Doctor Who_ The Forgotten Army - Brian Minchin [43]
'Yaara, call the rest of the cadets back in. We're going out together. I want to see this for myself. I'm going to pull together an armed unit so big and so strong there isn't anyone big enough to take us on.'
*
162
THE FORGOTTEN ARMY
Back in midtown New York, the Doctor and Amy were standing in the Grand Hall of the Natural History Museum.
'Why are we here?' Amy asked. 'We need to get the city back to normal.'
As soon as she had told him everything she'd discovered from the police about the unveiling of the mammoth, the Doctor had insisted they return to the Museum.
'I need to know, Amy, I can't not know. We need to find out where the mammoth really came from.'
The Doctor seemed to know his way around the Museum, and Amy followed as they took turn after turn, bowling through doors marked 'Private' and 'Staff Only'.
'I used to come here quite a bit when it first opened,' the Doctor said. 'Some of the stuff they dug up in the Gobi desert! Far too unstable to put on display. My fault. I never clean up after myself.'
Amy rolled her eyes. 'You are impossible!' she complained. 'Is there anywhere you haven't been before?'
They reached a door with a plaque labelled 'S. Horwitz', and the Doctor kicked it open, with a cheery 'Howdy!'
Inside was a small laboratory. A man and a woman looked up in surprise.
'So which of you is S. Horwitz, mammoth-maker to the masses, at least according to Amy's friends in 163
DOCTOR WHO
the NYPD?' the Doctor asked.
The man put his hand up, like a guilty schoolboy. 'I'm Sam Horwitz. And this is—'
Polly Vernon.’ the woman interrupted.
'You could at least look a bit pleased to see me!' the Doctor said, grinning at them.
'Please don't arrest me.’ stammered Sam. 'It wasn't my fault.'
The Doctor shushed him and said reassuringly, 'I wouldn't do a thing like that, but no more hiding down here, Sam. I need you.'
Sam shook his head, evidently confused. I saw you ridin g the mammoth. I thought they'd locked you up... and you were knocked out.'
'We saw you too, Matador Man,' Amy said. 'And you were there with schoolchildren, weren't you?' she said to Polly.
'My class -1 teach at an elementary school.'
'Quite a place you've got here.' The Doctor looked around the room as he talked, picking up bits of Sam's work and scanning papers. 'I do love a test tube. Amy, don't press that switch.'
Amy stopped fiddling with a wall panel, amazed as ever that the Doctor could tell anything that she was doing, even when he had his back to her.
The Doctor grabbed a chair, leapt onto it and put his feet up on the table. 'So, let's talk mammoth...'
Amy cut in to ask, 'What did the scan show?'
'You don't know, do you?' the Doctor said to Sam.
164
THE FORGOTTEN ARMY
'That's odd, that's very curious.' His eyes flickered over every detail of the paper he was looking at. 'Because this is a real lab, and you're a real scientist, been to all the great academic institutions, I see -Harvard, Yale, Aberystwyth...'
While he was talking, Polly got her mobile out, trying to make a call.
The Doctor raised a finger to stop her. 'Ah, ah, ah, never mind that, not that it works anyway. But I'm the Doctor, I'm here to stop what was hidden inside that mammoth. So I need to know. If you're a real scientist, Sam, then why couldn't you tell that it wasn't a real mammoth?' As an aside he said to Amy, 'And he seems to be human, no aliens inside his belly.
Or hers for that matter.'
Sam was spluttering with indignation. 'I don't know who you are, or what kind of doctor you are, and I don't know what you're suggesting. I am not part of any kind of hoax.'
The Doctor turned on his heels and made for the door.
'Thank you! That's all I needed to know.'
Sam stood up, confused. 'What do you mean?'
At the door, the Doctor turned to him. 'I scanned you, you're definitely human, all the right things in all the right places. Fear of being a failure, belief in the true nature of the mammoth, and a totally enormous crush on young