Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Dr Who – Martha and Ten The Inbetweens and Backstories ❯ Chapter Thirteen ( Chapter 13 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

"Another day, another opportunity to explore," the Doctor thought to himself as Martha entered the control room. It was a shame humans had to sleep so much; because whilst he was on his own with no one to distract him, his thoughts always turned to a certain pink and yellow girl.

`Where would you like to go now? I can take you anywhere! Anywhere at all!' the Doctor said with a grin, poised over the controls, fingers itching to press the switches that would take her to the place she wanted to go.

Martha didn't know what to say, so she just said something off the top of her head. `Let's go to the zoo.'

The Doctor looked at her as if she'd just kicked his puppy.

Then his expression relaxed and he just said, in his normal voice, `Nah, gotta be somewhere better than that. I'm offering you anywhere in the universe!'

`Can I think about it?'

He nodded. `Don't take too long, because we don't want to be wasting time when we could be having fun.'

She smiled at him and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. When she returned into the control room later, the Doctor was sitting on the jump seat, reading some book with a picture of a rocket on the cover.

`Aha! Martha! Excellent!' he said. `Decided yet?'

She shook her head. `I didn't mean to upset you,' she said.

He blinked, pretend-baffled. `You didn't upset me.'

`Yes, I did. But I didn't mean to. Just tell me, so I don't do it again, what's wrong with going to the zoo?'

He frowned at that, seeming to weigh up the options. Finally he simply said, `just not really me.'

`Come on, I can tell it's more than that.'

The Doctor sighed and drew in a deep breath. `OK. It . . . hurts. The thought of anything being caged hurts me.'

Martha perched on the edge of the jump seat. `Oh, but there're plenty of places without cages these days. My these days, I mean, where I come from. They give the animals loads of freedom.'

`Cages don't always have bars, Martha,' he said. `Just because you call something freedom, doesn't mean it is.' He looked at her, a bit pityingly. For a second she felt angry, patronised, and then something in his eyes suddenly made her understand.

`You couldn't live on only apples and Milky Ways,' she said, slowly. `You might not starve, but it'd still be cruel.'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. `Hungry? I can offer you a thirty course banquet in Imperial Japan, a kronkburger on Reblais Beta, dehydrated protein tablets on a shuttle to Mars - or there's always chips, nice little chippie in south London . . .'

He reached forwards, angling for a feather lying on top of the huge central console, but his fingers only skimmed it. She jumped up to get it for him. It was just a feather, grey and white, nothing to look at twice.

`Seagull?' she asked.

`Bookmark,' he replied, slipping it in place and slamming his book shut with a ringing thud. `Oh, right, see what you mean. No, dodo.'

Martha stared at him for a second. Sometimes the `anywhere in time and space' bit took her by surprise in the most unexpected ways. Reblais Beta in the 150th century, fine, animal extinct for three hundred-odd years, her time, unbelievable.

`That's where I choose!' she said, suddenly excited. `Please? To see a dodo! In its natural habitat,' she added hurriedly.

The Doctor seemed happy enough with her choice. `Okey dokey, all aboard the good ship TARDIS for a trip to the island of Mauritius - let's say sometime in the sixteenth century, before human discovery, back when the dodo was as alive as . . . as a dodo.'

He was at the controls now, twiddling dials - then suddenly he nipped back over to the jump seat, picked up the book and opened it again, extracting the dodo feather. He looked hard at his place, said, `Oh, I expect I'll remember where I was. Can't bear it when people turn over the page corners, just can't bear it,' shut the book again, and then was back at the console, inserting the feather into a little hole Martha could have sworn hadn't been there before.

The feather stuck out at a jaunty angle like it was on a Robin Hood hat, anomalous but still somehow completely at home among the alien technology.

`That,' said the Doctor, `will tune us in. Land us right at their big scaly feet. Sort of automatic dodo detector.' He paused. `Automatic dodo detector. I ought to patent that, next time we go somewhere with a . . . what d'you call it? Place where you patent things.'

`Patent office?' Martha offered.

`Good name, like it. You should trademark it. Next time we go somewhere with a . . . what d'you call it? Place where you trademark things.'

`I don't think there is an actual place -' Martha began, but the Doctor wasn't paying attention.

`Here we go!' he cried. With a final flick of a switch, the TARDIS sprang to life, as excited as its owner to get going once more. Martha fell back into the jump seat as the room began to vibrate.

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 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 brown-y 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.

What might have surprised her though was maybe . . . just maybe, the TARDIS had got it right for the Doctor.

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Martha was waiting for the Doctor in the Earth section of MOTLO, a planet sized museum dedicated to collecting the last specimen of every extinct species in the galaxy. With her by the empty dodo case were the remaining five Collection Agents, along with Dorothea the non-extinct Dodo. It seemed rather appropriate.

They'd been standing there for a few minutes when Martha spotted the Doctor approaching. Well, there wasn't anything to mask his approach. As far as the eye could see, the Earth section was still absolutely empty. She had only intended to release the Doctor from his exhibit as the last Time Lord specimen, but things went a bit wrong.

`You couldn't do it?' she asked him, trying to keep the dismay out of her voice.

`Yes, I could,' he replied.

Everyone looked puzzled. `So . . . it didn't work,' Rix said.

`Oh, I think it did.' The Doctor appeared rather pleased with himself. `Thing is, when I said I was returning everything, I didn't actually mean I was bringing them back here. They've all gone home. When you've got a time machine in the mix . . .'

`You sent them back to their own times!' Martha exclaimed, realising what that meant. `To die alone . . .' she hugged Dorothea.

But the Doctor was still smiling. `Well, I may not have got it spot on,' he said. `You know, tricky to get these things exact. It's entirely possible that they may have arrived quite a few years before they left, when members of their species were plentiful.'

Martha gaped at him. Wasn't that the sort of thing people were warned about, in science-fiction stories and stuff? `But . . . couldn't they end up being their own grandparents or something?'

He shrugged. `Maybe. I don't think it'll worry them that much. No one's going to get out the family photo album and say, “Hey - that jellyfish looks familiar.”'

And then Martha thought about how Eve the MOTLO curator had been willing to freeze the Doctor and her. `But there might have been, you know, people.'

He looked suddenly serious. `Then I hope they'll forgive me.'

She thought about it for a second, about how she'd feel if it were her. But she couldn't imagine it.

`So . . . sort of a happy ending,' she said, but she couldn't feel completely happy inside. `Not every animal would have got back home because of me though.'

`Which ones were those?' the Doctor asked, but the guilt was hitting too hard for her to spot the twinkle in his eye.

`You know - the ones that landed in the sea and stuff on modern Earth.'

`Ah, yes.' Now she couldn't fail to notice that he looked happier than events warranted. `While you were down on Earth - did you notice a single dinosaur apart from that Megalosaurus?'

`Er, yes,' she said. `They were the big ones with teeth on the TV, weren't they?'

`Ah, not the Dromaeosaurs, they were clones,' he said.

Eve, the crazy curator, the potty proprietor, had been cloning some of the exhibits in a mad scheme to destroy the Earth. Frank, a Collection Agent who came from a planet called Kinjana, had been her accomplice.

The Doctor continued his explanation. `Like the sabre-toothed tigers and the dodos. Funny thing, when I came to think about it - the news reports, TV, all over the world - not a sign of anything other than those three species, which was a bit odd, considering that 300 billion creatures should have just materialised. In fact, the only non-clone seemed to be the Megalosaurus, which, funnily enough, was the one that gave me the idea in the first place.'

`Come again?' Martha said, trying to keep up. `Words of one syllable might be a good idea. How come the animals weren't there? I sent them all back.'

He grinned. `You did. And I hijacked them all on arrival.'

`So not only did you send them back to a time before they were collected . . .'

`I picked them up a few hours before I'd had the idea of doing it in the first place. Them and any strays left over from Frank's business empire. Little Mervin the missing link, for example.'

`So what about the Megalosaurus?'

`Well, I knew I had to make an exception for it, because without it the pendant would never have had anything to track back to twenty- first-century Earth, so I'd never have met it, and I'd never have had the idea to send the animals back to before their own times which I had to exclude it from.'

Sometimes, when Martha listened to the Doctor, she got the impression that someone had taken a perfectly sensible, straightforward thought and then cut and pasted it at random all over the place. She just nodded and went `mm'. The others did too.

For a moment, everyone just stood around going `mm', Then Nadya said, `You know what this means? We're all out of a job.'

`Probably get a transfer to another section . . .' said Vanni.

`Ah,' said the Doctor, in his `spanner in the works' voice. `When I said I was returning everything - I really did mean everything. Seemed a waste, being in the central computer for the whole museum and not taking advantage of it . . . There are no more sections. There are no more exhibits.'

`No more MOTLO?'

`Nail on the head, that girl.'

The Collection Agents all looked a bit lost. Well, a lot lost really. `So . . . what happens now?' asked Celia. `Things will still be going extinct.'

Martha nodded. `Yeah, but it's OK to feel passionate about it. Like how you attacked the poacher who was trying to shoot the rhino? Why not try to stop the extinctions in a different sort of way?'

Celia sniffed dismissively, but there was a spark in her eyes where Martha's words had hit home

The Doctor and Martha headed back to the TARDIS. `Oh,' said Martha as they arrived in the relevant corridor. `Um . . . I don't actually know how to open the secret door from this side. Frank sort of let me in the first time.'

`And I didn't use the door at all,' said the Doctor. He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket. `Luckily I have a key that fits any lock . . .'

The screwdriver hummed, and to Martha's relief the secret door clicked open. And so did another other secret door on the opposite side of the corridor, and led into a very small, spartan room. Inside was a clear case, the same as all the other ones in the museum - and there was one single, solitary exhibit frozen inside.

Martha frowned. `I thought you sent everything back,' she said to the Doctor.

He was frowning as well. `I thought I did too.' He took a couple of steps closer, and his eyes widened in recognition. `Do you realise what this is?' he asked Martha.

She shook her head. `Should I?'

He pulled the pendant out of his pocket and held it up, displaying the MOTLO logo. A line drawing of a creature's head, a creature with tusks and triangular eyes.

Martha took the pendant and edged nearer, peering intently at the head of the creature inside the case. `It's the same thing,' she said. `Except . . . this one looks like it's crying. There's a tear on its cheek.'

There was a label, not a neat computer-generated one like the other exhibits had had, but small and handwritten. Martha bent down to read it. “Hr'oln”,' she said. `Hang on, h, r, apostrophe, o, l, n. That was Eve's password. Her first pet, Tommy said.'

She looked again at the animal. It reminded her a bit of the Steller's sea cow she'd seen in the museum, although only a quarter of the size of that giant animal and with arms instead of flippers. `Not exactly a cat or dog.'

`I think,' the Doctor told her, `that it's Eve's very first “specimen”, the thing she built the museum around. If it was never collected in the first place, my watchamadoodles with the computer wouldn't have affected it. But that doesn't mean I can't get it home.'

He took out the sonic screwdriver and used it to switch off the stasis field. The tusked head slowly lifted and, after 500 million years, the tear fell. The creature opened its mouth. `Eve?' it said.

Hr'oln, was a scientist, the last of the Cirranins, a technologically advanced people who were wiped out in a terrible, final war. The whole planet was destroyed and everything on it - every Cirranin, every Vish, every Elipig, every Grun. The Doctor felt a tragic affinity with the Cirranin and their fate.

Hr'lon had constructed Eve to be a companion and assistant in building her scientific equipment. And when the race of people Hr'lon was living among were wiped out by disease, she declared to Eve that she never wanted to see a species die out again.

Unfortunately, Eve took that as a programming instruction from her creator.

Martha thought Hr'oln was going to cry again when they took her into the laboratory and she saw Eve lying there, but whether it was for herself, or for the dead android, or at this further evidence of what her few ill-chosen words had led to, she couldn't say.

`She was my only friend once,' Hr'oln said, `and I think I have need of a friend again. We will work together to repopulate the planet.'

She gestured round her at the scientific apparatus and the dodo pen. `After all, no one knows better how this all works.'

`You could maybe rewire the “murderous scheming cow” circuit, though,' Martha suggested. But they couldn't really blame Hr'oln for what Eve had become, any more than they could blame Eve herself. After all that Hr'oln had lost . . .

And now the museum had gone too. `No one will ever see an ayeaye again,' Martha said. `Or a passenger pigeon, or a three-striped box turtle. No one without a time machine, anyway.'

`Nothing lasts forever,' the Doctor said, gazing into the distance, his thoughts far away. And then he focused again, and grinned. `Well, except the dodo . . .'

`Hang on, I know about cloning,' said Martha, `you only get an exact copy, you can't propagate a species by it. Eve only had one of each kind. There won't be any boy Dorotheas.'

`True,' the Doctor agreed, sighing. He drew something out of his pocket, which Martha recognised as the feather from Dorothea he'd used to track her to the lab. Then he drew something out of his other pocket. The original dodo feather that had brought the TARDIS to the museum in the first place. `Looks like it belongs to a boy to me,' he said.

`Woo!' Martha gave him a hug, then released it as she thought back to all those genetics lectures at medical school. `Oi, you are talking to a medical student here, and I know you can't clone from a feather. You're just trying to make me feel better.'

`Martha, this is the future! Just accept that they can do things.' He looked suddenly serious. `I don't do white lies.'

`Sorry,' she said, and hugged him again. `And who knows how many other samples might just happen to drop out of my pockets . . .' he said, as he unlocked the TARDIS door. `Hang on, pockets, that reminds me . . .'

He reached into his jacket and pulled out the I-pad with the I-Spyder Book of Earth Creatures on it. Martha had been keeping a tally of all the creatures she'd seen on this adventure, and if she scored nine million, she'd get a certificate.

But she didn't hold out a hand for the I-pad. `All the stuff I've seen,' she said, `and I haven't got anywhere near enough points for a certificate. I think it's impossible.'

The Doctor grinned. `Oh, I think there's one elusive specimen that you might be able to track down . . .' He scrolled through the index and pointed out an entry.

She laughed. `Are they joking?'

He shook his head. `No, just leaping to the wrong conclusion from the evidence.'

She did the sums, and couldn't believe it, because she was still one point short.

So the Doctor pointed out another entry, and Martha smiled. `Of course!' And then she smiled again, because this really was the end of the adventure. Well, apart from one last goodbye . . .

The Doctor was inside the TARDIS. Martha stood in the doorway, holding Dorothea. `So . . . you must have had pets on board the TARDIS before, right?' she said hopefully.

The Doctor thought for a moment, K-9 wasn't really a pet. `You never met Mickey, did you?' Then he smiled and shook his head. `Being apart from your own kind for ever - that's quite a burden to bear, you know.' He looked straight at her. `However much you're loved.'

Martha held his gaze for a few moments, then dropped her eyes to Dorothea. `Right,' she said reluctantly. She walked over to the pen, and lowered the bird inside. Without a backward glance, it trotted off to join its fellows. After a few moments, it was lost among the crowd.

Martha, staring wistfully at the dodo throng, tried to pretend she knew which one was Dorothea. But, really, she didn't. So she thought instead of the future, of the planet where a dead species would live again. Then she thought of the past, of the last dodo that had been, to her, the first dodo; no longer doomed to a choice between a lonely life or a lonely death - and hoped that it was happy, wherever it was.