seems to like it, and I suppose it’s better than ships in bottles. You ever tried that?”
“No,” Danny confessed.
“Don’t bother,” said Antonius sagely, “Waste of time. At least there’s something at the end of the day with alchemy, so they reckon.”
“Is there?” Danny said.
“Course there is,” Antonius replied. “But it wouldn’t suit me, not all that reading and stuff you’ve got to do. It’s all right when you’re stuck in the middle of the sea, maybe, but the skipper doesn’t stop there. He even does it on shore leave. I remember one time in New Amsterdam…”
“New York,” Sebastian interrupted him. “They call it New York now.”
“Do they?” Antonius looked surprised. “What a daft name. New York, then. Miserable place, that. You ever been there?”
“Yes,” Danny said.
“Do they still have that law where you can’t get a drink anywhere?”
“How do you mean?” Danny asked.
“You can’t get a drink in New Amsterdam,” Antonius explained, “It’s against the law. Same in the whole of America, come to think of it.”
“Hang on,” said Danny. “When was this?”
“Year or so back,” Antonius said, “when we were last there. Didn’t they have that law there when you went?”
“No,” Danny said. “No, they didn’t.”
“Anyway,” Antonius went on, “there we all were, shore leave coming up, everyone as dry as the bottom of a parrot’s cage, and where does the Skip take us in to? New bloody Amsterdam, just so’s he could go and look something up about alchemy in a library there. We were not pleased, I can tell you. I mean, what would you have thought?”
Danny shuddered very slightly. If he tried very hard, perhaps he could nudge what he had just heard into some dark, damp corner of his mind where his subconscious could hide it and build a protective layer of mother-of- pearl over it until it wasn’t quite so uncomfortable any more. “I’d have been livid,” he said.
“We were,” Antonius went on. “Sick as parrots, the lot of us. And then there was that other time, when we all had to go to Easter Island to see Halley’s Comet. That was all to do with alchemy, he said. Something about magnetism. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to drink on Easter Island except water. Mind you, the skipper’s completely nuts on Halley’s Comet. Never misses it.”
That word “never” was a problem, Danny thought. Do what we may, we will not get the mother-of-pearl to stick on that one.
“Really?”
“Obsessive, I call it,” said Antonius, disgustedly, “I mean, comets are all right, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and Halley’s Comet’s just another comet, right? But to hear the skipper talk, you’d think it was free beer and Christmas all rolled into one. Every time it pops up, there’s no talking to him for weeks. Not unless you want your head bitten off, I mean. God knows I don’t mind a man having a hobby, but there’s such a thing as taking it too far.”
Danny glanced at Sebastian out of the corner of his eye, just in case there was a clue to be gleaned there. After all, it was possible that Antonius was the sole loony on this ship and that everyone else was reasonably sane. But Sebastian only looked bored.
“What was all that you were saying about alchemy?” Danny asked Antonius. “About your captain, and it being a hobby of his?”
“Oh, he’s serious enough about it,” Antonius replied. “You interested in that sort of thing, then?”
“Yes,” Danny said. “Not that I’m an expert or anything, but…”
“Pity you missed the captain, then,” said Antonius. “Tell you what, though, you could have a word with old Cornelius. He’s not alchemy mad like the skipper, but he helps him a lot with the actual cooking of the stuff. He could show you the crucible and all that, if you like.”
Cornelius, it turned out, was only too happy to show the visitor the crucible, perhaps because the alternative was playing chess with Antonius. He led the way down to the rear gun-deck. There were no guns on the rear gun- deck; instead, there was a large stone basin with a sort of stove arrangement under it backing onto a bulkhead, with five or six shelves behind it. Half of these shelves had small, dark jars with handwritten Latin labels, while the other half contained books. Some of the books looked very old, but most of them were shiny new paperbacks, and when Danny glanced at the spines he saw that they were scientific textbooks. Because he had spent his science lessons daydreaming of scooping the big Board of Governors corruption scandal for the school magazine, Danny couldn’t tell whether they were really as high-powered as their titles suggested, but he was prepared to bet that “Elements of Quantum Mechanics” wasn’t in his local library, and neither were “Properties of Fissile Materials” or “Sub-Atomic Particle Dynamics”. Unless Fissile was rotten proof-reading for fossil, that was something nuclear, while Atomic spoke for itself. Nuclear! Suddenly, very far off, Danny began to see a chink of light.
“So you do a bit of this yourself, then, do you?” Cornelius’ voice broke in on his reverie. It was a loud voice, rather jolly, filtered through a lot of facial hair.
“A little bit,” said Danny cautiously. “Quantum mechanics, fissile properties, that sort of thing.”
“Huh.” Cornelius was not impressed, apparently. “All that modern crap the skipper’s so hot on. Boring. Give me the old ways any time”
“Good, are they?” Danny asked. Cornelius grinned.
“Good?” he chuckled. “Watch this.”
He produced a Zippo from the battered leather pouch that hung from his sword-belt and opened the stove door. Then he messed about with a few of the jars. “Don’t tell the skipper,” he said, “he gets all snotty if I use his gear. But I’ve done it lots of times, it’s like falling off a log.”
“Dangerous, you mean?”
“Easy,” said Cornelius. “You got anything metal on you?”
Danny had a sudden flashback to a children’s party when he was six. There had been a conjuror, and he had ended up with a lot of coloured flags being pulled out of his ears. He pulled himself together and reached in his pocket for his car keys. “Will these do?” he said.
“Fine,” replied Cornelius. He took them and tossed them into the crucible before Danny could stop him. There was a flash of white light and a faint humming noise, like the sound you hear when you stand under an electric pylon.
“Takes about thirty seconds to do all the way through,” Cornelius said. “Beats your fission into a cocked hat, if you ask me.”
Thirty seconds later, Cornelius reached under the stove and produced what looked like a solid gold ladle. With this he extracted the car keys from the crucible and held them under Danny’s nose. They were glowing with the same blue light, and they seemed to have been turned into pure gold. Pure gold car keys. It reminded Danny of the time Gerald had taken him round the Stock Exchange.
“There you go,” Cornelius said, and tipped them out onto Danny’s hand. “Don’t worry, they aren’t hot or anything.”
Danny winced, but he could feel nothing. The blue light faded away. The keys felt unnaturally cold and heavy. Solid gold. What did solid gold feel like?
“Impressive, huh?” said Cornelius.
“Very,” Danny said. He stared at his car keys. In his mind, a strange and terrible alchemy of his own was taking place. All this meaningless garbage was turning into a story; a story about unlicensed, clandestine nuclear experiments on a weird ship manned by lunatics. Story. Story. Story. If only he could get off this dreadful ship and get to a telephone, he would be through with even the distant threat of sports reporting for ever and ever. Until then, however, there was investigative journalism to be done.
“Tell me something,” he said as casually as possible. What was that man’s name? The arch-fiend of the nuclear lobby, the man behind all those goings-on at Dounreay. There had been a protest, he remembered.
“What?”
“Do you know someone, a guy called Montalban? Professor Montalban? He’s into all this alchemy, isn’t he?”
