Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [59]
‘I s’pose it’s all relative, though, isn’t it?’ Martha mused. The Doctor picked up a couple of long pairs of tweezers and began pulling and tugging at the thing in the dish. It reminded Martha of a greeny-black cow’s tongue – about six inches long and four across, one end rounded, the other raggedly flat, as though it had been cut.
‘Is it?’
‘I mean, with you being 900-and-odd. Anyone less than, ooh, 200
must seem much the same.’
‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘Probably.’
Suddenly, he looked up at her and took his glasses off.
‘Martha,’ he said, his tone suddenly very different.
‘Yeah?’
‘You mentioned babies,’ he said. Whoah! thought Martha, suddenly thrown. Where had this come from?
‘Babies?’
He nodded.
‘Did I?’
‘Well. . . ,’ he sucked in his cheeks and looked down at the thing slowly writhing in the dish. ‘Baby. Singular.’
‘What?’
‘This little beauty. You said it was a baby slimey.’
She pulled a stupid face. She couldn’t keep up. ‘ What? ’
‘This,’ he said, holding it up with a pair of tweezers where it twirled and twisted like the biggest slug Martha had ever seen. ‘You said it was a baby.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, and couldn’t have sounded less interested if it had been something he’d pulled out from under a car bonnet.
‘Well you were wrong – and right.’ He put it back in the dish. ‘Look at that flat edge: this has been cut. Cut from the tip of one of the big slimey’s tentacles. Probably poked itself into your chums’ nest and they managed to slice it off. There are fragments of stone in the cut end: language and tool-making, eh? Your furry friends are looking cleverer by the minute.
‘And the “right” bit?’
‘Well. . . ’ He popped his glasses back in his pocket and leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. ‘It’s a baby too – given the right environment and food, this little chap could grow up just like his daddy. Or mummy. Which is a bit disturbing, considering what Pallister was talking about.’
‘That’s how slimey reproduces, then? Chop off a bit of him and it grows into a new one?’
‘Looks like it. Give me another half hour with him and I’ll know for sure.’ He paused and looked up expectantly. ‘And although it’d be dreadfully sexist of me to suggest it, a cuppa wouldn’t half go down well right about now.’
Martha raised an eyebrow at him. ‘I’ll iet you off, just this once.
One lump or two?’
∗ ∗ ∗ Martha ran – almost literally – into Ty as she was fetching the Doctor his tea. They almost collided on the steps of the zoo lab. Ty looked flustered – something that Martha would never have imagined Ty could look.
‘I can’t find her,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Candy. No one’s seen her.’
‘But she came back here.’
Ty shook her head. ‘I don’t think she did: she left us, but there’s been no sign of her at all.’
‘She must be somewhere. Why wouldn’t she have come straight back here. . . ?’ Even as she asked the question, Martha knew the answer.
Well, one possible answer. Two, actually. ‘Maybe she decided to see if she could find the other settlers,’ she suggested, wrapping her hands around the cooling mug.
‘And maybe she got caught,’ Ty supplied the second possibility. ‘Why didn’t she just do what the Doctor said and come back here?’
Martha raised an eyebrow. ‘Well,’ she said wryly, ‘sometimes people don’t. Do what the Doctor says, I mean.’
‘He’s usually right, though.’
‘Usually,’ Martha agreed. ‘But not always. He does tend to get a bit bossy sometimes – makes people do the opposite, you know, just to show they’ve got a bit of independence.’
Listen to me! thought Martha. Some friend I am, slagging him off behind his back!
‘Sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience,’ Ty said with a smile.
Martha tried to brush it off. ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘He’s not like that with me.’
‘Yeah?’
Martha nodded confidently. ‘Wouldn’t dare.’
Ty laughed out loud. ‘I can believe that, honey. How long you two been together?’
‘Together?’ Martha suddenly felt herself blush. ‘Oh, it’s not like that.’ ‘No? What is it like, then? You his youthful sidekick, like in the movies?’
It was Martha’s turn to laugh. ‘Something like