Doctor Who BBCN14 - The Last Dodo

by Doctor Who

  ‘But you haven’t finished it yet,’ Martha called after him.

  He didn’t seem to hear. She wondered how many books he’d never got to finish. She wondered how many books he’d read, full stop.

  Probably more than existed in the biggest library on Earth.

  By the time the Doctor returned, the TARDIS had settled down a bit, although the rising and falling of the column in the centre of the console showed that they were still in flight. The Doctor had swapped his thick paper-paged book for a slim plastic slab, a bit like a large iPod. He held it out to Martha.

  She took it, and looked at the screen. ‘ The I-Spyder Book of Earth Creatures, ’ she read. ‘What’s this, then?’

  The Doctor grinned. ‘Lists every Earth animal there’s ever been.

  You get points for each one you spot. When you’ve got enough points, you send the book in to the Big Chief I-Spyder, and he sends you a certificate. Thought you could start with the dodo. Quite a lot of points for that one, cos it’s only found in such a tiny spot, both spatially and temporally.’

  It only took Martha a few seconds to get the hang of the little electronic book. She accessed the index first, but rapidly decided that browsing wasn’t the best way forward – ‘It’s got about 18 billion entries under “A”!’

  ‘Wait till you get to “S”,’ said the Doctor, ‘sandpiper, spiny anteater, seventeen-year locust, Sea Devil. . . ’ – and just inputted the word

  ‘Dodo’. A page sprang to life before her eyes: The I-Spyder Book of Earth Creatures: Dodo, Raphus cucullatus.

  ‘You get eight hundred points for spotting a dodo,’ she noted. ‘How many do I need for a certificate?’

  ‘Um. . . nine million, I think,’ he said.

  ‘Oh well. Gotta start somewhere.’

  The TARDIS began shuddering again.

  ‘Here we are!’ the Doctor announced. ‘One tropical paradise, palm trees and non-extinct birds included in the price. Incidentally, here’s an interesting if disputed fact: the word “dodo” is a corruption of the 10

  Dutch “doedaars”, meaning fat, um, rear. So if a dodo asks you if its bum looks big, probably tactful to fib.’

  The instant that the ship had ground to a halt, the Doctor’s hand was on the door lever. Martha loved that about him, the eagerness to explore, to tear off the wrapping of each new place like a child with its presents at Christmas.

  The doors opened. Framed in the doorway was a large browny-grey-y-white-y bird with a little tufty tail and a comically curved beak, far too big for its head. Actually, it was the thing’s size overall that surprised Martha the most – she’d been expecting maybe a turkey, and it was much bigger than that, perhaps a metre in height.

  But what shouldn’t have surprised her was that despite its unbelievably sophisticated technology, despite the Doctor’s supposedly expert piloting and despite the automatic dodo detector, the TARDIS had got it wrong again. Oh, a dodo had been detected all right, there was the proof right in front of her. But what it wasn’t surrounded by was a tropical paradise complete with palm trees. Instead there was a sign: Raphus cucullatus, Dodo. And there was a resigned dullness in the creature’s eye.

  It was in a cage.

  11

  THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES

  DODO

  Rephus cuculletus

  Location: Mauritius

  The flightless dodo bird is the largest member of the pigeon family and is found only on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Its most notable feature is the large, curved beak that dominates its featherless face. It is browny-grey in colour, with curly grey tail feathers and yellow tips to its small wings.

  Addendum:

  Last reported sighting: AD 1681.

  Cause of extinction: hunting by man; introduction of non-indigenous species, e.g. pigs, leading to destruction of eggs and competition for food; destruction of habitat.

  I-Spyder points value: 800

  THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES

  Creature

  Points

  Dodo

  800

  Subtotal

  800

  Marthahereagain,hello. So,we’vefoundadodo–andit’sinacage.

  Of course, that was the last thing I wanted. Well, not the very last, that would be to find ourselves back on the planet Belepheron, where the air smelled of bad eggs and boiled cabbage, and the natives’ idea of a friendly greeting was to smother you in green slime and cook you slowly over a fiery pit – look, you know what I mean. We’d just had that really awkward thing about zoos and cages, and I didn’t want to go there again, so discovering that the TARDIS had taken us to a bloomin’ bird behind bars was not a good thing.

  If you’d been there, seeing what I saw, you’d probably ask why I thought it was a captive, not a dead specimen. Why I thought it was alive. For a start, it actually wasn’t in a cage, you see, that was just the impression I got at first. It was in a sort of perspex box, the metal bars were part of a floor-to-ceiling grille that spanned the whole room.

  But the big thing was, it didn’t move. Not a millimetre. Not the tiniest flick of a feather. Frozen, it was. Stuffed, you’d probably think. And I don’t know why I didn’t think that, but I knew it was alive, just knew it. Maybe it’s something to do with my medical training – I’ve seen people slip from life to death with no outward sign at all, and I haven’t needed flatlining monitors to tell me what’s happened. It’s 15

  just something about them.

  When I could tear my eyes from the dodo, I looked around me and was pretty much staggered. There were these see-through boxes as far as the eye could see, and every box held an animal. I’m not going to start trying to list them, or even describe them. Some boxes as large as Buckingham Palace, some as small as a flea, each with a single creature inside it. That’s as far as I’ll go at the moment. Maybe more later. Almost certainly more later. But not now, because it’s too hard to get my head around it. Just accept that I was stunned. No, what did I say before – staggered. That suits it better.

  This sudden realisation, this comprehension of my surroundings, took only a second. I had this momentary thought of shutting the TARDIS doors before the Doctor could see, before he could get upset

  – but of course even that one second’s delay was far too much. I don’t doubt he’d taken it all in, probably taken in seven times as much as me in half the time. He was already walking forwards, a grim look on his face.

  Together, we stepped out of the TARDIS. And, what do you know?

  An alarm went off. That’s our life, that is.

  ‘Er, back inside the TARDIS is looking a good option right now,’ Martha said anxiously, as the siren wailed around them.

  ‘Oh come on, Martha, this is the good bit!’ replied the Doctor, not even looking back as he pulled the TARDIS doors closed behind him.

  She sighed. ‘Oh well, in for a penny. . . So your plan is, we stay here and be captured or interrogated or whatever by whoever set up that alarm system.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor agreed, nodding. ‘Especially now those guards have turned up.’

  He nodded over to their left, indicating the men who were approaching. They looked rather like the security guards from the hospital, with their navy-blue uniforms and peaked caps, but, to Martha’s deep discomfort, carried some form of chunky black space gun in their hands – something that the security guards back home had never done, although she thought some of them would have enjoyed it 16

  rather a lot.

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ one called.

  ‘Whatever you say,’ the Doctor called back cheerfully. ‘How about we put up our hands too? Would that be a help? Save you having to ask –’

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled one of the guards.

  ‘Oh, right, yes, didn’t think of that one –’

  ‘Shut up!’

  The Doctor raised one hand, and used the other to put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh!’ he hissed to Martha, who decided it wo
uld probably be a good idea to hold up her hands too.

  The men led them out of the room. Martha found it hard to keep her attention on them during the long walk, surrounded as she was by all sorts of bizarre creatures. Her hands kept falling to her sides as she spotted a giant megatherium or a brilliantly plumaged parrot on the other side of the grille, and the Doctor had to keep nudging her to raise them again. He too was paying careful attention to their surroundings, cheerfully pointing out – verbally – a gorilla here and a velociraptor there. Cheerfully, yes – but Martha could see again that hardness in his eyes she’d glimpsed earlier.

  As they left the room, Martha turned to see a sign above the door that read, simply, ‘Earth’. A logo by its side showed the letters

  ‘MOTLO’ in a circle around the head of a strange beast, a line drawing showing tusks and triangular eyes. The emblem was repeated over and over along the corridor they were led down.

  ‘Are we there yet?’ the Doctor asked like a petulant child on a car trip.

  ‘Where’s “there”?’ Martha said.

  He shrugged. ‘Journey’s end. I do hate this low-level threatening stuff that goes nowhere – what good is it to anyone? Let’s get into the real stuff, that’s what I say.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t wait for the real danger to kick in,’ she commented drily.

  ‘Good girl,’ said the Doctor, grinning at her as the guards came to a halt. ‘And it looks like we’re getting closer! Excellent!’

  17

  Their escorts ushered them through a door, and they passed into a sort of foyer with signs pointing in all directions. Due to the presence of names such as ‘Mars’ and ‘Venus’, she assumed the signs referred to planets, although other names were a mystery: Mondas, Refusis II (‘I’d like to see those exhibits,’ said the Doctor), Varos, Raxacoricofal-lapatorius, Tara. She briefly thought there was a planet called ‘Gift Shop’, until she realised that the sign was indicating, well, a gift shop.

  This had to be a museum, a gallery, something like that, although one wall displayed a map of continents and oceans, not the floor plan that one would expect in a museum lobby. There was no chance to investigate, however, as the guards led them through a door marked ‘No Entry’ and they were marched down another corridor. At the end was a door bearing the tusked-beast logo, and they were ushered through it. Martha shivered as she passed inside, temporarily dizzy, although she wasn’t quite sure why. Once in the room the feeling passed.

  There were no grilles or perspex-boxed creatures here; it was a ludicrously mundane-looking office containing a desk and a chair. On the chair, behind the desk, was sat a woman – a ludicrously mundane-looking woman. Middle-aged, grey-haired, too much red lipstick looking like a clown’s mouth against her pale skin. V-necked red jumper with a white shirt underneath and a tweed blazer on top. The whole scene was just so normal that Martha felt like laughing – although the still-present guns made her decide it would be a bad idea on the whole.

  ‘Hello!’ said the Doctor, springing forward and lowering his arms so he could go for a handshake. ‘I’m the Doctor and this is Martha, and we’re your prisoners. Which I assume means we’ve done something wrong, but no idea what. Any clues? Martha? Anyone?’

  The woman didn’t take the Doctor’s hand – they never did, Martha had noted. ‘Perhaps you would like to explain,’ she said in a low, slightly croaky voice, ‘what you were doing in our Earth section outside Northern hemisphere business hours?’

  The Doctor reached up and took Martha’s left wrist, dragging it down so he could see her watch. ‘Martha! Look at that! Your watch must be wrong. It’s outside Northern hemisphere business hours and 18

  we never realised.’

  Martha forbore to point out that the time shown by her watch hadn’t borne any relation to the time of her surroundings for quite a while now. The Doctor knew that, anyway.

  ‘Well, sorry about that,’ the Doctor continued. ‘Glad we’ve got it all cleared up, perhaps your chums here could put away their weapons now?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Oh, I hardly think so. Now you’ve finally been caught in the act, we’re not likely to just let you go. We take theft and sabotage very seriously here at MOTLO.’

  The Doctor nodded sympathetically. ‘Of course you do. Good for MOTLO. MOTLO, MOTLO, MOTLO. Magic Otters Telephone Lending Office? Magnetic Ointment Treatment Light Orchestra?’

  ‘My Odd Theoretical Love Outlet?’ offered Martha, getting a bemused and amused look from the Doctor. (‘I am a student,’ she reminded him. ‘Medical students and bands, you know. . . ’)

  ‘The Museum of the Last Ones, as you can’t possibly fail to be aware,’ the woman told them. ‘But perhaps you are not aware that I am Eve, the curator of the museum, and that I have no sense of humour.’

  The Doctor looked around the office for another chair, but, seeing none, perched on the edge of Eve’s desk instead. She drew her chair back sharply.

  ‘I’m not after jokes,’ he said. ‘Actually, I haven’t found much funny since we arrived here. Perhaps you could explain why your museum contains living specimens. Perhaps you could explain exactly what your museum is, and what it does. I mean, I wasn’t planning on sabotaging it, but I could always change my mind. You can help me make that decision. I realise you don’t have a sense of humour, but that shouldn’t stop you humouring me. What have you got to lose?’

  Only the Doctor could sound that threatening and that disarming at the same time.

  Eve began to speak. Probably, thought Martha, she wasn’t quite sure why she was doing so, why she was obeying the Doctor. After all, logic dictated that two people found in the middle of a building 19

  would have a fairly good idea of where they were without needing to be told.

  ‘This is the Museum of the Last Ones,’ Eve said again. ‘Home to the last remaining specimen of every otherwise-extinct life form in the universe.’

  The Doctor blinked. ‘But that’s trillions upon jillions upon, I don’t know, gazillions.’

  ‘And thus the museum encompasses the entire planet.’ said Eve.

  Martha stared at her. ‘Not exactly a family day out, then.’

  ‘More like a year out,’ said the Doctor. ‘You’d need to pack a fair few picnics. I might be inclined to be impressed, if I wasn’t fairly sure I’m not going to like anything I hear.’

  ‘How could you possibly object?’ Eve asked. ‘This is the greatest conservation project the universe has ever known.’ The Doctor shuf-fled around on the desk. ‘I knew an old lady who made gooseberry conserve,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there was a lot in it for the gooseberries.’

  Eve ignored him. ‘We monitor every species, everywhere. When there is a single specimen left, our detectors pick this up. A collection agent is dispatched to retrieve the specimen, so it may be preserved for all time. Thus no species will ever be fully extinct while the museum exists.’

  ‘You expect the last one to just hang around while you bimble down in your rocket ship or whatever?’ said Martha incredulously.

  The look Eve gave her was extremely pitying. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out a pendant, a chunky metal square on which was a numberpad and a large blue button. ‘The collection agents use teleport technology,’ she explained. ‘They can arrive at the correct location almost instantaneously.’ She dangled the pendant tauntingly in front of her. ‘But don’t think you can use these to escape. Each one is keyed to a specific individual, and will carry that person only.’

  ‘As if we’d try to escape!’ said the Doctor indignantly. ‘Still, that’s not all you use the technology for, is it – I thought I detected a little tele-porty swish as we came through your door. That makes sense; being curator of this whole museum would require quite a bit of commut-20

  ing otherwise. Still, you must work a long day, what with Northern hemisphere business hours, Southern hemisphere business hours, not to mention whatever time they open at the equator. . . ’

  ‘I never sle
ep,’ Eve told him.

  ‘Quite right! It’s for tortoises, I always say – unless you’re the last tortoise of your kind, of course, in which case you get to be put in suspended animation for all eternity instead.’

  ‘It has to be done,’ said Eve. She reached behind her and slid back a wooden panel. Below was a bank of tiny lights the size of pinpricks, hundreds if not thousands of them, flashing in an endless sequence, one after the other. ‘Each flash of a light represents an alert,’ Eve told them. ‘A species has come to an end.’

  Martha opened her eyes wide in shock. ‘But there have been loads, just since you opened the panel!’

  Eve nodded. ‘Indeed.’

  ‘The last dodo,’ Martha whispered under her breath. ‘But, hang on, there was a gorilla there. Gorillas aren’t extinct.’

  ‘Martha, Martha, Martha,’ said the Doctor. ‘Think.’

  She thought, and of course it was obvious. ‘They’re extinct now,’

  she said. ‘Whenever “now” is.’

  He nodded sadly. ‘I spotted an aye-aye, a Siberian tiger, a chubby little kakapo – puts it a bit after your time, but not necessarily by much.’

  Eve was looking both puzzled and fascinated. Martha realised that they had been talking too freely of their bizarre way of life – did they really want this woman to know they were time travellers? – and hastened to dig them out of the hole. ‘I left Earth a while ago,’ she said. ‘Travelling. It’s very easy to lose track of time.’

  Eve nodded. ‘Oh, Earth,’ she said. ‘I noted you were found in the Earth section. One of our busiest, by far. It wasn’t so bad once – the occasional mass extinction every few million years; most planets have those. But in the last few thousand years it’s become quite a challenge to keep up with everything that’s being lost.’

  ‘Ooh, biting social commentary there,’ the Doctor said. ‘Not that you don’t have a point.’ He jumped off the desk. ‘Well, thank you for 21