Flying Dutch

“Thank you. Recently, about sixty years ago, I discovered that intense radiation bombardment can partially reverse the effects of the elixir. Since then, I have been trying to construct a sufficiently powerful atomic generator to provide enough radiation for my purposes. Hence, I’m afraid, the nuclear industry. I must apologise for it, but there was no other way.”

“Quite,” Jane said, rather unsympathetically. “Go on, please.”

“Basically,” said the Professor, “if you put a person who has drunk elixir into the very heart of an atomic reaction, it adjusts the molecular structure. It loosens them up and jiggles them about. But the sort of jiggling I want—jiggling out the smell without jiggling the whole thing out of existence—isn’t easy, and I haven’t quite got it right yet. The obvious difficulty was that radiation is dangerous, and I wasn’t keen on experimenting on myself; nor, for that matter, on anyone else, not even Captain Vanderdecker—even though he got me into this situation in the first place. But then I remembered the cat who had drunk the elixir when I first tested it out, and eventually I tracked it down and acquired it. After some experiments at Dounreay in Scotland, I found that the smell could be temporarily suppressed by prolonged exposure to intense radiation of a certain type; a bit like the modern process of food irradiation. The longest period it’s lasted so far is a month, and soon Percy and I will have to go back for another dose.”

“Percy?”

Montalban flushed slightly. “I call my cat Percy,” he said, “short for Parsifal. The Holy Innocent, you see.”

Jane didn’t see, but wasn’t too bothered. She asked the Professor to continue.

“And that,” he said, “is my work. That is all that concerns me. The Cirencester Group, which has operated from here ever since I first built the house, comprises all the people whose assistance I require—bankers, financiers, public relations people, industrialists, heads of Government agencies…”

“Hold on,” said Danny, whose pen had just run out. “Now, then. What came after bankers?”

“…And, of course, the most important of them all, the Controller of Radio Three. Without these people…”

Danny had dropped his new pen. “What did you just say?”

“Radio Three,” said the Professor. “Without him, the whole system would break down, obviously. Now…”

“Why?” Danny demanded.

“I’m sorry,” Montalban said, “I thought I had explained all that. I said my computer used a system based on musical notation. Now, to all intents and purposes, it is musical notation. You can sit down at the piano and play one of my programmes with no difficulty at all, and usually (may I say, in all modesty) with great pleasure. In fact, I’d be prepared to wager that you know a great many of my programmes by heart. Of course, I wrote them all under several noms-de-plume…”

“Such as?” Danny asked.

“Bartok,” replied the Professor, “Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Chopin, Mozart, Elgar, Delius, Handel, Ravel, Schubert, Jelly Roll Morton…”

Danny’s mouth fell open. “You did?”

“Yes indeed.”

“I don’t believe it.”

The Professor smiled. “You’re prepared to believe that I invented the computer and the electric light, but not that I wrote the Eroica or Rhapsody in Blue—which is, as it happens, little more than a simple word-processing programme. Ah well, they say a prophet is never honoured in his own country. Let me give you a demonstration.”

The Professor got up and walked over to the rather impressive stereo system. He selected a compact disc and fed it into the machine.

“What’s sixty-six,” he asked Danny, “multiplied by the square root of nineteen, divided by five and squared?”

Danny started counting on his fingers and then gave up. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Here is a pocket calculator,” said the Professor. “You work it out on your machine, while I do it on mine.”.

Danny started pressing buttons, while Montalban played a short snatch from Handel’s Messiah. Then he switched off the stereo and said, “Nine hundred and eighty-four point nine five nine nine seven. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Danny confirmed. The Professor nodded.

“As you can tell by the date of the composition,” he said, “that was one of my first programmes, a simple calculating system. Catchy, though.”

Danny handed the calculator back in stunned silence, and the Professor went on.

“Hence,” he said, “the need to be able to dictate what is played on Radio Three at certain times; it’s my way of programming a number of other computers running my musical language in strategic positions all over the world. The consequences of the wrong thing being played at the wrong time can be catastrophic. For instance, the recent stock market slump was the result of some foolish person deciding to broadcast “The Ride of the Valkyries” at half-past five on a Friday afternoon. I didn’t compose that, by the way, but by pure chance it’s perfectly intelligible to one of my computers as an urgent command to sell short-dated Government stocks. I’m only thankful it wasn’t the overture to HMS Pinafore.”

There was a very long silence, disturbed only by the assistant cameraman humming “I Did It My Way”, during which the Professor drank the rest of his tea. Then Jane rallied the remaining shreds of her mental forces and asked a question.

“So where does that leave us?”

“That depends,” said the Professor, “on you. If you and your friends would be happy to forget all about what I’ve just told you, I can continue with my work until it’s finished; after that, I intend to retire and keep bees. If you refuse, of course, I shall have to do my best to carry on regardless. No doubt you will broadcast your discovery to the world, and although I will naturally use all my considerable influence and power to prevent you, you may possibly be believed, and then the world will have to make up its mind what it wants to do with me. I cannot be killed, or even bruised. I can do incalculable damage before I’m got rid of—all I have to do to cause an immediate recession is to pick up the telephone and ask the BBC to play “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” at three-fifteen tomorrow afternoon. It will take hundreds of years of poverty and darkness to dismantle the structures that I have built, and the immediate result of my overthrow—for want of a better word—will be the destruction of the economies of the free world…”

“Not you as well,” Jane said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing,” Jane said wearily. “Go on.”

But the Professor was interested. “You said not me as well,” he said. “Can I take it that you know about the Vanderdecker policy?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “Do you?”

“Most certainly,” said the Professor. “It’s one of my most worrying problems.”

“One of your problems?” Jane repeated.

“Assuredly,” Montalban replied. “You see, one of the first things I did after the South Sea Bubble collapsed was to buy up the Lombard National Bank.”

¦

Danny Bennett felt better. He had found a television.

Although no umbilical cord connected him to the instrument, he could feel its reviving power soaking into him, like the sun on Patmos only without the risk of sunburn. Admittedly, there was nothing on except “The Magic Roundabout” but that was better than no telly at all. As he sat and communed with his medium, an idea was germinating inside his brain, its roots cracking the thin, tight shell and groping forcefully for moisture and minerals. He could give the story to someone else.

Rather out of character? Very much so. A bit like Neil Armstrong saying to Buzz Aldrin, “You do it, I think I’ll stay in and do the ironing,” but the fact remains that Danny was seriously considering it. For all his Bafta-lust, he knew that this was a story that had to be made, and if he couldn’t make it himself, he had no option but to give it to