Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [60]
‘Oh, I think I’ve seen that. The cowboy one, I mean. And you’re. . .
which one?’
Martha pushed open the door to the zoo lab, tea slopping from the mug. ‘I’m the pretty one,’ she said. ‘And don’t let him tell you otherwise.’
‘What Pallister said,’ Ty asked. ‘What that thing said – about reproduction? What did it mean?’
A couple of dozen Sundayans, along with the Doctor, Martha and Ty, had gathered in the Council chamber around a roaring fire. Ty had found some new, clean clothes for Martha – a weird, shapeless orange kaftan thing that Martha was too polite to decline. She sat alongside the Doctor, picking half-heartedly at a plate of cheese and fruit and fried eggs that she’d been given.
‘That’s what I’ve been wondering too,’ he replied.
He perched himself on the corner of the council table and pulled an assortment of thoughtful faces. Ty brought around a tray of coffee and more of the ‘sap tea’ – which wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded.
‘What do we know about this thing, then?’ the Doctor continued.
‘There’s just the one of it, it’s absolutely massive, and it’s gobbling up everything around it to make itself even massiver. Makes sense that it lives in water, really – the buoyancy will help support its body, a bit like whales. And it’ll have all the seafood it needs. And judging by the bit that Martha here brought back, it reproduces by binary fission, splitting off bits of itself. I had a good poke at it: distributed nervous system, no single brain, no particularly specialised organs. Chop it into a million, billion pieces and before you know it, you’ve got a million billion new ones.’ He pulled a thoughtful face. ‘Would explain a lot about its intelligence too – or relative lack of. With a nervous system and “brain” spread throughout its enormous body, it’s a fairly slow thinker. There’s a limit to how fast nerve impulses can travel through its tissue. One reason why humans are so smart: small, very dense brains, fast communication between different parts of them.
This thing,’ he grimaced, ‘was hiding at the bottom of the sea when Mother Nature handed out smarts. Unfortunately for us and the otters, it’s turned a disadvantage into a whopping great advantage. Instead of trying to do its own thinking, it gets other, brighter species to do it for it. And in the process benefits from those other species’
knowledge of the environment that it finds itself in.’
‘And it’s taken our people,’ grunted Herrig, sprawled in a wooden chair near the fire.
Martha saw the flicker of acknowledgment in the Doctor’s eyes.
He’d tried to get all the kidnapped settlers back, but had failed. And the Doctor didn’t do failure well.
‘It can grow as big as it needs, and has no predators here on Sunday.
And judging by its rate of cell division, it’s not planning on dying of old age any time soon so it doesn’t need children competing for resources: He shook his head and fixed Henig with a look. ‘So there’s really only one reproductive strategy that makes sense. That picture you drew, Martha, when we brought you back from the otters’ nest: that single great blob enveloping the planet. Well if it’s got this planet sewn up all by itself, what would be the purpose of reproducing, eh?’ He looked round the room like a schoolteacher waiting for the right answer to an algebra question.
‘To spread to other planets?’ ventured Martha.
‘First-class honours!’ he grinned. ‘To spread to other planets. After all, I think we can be fairly sure that it arrived on – or in – the meteorite that caused the flood.’
‘OK,’ said Martha thoughtfully, settling back into a chair and putting her fingers together like some sort of evil genius. ‘But it can’t exactly conjure itself another meteorite out of nowhere to hitch a ride on; it can’t repair the settlers’ ship; and it doesn’t have the brains to make itself a great big space catapult to shoot its little babies into outer space with.’ Suddenly, Martha’s mouth dropped open. ‘Unless that’s what it was getting