Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [58]
The Doctor took a step towards her, but she waved him back. ‘One more step, and boom!’ she said. She sighed. ‘I’ve been doing this for ever. And I thought my job would never end, not until the end of the universe itself. But this forced me to think about it – and I found a loophole.’
‘It’s all about tenses, apparently,’ Martha said, resisting the temptation to make a ‘she’s screwy!’ gesture.
The Doctor looked interested. ‘Really?’ He looked at Eve. ‘Care to explain?’
She said, as if it made perfect sense, ‘I have to stop any species from dying out. And I have to make sure every planet is represented, remembered somehow. But this way, with the bombs – there is no point at which any species is dying out, just a single specimen remaining. Each species is fine – and then it has died out…’
‘You what?’ said the Doctor. ‘I think you could do with a dictionary, this whole dying, dying out business. Martha, if you’re ever stuck on what to buy Eve for Christmas, a dictionary’s probably an idea.’
‘Christmas?’ said Eve, happy again. ‘There won’t be any more Christmas. You see, I’ve realised that I needn’t stop at Earth. If I have to carryon until the universe ends, then I’ll end the universe. As long as I have one specimen from each planet, I’ll finally have peace! I’ll finally have… closure, I think they call it. I’ll have closure.’
‘Most people try therapy first,’ the Doctor said. ‘Destroying the universe tends to be a last resort.’
Martha shut her eyes. Time was ticking on – like the bomb – and Eve seemed lost in some strange incomprehensible non‐logic of her own. She couldn’t see a way that this could end well.
But the Doctor was speaking again. ‘I hate to have to break it to you, Eve – but you’re never going to manage it. You keep talking about the universe like it’s something quantifiable, but it isn’t, not really. You’re talking about the bit of the universe known to you. Look at Earth – that’s just one planet in one solar system. There are maybe, ooh, 50 billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and that’s just one of a few trillion galaxies, in a universe that keeps expanding. I’ve seen the list of planets in your lobby – you’ve been looking at the Milky Way, maybe a bit of Andromeda – but where are Beaus, M82, M83, M84, Celation, Isop, Kinrexian? It would take you billions of years to destroy all life in the universe, even if you were capable of it – and by the time you’d got to the last planet, got your last single specimen, life would have sprung up again on the first ones – it can be amazingly resilient. Face it, Eve – you’re never going to achieve peace that way.’
Eve staggered backwards. ‘All for nothing. It’s all been for nothing. I have failed in my objective. I cannot complete my mission.’
‘Oh well, missions aren’t everything –’ the Doctor began, but Eve screamed at him to shut up. She had sat down at the desk, and her eyelids were blinking at an alarming rate.
‘So… so… I don’t need either of you after all.’ She picked up Frank’s gun from the desk and pointed it towards them. ‘Don’t!’ yelled the Doctor and Martha together – but Eve had already pulled the trigger.
The gun exploded backwards. Eve slumped heavily to the floor.
Martha took a running jump, scattering dodos to all sides, and leapt over the pen wall. But as she reached the fallen body, she slowed down. There was no blood. Instead…
‘She’s an android!’
The Doctor joined her, gazing down at the Smoking hole where Eve’s chest had been. Wires sparked and fizzed.
‘I did wonder,’ he said. ‘All that odd logic. Her not being affected by the psychic paper. And she seemed to have been around for a very long time.’
The ticking from the bomb suddenly increased in speed and pitch. ‘Talking of very long times,’ he added, ‘that’s exactly what we don’t have.’
‘We’ve got to find those