fall. "Come on, Martha. The game's afoot!"
As they started to dematerialise, the Doctor added, "And probably lots of other body parts as well."