When they finally left the Tardis, it was well into morning. She could hear people calling her name throughout the farm.

“I’m over here!” she called back.

A blonde man led the first group that reached her. “Letitia,” he cried, “we’ve been looking everywhere for you! James said your guest is a doctor; we need him to look at this.” He pulled a crying child in front of him; it was Daisy from the story circle.

Letitia looked at the Doctor, unsure what to say, but he was already kneeling to look.

“She was bitten by a spider yesterday,” her father explained, “and at first it was just the welt, but today she woke up and started screaming, because – well, look!” He indicated her arm. About halfway down the forearm was the red welt, two puncture marks in the middle of it, and the surrounding skin had gone dry and wrinkled. There were irregular brown spots, and her fingers were curled and immobile.

The Doctor pulled something like a small flashlight out of his jacket pocket.

“What’s that?” Letitia whispered.

“Scanner,” he replied, shining it on Daisy’s arm. He swallowed, then pushed her away and stood up. “I can fix it,” he said, “if I can find the right thing in my supplies. But first I need to know where she was when she was bitten.”

“In that shed, getting a shovel,” her father answered, pointing to a weather-beaten shed between the field and the woods. He looked startled. “What the heck happened to the shed? We only built it a month ago, and yesterday it looked fine.”

The Doctor stared at him for a moment, then seemed to come to some decision.

“Stay here.” He rushed to the shed, opened it, looked inside for a moment, then slammed it shut and leaned against the door. Letitia watched that wild smile flash across his face, then disappear just as quickly. “Nobody go in there. Not for anything!” Then he dashed off into the woods, grabbing Letitia’s arm on his way past.

“Your supplies are out there?” Daisy’s father asked incredulously. Letitia only had time to smile reassuringly before she was yanked out of sight.

“What’s going on?” she huffed, fighting to keep up. “What’s in the shed?”

“Spiders,” the Doctor explained. “Only not natural ones. They’re time spiders.”

“Time spiders?”

“They live in the channels between time and space. They must have followed me out. Was there a storm yesterday, before I met you?” he yanked open the door of the Tardis and pulled her inside.

“Yes. We get a lot of early afternoon squalls this time of year.” She stopped to catch her breath.

“The lightning weakens the barrier.” He began rummaging around the control room. “The spiders could never get through on their own, no matter how violent the storm, but when something else – don’t stop now, you have to help me look! When something else comes through, like the Tardis, they can slip in around the sides, if the barrier is weak. I try not to go anywhere that there’s a storm on, just in case, but sometimes…”

He trailed off, then threw down the bizarre chunk of metal and wires he was holding and covered his face with his hands. “It’s all my fault,” he groaned. “I brought them here. That girl could die of old age and it’s all my fault!”

“Doctor…” Letitia began.

“I shouldn’t be here. I should have died with the rest. All I’m doing is endangering more innocent people…”

“Doctor!” she snapped, cutting him short. “It is not your fault.”

“Everywhere I go, disaster comes with me.”

She grabbed him by the lapels, pulled him off the floor, and shoved his back against a pillar. “Don’t you ever, ever, feel guilty for being alive!” she screamed. Then her eyes began to sting with tears, and she let go of the jacket and busied herself smoothing it out. “Not ever.”

“How on Earth did you just do that?”

“Maternal burst of strength. Has it never occurred to you, in almost nine hundred years, that this ship that you can’t quite control takes you exactly where you need to go to stop a disaster that’s already in progress?”

“Sure it has,” he nodded. “But not this time. Those spiders could not have come here without me.”

“I see,” she said. “And why are you here?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m speaking on the small scale. Why did you come to this place, in this time?”

“No, really, I don’t know,” he repeated. “I don’t remember how I escaped the war, and I don’t remember programming any coordinates. I just woke up, and I was here.”

“Then it’s not your fault you arrived during a storm.”

He looked away. “I suppose not.”

“Now, is there anything these people can do on their own to save Daisy? And get rid of the spiders?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Then I guess we’d better stop laying blame and just find what you need to stop them. What are we looking for?”

He shook his head and sighed heavily. Never argue with a mother. “Nanogenes and an electromagnetic pulse generator.” Shoving past her, he started to rummage around again.

Letitia wrinkled her forehead in confusion. “Nanowhat? Electrowhat? No, never mind. Just tell me what they look like.”

“The nanogenes will be in a small canister. It’ll look empty, or possibly have a slight golden glow to it. If you’re lucky, they’re actually labeled in English. The EMP… it would probably be faster just to make one. We’ll need wires…” he grunted as he pulled a few out of a panel on the other side of the central console and tossed them to her, “a power source – got one – and a solenoid. That’s a tight coil of uncoated copper wire. Tell you what: you keep looking for one, while I go check first aid for the nanogenes.”

He disappeared through yet another door. She started poking through various tool boxes in search of – what? A solar noid? Well, a coil of wire, anyway.

“Got them!” he announced, popping back into the room, waving a small canister at her, and continuing on out the door. She got up and rushed after him, grabbing the EMP components they had so far.

“Daisy!” he called, bounding through the trees and out toward the assembled audience. Her entire arm had aged now, and her hair was turning gray. He unscrewed one end of the container and said, “Put your hand in here.”

The girl obeyed, and the canister began to glow. Golden sparkles moved up her arm until they surrounded her, and then they coalesced back into the jar. She was back to herself.

“Thank you!” she cried, throwing her arms around the Doctor.

He gave her a hug, patted her back, and pushed her away. “We’re not done yet. I still need a solenoid.”

“What do you need a solenoid for, man?” It was the same shaggy man who had offered him a joint the day before. “Cause I’ve got a bunch in my workshop.”

“You have an electrical workshop? On a hippie commune? Fantastic!” The Doctor leapt to his feet, delighted. “People will never cease to surprise me. Have you got one about this big?” He gestured with his hands to indicate the size.

“Yeah, I think so. I’ll be right back.” He turned to go.

“I’m coming with you! We might need your tools!” The Doctor called. “Letitia, bring the other components.”

Once again she found herself racing after him. The three of them piled into the workshop.

“What’s your name?” the Doctor asked as the shaggy man began to search for the appropriately-sized solenoid.

“John.”

“Well, John, what we’ve got to do is build an electromagnetic pulse generator.”

“And that will kill the spiders?” Letitia asked.

“Not exactly, no. Lightning sets off an electromagnetic pulse; that’s how it creates gaps in the space-time barrier and lets the spiders slip through.” He was hooking up wires as he spoke. “So if we create another pulse, carefully centered and strong enough to hit them all – ah, yes, that’s perfect! It can send them back through. John, have you got a switch?”

John tossed him a switch, and he wired it in before Letitia could even see what he was doing.

“All set!” he announced. “Come on!”

By the time they got back to the shed, it had gone beyond weather-beaten and was now fully dilapidated. A few people were edging closer to it.

“Oi!” the Doctor yelled. “Didn’t I tell you not to go near the shed? What did I say? Don’t go near the shed!”

“Actually, you only said don’t go in it,” Daisy pointed out.

“Oh, did I?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry. My mistake. Don’t go near the shed either.”

He stopped long enough to hook up one more wire on the EMP, and it began to whir.

“Oh, and by the way, anybody with any electronic devices they want to keep had better get them to the far side of the field. I’ve set this to reach a much larger area than just the shed, in case any of the spiders crawled out. They prefer dark places, but you never know.”

People exchanged glances as he crept up to the shed, much more carefully now. Then he opened it and slipped inside. The whirring continued for a few more seconds, then there was a sound like a camera flash going off, and the air around them ionized.

When the Doctor came out of the shed, his hair was standing on end. As he approached the group, he glanced at his wrist, tapped at the watch on it, then rolled his eyes in exasperation and took it off.

“That was far out!” John whooped, throwing an arm around the Doctor’s neck.

“Thanks,” he choked.

Scene Selection

1. Survivor	4. Revelation
2. The Unicorn	5. Time Spiders
3. Lentil Stew	6. Eternity