Sky blinked back tears that blurred her eyes as she walked through the reception and out into the visitor’s car park overshadowed by the ten-storey main wing of Ealing hospital. She quickly spotted her mum’s car in its not quite fashionable colour. As she headed towards it, she was hailed by a familiar and friendly voice. Rani Chaudhary rushed towards her as she turned.

“Are you working, today?” Sky asked, feeling suspicious, then immediately hating the suspicion. Rani was a friend. She had been a friend as long as Sky could remember, which wasn’t as long as it would be if she were an ordinary girl, but it was long enough to know that she could trust Rani.

But could she trust a journalist?

“I AM working,” Rani admitted. “And, yes, it IS about Alison Farrell. But I’m not…. I'm not.…” She paused, sighing deeply, her shoulders sagging. “Sky… I need to talk to your mum. But… I won’t write anything either of you are uncomfortable with. Only, I think what happened to Alison is something Sarah-Jane might be better able to investigate.”

“Come and talk,” Sky conceded. “But… off the record?”

“Of course,” Rani agreed, hating that the question even had to be asked. She didn’t want to be a journalist pestering people at a traumatic time, and certainly not her friends who lived across the road.

They both climbed into the back of Sarah-Jane’s car and for a moment nobody spoke. Then Sarah-Jane poured two cups of coffee from a big flask.

“I’ve done so many visits to that hospital, when old Mrs Harte from number 26 was in with her second stroke. The café is always crowded and overpriced for the dreadful coffee it sells.”

Neither Rani nor Sky wanted to talk about coffee. Sarah-Jane knew that. She was talking just to give them time to gather their thoughts.

“It was horrible, going in there,” Sky said. “The room is nice, of course. There are so many flowers and cards there was hardly any room for the ones I brought from school. Her mum cried all the same, seeing how much everyone cared. Alison doesn’t even know. She's still in the coma. Her face is all bandaged up, her legs and arms in casts. She might never come back to school. And her face… her mum said surgery can do something about the scars – eventually.”

“I am sorry,” Sarah-Jane said, because it was what parents say when a school friend of their child has been involved in a terrible road accident. In her mind she was glad it was Mrs Farrell going through the vigil at the bedside and not her. She couldn’t begin to imagine what she would do if it had been Sky. Perhaps it was part of the reason why she had waited in the car. So she didn’t have to see that room, to have to say those useless phrases to Mrs Farrell.

“Sarah-Jane…” Rani said tentatively. “I need you to come with me and talk to Mr Gardener – the driver.”

“No!” Sky protested. “He’s nearly a murderer. He should be in jail. What he did to Alison….”

“That’s the point,” Rani argued. “He isn’t any of those things. He’s a victim of this, too. He’s really upset about what happened… and there’s something really weird – OUR sort of weird, that makes it absolutely not his fault in any way. Will you come and see what he has to say, and what he can show you, Sarah-Jane?”

“OUR sort of weird?” Sarah-Jane repeated.

“Just… see what you think,” Rani insisted. “Please… Sky, too. I understand how you feel, but keep an open mind… please.”

“All right,” Sky agreed, because she trusted Rani and liked her very much, and if she thought there was something….

“Well… my parking ticket runs out in ten minutes,” Sarah-Jane said, as if that decided the matter. She started the car and asked Rani where they were going.

Mr Alan Gardener, a chartered accountant who worked in the City of London, lived in a quiet cul-de-sac on the other side of the Great West Road from what most people would call ‘Ealing Proper’. It was a nice house with a neatly kept lawn at the front and a conservatory at the back.

Mr Gardener greeted Rani soberly when she introduced Sarah-Jane and Sky. He invited them into the drawing room and asked if they would like coffee.

“We just had some,” Sarah-Jane told him. “Rani tells me you have something important to say about the accident….”

“I’ve something to show anyone who wants to see. The police have a copy. They don’t know what to make of it… and nor do I. It still doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

He turned his television to the HDMI channel linked to his laptop and selected a video file. Everyone watched it, gasping with surprise and then shock at what they saw. Mr Gardener played it through twice more before Sarah-Jane gently took control of the laptop and tracked back through the video to the important bit.

Sky moved from where she had been sitting as far away from the ‘almost murderer’ and sat right beside him, putting her hand over his. Mr Gardener had tears in his eyes and his hand shook. So did hers.

“It wasn’t your fault, at all. You couldn’t have done anything to avoid hitting Alison. It was… just…”

“Just incredible,” Sarah-Jane said. “Tragic and horrible and incredible. What have the police said?”

The video file was the last five minutes of dashcam footage from Saturday afternoon when Mr Gardener drove along an ordinary stretch of road. He had been going North along the B455 from where it was called Saint Mary’s Road to where it became Ealing Green near the T-junction with The Grove. The data alongside the footage showed that he was driving at eighteen miles per hour – two miles less than the maximum twenty. He had right of way and the pedestrian crossing by the park on the left showed a green light for him to continue on along the clear road ahead.

Then suddenly, for thirty seconds, the dashcam showed a completely different street, different cars, different traffic lights.

Then just as suddenly the view changed again, and the crossing light was red. Alison Farrell was there, right in front of the car. There was a shudder as it hit her and carried on for at least two more metres with the girl slumped on the bonnet before throwing her onto the unforgiving road when the brakes engaged.

It was a horrible sight. Alison was a petite girl dressed in a leotard and skater skirt, with a bolero cardigan, on her way to the dance studio for her weekly class. She was tossed like a rag doll when the car hit her.

She was lucky to survive. That had been said so often since Saturday, by her mother, the doctors, police, the local radio news reader, but it was only now, looking at the footage, that Sky realised how true those words really were.

“One of the police said the video was doctored – fake,” Mr Gardener said. “But two others – in the technical forensics section or something said it couldn’t be. The digital indexes were correct or whatever it is they look at. But they don’t understand it at all. And one of them said… even though it proved it wasn’t my fault… they don’t know how it could be shown to a judge. So… so… if it came to that…”

“It won’t,” Sky assured him. She looked to Sarah-Jane to confirm as much. But both she and Rani looked worried, still.

“That’s the big problem with this sort of thing,” she said. “U.N.I.T. used to be able to pull strings using the Official Secrets Act, but these days everyone goes on about oversight and transparency and keeping the public informed. As if the public NEED to know that there are aliens living among us on this planet and that time doesn’t always go in a straight line. They are far better off not knowing about these things.”

Mr Gardener didn’t quite understand what she meant, but as far as his own problem was concerned, he was inclined to agree.

“Mr Gardener, might I have a copy of this recording,” Sarah-Jane asked. “I would like to examine the digital index myself. Plus, a couple of other tricks the police can't do. I’ll try to get to the bottom of it all.”

It was a matter of seconds to transfer a copy of the dashcam footage to a memory stick that Sarah-Jane carefully placed in her handbag. She promised once more to do her best.

“I’ll come and see you again and tell you how Alison is doing,” Sky said. “If you’d like that.”

Mr Gardner said he would very much like that,” he said, adding that he would really like to see the girl in hospital, but he wasn’t sure he would be welcome.

“Maybe once she wakes up,” Rani said, as a tactful answer. She felt worse than the last time she had talked to Mr Gardener. He was as grief stricken as Mrs Farrell, but the world saw him as the villain of the tragedy and he had only the three of them to offer any comfort or sympathy – and that had been a near thing with Sky.

“You’re going to get Mr Smith to examine the file?” Sky asked as they returned to the car.

“Yes, but first we’re going to the Tower of London.”

“Why?” Rani asked.

“Because that’s where U.N.I.T. keep its old case files, and there is one I want a look at. I was involved when it happened, so they can't refuse me. I hope Kate Stewart isn’t away in Geneva or Peru or New York. She’s the only one of the new lot I can stand. They all just think I’m an old woman who’s lost her way. They don’t realise I was part of it all when U.N.I.T. first came into existence.”

“Young people these days – no respect,” Rani and Sky chorused.

Kate Stewart, or as she was properly styled, Chief Scientific Officer Katherine Lethbridge Stewart was the only link to those strange times of the 1970s when her father, the Brigadier, was in charge of U.N.I.T., the United Nations Intelligence Task Force, the military and scientific organisation set up to investigate and fight alien and other unnatural interference in the affairs of planet Earth.

When Sarah-Jane told her she wanted to look at the files from Operation Golden Age, she knew exactly what it was about.

“Dad told me ALL about that one when I was a girl,” Kate said. “Dinosaurs appearing all over London, the city under martial law… then those deluded fools in their spaceship.”

“Spaceship?” Rani and Sky both looked surprised as Sarah-Jane filled in the story of some very clever but mind-bogglingly naïve people who thought they had been in suspended animation for a month inside a spaceship going to a new planet. In fact, they were in a bunker beneath Whitehall in a fake ship.

“You’re kidding,” Rani exclaimed. “They didn’t figure it out at all?”

“Not until I opened their ‘airlock’ and stepped out into space without a helmet,” Sarah-Jane answered. "But it’s not them I’m thinking of. The whole affair was started by some dangerously misguided scientists who had discovered a way to manipulate time. Their early experiments are what caused the dinosaurs to keep appearing.”

“Oh!” Sky and Rani both had the same idea at once.

“You think it was something like that… Mr Gardener’s car got moved out of time in some way….”

“Yes,” Sarah-Jane replied. “And, if so, if somebody is trying the same kind of experiments….”

“Then U.N.I.T. will have to put a stop to it,” Kate insisted. “Whether its alien interference or mad scientists, that is a serious danger to human life. Well within our remit. Thank you for bringing the situation to our attention….”

“That’s not exactly why I’m here,” Kate,” Sarah-Jane reminded her gently but firmly. “I’m not interested in the whole human race, right now. I’m just trying to find out how a girl from Sky’s class was nearly killed by a car that absolutely, definitely, was not there when she started to cross the road. I need the Project Golden Age data to try to see if anything matches up. If I uncover a global crisis, I’ll tell you about it and your boys in the bright red berets can swing into action, but until, then….”

“I didn’t hear you tell me your plan, just now,” Kate said. “I was too busy ordering the Project Golden Age file up from the archive. Best we leave it that way for now don’t you think?”

“I quite agree,” Sarah-Jane answered. “Have you had any contact with The Doctor lately?” This was small talk for Sarah-Jane and Kate, of course.

“She sent me a note about some trouble at a beauty pageant in Yorkshire a couple of months ago. She’d had to de-hypnotise a couple of people. She asked for a bit of surveillance in case they relapsed. One of them is on TV, so we didn’t want him getting upset.”

“Yes, the hypnotism really used to annoy me,” Sarah-Jane admitted. She and Kate laughed knowingly then assumed a solemn tone as a female corporal stepped into the office with a buff file. She handed it to Kate and marched back out smartly. Kate handed the file to Sarah-Jane, who opened it and read carefully.

“It isn’t all on computer?” Rani asked.

“Not these files,” Kate answered. “We don’t have enough copy-typists with high enough security clearance to get these digitised.”

“But mum DOES have clearance?” Sky asked with a note of awe in her voice.

“Well, she is the subject of at least half of the file,” Kate admitted. “And no, neither of you can see it. You really shouldn’t even be in the room, but I don't think I could keep you out, even with a whole army at my disposal."

Rani and Sky shared in the reflected glory of being associated with Sarah-Jane Smith. After a surprisingly short time she closed the file and handed it back to Kate.

“Any help?”

“Not much,” Sarah-Jane answered. “Sir Charles Grover and Professor Whitaker were assumed dead when they accidentally sent themselves back in time. General Finch died in the prison hospital at Colchester four years ago according to this. I can’t say I’m sorry. He was a nasty piece of work. There aren’t many people left alive who were part of the plot.”

“Mike Yates….” Kate began.

“Mike didn’t do this,” Sarah-Jane was quick to say. “He wouldn’t be so stupid.”

Kate didn’t comment. She didn't know Yates the way Sarah-Jane did. She only knew that, despite what was in this file, her father had trusted him.

“In any case, we’re looking for a scientist. Mike regularly used The Doctor’s Bunsen burner to make cocoa. That’s as scientific as he got.”

“So it was all a dead end?” Rani asked as they drove away from the Tower of London. “This is all nothing to do with what happened in the 1970s?”

“It wasn’t a total waste,” Sarah-Jane answered. “I needed to check a name. All the time I was involved with the Golden Age lot, I never heard anyone say Professor Whitaker’s first name. It was in the file. He’s Peter Whitaker. Rani, use your laptop to connect with Mr Smith. Have him trace Professor Whitaker’s children.”

“Children?” Sky echoed. “How do you know he had any?”

“I don’t. But if he did….”

“They’d be quite old by now,” Sky calculated. “If they were at school in the 1970s, they’d be… nearly sixty by now…. Ancient.”

“Thank you so much, my dear child,” Sarah-Jane responded. “That would make me…. No, I couldn’t be. I’ve got a teenage daughter. I couldn’t be THAT old.”

She laughed softly. So did Sky – something she hadn’t been able to do for the last few days without bursting into tears afterwards when the unhappiness returned.

“He HAD a son,” Rani confirmed. “But he died ten years ago - aged fifty-six. Complications of diabetes, it says here.”

“Sad,” Sky remarked. “But no good to us.”

“There’s a daughter. She is thirty.” Rani paused and breathed deeply. “She has a degree in physics… and she lives in… in Ealing Green.”

Sarah-Jane breathed deeply. Was it possible that a hunch like that might pay off so easily?

“We have to go and see her,” Sky insisted. “We should find out what she did.”

“If she did anything.”

“She LIVES fifty metres from the junction where the accident happened,” Rani insisted. “We have to go.”

“We COULD call Kate,” Sarah-Jane pointed out.

But she knew she wouldn’t. not until afterwards. U.N.I.T. could bring the woman in for questioning, confiscate whatever equipment she was using. Lock her up and throw away the key.

But Sarah-Jane knew that she and Sky both needed to see this woman first.

Driving past the scene where the accident had occurred was upsetting. Several people had brought flowers and tied them to the fence.

“I thought they only did that when people were dead,” Sky said. “Do they think Alison isn’t going to make it?”

“The hospital won’t let too many people in,” Rani said consolingly. “Maybe this was second best for them. It is a bit creepy, though.”

The house that, according to a simple search of the online Register of Electors, was occupied by Professor Jessica Whitaker, proved to be the only one of a row of six late Georgian terraced houses on Ealing Green that wasn’t divided into flats. In London, owning all three floors plus an attic and cellar of a house like that was something of a financial statement.

Or it could be a house inherited from a parent or grandparent, with hardly any furniture and less faded rectangles of wallpaper where pieces of artwork might have been hung before they were sold.

“Yes,” Professor Whitaker said, even though nobody had asked. “The house belonged to my grandfather – the one who vanished in the 1970s. My father kept it up, but I’ve been struggling.”

“I’m not from the Inland Revenue,” Sarah-Jane answered coldly. She had shown the Professor a very old U.N.I.T. pass to gain admittance to the house. “Was it you who found your grandfather’s notes on time manipulation?”

“But that is so obvious,” Rani protested. “Surely U.N.I.T. would have looked for anything like that after the Professor disappeared. I mean… they have the whole United Nations behind them. Searching a house wouldn’t be hard.”

“The cellar,” Professor Whitaker said. “There was a walled off section. I had all my winter toys down there, played there for hours. I never knew the room was a metre and a half smaller than it ought to be until I was clearing it out after my dad died – I’d thought of making it into a bedsit, for a bit of cash. Instead, I found… the most amazing thing.

“The most dangerous thing,” Sarah-Jane contradicted her. “Your grandfather kept… what… his prototype? The one he tried to destroy the world with was taken to pieces.”

Sarah-Jane knew that. She had watched The Doctor do it.

“A prototype – as you say. And all of his notes – his life’s work. Of course, I had to carry it on.”

“You want to destroy the human race?” Sarah-Jane asked, her voice even more icy.

“No…I thought… I thought it could have benefits for mankind. Perhaps… exploring the past, to solve historical mysteries… like the Princes in the Tower…. Or saving the Dodo.”

Sarah-Jane looked at this obviously intelligent woman in astonishment. So did Rani and Sky. They all knew exactly why that sort of thing couldn’t be done. How could a professor of physics not work it out?

“I also thought… I might find my grandfather… wherever he was lost in time. Yes, I know that’s what happened to him. It was hushed up at the time, but I met some people…. Not scientists, but they were there, too. Adam… Ruth….”

“The people from the fake spaceship.” Sarah-Jane nodded. She hadn’t even considered their involvement. They and others, writers, artists, Olympic medal winners, had been chosen as the ideal people to restart the human race in a Garden of Eden created by wiping out all the mistakes of humanity for thousands of generations. They had all been interviewed by U.N.I.T., of course, and made to sign the Official Secrets Act. But if they were approached by the granddaughter of the man who had taken them in, they might have talked, all the same.

“Anyway, I don’t know what the fuss is about,” Professor Whitaker added. “It didn’t come close to working. Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened?” Sky rushed at the Professor and would have physically attacked her if Rani hadn’t stepped in and held her tightly until the rage died down. While she did that Sarah-Jane inserted the USB drive from Mr Gardener’s computer into Rani’s laptop. She ran the dashcam footage.

Professor Whitaker looked at the terrible accident and the strange phenomenon that had occurred moments before. Her face paled to chalk-white and her eyes were wet with tears.

“I was in the cellar,” she said. “It’s sound-proofed. I didn’t even hear the sirens. I only heard there had been an accident later. And… and… I never dreamt it had anything to do with me. I thought… I thought….”

Sky shouted at her, but Rani hushed her.

“She didn’t know. She was stupid, doing an experiment like that. But she couldn’t have known anything like that would have happened. And afterwards… It looked like an ordinary accident to everyone but Mr Gardener. How could she have known?”

“She should have known,” Sky insisted, but the truth was sinking in, slowly. Professor Whitaker was a victim, too. She hadn’t intended to harm anyone in her effort to find her grandfather or rescue dodos from extinction, and now that she knew, she was hurting, too.

“I... am so very sorry,” she said again. “I… of course… I will stop the experiments, of course.”

“It’s too late,” Sky told her. “Alison is in a coma. If she comes out of it, she may still have brain damage. But even if she escapes that – her legs were shattered. She… she’s a DANCER. It could be months, years, before she could even walk, let alone dance. She’s lost her chance for the future. All because of… of you, not thinking about what you were doing.”

All the Professor could say in reply was, again, that she was sorry. It wasn’t enough, and she knew it.

“Don’t destroy the machine, yet,” Rani said. “I’ve got an idea.”

She told them what it was. Sarah-Jane protested at first. So did Professor Whitaker, because she wasn’t sure if it would be safe.

But Rani had her way, in the end.

“You two go home,” she said to Sarah-Jane and Sky. “I’ll see you there. I promise.”

They were both worried, but they agreed to do as Rani asked. As they stepped out of the house on Ealing Green they noticed something that gave them reason to hope, but they weren’t absolutely sure until they got home to Bannerman Road and found Rani in the drawing room with tea and cake waiting and the television switched to the HDMI channel.

Sarah-Jane and Sky sat and watched the dashcam footage from Mr Gardner’s car. They watched the approach to Ealing Green, then the strange part where the car was driving down a different place in a different time.

Then the sudden return to last Saturday afternoon, but this time, just as Alison was about to step into the road, Rani rushed from the park and grabbed her. Both girls fell back onto the pavement as the car drove by.

“Mr Gardner stopped his car and came running back to make sure we were all right,” Rani explained. “He gave us a lift to Alison’s dance studio and I had a cup of tea with him. He told me about the weird moment. The next day, I popped round to see him and he gave me the dashcam footage. He said I could do what I liked with it. He was just glad I was there at the very moment when something terrible could have happened. Could have happened… not DID happen. Alison had a bruised elbow, but she just put a plaster on it and went to dance.”

“I knew it was ok when we saw the crossing… and there were no flowers,” Sky said.

“The tricky thing was staying out of the way for a few days, so as not to cause some kind of time crash,” Rani said. “I booked into a nice hotel and ordered room service. It was awfully boring. But it was worth it.”

“I agree,” Sarah-Jane said. “The Doctor has always been against changing history. But on this occasion, I'm sure it would be all right. Kate will have to talk to Professor Whitaker, but I think she’s learnt her lesson. It was a close thing. And Rani doesn’t even get a story out of it. Her paper wouldn’t print something about weird phenomena in Ealing.”

“That’s all right,” Rani acknowledged. “When Alison joins the Royal Ballet I’ll get the exclusive interview.”