There was a very, very long silence, during which the young German tried to recapture the use of his brain.
“So you’ve been alive since 1553?” he said at last.
“Yes,” said the stranger, “that puts it very neatly. And also in perspective. Is there anything else you want to ask me?”
“No,” said the German. “No, I think you’ve said quite enough.”
“Oh well,” said the stranger. “I seem to have that effect on people. Not,” he went on, “that I tend to tell my story much these days. In fact, you’re the first person in over thirty years I’ve told it to.”
“Well…” the young German started to say; then he thought better of it and decided to stare horribly at the stranger, like a man in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s less cheerful paintings. The stranger seemed to find the silence awkward, and to break the tension he started to speak again.
“Oh yes,” said the stranger, “I’ve had some interesting experiences in my time. Well, fairly interesting. Now you mentioned Napoleon a moment ago. The only time I met Napoleon…”
The young German suddenly jumped up, screamed, and ran away, very fast.
Vanderdecker shook his head and went to the bar for another drink. It had been roughly the same the last time he told the story, when he had landed in Porlock and met the man who was on his way to a wedding. That, he had said to himself, is the last time; but the pleasure of talking to someone new after seven years with Antonius, Johannes, Pieter and Cornelius had gone to his head.
In case you were wondering, the young German made a moderate recovery, after two or three months of careful nursing, and went on to become the composer of such celebrated operatic masterpieces as
∨ Flying Dutch ∧
FOUR
The plump young man is now two years older and an inch and an eighth plumper, and he has become a partner in the firm of Moss Berwick. Oddly enough, there were no comets seen that evening nine weeks ago when Mr Clough and Mr Demaris told him the wonderful, wonderful news; the only possible explanation is that it was a cloudy night, and the celestial announcement was obscured by a mass of unscheduled cumulo-nimbus. These things happen, and all we can do is put up with them.
Although they had made the plump young man (whose name, for what it is worth, was Craig Ferrara) a partner, they had not seen fit to tell him about The Thing. Or at least, they had not told him what it was; they had hinted at its existence, but that was all. For his part, Craig Ferrara had been aware that it existed for some time, ever since he had been allowed access to the computer files generally known in the firm as the Naughty Bits.
Moss Berwick’s computer was a wonderful thing. It lived, nominally, in Slough; but, rather like God, it was omnipresent and of course omniscient. Unlike God, you could telephone it from any one of the firm’s many offices and even, if you were a show-off like Craig Ferrara, from your car. You could ask it questions. Sometimes it would answer and sometimes not, depending on whether it wanted to. Not could, mark you; wanted to. It would take a disproportionate amount of ingenuity to think up a sensible question that the computer couldn’t answer if it wanted to, up to and including John Donne’s famous conversation-killers about where the lost years are and who cleft the Devil’s foot—and this despite the fact that the Devil is not (as yet) a client of Moss Berwick.
But in order to ask the computer high-rolling questions like these, you have to be the right sort of person. Only someone with a Number can get at that part of the computer; all that earthworms like Jane Doland can get out of it is a lot of waffle about the Retail Price Index for March 1985. Not that Jane Doland hadn’t been trying, ever since she came back from Bridport. That, although he didn’t know it, was the main reason why Craig Ferrara had become a partner.
