“Good, are they?” Danny asked. Cornelius grinned.
“Good?” he chuckled. “Watch this.”
He produced a Zippo from the battered leather pouch that hung from his sword-belt and opened the stove door. Then he messed about with a few of the jars. “Don’t tell the skipper,” he said, “he gets all snotty if I use his gear. But I’ve done it lots of times, it’s like falling off a log.”
“Dangerous, you mean?”
“Easy,” said Cornelius. “You got anything metal on you?”
Danny had a sudden flashback to a children’s party when he was six. There had been a conjuror, and he had ended up with a lot of coloured flags being pulled out of his ears. He pulled himself together and reached in his pocket for his car keys. “Will these do?” he said.
“Fine,” replied Cornelius. He took them and tossed them into the crucible before Danny could stop him. There was a flash of white light and a faint humming noise, like the sound you hear when you stand under an electric pylon.
“Takes about thirty seconds to do all the way through,” Cornelius said. “Beats your fission into a cocked hat, if you ask me.”
Thirty seconds later, Cornelius reached under the stove and produced what looked like a solid gold ladle. With this he extracted the car keys from the crucible and held them under Danny’s nose. They were glowing with the same blue light, and they seemed to have been turned into pure gold. Pure gold car keys. It reminded Danny of the time Gerald had taken him round the Stock Exchange.
“There you go,” Cornelius said, and tipped them out onto Danny’s hand. “Don’t worry, they aren’t hot or anything.”
Danny winced, but he could feel nothing. The blue light faded away. The keys felt unnaturally cold and heavy. Solid gold. What did solid gold feel like?
“Impressive, huh?” said Cornelius.
“Very,” Danny said. He stared at his car keys. In his mind, a strange and terrible alchemy of his own was taking place. All this meaningless garbage was turning into a story; a story about unlicensed, clandestine nuclear experiments on a weird ship manned by lunatics. Story. Story. Story. If only he could get off this dreadful ship and get to a telephone, he would be through with even the distant threat of sports reporting for ever and ever. Until then, however, there was investigative journalism to be done.
“Tell me something,” he said as casually as possible. What was that man’s name? The arch-fiend of the nuclear lobby, the man behind all those goings-on at Dounreay. There had been a protest, he remembered.
“What?”
“Do you know someone, a guy called Montalban? Professor Montalban? He’s into all this alchemy, isn’t he?”
Cornelius’ face split into a huge laugh. “Too right I know Montalban,” he said. “He’s the one who got us into this mess to start with.” Then something seemed to register inside Cornelius’ head. He looked at Danny again; eyes not friendly, not friendly at all. “How come you know Montalban?” he said.
Fortune, it has often been observed, favours the brave. At that particular crucial moment, two boats were approaching the
Danny spotted the motor-boat through an open gunport.
On the one hand, he said to himself, I cannot swim. Never mind.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Cornelius roared at him, and tried to grab his arm; but it was too late. Danny had already squeezed his slight shoulders through the gunport. A moment later he was in the water, bawling for help and thrashing about like a wounded shark. The motor-boat picked him up just before he drowned.
The first thing he saw when his eyes opened was a camera bag with lots of lenses and rolls of film in it. “Press?” he gasped.
“Well, sort of,” said one of his rescuers. “Freelance. Does it really matter, in the circumstances?”
Swing low, sweet chariot, said Danny’s soul inside him. “Listen…” he said.
∨ Flying Dutch ∧
NINE
There you go,” said Mrs Clarke, “I’ve brought you a nice cup of coffee. Don’t let it get cold.”
She put the cup down on the table, next to the other two cups. They were all full of cold coffee, with that pale off-white scum on the top that right-thinking people find so off-putting.
“Thank you,” said the man at the table without looking up. He reached out, located a cup by touch, lifted it to his mouth and drank half of its contents. It was one of the cold ones, but he didn’t seem to notice. Mrs Clarke shuddered and went away. Although she was not a religious woman, she knew where people who let hot drinks go cold went when they died. Back in front of her typewriter she shook her head sadly and wished, not for the first time, that she’d taken the job at the plastics factory instead.
