“After three months we were all so crazy with boredom and mutual loathing that we decided to blow up the ship and ourselves with it. It didn’t do any good, of course. The ship blew up all right, but we didn’t. We floated, and after a while the number of dead fish got so embarrassing we decided we’d better swim on a bit before we wiped out the livelihood of every fisherman in the Atlantic Ocean. After a day or so of nonchalant doggy-paddling we ran into another ship. They must have been downwind of us, because before we’d got within two hundred yards of them they’d taken to the boats and were rowing away as fast as their arms could work the oars. That sort of thing really dents your self-confidence, you can imagine. You begin to despair of making those lasting relationships with people that add the interest to life.”
“Well, after we’d made the new ship comfortable—painted out the name and got it nice and squalid—we sailed on a bit longer and a bit longer still, and we came to a decision. The time had come, we decided, to try and do something about it, rather than tamely giving in. That’s the way we are in Holland; every brick wall you come to has big red marks where people have been beating their heads against it. Now it so happened that when we blew the ship up I had old Fortunatus’ notebooks in the pocket of my doublet, and although the ink had run in a few places they were still legible—I think he’d written them in some kind of incredibly clever new ink, and it makes you wonder why he ever bothered with turning base metals into gold when he had such a fantastically commercial proposition at his fingertips. Anyway, we read through those notebooks until we knew them by heart. We discussed them, argued about them, tried experiment after experiment, even tried reading them upside down; all totally useless, needless to say, but at least it passed the time, and although we didn’t discover an antidote to the elixir we did find out some extremely interesting things along the way. Extremely interesting…I’m sorry, I’m wandering off again. I do tend to do that, I’m afraid. It comes of having nothing to do for long periods of time but talk; it makes you extremely wordy.”
“Where was I? Oh yes. One morning, exactly seven years after we’d first drunk the elixir, we all woke up to find that the smell had actually gone. It was amazing. We were still invulnerable and immortal, of course, but at least we didn’t niff quite so much, and the first thing we did was set course for the nearest land-mass, which happened to be Le Havre. We had all assumed that one of our numerous experiments had finally worked, and that we’d cracked it.”
“We spent the next month getting thrown out of every tavern, inn and brothel in Le Havre, predictably enough, and we were just on the point of saying goodbye to each other and going our separate ways—as you can easily appreciate, after all that time on the ship and what with the smell and everything, we all hated each other so much you wouldn’t credit it—when the first delicate whiff of the Great Pong came filtering through and we knew that we weren’t home and dry after all. We spent a frantic afternoon buying up every drop of beer, every chess-set, every book and every piece of chemical apparatus that we could lay our hands on, and we got back to the ship just before a mob of extremely savage Frenchmen with handkerchiefs in front of their faces threw us into the sea.”
“We were still kidding ourselves that we had found an antidote and that it had worn off, and so we carefully recreated all the experiments we had done in the last seven years, and made scrupulous notes in proper joined-up writing in a big leather-bound book. But when we’d tried everything and nothing had worked, we lost heart and spent a whole year playing shoveha’penny all round the coast of Africa. We did land once or twice, but only for hours at a time, and there is—or was—a tribe in Madagascar that worships us as gods; pretty ceremonies, very heavy on the incense. Now then; seven years after our brief visit to La Havre, the smell stopped again, and we scrambled into Tangier to do our shopping—we wasted a week getting there, what with contrary winds—knowing full well that we had exactly a month before we had to leave. We were right, of course. Three weeks later, the smell came back, and seven years later it went away again. That’s the way the pattern works, and once we’d spent forty-nine years reading up on alchemical theory we all knew why, it was blindingly obvious.”
“We were all pretty good alchemists by then, incidentally, and that’s how we make our living. For eighty-three months in each seven years we turn base metal into gold, and in the remaining month we spend it. That’s the problem with alchemy; it works all right, but compared with simply taking a pick and a shovel and digging the stuff out of the ground it’s hopelessly inefficient. There I go again, digressing. Do please excuse me.”
