Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [20]
Suddenly, all at once, the little fellers stopped their play. From where he was, he could hear squeaking and chittering, and saw that they were all looking at him. Some of them were standing upright in the shallows, others were along the bank, on all fours or up on their hind legs. And then – and this is when Orlo dropped his sandwich –
they turned, as one, and looked back into the swamp. Automatically, Orlo followed their gaze. For a moment, he wondered what they’d heard or seen, but then something gleamed through the tops of the trees, something artificial.
Orlo raised his hand to shelter his eyes, squinted, and realised what he was seeing: it was a curved, mirror-like piece of metal, arcing over like a dolphin in mid-leap.
It was one of the fins of the One Small Step, the ship the colonists had arrived in. The ship that had been washed away in the flood. The ship that they never thought they’d see again.
And the otters were leading him to it.
‘Orlo brought this one in this morning,’ Candy said, pointing to the new otter.
It had been installed in one of the cages in the zoo lab and seemed to have calmed down a little. But it stared out at Ty, the Doctor and Candy suspiciously, with baleful little eyes. Col stood to one side, watching. Candy reckoned that he was still a bit wary of the Doctor: he kept looking him up and down, as if trying to work out what made him tick.
‘He said it was a real handful,’ Candy said.
‘What are they like normally – when you catch them, that is?’ The Doctor leaned forward and made squeaking noises at the otter. It glared back at him.
‘Normally,’ answered Ty, ‘they’re fairly docile. Sometimes they put up a bit of a struggle, but they calm down quite quickly.’ She indicated one of the others, a plump little thing, with a greyish splodge on its right ear, happily curled up asleep. ‘This one is our oldest resident.
Brought him in last week. He was aggressive when we brought him in, but now he’s a real sweetie – and very bright: he’s got the maze down to under a minute.’
‘The maze?’
She showed him a large side room, the floor laid out with a complex, wall-to-wall maze, half a metre high. The roof of it was a crazy-paving of mismatched plastic sheets to stop the otters just jumping over the walls to get to the food at the far end of the room. At various points along the route, there were levers and pulleys and sliding panels to operate to further test the otters’ brainpower.
‘We used it as a test of how bright they are. We don’t really have the resources for anything else. Food goes at one end, an otter at the other, and we time how long it takes them to get to it. When we first brought him in, it took him almost an hour, and boy was he snappy about it.’
‘That’s not unusual, surely?’ the Doctor frowned. ‘Most intelligent creatures do that. It’s called learning – start off bad, get better. Even humans are quite good at it.’
Ty pulled a face. ‘I’m a zoologist, Doctor – I’ve worked with animals for years, and with people before that. And there’s something just wrong about this: it’s the speed with which their learning curve increases – and then suddenly plateaus out after about two days. If the otters were capable of learning so quickly, it’d be them building a city here, not us.’
‘Oh, don’t judge alien species by your own,’ the Doctor said, making a sucking noise. ‘There are as many types of intelligence and learning as there are worlds out there.’ He took the clipboard from her and scanned it, and again Candy saw the sharpness in his eyes. ‘Still, I see what you mean. The otters have clearly evolved to fill an environmental niche, and their speed of learning is a bit at odds with it, I’ll grant you.’
Candy cut in. ‘I wondered if it was us.’
‘Us?’ Ty was puzzled.
‘You think proximity to humans is making them smarter?’ said the Doctor. ‘“Brains by osmosis.” As ideas go, it’s not a bad one, but you’d think that they’d carry on getting smarter, wouldn’t you? Oh hello –
what’s this, then?’
Candy peered