Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [60]
Don’t ask me how the Doctor knew the way from the secret lab to Eve’s office – he’s that sort of person. I wonder if Time Lords have a bit of homing pigeon in their ancestry too. Anyway, we reached it in super‐quick time and the Doctor dashed inside, only to find Rix, Nadya, Vanni and Celia already there. They all looked a bit worried, which was perfectly reasonable.
‘Doctor!’ Vanni said (people do that, you know. It’s always ‘Doctor!’ Never ‘Martha!’ Same with villains. ‘Get the Doctor and the girl!’ Oh well, maybe one day it’ll be ‘Get Martha and the man!’ and he’ll know what it feels like to be the anonymous spare part. Not that I actually want to be captured by villains or anything, I should point out). ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Vanni continued.
‘All the traces disappeared from Earth,’ Nadya said. ‘Goodness knows what sort of mess there is down there…’
‘So we came to find Eve, but she’s not here,’ added Celia.
‘Tommy’s in the infirmary, but no one knows how he was hurt,’ said Rix.
‘And Celia went to see Frank in detention but he wasn’t there,’ Vanni finished.
I stood there, trying to think how to explain it all to them in ways that would not get me into a lot of trouble, but the Doctor got there first. ‘To take your points in reverse order,’ he said, ‘Frank’s on the loose somewhere, sabre‐toothed tiger, Eve’s indisposed –’
‘And an android,’ I put in helpfully.
‘– and I’m here to clean up the mess for you.’ He sat down at Eve’s computer and started to tap away. I envy that. Put him in front of any futuristic machine and he’s there straight away, he doesn’t even have to search for the on switch.
‘An android?’ said Celia, as this interesting and probably rather surprising fact seemed to finally penetrate. ‘What do you mean, an android?’
The Doctor didn’t look up from the screen. ‘Looks like another candidate for a dictionary. Android: humanoid automaton. Martha, you could give that dictionary you were going to buy for Eve to Celia instead, seeing as Eve won’t be needing it, what with being a humanoid automaton an’ all.’
Celia got all huffy at that, not that I entirely blamed her, so I did my best to explain to her and the other Earthers what it was all about. Not that that amounted to much more than ‘we know she’s an android because when her chest exploded it was full of wires and no, she probably won’t be back at work for a while’.
Just as I was stumbling to the end of my inadequate explanation, the Doctor turned away from the computer in frustration. ‘Bother,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Password protected.’ He looked at the Earthers. ‘Anyone know Eve’s password?’
They shook their heads. ‘Bother,’ he said again.
It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me. ‘Surely you can work it out,’ I said.
He looked at me pityingly. ‘It was set up by an android who has an android’s sophisticated electronic brain. She won’t have used the name of her first pet or her favourite TV character, it’ll be some immensely complex and unguessable formula of hundreds of symbols. It’ll take hours, days even, to workout.’
Needless to say, I felt crushed. ‘Would Frank know it?’ I suggested, trying to make amends for my stupidity. ‘He’ obviously been working closely with Eve.’
He grimaced. ‘Maybe. But Frank’s bound to have made his escape by now. He’ll have found out that his protectress has gone all explody, and got off planet before anyone decides to tick him off for all the attempted genocide.’
I felt crushed again. But Vanni said, ‘How? There aren’t any tourist ships due for hours.’
‘And he can’t teleport off,’ put in Rix. ‘He’d need to gel his pendant back off Tommy first.’
We all looked at each other. ‘Tommy!’
We were all set to