Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [64]
‘You couldn’t do it?’ I asked him, trying to keep the dismay out of my voice.
‘Yes, I could,’ he replied.
Everyone looked puzzled, and I’m sure I did too. ‘So… it didn’t work,’ Rix said.
‘Oh, I think it did.’ The Doctor appeared rather pleased with himself. ‘Thing is, when I said I was returning everything, I didn’t actually mean I was bringing them back here. They’ve all gone home. When you’ve got a time machine in the mix…’
‘You sent them back to their own times!’ I exclaimed.
Then I realised what that meant. ‘To die alone…’ I hugged Dorothea.
But the Doctor was still smiling. ‘Well, I may not have got it spot on,’ he said. ‘You know, tricky to get these things exact. It’s entirely possible that they may have arrived quite a few years before they left, when members of their species were plentiful.’
I gaped at him. Wasn’t that the sort of thing people were warned about, in science‐fiction stories and stuff? ‘But… couldn’t they end up being their own grandparents or something?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t think it’ll worry them that much. No one’s going to get out the family photo album and say, “Hey – that jellyfish looks familiar.”’
And then I thought about how Eve had been willing to freeze the Doctor and me. ‘But there might have been, you know, people.’
He looked suddenly serious. ‘Then I hope they’ll forgive me.’
I thought about it for a second, about how I’d feel if it were me. But I couldn’t imagine it.
‘So… sort of a happy ending,’ I said, but I couldn’t feel completely happy inside. I knew that not every animal would have got back home. Because of me.
‘Which ones were those?’ the Doctor asked, but the guilt was hitting too hard for me to spot the twinkle in his eye.
‘You know – the ones that landed in the sea and stuff on modern Earth.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Now I couldn’t fail to notice that he looked happier than events warranted. ‘While you were down on Earth – did you notice a single dinosaur apart from that Megalosaurus?’
‘Er, yes,’ I said. ‘They were the big ones with teeth on the TV, weren’t they?’
‘Ah, not the dromaeosaurs, they were clones,’ he said. ‘Like the sabre‐toothed tigers and the dodos. Funny thing, when I came to think about it – the news reports, TV, all over the world – not a sign of anything other than those three species, which was a bit odd, considering that 300 billion creatures should have just materialised. In fact, the only non‐clone seemed to be the Megalosaurus, which, funnily enough, was the one that gave me the idea in the first place.’
I was possibly not following this quite as well as I’d have liked. ‘Come again?’ I said. ‘Words of one syllable might be a good idea. How come the animals weren’t there? I sent them all back.’
He grinned. ‘You did. And I hijacked them all on arrival.’
‘So not only did you send them back to a time before they were collected…
‘I picked them up a few hours before I’d had the idea of doing it in the first place. Them and any strays left over from Frank’s business empire. Little Mervin the missing link, for example.’
‘So what about the Megalosaurus?’
‘Well, I knew I had to make an exception for it, because without it the pendant would never have had anything to track back to twenty‐first‐century Earth, so I’d never have met it, and I’d never have had the idea to send the animals back to before their own times which I had to exclude it from.’
Sometimes, listening to the Doctor, you got the impression that someone had taken a perfectly sensible, straightforward thought and then cut and pasted it at random all over the place. I just nodded and went ‘mm’, The others did too.
For a moment, everyone just stood around going ‘mm’, Then Nadya said, ‘You know what this means? We’re all out of a job.’
‘Probably get a transfer to another section…’ said Vanni.