Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [15]
The Doctor nodded. ‘Handy if you’re doing something dodgy and don’t want visitors, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps there’s a teleport,’ she suggested.
‘Which wouldn’t be native Earth technology at this time,’ he told her. ‘Yet another indication that it’s an inside job, Agent Jones. The museum folk seem happy enough to zap around all over the place. Aha!’
Martha walked round to look over his shoulder and see what he’d discovered.
There was a list of names: Quagga. Bluebuck. Black Rhinoceros. There were a lot more than the five Eve had suggested. Below each name was, first, a short string of numbers and letters, second, a long row of figures. ‘What do they look like to you?’ the Doctor asked.
She looked at the top row, under ‘Quagga’: 3.7M. It took a few moments, but she got it. ‘Million,’ she said. ‘The “M” must stand for million. There should be a pound sign or a dollar sign or something in front.’
‘And the other numbers?’
Again a few seconds thought, then: ‘They’re in the same format as the coordinates Eve gave us to get here. But what’s a quagga? Some sort of animal, I guess.’
The Doctor looked sad. ‘Relative of the zebra, a sub‐species – looks just like one, except it’s only striped on the head and part of the body, and it’s a chestnut‐brown colour with white stripes, rather than black and white like a zebra – a quagga crossing wouldn’t show up on the road nearly as much, but it was a beautiful animal. Good old humans – they didn’t even realise it was a creature in its own right until after the last one had died. In fact, they didn’t even realise they’d all died out for years.’
‘Killed by humans?’ Martha asked, knowing the answer.
‘Oh yes, all the ones in the wild, end of the nineteenth century, shot by settlers who thought it might eat up the grass they wanted for their cows. The last known quagga died in an Amsterdam zoo in 1883. Or at least, the last known up till now. Goodness knows where MOTLO’s’ – he said the name disdainfully – ‘one came from; hidden in a little corner of South Africa or in some private collection somewhere.’
‘And now it’s gone too,’ said Martha, sadly. Only two minutes ago she hadn’t known that this animal had ever existed, and now she knew that it had, and it had been lost, and lost again, and the sudden stab of regret was almost unbearable. ‘Sometimes I hate people,’ she said.
The Doctor grabbed her hands in his. ‘Martha! No, no, no! Hate what some of them do, hate some individuals if you must, hate intolerance and injustice and slaughter and man’s inhumanity to man, but never, never hate people.’ He skimmed through the list, pointing out a name here, a name there. ‘The Paradise Parrot. The Ilin Island Cloudrunner. Whether or not humans were responsible for their disappearance, what you have to remember is that it was humans who were responsible for coming up with inspiring, evocative names in the first place.’ He threw out a hand. ‘The cloudrunner! How brilliant is that? Some human discovers these fluffy rodents skitting about high up in the mountain treetops, and instead of calling them “tree rats” or “mountain mice”, they decide to call them “cloudrunners”. Don’t you feel something stirring inside you when you hear that?’ He smiled. ‘It’s embarrassing, but actually some of my best friends are human.’
Martha couldn’t bring herself to smile back, not even at the thought of a cute fluffy rodent; she was finding it hard to marshal her thoughts on such matters just for the moment. She sought refuge in the mystery at hand. ‘So… someone’s selling off these animals. The quagga and the bluebuck and everything. For whacking great sums. And the coordinates are where they’ve been taken, the delivery address.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘That’s exactly what I thought.’ Martha had opened a desk drawer. ‘There’s a duplicate list in here,’ she said. Then she frowned. ‘That’s funny. Here, the bluebuck’s listed as 4.2 million. On the screen –’ she checked – ‘it’s 4.4.’
‘Maybe they had a sale,