“Fair enough,” Vanderdecker said. “Now listen, you lot. I’ve been thinking…”
And he explained the idea of the oil-tanker. It was well-received, particularly by Antonius, who had been wondering what was going to happen next. They all had a drink to celebrate. They drank the whisky, the wine, the gin, the brandy, the cherry brandy, the rest of the apple brandy and the sherry. At this point, Danny and the camera crew passed out, leaving Jane, the Flying Dutchman and the crew to drink the vermouth, the Tia Maria, the ouzo, the port, the bourbon, the vodka, the bacardi, the schnapps and the ginger-beer shandy.
“That seems to be the lot,” Vanderdecker said, disappointed. “And not a drop of beer in the whole place.”
“What’s this, Skip?” Antonius asked, holding up a cut-glass decanter. There was no label on it, but it was a pleasant dark golden colour.
“Where did you find that, Antonius?” Vanderdecker asked.
“In this little cabinet thing.”
Vanderdecker sniffed it. “Smells like rum,” he said. “Anyone fancy a drop of rum?”
Everyone, it transpired, fancied a drop of rum. It must have been good rum, because it made them all feel very sleepy.
When they woke up, everyone had headaches, Jane included. From the kitchen came the smell of frying bacon, which made them all feel sick. Slowly, Vanderdecker lifted himself to his feet, looked around to see if he could see where he’d left his head the previous evening, and went into the kitchen to kill whoever was making that horrible smell.
It was Montalban, wearing a striped pinny, frying bacon. He had also made a big pot of coffee, of which Vanderdecker consumed a large quantity straight from the spout.
“Why aren’t you as ill as the rest of us?” he asked the Professor.
“I never get hangovers,” said the Professor.
Vanderdecker scowled. “Clean living, huh?”
“No,” the Professor replied. “I have a little recipe.”
“Gimme.”
The Professor grinned and pointed to a half-full jug on the worktop. “There’s tomato juice and raw egg,” he said, “and mercury and nitric acid and white lead and heavy water. And Worcester sauce,” he added, “to taste.”
Vanderdecker had some and felt much better. “Thanks,” he said. “It was the rum that did it.”
“Rum?”
“Vicious stuff, rum,” Vanderdecker said. “Does horrible things to you.”
“I haven’t got any rum,” Montalban said.
“Not now you haven’t.”
Montalban was looking at him. “No, I never keep any in the house,” he said. “Are you sure it was rum?”
“Well,” Vanderdecker said, “there wasn’t a label on the decanter but it tasted like rum. I think.”
“Which decanter?”
“In a little glass-fronted cabinet thing, by the telephone table,” Vanderdecker said. “Maybe it was calvados, come to think of it, except calvados always gives me heartburn and heartburn was about the only thing I wasn’t suffering from when I woke up just now.”
Montalban was staring now, but not at the bacon, which was burning. “Large cut-glass decanter in a small glass-fronted cabinet,” he said.
“That’s right. Sorry, was it special or something? We just weren’t noticing…”
“That wasn’t rum, I’m afraid,” Montalban said. “That was elixir.”
Vanderdecker’s eyes grew very round and his hands fell to his sides. “You what?” he said.
“Elixir,” Montalban said.
“Oh SHIT,” Vanderdecker replied. “Not again.”
“I’m afraid so,” said the Professor, “yes.”
Vanderdecker’s spine seemed to melt, and he slithered against the worktop, knocking over a glass jar of pearl barley. “You stupid…”
“It’s not my fault,” Montalban protested nervously. “For Heaven’s sake, I’d have thought you and your friends would have learned your lesson by now, really…”
Vanderdecker straightened up, turned his head to the wall and started to bang it furiously on the corner of some shelf units. “Not you,” he said, “me. Antonius. No, me. Oh hell!”
“It’s not,” Montalban said, “exactly the same elixir as well, as last time.”
Vanderdecker stopped pounding his head against the shelves and looked at him. “It isn’t?”
“Well,” said the Professor, “it’s basically the same, but I did make certain changes to the molecular…”
He stopped short, because Vanderdecker’s hands round his windpipe made talking difficult. “Does it make you smell?” Vanderdecker snarled. Montalban said nothing in reply—not for want of trying—but his lips made the necessary movements to shape “No”.
“You sure?” Montalban nodded vigorously, and Vanderdecker let him go.
“But,” he added, as soon as he had breath enough to do so, “it does have side-effects.”
“It does?”
“I fear so.”
Vanderdecker groaned. “Go on,” he said, “tell me.”
“You understand,” Montalban said, first making sure that he had the bulk of a chest freezer between himself and his interlocutor, “that my data is based on necessarily perfunctory and in-complete tests, confined entirely to non-human animal subjects, and that what I say is on a completely without prejudice basis?”
“Tell me.”
“You really must understand that none of this has been proved to the high standards…”
“Tell me,” Vanderdecker said.
“It makes you go bright green.”
“Green?”
Montalban nodded again. “Green,” he confirmed, “and you shine in the dark. There is also an eerie humming noise. Additional limbs are sometimes (although not invariably) acquired, depending on the individual subject’s metabolism and whether or not he is a vertebrate to begin with. Also,” Montalban added quickly as Vanderdecker picked up a biscuit-barrel and drew back his arm, “the effects are strictly temporary.”
“You what?”
“The phenomena I have just described,” Montalban said, “are exhibited in the short term only, for no more than a few weeks at a time. They do, however, recur; like malaria, I suppose, although on a fascinatingly regular basis.”
“How often?”
Montalban shrugged non-committally, and Vanderdecker threw the biscuit-barrel at him. While he was reeling and picking smashed pottery and Bath Olivers out of his hair, Vanderdecker had time to find a spaghetti-jar and flourish it threateningly.
“My best estimate,” Montalban said, “at the present time is that the symptoms manifest themselves on average for two one-month periods in each calendar year. But I should stress,” he said, ignoring the spaghetti jar, “that this is based on observation of a small nest of field-voles, two of which escaped, and the tests only cover a three-year period, which is by any standards…”
“Why?”
“My housekeeper,” Montalban admitted, “is terrified of mice. Green luminous mice especially. So I had to get rid of them. Since they were immortal and invulnerable…”
“That bit still works, does it?”
“Most certainly, yes,” said the Professor. “Since they were immortal and invulnerable and I couldn’t keep them around the house, they are now manning a small space-station in orbit three hundred thousand kilometres above the surface of Mars, providing invaluable data on…”
“I see,” Vanderdecker said. “Green luminous and noisy, and perhaps an extra arm or two. What happens with the arms, by the way?”
“The additional limbs,” said the Professor, “are also temporary.”
