by Doctor Who
‘The animals aren’t aware, though, are they?’ said Martha. But she thought how she’d known, known without a doubt, that the dodo was alive, and she wondered if it had been a spark of sentience she had detected.
She looked towards the distant diplodocus, so majestic, so serene, and shivered.
32
THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
DIPLODOCUS
Diplodocus longus
Location: North America
The giant herbivorous diplodocus is the Earth’s longest known land-dweller, more than 25 metres in length. It walks on four legs and has a long, thin neck supporting a small head. Its massive tail –which makes up over half of its length – tapers to a narrow point, and is held horizontal as it walks. It has a ridge of spines down the length of its back.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: late Jurassic period.
Cause of extinction: environmental changes.
I-Spyder points value: 600
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
Subtotal
9700
Tommy and Rix finally led the Doctor and Martha to the spot where the Black Rhino had been. Martha had a vague idea that she’d seen a rhino once, but whether it was at the zoo, or a safari park, and if it had been a black one or a white one or a sky-blue-pink one, she had no idea at all. She felt a bit guilty about that. ‘You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,’ she remembered her grandmother used to say, and it was true – probably true of most of the human race.
The see-through box now had a side missing, a big gaping emptiness at the front. The Doctor lost his surly expression, whipped out his glasses and jumped into full-on Sherlock Holmes mode, examining every inch of the outside of the cage, going down on hands and knees to peer closely at the floor surrounding it. Then he went over the inside with a fine-tooth comb, and if Martha thought he’d hesitated just the tiniest bit before climbing in, she’d never have dreamt of mentioning it. Anyway, she’d probably imagined it.
‘Any clues, Ace Ventura?’ she asked, as he clambered out.
‘Apart from the footprints, the cigar ash and the signed confession?’
he said.
‘Yes, apart from those.’
35
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Not really.’ He pointed at a small keypad at the top of the cage. ‘I take it that controls the stasis field?’
Tommy nodded. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a white handkerchief covered with little print dinosaurs, which he tossed into the box. Then his fingers dashed out a series of numbers at lightning speed on the keypad. The missing wall shimmered into existence and the descent of the still-floating handkerchief was suddenly arrested; it hung there in mid-air, a snapshot of time.
They stared at the frozen hankie for a few moments, then Tommy reached out and tapped the pad again – Martha mechanically noted the numbers: 5, 7, 9, 3, 1, 0, 0, 8 – and the box’s front vanished as quickly as it had appeared; the handkerchief floated gently down to the floor, from where Tommy picked it up and blew his nose noisily, The Doctor reached up to the keypad. ‘No sign of tampering,’ he said. ‘How many people know the access codes?’
‘Just the six of us, the Earthers,’ said Tommy slowly, suddenly looking worried.
‘And Eve,’ added Rix. ‘And, really, we’ve never bothered to keep them that secret.’
‘But only the Earthers could switch off the movement sensors,’
Tommy pointed out. The only time they went off was when you arrived here, Doctor.’ Was he only just realising that he and his colleagues were the main suspects, or was it a double bluff to remove suspicion by inviting it so openly?
‘Sensors!’ the Doctor cried suddenly. ‘Why didn’t I think of it before?
Come on, everyone, we’re wasting our time here! Back to Eve’s office!’
He dived off, calling ‘No time to lose!’ over his shoulder. Martha jogged to keep up. ‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s up? Something about those movement sensor things?’
‘Nope,’ he replied, not slowing down. ‘Not them. Remember that bank of lights? Alerts every time a population gets down to one. Presumably once that creature is in stasis, the alert disappears. But what if it’s reactivated?’
Martha ‘oh’ed in understanding. ‘So once the rhino was removed from stasis, its warning light would come on again.’
36
‘Yup.’
‘And if we can track down the rhino, we might be able to find whoever nicked it.’
‘Yup.’
Martha thought about it. ‘But what if it’s dead?’
The Doctor did a running shrug. ‘Then this won’t work. But it’s only been gone, ooh, twenty minutes max? Hope springs eternal, Agent Jones, hope springs eternal.’
The Doctor’s unerring direction sense brought them back to the exit, and he raced down the corridor and through the foyer while Tommy, Rix and Martha struggled to keep up. By the time they reached Eve’s office, the Doctor had already burst in. Ignoring Eve’s obvious disap-proval of his unheralded entry, he launched into an explanation of his theory.
Luckily, Eve caught on at once, and her frown vanished. ‘I should have thought of that,’ she said. ‘But the alerts are in chronological order; it never crossed my mind to go back through past extinctions. . . ’
‘No time for tears,’ the Doctor told her, although anyone who looked less likely to break down crying Martha couldn’t imagine. The Doctor ducked behind the desk and pulled back the wall panel to reveal the warning system. He and Eve bent over it as Martha, Tommy and Rix looked on anxiously.
‘Yes!’ The Doctor looked up, beaming. Even Eve was smiling in delight.
‘You’ve found it?’ asked Martha. The Doctor clicked his fingers in mock modesty.
‘It’s back on Earth,’ Eve informed everyone.
‘So where do we go from here?’
‘We go after it, of course!’ said the Doctor. ‘Back to good ol’ Earth.’
Rix looked slightly taken aback. ‘I think that’s our job.’
The Doctor flashed him a smile. ‘Oh, I think you’ll find it’s ours too.’
He turned to Eve. ‘You’ll authorise us, I’m sure.’
She nodded, and reached forward to open a desk drawer. From inside she pulled out two of the pendant-like devices and handed one each to the Doctor and Martha, then turned to her computer. ‘I’ll 37
programme you in,’ she said, and then, thirty seconds later, ‘OK. All done. Enter these coordinates. . . ’
She reeled off a list of figures, and Tommy showed Martha the buttons on the pendant to press. ‘Then it’s the big blue one to operate it.’
‘Come on then,’ said Rix, impatiently.
‘Earth ho!’ called the Doctor.
As one, he, Martha, Tommy and Rix pressed their blue buttons. As one, they disappeared. . .
. . . and found themselves somewhere else.
They were in a gloomy warehouse; bare concrete walls and floors made it seem colder than it was, and the dim strip lighting that was the only illumination didn’t help. In a couple of corners lay things that Martha instinctively d
idn’t want to investigate too closely; even her medical training didn’t overcome that initial squeamishness on seeing something that was certainly dead, and no longer whole. In another corner lay something more recognisable – what must be the Black Rhinoceros. The Doctor was already moving towards it, and Martha followed him warily.
‘Look at you, you’re beautiful,’ he said softly. Then: ‘There’s no danger, it’s been tranquillised,’ he called back as he reached the mag-nificent creature. But now that hard edge was back in his voice.
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Martha as she joined him, immediately spotting the problem.
Tommy arrived by her side. ‘Its horn,’ he said. ‘It’s gone!’ For a second the anger in his expression matched that of the Doctor.
The rhino had once had two horns, a huge, piercing spike that dominated its face, and a smaller, modest one behind that. It was the larger of the two that had vanished, leaving the creature, however giant, now looking forlorn and somehow feeble.
‘Sawn off,’ the Doctor said, bending closer to examine the stump, crusty with dried blood.
‘But why?’ Martha asked.
38
Tommy was no longer the light-hearted joker of earlier; he looked disgusted. ‘One of the reasons they became extinct in the first place
– idiots getting it into their heads that rhino horn could cure all ills.
People’d pay through the nose for it, and poachers would be happy to provide.’ He sighed. ‘We should thank our lucky stars this one’s still alive. The poachers didn’t usually take such care.’
Martha shivered, and looked up for the Doctor’s reaction – but he’d left the drugged animal and was wandering over to a door on the opposite side of the warehouse. It needed a zap of the sonic screwdriver, but a few seconds later he was through. Martha, feeling that she was spending most of the day following in his wake, trotted after him.
There was a tiny, spartan office through the door, containing nothing but a table, a chair and a computer. The Doctor sat on the chair, wiggled his fingers as if he were about to launch into a piano concerto, and then plunged at the keyboard.
‘Notice anything interesting about this room?’ he asked Martha, without looking up.
She turned her head. ‘Interesting’ was not a word she would have chosen to describe her surroundings in any way. There was no other furniture, no decoration, just a barely illuminating fluorescent tube in the ceiling. To her left was a plain wall of breeze blocks, the same in front of her and to her right. Behind her was the door through which she’d entered. Oh.
‘There’s no exit,’ she said. ‘You can only go back the way you came.’
‘And notice anything interesting about the way we came?’
This time it was easy, now she knew what she was looking for.
‘There was no exit in the warehouse, either. This was the only door.
There wasn’t even a window.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Handy if you’re doing something dodgy and don’t want visitors, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps there’s a teleport,’ she suggested.
‘Which wouldn’t be native Earth technology at this time,’ he told her. ‘Yet another indication that it’s an inside job, Agent Jones. The museum folk seem happy enough to zap around all over the place.
Aha!’
39
Martha walked round to look over his shoulder and see what he’d discovered.
There was a list of names: Quagga. Bluebuck. Black Rhinoceros.
There were a lot more than the five Eve had suggested. Below each name was, first, a short string of numbers and letters, second, a long row of figures. ‘What do they look like to you?’ the Doctor asked.
She looked at the top row, under ‘Quagga’: 3.7M. It took a few moments, but she got it. ‘Million,’ she said. ‘The “M” must stand for million. There should be a pound sign or a dollar sign or something in front.’
‘And the other numbers?’
Again a few seconds thought, then: ‘They’re in the same format as the coordinates Eve gave us to get here. But what’s a quagga? Some sort of animal, I guess.’
The Doctor looked sad. ‘Relative of the zebra, a sub-species – looks just like one, except it’s only striped on the head and part of the body, and it’s a chestnut-brown colour with white stripes, rather than black and white like a zebra – a quagga crossing wouldn’t show up on the road nearly as much, but it was a beautiful animal. Good old humans
– they didn’t even realise it was a creature in its own right until after the last one had died. In fact, they didn’t even realise they’d all died out for years.’
‘Killed by humans?’ Martha asked, knowing the answer.
‘Oh yes, all the ones in the wild, end of the nineteenth century, shot by settlers who thought it might eat up the grass they wanted for their cows. The last known quagga died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Or at least, the last known up till now. Goodness knows where MOTLO’s’
– he said the name disdainfully – ‘one came from; hidden in a little corner of South Africa or in some private collection somewhere.’
‘And now it’s gone too,’ said Martha, sadly. Only two minutes ago she hadn’t known that this animal had ever existed, and now she knew that it had, and it had been lost, and lost again, and the sudden stab of regret was almost unbearable. ‘Sometimes I hate people,’ she said.
The Doctor grabbed her hands in his. ‘Martha! No, no, no! Hate what some of them do, hate some individuals if you must, hate in-40
tolerance and injustice and slaughter and man’s inhumanity to man, but never, never hate people.’ He skimmed through the list, pointing out a name here, a name there. ‘The Paradise Parrot. The Ilin Island Cloudrunner. Whether or not humans were responsible for their disappearance, what you have to remember is that it was humans who were responsible for coming up with inspiring, evocative names in the first place.’ He threw out a hand. ‘The cloudrunner! How brilliant is that? Some human discovers these fluffy rodents skitting about high up in the mountain treetops, and instead of calling them “tree rats” or
“mountain mice”, they decide to call them “cloudrunners”. Don’t you feel something stirring inside you when you hear that?’ He smiled.
‘It’s embarrassing, but actually some of my best friends are human.’
Martha couldn’t bring herself to smile back, not even at the thought of a cute fluffy rodent; she was finding it hard to marshal her thoughts on such matters just for the moment. She sought refuge in the mystery at hand. ‘So. . .
someone’s selling off these animals. The quagga and the bluebuck and everything. For whacking great sums. And the coordinates are where they’ve been taken, the delivery address.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ Martha had opened a desk drawer. ‘There’s a duplicate list in here,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘That’s funny. Here, the bluebuck’s listed as 4.2 million.
On the screen –’ she checked – ‘it’s 4.4.’
‘Maybe they had a sale,’ the Doctor said, in what she considered to be slightly bad taste. ‘Prices slashed! Everything must go! If you find an extinct animal on sale anywhere else for less, we’ll refund the difference! As long as they don’t do a “buy one, get one free”. . . that could cause ructions.’
Martha gave him a look, and he adopted a falsely contrite expression in return. ‘Tell you what, it’ll probably all become clear when we investigate. That’s an idea! Shall we investigate, Agent Jones?’
She glanced back through the doorway. ‘What about Tommy and Rix?’
‘Well we could tell the two suspects what we’re up to. . . ’
He
grinned, already programming the first listed coordinates into his pendant. ‘But you know what they say, two’s company. . . ’
41
‘And four’s two too many.’ She was copying the figures into her own device. ‘Except for the Fab Four. . . four seasons pizza. . . �
��
‘The Four Yorkshiremen sketch. . . The Four Just Men. . . ’
‘The Four Tops, the Fantastic Four. . . ’
‘Radio 4, the Four Tenors. . . ’
‘That’s the Three Tenors!’
‘Well, yes, it is now, I mean they begged me to join them perma-nently but I couldn’t really spare the time, not with how often I have to save the world. . . Ready?’
‘Ready.’
They pressed their blue buttons.
42
THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
ILIN ISLAND CLOUDRUNNER
Crateromys paulus
Location: Ilin Island
The Ilin Island Cloudrunner, found in the forests of the tiny Philippine island of Ilin, is a large browny-grey rat. Its distinctive feature is its long furry tail.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: AD 1953.
Cause of extinction: destruction of habitat.
I-Spyder points value: 2000
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
Subtotal
10000
