Smith took a deep breath. ‘That depends on what you call me. I remember running through the streets of Aberdeen, with a gang of boys behind me. I remember a lot of military louts shouting at me, and I remember girls hating and excluding me. That’s in here.’ He tapped his head. ‘But in there’⁠ — he gestured towards the Pod⁠ — ‘I remember other kinds of bullying. A boy in my class who so hated and loved me that he kept upsetting my experiments. I made myself forget it, thought that I was an adult and could leave it behind. But if you ignore that, you ignore yourself.’ He closed his eyes, concentrating on what the sphere was telling him. ‘Recently, I thought I had become wiser than him, but found that I was still hurting people terribly.’ He opened his eyes again, an expression of excited discovery on his face.

‘I’d climbed back on the wheel. Become a bully. Which is why I decided to stop.’

‘Being a bully?’

‘Being me.’

Joan put a hand on Smith’s shoulder. ‘So it’s all true? This man I’ve got to know isn’t the real you?’

Smith took her hand. ‘He is now. Tim, I know what you’re carrying. It’s mine, though I didn’t know it until now.’

‘Then I should give it back to you.’ He was frowning, something in his head shouting to him about context and consequences.

‘Yes.’ Smith held out his hand.

Tim paused, looking at the Pod. ‘If I put it to my head, I’d change, wouldn’t I?’

‘You’d become the Doctor, I suppose. Do you want to?’

‘He’s the one in the Pod?’

‘Apparently.’ Smith concentrated on what he was feeling from the Pod. ‘He’s like me, only inhuman. Dangerous. Loving greatly but not small-ly. He’s Merlin. You know the sort of thing.’

‘You were him?’

‘I took that part of me out and put it in there.’ ‘Do you want to be him again?’

‘No,’ Smith said firmly. ‘I don’t think he’s quite me any more.’

‘I feel like I should tell them to form a crocodile,’ Benny muttered. She and Alexander were leading a group of four boys down the track that led on to the hills.

They’d spent the last half hour wandering about the hummocks and dells of the hillsides in the dark, the boys occasionally gazing down at the moonlit glass palace that had once been their school. ‘I mean, why did we do this? Was Tim really fond of coming up here?’

‘He did go up there sometimes, miss,’ Merryweather said.

‘Call me Bernice or Benny, I really don’t like being reminded of my marital status every sentence, particularly at the moment.’

‘You’re thinking about Dr Smith’s engagement?’ asked Alexander. ‘Oh dear.’ He glanced at the startled boys. ‘That’s let the cat out of the bag.’