Doctor Who BBCN14 - The Last Dodo

by Doctor Who

  in mind: the TARDIS. Thank goodness it was still where we’d left it.

  The Doctor turned the key in the lock and we both fell inside.

  I stumbled out an explanation, telling the Doctor what I’d done. ‘So

  – what’s happened to all the animals?’ I asked again.

  He took the pendant from around his neck and began to examine it.

  ‘Oh,’ I said in realisation. ‘If they’re out of suspended animation we can track them, like the rhino.’ The Doctor nodded.

  ‘But we don’t have Eve’s computer. . . ’

  ‘What’s better, Eve’s computer or the TARDIS?’

  Well, I didn’t know how powerful Eve’s computer was, but I supposed the TARDIS was a pretty safe bet.

  ‘All the information we need should be in this.’ The Doctor plucked the dodo feather out of the console and put his pendant in its place.

  His fingers twirled across control panels and the column in the centre began to rise and fall. A screen flickered into life and the Doctor perched his glasses on his nose to examine it. ‘Ah.’

  It didn’t sound like a good ‘ah’ to me. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re on our way to Earth.’ He sighed.

  ‘And that’s bad? Come on, you’ve got to tell me,’ I added, as he hesitated.

  ‘I have a theory about what happened,’ he said at last. ‘Well, I say theory, I’m fairly sure, what with me being, you know, clever and all that. And that destination pretty much confirms it.’

  I held my breath, waiting for the worst. But I hadn’t suspected quite how bad the worst could be.

  ‘Each specimen is put into suspended animation and teleported directly into a prepared cage, via a pendant. You were trying to open a cage, lift the suspended animation field, and release the. . . occupant

  – in other words, more or less reverse the process. The sonic screwdriver enabled you to do that – but it didn’t know where to stop. I strongly suspect it amplified the signal, connecting back through the pendant to the central computer, removing all suspended animation fields and feeding inverse coordinates to every animal in a sort of teleportation power surge.’

  103

  ‘You mean. . . ?’

  ‘That all the creatures have ended up back where they came from, yes. Luckily I hadn’t been teleported from anywhere, so I wasn’t affected.’

  But I was still thinking about the other animals. His words had given me the tiniest sliver of hope. ‘Back where they originally came from, right. Exactly where they disappeared from. Exactly. The same time, I mean,’ I added, just to make it absolutely clear.

  But he shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. The museum doesn’t have time travel. Not even having the sonic screwdriver in the mix could help out there.’

  So I’d sent back billions of extinct animals to twenty-first-century Earth.

  ‘Can we reverse it?’ I asked. ‘Reverse the reversal, send them back?’

  His nose crinkled up. ‘Possibly. The question is. . . even if I can do it, do I want to?’

  That didn’t make sense. ‘You what?’

  ‘Better to die in freedom than live in a cage. . . ’ he said.

  ‘Better to be eaten by a dinosaur than live out your normal twenty-first-century life?’

  For a second I thought he might argue, but he said, ‘Good point.’

  Then he sort-of smiled. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. After all, we like a challenge, don’t we, Martha? Something to get our teeth into!’

  Talk about unfortunate phrasing. ‘And there’ll be a load or dinosaurs down there, getting their teeth into people!’

  ‘Old dinosaurs, dying dinosaurs. And the way the land masses have changed, half of them will land in the sea anyway. . . ’

  Way to pile on the guilt, Doctor. ‘So now I’m the person who wiped out the dinosaurs! Was it a comet, was it climate change, no, it was Martha Jones mucking around with an electronic tool that makes a silly noise!’

  The Doctor looked offended at that. ‘It’s not silly! It’s –’ He broke off in mid-sonic-screwdriver defence as the TARDIS juddered to a halt.

  ‘But what are we going to do?!’ I asked. ‘We can’t track down 300 billion creatures. . . can we?’ I mean, with a TARDIS, I guessed 104

  anything was possible.

  ‘That would be mad!’ he said, grinning, which meant he’d been considering the idea. ‘Tell you what, though, let’s see where the old girl –’ he patted the console – ‘has brought us while I think up a Plan B.’

  Then he turned to me. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ The smile slipped for a second and there was an expression so intense I couldn’t bear to look at it. I remembered the Chinese girl, how she was willing to do anything to save the person she’d loved. And I realised that whatever I’d done, whatever the consequences might be, I’d dragged the Doctor out of hell. And how could I be sorry for that?

  105

  THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES

  PHORUSRHACOS

  Phorusrhacos longissimus

  Location: South America

  The head of this giant flightless bird is out of proportion to the rest of its body, being a similar size to that of the horse, equus caballus. It stands approximately two metres high, and has a large hooked beak. It is a predatory carnivore.

  Addendum:

  Last reported sighting: 20 million BC.

  Cause of extinction: competition for prey due to joining of continents South and North America; climate change.’

  I-Spyder points value: 800

  THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES

  Creature

  Points

  Dodo

  800

  Megatherium

  500

  Paradise parrot

  500

  Velociraptor

  250

  Mountain gorilla

  500

  Aye-aye

  900

  Siberian tiger

  600

  Kakapo

  900

  Indefatigable Galapagos mouse

  1500

  Stegosaurus

  500

  Triceratops

  550

  Diplodocus

  600

  Ankylosaurus

  650

  Dimetrodon

  600

  Passenger pigeon

  100

  Thylacine

  250

  Black rhinoceros

  300

  Mervin the missing link

  23500

  Tau duck

  5

  Dong tao chicken

  4

  Red-eared slider

  40

  Chinese three-striped box turtle

  350

  Forest dragonfly

  150

  Phorusrhacos

  450

  Steller’s sea cow

  1000

  Subtotal

  35499

  The TARDIS had landed in a cul-de-sac, a narrow side street filled with puddles and rubbish. Martha hurried to the end of the pas-sageway, expecting to see screaming men, women and children running this way and that, arms waving above their heads and eyes wide in terror. But no. The only waving arms belonged to a woman trying to catch the attention of someone the other side of a road, the only wide eyes belonged to a couple of teenage girls watching a couple of teenage boys walk past.

  They were in a town – ahead was the high street by the look of things – and almost certainly somewhere in the UK. It wasn’t especially futuristic – no hover-cars or moving pavements – and it wasn’t at all unrecognisable from places of Martha’s own time, there were bou-tiques, coffee shops and newsagents – although these days, judging by the shop windows, fluorescent green leg warmers were currently in fashion, a cinnamon-orange latte cost e 11.50, and some celeb had run off with some other celeb’s wife.

  The Doctor shut the TARDIS doors and joined her, and they wa
ndered off down the street together.

  ‘So,’ said Martha, ‘what do we do now? What are we looking for?’

  109

  He shrugged. ‘The pendant should have given the TARDIS something to work on, should have brought us to a set of relevant coordinates, a place where some creature came from. But could be anything. You know, this would almost certainly have been all forest once. Trees instead of telegraph poles. Bushes instead of bins. And of course whatever was picked up from here originally could be virtually undetectable, could be a microbe, a gnat, a flea. . . ’

  ‘Or that!’ Martha rolled her eyes. Talk about déjà vu!’ No one else could have spotted it, because it wasn’t as if a bizarre-looking bird bigger than a turkey was likely to pass without comment. It was poking its head round a rubbish bin, pushing its enormous hooked beak into a fast-food container that hadn’t quite made it inside the receptacle, and seemed remarkably unfazed by the human hustle and bustle surrounding it. It was a dodo.

  The Doctor and Martha approached, gingerly.

  ‘Don’t scare it!’

  Martha whispered, creeping forwards on tiptoes.

  The dodo didn’t run away, just pulled its head out of the cardboard box, spilling ancient French fries across the pavement as it did so, and looked at them with curious eyes as they reached it. Martha came to a halt. ‘Now what?’ she hissed at the Doctor, not having thought any further than getting as close to it as possible.

  ‘Back to the TARDIS,’ he whispered back. ‘Keep it safe.’ She held out a hand, with vague thoughts of how you let dogs or horses sniff you, and the bird waddled towards her, still unafraid. By now one or two people had turned to look, and the Doctor said loudly, ‘Ah, there you are, Dorothea. Got lost again! Giant Peruvian flightless homing pigeon,’ he added to a staring old lady with a shopping basket on wheels. ‘Probably got a bit confused by the one-way system. Come on, girl! Home’s this way!’

  The dodo – and Martha couldn’t fathom why the Doctor had decided to call it Dorothea – stuck close to her side as they made their way back to the TARDIS. There was something else she couldn’t work out: ‘I thought I’d just put everything in reverse, sent things back to where they came from. But the dodo didn’t come from here, it came from Mauritius. And it wasn’t found anywhere else, that’s what your 110

  I-Spyder book says.’

  The Doctor nodded.

  ‘Good point.

  But sailors did carry them

  off: brought them back home as curiosities, displayed them to the sensation-seeking public for a groat a go. In London in 1638 you could spend a fun afternoon out watching a dodo eat stones as big as nutmegs. Wouldn’t be the first species which died out in captivity, not by a long chalk.’ His gaze drifted to the middle distance. ‘Last ever Tasmanian Tiger, Beaumaris Zoo, 1936. Neglected and starved, she finally froze to death. While troops were slaughtering each other at the start of the Great War, the last ever passenger pigeon was dying in Cincinatti Zoo. I’ve already told you about the last quagga. . . ’

  ‘Except they weren’t the last ones,’ Martha pointed out. ‘We know what happened to the last-ever quagga.’ She shivered, remembering.

  ‘They must have been the penultimate ones. No one would know about the last ever ones, because they’d just. . . disappear. Zapped off to the museum. Like Dorothea here.’

  She reached down and rubbed the creature’s downy head.

  And then they heard the first scream.

  Have you ever been in a situation where things are spiralling horribly, awfully out of control, and you know it’s all your fault? I think there are really only two ways to react: be paralysed with fear and guilt, or shove the weight of responsibility to the back of your mind and treat it like you would any other hideous happening. My instinct was to do the former, but I knew I had to force myself to do the latter, because people were going to die.

  The Doctor reacts so quickly, it’s like it’s programmed in. Hear scream, turn and run. Towards it, I mean, not away. As if.

  And it’s becoming instinctive in me, too. I took a brief, longing look at the still-distant TARDIS, and followed him. Then stopped, reversed, and picked up Dorothea. Then tried to run, found she was too heavy, and stumbled forwards with a kind of lurching trot instead.

  There were more and more screams coming now, suddenly joined by the piercing screech of a fire alarm. We rounded a corner, and were nearly knocked over by a crowd of people running the other way, but 111

  there was no sign of a fire. In front of us was a supermarket, with screaming shoppers streaming out of the automatic doors, dropping their carrier bags in panic and sending apples and oranges and frozen ready meals sliding away in all directions. One woman was yelling ‘A bear, a bear!’, another was crying ‘A tiger!’ and a spotty teenage boy in a pastel yellow supermarket uniform was shouting about ‘A monster!’

  By the time I got there, the doors were just hissing shut behind the Doctor. Seconds later, they slid open again for me. I crept in cautiously

  – mind you, I could have been wearing hobnailed boots for all you could hear above the alarm – but I was unable to see where he’d got to, or where the bear/tiger/monster was, for that matter. Dorothea looked around curiously as I tiptoed down the fruit and veg aisle, stretching out her neck to snag a bunch of grapes in her enormous beak.

  We were creeping past the deli counter when I heard a crash. I hurried as fast as I could towards it, trying not to slip on the tins of peaches and pears that were rolling across the floor. Round the corner, I could see why the fleeing customers had been confused. The creature was the size and shape of a bear, but with the tawny coat and feline face of a big cat.

  It also had the largest set of fangs I’d ever seen, like a couple of bony bananas sticking out of its mouth.

  And the Doctor was standing right in front of it. I yelped. ‘Is that a sabre-toothed tiger?’

  The Doctor looked in my direction. ‘Yes. Interesting, isn’t it? Because there’s no way the last one could have crossed the Atlantic and ended up here.’

  Yes, Doctor, now was definitely the time to be worrying about how it arrived thousands of years ago, rather than that it was HERE, NOW!

  I edged closer nervously and saw that the Doctor was holding up the sonic screwdriver, waving it in the animal’s face. It was shaking its furry head from side to side, as if trying to dislodge a buzzing bee from inside its skull. Behind it crouched a couple of old ladies, tea-cosy hats on their heads, obviously far too scared to attempt to pass the beast.

  112

  The Doctor used the non-sonic-screwdriver-holding hand to wave me away. ‘Get out while you can,’ he said. This won’t hold it for long, I’ve just confused it for a few moments. Trying to give people time to get away. The sabre-tooth is built for ambush, not catching prey on the run – if they get enough of a head start, they should be OK.’

  One of the old ladies whimpered. ‘Go on,’ he urged me again, then called out, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be all right,’ in a cheerfully reassuring voice that was almost drowned out by the sound of sirens from outside. I turned to look through the glass store front, and could see two great big fire engines drawing up. Firemen jumped down and the automatic doors swished open to let them into the shop. They saw the sabre-tooth. They ran out again.

  All except one, a tall, moustached black man. ‘No fire, then,’ he called out to the Doctor – and I won’t say he didn’t sound scared, but I guess he was the kind of man who didn’t let being scared get in the way.

  ‘No fire,’ the Doctor called back. ‘I won’t say it was exactly a false alarm, but. . . ’

  ‘What can I do to help?’ the fireman yelled over the sound not only of the bell, but also of one of the fire engines hastily reversing away outside.

  I nudged the Doctor. I could see that the tiger was beginning to focus, wasn’t shaking its head anywhere near so violently. We might not have very long.

  ‘Right!’ said the Doctor, all firm and decisive. ‘As
soon as the spell breaks, I’ll try to lead it out. Could you, er. . . ?’

  ‘Albert.’

  ‘Albert, you see to Agnes and Millicent here. But make sure you’re not in its path.’ I could see the Doctor was worried. How much easier for the animal to turn on sitting prey rather than chase after a running target.

  And Albert got the idea too. He nodded, and before the Doctor could say another word he had leapt onto a chiller cabinet and was inching along, making his way to the other side of the tiger, to where the two old ladies were huddled together. ‘Be careful!’ I shrieked, 113

  ridiculously – I mean, as if you weren’t going to be careful when you were climbing over a deadly prehistoric predator.

  He jumped down the other side and, after a breathless hello to the women, began grabbing packets and tins, building a barrier between them and the animal. Even worried as he was, I saw half a grin on the Doctor’s face – this was his kind of man.

  ‘How did the sabre-tooth die out?’ I asked, hoping for a clue. I mean, I know we couldn’t – shouldn’t – kill the last member of an otherwise extinct species, but if it was it or me. . .

  ‘Climate change, leading to vegetation change, leading to prey change, leading to no food,’ the Doctor replied. ‘Probably.’

  ‘So not a solution we could utilise in the next two minutes, then,’ I said – as the tiger took a step towards us.

  The Doctor began to pull packets of bacon out of the chiller, ripping them open and draping the rashers over his shoulders. He had, I decided, gone totally loopy. ‘Might help if I really smell of meat!’ he told me. ‘Entice him in this direction!’

  Yes, loopy. Noble, but loopy.

  ‘Now, Martha, run!’ he yelled at me. And I decided that this time, it really was a good idea to do as he said.

  I stumbled down the aisle towards the exit, swerving round abandoned groceries and pushing my way through ‘Five items or less’.

  ‘Faster!’ the Doctor was yelling, not seeming to appreciate the fact that I was carrying a bird the size of a sheep. And I wasn’t going to leave her – but, on the other hand, I didn’t want to be ripped to pieces by a sabre-toothed tiger either. What to do?