'Nor is there any sign of the village being demilitarised.  Still each night and day, an army platoon patrols these deserted, decaying streets, keeping the outside world in the dark...'

'Good grief,' muttered Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, as a squat shadowy shape came running up behind this journalist woman on the TV screen.  Another of the imp-like creatures came into shot, scuttling round the girl's legs as she continued tailking, oblivious.  'Pause it, could you, Palmer?'

Palmer  raised the remote and the image flickered to a halt.  The girl - Claire, was it, Claire Aldwych?  He was getting to be dreadful with names - was caught mid-blink on the screen.

'Very flattering,' she remarked sourly from the back of the viewing room.

The eyes of the gremlin at her feet were ghostly and red, looking straight at the camera.  As he studied the almost transparent creatures on the tape, Lethbridge-Stewart forgot all about the nagging pain in his back from overdoing the gardening, his annoyance at having to cancel arrangements for his last day with Doris before her week away to be here in UNIT HQ for Palmer.  He felt a familiar thrill at the sight of the unknown, to be facing up to something unearthly - soon followed by mixed feelings of guilt and regret.  He was retired.  His days of heading up UNIT's British forces were far behind him; now he was just a happily married man living out his last days in a big house with a fine garden.  A garden he should be getting back to.

Palmer shouldn't have troubled him with this.  It stirred up all the old feelings inside him.  What was he supposed to do?  Old Lethbridge-Stewart had retired from the fray, but he'd always known the monsters, the terrors, would never give up their designs on the Earth.  The struggle would never be over; that was why UNIT existed.

That was why Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart had existed, for a long time.

He didn't like to think of it all going on without him.

Palmer leaned forward.  'Have you ever seen anything like it, Brigadier?'

Lethbridge-Stewart jerked back to the present from glory days of the past.  The imp thing was staring out at him, frozen on the screen.  But it was like it wasn't quite there, as if he were seeing only the reflection of the thing in the monitor screen, and that in fact, it was sitting beside him.

'Ah...  No, Palmer, I haven't.  Not quite like that:.' He paused.  'Remind me, were you with me at Devil's End?  Mid-1970s?'

Palmer shook his head.  'No sir, I was seconded to UNIT during...'  He glanced anxiously at Claire in the corner.  'That time-bending business.  With the Master.'

Lethbridge-Stewart smiled to himself fondly.  'Ah, yes, a while later... Well, at Devil's End we came up against a little chap with wings a bit like that.  Nasty bit of work.  But he was stone, Palmer, and there was only one of him.  Solid.  We all saw him.  And we all saw him die.'  He turned to Claire.  'And yet you claim to have seen nothing at all, Miss Aldwych?'

The girl rolled her eyes.  'Do you think I'd have stood there reporting if I'd seen those things running about the place?'

It's like... like they're keeping an eye on you,' Palmer ventured.

'They're linked to whatever's in the bottom of that crater,' Claire said bluntly.  'Whatever those troops are guarding.  It's obvious.'  She looked at the two of them pointedly.  'Well, obvious to those with access to information on whatever it was that came down...'