Flying Dutch полностью

The first mate nodded and went away. The coffee-mill was still turning fitfully, but it would soon be still again. Vanderdecker, for his part, was beginning to have his doubts. What if the smell did drive everyone away as soon as they came within smelling distance of the plant? And presumably it wasn’t going to be all that easy getting to see Montalban even if he was till there. He knew that all self-respecting governments are less than happy about the thought of members of the public tripping lightly round nuclear power stations, or even coming near them in a disconcerting manner. Now there was something about the sailing ship Verdomde that many people found highly disconcerting, and although its crew were invulnerable, the ship wasn’t. Not that he felt any great sentimental attachment to his command—far from it; he hated every timber in its nasty, clinker-built frame—but if the Verdomde got blown out of the water by some over-excitable patrol boat, they might have problems in finding another one; or at least one sufficiently primitive that it ran on wind and not oil. Oil is hard to come by when you spend all your time in the middle of the ocean and smell perfectly horrible.

Vanderdecker was still busy worrying himself to death (so to speak) with these and other misgivings when the look-out sighted Duncansby Head. This was Vanderdecker’s cue to get out his charts and his sextant, since there were other perils to navigation in these waters besides patrol-boats; for one thing there were rocks, and also sandbanks, eccentric and malicious tides and sundry other hazards to navigation. It was refreshing to be doing some real sailing again, and the Flying Dutchman’s mind soon became far too full with getting there to contain any worries about what he was going to do as and when he succeeded in this aim.

“If I remember right,” said the captain to the first mate, “there’s a little cove around here somewhere that we can hide up in.”

It was getting dark, and Vanderdecker was worried about shoals. They hadn’t progressed very far with their inch-by-inch search for Dounreay, but progress was necessarily slow because of the need to keep out of sight. Now a good skipper can plot a course that keeps him from being seen from the shore; or he can hug the coastline in such a way as to render himself almost invisible from the open sea. But not both at the same time. As it turned out, the Verdomde was seen by several ships and a fair number of landsmen, but none of them took any notice. They naturally assumed that the fishlinger people were filming yet another commercial, and carried on with their everyday tasks.

Vanderdecker found the cove in the end, just before it became too dark to see anything at all, and the anchor slithered down and hit the water with its usual dull splosh. The crew settled down to sleep, but Vanderdecker was too restless to join them. Somewhere out there he might find the answer to his problem, and although common sense told him that the power station was not something he was likely to overlook, he felt an urge to get off the ship and go and have a look about. He licked his finger to reassure himself that the wind was still out to sea, lowered the boat, and rowed ashore.

A brisk climb brought him to the top of the low, shallow cliff, and he walked down the slope on the other side. To his dismay, he saw a building with lights in the windows, and the wind was changing. No good at all. He set off briskly in the other direction.

How it happened was always a mystery to him. One minute he was walking along the tarmac road, the next minute a car came round the sharp bend, failed to stop, and slammed into him. He went over the bonnet, bounced on the roof, and slid over the hatchback rear end to the ground. The car screeched to a halt (and why the devil couldn’t you have done that in the first place, said the Flying Dutchman under his breath), the door flew open, and the driver came running towards him. Vanderdecker groaned. Whoever this road-hog was, he was going to get the shock of his life just as soon as he next breathed in. Served him right, too.

It wasn’t a he, it was a she. Very much a she, bending over him and looking extremely worried.

“Oh God,” she said, “are you all right?”

Vanderdecker stared in disbelief. Even he could smell it, and he had long since stopped noticing the smell, except when it was at its most virulent. For some reason, contact with dry land tended to make it even more rank and offensive than usual. But this girl didn’t seem to have noticed, or else she was being quite incredibly polite.

“I’m fine,” Vanderdecker said, and stood up to prove it. “Look, no broken bones or anything. You may have shortened the life-expectancy of my trousers a bit but…”