by Doctor Who
code of the Knights Templar, or was acting out of some virtuous desire to rescue a damsel in distress. I’m talking about Martha,’ he pointed out hurriedly. ‘This Time Lord’s neither a damsel nor distressed.’
There was a sudden silence.
‘Time Lord,’ said Eve, huskily, the words almost catching in her throat.
The Doctor stood absolutely still, not looking at her, staring unseeingly at the frozen rhino.
‘The last Time Lord.’
The Doctor still said nothing.
‘The only survivor. The only specimen.’
He moved then, spinning round, eyes blazing with anger and hurt.
No fear though, even knowing, as he couldn’t help knowing then, what was in her mind. ‘The One Cent Magenta,’ he snarled.
And she took him completely unawares.
He’d expected verbal sparring. She was alone, she was unarmed, she was a short woman and he was a tall man. He held all the cards.
But she was a collector, and she was a fanatic, and he didn’t expect what happened next.
Eve ran at him, her head down. She butted him right in the middle of his stomach, and, surprised, he staggered backwards. Couldn’t stop himself. Spiralling his arms to try to regain his balance, sonic screwdriver dropping to the floor, he found himself propelled into an empty perspex box. A vague memory surfaced through the whirling thoughts in his head: Martha worrying that another creature had been stolen and Tommy telling her no, this box must have been prepared for a new specimen.
And then Eve was throwing herself at the small keypad at the top of the cage, and in that second everything ended for the Doctor.
Eve sank down on the carpeted walkway, staring up at her latest acqui-sition. Now it was all over, any trace there may have been of emotion had vanished, and, although her first words were ‘I’m sorry’, there was no hint of regret; they were just standard words, a formula to 79
introduce the point she was making. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, addressing the petrified Time Lord in front of her. ‘I know you’re not in the right place, which is undignified, but, as I’m sure you will understand, there is no section for your planet, as yet. I will have one constructed, but at the moment I’m afraid you’ll have to remain here. Seems like even when you avoid the planet Earth, you can’t escape it,’ she para-phrased.
She sat there for a long time, just looking. Some of the collection agents had had problems in the past when expected to gather higher-order specimens: sentient, self-aware, intelligent. Eve had no such problem. Their preservation was for the greater good. If she had been more empathic, Eve might even have made the argument that letting something live out its life knowing it was the only one of its kind was a far crueller fate. But her only thoughts were for the Collection.
Something would have to be done about the display: the shocked, angry, disbelieving look on the Doctor’s face was just not appropriate, nor was his gravity-defying pose, falling backwards with arms raised.
It might worry some of the younger visitors. She would conceal the exhibit for now. Oh, and there was the Doctor’s friend to be considered, too, of course. She would probably have some absurd emotional reaction to the situation: she would have to be got out of the way. As a human, she had no intrinsic value, there were still billions of them around. . .
It might have been then that an idea started to form in Eve’s mind.
But her immediate problem was Martha. And just then a sound started up, an alert, relating to the Earth section. Another species on the brink of extinction; just another day at the office for MOTLO. Then there was a beep, an attempt at communication. ‘Eve?’ came Celia’s voice, distressed. ‘What do I do? I can’t do it on my own!’
‘Celia. One moment, please.’ Of course, Celia was on duty – although her partner was currently unavailable, thanks to the Doctor.
But in the short term. . . the phrase ‘killing two birds with one stone’
fitted the case perfectly, ironic indeed for a venture dedicated to saving life. Eve looked at the frozen figure in front of her. ‘The Doctor suggests that Martha could accompany you for now. He and I are 80
busy, currently. It will give her something to do.’ She didn’t smile knowingly; she didn’t give an evil laugh. It was a lie to achieve a purpose – it gave her no pleasure nor caused her any distress.
There was a moment’s pause, then a background voice, that of Martha, could be heard saying ‘OK.’
‘Good,’ Eve said. ‘I’ll programme you in. Be ready, time is precious.’
She pushed herself up from the floor, regaining her feet in one swift, perfectly balanced movement, then walked briskly back to the door that would transport her to her office. It wasn’t long before she was sat in front of the computer and enabling Martha’s travel pendant to receive the same alert transmissions and coordinates as Celia’s.
Seconds later, a little window popped up on her screen to inform her that the two women had left the museum, hot on the trail.
But of course the problem of Martha had not been resolved, just postponed.
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THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
TASMANIAN TIGER
Thylacinus cynocephalus
Location: Australasia
The doglike Tasmanian tiger, also known as the Thylacine, is a carnivorous, predatory marsupial. It has a smooth brown coat with black or darker brown stripes on its rear and is approximately 160
centimetres in length, with about a third of that being its tail. The male is generally larger than the female.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: AD 1936.
Cause of extinction: hunting by man (several bounties were placed on the animals’ heads during the 19th and early 20th centuries); disease.
I-Spyder points value: 300
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
Subtotal
33500
T here was a time, once, when I was caged.
I wanted to wander, and They said: No. But I needed – I need – to wander, and so it hurt. It really hurt.
They said: But at least you’re safe there. No danger. Not like in your wandering days.
No danger, perhaps. But no life, either. They said: Really, it’s for your own good.
But who were They to decide? They’d never lived as I had, never tra-versed the wide open spaces, felt the adrenalin of the chase, seen the beauty – the incomparable, indescribable beauty of my natural habitat.
For my own good, indeed!
See me pacing the tiny space, trapped. I was going out of my mind!
They watched me. They used me. They said: You can help the people around you.
So I did, because I had no choice. The people around me treated me like a resource, not understanding that their every desire tightened the chains that bound me.
But of course They didn’t care.
Now They’re all gone. There’s only me left. I’m free, now.
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I’m the last of my kind, and I miss Them. You’d
think I’d forgive Them for what they did, so long ago. But I can’t. Some things are unforgivable.
I was a Time Lord in exile.
Or was I an animal in a zoo?
Martha blinked, her pupils contracting suddenly after the transition from the dim artificial light of the MOTLO canteen to brilliant sun-shine. If her eardrums had been able to contract too they would have done; the increase in the ambient sound was even greater. Traders hawked their wares at top volume, old women haggled over prices, young men shouted to each other across the market place, but above it all were the animal noises: howlings, growlings, screeches and shrieks, the clucking of chickens and quacking of ducks.
She took in a lungful of the heady, spicy atmosphere. Even without the evidence of her eyes, she would have known she was in the Orient again, but nothing could contrast more with the serenity of the garden she had visited earlier. Bustle was the order of the day. Luckily this meant that everyone was far too busy with their own business to notice two western-looking women appearing abruptly in a side street.
Celia sniffed. ‘Frank used to love markets,’ she said.
‘Yeah, he was probably comparing prices,’ said Martha, her sympathy almost entirely exhausted by now. Then she did a mental double take. ‘Hang on, you mean you come to places like this a lot? I’ve heard of people trading in endangered animals, but they’re not going to do it in the open like this, are they?’
‘Don’t be naive,’ said Celia. ‘It happens all the time. Or else they just don’t know or don’t care.’ She held up her pendant, using it like a compass, then pointed towards a stall with crates stacked in front of it. ‘That’s where we want to be.’
They threaded their way through the crowd, passing rows of squawking chickens suspended from ropes by their feet, hearing the barking of caged dogs that Martha couldn’t bear to look at. London’s food markets, with their organic veg and local cheeses and men yelling about ‘free pahndsa strawbries fra pahnd’, seemed worlds 86
away.
The crates Celia had indicated turned out to contain heaped piles of turtles. A few curious chelonian heads swung up to look as she plunged her hands in and began to sort through the stacks of shells.
The stallholder beamed across at the two women. ‘Yes, yes, take your time, all are very good,’ he said.
Finally Celia located her prize, and pointed out a turtle that Martha would have been hard-pressed to distinguish from all the others if it hadn’t been for the three black stripes on its back. She couldn’t really get her head around it: this little brown and green creature – with its surprisingly cute face for a reptile – was the only one of its kind on Earth. That was hard to deal with. This was it, journey’s end for an entire species. What made it really difficult, though, was the banality of it all. People going about their ordinary, everyday business and suddenly whoops, no more turtles, and did any of them give a monkey’s? Didn’t seem like it. Without them, some diner would have tucked into his turtle soup, not caring that he would be the last person in the universe ever to be near even the remains of a unique creature.
A thought struck her. ‘You got the call to come here, what, minutes ago?’
Celia nodded.
‘And you get the call when the little light goes on in Eve’s office, that means there’s only one animal left.’
Another nod.
‘But then. . . a few minutes ago, there must have been another one.
Another turtle. There must have been two turtles, and then something happened to one of them, and now this is the only one left.’
‘That’s right.’
Martha screwed up her forehead. ‘But. . . but. . . that means that if we’d known about it just a little bit earlier, we could have saved that other turtle too. It might have been, you know, a boy turtle. If this one’s a girl turtle. Or the other way around. You could have taken them both back and they’d have had little baby turtles, and the baby turtles would have had baby turtles, and yes, OK, we’re talking a bit of inbreeding here, but the species would have been saved. All for the 87
sake of a minute or two!’
‘It’d hardly be the Museum of the Last Ones, then,’ Celia pointed out. ‘It would be the Museum of the Last Two, for a while, until they start breeding and then who knows?’
Martha nodded hard. ‘But that’s the point!’
The other girl looked exasperated. ‘The last one is what we’re told about, so the last one is what we get. Don’t ask me how the technology works, maybe it can only pick up the trace when there’s one left.’
Martha held her hands to her head, trying to think or a way of ar-ticulating the thoughts swimming around in it, ‘But surely, sometimes you’re not gonna make it in time.’ She remembered a story the Doctor had told her earlier in the day. ‘Like – the Great Auk, right? There was only one pair left in the whole world, and their egg. Then this collector sends a couple of blokes to get him a skin, and they club the birds to death and trample on their egg.’ She stopped for a second, feeling slightly sick. ‘All dead in moments, not much time for you to swoop in and carry off the last one to its new space home. And he said he didn’t see one listed in the museum. But if you’d gone years earlier, picked up a few when they were all swimming around in the sea, taken them somewhere safe. . . It wouldn’t have to be a museum at all any more.’
She unconsciously echoed the Doctor’s earlier thoughts. ‘It’d be a sort of Noah’s Ark! Wouldn’t that be better?’
Celia narrowed her eyes. ‘Look, it’s Eve’s museum, and it’s her decision. At least we’re doing something. I mean, this is your planet, isn’t it? I’ve not noticed you dashing around saving two of every kind.’
Martha was about to respond – not that she was entirely sure what she was going to say – when she noticed that the stallholder, who had fished out the turtle and was holding it up by a leg, had picked up a cleaver in his other hand. The little creature was struggling, fighting against gravity and the man’s grasp to try to draw its limbs and head into the safety of its shell. ‘No!’ she yelped. ‘Don’t kill it!’ She grabbed the animal from the man and he shrugged, unconcerned. The turtle, placid again, twisted its stripy head round and regarded Martha calmly, not knowing the deadly fate from which it had been saved; not knowing the just-as-final fate for which it was now destined.
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Celia handed over a small piece of plastic, the size and shape of a credit card but with a tiny display screen on the front. The trader pushed it into a reader on his stall and an amount flashed green on the screen as the transaction went through.
Martha was feeling restless and dissatisfied. She hadn’t wanted to do this, certainly hadn’t wanted to hang around with Celia, but she’d assumed that there was a sort of nobility in the work, a passion that inspired the collection agents. She expected them to be Indiana Jones types, facing down big-game hunters and ruthless rainforest destroy-ers, engaged in battles to the death to rescue animals small and furry or tall and proud. While she’d sympathised with the Doctor’s anti-MOTLO stance, she had felt admiration for the Earthers, risking their lives to preserve these precious creatures – and to save the human race from the catastrophic consequences of their actions.
Instead. . . they’d popped down to Earth, bought the Last One for a few dong and would be back in time for breakfast.
The two women weren’t looking at each other as they walked back towards the alleyway, but if either one had turned she would have seen a mirror image of her own mulish expression on the other’s face.
And each was concentrating so hard on ignoring the other that they failed at first to notice that something was happening to their pendants. But it was soon impossible to ignore. ‘Hey!’ Martha held hers up. ‘It’s glowing! Why’s it doing that?’ she asked the air in front of her.
But realisation had swept away Celia’s mood.
She looked at
Martha’s pendant, then her own. ‘It’s like an alarm,’ she said, puzzled and anxious. ‘
It’s telling us to get a move on. . . ’
‘What, to get back to the museum?’
‘No! To rescue the Last One. . . ’
Martha looked down at the little turtle. ‘But we have.’
Celia looked at the turtle too. Then she bent down to look at it more closely. Then she straightened up, took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Then she opened them, looked at the turtle again and shouted:
‘Where are the stripes? This isn’t the right turtle!’
‘What?’
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‘We were sent to collect a Three-Striped Box Turtle, so named because it has three stripes on its back. This has no stripes on its back.
It has a yellow and black head. This has got red stripes on its head!
You got the wrong one!’
‘Me?!’ said Martha indignantly. ‘I just took the one the stallholder handed me!’
But Celia wasn’t listening any more, she’d already set off at a run.
Martha followed her but, by the time she reached the stall, Celia was already yelling at the turtle seller in a voice so high-pitched it was very unlikely he could understand a word she said.
‘You sold us the wrong turtle,’ Martha clarified, seeing the man’s look of incomprehension. ‘Let me talk to him,’ she told the other girl.
‘You find the right one.’
Celia dived into the crate, as Martha turned back to the salesman
– who didn’t seem particularly concerned. ‘That is a good turtle,’ he said, pointing at the one in Martha’s hands. ‘You will get no better turtle.’
‘Yes, but it’s not the one we picked out,’ she told him. ‘And we wanted that one particularly.’
He shrugged. ‘That is a good turtle,’ he said again. ‘You will get no better turtle.’
‘Yes,’ she said again, trying to remain patient, ‘but it’s not the one we picked out.’
Celia was getting more frantic by the second. Suddenly she threw her hands into the air. ‘It’s not here!’ she cried.
