ed to his friends, Edward Smith fell into his multi-coloured deck-chair which fell onto his multi-coloured deck of his...what sort of boat was it?

 

Ned neither knew nor cared. It did remind him of something he had seen in Laurel and Hardy film. To tell you the truth, I am not altogether certain where all this is taking place. Would, 'just off a sandy-beech on the Californian coast' do? It would for Ned.

 

For him the world was a nice place, but you might as well enjoy yourself with a little innocent fun when you were young ( Ned was twenty-five ), when you could afford to make mistakes. That was what his old Texan grand-mother used to tell him when he was a child and he always had a lot of respect for old Granny Cartwheel.

He did not want to put anybody down - he was too busy singing and playing.

 

He lay uncomfortably embraced by the collapsed deck-chair and did not care. The hazy, salty air made him giggle, like bathing in ether, thou I've never tried it. He could here his friends playing ball on the beach, the sounds as if in radio-signals drifting across the stretch of sea or messages from another planet.

 

He gazed into the dome above him. The circle sky; dark in the centre and pale towards the circumference. It was wonderful.

 

Sure, the sky was just another sea and from this 'sea' Edward Smith had received a message, a gift, a magical gift.

 

A magical gift had fallen from the sky into the sea yesterday. It was a small and beautiful thingamajig, a...he no longer cared for specification.

 

Perhaps it had come from a moon-rocket or didn't a satellite crash in the gulf of Mexico in mysterious circumstances last week? It could be from that! A message from the sky...maybe there were people beyond the sky, the other 'sea', playing space-ball on a multi-coloured beach, dallying in the innocence of life, just trying to be friendly not putting anybody down.

 

What would he do with his little gift? It sure was a curious article. A funny little golden tube thing. Maybe he ought to give it to someone, they could be looking for it. No. He figured that whoever it belonged to would have plenty of the thingamajigs and anyway, who on Earth knew it was on Ned's boat?

 

Perhaps he would give it to Valerie. He was awfully fond of Valerie. He just went all silly when he was with Valerie. She just maybe the one but, golly-gee, she wouldn't want him with his long hair, side-burns and silly pom-pom hat, would she? He was awfully fond of Valerie.

 

The thingamajig was in his bunk-bed down below, wasn't it? It would be safe there. Maybe it was worth money. "Money was the root of all evil," his Grand pappy Woolhat would tell him. He wasn't really Ned's grandfather but he did seem like one. Ned no longer cared for specification.

 

He pulled his guitar towards him and tried to write a song.

 

'Innocence is bliss; consciousness is damnation,' he thought. True, but too serious for a song. Instead he wrote about buying a dog because canine friends proved much better than girls in the long-run, but like all writers of songs of that ilk, he was not speaking from experience.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

he Doctor rubbed his tired eyes and scratched his unshaven face. Materialisation was a dangerous process and the Doctor was in no mood for concentrating on the flashing lights and buzzing noises all around the control room. He wanted to go back to bed. It had been a long night, if there was such a thing as 'night' a board the TARDIS. Still, a landing might mean fresh air. The ship had been adrift in the nothingness of nothingness of which everything is something for a fortnight. Their last landing had not been a happy one.

 

He had promised he would take Jamie to meet his old friend Robbie Burns but the TARDIS had landed on a highland heath in 1970 between a television camera and Fife Robertson ( another of the Doctor's old friends ) who was shooting a new television series and was most laconic in expressing his annoyance to his Time Lord acquaintance.