Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [107]
‘Care to tell us about it?’ Roz said, suddenly suspicious.
‘I met him in Cairo back in January 1936, at a race meeting. He was clearly a very intelligent man, and glad of such company, for once, so I —’
‘— told him all about radar and how to build stealth planes.’
‘No.’ The Doctor was clearly hurt. ‘You humans are quite capable of inventing weapons all by your —’
‘You’re hardly in a position to lecture us, are you?’
‘No.’ The Doctor looked down at his feet like a naughty schoolboy.
‘So what happened?’
Quietly, the Doctor told them about Cairo, about meeting Hartung and the afternoon at the race-track. Then he told them about what had happened that evening...
Mel was wearing a striking creation in sequins and pink organza that she’d found in the TARDIS wardrobe room. She was sitting at a small table at the edge of the ballroom of the Grand Imperial Hotel with the Doctor and Emil. The racing driver was the centre of attention, and so Mel had received more than her fair share of curious looks from the other guests. Although the surroundings were sumptuous, with half a dozen crystal chandeliers hanging from a richly painted ceiling and a full orchestra playing, all three sat staring out of the window, watching owls gently swoop past.
Whooo, ululated the owl, the pitch of its call dropping gradually.
‘Fascinating creatures, owls. They’ve been around for twelve million years,’ the Doctor remarked.
‘One of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs is an owl,’ Emil replied.
Illogical though it might be, Mel was afraid of the creatures. ‘They give me the creeps,’ she admitted.
Emil and the Doctor shared a knowing look.
An owl dived past the window, its feet splayed.
‘It’s going in for the kill. Do you know they can see well in the dark?’ Emil asked.
‘Do they have sonar, like bats?’ Mel wondered. ‘You know, they send out a high-pitched squeak and can build up a picture from the echoes. Like radar.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘No, owls have a combination of sharp eyesight and acute hearing. Owls are binocular, with quite a narrow field of vision, and they sometimes have difficulty seeing things that aren’t moving.
However, an owl is quite capable of tracking voles across a field just by the sound they make when they are chewing grass. As far as I know, only two species of bird use biosonar, the swiftlet and the oilbird. Both breed in very dark caves. It’s a fascinating subject: those birds produce twelve clicking sounds a second in the one kilohertz and sixteen kilohertz range and —’
‘What’s a “kilohertz”, please?’ Emil asked.
The hertz is the SI unit for cycles per second,’ Mel supplied. She didn’t tell him that the word was only coined in the 1960s.
‘The really clever thing, of course,’ the Doctor said, smiling to himself, ‘is that the mouse can’t see or hear the owl coming. The poor little thing doesn’t defend itself, because it doesn’t know it is being attacked until it is far, far too late.’
‘Come on Emil, let’s dance.’
As Emil took Mel by the arm, an owl, the same they had seen before, swooped up into the night with a mouse impaled in its talons.
* * *
‘Hang on,’ said Benny. ‘You didn’t tell the Germans how to build stealth planes, all you did was talk about owls?’
‘Yes, but that conversation sparked off Hartung’s imagination, joined up few of the dots for him. It made a few links explicit, encouraged him to research into echo-location, so he found out about the radar experiments. That conversation was the first link in the chain that led to the building of Hugin and Munin. Careless talk costs lives.’
‘But...’ Roz tried to think about all the things she had told Reed. She remembered the stungun concealed in her jacket and the mass detector in her holdall. It probably wouldn’t be diplomatic to mention all this to the Doctor.
‘When I learnt what Hartung had built, I hoped against hope that he had got the information from somewhere else.
But he hadn’t; it was all my fault — without me, none of this would have happened.’
‘It’s still a bit cryptic, isn’t it?