by Doctor Who
At that moment, just as my head was about to explode (and my lungs too, come to that), I spotted the solution. Two seconds later, Dorothea was happily sat in a supermarket trolley, and I was dashing down the road pushing it like a demented contestant on Supermarket Sweep.
The Doctor caught me up as I passed the remaining fire engine. ‘Is it coming?’ I gasped.
‘Oh yes. Albert and the others’ll be fine.’
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‘Good,’ I replied, although, selfish as it may sound, I was at that exact second more worried about me. ‘What now?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ the Doctor said, filling me with no confidence whatsoever..
A roar came from behind and I upped my speed. ‘Are you sure they can’t sprint?’
‘They’re not built for speed over long distances,’ he reassured me, strewing bacon on the path as he ran to try to distract the creature.
‘Bummer for them when their habitat turned to desert, no trees to lurk behind for an ambush. . . ’ And I could almost hear ideas stirring inside his head as we turned into the high street. ‘Martha! Do you know why people of your time knew so much about an extinct animal from the Ice Age?’
‘No,’ I panted, fighting to keep the trolley on a straight path as its wheels wanted to go all over the place.
‘The reason is, thousands of’em were preserved in the La Brea tar pits in what became Los Angeles. Bison wanders in, gets stuck, tiger thinks “aha! Easy prey”, goes in after it and gets stuck too. Sinks into the goo and dies.’
‘Hurrah,’ I said, as sarcastically as I could manage through the shortness of breath. ‘Lucky there’re some good old English tar pits just down the road.’
‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Well spotted! Down on the road. . . ’
He stopped dead. Which I thought was about to become literally true, because the tiger, not to be sidetracked by some slices of dead pig, was gaining on us. We had seconds.
The Doctor stood in the middle of the road, sonic screwdriver raised. But we knew that only worked for a few moments!
‘Doctor!’ I screamed as the sabre-tooth bounded towards us, closer, closer. . .
As I watched in panic, though, I saw that he was doing something different this time. Where the screwdriver was pointing at the road, the top layer was beginning to bubble. The tarmac surface was melting. . .
The sabre-tooth leapt – and landed on the sticky tar. Its paws started 115
to sink – and the Doctor twiddled the screwdriver’s controls; the surface stopped bubbling, started solidifying again. Seconds later, the tiger was trapped, up to its furry ankles in what the Mafia would probably call tarmac overshoes. It roared furiously.
Now what? ‘We’re not taking that back to the TARDIS too, are we?’
I asked the Doctor, as we stood watching the angry animal. I still felt a bit shivery.
‘Don’t think it would fit through the cat flap,’ he replied. ‘And I bet it’s not house tr–’
Then a familiar voice came from behind us, interrupting the Doctor.
‘You beat me to it!’
I turned. There was a figure in MOTLO green overalls, a pendant in his hands and a relieved expression on his bearded face. Tommy.
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THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
SABRE-TOOTHED TIGER
Smilodon fatalis
Location: North America
The most distinctive feature of the sabre-toothed tiger is its two upper canine teeth. These sabre-like blades are about 17
centimetres long, tapering to a serrated point. It has a heavy, muscular body with a thick chest. Its tail is short and it has retractile claws. It preys on large herbivores such as bison.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: c. 9000 BC.
Probable cause of extinction: loss of prey due to climate change.
I-Spyder points value: 500
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
Sabre-toothed tiger
500
Subtotal
35999
Tommy jogged towards the Doctor and Martha, darting glances at the static sabre-tooth. ‘Well done!’ he said. ‘Everything’s gone mad, the signals are cutting out as soon as they’re received. I’d given up hope of tracking anything at all –’ He broke off, staring at Martha’s shopping trolley, and a frown spread across his face. The Earther held up his pendant, shaking it like a stopped watch. ‘Damn, I thought that meant things were working properly again, but it must still be on the blink. It says there’s only one specimen in the area, and it’s pointing in another direction entirely.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I can take them both back anyway. . . ’
Martha pulled the dodo back as he tried to take it. A feather fluttered to the floor, which the Doctor picked up. ‘Don’t take her,’ Martha said. ‘Please.’
Tommy raised an eyebrow. ‘Why not? Come on, Martha, do you know how much damage has been done to the collection? We need to get as many specimens back as soon as possible!’
She shook her head. ‘If that much damage has been done,’ she said, and couldn’t suppress a guilty shudder, ‘then one more or less here or there isn’t going to make much difference, is it?’ Down by her knees, Dorothea gave a little squawk, and Martha leaned over to pat her on 119
the beak. ‘I don’t want her back in one of your cages. Not yet. She’s happy with me. Let her live a little.’
‘Until a dinosaur gets her, or one of the Earth natives decides to stick her in a freak show, or she tries to cross the road in front of one of those cars they didn’t have a few hundred years ago when she was last around.’
Martha refused to let him wind her up. ‘Yeah. Except those things aren’t going to happen, cos I’m looking after her.’
They locked gazes for a few moments, each intolerant of the other’s point of view, but it was Tommy who dropped his eyes first. He didn’t look happy but, as his only other option was to take the bird by force, Martha thought she’d won the point for the time being. Still, probably best not to take her eye off Dorothea while any Earther was around from now on.
The Doctor broke the tension – well, in a way, his question made Martha feel more tense than ever. ‘So, what’s going on up there?’ he asked Tommy. ‘Back in everyone’s favourite Museum of the Last Ones.’
‘You know what happened?’ Tommy said. The Doctor nodded.
Martha couldn’t bring herself to. ‘The entire Earth section was affected, but nowhere else. We still don’t know what caused it – some massive power surge is what they’re saying.’ (Guilt made Martha’s stomach flip-flop worse than if she’d been on a roller-coaster at Alton Towers, but ther
e was a sense of relief there too – ‘only’ the Earth section. Not all the museum. OK, that was still billions of creatures, but. . . ) ‘Whether Eve has more of a clue about it than the rest of us I’ve no idea,’ Tommy continued. ‘She’s practically had a breakdown over this.’ Well, it served her right for trying to trap the Doctor. Martha tried to keep that in mind, rather than thinking of everything else that her actions had achieved. . .
‘Has she really?’ the Doctor was replying when Martha focused again. ‘A breakdown, you say?’
Tommy nodded. ‘Well, MOTLO is her life’s work. OK, so the Earth section’s only a small part of it, but even so. . . ’
And she’d lost the last of the Time Lords too. But neither the Doctor nor Martha was going to enlighten Tommy about that.
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Tommy shook his head sadly. ‘Of course, it means a lot to all of us, but to Eve – well, she’s been there for ever. Her life’s work, like I said.’
The Doctor’s head jerked up then, a flash of interest in his eyes, like something had just occurred to him. ‘Her life’s work. Yes. Do you know, I wonder if it really is.’
‘What do you mean?’ Martha asked.
‘I’m just wondering,’ he replied, ‘quite how long Eve has worked at the museum for.’
This interesting question didn’t seem to concern Tommy, who was now heading towards the still-struggling sabre-toothed tiger. ‘Not got any objections to me taking this one back, Martha?’ he said. She shook her head. Not that the tiger didn’t deserve a few moments of freedom as much as the dodo, she supposed, but. . . Well, it was easier to feel sympathy towards something that didn’t want to eat you.
Tommy continued walking towards the creature, pendant held in his outstretched hand, completely unafraid.
Martha and the Doctor, watching, were unafraid too.
They knew by now how the pendants worked, whether they agreed with the procedure or not. First the animal would be immobilised.
Then it would be zapped straight to its museum prison, into its cell.
So not one of them thought for a second that Tommy was in danger.
And it took a second to realise what was happening, as he raised the pendant, as nothing happened. As the tiger sank its enormous canines into his side.
Tommy collapsed to the pavement and the Doctor leapt forwards, fumbling for his sonic screwdriver, Martha at his heels, her medical instincts having kicked in immediately. As they got close, the Doctor waved his little metal device at the tiger like a magic wand. Snarling resentfully, the beast pulled its head back. The Doctor held his position, keeping the creature at bay.
Martha threw herself down on the pavement beside Tommy. To her enormous relief, a few checks showed he was still alive, although he was bleeding heavily. Nervously aware of the fearsome creature towering over her – and remembering that the ultrasonics of the screwdriver hadn’t kept it quiet for that long before – she set to work, 121
staunching the bleeding and making Tommy comfortable.
‘He’ll be OK,’ she said to the Doctor after a few minutes, still concentrating on her patient. ‘But he should get to a hospital. I mean, he’ll need a tetanus shot at the very least. Who knows what sort of bacteria there might be on the teeth of a ten-thousand-year-old tiger?’
The Doctor didn’t reply, and she looked up then. He was still holding out the sonic screwdriver, still keeping the tiger away from Tommy, but his head was turned away, staring in the other direction.
Martha stared too.
‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with M,’ the Doctor said after a second.
‘You mean D,’ said Martha, in a flat, puzzled voice as she saw what he was looking at.
‘No no no. M. I’m talking about one great big mmm-mystery.’
And Martha couldn’t help but agree. Because there in a shop doorway was another dodo.
I looked back over my shoulder. Dorothea was still in the shopping trolley, happily shredding stray carrier bags with the point of her mad beak to form a sort of nest.
I turned the other way again. There, scrabbling through a pile of abandoned Big Issues, was what could have been her twin.
Two dodos. Which wasn’t possible. One specimen of everything, the museum had. Just the one.
Except. . .
There was another sabre-toothed tiger coming down the high street.
Mystery upon mystery. The evidence was mounting up that something dodgy was going on. Two dodos when the museum only had one. Two tigers when the museum only had one. Tommy had thought there was only one ‘specimen’ in the area. His pendant didn’t freeze the tiger. So, yes, lots of evidence, lots of ooh-er-it’s-a-mystery – but, quite frankly, just at that moment I wanted to deal with the not-dying first and do the detective thing later.
We couldn’t just run, not with an unconscious and injured man at our feet. We couldn’t get back to the TARDIS, because the second 122
sabre-tooth was between it and us. At the moment the sonic screwdriver was keeping it at a distance, but it was making tentative steps forward and it was pretty clear that it wouldn’t keep working for long.
And then I saw something even more bizarre. I grabbed the Doctor’s arm and pointed.
‘Mm, interesting,’ said the Doctor, responding to my ‘ooh ooh ooh’
and frantic indications in the direction of the dodo. He whipped his glasses out of his pocket and balanced them on his nose, peering distantly at the bird and what it was doing. ‘Yes, I’d definitely say that was interesting.’
Actually, this was all turning into interesting overload. Because just then, as I gazed over the Doctor’s shoulder, I spotted something else.
I’ll try to explain our position, because it’s probably getting a bit complicated for you to follow: imagine a nice high street lined with shops.
In the middle of the street see three people, a supermarket trolley with a dodo in it, and an angrily trapped sabre-toothed tiger. The Doctor is waving his sonic screwdriver between that tiger and another one that’s approaching from the right. That’s your right as you’re imagining this, not his right; it would have been his right a few moments ago, but now he’s facing you with the screwdriver behind his back, as he stares at the dodo. For the purposes of our imaginary plan, you’re pretty much standing on the dodo. Ooh, almost forgot, way behind the second tiger (to your right, remember) you can see the TARDIS, a little square blue shape in the distance.
Right, the Doctor’s looking towards you, and I’m looking a bit to your left, where there’s an electricals shop. I’m nudging the Doctor again, and now he’s looking there too. We start to edge a bit closer, but we can’t go too far because the Doctor has to keep the tiger away from Tommy, who’s still unconscious on the ground.
So, this shop – the window’s all full of futuristic tellies, all enormous flat screens and 3-D. That would have caught my eye anyway, but my gaze was dragged towards what the screens were showing: a news report I guess, although a few days ago I would have assumed it to be an action movie. The scene changed rapidly between horrors, some all too familiar – more sabre-toothed tigers on the rampage with people 123
fleeing left and right, worse still, little two-legged dinosaurs running wild. ‘What are they?’ I said.
‘Look it up in the I-Spyder guide,’ the Doctor said, and I’d actually got as far as getting out the book when I realised that it didn’t exactly matter; all that mattered was that they had very sharp teeth and claws. ‘You look,’ I said, pushing the book at the Doctor.
He took it, but something else on the screen had got his attention.
His glasses came out again and he was leaning forwards, concentrating hard. He’d spotted something. I couldn’t tell what, but he nodded for me to go a bit closer, so I did – and then I saw it too.
In almost every scene, somewhere, in the background, or the fore-ground, or somewhere off to the side, there was a plump grey-white bird, big of beak and perky of tail feather. A dodo. That was
weird enough. But what made it even odder was that, just like the one in front of us (the one you’re standing on), they all seemed to be scrabbling at the ground. In some of the pictures, a white sphere was visible at their feet.
‘They’ve got eggs,’ I said. ‘And they’re burying them. Do you think there’s some weird plan going on to repopulate the Earth with dodos?’
‘You mean, someone’s sending sabre-toothed tigers and dinosaurs to clear the way for our feathered friends? Bit extreme, don’t you think?’
I huffed. ‘Well, what do you think’s going on?’
‘Oh, bound to be something far more sinister.’
Now I sighed as I took the few steps backwards needed to join him again. ‘Isn’t it always? Come on, then, give us a clue.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, there’s another clue heading this way. But I’m not sure you’d want it, even for a present.’
I looked where he was pointing – down the street to your left. There was a dinosaur. Not one of the ones like on the shop’s tellies – they were only (ha, ‘only’!) about six feet long and this was at least half that again, standing upright like a Tyrannosaurus, with a huge head and, ooh, ee-nor-mous pointed teeth.
Amazing how calmly I’m telling you all that. Oh, here comes a dinosaur. Here comes something ready, willing and able to bite me 124
in half in a second, and, ooh look, there’s no escape. The sonic’s not going to work on tigers and dinosaurs, is it? And like I said before, we can’t run away, not with an unconscious man at our feet.
Talking of whom, I knelt down to check his progress. He wasn’t making any. ‘I would have hoped he’d be waking up by now,’ I said to the Doctor. ‘Really, he needs to get to a hospital, be checked out properly.’
The Doctor’s answer didn’t seem to be an answer at all, at first. ‘This is obviously something to do with MOTLO,’ he said. Well, yeah, even I’d figured that one out. Thanks, Doctor.
‘So we need to find out what’s going on there. What’s with the tigers and dodos and dinosaurs.’ Couldn’t disagree there.
