Flying Dutch

“What long words Miss Doland is using,” Vanderdecker replied. “It’s not a bit like that. Hell, you don’t notice, it’s too gradual; it would be like claiming that the turning of the earth made you dizzy. I don’t even feel particularly different, to be honest with you. I think I stopped feeling different when I turned nineteen and stopped growing, and since then I’ve always been the same. It’d be another matter if I’d gone to sleep and then woken up hundreds of years later, but…I guess going on a hovercraft must be like that.”

“Haven’t you ever?”

“What, been on a hovercraft? No fear. Those things are dangerous.”

Jane giggled. “But Julius,” she said, “you’re invulnerable and immortal, nothing’s dangerous to you. You can’t be afraid of hovercraft.”

“Want to bet?”

Jane smiled, and shook her head. Would she be like him in four hundred years or so, or would he always keep this start on her?

“Nice of the Professor to come and see us off, wasn’t it?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“Do you think he ever will get round to finding an antidote?” Vanderdecker grinned. “Eventually,” he said, “maybe. Where’s the hurry?”

“There isn’t one.”

In the distance, the environmentalist action ship Erdkrieger changed course sharply. The ship’s Geiger counter had suddenly started bleeping furiously and playing “Jerusalem” and someone had suggested that the huge ship on the skyline might have something to do with it.

They launched a dinghy and set out to investigate. Business had been slack lately, what with the new initiative (nobody knew where it had started) to phase out nuclear power worldwide, and for once there was no shortage of volunteers.

“Ahoy!” shouted the captain of the Erdkrieger. “You there on the tanker!”

He raised his binoculars and recognised a familiar face.

“Fancy meeting you again,” Vanderdecker replied through the loud-hailer. “How’s saving the world going?”

“Sehr gut,” the German replied. “Is your ship making the radiation?”

“That’s not radiation,” Vanderdecker replied, “not as such. Completely harmless.”

“If that’s so,” said the German, “why are you bright green and glowing slightly?”

“Too much Limberger cheese,” Vanderdecker shouted back. “Come on, you know me. I’m a Friend of the Earth too, you know. Me and the Earth are like that.”

“Okay,” said the German. “Sorry to have troubled you. Auf wiedersehen!”

“Auf wiedersehen!” Vanderdecker called back, and added “idiot” under his breath. He left the bridge and went below to the library. Jane was in the drawing-room, comparing carpet samples. At the moment, she was dead set on a sort of beigy-pink with a faint texture in the pile. As he thought of it, Vanderdecker shuddered, ever so slightly, until he remembered that carpets wear out, eventually, even the best of them. He’d just have to outlive the bugger.

As he walked down the ladder, Vanderdecker paused and looked out over the sea. Very big, the sea, an awful lot of it, like history, or life. The hell with it.

“Skip,” said a voice from above his head. “You got a moment?”

Vanderdecker sighed. “Of course I have, Antonius.” He climbed the ladder again.

“Skip,” Antonius said. “I can’t find the mainmast.”

“There isn’t one.”

“No mainmast?”

“No mainmast. Propellers instead.”

Antonius reflected for a moment. “Skip,” he said.

“Yes?”

“How do you get the sail to stay up on a propeller?”

“You don’t,” Vanderdecker said. “It sits in the water and goes round and round.”

Antonius frowned. “And they call that progress,” he sneered. Vanderdecker smiled at him, nodded, and went below again, banging his head on a low girder as he did so. I’ll get used to it, he thought, in time.

And so he did. And they all lived happily. Ever after.