completely indescribable, and the young German looked away quickly. He could still see it behind his eyelids days later. He felt a sudden urge to discuss the career of Charlemagne, but before he could do this the stranger resumed his narrative.
“However,” said the stranger, “there were side-effects. Shall I tell you about the side-effects? Do please say if you’d rather I didn’t. We could talk about Gustavus Adolphus if you like.”
“Tell me,” said the young German, “about the side effects.”
“We spent a fortnight in Bristol drinking to excess and laying up a cargo—wool, I think, and tin ore, and a bit of salt fish, definitely no jute—and then we left. We would have liked to stay longer, but we had somehow made ourselves unpopular in Bristol and most of the taverns had banned us—and that took some doing in Bristol, even then. So we set sail for Flanders, and we made good headway for a day or two, until the wind dropped again. But we didn’t care; we had plenty of beer now, and no killjoy alchemist on board. It was then we noticed it.”
“Noticed what?”
“The smell. The nastiest, most sordid, least pleasant smell you ever came across in all your born days. Nothing more unlike the scent of dewy roses could ever exist this side of Plato’s Republic. And the smell was coming from us.”
The stranger finished his drink and looked through the empty glass at something the young German couldn’t see. The young German decided that that was probably just as well.
“After a day of frantic and hysterical washing,” continued the stranger, “which only seemed to make it worse, one of us hit on the idea of consulting the alchemist’s notebooks, which he had left behind on the ship when he got arrested. Sure enough, we found the answer, in a passage where our old buddy Fortunatus was describing his experiments on the cat in Cadiz. He had done his best to get round the problem by fiddling the recipe here and there, and he was pretty positive he had fixed it, which I suppose explains why he drank it himself after we’d done his guinea-pig work for him.”
“Well,” said the young German, “that was fascinating. I really ought to be getting…”
“I really wish,” said the stranger, “I could describe that smell for you now. Try to imagine, if you possibly can, a muck-heap on which someone has placed the decomposing bodies of three hundred and thirty-three dead foxes. Next to this muck-heap try and picture an open sewer. Not just an ordinary open sewer, mind—this one collects the effluent from an ammonia works on the way. The muck-heap is, of course, in the back yard of a cholera hospital… No, don’t bother. Just take it from me, it was an absolute zinger of a smell.”
“Anyway, it soon became painfully obvious that unless and until we found some way of toning this odour down a bit, the only place we could be was as far out in the middle of the ocean as we could possibly get. So we set sail for nowhere in particular, rationed the beer, and waited. We waited and we waited and we waited. Occasionally something would happen to relieve the monotony. A Barbary corsair would creep up on us and attempt to board us, which was good for a laugh. One of us would go for a swim, and an hour later you couldn’t see the surface of the water for dead fish. Not to mention the run-in we had with what you would know as the Spanish Armada; boy, did we have some fun with them! Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were the occasional highlights. But most of the time it was dead boring.”
“After three months we were all so crazy with boredom and mutual loathing that we decided to blow up the ship and ourselves with it. It didn’t do any good, of course. The ship blew up all right, but we didn’t. We floated, and after a while the number of dead fish got so embarrassing we decided we’d better swim on a bit before we wiped out the livelihood of every fisherman in the Atlantic Ocean. After a day or so of nonchalant doggy-paddling we ran into another ship. They must have been downwind of us, because before we’d got within two hundred yards of them they’d taken to the boats and were rowing away as fast as their arms could work the oars. That sort of thing really dents your self-confidence, you can imagine. You begin to despair of making those lasting relationships with people that add the interest to life.”
“Well, after we’d made the new ship comfortable—painted out the name and got it nice and squalid—we sailed on a bit longer and a bit longer still, and we came to a decision. The time had come, we decided, to try and do something about it, rather than tamely giving in. That’s the way we are in Holland; every brick wall you come to has big red marks where people have been beating their heads against it. Now it so happened that when we blew the ship up I had old Fortunatus’ notebooks in the pocket of my doublet, and although the ink had run in a few places they were still legible—I think he’d written them in some kind of incredibly clever new ink, and it makes you wonder why he ever bothered with turning base metals into gold when he had such a fantastically commercial proposition at his fingertips. Anyway, we read through those notebooks until we knew them by heart. We discussed them, argued about them, tried experiment after experiment, even tried reading them upside down; all totally useless, needless to say, but at least it passed the time, and although we didn’t discover an antidote to the elixir we did find out some extremely interesting things along the way. Extremely interesting…I’m sorry, I’m wandering off again. I do tend to do that, I’m afraid. It comes of having nothing to do for long periods of time but talk; it makes you extremely wordy.”
“Where was I? Oh yes. One morning, exactly seven years after we’d first drunk the elixir, we all woke up to find that the smell had actually gone. It was amazing. We were still invulnerable and immortal, of course, but at least we didn’t niff quite so much, and the first thing we did was set course for the nearest land-mass, which happened to be Le Havre. We had all assumed that one of our numerous experiments had finally worked, and that we’d cracked it.”
“We spent the next month getting thrown out of every tavern, inn and brothel in Le Havre, predictably enough, and we were just on the point of saying goodbye to each other and going our separate ways—as you can easily appreciate, after all that time on the ship and what with the smell and everything, we all hated each other so much you wouldn’t credit it—when the first delicate whiff of the Great Pong came filtering through and we knew that we weren’t home and dry after all. We spent a frantic afternoon buying up every drop of beer, every chess-set, every book and every piece of chemical apparatus that we could lay our hands on, and we got back to the ship just before a mob of extremely savage Frenchmen with handkerchiefs in front of their faces threw us into the sea.”
“We were still kidding ourselves that we had found an antidote and that it had worn off, and so we carefully recreated all the experiments we had done in the last seven years, and made scrupulous notes in proper joined-up writing in a big leather-bound book. But when we’d tried everything and nothing had worked, we lost heart and spent a whole year playing shoveha’penny all round the coast of Africa. We did land once or twice, but only for hours at a time, and there is—or was—a tribe in Madagascar that worships us as gods; pretty ceremonies, very heavy on the incense. Now then; seven years after our brief visit to La Havre, the smell stopped again, and we scrambled into Tangier to do our shopping—we wasted a week getting there, what with contrary winds—knowing full well that we had exactly a month before we had to leave. We were right, of course. Three weeks later, the smell came back, and seven years later it went away again. That’s the way the pattern works, and once we’d spent forty-nine years reading up on alchemical theory we all knew why, it was blindingly obvious.”
“We were all pretty good alchemists by then, incidentally, and that’s how we make our living. For eighty- three months in each seven years we turn base metal into gold, and in the remaining month we spend it. That’s the problem with alchemy; it works all right, but compared with simply taking a pick and a shovel and digging the stuff out of the ground it’s hopelessly inefficient. There I go again, digressing. Do please excuse me.”
There was a very, very long silence, during which the young German tried to recapture the use of his brain.
“So you’ve been alive since 1553?” he said at last.
“Yes,” said the stranger, “that puts it very neatly. And also in perspective. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
“No,” said the German. “No, I think you’ve said quite enough.”
“Oh well,” said the stranger. “I seem to have that effect on people. Not,” he went on, “that I tend to tell my story much these days. In fact, you’re the first person in over thirty years I’ve told it to.”
“Well…” the young German started to say; then he thought better of it and decided to stare horribly at the stranger, like a man in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s less cheerful paintings. The stranger seemed to find the silence awkward, and to break the tension he started to speak again.
“Oh yes,” said the stranger, “I’ve had some interesting experiences in my time. Well, fairly interesting. Now you mentioned Napoleon a moment ago. The only time I met Napoleon…”
The young German suddenly jumped up, screamed, and ran away, very fast.
Vanderdecker shook his head and went to the bar for another drink. It had been roughly the same the last
