“Contacts, then,” Danny said. “I have contacts. All I’d have to do to get my own show on Channel 4 is snap my fingers.”
“All
“What boat?”
“You have to film it from a boat,” he was informed. “That’s how you film boats. They tell me.”
Danny fumed, like a cigarette discarded on flame-proof furniture fabric, and then said, “All right, you win. Where do I have to go?”
On the other side of the desk a very faint grin started to form, and out of it came the word “Bridport”.
“Bridport? Where the bloody hell is Bridport?”
“Bridport,” said the context of the grin, “is where the Bridport Old Ships Race starts from. Beyond that, I must confess I know very little. Mandy in the front office has an atlas, ask her.”
Mandy in the front office did indeed have an atlas, which was so up to date that it showed all the principal towns in the Belgian Congo. It also showed Bridport.
“You going there, are you?” she asked.
“No,” Danny replied, “I just needed reassuring it was still there.” He sighed and went to sort out his briefcase.
Aboard the protest ship
“Woher,” someone said, “kommt der Gerucht?”
Someone else asked what the hell that was supposed to mean, and a third party translated for her.
“Where’s the smell coming from?”
“That’s the trouble,” remarked the second party from behind her handkerchief, “with being on a goddamn multilingual ship.”
Wherever the smell was coming from, it was not pleasant. Some of the ship’s company compared it to a Zellophanpapierfabrik; others got halfway through saying Exkrementeverarbeitungswerk before the vapours got into their lungs and reduced them to spluttering hulks.
“Sewage farm,” explained the translator.
“I guessed.”
In any event, it was a horrible smell, and horrible smells out in the middle of the sea can only mean one thing to the crew of an environmental patrol vessel.
“We’d better get those guys, whoever they are,” said the imperfect linguist. “You fetch the handcuffs and I’ll go connect up the fire hoses.”
The translator, a short, weather-beaten New Zealander, refused to budge. She was happy where she was. It might be cramped and wet and full of discarded foodstuffs, but it was out of the way of the terrible breeze that was carrying the Geruch in from wherever it originated. Her companion started off full of scorn, but came back rather quickly.
“Jesus,” she said, “it smells really awful.”
The captain, a tall, blond German, was going round issuing gas masks. They helped, but not all that much; they had only been designed to cope with relatively minor environmental pollution, such as mustard gas. Nevertheless, their morale value at least was sufficient to enable the imperfect linguist and a few other diehards to scramble out of hard cover and take stock of the situation.
Through the misted eyepieces of their masks, they could dimly make out a ship creaking slowly towards them across the whale-road. It was slow, and it was unnaturally quiet. But the imperfect linguist, whose name was Martha and who came from Bethlehem, Pa., knew what that signified.
“This is something big,” she said to the New Zealander.
“Is it?”
“I read about it,” she replied. “There’s some new kinds of waste so volatile they daren’t put them on conventional ships because of the danger of combustion; you know, sparks from the electrics, that kind of thing. So they use these sail-powered ships.”
“I never heard that.”
“Well you wouldn’t, would you,” Martha said. “It’s secret.”
That made sense, and the New Zealander scurried off to tell the captain, whom she eventually found inside one of the lifeboats, with a tarpaulin over his head.
The captain’s appeal for volunteers was truly a call for heroes, for the mission that was proposed called for selfless dedication to the cause. It demanded the sort of sacrifice that ought once and for all to sort out who were the real friends of the earth and who were the ones who just dropped in now and then for a cup of coffee and a chat. So rigorous was this selection process that the result was two people only. As the outboard motor of the dinghy finally fired and propelled the frail craft towards the poison ship, the New Zealander set her jaw and tried to think of the rain forests. It wasn’t easy.
“For Chrissakes, Jo, you nearly had us over,” remarked her fellow martyr, as they bounced off a rather bumptious wave. “This isn’t Indianapolis, throttle back a bit.”
Jo throttled right back while Martha checked the handcuffs with which they were going to chain themselves to the side of the poison ship. Deep down in the unregenerate parts of her brain, there was a tiny hope that the handcuffs would fall to bits and they could go back to the
“They seem to be taking it very calmly,” she muttered as they came within fifty yards of their target.
“You what?”
“They seem to be taking it very calmly!” Martha yelled. Jo shrugged. By and large, she was thinking to herself, she was regretting that she hadn’t become a dentist like her family wanted her to. Dentists also have their part to play in the Great Society, and they don’t have to chain themselves to extremely smelly ships.
“If they turn the hoses on us,” Martha continued, “just try and kinda roll with it.”
“They don’t look like they’ve got any hoses, Martha,” Jo replied. “Looks a bit on the primitive side to me.”
“That’s just a front,” Martha replied confidently. She had been in this game long enough to know that all the masks of the enemy are fundamentally weird.
“Are those cannons sticking out the side?” Jo asked.
“Could be,” Martha said. “They sure look like cannons. Probably the pipes they pump the stuff out of, though.”
At last they could make out a human being on the ship. Two human beings, two human beings leaning against the rail looking mildly interested. They seemed entirely oblivious to the smell.
Martha seized the grappling-hook while Jo swung the tiller. There didn’t seem an awful lot you could get a handcuff round on the gleaming oak sides of the ship, but she owed it to herself to try.
“Hello there,” said a voice from above her head. “Are you lost?”
Martha blinked. “Are we what?”
“Lost,” repeated the voice.
“Don’t try that one with me, buster,” Martha said. “We’re coming alongside, and don’t bother trying to stop us.”
The taller of the two men gazed at her with a puzzled expression. “Do you really want to come alongside?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Takes all sorts,” replied the taller man. “Shall I drop you a line?”
Martha was about to say something, but Jo explained that it was also a seafaring term. “He wants to lower us a rope,” she whispered.
“What?”
“He wants to lower us a bloody rope!” Jo shouted.
“That’s right,” said the man on the ship, “I want to lower you a rope. If you’d like me to, that is. I’m not bothered one way or the other.”
Martha only had a few seconds to decide whether this was simple or duplex treachery. She decided on
