As feeling came back to him, he heard hesitant, shuffling footsteps. It took effort to sit up, but going slowly he managed it. A group of mouthless men in leather aprons and Bermuda shorts huddled a short distance from him, in the narrow alleyway between the huge, dark machines. One mouthless man gestured and pointed to the far end of the engine rooms. The Doctor looked, squinting to make sense of what he saw. A tall, skinny man in a fetching pinstriped suit was stepping into a wall of scrambled egg.

'Huh thuh,' said the Doctor, watching him vanish. He had meant to say, 'Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?'

He sat there, recovering and, after a while, the mouthless men brought him a mug of tea with a picture of a sheep on it. His hands shook as he held the mug, but with each sip he felt better and better. The engines around him filled his head with noise and his skin felt itchy with grime. Yet the dark and solid machinery seemed immaculate, the air rich with the stink of detergent; he just imagined the dirt.

'Thank you,' he said as the mouthless men helped him up on his feet. They let him walk unaided but kept close in case he fell. The Doctor made his way to the wall-mounted controls for the experimental drive. A small porthole let him look into the machine itself, and he gazed in on the eerie light. The light was just the same as that inside the TARDIS's central column. It swirled and murmured, restless and alive.

'OK,' said the Doctor, checking over the engine controls. He made a mental note of the readings and how they differed from those upstairs on the bridge. The trick was then to get the TARDIS to make up for the difference. That would, he hoped, break them from the loop. Adjusting dials and switching levers, he felt the old speed and dexterity returning to his fingers. His thoughts were starting to speed up, too.

He spun on his heel, surprising the mouthless men, and hurried down the alleyway between the large machines to where the TARDIS waited. It took a moment to find the key and then he was inside. As always, stepping over the threshold filled him with sudden ease. His head felt clearer, his body less sore.

The console still sparked and smoked from where the ship had crashed into the Brilliant. The Doctor hurried over, swatting away the smoke and working the various controls. Yes, he could see it clearly now. They'd crashed because the Brilliant sat just outside space and time. Like jumping onto a moving bus, only it turned out to be rushing towards you.

The gravitic anomaliser protested as he wound it round to eight. He keyed in the values of the Brilliant's two different Kodicek readings, and fired up the TARDIS's temporal shields. The idea was that he could give the Brilliant a nudge at the right angle and the starship's own systems would do the rest. He wouldn't even need to use the TARDIS's own reality-warping talents.

And then a thought struck him. A brilliant one.

He hurried round the console, pulling up the floor grating to expose the thick black cables coiling underneath. A bit of sonic screwdriver action, and he'd separated one of the connections. Bits of what might have been scrambled egg dripped from the open ends of cable.

He hurried back out of the TARDIS, bringing the cable so that it spooled out behind him, still connected at one end to the machinery of the TARDIS. It took a bit of negotiating the cable through the alleyway between the Brilliant's huge and noisy engines, like getting the flex from a vacuum cleaner to fit round chairs and tables. But he reached the controls of the experimental drives, and then just had to find something that he might connect the cable to. The control desk of the experimental drive had input ports, but none quite fitted.

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'Should have thought of that.'

He looked quickly all around for something that might help, but he knew there was little he could do. And then one of the mouthless men came forward with what looked like a squeezy bottle of ketchup. The Doctor tried plugging the TARDIS cable into each of the different ports, and once he'd identified the best fit the mouthless man sealed it in with the jelly-like sealant that oozed from the squeezy bottle. It was the same fast-acting, impossibly strong stuff that had sealed the hole in the side of the ship when Archibald's capsule had torn through it.

'Well done you,' said the Doctor to the mouthless man as he tested the join was secure. In fact, the join was stronger than the cable was itself. The Doctor hurried back to the TARDIS.

A group of mouthless men huddled at the doorway, peering into the huge interior but not daring to venture any further.

'Well?' said the Doctor. 'Aren't you going to say how it's bigger on the inside?' The mouthless men turned to look at him. 'No, I guess not,' he said. 'Look, you can ride with me but it's going to be bumpy. Or you can stay here, which will probably be the same. Your choice.'

It was a little disappointing, but none of the mouthless men would come with him. He shrugged, ducked between them into the TARDIS and dashed over to the controls. The mouthless men watched him from the open doorway, the thick black cable snaking between their legs back to the controls of the experimental drive. He could see them wanting to ask him what he had just done. 'I've bolted your ship to mine,' he said. 'And now I can run your systems from here. But my ship can also compensate for some of the loopy stuff happening. So I might even be able to control aspects of the loop itself. And then we're laughing. Ha ha!'

The mouthless men nodded, though not as keenly as he'd have liked. Still, there was little he could do about that now.

'You probably want to stand back a bit,' he told them. They retreated in fear as he worked the controls in front of him. It had been a while since he'd last tried to take off with the doors still open, he thought. Probably because it was such a dangerous thing to do. Dangerous and reckless. Dangerous and reckless and irresponsible. Just his thing, really.

He released the TARDIS handbrake.

With the familiar low rasping, grating from deep within its own strange engines, the TARDIS began to warp the material of space-time around it. The Doctor stood resolute at the controls as what might have been a tornado tore through the open doors and sent papers, sweets and his 1966 Martin Rowlands trimphone whirling all around him. Where before the open TARDIS doors had looked out into the engine rooms, the way was now blocked by a wall of pulsing, straining scrambled egg. The tornado whirled ever faster round and round him, howling and shrieking in time to the noise of the TARDIS's engines.

And then it was suddenly over, the sweets and paper and designer telephone crashing to the floor.

'Said it was easy,' said the Doctor, though only to himself. And he bounded through the open, eggless TARDIS doors and back into the Brilliant's engine rooms. 'Oh,' he said, stopping suddenly. 'I don't think that's quite right.'

Outside, the engine rooms lay silent. The huge machinery stood perfectly still. There was no one about.

'Hello?' called the Doctor. No one responded. 'I know you can't speak,' he called out. 'But maybe you could hit something, make some kind of noise.'

Again there was nothing but silence.

Moving slowly, warily, the Doctor followed the thick black cable from the TARDIS as it wended along the alleyway between the still machines. The cut-off end of the cable lay on the floor in front of where the controls for the experimental drive had been. It had been cut off with a knife.

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'That shouldn't have happened.'

He examined the empty space, and it was clear the experimental drive had been torn from the housing in which it had been secured. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps realigning the Brilliant had made the drive implode, which would be quite a neat solution to everything. But in his hearts he knew that that couldn't have been what had happened.