Flying Dutch полностью

Danny, sitting on the floor surrounded by the wreckage of a chair, stared in horror and relaxed his grip on Harvey’s arm. Suddenly everyone was looking at the Professor, who did something very unexpected. He didn’t fall over.

“Please, Mr Bennett,” he said, removing a flattened bullet from the lapel of his jacket for all the world as if it were a poppy on the day after Armistice Sunday, “I must ask you to be more careful. There could have been an accident, you know.”

Harvey expressed himself rather more vigorously, and placed the barrel of his gun in Danny’s ear. Gradually, everyone resumed their place, and the cat went back to sleep.

“Perhaps,” said the Professor, “I had better explain.”

∨ Flying Dutch ∧

ELEVEN

Not now, Sebastian,” said Vanderdecker, and instinctively ducked. The sound of an invulnerable Dutchman hitting oak planks suggested that Sebastian hadn’t heard him in time.

It’s quite a distinctive sound, and to tell the truth Vanderdecker was heartily sick of it. Day in, day out, the same monotonous clunking. Had he thought about it earlier, Vanderdecker reflected, he could have turned it to some useful purpose. For example, he could have trained Sebastian to make his futile leaps every hour on the hour, and then it wouldn’t matter quite so much when he forgot to wind his watch.

Too late now, however, to make a bad lifetime’s work good. With the sort of deftness that only comes with long practice, he put the irritating thought out of his mind and wondered how Jane was getting on. Had she succeeded in tracking the alchemist down yet? She had thought it would be quite easy, and perhaps it would be; after all, the name Montalban seemed to be familiar to other people beside himself these days. There was the lunatic the crew had fished out of the sea and shown the alchemical plant to, for example; apparently, he’d come up with the same name all of his own accord. Certainly Jane had heard of him. So maybe all she’d have to do would be to look him up in the telephone book. Why didn’t I ever think of that?

So let’s suppose she’s actually managed to deliver the message. What if Montalban wasn’t interested? What if he didn’t come? Come to that, what if he hadn’t actually discovered an antidote to the Smell? That didn’t bear thinking about; nor was it logical. If he was able to pass freely in normal human society, it stood to reason that he’d come up with something that dealt with the problem, even if it was only exceptionally pungent pipe tobacco. Except that they had all tried that, and it was a washout like everything else; and since Matthias had got to like the horrible stuff, there was something else they had all had to learn to put up with.

Now if there’s one other thing we have all had to learn, Vanderdecker said to himself as he leaned on the rail and watched the seagulls veering away in shocked disgust, it’s tolerance. With the exceptions of needled beer and country and western music, we’ve learned to tolerate pretty well everything on the surface of the earth. We don’t mind being spat at, shot at, hosed down with water-cannon, exorcised and thrown out of Berni Inns. We can handle Sebastian’s suicide attempts, Cornelius’s snoring, Johannes’s toenail-clipping, Pieter Pretorius’s whistling, Antonius’s conversation and chess playing, pretty well everything about the cook, with nothing more than a resigned shrug and a little therapeutic muttering. In a world which still hasn’t grown out of killing people for adhering to the wrong religion, political party or football team, this is no small achievement. A bit like Buddhism, Vanderdecker considered, without all that sitting about and humming.

And after all this time, what else would we do? Vanderdecker blew his nose thoughtfully, for this was something he had managed to keep from reflecting on for several centuries. What would it be like not being on this ship, or for that matter not being at all? The second part of that enquiry he could dismiss at once; it’s impossible to imagine not being at all, and probably just as well. But suppose we can somehow get shot of the smell, what would we do?

The Flying Dutchman smiled. It’s typical, of course, he said to himself, that I saw “we” after so many years of all being in the same boat, we poor fools share a collective consciousness that you don’t get anywhere else in the animal kingdom. True, we all dislike each other intensely, or tell ourselves that we do: but the arm probably hates the hand, and no doubt the toes say cutting things about the ankle behind its back. We are the creations, as well as the victims, of our common experience. I can’t see us ever splitting up, or admitting anyone else to our society. Particularly not the latter; by the time we’d all grown used to the newcomer’s own particular habits, he or she would long since have died of old age.