Standing there in her stockinged feet in a sitting room outside Cirencester, Jane Doland had single-handedly solved one of the most inscrutable mysteries of the twentieth century. She knew why they played background music to Ceefax, and the principle by which it was selected.
All she needed to find now was the Professor’s decoder, but that wasn’t going to be easy. Given Montalban’s love of camouflage, it could be anything; the Georgian tea service, the Dresden shepherdess, the ormulu clock, the little black box labelled “Decoder’…”
With trembling hands, she plugged it in and switched it on. As the television set launched into “Thank Heaven For Little Girls”, there was a buzzing noise from the box, a whistling, a hissing, and then a mechanical Dalek voice started to speak.
“Melbourne,” said the voice, “sixteen. Perth nil.”
“Damn,” said Jane, and in a sudden access of fury she snatched up the remote control and dashed it to the floor. There was a snowstorm of coloured lights on the screen, and the news headlines appeared.
Jane peered at them. Latest on Dounreay crisis. Evacuation proceeding in orderly fashion. No cause for alarm as yet. Questions in the House. So that was how Harvey was handling it. How terribly unimaginative of him.
Then she caught the subdued muttering of the Dalek in the black box. It was urging the world to buy. Buy equities, it was saying. Buy gilts. Buy municipal bonds. Buy short-dated government stocks. Buy breweries, industrials, communications, chemicals, entertainments, even unit trusts. Buy.
Jane’s jaw dropped, and then she picked up the remote control, made a wish, and threw it at the wall. She got the City News. So that’s how it’s done.
Share prices, she discovered, were going through the roof. FT All Share Index reaches all time peak. Dow Jones explodes in buying frenzy. Hang Seng hangs loose. What, Jane asked, is going on?
The decoder wasn’t much help this time: it just kept on repeating its command to buy. Buy Czarist government securities. Buy South Sea Company five per cent Unsecured Loan Stock. A fat lot of help the decoder was being. Jane shrugged and went to look for a wireless.
She eventually found a portable in the kitchen and tuned it to Radio Three. We apologise for the continued interruption to the scheduled programme, it was saying, owing to the Dounreay crisis. Meanwhile, we continue with our impromptu Gilbert and Sullivan medley, and now let’s hear “Three Little Maids From School” from the D’Oyly Carte company’s 1956 recording of
The decoder raised its voice to a hysterical scream, conjured the world in the bowels of Christ to buy De Lorean 25p Ordinary Shares, and blew up. Jane shook her head several times, switched off the radio and the television, and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea.
The cat was having a thoroughly rotten time. It was hot, there were no mice, and slabs of pre-stressed concrete kept falling on its head. On the other hand, it had managed to get away from those lunatics with the silly names.
In that ineffably feline way cats have, it arched its back, stretched, flexed its claws and started to stroll quietly, a cat walking by itself. Four centuries of existence had taught it a sort of unthinking optimism. Although the odds against it seemed long, there might be mice somewhere, or birds, or even a decomposing chicken carcass. In this room here, for instance.
In the room there was a table, and on the table was a square white thing which the cat failed to recognise as a computer console. Made of the very latest space-age materials, it had not yet melted. It had been designed to withstand extremes of temperature which would long since have carbonised diamonds. This was necessary, because this was no ordinary playing-video-games computer, but the main instrument panel for the whole complex. Anything that was still capable of working inside this inferno was operated from here.
But the cat wasn’t to know that. To the cat, it looked like a nice place to curl up and sleep. With a delicate little hop, the cat jumped onto the table and made its way to the centre of the console, its velvet-padded paws resting ever so lightly on the many labelled keys. The cat turned round three times, lay down and went to sleep.
“Sebastian!” Vanderdecker yelled. “Over there, to your left.”
Sebastian looked round and saw the little patch of flame which was evidently distressing his commander. He stamped on it until it went out.
They had been at it for hours, and they weren’t making much headway. It was a big building, and most of it was on fire, and it takes time to beat out flames with nothing but your bare hands and feet. Meanwhile the needle on the Professor’s geiger counter (this one was enclosed in a Faberge egg) was slowly creeping higher. Not galloping, just creeping. Not galloping yet.
“Look, Montalban,” Vanderdecker gasped, “are we getting anywhere or not? This is not a time for conventional politeness.”
“I’m afraid not,” the Professor said. “The fire is too widespread. There just isn’t time to put it out this way.”
Vanderdecker nodded. “So?”
“Well,” Montalban replied, “there doesn’t seem to be very much point in our staying here, does there?”
Vanderdecker shook his head vigorously. “The hell with you,” he said. “There has to be something we can do.” He jumped on a patch of fire, more to relieve his feelings than for any other motive.
“Unfortunately…” The Professor was suddenly quiet. The Faberge egg started to tinkle out “The Blue Danube”. “Oh dear,” he muttered sadly.
“Now what?”
“Situation critical,” Montalban replied. “Such a pity.”
“All right, all right,” Vanderdecker shouted, “why don’t you do something for a change instead of going all to pieces like that?” And he looked round for somebody to shout at. Just then, the first mate came up.
“Skip,” he said. “I’ve lost the cat.”
“The what?”
“The cat. The guinea-pig. Whatever.”
“Really?” Vanderdecker growled. “What a bloody cataclysm!”
“All right, let’s go and look for the perishing cat. I’m getting bored just standing here.”
The first mate said that he had last seen it over there, so they went that way. And, in due course, they arrived at the door of the room with the computer console on it.
“What’s in here?” Vanderdecker asked, curiously. “It doesn’t seem as badly damaged as the rest of it all.”
“It’s the computer room,” Montalban replied. “Everything in here is the state of the art in heat-resistance technology.”
“Shoo!”
“Bless you,” Vanderdecker said instinctively, but the Professor wasn’t sneezing. He was getting the cat off the console.
“That explains it,” he said. “That dratted animal has pressed all the wrong buttons.” Montalban typed frantically for a moment, but the needle on the Faberge egg continued to rise and “The Blue Danube” was getting faster and faster. “It’s switched off most of the failsafe mechanisms,” Montalban explained crossly. “You
“So that’s it, is it?” Vanderdecker asked. “There really is nothing we can do?”
“We could leave,” the professor suggested, “before the entire complex blows up, with a force approximately nine hundred times that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs put together. I think in the circumstances that leaving would be extremely prudent.”
“Fine,” Vanderdecker said. “You just shove off, then. I think I’ll stay here for a bit.” He kicked the table.
“Well, goodbye then,” Montalban said, “it was so nice to have seen you again. Do drop in if ever you happen to be passing.”
The Faberge egg had stopped playing “The Blue Danube” and struck up “The Minute Waltz”. Montalban dropped it, screamed, and fled.
“Here, Captain,” said Sebastian. Vanderdecker turned round and looked at him. He was standing by a small door like a safe-deposit box with a lurid black and red skull and crossbones stencilled on it. “Pirates?” he suggested.
