“Thank you. Recently, about sixty years ago, I discovered that intense radiation bombardment can partially reverse the effects of the elixir. Since then, I have been trying to construct a sufficiently powerful atomic generator to provide enough radiation for my purposes. Hence, I’m afraid, the nuclear industry. I must apologise for it, but there was no other way.”
“Quite,” Jane said, rather unsympathetically. “Go on, please.”
“Basically,” said the Professor, “if you put a person who has drunk elixir into the very heart of an atomic reaction, it adjusts the molecular structure. It loosens them up and jiggles them about. But the sort of jiggling I want—jiggling out the smell without jiggling the whole thing out of existence—isn’t easy, and I haven’t quite got it right yet. The obvious difficulty was that radiation is dangerous, and I wasn’t keen on experimenting on myself; nor, for that matter, on anyone else, not even Captain Vanderdecker—even though he got me into this situation in the first place. But then I remembered the cat who had drunk the elixir when I first tested it out, and eventually I tracked it down and acquired it. After some experiments at Dounreay in Scotland, I found that the smell could be temporarily suppressed by prolonged exposure to intense radiation of a certain type; a bit like the modern process of food irradiation. The longest period it’s lasted so far is a month, and soon Percy and I will have to go back for another dose.”
“Percy?”
Montalban flushed slightly. “I call my cat Percy,” he said, “short for Parsifal. The Holy Innocent, you see.”
Jane didn’t see, but wasn’t too bothered. She asked the Professor to continue.
“And that,” he said, “is my work. That is all that concerns me. The Cirencester Group, which has operated from here ever since I first built the house, comprises all the people whose assistance I require—bankers, financiers, public relations people, industrialists, heads of Government agencies…”
“Hold on,” said Danny, whose pen had just run out. “Now, then. What came after bankers?”
“…And, of course, the most important of them all, the Controller of Radio Three. Without these people…”
Danny had dropped his new pen. “What did you just say?”
“Radio Three,” said the Professor. “Without him, the whole system would break down, obviously. Now…”
“Why?” Danny demanded.
“I’m sorry,” Montalban said, “I thought I had explained all that. I said my computer used a system based on musical notation. Now, to all intents and purposes, it
“Such as?” Danny asked.
“Bartok,” replied the Professor, “Mendelssohn, Sibelius, Chopin, Mozart, Elgar, Delius, Handel, Ravel, Schubert, Jelly Roll Morton…”
Danny’s mouth fell open. “You did?”
“Yes indeed.”
“I don’t believe it.”
The Professor smiled. “You’re prepared to believe that I invented the computer and the electric light, but not that I wrote the
The Professor got up and walked over to the rather impressive stereo system. He selected a compact disc and fed it into the machine.
“What’s sixty-six,” he asked Danny, “multiplied by the square root of nineteen, divided by five and squared?”
Danny started counting on his fingers and then gave up. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Here is a pocket calculator,” said the Professor. “You work it out on your machine, while I do it on mine.”.
Danny started pressing buttons, while Montalban played a short snatch from Handel’s
“Yes,” Danny confirmed. The Professor nodded.
“As you can tell by the date of the composition,” he said, “that was one of my first programmes, a simple calculating system. Catchy, though.”
Danny handed the calculator back in stunned silence, and the Professor went on.
