Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [5]
When I could tear my eyes from the dodo, I looked around me and was pretty much staggered. There were these see‐through boxes as far as the eye could see, and every box held an animal. I’m not going to start trying to list them, or even describe them. Some boxes as large as Buckingham Palace, some as small as a flea, each with a single creature inside it. That’s as far as I’ll go at the moment. Maybe more later. Almost certainly more later. But not now, because it’s too hard to get my head around it. Just accept that I was stunned. No, what did I say before – staggered. That suits it better.
This sudden realisation, this comprehension of my surroundings, took only a second. I had this momentary thought of shutting the TARDIS doors before the Doctor could see, before he could get upset – but of course even that one second’s delay was far too much. I don’t doubt he’d taken it all in, probably taken in seven times as much as me in half the time. He was already walking forwards, a grim look on his face.
Together, we stepped out of the TARDIS. And, what do you know? An alarm went off. That’s our life, that is.
‘Er, back inside the TARDIS is looking a good option right now,’ Martha said anxiously, as the siren wailed around them.
‘Oh come on, Martha, this is the good bit!’ replied the Doctor, not even looking back as he pulled the TARDIS doors closed behind him.
She sighed. ‘Oh well, in for a penny… So your plan is, we stay here and be captured or interrogated or whatever by whoever set up that alarm system.’
‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor agreed, nodding. ‘Especially now those guards have turned up.’
He nodded over to their left, indicating the men who were approaching. They looked rather like the security guards from the hospital, with their navy‐blue uniforms and peaked caps, but, to Martha’s deep discomfort, carried some form of chunky black space gun in their hands – something that the security guards back home had never done, although she thought some of them would have enjoyed it rather a lot.
‘Stay right where you are,’ one called.
‘Whatever you say,’ the Doctor called back cheerfully. ‘How about we put up our hands too? Would that be a help? Save you having to ask –’
‘Shut up!’ yelled one of the guards.
‘Oh, right, yes, didn’t think of that one –’
‘Shut up!’
The Doctor raised one hand, and used the other to put a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh!’ he hissed to Martha, who decided it would probably be a good idea to hold up her hands too.
The men led them out of the room. Martha found it hard to keep her attention on them during the long walk, surrounded as she was by all sorts of bizarre creatures. Her hands kept falling to her sides as she spotted a giant megatherium or a brilliantly plumaged parrot on the other side of the grille, and the Doctor had to keep nudging her to raise them again. He too was paying careful attention to their surroundings, cheerfully pointing out – verbally – a gorilla here and a velociraptor there. Cheerfully, yes – but Martha could see again that hardness in his eyes she’d glimpsed earlier.
As they left the room, Martha turned to see a sign above the door that read, simply, ‘Earth’. A logo by its side showed the letters ‘MOTLO’ in a circle around the head of a strange beast, a line drawing showing tusks and triangular eyes. The emblem was repeated over and over along the corridor they were led down.
‘Are we there yet?’ the Doctor asked like a petulant child on a car trip.
‘Where’s “there”?’ Martha said.
He shrugged. ‘Journey’s end. I do hate this low‐level threatening stuff that goes nowhere – what good is it to anyone? Let’s get into the