Cornelius’ face split into a huge laugh. “Too right I know Montalban,” he said. “He’s the one who got us into this mess to start with.” Then something seemed to register inside Cornelius’ head. He looked at Danny again; eyes not friendly, not friendly at all. “How come you know Montalban?” he said.
Fortune, it has often been observed, favours the brave. At that particular crucial moment, two boats were approaching the
Danny spotted the motor-boat through an open gunport.
On the one hand, he said to himself, I cannot swim. Never mind.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Cornelius roared at him, and tried to grab his arm; but it was too late. Danny had already squeezed his slight shoulders through the gunport. A moment later he was in the water, bawling for help and thrashing about like a wounded shark. The motor-boat picked him up just before he drowned.
The first thing he saw when his eyes opened was a camera bag with lots of lenses and rolls of film in it. “Press?” he gasped.
“Well, sort of,” said one of his rescuers. “Freelance. Does it really matter, in the circumstances?”
Swing low, sweet chariot, said Danny’s soul inside him. “Listen…” he said.
NINE
There you go,” said Mrs Clarke, “I’ve brought you a nice cup of coffee. Don’t let it get cold.”
She put the cup down on the table, next to the other two cups. They were all full of cold coffee, with that pale off-white scum on the top that right-thinking people find so off-putting.
“Thank you,” said the man at the table without looking up. He reached out, located a cup by touch, lifted it to his mouth and drank half of its contents. It was one of the cold ones, but he didn’t seem to notice. Mrs Clarke shuddered and went away. Although she was not a religious woman, she knew where people who let hot drinks go cold went when they died. Back in front of her typewriter she shook her head sadly and wished, not for the first time, that she’d taken the job at the plastics factory instead.
Had Professor Montalban, who had recently returned from Geneva, realised how much pain he was inflicting on his secretary, he would have taken care to drink the hot coffee. He was by no means a callous person. Just now, however, his powers of concentration were directed elsewhere. His mind was centred on a small area of the table, which contained a foolscap pad, three pencils (sharpened at both ends), a calculator and ten or fifteen books, all open. He had a headache, but that was not a problem. He had had the same headache for three hundred and forty- two years, and he knew it was caused by eyestrain. Because of the elixir, it was impossible for his eyesight to deteriorate, however much he abused it, but it didn’t stop him getting headaches. He also knew that the optician in Cornmarket Street could fix him up in ten minutes with something that would cure his headache for ever. It was just a question of finding the time. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day.
Ironic, really, time was one thing that Professor Montalban had plenty of. Genius he most certainly lacked; he didn’t even have that little spark of intuition that the scientist so desperately needs if he is ever going to get anywhere. He was nothing more than a competent and careful follower of the proper scientific procedures. But, because he had plenty of time, this didn’t matter. He could do everything by a process of elimination. This may sound haphazard, but the true test of any scientific method is results, and Montalban’s results were quite astoundingly spectacular, if you chose to look at them that way. Every major scientific discovery from gravity to the electric toothbrush was based on the work of Professor Montalban. Every breakthrough, every quantum leap, ever new departure he had either initiated or, more usually, carried through himself to the verge of publication. In every case, someone had come in at the last moment and stolen all the credit, but that was what the professor wanted. He had reasons of his own for not wanting to make himself conspicuous.
Suppose a Neolithic cave-dweller had wanted to put some shelves up in his cave. All he has is a tree. What he must do is invent the refinement of metals, the saw, the plane, the chisel, the drill, the screwdriver, the screw, the rawlplug, sandpaper, polyurethane varnish, the spirit level, the carpenter’s pencil and, finally, the marble-look Formica veneer, and then he can set to work. Nothing intellectually taxing about it all, but it takes a lot of time.
Professor Montalban had not set out to discover electricity, nuclear fission, or the circulation of the blood, just as the caveman has no great urge to pioneer the Stanley knife: they were just tiresome and necessary stages in the quest for the final overriding objective, in the same way as modern mathematics is a by-product of Richard the Lion-Heart’s desire to recapture Jerusalem. Professor Montalban’s objective was, in his eyes at least, infinitely more important than the little side-shows on the way, such as splitting the atom: Professor Montalban was searching for the Ultimate Deodorant.
That had not always been the objective. When he was young, he had been more interested in the secret of eternal life and the transmigration of elements, which was how he had got into this mess in the first place. He now regarded his earlier ambitions in the way the managing director of a major multinational might review his childish intention to be an engine-driver. If he had any philosophy of life, it was that everything happens by accident, and that at any given time, ninety-nine-point-nine-five per cent of the human race are a confounded nuisance.
He worked on, as he had been doing for so many years, until his headache became so insistent that he could concentrate no longer; and by that time, of course, the optician had shut up shop and gone home. So the professor put on his jacket and took a stroll round the college yard to clear his head. It was a cool evening, and if Montalban hadn’t been so engrossed in a fallacy he had detected in the theory of Brownian motion he would probably have enjoyed the sunset. As it was, he wandered into the college bar without thinking and sat down at one of the badly- scarred chipboard tables in front of the television. He didn’t take any notice of what was on the screen—a sports programme of some sort—and let his thoughts wander back to the interplay of random particles. Then he became aware of somebody yelling something loudly in the very furthest part of his mind.
“Look!” it was yelling. Professor Montalban looked. On the screen, in the far corner of the picture but unmistakable, he saw something he recognised. It was a ship.
“And?” Jane asked.
“And,” Vanderdecker said, “that’s about it, really. I have had other experiences, but none of them germane to the point at issue. Which reminds me.”
“Yes?”
Vanderdecker smiled, and lifted his glass to his lips. “What is the point at issue? Why were you looking for me?”
Despite the recent reform in British licensing laws, the only place you can get a drink at half-past three in the afternoon in West Bay is the Rockcliffe Inn. It is hard to imagine a thirst powerful enough to drive a person into the Rockcliffe Inn. It can therefore be taken as read that Vanderdecker was not smiling at his beer, which was thick, cloudy and infested with little white specks that reminded him of the stuff you find in the corners of your eyes after a long sleep.
“Because of the insurance policy,” Jane said.
Vanderdecker looked up. “What insurance policy?” he asked.
“The Vanderdecker policy,” Jane said.
“Don’t let’s be all cryptic,” Vanderdecker replied, “not when the beer’s so foul. If you want to be cryptic, I demand Stella Artois at the very least.”
“Who’s Stella Artois?”
“Barbarian.”
“Sorry.”
“Stella Artois,” said Vanderdecker, “is a brand of beer. I’m sorry, that was very rude of me. I shouldn’t have called you a barbarian just because you’ve never heard of it. Are you sure you’ve never heard of it?”
“Yes,” Jane replied. “I don’t like beer very much, I’m afraid.”
