“Where’s Rory? I want him, right now,” demanded Amy as the TARDIS lurched away into space and time. The Doctor had only briefly met her fiancé, Rory Williams, once before. She did not think the Doctor understood what she saw in Rory. Some days, she was not entirely sure what she saw in Rory. But she was certain of this: nobody took her fiancé away from her.
“Good question. Where’s Rory? Also, where’s seven billion other people?” he asked.
“I want my Rory.”
“Well, wherever the rest of them are, he’s there too. And you ought to have been with them. At a guess, neither of you were ever born.”
Amy looked down at herself, checking her feet, her legs, her elbows, her hands (the squiggly whatsit glittered like an Escher nightmare on her wrist. She dropped it onto the control panel). She reached up and grasped a handful of auburn hair. “If I wasn’t born, what am I doing here?”
“You’re an independent temporal nexus, chronosynclastically established as an inverse.” He saw her expression, and stopped.
“You’re telling me it’s timey-wimey, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, seriously. “I suppose I am. Right. We’re here.”
He adjusted his bow tie with precise fingers, tipping it to one side rakishly.
“But, Doctor. The human race didn’t die out in 1984.”
“New timeline. It’s a paradox.”
“And you’re the paradoctor?”
“Just the Doctor.” He adjusted his bow tie to its earlier alignment, stood up a little straighter. “There’s something familiar about all this.”
“What?”
“Don’t know. Hmm. Kin. Kin. Kin. I keep thinking of masks. Who wears masks?”
“Bank robbers?”
“No.”
“Really ugly people?”
“No.”
“Hallowe’en? People wear masks at Hallowe’en.”
“Yes! They do!”
“So that’s important?”
“Not even a little bit. But it’s true. Right. Big divergence in time stream. And it’s not actually possible to take over a Level 5 planet in a way that would satisfy the Shadow Proclamation unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
The Doctor stopped moving. He bit his lower lip. Then: “Oh. They wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“They couldn’t. I mean, that would be completely . . .”
Amy tossed her hair, and did her best to keep her temper. Shouting at the Doctor never worked, unless it did. “Completely what?”
“Completely impossible. You can’t take over a Level 5 planet. Unless you do it legitimately.” On the TARDIS control panel something whirled and something else went ding. “We’re here. It’s the nexus. Come on! Let’s explore 1984.”
“You’re enjoying this,” said Amy. “My whole world has been taken over by a mysterious voice. All the people are extinct. Rory’s gone. And you’re enjoying this.”
“No, I’m not,” said the Doctor, trying hard not to show how much he was enjoying it.
THE BROWNINGS STAYED in the hotel while Mr. Browning looked for a new house. The hotel was completely full. Coincidentally, the Brownings learned, in conversation with other hotel guests over breakfast, they had also sold their houses and flats. None of them seemed particularly forthcoming about who had bought their previous residences.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said, after ten days. “There’s nothing for sale in town. Or anywhere around here. They’ve all been snapped up.”
“There must be something,” said Mrs. Browning.
“Not in this part of the country,” said Mr. Browning. “What does the estate agent say?”
“Not answering the phone,” said Mr. Browning.
“Well, let’s go and talk to her,” said Mrs. Browning. “You coming with, Polly?”
Polly shook her head. “I’m reading my book,” she said.
Mr. and Mrs. Browning walked into town, and they met the estate agent outside the door of the shop, putting up a notice saying “Under New Management.” There were no properties for sale in the window, only a lot of houses and flats with SOLD on them.
“Shutting up shop?” asked Mr. Browning.
“Someone made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” said the estate agent. She was carrying a heavy-looking plastic shopping bag. The Brownings could guess what was in it.
“Someone in a rabbit mask?” asked Mrs. Browning.
When they got back to the hotel, the manager was waiting in the lobby for them, to tell them they wouldn’t be living in the hotel much longer.
“It’s the new owners,” she explained. “They are closing the hotel for refurbishing.”
“New owners?”
“They just bought it. Paid a lot of money for it, I was told.”
Somehow, this did not surprise the Brownings one little bit. They were not surprised until they got up to their hotel room, and Polly was nowhere to be seen.
IV.
“Nineteen eighty-four,” mused Amy Pond. “I thought somehow it would feel more, I don’t know. Historical. It doesn’t feel like a long time ago. But my parents hadn’t even met yet.” She hesitated, as if she were about to say something about her parents, but her attention drifted. They crossed the road.
“What were they like?” asked the Doctor. “Your parents?”
Amy shrugged. “The usual,” she said, without thinking. “A mum and a dad.”
“Sounds likely,” agreed the Doctor much too readily. “So, I need you to keep your eyes open.”
“What are we looking for?”
It was a little English town, and it looked like a little English town as far as Amy was concerned. Just like the one she’d left, only without the coffee shops, or the mobile phone shops.
“Easy. We’re looking for something that shouldn’t be here. Or we’re looking for something that should be here but isn’t.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Not sure,” said the Doctor. He rubbed his chin. “Gazpacho, maybe.”
“What’s gazpacho?”
“Cold soup. But it’s meant to be cold. So if we looked all over 1984 and couldn’t find any gazpacho, that would be a clue.”
“Were you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“A madman. With a time machine.”
“Oh, no. It took ages until I got the time machine.”
They walked through the center of the little town, looking for something unusual, and finding nothing, not even gazpacho.
POLLY STOPPED AT the garden gate in Claversham Row, looking up at the house that had been her house since they had moved here, when she was seven. She walked up to the front door, rang the doorbell and waited, and
