"Daah dee dah dee dah dee dah dee dah dee dah daaah..."
"Romana!"
"I'm down here!" The slim blonde woman stopped humming and paused in her aimless meandering through white corridors until the caller caught up with her. He came jogging round the corner, elfin features creased in frown.
"What are you doing?" asked Adric.
Romana shrugged and carried on walking. "Just wandering. And wondering. Have you seen the Doctor?"
Adric started to walk beside her. "Not really. He just shouted at me when I tried to enter the console room. I've never seen him so angry!"
She shot him a significant glance. "He's not angry. He's just frightened."
"Frightened!" the boy laughed nervously. "The Doctor told me he wasn't frightened by anything."
"We're all frightened by something," she said simply.
"Oh," said Adric. There was a pause. "What's he frightened of?"
"Being stuck in E-Space the rest of his life. And taking me back to Gallifrey, of course."
He looked at her shrewdly. "You don't want to go back, do you?"
"Isn't this interesting!"
She stopped in front of a door set in the gleaming roundel-covered walls. She pulled the handle and the door swung open, revealing a row of dusty shelves, empty save for a single tarnished brass candlestick with a grubby candle stub set in it.
"Is it?" asked Adric. He peered at the candlestick. Beside it, in the dust, someone had scrawled some letters. Slowly he read them out. "P - W - 4 - B - J. What does that mean?"
Romana shrugged and pushed the door shut. "It's proof of an old Earth saying."
"What's that?"
"All the nice girls like a sailor." She started walking down the corridor again, humming vaguely. Adric shook his head in bewilderment and followed.
"You changed the subject."
"You noticed that, did you?" She stopped again and cocked her head. "Do you hear that?"
Adric listened too. "What?"
"Shhh!" They listened. Adric strained his ears, but couldn't detect anything other than the normal quiet hum of the TARDIS interior. Romana nodded her head. "It is different. I thought it was. It's been bothering me all week." She moved on again, still humming.
"You did it again!"
"What?"
"Changed the subject. Are you all right Romana?"
She turned on him, suddenly angry. "All right? All right? Of course I'm not all right! I'm stuck fast in an unexplored pocket universe with no apparent exit in sight, in the company of a certified renegade who's supposed to have taken me home a century ago; not that I want to go, but that's not the point is it? The point is I've been wandering these blasted corridors for three hours now humming the theme tune to 'The Godfather' and trying to remember the name of the actor who played Tom Hagen when I'm supposed to be thinking about trying to get us out of this mess, and you ask me if I'm all right?" She glared at him, colour rising to her cheeks.
"Sorry," he mumbled bashfully, and stared at his feet. "I didn't know."
Romana closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it go slowly. She reached out and touched his arm. "Adric, I'm sorry too. But this whole thing is starting to get to me."
"That's all r-" he shook his head, trying to think of something different to say. Romana chuckled, and finished the phrase off for him.
"All right? Yes. I suppose it will be, one day. One day..."
They continued trailing down the corridors, hands in pockets, both lost in their own thoughts. Adric paused in front of another door. A dog-eared piece of A3 paper had been tacked to the front of it. He pulled it off and studied it. Scrawled in pink highlighter were the words: 'OUT OF ORDER'.
"What's this mean? What's behind this one?"
Romana didn't look back, but replied: "Auxiliary navigation control and astral & temporal cartography. Jolly useful if you want to know exactly where and when you are. Technically it should be located closer to the prime console room, but..." She came to a dead stop as realisation struck.
"Romana...are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Possibly... shall we have a peek inside?"
She pushed open the door. It was a dim, softly lit room not unlike the old secondary console room he'd been shown on an ad-hoc guided tour the Doctor had given him not long after he'd properly joined the crew, all wood panels and brass fittings. It smelt strongly of wood polish and old paper. Charts and maps of all sizes and descriptions filled the room, on desks, chairs, chests, shelves, while some hung from the walls. In the centre of the room was a raised dais, ornately founded out of brass. A motif of the crouched figure of Atlas, holding up the world, was on one side. A panel in the front of the dais had been removed to expose the workings within, and an open toolbox sat before it. Romana came over and crouched down to examine it, while Adric wandered around the room.
"Amazing," he breathed. Curiously he touched a yellowing map held flat on a desk top by three metal weights and a grubby mug with 'U.N.I.T.' stencilled on the side. The map disintegrated beneath his touch and he hurriedly moved on to a battered PC and monitor sitting on another desk. He flicked the monitor on and gazed at what was on the screen.
"RAC Route Planner ... Romana, is this going to be of help?"
"We're stuck in E-Space, not the M25 orbital. Adric, look at this."
Adric came over to where Romana was crouching. She was fiddling with the machinery inside.
"This is the TARDIS's prime astral cartography unit. It looks like the Doctor was attempting to repair it."
Adric ran a finger along the top of the dais and pulled a face at the thick layer of dust on it. "A long time ago, by the looks of it!"
"Thing is, he's nearly succeeded. I wonder why he stopped?" She shrugged, then made a couple more adjustments and slipped a plug into a socket. Power whined from within the dais, and Romana hurriedly backed out. She stood up and dusted her hands with satisfaction. "Give it a minute to warm up. The elements in the old Type-40 Hologram servers take a while to heat up."
A bell chimed and a glowing ball suddenly shimmered into existence a foot above the dais, filled with a myriad of floating dots. Adric gasped in wonderment, but Romana looked disappointed. "How functional. How drab," she remarked. She reached up and touched one of the dots swimming in the ball. There was a 'ping' and the ball changed pattern. She pointed up at a flashing blue dot floating near its centre.
"There we are. See?"
Adric shook his head. "Not really. Is that supposed to be a map of where we are, then?"
"Correct. This," and she gestured, "is E-Space. That blue dot is us, the TARDIS."
"Can it show the way out of E-Space?" He looked at her eagerly, but her face was curiously unreadable.
"Oh, very definitely. Right about there. See?" A slim trail of light snaked across the ball, pointing to a winking yellow dot on the very edge of the ball. "A wormhole. Leads all the way back, virtually to my own front door."
"Gallifrey?"
"Gallifrey... Home." she murmured, almost regretfully. She gazed up at the shining trail, emotions churning, mind burning with possibilities. A way out, a way home. That was what they all wanted. Wasn't it?
She made a decision.
Suddenly her face became alert. "I say, can you smell burning?" She started sniffing the air, and Adric followed suit, alarmed.
"No," he said dubiously.
"I can. Whoops!" She ducked back under the dais and a moment later the ball of lights vanished in a puff of pixels.
"Romana, it's gone!" the boy cried agitatedly. Romana looked up apologetically and help up a small discoloured glass valve.
"Venticular dispersement control. The Doctor was further away from fixing it than I thought. Oh dear," she said, not really looking as if she meant it.
"Can't you fix it?"
"Oh yes. If I had another valve." She stood up again and carefully popped the valve into her pocket. Mindful of her engineering training she replaced the panel and started towards the door.
"Can't we find another valve? Surely there must be one somewhere."
"Valves like this don't grow on trees, and we're several trillion light years from anywhere that might - and I say might - stock one." She opened the door, waiting for him to follow.
"What about in one of the TARDIS storerooms? There must be another one somewhere?"
She shrugged, unconcerned. "Possibly. Who knows?" She closed the door behind him and carefully re-stuck the sign to the door, then started to wander off down the corridor again.
"Shouldn't we tell the Doctor? Maybe he might know another way to fix it. K-9 certainly would, I'm sure of it!"
"Oh no!" she said a little too quickly, then hastily added: "I mean, why worry them? They've enough to worry about." She patted him on the arm. "I'd forget all about it. A nice try, though, don't you think?" She moved away.
"But..." he started. Romana stopped dead and suddenly yelped. He rushed over. "What is it, have you thought of a way to fix it?"
"Robert Duvall!" she beamed.
"What?"
"Robert Duvall. He was Tom Hagen! You know, I was afraid that was going to bother me all day."
With a satisfied smile, she resumed her wanderings.
