Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams (1987)

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Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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to my mother,

who liked the bit about the horse

[::: AUTHOR’S NOTE ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The physical descriptions of St Cedd’s College in this book, in so

far as they are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of St

John’s College, Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately

from other colleges as well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in

real life, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at Jesus.

The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious

assemblage, and no correspondence is intended between any institutions

or characters in this book and any real institutions or people, living,

dead, or wandering the night in ghostly torment.

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus

computer and LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing

software.

The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The

Graphics Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image

of the text. My thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help

with this process.

Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for all her

help in nursing this book into existence.

Douglas Adams

London, 1987

[::: CHAPTER 1 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

This time there would be no witnesses.

This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and

the onset of that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by

which so many of the world’s most momentous events seem to be

accompanied.

The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the

floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged

with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom

was a dreary kind of prickle.

Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the

low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a

kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.

It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of

magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at

a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible

than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages

dead.

The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly

along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,

the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.

But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was

not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering

deep within it.

The light was only just visible -- except of course that there was

no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a

light. Every few minutes it grew a little stronger and a little

brighter and then faded slowly away almost to nothing. At the same time

a low keening noise drifted out on the wind, built up to a kind of

wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, away.

Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile

light. It emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit

of the tower, pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the

shadowy figure that could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared

inside once more.

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The

world seemed dead, the night a blankness.

And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this time

growing in power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of

brightness it had previously attained, and then kept going, increasing,

increasing. The keening sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and

stridency until it became a wailing scream. The scream screamed on and

on till it became a blinding noise and the light a deafening redness.

And then, abruptly, both ceased.

There was a millisecond of silent darkness.

An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within

the mud beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud

convulsed, earth and sky bellowed at each other, there was a horrible

pinkness, a sudden greenness, a lingering orangeness that stained the

clouds, and then the light sank and the night at last was deeply,

hideously dark. There was no further sound other than the soft tinkle

of water.

But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on a

day that was, or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be if

there had been anybody there to whom it could seem to be anything at

all, warmer, clearer and brighter -- an altogether livelier day than

any yet known. A clear river ran through the shattered remains of the

valley.

And time began seriously to pass.

[::: CHAPTER 2 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.

From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into

another valley, with which it was having a problem.

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down

upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not

even the Monk. The horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to

try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a

video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving

you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched

tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it

yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what

was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the

things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had

started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was

even beginning to believe things they’d have difficulty believing in

Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor

had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of

miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed

that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including

the Monk itself and the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.

This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from

any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere

impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility

of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with

a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that

this was one of the silliest.

How long did the Monk believe these things?

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which

moves mountains, or at least believes them against all the available

evidence to be pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock

against which the world could hurl whatever it would, yet it would not

be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, twenty-four hours was usually

about its lot.

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was

sceptical about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? An

unusual horse perhaps?

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of

its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as

convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to

be found. They have always understood a great deal more than they let

on. It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other

creature, without forming an opinion about them.

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every

day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought

about them whatsoever.

When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be

important that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects.

There must be no danger of their looking at all like real people. You

wouldn’t want your video recorder lounging around on the sofa all day

while it was watching TV. You wouldn’t want it picking its nose,

drinking beer and sending out for pizzas.

So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and

also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People,

and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were

held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes

of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given

was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of

crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, but

were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two.

A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the

most preposterous things.

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to

believe in one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video

recorder that was watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this

caused it to blow a bank of illogic circuits. The video recorder only

had to watch them, of course. It didn’t have to believe them all as

well. This is why instruction manuals are so important.

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good

was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a

lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe

that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then

broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new

motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus

models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking

Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen

entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously

without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and

at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for

less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.

That was it. Done.

The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could

believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done

by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to

make.

For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be

three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven

hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric

trust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant-

asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock,

overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of the

Monk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit.

Time passed.

[::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Time passed.

Susan waited.

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the

phone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time

that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already,

of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. They were

well and truly into his time now, and even allowing for traffic,

mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, it was now well over

half an hour past the time that he had insisted was the latest time

they could possibly afford to leave, so she’d better be ready.

She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but

didn’t believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him,

though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If

nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Now

there was an idea.

She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news on

television. The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control and

watched something on another channel for a bit. She didn’t know what it

was, but it also made her cross. Perhaps she should phone. She was

damned if she was going to phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phone

her at the same moment and not be able to get through.

She refused to admit that she had even thought that.

Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She didn’t,

that was for sure.

Three times in a row he’d done this. Three times in a row was

enough. She angrily flipped channels one more time. There was a

programme about computers and some interesting new developments in the

field of things you could do with computers and music.

That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself

that that was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real

ultimate it.

She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping an angry

Filofax. She flipped briskly through it and dialed a number.

‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call

you if I was free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a

ditch, remember? Well, I suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely,

completely and utterly free, and there isn’t a decent ditch for miles

around. Make your move while you’ve got your chance is my advice to

you. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’

She pulled on her shoes and coat, paused when she remembered that it

was Thursday and that she should put a fresh, extra-long tape on the

answering machine, and two minutes later was out of the front door.

When at last the phone did ring the answering machine said sweetly that

Susan Way could not come to the phone just at the moment, but that if

the caller would like to leave a message, she would get back to them as

soon as possible. Maybe.

[::: CHAPTER 4 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type.

The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night

like this. It rose unwillingly and hung like an ill spectre.

Silhouetted against it, dim and hazy through the dampness which rose

from the unwholesome fens, stood the assorted towers and turrets of St

Cedd’s, Cambridge, a ghostly profusion of buildings thrown up over

centuries, medieval next to Victorian, Odeon next to Tudor. Only rising

through the mist did they seem remotely to belong to one another.

Between them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool of light

to another, shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which folded

themselves into the cold night behind them.

It was seven o’clock. Many of the figures were heading for the

college dining hall which divided First Court from Second Court, and

from which warm light, reluctantly, streamed. Two figures in particular

seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even

muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted

heron.

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly

restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from

a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate.

If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than

that, but -- well, it was impossible to tell. Certainly his face was

heavily lined, and the small amount of hair that escaped from under his

red woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much its own ideas

about how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled inside a

heavy coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with very faded purple

trim, the badge of his unique and peculiar academic office.

As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He was

pointing at items of interest along the way, despite the fact that it

was too dark to see any of them. The younger man was saying ‘Ah yes,’

and ‘Really? How interesting...’ and ‘Well, well, well,’ and ‘Good

heavens.’ His head bobbed seriously.

They entered, not through the main entrance to the hall, but through

a small doorway on the east side of the court. This led to the Senior

Combination Room and a dark-panelled anteroom where the Fellows of the

college assembled to slap their hands and make ‘brrrrrr’ noises before

making their way through their own entrance to the High Table.

They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This was

complicated for the older man by the necessity first of taking off his

professorial gown, and then of putting it back on again once his coat

was off, then of stuffing his hat in his coat pocket, then of wondering

where he’d put his scarf, and then of realising that he hadn’t brought

it, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his handkerchief, then of

fishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and finally of

finding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turned

out he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the damp

and bitter wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens.

He bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and they took

the last two vacant seats at the High Table, braving a flurry of frowns

and raised eyebrows for interrupting the Latin grace to do so.

Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with the

undergraduates in the colder months. More unusually, the hall was

candlelit, as it was now only on very few special occasions. Two long,

crowded tables stretched off into the glimmering darkness. By

candlelight, people’s faces were more alive, the hushed sounds of their

voices, the clink of cutlery and glasses, seemed more exciting, and in

the dark recesses of the great hall, all the centuries for which it had

existed seemed present at once. High Table itself formed a crosspiece

at the top, and was raised about a foot above the rest. Since it was a

guest night, the table was set on both sides to accommodate the extra

numbers, and many diners therefore sat with their backs to the rest of

the hall.

‘So, young MacDuff,’ said the Professor once he was seated and

flapping his napkin open, ‘pleasure to see you again, my dear fellow.

Glad you could come. No idea what all this is about,’ he added, peering

round the hall in consternation. ‘All the candles and silver and

business. Generally means a special dinner in honour of someone or

something no one can remember anything about except that it means

better food for a night.’

He paused and thought for a moment, and then said, ‘It seems odd,

don’t you think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely

with the brightness of the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary

heights the kitchen staff could rise to if you confined them to

perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I think. Got some good vaults

in the college that could be turned over to the purpose. I think I

showed you round them once, hmmm? Nice brickwork.’

All this came as something of a relief to his guest. It was the

first indication his host had given that he had the faintest

recollection who he was. Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius

Professor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on being called had a

memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra

Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hither

and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.

When he had telephoned with the invitation a few days previously, he

had seemed extremely keen to see his former pupil, and yet when Richard

had arrived this evening, a little on the late side, admittedly, the

Professor had thrown open the door apparently in anger, had started in

surprise on seeing Richard, demanded to know if he was having emotional

problems, reacted in annoyance to being reminded gently that it was now

ten years since he had been Richard’s college tutor, and finally agreed

that Richard had indeed come for dinner, whereupon he, the Professor,

had started talking rapidly and at length about the history of the

college architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere entirely.

‘Reg’ had never actually taught Richard, he had only been his

college tutor, which meant in short that he had had charge of his

general welfare, told him when the exams were and not to take drugs,

and so on. Indeed, it was not entirely clear if Reg had ever taught

anybody at all and what, if anything, he would have taught them. His

professorship was an obscure one, to say the least, and since he

dispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honoured

technique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustive

list of books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirty

years, then flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no one

had ever discovered the precise nature of his academic discipline. He

had, of course, long ago taken the precaution of removing the only

extant copies of the books on his reading list from the university and

college libraries, as a result of which he had plenty of time to, well,

to do whatever it was he did.

Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well with the

old fruitcake, he had one day plucked up courage to ask him what,

exactly, the Regius Professorship of Chronology was. It had been one of

those light summery days when the world seems about to burst with

pleasure at simply being itself, and Reg had been in an

uncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked over the

bridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college from

the newer.

‘Sinecure, my dear fellow, an absolute sinecure,’ he had beamed. ‘A

small amount of money for a very small, or shall we say non-existent,

amount of work. That puts me permanently just ahead of the game, which

is a comfortable if frugal place to spend your life. I recommend it.’

He leaned over the edge of the bridge and started to point out a

particular brick that he found interesting. ‘But what sort of study is

it supposed to be?’ Richard had pursued. ‘Is it history? Physics?

Philosophy? What?’

‘Well,’ said Reg, slowly, ‘since you’re interested, the chair was

originally instituted by King George III, who, as you know, entertained

a number of amusing notions, including the belief that one of the trees

in Windsor Great Park was in fact Frederick the Great.

‘It was his own appointment, hence “Regius”. His own idea as well,

which is somewhat more unusual.’

Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shouted

at each other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent months

locked away in their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking

into the light. Couples walking along the bank got so excited about the

general wonderfulness of it all that they had to pop inside for an

hour.

‘The poor beleaguered fellow,’ Reg continued, ‘George III, I mean,

was, as you may know, obsessed with time. Filled the palace with

clocks. Wound them incessantly. Sometimes would get up in the middle of

the night and prowl round the palace in his nightshirt winding clocks.

He was very concerned that time continued to go forward, you see. So

many terrible things had occurred in his life that he was terrified

that any of them might happen again if time were ever allowed to slip

backwards even for a moment. A very understandable fear, especially if

you’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatest

sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. He appointed me, or

rather I should say, my office, this professorship, you understand, the

post that I am now privileged to hold to -- where was I? Oh yes. He

instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any

particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was

any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were,

I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take

the rest of my career off.’

‘And your predecessors?’

‘Er, were much of the same mind.’

‘But who were they?’

‘Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid to a man.

Remind me to tell you about them some day. See that brick? Wordsworth

was once sick on that brick. Great man.’

All that had been about ten years ago.

Richard glanced around the great dining hall to see what had changed

in the time, and the answer was, of course, absolutely nothing. In the

dark heights, dimly seen by the flickering candlelight, were the

ghostly portraits of prime ministers, archbishops, political reformers

and poets, any of whom might, in their day, have been sick on that same

brick.

‘Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if

introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, ‘I hear you’ve

suddenly done very well for yourself, at last, hmmm?’

‘Er, well, yes, in fact,’ said Richard, who was as surprised at the

fact as anybody else, ‘yes, I have.’

Around the table several gazes stiffened on him.

‘Computers,’ he heard somebody whisper dismissively to a neighbour

further down the table. The stiff gazes relaxed again, and turned

away.

‘Excellent,’ said Reg. ‘I’m so pleased for you, so pleased.’

‘Tell me,’ he went on, and it was a moment before Richard realised

that the Professor wasn’t talking to him any more, but had turned to

the right to address his other neighbour, ‘what’s all this about,

this,’ he flourished a vague hand over the candles and college silver,

‘...stuff?’

His neighbour, an elderly wizened figure, turned very slowly and

looked at him as if he was rather annoyed at being raised from the dead

like this.

‘Coleridge,’ he said in a thin rasp, ‘it’s the Coleridge Dinner you

old fool.’ He turned very slowly back until he was facing the front

again. His name was Cawley, he was a Professor of Archaeology and

Anthropology, and it was frequently said of him, behind his back, that

he regarded it not so much as a serious academic study, more as a

chance to relive his childhood.

‘Ah, is it,’ murmured Reg, ‘is it?’ and turned back to Richard.

‘It’s the Coleridge Dinner,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Coleridge was a

member of the college, you know,’ he added after a moment. ‘Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor. Poet. I expect you’ve heard of him. This is his Dinner.

Well, not literally, of course. It would be cold by now.’ Silence.

‘Here, have some salt.’

‘Er, thank you, I think I’ll wait,’ said Richard, surprised. There

was no food on the table yet.

‘Go on, take it,’ insisted the Professor, proffering him the heavy

silver salt cellar.

Richard blinked in bemusement but with an interior shrug he reached

to take it. In the moment that he blinked, however, the salt cellar had

completely vanished.

He started back in surprise.

‘Good one, eh?’ said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet from

behind the ear of his deathly right-hand neighbour, provoking a

surprisingly girlish giggle from somewhere else at the table. Reg

smiled impishly. ‘Very irritating habit, I know. It’s next on my list

for giving up after smoking and leeches.’

Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick

their noses, others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’s

vice was a harmless if peculiar one -- an addiction to childish

conjuring tricks. Richard remembered the first time he had been to see

Reg with a problem -- it was only the normal /Angst/ that periodically

takes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when they have essays

to write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the time. Reg

had sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown of

concentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he pondered

seriously, stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward and

looked him in the eye.

‘I suspect that your problem,’ he said, ‘is that you have too many

paper clips up your nose.’

Richard stared at him.

‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ said Reg, and leaning across the desk he

pulled from Richard’s nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a small

rubber swan.

‘Ah, the real culprit,’ he said, holding up the swan. ‘They come in

cereal packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I’m glad

we’ve had this little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturb

me again if you have any more such problems.’

Needless to say, Richard didn’t.

Richard glanced around the table to see if there was anybody else he

recognised from his time at the college.

Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s

Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him

at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three

years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a

beard and pretending to be someone else.

Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify.

Neither, in fact, had anyone else. He was thin and vole-like and had

the most extraordinarily long bony nose -- it really was very, very

long and bony indeed. In fact it looked a lot like the controversial

keel which had helped the Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983,

and this resemblance had been much remarked upon at the time, though

not of course to his face. No one had said anything to his face at all.

No one.

Ever.

Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and

embarrassed by his nose to speak, and the second time was worse because

of the first time, and so on. Years had gone by now, seventeen in all.

In all that time he had been cocooned in silence. In hall it had long

been the habit of the college servants to position a separate set of

salt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, since no one could ask

him to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other side of him

was not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose being

in the way.

The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made and

repeated regularly throughout every evening. They consisted of tapping

each of the fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of the

fingers of his right hand. He would then occasionally tap some other

part of his body, a knuckle, an elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forced

to stop this by the requirements of eating he would start blinking each

of his eyes instead, and occasionally nodding. No one, of course, had

ever dared to ask him why he did this, though all were consumed with

curiosity.

Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him.

In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin,

the Classics Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity. His

heavy rimless glasses were almost solid cubes of glass within which his

eyes appeared to lead independent existences like goldfish. His nose

was straight enough and ordinary, but beneath it he wore the same beard

as Clint Eastwood. His eyes gazed swimmingly around the table as he

selected who was going to be spoken at tonight. He had thought that his

prey might be one of the guests, the newly appointed Head of Radio

Three, who was sitting opposite -- but unfortunately he had already

been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor of

Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the

phrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of those

three words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any

sentence which contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered

meaningless and could not, consequently, be advanced as part of an

argument in favour of any given programme-scheduling strategy. The poor

man was already beginning to grip his cutlery too tightly. His eyes

darted about desperately looking for rescue, and made the mistake of

lighting on those of Watkin.

‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the most

friendly way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowl

of newly arrived soup, from which position it would not allow itself to

be moved. Yet. Let the bugger suffer a little. He wanted the rescue to

be worth at least a good half dozen radio talk fees.

Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little

girlish giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick. Astonishingly

enough it was a little girl. She was about eight years old with blonde

hair and a glum look. She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at

the table leg.

‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise.

‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise.

Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. ‘The

girl,’ he whispered, ‘the very, very little girl. Is it some new maths

professor?’

Reg peered round at her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘I

haven’t the faintest idea. Never known anything like it. How

extraordinary.’

At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who

suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his

neighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table.

She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air with

redoubled vigour. He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked

him. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her

glum evening, but it didn’t last. Her father briefly shared with the

table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but

nobody felt able to run with the topic.

‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of

course clearly long overdue. I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to

remedying this situation at the first opportunity.’

‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er,

that is... he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’

The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father looked

sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at

him.

‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could.

‘When, then?’

‘Later. Maybe. Later, we’ll see.’

She hunched grumpily back in her seat. ‘You always say later,’ she

mouthed at him.

‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg. ‘There isn’t a don at this table who

doesn’t behave exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.’ Their soup

arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard’s.

‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of

spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was

not a taste explosion, ‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap. Something

to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music. I

thought you read English when you were here -- though only, I realise,

in your spare time.’ He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of

his soup spoon. ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before Richard even had a

chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some sort of

computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?’

‘Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of

electric abacus, but...’

‘Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg. ‘In skilled

hands it’s a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it

requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and

never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.’

‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard.

‘True enough,’ conceded Reg.

‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t

do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard,

‘but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-

witted pupil.’

Reg looked at him quizzically.

‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said.

‘I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’

‘I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of

trying to teach anything to anybody?’

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval

from up and down the table.

Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to

understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone

else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more

slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down

into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of

programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into

little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly

learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more

than the pupil. Isn’t that true?’

‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a low

growl from somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontal

lobotomy.’

‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K

machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but

what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the

machine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own word

processor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would take

about three hours.’

‘I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?’

‘Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were

absolutely fascinating. For instance, I discovered that...’

He broke off, laughing at himself.

‘I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,’ he added.

‘That didn’t help.’

‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg. ‘Your past has murkier things

in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares

with this soup.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully. ‘I

must go and have a word with the kitchen staff one day. I would like to

be sure that they are keeping the right bits and throwing the proper

bits away. So. A rock group, you say. Well, well, well. Good heavens.’

‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band,

but in fact we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the

early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than

the Beatles ever did, which was basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t.

I left Cambridge and starved for three years.’

‘But didn’t I bump into you during that period,’ said Reg, ‘and you

said you were doing very well?’

‘As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on the

roads. More than enough, I felt, to support an entire career. However,

I got the sack for sweeping the mess on to another sweeper’s patch.’

Reg shook his head. ‘The wrong career for you, I’m sure. There are

plenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapid

preferment.’

‘I tried a few -- none of them much grander, though. And I kept none

of them very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly.

I’d be found asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets -

- depending on what the job was. Been up all night with the computer

you see, teaching it to play “Three Blind Mice”. It was an important

goal for me.’

‘I’m sure,’ agreed Reg. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the college servant

who took his half-finished plate of soup from him, ‘thank you very

much. “Three Blind Mice”, eh? Good. Good. So no doubt you succeeded

eventually, and this accounts for your present celebrated status. Yes?’

‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.’

‘I feared there might be. Pity you didn’t bring it with you though.

It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently having

our dull and crusty company forced upon her. A swift burst of “Three

Blind Mice” would probably do much to revive her spirits.’ He leaned

forward to look past his two right-hand neighbours at the girl, who was

still sitting sagging in her chair.

‘Hello,’ he said.

She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swinging

her legs again.

‘Which do you think is worse,’ enquired Reg, ‘the soup or the

company?’

She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down.

‘I think you’re wise not to commit yourself at this stage,’

continued Reg. ‘Myself, I’m waiting to see the carrots before I make

any judgements. They’ve been boiling them since the weekend, but I fear

it may not be enough. The only thing that could possibly be worse than

the carrots is Watkin. He’s the man with the silly glasses sitting

between us. My name’s Reg, by the way. Come over and kick me when you

have a moment.’ The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who

stiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good-

naturedly.

‘/Well/, little girl,’ he said to her awkwardly, and she had

desperately to suppress a hoot of laughter at his glasses. Little

conversation therefore ensued, but the girl had an ally, and began to

enjoy herself a tiny little bit. Her father gave her a relieved smile.

Reg turned back to Richard, who said, suddenly, ‘Do you have any

family?’

‘Er... no,’ said Reg, quietly. ‘But tell me. After “Three Blind

Mice”, what then?’

‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for

WayForward Technologies...’

‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way. Tell me, what’s he like?’

Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probably

because he was asked it so often.

‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press. I like

him a lot, actually. Like any driven man he can be a bit trying at

times, but I’ve known him since the very early days of the company when

neither he nor I had a bean to our names. He’s fine. It’s just that

it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you

possess an industrial-grade answering machine.’

‘What? Why’s that?’

‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s

talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will

listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is

increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well.

He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose

sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned,

transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in

a blue folder.’

‘A blue one, eh?’

‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richard

with a shrug.

Reg considered this. ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorder

because he doesn’t like talking to himself,’ he said. ‘There is a logic

there. Of a kind.’

He took a mouthful of his newly arrived /porc au poivre/ and

ruminated on it for a while before gently laying his knife and fork

aside again for the moment.

‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in all

this?’

‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the

Apple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing,

powerful, easy to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what he

wanted in it, and he just said, “Everything. I want the top piece of

all-singing, all-dancing business software for that machine.” And being

of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I took him literally.

‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can

be used to map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process -- and so

on. And any set of company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of

numbers. So I sat down and wrote a program that’ll take those numbers

and do what you like with them. If you just want a bar graph it’ll do

them as a bar graph, if you want them as a pie chart or scatter graph

it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you want dancing

girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention from

the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do

that as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock

of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the

wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each

division of your company. Great for producing animated corporate logos

that actually /mean/ something.

‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company

accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.

Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over

it.’

Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised

delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.

‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a

sequence or pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard. ‘Numbers can express

the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and

lengths.’

‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.

Richard grinned.

‘Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that.’

‘It would help you speak more easily.’ Reg returned the carrot to

his plate, untasted. ‘And this software did well, then?’ he asked.

‘Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies

emerged sounding like the Dead March from /Saul/, but in Japan they

went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company

anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d

probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.

Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing,

commercially. Though the thing that’s interesting me most now is what

happens if you leave the accounts out of it. Turn the numbers that

represent the way a swallow’s wings beat directly into music. What

would you hear? Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Reg, ‘quite fascinating,’ and popped the carrot

at last into his mouth. He turned and leaned forward to speak to his

new girlfriend.

‘Watkin loses,’ he pronounced. ‘The carrots have achieved a new all-

time low. Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the carrots, I’m afraid,

are world-beaters.’

The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled at him.

Watkin was trying to take all this good-naturedly, but it was clear as

his eyes swam at Reg that he was more used to discomfiting than being

discomfited.

‘Please, Daddy, can I now?’ With her new-found, if slight,

confidence, the girl had also found a voice.

‘Later,’ insisted her father.

‘This is already later. I’ve been timing it.’

‘Well...’ He hesitated, and was lost.

‘We’ve been to Greece,’ announced the girl in a small but awed

voice.

‘Ah, have you indeed,’ said Watkin, with a little nod. ‘Well, well.

Anywhere in particular, or just Greece generally?’

‘Patmos,’ she said decisively. ‘It was beautiful. I think Patmos is

the most beautiful place in the whole world. Except the ferry never

came when it said it would. Never, ever. I timed it. We missed our

flight but I didn’t mind.’

‘Ah, Patmos, I see,’ said Watkin, who was clearly roused by the

news. ‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the

Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world,

are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of

true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of

course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction.

Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I

think so.’

She frowned at him.

‘I found a pot,’ she said.

‘Probably nothing,’ interrupted her father hastily. ‘You know the

way it is. Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks

they’ve found a pot, don’t they? Ha, ha.’

There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true.

‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water. While we were

waiting for the damn ferry.’

‘Sarah! I’ve told you...’

‘It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I

didn’t think you knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was

meant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it was

a proper ancient Greek thing or not. I think it’s /very/ old. Will you

please let them see it, Daddy?’

Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his

chair.

‘Did you know, young lady,’ said Watkin to her, ‘that the Book of

Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the

Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been

written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off,

doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you’re killing

time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then

gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find

that very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.’ He

nodded at her.

She looked at him as if he were mad.

‘Well, here it is,’ said her father, plonking the thing down on the

table. ‘Just a pot, as you see. She’s only six,’ he added with a grim

smile, ‘aren’t you, dear?’

‘Seven,’ said Sarah.

The pot was quite small, about five inches high and four inches

across at its widest point. The body was almost spherical, with a very

narrow neck extending about an inch above the body. The neck and about

half of the surface area were encrusted with hard-caked earth, but the

parts of the pot that could be seen were of a rough, ruddy texture.

Sarah took it and thrust it into the hands of the don sitting on her

right.

‘You look clever,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think.’

The don took it, and turned it over with a slightly supercilious

air. ‘I’m sure if you scraped away the mud from the bottom,’ he

remarked wittily, ‘it would probably say “Made in Birmingham”.’

‘That old, eh?’ said Sarah’s father with a forced laugh. ‘Long time

since anything was made there.’

‘Anyway,’ said the don, ‘not my field, I’m a molecular biologist.

Anyone else want to have a look?’

This question was not greeted with wild yelps of enthusiasm, but

nevertheless the pot was passed from hand to hand around the far end of

the table in a desultory fashion. It was goggled at through pebble

glasses, peered at through horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, and

squinted at by someone who had left his glasses in his other suit,

which he very much feared had now gone to the cleaner’s. No one seemed

to know how old it was, or to care very much. The young girl’s face

began to grow downhearted again.

‘Sour lot,’ said Reg to Richard. He picked up a silver salt cellar

again and held it up.

‘Young lady,’ he said, leaning forward to address her.

‘Oh, not again, you old fool,’ muttered the aged archaeologist

Cawley, sitting back and putting his hands over his ears.

‘Young lady,’ repeated Reg, ‘regard this simple silver salt cellar.

Regard this simple hat.’

‘You haven’t got a hat,’ said the girl sulkily.

‘Oh,’ said Reg, ‘a moment please,’ and he went and fetched his

woolly red one.

‘Regard,’ he said again, ‘this simple silver salt cellar. Regard

this simple woolly hat. I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and I

pass the hat to you. The next part of the trick, dear lady... is up to

you.’

He handed the hat to her, past their two intervening neighbours,

Cawley and Watkin. She took the hat and looked inside it.

‘Where’s it gone?’ she asked, staring into the hat.

‘It’s wherever you put it,’ said Reg.

‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘I see. Well... that wasn’t very good.’

Reg shrugged. ‘A humble trick, but it gives me pleasure,’ he said,

and turned back to Richard. ‘Now, what were we talking about?’

Richard looked at him with a slight sense of shock. He knew that the

Professor had always been prone to sudden and erratic mood swings, but

it was as if all the warmth had drained out of him in an instant. He

now wore the same distracted expression Richard had seen on his face

when first he had arrived at his door that evening, apparently

completely unexpected. Reg seemed then to sense that Richard was taken

aback and quickly reassembled a smile.

‘My dear chap!’ he said. ‘My dear chap! My dear, dear chap! What was

I saying?’

‘Er, you were saying “My dear chap”.’

‘Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something. A sort of short

toccata on the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior to

introducing the main subject of my discourse, the nature of which I

currently forget. You have no idea what I was about to say?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew exactly

what I was going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it,

would there? Now, how’s our young guest’s pot doing?’

In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced himself no expert on

what the ancients had made for themselves to drink out of, only on what

they had written as a result. He said that Cawley was the one to whose

knowledge and experience they should all bow, and attempted to give the

pot to him.

‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘yours was the knowledge and experience to

which we should bow. Oh, for heaven’s sake, take your hands off your

ears and have a look at the thing.’

Gently, but firmly, he drew Cawley’s right hand from his ear,

explained the situation to him once again, and handed him the pot.

Cawley gave it a cursory but clearly expert examination.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about two hundred years old, I would think. Very

rough. Very crude example of its type. Utterly without value, of

course.’

He put it down peremptorily and gazed off into the old minstrel

gallery, which appeared to anger him for some reason.

The effect on Sarah was immediate. Already discouraged, she was

thoroughly downcast by this. She bit her lip and threw herself back

against her chair, feeling once again thoroughly out of place and

childish. Her father gave her a warning look about misbehaving, and

then apologised for her again.

‘Well, Buxtehude,’ he hurried on to say, ‘yes, good old Buxtehude.

We’ll have to see what we can do. Tell me...’

‘Young lady,’ interrupted a voice, hoarse with astonishment, ‘you

are clearly a magician and enchantress of prodigious powers!’

All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off. He was gripping the pot

and staring at it with manic fascination. He turned his eyes slowly to

the little girl, as if for the first time assessing the power of a

feared adversary.

‘I bow to you,’ he whispered. ‘I, unworthy though I am to speak in

the presence of such a power as yours, beg leave to congratulate you on

one of the finest feats of the conjurer’s art it has been my privilege

to witness!’

Sarah stared at him with widening eyes.

‘May I show these people what you have wrought?’ he asked earnestly.

Very faintly she nodded, and he fetched her formerly precious, but

now sadly discredited, pot a sharp rap on the table.

It split into two irregular parts, the caked clay with which it was

surrounded falling in jagged shards on the table. One side of the pot

fell away, leaving the rest standing.

Sarah’s eyes goggled at the stained and tarnished but clearly

recognisable silver college salt cellar, standing jammed in the remains

of the pot.

‘Stupid old fool,’ muttered Cawley.

After the general disparagement and condemnation of this cheap

parlour trick had died down -- none of which could dim the awe in

Sarah’s eyes -- Reg turned to Richard and said, idly:

‘Who was that friend of yours when you were here, do you ever see

him? Chap with an odd East European name. Svlad something. Svlad

Cjelli. Remember the fellow?’

Richard looked at him blankly for a moment.

‘Svlad?’ he said. ‘Oh, you mean Dirk. Dirk Cjelli. No. I never

stayed in touch. I’ve bumped into him a couple of times in the street

but that’s all. I think he changes his name from time to time. Why do

you ask?’

[::: CHAPTER 5 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

High on his rocky promontory the Electric Monk continued to sit on a

horse which was going quietly and uncomplainingly spare. From under its

rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into the valley, with

which it was having a problem, but the problem was a new and hideous

one to the Monk, for it was this -- Doubt.

He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it gnawed at the

very root of his being.

The day was hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down

upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not

even the Monk. But strange things were beginning to fizz in its brain,

as they did from time to time when a piece of data became misaddressed

as it passed through its input buffer.

But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously at first,

but then with a great searing white flame of belief which overturned

all previous beliefs, including the stupid one about the valley being

pink, that somewhere down in the valley, about a mile from where he was

sitting, there would shortly open up a mysterious doorway into a

strange and distant world, a doorway through which he might enter. An

astounding idea.

Astoundingly enough, however, on this one occasion he was perfectly

right.

The horse sensed that something was up.

It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head. It had gone into a

sort of trance looking at the same clump of rocks for so long, and was

on the verge of imagining them to be pink itself. It shook its head a

little harder.

A slight twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk’s heels and

they were off, picking their way carefully down the rocky incline. The

way was difficult. Much of it was loose shale -- loose brown and grey

shale, with the occasional brown and green plant clinging to a

precarious existence on it. The Monk noticed this without

embarrassment. It was an older, wiser Monk now, and had put childish

things behind it. Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all

natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true

enlightenment.

The sun beat hard on them. The Monk wiped the sweat and dust off its

face and paused, leaning forward on the horse’s neck. It peered down

through the shimmering heat haze at a large outcrop of rock which stood

out on to the floor of the valley. There, behind that outcrop, was

where the Monk thought, or rather passionately believed to the core of

its being, the door would appear. It tried to focus more closely, but

the details of the view swam confusingly in the hot rising air.

As it sat back in its saddle, and was about to prod the horse

onward, it suddenly noticed a rather odd thing.

On a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that the Monk

was surprised not to have noticed it before, was a large painting. The

painting was crudely drawn, though not without a certain stylish sweep

of line, and seemed very old, possibly very, very old indeed. The paint

was faded, chipped and patchy, and it was difficult to discern with any

clarity what the picture was. The Monk approached the picture more

closely. It looked like a primitive hunting scene.

The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures were clearly early

hunters. They carried rough spears, and were in hot pursuit of a large

horned and armoured creature, which appeared to have been wounded in

the hunt already. The colours were now so dim as to be almost non-

existent. In fact, all that could be clearly seen was the white of the

hunters’ teeth, which seemed to shine with a whiteness whose lustre was

undimmed by the passage of what must have been many thousands of years.

In fact they even put the Monk’s own teeth to shame, and he had cleaned

them only that morning.

The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only in pictures

or on the TV, never in real life. They were usually to be found in

caves where they were protected from the elements, otherwise they would

not have survived.

The Monk looked more carefully at the immediate environs of the rock

wall and noticed that, though not exactly in a cave, it was

nevertheless protected by a large overhang and was well sheltered from

the wind and rain. Odd, though, that it should have managed to last so

long. Odder still that it should appear not to have been discovered.

Such cave paintings as there were were all famous and familiar images,

but this was not one that he had ever seen before.

Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made. Perhaps

if he were to return to the city and announce this discovery he would

be welcomed back, given a new motherboard after all and allowed to

believe -- to believe -- believe what? He paused, blinked, and shook

his head to clear a momentary system error.

He pulled himself up short.

He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way

to... to...

The Door was The Way.

Good.

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you

didn’t have a good answer to.

Brusquely he tugged the horse’s head round and urged it onward and

downward. Within a few minutes more of tricky manoeuvring they had

reached the valley floor, and he was momentarily disconcerted to

discover that the fine top layer of dust that had settled on the brown

parched earth was indeed a very pale brownish pink, particularly on the

banks of the sluggish trickle of mud which was all that remained, in

the hot season, of the river that flowed through the valley when the

rains came. He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust and run

it through his fingers. It was very fine and soft and felt pleasant as

he rubbed it on his skin. It was about the same colour, perhaps a

little paler.

The horse was looking at him. He realised, a little belatedly

perhaps, that the horse must be extremely thirsty. He was extremely

thirsty himself, but had tried to keep his mind off it. He unbuckled

the water flask from the saddle. It was pathetically light. He

unscrewed the top and took one single swig. Then he poured a little

into his cupped hand and offered it to the horse, who slurped at it

greedily and briefly.

The horse looked at him again.

The Monk shook his head sadly, resealed the bottle and replaced it.

He knew, in that small part of his mind where he kept factual and

logical information, that it would not last much longer, and that,

without it, neither would they. It was only his Belief that kept him

going, currently his Belief in The Door.

He brushed the pink dust from his rough habit, and then stood

looking at the rocky outcrop, a mere hundred yards distant. He looked

at it not without a slight, tiny trepidation. Although the major part

of his mind was firm in its eternal and unshakeable Belief that there

would be a Door behind the outcrop, and that the Door would be The Way,

yet the tiny part of his brain that understood about the water bottle

could not help but recall past disappointments and sounded a very tiny

but jarring note of caution.

If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then he could

continue to believe in it forever. It would be the lodestone of his

life (what little was left of it, said the part of his brain that knew

about the water bottle).

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to the Door and it

wasn’t there... what then?

The horse whinnied impatiently.

The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of

circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the

very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever

the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of Belief?

The Door would still be there, even if the door was not.

He pulled himself together. The Door would be there, and he must now

go to it, because The Door was The Way.

Instead of remounting his horse, he led it. The Way was but a short

way, and he should enter the presence of the Door in humility.

He walked, brave and erect, with solemn slowness. He approached the

rocky outcrop. He reached it. He turned the corner. He looked.

The Door was there.

The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised.

The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment. So braced was he

for dealing with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that,

though he would never know to admit it, he was completely unprepared

for this. He stared at The Door in sheer, blank system error.

It was a door such as he had never seen before. All the doors he

knew were great steel-reinforced things, because of all the video

recorders and dishwashers that were kept behind them, plus of course

all the expensive Electric Monks that were needed to believe in it all.

This one was simple, wooden and small, about his own size. A Monk-size

door, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass knob slightly

less than halfway up one side. It was set simply in the rock face, with

no explanation as to its origin or purpose.

Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to his

feet and, leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it. He

reached out and touched it. He was so startled when no alarms went off

that he jumped back. He touched it again, more firmly this time.

He let his hand drop slowly to the handle -- again, no alarms. He

waited to be sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently. He felt a

mechanism release. He held his breath. Nothing. He drew the door

towards him, and it came easily. He looked inside, but the interior was

so dim in contrast with the desert sun outside that he could see

nothing. At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, pulling the

horse in after him.

A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sight

around the next outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face,

stood up, stretched his limbs and made his way back towards the door,

patting his clothes as he did so.

[::: CHAPTER 6 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:’

The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds

that a sense of the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted

by reading it in a silly voice. He soared and swooped at the words

until they seemed to duck and run for cover.

‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.’

Richard relaxed back into his seat. The words were very, very

familiar to him, as they could not help but be to any English graduate

of St Cedd’s College, and they settled easily into his mind.

The association of the college with Coleridge was taken very

seriously indeed, despite the man’s well-known predilection for certain

recreational pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, his

greatest work, was composed, in a dream.

The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the college

library, and it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of the

Coleridge Dinner, that the poem was read.

‘So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’

Richard wondered how long it took. He glanced sideways at his former

Director of Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness of

his reading posture. The singsong voice irritated him at first, but

after a while it began to lull him instead, and he watched a rivulet of

wax seeping over the edge of a candle that was burning low now and

throwing a guttering light over the carnage of dinner.

‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’

The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself during

the course of the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon his

own mind began to wander, and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in the

meal, he wondered what had lately become of his former... was friend

the word? He seemed more like a succession of extraordinary events than

a person. The idea of him actually having friends as such seemed not so

much unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like the idea of

the Suez crisis popping out for a bun.

Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was

hardly right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated

about, those too were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a

serious accident on the motorway might be popular -- everyone slows

down to have a good look, but no one will get too close to the flames.

Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, infamously known as Dirk.

He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats.

That is to say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore,

but he wore it with a passion that was rare in one so young. The hat

was dark red and round, with a very flat brim, and it appeared to move

as if balanced on gimbals, which ensured its perfect horizontality at

all times, however its owner moved his head. As a hat it was a

remarkable rather than entirely successful piece of persona!

decoration. It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely and

flattering, if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise.

People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied

about himself, but what the source of these stories might be, if not

his own denials, was never entirely clear.

The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedly

inherited from his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, had

lived at the smarter end of Transylvania. That is to say, he didn’t

make any such claim at all, and said it was the most absurd nonsense.

He strenuously denied that there were bats of any kind at all in his

family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such malicious

fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy

leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are

supposed to help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. He

would allow people to discover him hanging from this machine at all

kinds of odd hours of the day, and more particularly of the night,

expressly so that he could vigorously deny that it had any significance

whatsoever.

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of

the most exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth

that he was a psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant,

psychosassic vampire bat.

What did ‘psychosassic’ mean?

It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything

at all.

‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted...’

Dirk had also been perpetually broke. This would change.

It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow called

Mander, who, if the truth were known, had probably been specially

selected by Dirk for his credulity.

Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he would

talk in his sleep. Not only that, but the sort of things he would say

in his sleep would be things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes to

the mumble mumble burble was the turning point for the growth of empire

in the snore footle mumble. Discuss.’

‘...like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’

The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed.

This was shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirk

had just said, or judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a very

likely question in the Economic History paper.

Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened very

hard, but other than a few completely disconnected mumblings about

Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian war, the latter being

largely directed by Dirk into his pillow, he learned nothing more.

News, however, spread -- quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire.

‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.’

For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined and

dined in the hope that he would sleep very soundly that night and

dream-speak a few more exam questions. Remarkably, it seemed that the

better he was fed, and the finer the vintage of the wine he was given

to drink, the less he would tend to sleep facing directly into his

pillow.

His scheme, therefore, was to exploit his alleged gifts without ever

actually claiming to have them. In fact he would react to stories about

his supposed powers with open incredulity, even hostility.

‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!’

Dirk was also, he denied, a clairaudient. He would sometimes hum

tunes in his sleep that two weeks later would turn out to be a hit for

someone. Not too difficult to organise, really.

In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary

to support these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did was

allow people’s enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him. The

laziness was essential -- if his supposed feats of the paranormal had

been detailed and accurate, then people might have been suspicious and

looked for other explanations. On the other hand, the more vague and

ambiguous his ‘predictions’ the more other people’s own wishful

thinking would close the credibility gap.

Dirk never made much out of it -- at least, he appeared not to. In

fact, the benefit to himself, as a student, of being continually wined

and dined at other people’s expense was more considerable than anyone

would expect unless they sat down and worked out the figures.

And, of course, he never claimed -- in fact, he actively denied --

that any of it was even remotely true.

He was therefore well placed to execute a very nice and tasty little

scam come the time of finals.

‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’

‘Good heavens...!’ Reg suddenly seemed to awake with a start from

the light doze into which he had gently slipped under the influence of

the wine and the reading, and glanced about himself with blank

surprise, but nothing had changed. Coleridge’s words sang through a

warm and contented silence that had settled on the great hall. After

another quick frown, Reg settled back into another doze, but this time

a slightly more attentive one.

‘A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.’

Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firm

prediction about what questions would be set for examination that

summer.

He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort of

thing that he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do,

though in many ways he would like to, just to have the chance to

disprove his alleged and strongly disavowed abilities.

And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared, that he eventually

agreed -- only because it would once and for all scotch the whole silly

-- immensely, tediously silly -- business. He would make his

predictions by means of automatic writing under proper supervision, and

they would then be sealed in an envelope and deposited at the bank

until after the exams.

Then they would be opened to see how accurate they had been /after/

the exams.

He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes from a

pretty hefty number of people to let them see the predictions he had

written down, but he was absolutely shocked by the idea. That, he said,

would be /dishonest/...

‘Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’

Then, a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen around

town wearing something of a vexed and solemn expression. At first he

waved aside enquiries as to what it was that was bothering him, but

eventually he let slip that his mother was going to have to undergo

some extremely expensive dental work which, for reasons that he refused

to discuss, would have to be done privately, only there wasn’t the

money.

From here, the path downward to accepting donations for his mother’s

supposed medical expenses in return for quick glances at his written

exam predictions proved to be sufficiently steep and well-oiled for him

to be able to slip down it with a minimum of fuss.

Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could perform

this mysterious dental operation was an East European surgeon now

living in Malibu, and it was in consequence necessary to increase the

level of donations rather sharply.

He still denied, of course, that his abilities were all that they

were cracked up to be, in fact he denied that they existed at all, and

insisted that he would never have embarked on the exercise at all if it

wasn’t to disprove the whole thing -- and also, since other people

seemed, at their own risk, to have a faith in his abilities that he

himself did not, he was happy to indulge them to the extent of letting

them pay for his sainted mother’s operation.

He could only emerge well from this situation.

Or so he thought.

‘And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means of automatic

writing, he had, in fact, pieced together simply by doing the same

minimum research that any student taking exams would do, studying

previous exam papers, and seeing what, if any, patterns emerged, and

making intelligent guesses about what might come up. He was pretty sure

of getting (as anyone would be) a strike rate that was sufficiently

high to satisfy the credulous, and sufficiently low for the whole

exercise to look perfectly innocent.

As indeed it was.

What completely blew him out of the water, and caused a furore which

ended with him being driven out of Cambridge in the back of a Black

Maria, was the fact that all the exam papers he sold turned out to be

the same as the papers that were actually set.

Exactly. Word for word. To the very comma.

‘Wave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise...’

And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports which

exposed him as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so that

they could have another round of exposing him as a fraud again and then

trumpeting him as the real thing again, until they got bored and found

a nice juicy snooker player to harass instead, was that.

In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time

and had usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that

wants to know if you think it owes you money before it blossoms into

one that hopes you will lend it some. Dirk’s regular name changes

suggested to Richard that he wasn’t alone in being treated like this.

He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly

alive within the small confines of a university community should have

seemed to fade so much in the light of common day. And he wondered at

Reg’s asking after him like that, suddenly and out of the blue, in what

seemed altogether too airy and casual a manner.

He glanced around him again, at his lightly snoring neighbour, Reg;

at little Sarah rapt in silent attention; at the deep hall swathed in

darkly glimmering light; at the portraits of old prime ministers and

poets hung high in the darkness with just the odd glint of candlelight

gleaming off their teeth; at the Director of English Studies standing

reading in his poetry-reading voice; at the book of ‘Kubla Khan’ that

the Director of English Studies held in his hand; and finally,

surreptitiously, at his watch. He settled back again.

The voice continued, reading the second, and altogether stranger

part of the poem...

[::: CHAPTER 7 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way’s life, and he

was wondering if the rain would hold off for the weekend. The forecast

had said changeable -- a misty night tonight followed by bright but

chilly days on Friday and Saturday with maybe a few scattered showers

towards the end of Sunday when everyone would be heading back into

town.

Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way.

The weather forecast hadn’t mentioned that, of course, that wasn‘t

the job of the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty

misleading as well. It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary

activity in his sign and had urged him to differentiate between what he

thought he wanted and what he actually needed, and suggested that he

should tackle emotional or work problems with determination and

complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention that he would

be dead before the day was out.

He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a small

filling station for some petrol, where he sat for a moment, finishing

off a call on his car phone.

‘OK, look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or maybe later

tonight. Or call me. I should be at the cottage in half an hour. Yes, I

know how important the project is to you. All right, I know how

important it is, full stop. You want it, I want it. Of course I do. And

I’m not saying that we won’t continue to support it. I’m just saying

it’s expensive and we should look at the whole thing with determination

and complete honesty. Look, why don’t you come out to the cottage, and

we can talk it through. OK, yeah, yes, I know. I understand. Well,

think about it, Kate. Talk to you later. Bye.’

He hung up and continued to sit in his car for a moment.

It was a large car. It was a large silver-grey Mercedes of the sort

that they use in advertisements, and not just advertisements for

Mercedes. Gordon Way, brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff,

was a rich man, the founder and owner of WayForward Technologies II.

WayForward Technologies itself had of course gone bust, for the usual

reason, taking his entire first fortune with it.

Luckily, he had managed to make another one.

The ‘usual reason’ was that he had been in the business of computer

hardware when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly got

bored with boxes that went bing. His second fortune had been made in

software instead. As a result of two major pieces of software, one of

which was /Anthem/ (the other, more profitable one had never seen the

light of day), WFT-II was the only British software company that could

be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. companies as

Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines of

‘WayForward Technologies, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft

or Lotus...’ but it was a start. WayForward was in there. And he owned

it.

He pushed a tape into the slot on the stereo console. It accepted it

with a soft and decorous click, and a moment or two later Ravel’s

/Boléro/ floated out of eight perfectly matched speakers with fine-

meshed matte-black grilles. The stereo was so smooth and spacious you

could almost sense the whole ice-rink. He tapped his fingers lightly on

the padded rim of the steering wheel. He gazed at the dashboard.

Tasteful illuminated figures and tiny, immaculate lights gazed dimly

back at him. After a while he suddenly realised this was a self service

station and got out to fill the tank.

This took a minute or two. He stood gripping the filler nozzle,

stamping his feet in the cold night air, then walked over to the small

grubby kiosk, paid for the petrol, remembered to buy a couple of local

maps, and then stood chatting enthusiastically to the cashier for a few

minutes about the directions the computer industry was likely to take

in the following year, suggesting that parallel processing was going to

be the key to really intuitive productivity software, but also strongly

doubting whether artificial intelligence research /per se/,

particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLog

language, was really going to produce any serious commercially viable

products in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desk

top environment was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not

at all.

‘The man just liked to talk,’ he would later tell the police. ‘Man,

I could have walked away to the toilet for ten minutes and he would’ve

told it all to the till. If I’d been fifteen minutes the till would

have walked away too. Yeah, I’m sure that’s him,’ he would add when

shown a picture of Gordon Way. ‘I only wasn’t sure at first because in

the picture he’s got his mouth closed.’

‘And you’re absolutely certain you didn’t see anything else

suspicious?’ the policeman insisted. ‘Nothing that struck you as odd in

any way at all?’

‘No, like I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an ordinary

night, just like any other night.’

The policeman stared at him blankly. ‘Just for the sake of

argument,’ he went on to say, ‘if I were suddenly to do this...’ -- he

made himself go cross-eyed, stuck his tongue out of the corner of his

mouth and danced up and down twisting his fingers in his ears -- ‘would

anything strike you about that?’

‘Well, er, yeah,’ said the cashier, backing away nervously. ‘I’d

think you’d gone stark raving mad.’

‘Good,’ said the policeman, putting his notebook away. ‘It’s just

that different people sometimes have a different idea of what “odd”

means, you see, sir. If last night was an ordinary night just like any

other night, then I am a pimple on the bottom of the Marquess of

Queensbury’s aunt. We shall be requiring a statement later, sir. Thank

you for your time.’

That was all yet to come.

Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled back

towards his car. Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathered

a finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it, and looked like -- well,

it looked like an extremely expensive Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caught

himself, just for a millisecond, wishing that he had something like

that, but he was now quite adept at fending off that particular line of

thought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling depressed

and confused.

He patted it in a proprietorial manner, then, walking around it,

noticed that the boot wasn’t closed properly and pushed it shut. It

closed with a good healthy clunk. Well, that made it all worth it,

didn’t it? Good healthy clunk like that. Old-fashioned values of

quality and workmanship. He thought of a dozen things he had to talk to

Susan about and climbed back into the car, pushing the auto-dial code

on his phone as soon as the car was prowling back on to the road.

‘...so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as

soon as possible. Maybe.’

/Beep./

‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ he said, cradling the phone awkwardly

on his shoulder. ‘Just on my way to the cottage. It’s er, Thursday

night, and it’s, er... 8.47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I have

those people from the States coming over this weekend to thrash out the

distribution on /Anthem/ Version 2.00, handling the promotion, all that

stuff, and look you know I don’t like to ask you this sort of thing,

but you know I always do anyway, so here it is.

‘I just need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean /really/ on

the case. I can ask him, and he says, Oh sure, it’s fine, but half the

time -- shit, that lorry had bright lights, none of these bastard lorry

drivers ever dips them properly, it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead in

the ditch, that would be something, wouldn’t it, leaving your famous

last words on somebody’s answering machine, there’s no reason why these

lorries shouldn’t have automatic light-activated dipper switches. Look,

can you make a note for me to tell Susan -- not you, of course,

secretary Susan at the office -- to tell her to send a letter from me

to that fellow at the Department of the Environment saying we can

provide the technology if he can provide the legislation? It’s for the

public good, and anyway he owes me a favour plus what’s the point in

having a CBE if you can’t kick a little ass? You can tell I’ve been

talking to Americans all week.

‘That reminds me, God, I hope I remembered to pack the shotguns.

What is it with these Americans that they’re always so mad to shoot my

rabbits? I bought them some maps in the hope that I can persuade them

to go on long healthy walks and take their minds off shooting rabbits.

I really feel quite sorry for the creatures. I think I should put one

of those signs on my lawn when the Americans are coming, you know, like

they have in Beverly Hills, saying `Armed Response’.

‘Make a note to Susan, would you please, to get an `Armed Response’

sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the right height for

rabbits to see. That’s secretary Susan at the office not you, of

course.

‘Where was I?

‘Oh yes. Richard and /Anthem/ 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to be

in beta testing in two weeks. He tells me it’s fine. But every time I

see him he’s got a picture of a sofa spinning on his computer screen.

He says it’s an important concept, but all I see is furniture. People

who want their company accounts to sing to them do not want to buy a

revolving sofa. Nor do I think he should be turning the erosion

patterns of the Himalayas into a flute quintet at this time.

‘And as for what Kate’s up to, Susan, well, I can’t hide the fact

that I get anxious at the salaries and computer time it’s eating up.

Important long-term research and development it might be, but there is

also the possibility, only a possibility, I’m saying, but nevertheless

a possibility which I think we owe it to ourselves fully to evaluate

and explore, which is that it’s a lemon. That’s odd, there’s a noise

coming from the boot, I thought I’d just closed it properly.

‘Anyway, the main thing’s Richard. And the point is that there’s

only one person who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting the

important work done, or if he’s just dreaming, and that one person is,

I’m afraid, Susan.

‘That’s you, I mean, of course, not secretary Susan at the office.

‘So can you, I don’t like to ask you this, I really don’t, can you

really get on his case? Make him see how important it is? Just make

sure he realises that WayForward Technologies is meant to be an

expanding commercial business, not an adventure playground for crunch-

heads. That’s the problem with crunch-heads -- they have one great idea

that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them

for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their

navels. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the boot

properly. Won’t be a moment.’

He put the telephone down on the seat beside him, pulled over on to

the grass verge, and got out. As he went to the boot, it opened, a

figure rose out of it, shot him through the chest with both barrels of

a shotgun and then went about its business.

Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to

his astonishment at what happened next.

[::: CHAPTER 8 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘Come in, dear fellow, come in.’

The door to Reg’s set of rooms in college was up a winding set of

wooden stairs in the corner of Second Court, and was not well lit, or

rather it was perfectly well lit when the light was working, but the

light was not working, so the door was not well lit and was,

furthermore, locked. Reg was having difficulty in finding the key from

a collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja warrior could

hurl through the trunk of a tree.

Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors, like

airlocks, and like airlocks they are fiddly to open. The outer door is

a sturdy slab of grey painted oak, with no features other than a very

narrow slit for letters, and a Yale lock, to which suddenly Reg at last

found the key.

He unlocked it and pulled it open. Behind it lay an ordinary white-

panelled door with an ordinary brass doorknob.

‘Come in, come in,’ repeated Reg, opening this and fumbling for the

light switch. For a moment only the dying embers of a fire in the stone

grate threw ghostly red shadows dancing around the room, but then

electric light flooded it and extinguished the magic. Reg hesitated on

the threshold for a moment, oddly tense, as if wishing to be sure of

something before he entered, then bustled in with at least the

appearance of cheeriness.

It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently shabby

furniture contrived to fill quite comfortably. Against the far wall

stood a large and battered old mahogany table with fat ugly legs, which

was laden with books, files, folders and teetering piles of papers.

Standing in its own space on the desk, Richard was amused to note, was

actually a battered old abacus.

There was a small Regency writing desk standing nearby which might

have been quite valuable had it not been knocked about so much, also a

couple of elegant Georgian chairs, a portentous Victorian bookcase, and

so on. It was, in short, a don’s room. It had a don’s framed maps and

prints on the walls a threadbare and faded don’s carpet on the floor,

and it looked as if little had changed in it for decades, which was

probably the case because a don lived in it.

Two doors led out from either end of the opposite wall, and Richard

knew from previous visits that one led to a study which looked much

like a smaller and more intense version of this room -- larger clumps

of books, taller piles of paper in more imminent danger of actually

falling, furniture which, however old and valuable, was heavily marked

with myriad rings of hot tea or coffee cups, on many of which the

original cups themselves were probably still standing.

The other door led to a small and rather basically equipped kitchen,

and a twisty internal staircase at the top of which lay the Professor’s

bedroom and bathroom.

‘Try and make yourself comfortable on the sofa,’ invited Reg,

fussing around hospitably. ‘I don’t know if you’ll manage it. It always

feels to me as if it’s been stuffed with cabbage leaves and cutlery.’

He peered at Richard seriously. ‘Do you have a good sofa?’ he enquired.

‘Well, yes.’ Richard laughed. He was cheered by the silliness of the

question.

‘Oh,’ said Reg solemnly. ‘Well, I wish you’d tell me where you got

it. I have endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found a

comfortable one in all my life. How do you find yours?’ He encountered,

with a slight air of surprise, a small silver tray he had left out with

a decanter of port and three glasses.

‘Well, it’s odd you should ask that,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve never sat

on it.’

‘Very wise,’ insisted Reg earnestly, ‘very, very wise.’ He went

through a palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat.

‘Not that I wouldn’t like to,’ said Richard. ‘It’s just that it’s

stuck halfway up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat.

As far as I can make it out, the delivery men got it part way up the

stairs, got it stuck, turned it around any way they could, couldn’t get

it any further, and then found, curiously enough, that they couldn’t

get it back down again. Now, that should be impossible.’

‘Odd,’ agreed Reg. ‘I’ve certainly never come across any

irreversible mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have

you spoken to any spatial geometricians?’

‘I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to

be able to solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step

and stared at it for over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably

stuck. Admittedly he’s a few years older now and has found out about

girls, but it’s got me puzzled.’

‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let me

know first if there’s anything I can get you. Port perhaps? Or brandy?

The port I think is the better bet, laid down by the college in 1934,

one of the finest vintages I think you’ll find, and on the other hand I

don’t actually have any brandy. Or coffee? Some more wine perhaps?

There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking for an excuse to open,

though it should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour or two,

which is not to say that I couldn’t... no,’ he said hurriedly,

‘probably best not to go for the Margaux tonight.’

‘Tea is what I would really like,’ said Richard, ‘if you have some.’

Reg raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I have to drive home.’

‘Indeed. Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen. Please

carry on, I shall still be able to hear you. Continue to tell me of

your sofa, and do feel free in the meantime to sit on mine. Has it been

stuck there for long?’

‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down. ‘I could

just saw it up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’t

a logical answer. And it also made me think -- it would be really

useful to know before you buy a piece of furniture whether it’s

actually going to fit up the stairs or around the corner. So I’ve

modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer -- and so far

it just says no way.’

‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle.

‘That it can’t be done. I told it to compute the moves necessary to

get the sofa out, and it said there aren’t any. I said “What?” and it

said there aren’t any. I then asked it, and this is the really

mysterious thing, to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa into

its present position in the first place, and it said that it couldn’t

have got there. Not without fundamental restructuring of the walls. So,

either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of the

matter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrong

with the program. Which would you guess?’

‘And are you married?’ called Reg.

‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. A sofa stuck on the stairs for a

month. Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl

that I’m not married to.’

‘What’s she like? What does she do?’

‘She’s a professional cellist. I have to admit that the sofa has

been a bit of a talking point. In fact she’s moved back to her own flat

until I get it sorted out. She, well...’

He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room in

a desultory sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire. He

gave it a bit of a poke and threw on a couple of extra logs to try and

ward off the chill of the room.

‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last. ‘But they are

very different. I’m not sure she really approves of computers very

much. And she doesn’t much like his attitude to money. I don’t think I

entirely blame her, actually, and she doesn’t know the half of it.’

‘Which is the half she doesn’t know?’

Richard sighed.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s to do with the project which first made the

software incarnation of the company profitable. It was called /Reason/,

and in its own way it was sensational.’

‘What was it?’

‘Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many

of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there

have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at

decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so

that they then point naturally towards the right decision. The drawback

with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and

analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.’

‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen.

‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed

you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and

only then to give it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was

able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a

plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with

the conclusion.

‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to

buy himself a Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke

and a hopeless driver. Even his bank manager was unable to find fault

with his reasoning. Even when Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’

‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’

‘No. We never sold a single copy.’

‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’

‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought

up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on

a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other

hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve

recently been analysing a lot of the arguments put forward in favour of

the Star Wars project, and if you know what you’re looking for, the

pattern of the algorithms is very clear.

‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the

last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is

using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason

only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that.’

‘Do you have a copy?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Richard, ‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with

it. Anyway, when the Pentagon bought everything, they bought

everything. Every scrap of code, every disk, every notebook. I was glad

to see the back of it. If indeed we have. I just busy myself with my

own projects.’

He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing here when

he had so much work on. Gordon was on at him continually about getting

the new, super version of /Anthem/ ready for taking advantage of the

Macintosh II, and he was well behind with it. And as for the proposed

module for converting incoming Dow Jones stock-market information into

MIDI data in real time, he’d only meant that as a joke, but Gordon, of

course, had flipped over the idea and insisted on its being

implemented. That too was meant to be ready but wasn’t. He suddenly

knew exactly why it was he was here.

Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn’t see why

Reg had been quite so keen to see him. He picked up a couple of books

from the table. The table obviously doubled as a dining table, because

although the piles looked as if they had been there for weeks, the

absence of dust immediately around them showed that they had been moved

recently.

Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with someone

different can become as urgent as any other need when you live in a

community as enclosed as a Cambridge college was, even nowadays. He was

a likeable old fellow, but it was clear from dinner that many of his

colleagues found his eccentricities formed rather a rich sustained diet

-- particularly when they had so many of their own to contend with. A

thought about Susan nagged him, but he was used to that. He flipped

through the two books he’d picked up.

One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the hauntings of

Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England. Its spine was

getting raggedy, and the photographic plates were so grey and blurry as

to be virtually indistinguishable. A picture he thought must be a very

lucky (or faked) shot of a ghostly apparition turned out, when he

examined the caption, to be a portrait of the author.

The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence was a

guide to the Greek islands. He thumbed through it idly and a piece of

paper fell out.

‘Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?’ called out Reg. ‘Or Darjeeling? Or

PG Tips? It’s all tea bags anyway, I’m afraid. And none of them very

fresh.’

‘Darjeeling will do fine,’ replied Richard, stooping to pick up the

piece of paper.

‘Milk?’ called Reg.

‘Er, please.’

‘One lump or two?’

‘One, please.’

Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing as he did so

that it had a hurriedly scribbled note on it. The note said, oddly

enough, ‘Regard this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple

hat.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Er, what?’ said Richard, startled. He put the book hurriedly back

on the pile.

‘Just a tiny joke of mine,’ said Reg cheerily, ‘to see if people are

listening.’ He emerged beaming from the kitchen carrying a small tray

with two cups on it, which he hurled suddenly to the floor. The tea

splashed over the carpet. One of the cups shattered and the other

bounced under the table. Reg leaned against the door frame, white-faced

and staring.

A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard was too

startled to react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to help. But the

old man was already apologising and offering to make him another cup.

Richard helped him to the sofa.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Richard helplessly. ‘Shall I get a

doctor?’

Reg waved him down. ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted, ‘I’m perfectly

well. Thought I heard, well, a noise that startled me. But it was

nothing. Just overcome with the tea fumes, I expect. Let me just catch

my breath. I think a little, er, port will revive me excellently. So

sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ He waved in the general direction

of the port decanter. Richard hurriedly poured a small glass and gave

it to him.

‘What kind of noise?’ he asked, wondering what on earth could shock

him so much.

At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and an

extraordinary kind of heavy breathing noise.

‘That...’ whispered Reg. The glass of port lay shattered at his

feet. Upstairs someone seemed to be stamping. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Well, yes.’

This seemed to relieve the old man.

Richard looked nervously up at the ceiling. ‘Is there someone up

there?’ he asked, feeling this was a lame question, but one that had to

be asked.

‘No,’ said Reg in a low voice that shocked Richard with the fear it

carried, ‘no one. Nobody that should be there.’

‘Then...’

Reg was struggling shakily to his feet, but there was suddenly a

fierce determination about him.

‘I must go up there,’ he said quietly. ‘I must. Please wait for me

here.’

‘Look, what is this?’ demanded Richard, standing between Reg and the

doorway. ‘What is it, a burglar? Look, I’ll go. I’m sure it’s nothing,

it’s just the wind or something.’ Richard didn’t know why he was saying

this. It clearly wasn’t the wind, or even anything like the wind,

because though the wind might conceivably make heavy breathing noises,

it rarely stamped its feet in that way.

‘No,’ the old man said, politely but firmly moving him aside, ‘it is

for me to do.’

Richard followed him helplessly through the door into the small

hallway, beyond which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden staircase led

up from here; the steps seemed damaged and scuffed.

Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at the top

of the stairwell, and he looked up it with grim apprehension.

‘Wait here,’ he said, and walked up two steps. He then turned and

faced Richard with a look of the most profound seriousness on his face.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘that you have become involved in what is...

the more difficult side of my life. But you are involved now,

regrettable though that may be, and there is something I must ask you.

I do not know what awaits me up there, do not know exactly. I do not

know if it is something which I have foolishly brought upon myself with

my... my hobbies, or if it is something to which I have fallen an

innocent victim. If it is the former, then I have only myself to blame,

for I am like a doctor who cannot give up smoking, or perhaps worse

still, like an ecologist who cannot give up his car -- if the latter,

then I hope it may not happen to you.

‘What I must ask you is this. When I come back down these stairs,

always supposing of course that I do, then if my behaviour strikes you

as being in any way odd, if I appear not to be myself, then you must

leap on me and wrestle me to the ground. Do you understand? You must

prevent me from doing anything I may try to do.’

‘But how will I know?’ asked an incredulous Richard. ‘Sorry I don’t

mean it to sound like that, but I don’t know what...?’

‘You will know,’ said Reg. ‘Now please wait for me in the main room.

And close the door.’

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Richard stepped back and did as he

was asked. From inside the large untidy room he listened to the sound

of the Professor’s tread mounting the stairs one at a time.

He mounted them with a heavy deliberation, like the ticking of a

great, slow clock.

Richard heard him reach the top landing. There he paused in silence.

Seconds went by, five, maybe ten, maybe twenty. Then came again the

heavy movement and breath that had first so harrowed the Professor.

Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The chill of

the room oppressed and disturbed him. He shook his head to try and

shake off the feeling, and then held his breath as the footsteps

started once again slowly to traverse the two yards of the landing and

to pause there again.

After only a few seconds, this time Richard heard the long slow

squeak of a door being opened inch by inch, inch by cautious inch,

until it must surely now at last be standing wide agape.

Nothing further seemed to happen for a long, long time.

Then at last the door closed once again, slowly.

The footsteps crossed the landing and paused again. Richard backed a

few slight paces from the door, staring fixedly at it. Once more the

footsteps started to descend the stairs, slowly, deliberately and

quietly, until at last they reached the bottom. Then after a few

seconds more the door handle began to rotate. The door opened and Reg

walked calmly in.

‘It’s all right, it’s just a horse in the bathroom,’ he said

quietly.

Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground.

‘No,’ gasped Reg, ‘no, get off me, let me go, I’m perfectly all

right, damn it. It’s just a horse, a perfectly ordinary horse.’ He

shook Richard off with no great difficulty and sat up, puffing and

blowing and pushing his hands through his limited hair. Richard stood

over him warily, but with great and mounting embarrassment. He edged

back, and let Reg stand up and sit on a chair.

‘Just a horse,’ said Reg, ‘but, er, thank you for taking me at my

word.’ He brushed himself down.

‘A horse,’ repeated Richard.

‘Yes,’ said Reg.

Richard went out and looked up the stairs and then came back in.

‘A /horse/?’ he said again.

‘Yes, it is,’ said the Professor. ‘Wait --’ he motioned to Richard,

who was about to go out again and investigate -- ‘let it be. It won’t

be long.’

Richard stared in disbelief. ‘You say there’s a horse in your

bathroom, and all you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?’

The Professor looked blankly at him.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry if I... alarmed you earlier, it was

just a slight turn. These things happen, my dear fellow, don’t upset

yourself about it. Dear me, I’ve known odder things in my time. Many of

them. Far odder. She’s only a horse, for heaven’s sake. I’ll go and let

her out later. Please don’t concern yourself. Let us revive our spirits

with some port.’

‘But... how did it get in there?’

‘Well, the bathroom window’s open. I expect she came in through

that.’

Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not for the

last time, through eyes that were narrowed with suspicion.

‘You’re doing it deliberately, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Doing what, my dear fellow?’

‘I don’t believe there’s a horse in your bathroom,’ said Richard

suddenly. ‘I don’t know what is there, I don’t know what you’re doing,

I don’t know what any of this evening means, but I don’t believe

there’s a horse in your bathroom.’ And brushing aside Reg’s further

protestations he went up to look.

The bathroom was not large.

The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the age

and nature of the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwise

the fittings were stark and institutional.

There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on the

floor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stains

and chips in the enamel, and also a small basic basin with a toothbrush

and toothpaste in a Duralex beaker standing next to the taps. Screwed

into the probably priceless panelling above the basin was a tin mirror-

fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many

times, and the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation.

The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. There

was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, with

an old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly folded

but threadbare small towels. There was also a large horse in the room,

taking up most of it.

Richard stared at it, and it stared at Richard in an appraising kind

of way. Richard swayed slightly. The horse stood quite still. After a

while it looked at the cupboard instead. It seemed, if not content,

then at least perfectly resigned to being where it was until it was put

somewhere else. It also seemed... what was it?

It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that streamed in through

the window. The window was open but small and was, besides, on the

second floor, so the notion that the horse had entered by that route

was entirely fanciful.

There was something odd about the horse, but he couldn’t say what.

Well, there was one thing that was clearly very odd about it indeed,

which was that it was standing in a college bathroom. Maybe that was

all.

He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on its neck.

It felt normal -- firm, glossy, it was in good condition. The effect of

the moonlight on its coat was a little mazy, but everything looks a

little odd by moonlight. The horse shook its mane a little when he

touched it, but didn’t seem to mind too much.

After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a few times and

scratched it gently under the jaw. Then he noticed that there was

another door into the bathroom, in the far corner. He moved cautiously

around the horse and approached the other door. He backed up against it

and pushed it open tentatively.

It just opened into the Professor’s bedroom, a small room cluttered

with books and shoes and a small single bed. This room, too, had

another door, which opened out on to the landing again.

Richard noticed that the floor of the landing was newly scuffed and

scratched as the stairs had been, and these marks were consistent with

the idea that the horse had somehow been pushed up the stairs. He

wouldn’t have liked to have had to do it himself, and he would have

liked to have been the horse having it done to him even less, but it

was just about possible.

But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had one last look

back at him, and then he returned downstairs.

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘You have a horse in your bathroom and I will,

after all, have a little port.’

He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was quietly

contemplating the fire and was in need of a refill.

‘Just as well I did put out three glasses after all,’ said Reg

chattily. ‘I wondered why earlier, and now I remember.

‘You asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to have done

so. On account of the sofa no doubt. Never mind, these things happen.

Whoa, not too much, you’ll spill it.’

All horse-related questions left Richard’s mind abruptly.

‘I did?’ he said.

‘Oh yes. I remember now. You rang me back to ask me if it would be

all right, as I recall. I said I would be charmed, and fully intended

to be. I’d saw the thing up if I were you. Don’t want to sacrifice your

happiness to a sofa. Or maybe she decided that an evening with your old

tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted for the more exhilarating

course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know what I would have

done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a hectic

social round these days.’

It was Richard’s turn to be white-faced and staring.

Yes, he had assumed that Susan would not want to come.

Yes, he had said to her it would be terribly dull. But she had

insisted that she wanted to come because it would be the only way she’d

get to see his face for a few minutes not bathed in the light of a

computer screen, so he had agreed and arranged that he would bring her

after all.

Only he had completely forgotten this. He had not picked her up.

He said, ‘Can I use your phone, please?’

[::: CHAPTER 9 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do.

He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There was a

horrific hole in his chest, but the blood that was gobbing out of it

had slowed to a trickle. Otherwise there was no movement from his chest

at all, or, indeed, from any other part of him.

He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear to him that

whatever part of him it was that was moving, it wasn’t any part of his

body.

The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At a few

feet distant from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in the grass.

He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clock

in the morning, unable to put their mind to rest, but unable to find

anything to do with it. He realised that he had just had something of a

shock, which might account for his inability to think clearly, but

didn’t account for his ability actually to think at all.

In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if

anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or

extinction, one thing has never been in doubt -- that you would at

least know the answer when you were dead.

Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he

was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered

before.

He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as the body

that still lay slowly cooling on the ground, giving up its blood heat

in wraiths of steam that mingled with the mist of the chill night air.

Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly,

wonderingly and wobblingly. The ground seemed to give him support, it

took his weight. But then of course he appeared to have no weight that

needed to be taken. When he bent to touch the ground he could feel

nothing save a kind of distant rubbery resistance like the sensation

you get if you try and pick something up when your arm has gone dead.

His arm had gone dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all his

torso and his head.

His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not.

He stood in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the mist curled

slowly through him.

He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished-looking him-

thing lying still and mangled on the ground, and his flesh wanted to

creep. Or rather, he wanted flesh that could creep. He wanted flesh. He

wanted body. He had none.

A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was nothing and

went nowhere. He shook and felt nothing.

Music and a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked towards it.

He tried to walk sturdily, but it was a faint and feeble kind of

walking, uncertain and, well, insubstantial. The ground felt frail

beneath his feet.

The door of the car was still open on the driver’s side, as he had

left it when he had leaped out to deal with the boot lid, thinking he’d

only be two seconds.

That was all of two minutes ago now, when he’d been alive. When he’d

been a person. When he’d thought he was going to be leaping straight

back in and driving off. Two minutes and a lifetime ago.

This was insane, wasn’t it? he thought suddenly.

He walked around the door and bent down to peer into the external

rear-view mirror.

He looked exactly like himself, albeit like himself after he’d had a

terrible fright, which was to be expected, but that was him, that was

normal. This must be something he was imagining, some horrible kind of

waking dream. He had a sudden thought and tried breathing on the rear-

view mirror.

Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a doctor,

that’s what they always did on television -- if no mist formed on the

mirror, there was no breath. Perhaps, he thought anxiously to himself,

perhaps it was something to do with having heated wing mirrors. Didn’t

this car have heated wing mirrors? Hadn’t the salesman gone on and on

about heated this, electric that, and servo-assisted the other? Maybe

they were digital wing mirrors. That was it. Digital, heated, servo-

assisted, computer-controlled, breath-resistant wing mirrors...

He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned slowly

and gazed again in apprehension at the body lying on the ground behind

him with half its chest blown away. That would certainly satisfy a

doctor. The sight would be appalling enough if it was somebody else’s

body, but his own...

He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried to make the word toll

dramatically in his mind, but it wouldn’t. He was not a film sound

track, he was just dead.

Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually became

distressed by the expression of asinine stupidity on its face.

It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just such an

expression as somebody who is in the middle of being shot with his own

shotgun by somebody who had been hiding in the boot of his car might be

expected to wear, but he nevertheless disliked the idea that anyone

might find him looking like that.

He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to rearrange his

features into some semblance of dignity, or at least basic

intelligence.

It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to knead the

skin, the sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he couldn’t seem to

get a proper grip on it, or on anything. It was like trying to model

plasticine when your arm has gone to sleep, except that instead of his

grip slipping off the model, it would slip through it. In this case,

his hand slipped through his face.

Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at his sheer bloody

blasted impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find himself

throttling and shaking his own dead body with a firm and furious grip.

He staggered back in amazed shock. All he had managed to do was to add

to the inanely stupefied look of the corpse a twisted-up mouth and a

squint. And bruises flowering on its neck.

He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a strange

howling from deep within whatever this thing he had become was.

Clutching his hands to his face, he staggered backwards, retreated to

his car and flung himself into the seat. The seat received him in a

loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who disapproves of the last

fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish you with a basic

sherry, but refuses to catch your eye.

Could he get himself to a doctor?

To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled violently with

the steering wheel, but his hands slipped through it. He tried to

wrestle with the automatic transmission shift and ended up thumping it

in rage, but not being able properly to grasp or push it.

The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into the

telephone, which had been lying on the passenger seat listening

patiently all this time. He stared at it and realised with a growing

fever of excitement that he was still connected to Susan’s telephone-

answering machine. It was the type that would simply run and run until

he hung up. He was still in contact with the world.

He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let it slip,

and was in the end reduced to bending himself down over its mouthpiece.

‘Susan!’ he cried into it, his voice a hoarse and distant wail on the

wind. ‘Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m dead... I’m

dead... I’m dead and... I don’t know what to do...’ He broke down

again, sobbing in desperation, and tried to cling to the phone like a

baby clinging to its blanket for comfort.

‘Help me, Susan...’ he cried again.

‘/Beep/,’ said the phone.

He looked down at it again where he was cuddling it. He had managed

to push something after all. He had managed to push the button which

disconnected the call. Feverishly he attempted to grapple the thing

again, but it constantly slipped through his fingers and eventually lay

immobile on the seat. He could not touch it. He could not push the

buttons. In rage he flung it at the windscreen. It responded to that,

all right. It hit the windscreen, careered straight back though him,

bounced off the seat and then lay still on the transmission tunnel,

impervious to all his further attempts to touch it.

For several minutes still he sat there, his head nodding slowly as

terror began to recede into blank desolation.

A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing odd -- a

car stopped by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the night their

headlights would probably not have picked out the body lying in the

grass behind the car. They certainly would not have noticed a ghost

sitting inside it crying to himself.

He didn’t know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware of time

passing, only that it didn’t seem to pass quickly. There was little

external stimulus to mark its passage. He didn’t feel cold. In fact he

could almost not remember what cold meant or felt like, he just knew

that it was something he would have expected to feel at this moment.

Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would have to do

something, though he didn’t know what. Perhaps he should try and reach

his cottage, though he didn’t know what he would do when he got there.

He just needed something to try for. He needed to make it through the

night.

Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his foot and

knee grazing easily through part of the door frame. He went to look

again at his body, but it wasn’t there.

As if the night hadn’t produced enough shocks already. He started,

and stared at the damp depression in the grass.

His body was not there.

[::: CHAPTER 10 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Richard made the hastiest departure that politeness would allow.

He said thank you very much and what a splendid evening it had been

and that any time Reg was coming up to London he must let him, Richard,

know and was there anything he could do to help about the horse. No?

Well, all right then, if you’re sure, and thank you again, so much.

He stood there for a moment or two after the door finally closed,

pondering things.

He had noticed during the short time that the light from Reg’s room

flooded out on to the landing of the main staircase, that there were no

marks on the floorboards there at all. It seemed odd that the horse

should only have scuffed the floorboards inside Reg’s room.

Well, it all seemed very odd, full stop, but here was yet another

curious fact to add to the growing pile. This was supposed to have been

a relaxing evening away from work.

On an impulse he knocked on the door opposite to Reg’s. It took such

a long time to be answered that Richard had given up and was turning to

go when at last he heard the door creak open.

He had a slight shock when he saw that staring sharply up at him

like a small and suspicious bird was the don with the racing-yacht keel

for a nose.

‘Er, sorry,’ said Richard, abruptly, ‘but, er, have you seen or

heard a horse coming up this staircase tonight?’

The man stopped his obsessive twitching of his fingers. He cocked

his head slightly on one side and then seemed to need to go on a long

journey inside himself to find a voice, which when found turned out to

be a thin and soft little one.

He said, ‘That is the first thing anybody has said to me for

seventeen years, three months and two days, five hours, nineteen

minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve been counting.’

He closed the door softly again.

Richard virtually ran through Second Court.

When he reached First Court he steadied himself and slowed down to a

walking pace.

The chill night air was rasping in his lungs and there was no point

in running. He hadn’t managed to talk to Susan because Reg’s phone

wasn’t working, and this was another thing that he had been

mysteriously coy about. That at least was susceptible of a rational

explanation. He probably hadn’t paid his phone bill.

Richard was about to emerge out on to the street when instead he

decided to pay a quick visit to the porter’s lodge, which was tucked

away inside the great archway entrance into the college. It was a small

hutchlike place filled with keys, messages and a single electric bar

heater. A radio nattered to itself in the background.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to the large black-suited man standing behind

the counter with his arms folded. ‘I...’

‘Yes, Mr MacDuff, what can I do for you?’

In his present state of mind Richard would have been hard-pressed

himself to remember his own name and was startled for a moment.

However, college porters are legendary for their ability to perform

such feats of memory, and for their tendency to show them off at the

slightest provocation.

‘Is there,’ said Richard, ‘a horse anywhere in the college -- that

you know of? I mean, you would know if there was a horse in the

college, wouldn’t you?’

The porter didn’t blink.

‘No, sir, and yes, sir. Anything else I can help you with, Mr

MacDuff, sir?’

‘Er, no,’ said Richard and tapped his fingers a couple of times on

the counter. ‘No. Thank you. Thank you very much for your help. Nice to

see you again, er... Bob,’ he hazarded. ‘Good-night, then.’

He left.

The porter remained perfectly still with his arms folded, but

shaking his head a very, very little bit.

‘Here’s some coffee for you, Bill,’ said another porter, a short

wiry one, emerging from an inner sanctum with a steaming cup. ‘Getting

a bit colder tonight?’

‘I think it is, Fred, thanks,’ said Bill, taking the cup.

He took a sip. ‘You can say what you like about people, they don’t

get any less peculiar. Fellow in here just now asking if there was a

horse in the college.’

‘Oh yes?’ Fred sipped at his own coffee, and let the steam smart his

eyes. ‘I had a chap in here earlier. Sort of strange foreign priest.

Couldn’t understand a word he said at first. But he seemed happy just

to stand by the fire and listen to the news on the radio.’

‘Foreigners, eh.’

‘In the end I told him to shoot off. Standing in front of my fire

like that. Suddenly he says is that really what he must do? Shoot off?

I said, in my best Bogart voice, “You better believe it, buddy.”’

‘Really? Sounded more like Jimmy Cagney to me.’

‘No, that’s my Bogart voice. This is my Jimmy Cagney voice -- “You

better believe it, buddy.”’

Bill frowned at him. ‘Is that your Jimmy Cagney voice? I always

thought that was your Kenneth McKellar voice.’

‘You don’t listen properly, Bill, you haven’t got the ear. This is

Kenneth McKellar. “Oh, you take the high road and I’ll take the low

road...”’

‘Oh, I see. I was thinking of the Scottish Kenneth McKellar. So what

did this priest fellow say then, Fred?’

‘Oh, he just looked me straight in the eyes, Bill, and said in this

strange sort of...’

‘Skip the accent, Fred, just tell me what he said, if it’s worth

hearing.’

‘He just said he did believe me.’

‘So. Not a very interesting story then, Fred.’

‘Well, maybe not. I only mention it because he also said that he’d

left his horse in a washroom and would I see that it was all right.’

[::: CHAPTER 11 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Gordon Way drifted miserably along the dark road, or rather, tried

to drift.

He felt that as a ghost -- which is what he had to admit to himself

he had become -- he should be able to drift. He knew little enough

about ghosts, but he felt that if you were going to be one then there

ought to be certain compensations for not having a physical body to lug

around, and that among them ought to be the ability simply to drift.

But no, it seemed he was going to have to walk every step of the way.

His aim was to try and make it to his house. He didn’t know what he

would do when he got there, but even ghosts have to spend the night

somewhere, and he felt that being in familiar surroundings might help.

Help what, he didn’t know. At least the journey gave him an objective,

and he would just have to think of another one when he arrived.

He trudged despondently from lamppost to lamppost, stopping at each

one to look at bits of himself.

He was definitely getting a bit wraithlike.

At times he would fade almost to nothing, and would seem to be

little more than a shadow playing in the mist, a dream of himself that

could just evaporate and be gone. At other times he seemed to be almost

solid and real again. Once or twice he would try leaning against a

lamppost, and would fall straight through it if he wasn’t careful.

At last, and with great reluctance, he actually began to turn his

mind to what it was that had happened. Odd, that reluctance. He really

didn’t want to think about it. Psychologists say that the mind will

often try to suppress the memory of traumatic events, and this, he

thought, was probably the answer. After all, if having a strange figure

jump out of the boot of your own car and shoot you dead didn’t count as

a traumatic experience, he’d like to know what did.

He trudged on wearily.

He tried to recall the figure to his mind’s eye, but it was like

probing a hurting tooth, and he thought of other things.

Like, was his will up-to-date? He couldn’t remember, and made a

mental note to call his lawyer tomorrow, and then made another mental

note that he would have to stop making mental notes like that.

How would his company survive without him? He didn’t like either of

the possible answers to that very much.

What about his obituary? There was a thought that chilled him to his

bones, wherever they’d got to. Would he be able to get hold of a copy?

What would it say? They’d better give him a good write-up, the

bastards. Look at what he’d done. Single-handedly saved the British

software industry: huge exports, charitable contributions, research

scholarships, crossing the Atlantic in a solar-powered submarine

(failed, but a good try) -- all sorts of things. They’d better not go

digging up that Pentagon stuff again or he’d get his lawyer on to them.

He made a mental note to call him in the mor...

No.

Anyway, can a dead person sue for libel? Only his lawyer would know,

and he was not going to be able to call him in the morning. He knew

with a sense of creeping dread that of all the things he had left

behind in the land of the living it was the telephone that he was going

to miss the most, and then he turned his mind determinedly back to

where it didn’t want to go.

The figure.

It seemed to him that the figure had been almost like a figure of

Death itself; or was that his imagination playing tricks with him? Was

he dreaming that it was a cowled figure? What would any figure, whether

cowled or just casually dressed, be doing in the boot of his car?

At that moment a car zipped past him on the road and disappeared off

into the night, taking its oasis of light with it. He thought with

longing of the warm, leather-upholstered, climate-controlled comfort of

his own car abandoned on the road behind him, and then a sudden

extraordinary thought struck him.

Was there any way he could hitch a lift? Could anyone actually see

him? How would anyone react if they could? Well, there was only one way

to find out.

He heard another car coming up in the distance behind him and turned

to face it. The twin pools of hazy lights approached through the mist

and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck his thumb out at them.

The car swept by regardless.

Nothing.

Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the receding red rear

lights, and realised, looking straight through his own upraised arm,

that he wasn’t at his most visible at the moment. Was there perhaps

some effort of will he could make to render himself more visible when

he wanted to? He screwed up his eyes in concentration, then realised

that he would need to have his eyes open in order to judge the results.

He tried again, forcing his mind as hard as he could, but the results

were unsatisfactory.

Though it did seem to make some kind of rudimentary, glowing

difference, he couldn’t sustain it, and it faded almost immediately,

however much he piled on the mental pressure. He would have to judge

the timing very carefully if he was going to make his presence felt, or

at least seen.

Another car approached from behind, travelling fast. He turned

again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the moment was right and willed

himself visible.

The car swerved slightly, and then carried on its way, only a little

more slowly. Well, that was something. What else could he do? He would

go and stand under a lamppost for a start, and he would practise. The

next car he would get for sure.

[::: CHAPTER 12 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘...so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as

soon as possible. Maybe.’

/Beep./

‘Shit. Damn. Hold on a minute. Blast. Look... er...’

/Click./

Richard pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed his car

into reverse for twenty yards to have another look at the sign-post by

the road junction he’d just sped past in the mist. He had extracted

himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which

involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a

sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random

direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for.

Arriving back at the junction he tried to correlate the information

on the signpost with the information on the map. But it couldn’t be

done. The road junction was quite deliberately sitting on a page divide

on the map, and the signpost was revolving maliciously in the wind.

Instinct told him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but he

didn’t want to go back the way he’d come for fear of getting sucked

back into the gravitational whirlpool of Cambridge’s traffic system.

He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in

that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a

speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left and after

a few more such manoeuvres was thoroughly lost.

He swore to himself and turned up the heating in the car. If he had

been concentrating on where he was going rather than trying to navigate

and telephone at the same time, he told himself, he would at least know

where he was now. He didn’t actually like having a telephone in his

car, he found it a bother and an intrusion. But Gordon had insisted and

indeed had paid for it.

He sighed in exasperation, backed up the black Saab and turned

around again. As he did so he nearly ran into someone lugging a body

into a field. At least that was what it looked like for a second to his

overwrought brain, but in fact it was probably a local farmer with a

sackful of something nutritious, though what he was doing with it on a

night like this was anyone’s guess. As his headlights swung around

again, they caught for a moment a silhouette of the figure trudging off

across the field with the sack on his back.

‘Rather him than me,’ thought Richard grimly, and drove off again.

After a few minutes he reached a junction with what looked a little

more like a main road, nearly turned right down it, but then turned

left instead. There was no signpost.

He poked at the buttons on his phone again.

‘...get back to you as soon as possible. Maybe.’

/Beep./

‘Susan, it’s Richard. Where do I start? What a mess. Look I’m sorry,

sorry, sorry. I screwed up very badly, and it’s all my fault. And look,

whatever it takes to make up for it, I’ll do it, solemn promise...’

He had a slight feeling that this wasn’t the right tone to adopt

with an answering machine, but he carried straight on.

‘Honestly, we can go away, take a holiday for a week, or even just

this weekend if you like. Really, this weekend. We’ll go somewhere

sunny. Doesn’t matter how much pressure Gordon tries to put on me, and

you know the sort of pressure he can muster, he is your brother, after

all. I’ll just... er, actually, it might have to be next weekend. Damn,

damn, damn. It’s just that I really have promised to get, no, look, it

doesn’t matter. We’ll just do it. I don’t care about getting /Anthem/

finished for Comdex. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll just go.

Gordon will just have to take a running jump -- Gaaarghhhh!’

Richard swerved wildly to avoid the spectre of Gordon Way which

suddenly loomed in his headlights and took a running jump at him.

He slammed on the brakes, started to skid, tried to remember what it

was you were supposed to do when you found yourself skidding, he knew

he’d seen it on some television programme about driving he’d seen ages

ago, what was the programme? God, he couldn’t even remember the title

of the programme, let alone -- oh yes, they’d said you mustn’t slam on

the brakes. That was it. The world swung sickeningly around him with

slow and appalling force as the car slewed across the road, spun,

thudded against the grass verge, then slithered and rocked itself to a

halt, facing the wrong way. He collapsed, panting, against the steering

wheel.

He picked up the phone from where he’d dropped it.

‘Susan,’ he gasped, ‘I’ll get back to you,’ and hung up.

He raised his eyes.

Standing full in the glare of his headlights was the spectral figure

of Gordon Way staring straight in through the windscreen with ghastly

horror in its eyes, slowly raising its hand and pointing at him.

He wasn’t sure how long he just sat there. The apparition had melted

from view in a few seconds, but Richard simply sat, shaking, probably

for not more than a minute, until a sudden squeal of brakes and glare

of lights roused him.

He shook his head. He was, he realised, stopped in the road facing

the wrong way. The car that had just screeched to an abrupt halt almost

bumper to bumper with him was a police car. He took two or three deep

breaths and then, stiff and trembling, he climbed out and stood up to

face the officer who was walking slowly towards him, silhouetted in the

police car’s headlights.

The officer looked him up and down.

‘Er, I’m sorry, officer,’ said Richard, with as much calmness as he

could wrench into his voice. ‘I, er, skidded. The roads are slippery

and I, er... skidded. I spun round. As you see, I, I’m facing the wrong

way.’ He gestured at his car to indicate the way it was facing.

‘Like to tell me why it was you skidded then, exactly, sir?’ The

police officer was looking him straight in the eye while pulling out a

notebook.

‘Well, as I said,’ explained Richard, ‘the roads are slippery

because of the mist, and, well, to be perfectly honest,’ he suddenly

found himself saying, in spite of all his attempts to stop himself, ‘I

was just driving along and I suddenly imagined that I saw my employer

throwing himself in front of my car.’

The officer gazed at him levelly.

‘Guilt complex, officer,’ added Richard with a twitch of a smile,

‘you know how it is. I was contemplating taking the weekend off.’

The police officer seemed to hesitate, balanced on a knife edge

between sympathy and suspicion. His eyes narrowed a little but didn’t

waver.

‘Been drinking, sir?’

‘Yes,’ said Richard, with a quick sigh, ‘but very little. Two

glasses of wine max. Er... and a small glass of port. Absolute max. It

was really just a lapse of concentration. I’m fine now.’

‘Name?’

Richard gave him his name and address. The policeman wrote it all

down carefully and neatly in his book, then peered at the car

registration number and wrote that down too.

‘And who is your employer then, sir?’

‘His name is Way. Gordon Way.’

‘Oh,’ said the policeman raising his eyebrows, ‘the computer

gentleman.’

‘Er, yes, that’s right. I design software for the company.

WayForward Technologies II.’

‘We’ve got one of your computers down the station,’ said the

policeman. ‘Buggered if I can get it to work.’

‘Oh,’ said Richard wearily, ‘which model do you have?’

‘I think it’s called a Quark II.’

‘Oh, well that’s simple,’ said Richard with relief. ‘It doesn’t

work. Never has done. The thing is a heap of shit.’

‘Funny thing, sir, that’s what I’ve always said,’ said the

policeman. ‘Some of the other lads don’t agree.’

‘Well, you’re absolutely right, officer. The thing is hopeless. It’s

the major reason the original company went bust. I suggest you use it

as a big paperweight.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to do that, sir,’ the policeman persisted.

‘The door would keep blowing open.’

‘What do you mean, officer?’ asked Richard.

‘I use it to keep the door closed, sir. Nasty draughts down our

station this time of year. In the summer, of course, we beat suspects

round the head with it.’

He flipped his book closed and prodded it into his pocket.

‘My advice to you, sir, is to go nice and easy on the way back. Lock

up the car and spend the weekend getting completely pissed. I find it’s

the only way. Mind how you go now.’

He returned to his car, wound down the window, and watched Richard

manoeuvre his car around and drive off into the night before heading

off himself.

Richard took a deep breath, drove calmly back to London, let himself

calmly into his flat, clambered calmly over the sofa, sat down, poured

himself a stiff brandy and began seriously to shake.

There were three things he was shaking about.

There was the simple physical shock of his near-accident, which is

the sort of thing that always churns you up a lot more than you expect.

The body floods itself with adrenaline, which then hangs around your

system turning sour.

Then there was the cause of the skid -- the extraordinary apparition

of Gordon throwing himself in front of his car at that moment. Boy oh

boy. Richard took a mouthful of brandy and gargled with it. He put the

glass down.

It was well known that Gordon was one of the world’s richest natural

resources of guilt pressure, and that he could deliver a ton on your

doorstep fresh every morning, but Richard hadn’t realised he had let it

get to him to such an unholy degree.

He took up his glass again, went upstairs and pushed open the door

to his workroom, which involved shifting a stack of BYTE magazines that

had toppled against it. He pushed them away with his foot and walked to

the end of the large room. A lot of glass at this end let in views over

a large part of north London, from which the mist was now clearing. St

Paul’s glowed in the dark distance and he stared at it for a moment or

two but it didn’t do anything special. After the events of the evening

he found this came as a pleasant surprise.

At the other end of the room were a couple of long tables smothered

in, at the last count, six Macintosh computers. In the middle was the

Mac II on which a red wire-frame model of his sofa was lazily revolving

within a blue wire-frame model of his narrow staircase, complete with

banister rail, radiator and fuse-box details, and of course the awkward

turn halfway up.

The sofa would start out spinning in one direction, hit an

obstruction, twist itself in another plane, hit another obstruction,

revolve round a third axis until it was stopped again, then cycle

through the moves again in a different order. You didn’t have to watch

the sequence for very long before you saw it repeat itself.

The sofa was clearly stuck.

Three other Macs were connected up via long tangles of cable to an

untidy agglomeration of synthesisers -- an Emulator II+ HD sampler, a

rack of TX modules, a Prophet VS, a Roland JX 10, a Korg DW8000, an

Octapad, a left-handed Synth-Axe MIDI guitar controller, and even an

old drum machine stacked up and gathering dust in the corner -- pretty

much the works. There was also a small and rarely used cassette tape

recorder: all the music was stored in sequencer files on the computers

rather than on tape.

He dumped himself into a seat in front of one of the Macs to see

what, if anything, it was doing. It was displaying an ‘Untitled’

/Excel/ spreadsheet and he wondered why.

He saved it and looked to see if he’d left himself any notes and

quickly discovered that the spreadsheet contained some of the data he

had previously downloaded after searching the /World Reporter/ and

/Knowledge/ on-line databases for facts about swallows.

He now had figures which detailed their migratory habits, their wing

shapes, their aerodynamic profile and turbulence characteristics, and

some sort of rudimentary figures concerning the patterns that a flock

would adopt in flight, but as yet he had only the faintest idea as to

how he was going to synthesise them all together.

Because he was too tired to think particularly constructively

tonight he savagely selected and copied a whole swathe of figures from

the spreadsheet at random, pasted them into his own conversion program,

which scaled and filtered and manipulated the figures according to his

own experimental algorithms, loaded the converted file into

/Performer/, a powerful sequencer program, and played the result

through random MIDI channels to whichever synthesisers happened to be

on at the moment.

The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony, and he

stopped it.

He ran the conversion program again, this time instructing it to

force-map the pitch values into G minor. This was a utility he was

determined in the end to get rid of because he regarded it as cheating.

If there was any basis to his firmly held belief that the rhythms and

harmonies of music which he found most satisfying could be found in, or

at least derived from, the rhythms and harmonies of naturally occurring

phenomena, then satisfying forms of modality and intonation should

emerge naturally as well, rather than being forced.

For the moment, though, he forced it.

The result was a short burst of the most hideous cacophony in G

minor.

So much for random shortcuts.

The first task was a relatively simple one, which would be simply to

plot the waveform described by the tip of a swallow’s wing as it flies,

then synthesise that waveform. That way he would end up with a single

note, which would be a good start, and it shouldn’t take more than the

weekend to do.

Except, of course, that he didn’t have a weekend available to do it

in because he had somehow to get Version 2 of /Anthem/ out of the door

sometime during the course of the next year, or ‘month’ as Gordon

called it.

Which brought Richard inexorably to the third thing he was shaking

about.

There was absolutely no way that he could take the time off this

weekend or next to fulfil the promise he had made to Susan’s telephone-

answering machine. And that, if this evening’s débacle had not already

done so, would surely spell the final end.

But that was it. The thing was done. There is nothing you can do

about a message on someone else’s answering machine other than let

events take their course. It was done. It was irrevocable.

An odd thought suddenly struck him.

It took him by considerable surprise, but he couldn’t really see

what was wrong with it.

[::: CHAPTER 13 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

A pair of binoculars scanning the London night skyline, idly,

curious, snooping. A little look here, a little look there, just seeing

what’s going on, anything interesting, anything useful.

The binoculars settle on the back of one particular house, attracted

by a slight movement. One of those large late-Victorian villas,

probably flats now. Lots of black iron drainpipes. Green rubber

dustbins. But dark. No, nothing.

The binoculars are just moving onwards when another slight movement

catches in the moonlight. The binoculars refocus very slightly, trying

to find a detail, a hard edge, a slight contrast in the darkness. The

mist has lifted now, and the darkness glistens. They refocus a very,

very little more.

There it is. Something, definitely. Only this time a little higher

up, maybe a foot or so, maybe a yard. The binoculars settle and relax -

- steady, trying for the edge, trying for the detail. There. The

binoculars settle again -- they have found their mark, straddled

between a windowsill and a drainpipe.

It is a dark figure, splayed against the wall, looking down, looking

for a new foothold, looking upwards, looking for a ledge. The

binoculars peer intently.

The figure is that of a tall, thin man. His clothes are right for

the job, dark trousers, dark sweater, but his movements are awkward and

angular. Nervous. Interesting. The binoculars wait and consider,

consider and judge.

The man is clearly a rank amateur.

Look at his fumbling. Look at his ineptitude. His feet slip on the

drainpipe, his hands can’t reach the ledge. He nearly falls. He waits

to catch his breath. For a moment he starts to climb back down again,

but seems to find that even tougher going.

He lunges again for the ledge and this time catches it. His foot

shoots out to steady himself and nearly misses the pipe. Could have

been very nasty, very nasty indeed.

But now the way is easier and progress is better. He crosses to

another pipe, reaches a third-floor window ledge, flirts briefly with

death as he crawls painfully on to it, and makes the cardinal error and

looks down. He sways briefly and sits back heavily. He shades his eyes

and peers inside to check that the room is dark, and sets about getting

the window open.

One of the things that distinguish the amateur from the professional

is that this is the point when the amateur thinks it would have been a

good idea to bring along something to prise the window open with.

Luckily for this amateur the householder is an amateur too, and the

sash window slides grudgingly up. The climber crawls, with some relief,

inside.

He should be locked up for his own protection, think the binoculars.

A hand starts to reach for the phone. At the window a face looks back

out and for a moment is caught in the moonlight, then it ducks back

inside to carry on with its business.

The hand stays hovering over the phone for a moment or two, while

the binoculars wait and consider, consider and judge. The hand reaches

instead for the A-Z street map of London.

There is a long studious pause, a little more intent binocular work,

and then the hand reaches for the phone again, lifts it and dials.

[::: CHAPTER 14 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Susan’s flat was small but spacious, which was a trick, reflected

Richard tensely as he turned on the light, that only women seemed able

to pull off.

It wasn’t that observation which made him tense, of course -- he’d

thought it before, many times. Every time he’d been in her flat, in

fact. It always struck him, usually because he had just come from his

own flat, which was four times the size and cramped. He’d just come

from his own flat this time, only via a rather eccentric route, and it

was this that made his usual observation unusually tense.

Despite the chill of the night he was sweating.

He looked back out of the window, turned and tiptoed across the room

towards where the telephone and the answering machine stood on their

own small table.

There was no point, he told himself, in tiptoeing. Susan wasn’t in.

He would be extremely interested to know where she was, in fact -- just

as she, he told himself, had probably been extremely interested in

knowing where he had been at the beginning of the evening.

He realised he was still tiptoeing. He hit his leg to make himself

stop doing it, but carried on doing it none the less.

Climbing up the outside wall had been terrifying.

He wiped his forehead with the arm of his oldest and greasiest

sweater. There had been a nasty moment when his life had flashed before

his eyes but he had been too preoccupied with falling and had missed

all the good bits. Most of the good bits had involved Susan, he

realised. Susan or computers. Never Susan and computers -- those had

largely been the bad bits. Which was why he was here, he told himself.

He seemed to need convincing, and told himself again.

He looked at his watch. Eleven forty-five.

It occurred to him he had better go and wash his wet and dirty hands

before he touched anything. It wasn’t the police he was worried about,

but Susan’s terrifying cleaner. She would know.

He went into the bathroom, turned on the light switch, wiped it, and

then stared at his own startled face in the bright neon-lit mirror as

he ran the water over his hands. For a moment he thought of the

dancing, warm candlelight of the Coleridge Dinner, and the images of it

welled up out of the dim and distant past of the earlier part of the

evening. Life had seemed easy then, and carefree. The wine, the

conversation, simple conjuring tricks. He pictured the round pale face

of Sarah, pop-eyed with wonder. He washed his own face.

He thought:

‘...Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

He brushed his own hair. He thought, too, of the pictures hanging

high in the darkness above their heads. He cleaned his teeth. The low

buzz of the neon light snapped him back to the present and he suddenly

remembered with appalled shock that he was here in his capacity as

burglar.

Something made him look himself directly in the face in the mirror,

then he shook his head, trying to clear it.

When would Susan be back? That, of course, would depend on what she

was doing. He quickly wiped his hands and made his way back to the

answering machine. He prodded at the buttons and his conscience prodded

back at him. The tape wound back for what seemed to be an interminable

time, and he realised with a jolt that it was probably because Gordon

had been in full flood.

He had forgotten, of course, that there would be messages on the

tape other than his own, and listening to other people’s phone messages

was tantamount to opening their mail.

He explained to himself once again that all he was trying to do was

to undo a mistake he had made before it caused any irrevocable damage.

He would just play the tiniest snippets till he found his own voice.

That wouldn’t be too bad, he wouldn’t even be able to distinguish what

was being said.

He groaned inwardly, gritted his teeth and stabbed at the Play

button so roughly that he missed it and ejected the cassette by

mistake. He put it back in and pushed the Play button more carefully.

/Beep./

‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ said the answering machine. ‘I’m just

on my way to the cottage. It’s, er...’ He wound on for a couple of

seconds. ‘...need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean /really/

on...’ Richard set his mouth grimly and stabbed at the Fast Forward

again. He really hated the fact that Gordon tried to put pressure on

him via Susan, which Gordon always stoutly denied he did. Richard

couldn’t blame Susan for getting exasperated about his work sometimes

if this sort of thing was going on.’

/Click./

‘...Response. Make a note to Susan would you please, to get an

“Armed Response” sign made up with a sharp spike on the bottom at the

right height for rabbits to see.’

‘/What?/’ muttered Richard to himself, and his finger hesitated for

a second over the Fast Forward button. He had a feeling that Gordon

desperately wanted to be like Howard Hughes, and if he could never hope

to be remotely as rich, he could at least try to be twice as eccentric.

An act. A palpable act.

‘That’s secretary Susan at the office, not you, of course,’

continued Gordon’s voice on the answering machine. ‘Where was I? Oh

yes. Richard and /Anthem/ 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to be in beta

testing in two...’ Richard stabbed at the Fast Forward, tight-lipped.

‘...point is that there’s only one person who’s really in a position

to know if he’s getting the important work done, or if he’s just

dreaming, and that one person...’ He stabbed angrily again. He had

promised himself he wouldn’t listen to any of it and now here he was

getting angry at what he was hearing. He should really just stop this.

Well, just one more try.

When he listened again he just got music. Odd. He wound forward

again, and still got music. Why would someone be phoning to play music

to an answering machine? he wondered.

The phone rang. He stopped the tape and answered it, then almost

dropped the phone like an electric eel as he realised what he was

doing. Hardly daring to breathe, he held the telephone to his ear.

‘Rule One in housebreaking,’ said a voice. ‘Never answer the

telephone when you’re in the middle of a job. Who are you supposed to

be, for heaven’s sake?’

Richard froze. It was a moment or two before he could find where he

had put his voice.

‘Who is this?’ he demanded at last in a whisper.

‘Rule Two,’ continued the voice. ‘Preparation. Bring the right

tools. Bring gloves. Try to have the faintest glimmering of an idea of

what you’re about before you start dangling from window ledges in the

middle of the night.

‘Rule Three. /Never/ forget Rule Two.’

‘Who is this?’ exclaimed Richard again.

The voice was unperturbed. ‘Neighbourhood Watch,’ it said. ‘If you

just look out of the back window you’ll see...’

Trailing the phone, Richard hurried over to the window and looked

out. A distant flash startled him.

‘Rule Four. Never stand where you can be photographed.

‘Rule Five... Are you listening to me, MacDuff?’

‘What? Yes...’ said Richard in bewilderment. ‘How do you know me?’

‘Rule Five. /Never/ admit to your name.’

Richard stood silent, breathing hard.

‘I run a little course,’ said the voice, ‘if you’re interested...’

Richard said nothing.

‘You’re learning,’ continued the voice, ‘slowly, but you’re

learning. If you were learning fast you would have put the phone down

by now, of course. But you’re curious -- and incompetent -- and so you

don’t. I don’t run a course for novice burglars as it happens, tempting

though the idea is. I’m sure there would be grants available. If we

have to have them they may as well be trained.

‘However, if I did run such a course I would allow you to enrol for

free, because I too am curious. Curious to know why Mr Richard MacDuff

who, I am given to understand, is now a wealthy young man, something in

the computer industry, I believe, should suddenly be needing to resort

to house-breaking.’

‘Who -- ?’

‘So I do a little research, phone Directory Enquiries and discover

that the flat into which he is breaking is that of a Miss S. Way. I

know that Mr Richard MacDuff’s employer is the famous Mr G. Way and I

wonder if they can by any chance be related.’

‘Who -- ?’

‘You are speaking with Svlad, commonly known as “Dirk” Cjelli,

currently trading under the name of Gently for reasons which it would

be otiose, at this moment, to rehearse. I bid you good evening. If you

wish to know more I will be at the Pizza Express in Upper Street in ten

minutes. Bring some money.’

‘Dirk?’ exclaimed Richard. ‘You... Are you trying to blackmail me?’

‘No, you fool, for the pizzas.’ There was a click and Dirk Gently

rang off.

Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead

again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster.

His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little

synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started

dancing around and singing nursery rhymes. He shook his head to try and

make them stop, and quickly sat down at the answering machine again.

He fought with himself over whether or not he was going to push the

Play button again, and then did so anyway before he had made up his

mind. Hardly four seconds of light orchestral music had oozed

soothingly past when there came the sound of a key scratching in the

lock out in the hallway.

In panic Richard thumped the Eject button, popped the cassette out,

rammed it into his jeans pocket and replaced it from the pile of fresh

cassettes that lay next to the machine. There was a similar pile next

to his own machine at home. Susan at the office provided them -- poor,

long-suffering Susan at the office. He must remember to feel sympathy

for her in the morning, when he had the time and concentration for it.

Suddenly, without even noticing himself doing it, he changed his

mind. In a flash he popped the substitute cassette out of the machine

again, replaced the one he had stolen, rammed down the rewind button

and made a lunge for the sofa where, with two seconds to go before the

door opened, he tried to arrange himself into a nonchalant and winning

posture. On an impulse he stuck his left hand up behind his back where

it might come in useful.

He was just trying to arrange his features into an expression

composed in equal parts of contrition, cheerfulness and sexual

allurement when the door opened and in walked Michael Wenton-Weakes.

Everything stopped.

Outside, the wind ceased. Owls halted in mid-flight. Well, maybe

they did, maybe they didn’t, certainly the central heating chose that

moment to shut down, unable perhaps to cope with the supernatural chill

that suddenly whipped through the room.

‘What are you doing here, Wednesday?’ demanded Richard. He rose from

the sofa as if levitated with anger.

Michael Wenton-Weakes was a large sad-faced man known by some people

as Michael Wednesday-Week, because that was when he usually promised to

have things done by. He was dressed in a suit that had been superbly

well tailored when his father, the late Lord Magna, had bought it forty

years previously.

Michael Wenton-Weakes came very high on the small but select list of

people whom Richard thoroughly disliked.

He disliked him because he found the idea of someone who was not

only privileged, but was also sorry for himself because he thought the

world didn’t really understand the problems of privileged people,

deeply obnoxious. Michael, on the other hand, disliked Richard for the

fairly simple reason that Richard disliked him and made no secret of

it.

Michael gave a slow and lugubrious look back out into the hallway as

Susan walked through. She stopped when she saw Richard. She put down

her handbag, unwound her scarf, unbuttoned her coat, slipped it off,

handed it to Michael, walked over to Richard and smacked him in the

face.

‘I’ve been saving that up all evening,’ she said furiously. ‘And

don’t try and pretend that’s a bunch of flowers you’ve forgotten to

bring which you’re hiding behind your back. You tried that gag last

time.’ She turned and stalked off.

‘It’s a box of chocolates I forgot this time,’ said Richard glumly

and held out his empty hand to her retreating back. ‘I climbed up the

entire outside wall without them. Did I feel a fool when I got in.’

‘Not very funny,’ said Susan. She swept into the kitchen and sounded

as if she was grinding coffee with her bare hands. For someone who

always looked so neat and sweet and delicate she packed a hell of a

temper.

‘It’s true,’ said Richard, ignoring Michael completely. ‘I nearly

killed myself.’

‘I’m not going to rise to that,’ said Susan from within the kitchen.

‘If you want something big and sharp thrown at you why don’t you come

in here and be funny?’

‘I suppose it would be pointless saying I’m sorry at this point,’

Richard called out.

‘You bet,’ said Susan, sweeping back out of the kitchen again. She

looked at him with her eyes flashing, and actually stamped her foot.

‘Honestly, Richard,’ she said, ‘I suppose you’re going to say you

forgot again. How can you have the gall to stand there with two arms,

two legs and a head as if you’re a human being? This is behaviour that

a bout of amoebic dysentery would be ashamed of. I bet that even the

very lowest form of dysentery amoeba shows up to take its girlfriend

out for a quick trot around the stomach lining once in a while. Well, I

hope you had a lousy evening.’

‘I did,’ said Richard. ‘You wouldn’t have liked it. There was a

horse in the bathroom, and you know how you hate that sort of thing.’

‘Oh, Michael,’ said Susan brusquely, ‘don’t just stand there like a

sinking pudding. Thank you very much for dinner and the concert, you

were very sweet and I did enjoy listening to your troubles all evening

because they were such a nice change from mine. But I think it would be

best if I just found your book and pushed you out. I’ve got some

serious jumping up and down and ranting to do, and I know how it upsets

your delicate sensibilities.’

She retrieved her coat from him and hung it up. While he had been

holding it he had seemed entirely taken up with this task and oblivious

to anything else. Without it he seemed a little lost and naked and was

forced to stir himself back into life. He turned his big heavy eyes

back on Richard.

‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I, er, read your piece in... in /Fathom/. On

Music and, er...’

‘Fractal Landscapes,’ said Richard shortly. He didn’t want to talk

to Michael, and he certainly didn’t want to get drawn into a

conversation about Michael’s wretched magazine. Or rather, the magazine

that used to be Michael’s.

That was the precise aspect of the conversation that Richard didn’t

want to get drawn into.

‘Er, yes. Very interesting, of course,’ said Michael in his silky,

over-rounded voice. ‘Mountain shapes and tree shapes and all sorts of

things. Recycled algae.’

‘Recursive algorithms.’

‘Yes, of course. Very interesting. But so wrong, so terribly wrong.

For the magazine, I mean. It is, after all, an /arts/ review. I would

never have allowed such a thing, of course. Ross has utterly ruined it.

Utterly. He’ll have to go. /Have/ to. He has no sensibilities and he’s

a thief.’

‘He’s not a thief, Wednesday, that’s absolutely absurd,’ snapped

Richard, instantly getting drawn into it in spite of his resolution not

to. ‘He had nothing to do with your getting the push whatsoever. That

was your own silly fault, and you...’

There was a sharp intake of breath.

‘Richard,’ said Michael in his softest, quietest voice -- arguing

with him was like getting tangled in parachute silk -- ‘I think you do

not understand how important...’

‘Michael,’ said Susan gently but firmly, holding open the door.

Michael Wenton-Weakes nodded faintly and seemed to deflate.

‘Your book,’ Susan added, holding out to him a small and elderly

volume on the ecclesiastical architecture of Kent. He took it, murmured

some slight thanks, looked about him for a moment as if he’d suddenly

realised something rather odd, then gathered himself together, nodded

farewell and left.

Richard didn’t appreciate quite how tense he had become till Michael

left and he was suddenly able to relax. He’d always resented the

indulgent soft spot that Susan had for Michael even if she did try to

disguise it by being terribly rude to him all the time. Perhaps even

because of that.

‘Susan, what can I say...?’ he started lamely.

‘You could say “Ouch” for a start. You didn’t even give me that

satisfaction when I hit you, and I thought I did it rather hard. God,

it’s freezing in here. What’s that window doing wide open?’

She went over to shut it.

‘I told you. That’s how I got in,’ said Richard.

He sounded sufficiently as if he meant it to make her look round at

him in surprise.

‘Really,’ he said. ‘Like in the chocolate ads, only I forgot the box

of chocolates...’ He shrugged sheepishly.

She stared at him in amazement.

‘What on earth possessed you to do that?’ she said. She stuck her

head out of the window and looked down. ‘You could have got killed,’

she said, turning back to him.

‘Well, er, yes...’ he said. ‘It just seemed the only way to... I

don’t know.’ He rallied himself. ‘You took your key back remember?’

‘Yes. I got fed up with you coming and raiding my larder when you

couldn’t be bothered to do your own shopping. Richard, you really

climbed up this wall?’

‘Well, I wanted to be here when you got in.’

She shook her head in bewilderment. ‘It would have been a great deal

better if you’d been here when I went out. Is that why you’re wearing

those filthy old clothes?’

‘Yes. You don’t think I went to dinner at St Cedd’s like this?’

‘Well, I no longer know what you consider to be rational behaviour.’

She sighed and fished about in a small drawer. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘if

it’s going to save your life,’ and handed him a couple of keys on a

ring. ‘I’m too tired to be angry anymore. An evening of being lobbied

by Michael has taken it out of me.’

‘Well, I’ll never understand why you put up with him,’ said Richard,

going to fetch the coffee.

‘I know you don’t like him, but he’s very sweet and can be charming

in his sad kind of way. Usually it’s very relaxing to be with someone

who’s so self-absorbed, because it doesn’t make any demands on you. But

he’s obsessed with the idea that I can do something about his magazine.

I can’t, of course. Life doesn’t work like that. I do feel sorry for

him, though.’

‘I don’t. He’s had it very, very easy all his life. He still has it

very, very easy. He’s just had his toy taken away from him that’s all.

It’s hardly unjust, is it?’

‘It’s not a matter of whether it’s just or not. I feel sorry for him

because he’s unhappy.’

‘Well, of course he’s unhappy. Al Ross has turned /Fathom/ into a

really sharp, intelligent magazine that everyone suddenly wants to

read. It was just a bumbling shambles before. Its only real function

was to let Michael have lunch and toady about with whoever he liked on

the pretext that maybe they might like to write a little something. He

hardly ever got an actual issue out. The whole thing was a sham. He

pampered himself with it. I really don’t find that charming or

engaging. I’m sorry, I’m going on about it and I didn’t mean to.’

Susan shrugged uneasily.

‘I think you overreact,’ she said, ‘though I think I will have to

steer clear of him if he’s going to keep on at me to do something I

simply can’t do. It’s too exhausting. Anyway, listen, I’m glad you had

a lousy evening. I want to talk about what we were going to do this

weekend.’

‘Ah,’ said Richard, ‘well...’

‘Oh, I’d better just check the messages first.’

She walked past him to the telephone-answering machine, played the

first few seconds of Gordon’s message and then suddenly ejected the

cassette.

‘I can’t be bothered,’ she said, giving it to him. ‘Could you just

give this straight to Susan at the office tomorrow? Save her a trip. If

there’s anything important on it she can tell me.’

Richard blinked, said, ‘Er, yes,’ and pocketed the tape, tingling

with the shock of the reprieve.

‘Anyway, the weekend --’ said Susan, sitting down on the sofa.

Richard wiped his hand over his brow. ‘Susan, I...’

‘I’m afraid I’ve got to work. Nicola’s sick and I’m going to have to

dep for her at the Wigmore on Friday week. There’s some Vivaldi and

some Mozart I don’t know too well, so that means a lot of extra

practice this weekend, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

‘Well, in fact,’ said Richard, ‘I have to work as well.’ He sat down

by her.

‘I know. Gordon keeps on at me to nag you. I wish he wouldn’t. It’s

none of my business and it puts me in an invidious position. I’m tired

of being pressurised by people, Richard. At least you don’t do that.’

She took a sip of her coffee.

‘But I’m sure,’ she added, ‘that there’s some kind of grey area

between being pressurised and being completely forgotten about that I’d

quite like to explore. Give me a hug.’

He hugged her, feeling that he was monstrously and unworthily lucky.

An hour later he let himself out and discovered that the Pizza Express

was closed.

Meanwhile, Michael Wenton-Weakes made his way back to his home in

Chelsea. As he sat in the back of the taxi he watched the streets with

a blank stare and tapped his fingers lightly against the window in a

slow thoughtful rhythm.

/Rap tap tap a rap tap a rap a tap./

He was one of those dangerous people who are soft, squidgy and

cowlike provided they have what they want. And because he had always

had what he wanted, and had seemed easily pleased with it, it had never

occurred to anybody that he was anything other than soft, squidgy and

cowlike. You would have to push through a lot of soft squidgy bits in

order to find a bit that didn’t give when you pushed it. That was the

bit that all the soft squidgy bits were there to protect.

Michael Wenton-Weakes was the younger son of Lord Magna, publisher,

newspaper owner and over-indulgent father, under whose protective

umbrella it had pleased Michael to run his own little magazine at a

magnificent loss. Lord Magna had presided over the gradual but

dignified and well-respected decline of the publishing empire

originally founded by his father, the first Lord Magna.

Michael continued to tap his knuckles lightly on the glass.

/A rap tap a rap a tap./

He remembered the appalling, terrible day when his father had

electrocuted himself changing a plug, and his mother, his /mother/,

took over the business. Not only took it over but started running it

with completely unexpected verve and determination. She examined the

company with a very sharp eye as to how it was being run, or walked, as

she put it, and eventually even got around to looking at the accounts

of Michael’s magazine.

/Tap tap tap./

Now Michael knew just enough about the business side of things to

know what the figures ought to be, and he had simply assured his father

that that was indeed what they were.

‘Can’t allow this job just to be a sinecure, you must see that, old

fellow, you have to pay your way or how would it look, how would it

be?’ his father used to say, and Michael would nod seriously, and start

thinking up the figures for next month, or whenever it was he would

next manage to get an issue out.

His mother, on the other hand, was not so indulgent. Not by a

lorryload.

Michael usually referred to his mother as an old battleaxe, but if

she was fairly to be compared to a battleaxe it would only be to an

exquisitely crafted, beautifully balanced battleaxe, with an elegant

minimum of fine engraving which stopped just short of its gleaming

razored edge. One swipe from such an instrument and you wouldn’t even

know you’d been hit until you tried to look at your watch a bit later

and discovered that your arm wasn’t on.

She had been waiting patiently -- or at least with the appearance of

patience -- in the wings all this time, being the devoted wife, the

doting but strict mother. Now someone had taken her -- to switch

metaphors for a moment -- out of her scabbard and everyone was running

for cover.

Including Michael.

It was her firm belief that Michael, whom she quietly adored, had

been spoiled in the fullest and worst sense of the word, and she was

determined, at this late stage, to stop it.

It didn’t take her more than a few minutes to see that he had been

simply making up the figures every month, and that the magazine was

haemorrhaging money as Michael toyed with it, all the time running up

huge lunch bills, taxi accounts and staff costs that he would playfully

set against fictitious taxes. The whole thing had simply got lost

somewhere in the gargantuan accounts of Magna House.

She had then summoned Michael to see her.

/Tap tap a rap a tappa./

‘How do you want me to treat you,’ she said, ‘as my son or as the

editor of one of my magazines? I’m happy to do either.’

‘Your magazines? Well, I am your son, but I don’t see...’

‘Right. Michael, I want you to look at these figures,’ she said

briskly, handing over a sheet of computer printout. ‘The ones on the

left show the actual incomings and outgoings of /Fathom/, the ones on

the right are your own figures. Does anything strike you about them?’

‘Mother, I can explain, I --’

‘Good,’ said Lady Magna sweetly, ‘I’m very glad of that.’

She took the piece of paper back. ‘Now. Do you have any views on how

the magazine should best be run in the future?’

‘Yes, absolutely. Very strong ones. I --’

‘Good,’ said Lady Magna, with a bright smile. ‘Well, that’s all

perfectly satisfactory, then.’

‘Don’t you want to hear -- ?’

‘No, that’s all right, dear. I’m just happy to know that you do have

something to say on the matter to clear it all up. I’m sure the new

owner of /Fathom/ will be glad to listen to whatever it is.’

‘What?’ said a stunned Michael. ‘You mean you’re actually selling

/Fathom/?’

‘No. I mean I’ve already sold it. Didn’t get much for it, I’m

afraid. One pound plus a promise that you would be retained as editor

for the next three issues, and after that it’s at the new owner’s

discretion.’

Michael stared, pop-eyed.

‘Well, come now,’ said his mother reasonably, ‘we could hardly

continue under the present arrangement, could we? You always agreed

with your father that the job should not be a sinecure for you. And

since I would have a great deal of difficulty in either believing or

resisting your stories, I thought I would hand the problem on to

someone with whom you could have a more objective relationship. Now, I

have another appointment, Michael.’

‘Well, but... who have you sold it to?’ spluttered Michael.

‘Gordon Way.’

‘Gordon Way! But for heaven’s sake, Mother, he’s --’

‘He’s very anxious to be seen to patronise the arts. And I think I

do mean patronise. I’m sure you’ll get on splendidly, dear. Now, if you

don’t mind --’

Michael stood his ground.

‘I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous! I --’

‘Do you know, that’s exactly what Mr Way said when I showed him

these figures and then demanded that you be kept on as editor for three

issues.’

Michael huffed and puffed and went red and wagged his finger, but

could think of nothing more to say. Except, ‘What difference would it

have made to all this if I’d said treat me as the editor of one of your

magazines?’

‘Why, dear,’ said Lady Magna with her sweetest smile, ‘I would have

called you Mr Wenton-Weakes, of course. And I wouldn’t now be telling

you straighten your tie,’ she added, with a tiny little gesture under

her chin.

/Rap tap tap rap tap tap./

‘Number seventeen, was it, guv?’

‘Er... what?’ said Michael, shaking his head.

‘It was seventeen you said, was it?’ said the cab driver, ‘‘Cause

we’re ‘ere.’

‘Oh. Oh, yes, thank you,’ said Michael. He climbed out and fumbled

in his pocket for some money.

‘Tap tap tap, eh?’

‘What?’ said Michael handing over the fare.

‘Tap tap tap,’ said the cab driver, ‘all the bloody way here. Got

something on your mind, eh, mate?’

‘Mind your own bloody business,’ snapped Michael savagely.

‘If you say so, mate. Just thought you might be going mad or

something,’ said the cabbie and drove off.

Michael let himself into his house and walked through the cold hall

to the dining room, turned on the overhead light and poured himself a

brandy from the decanter. He took off his coat, threw it across the

large mahogany dining table and pulled a chair over to the window where

he sat nursing his drink and his grievances.

/Tap tap tap/, he went on the window.

He had sullenly remained as editor for the stipulated three issues

and was then, with little ceremony, let go. A new editor was found, a

certain A. K. Ross, who was young, hungry and ambitious, and he quickly

turned the magazine into a resounding success. Michael, in the

meantime, had been lost and naked. There was nothing else for him.

He tapped on the window again and looked, as he frequently did, at

the small table lamp that stood on the sill. It was a rather ugly,

ordinary little lamp, and the only thing about it that regularly

transfixed his attention was that this was the lamp that had

electrocuted his father, and this was where he had been sitting.

The old boy was such a fool with anything technical. Michael could

just see him peering with profound concentration through his half moons

and sucking his moustache as he tried to unravel the arcane

complexities of a thirteen-amp plug. He had, it seemed, plugged it back

in the wall without first screwing the cover back on and then tried to

change the fuse /in situ/. From this he received the shock which had

stilled his already dicky heart.

Such a simple, simple error, thought Michael, such as anyone could

have made, anyone, but the consequences of it were catastrophic.

Utterly catastrophic. His father’s death, his own loss, the rise of the

appalling Ross and his disastrously successful magazine and...

/Tap tap tap./

He looked at the window, at his own reflection, and at the dark

shadows of the bushes on the other side of it. He looked again at the

lamp. This was the very object, this the very place, and the error was

such a simple one. Simple to make, simple to prevent.

The only thing that separated him from that simple moment was the

invisible barrier of the months that had passed in between.

A sudden, odd calm descended on him as if something inside him had

suddenly been resolved.

/Tap tap tap./

/Fathom/ was his. It wasn’t meant to be a success, it was his life.

His life had been taken from him, and that demanded a response.

/Tap tap tap crack./

He surprised himself by suddenly punching his hand through the

window and cutting himself quite badly.

[::: CHAPTER 15 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Some of the less pleasant aspects of being dead were beginning to

creep up on Gordon Way as he stood in front of his ‘cottage’.

It was in fact a rather large house by anybody else’s standards but

he had always wanted to have a cottage in the country and so when the

time came for him finally to buy one and he discovered that he had

rather more money available than he had ever seriously believed he

might own, he bought a large old rectory and called it a cottage in

spite of its seven bedrooms and its four acres of dank Cambridgeshire

land. This did little to endear him to people who only had cottages,

but then if Gordon Way had allowed his actions to be governed by what

endeared him to people he wouldn’t have been Gordon Way.

He wasn’t, of course, Gordon Way any longer. He was the ghost of

Gordon Way.

In his pocket he had the ghosts of Gordon Way’s keys.

It was this realisation that had stopped him for a moment in his

invisible tracks. The idea of walking through walls frankly revolted

him. It was something he had been trying strenuously to avoid all

night. He had instead been fighting to grip and grapple with every

object he touched in order to render it, and thereby himself,

substantial. To enter his house, his own house, by any means other than

that of opening the front door and striding in in a proprietorial

manner filled him with a hurtling sense of loss.

He wished, as he stared at it, that the house was not such an

extreme example of Victorian Gothic, and that the moonlight didn’t play

so coldly on its narrow gabled windows and its forbidding turrets. He

had joked, stupidly, when he bought it that it looked as if it ought to

be haunted, not realising that one day it would be -- or by whom.

A chill of the spirit gripped him as he made his way silently up the

driveway, lined by the looming shapes of yew trees that were far older

than the rectory itself. It was a disturbing thought that anybody else

might be scared walking up such a driveway on such a night for fear of

meeting something such as him.

Behind a screen of yew trees off to his left stood the gloomy bulk

of the old church, decaying now, only used in rotation with others in

neighbouring villages and presided over by a vicar who was always

breathless from bicycling there and dispirited by the few who were

waiting for him when he arrived. Behind the steeple of the church hung

the cold eye of the moon.

A glimpse of movement seemed suddenly to catch his eye, as if a

figure had moved in the bushes near the house, but it was, he told

himself, only his imagination, overwrought by the strain of being dead.

What was there here that he could possibly be afraid of?

He continued onwards, around the angle of the wing of the rectory,

towards the front door set deep within its gloomy porch wreathed in

ivy. He was suddenly startled to realise that there was light coming

from within the house. Electric light and also the dim flicker of

firelight.

It was a moment or two before he realised that he was, of course,

expected that night, though hardly in his present form. Mrs Bennett,

the elderly housekeeper, would have been in to make the bed, light the

fire and leave out a light supper for him.

The television, too, would be on, especially so that he could turn

it off impatiently upon entering.

His footsteps failed to crunch on the gravel as he approached.

Though he knew that he must fail at the door, he nevertheless could not

but go there first, to try if he could open it, and only then, hidden

within the shadows of the porch, would he close his eyes and let

himself slip ashamedly through it. He stepped up to the door and

stopped.

It was open.

Just half an inch, but it was open. His spirit fluttered in fearful

surprise. How could it be open? Mrs Bennett was always so conscientious

about such things. He stood uncertainly for a moment and then with

difficulty exerted himself against the door. Under the little pressure

he could bring to bear on it, it swung slowly and unwillingly open, its

hinges groaning in protest. He stepped through and slipped along the

stone-flagged hallway. A wide staircase led up into the darkness, but

the doors that led off from the hallway all stood closed.

The nearest door led into the drawing room, in which the fire was

burning, and from which he could hear the muted car chases of the late

movie. He struggled futilely for a minute or two with its shiny brass

door knob, but was forced in the end to admit a humiliating defeat, and

with a sudden rage flung himself straight at the door -- and through

it.

The room inside was a picture of pleasant domestic warmth. He

staggered violently into it, and was unable to stop himself floating on

through a small occasional table set with thick sandwiches and a

Thermos flask of hot coffee, through a large overstuffed armchair, into

the fire, through the thick hot brickwork and into the cold dark dining

room beyond.

The connecting door back into the sitting room was also closed.

Gordon fingered it numbly and then, submitting himself to the

inevitable, braced himself, and slid back through it, calmly, gently,

noticing for the first time the rich internal grain of the wood.

The coziness of the room was almost too much for Gordon, and he

wandered distractedly around it, unable to settle, letting the warm

liveliness of the firelight play through him. Him it couldn’t warm.

What, he wondered, were ghosts supposed to do all night?

He sat, uneasily, and watched the television. Soon, however, the car

chases drifted peacefully to a close and there was nothing left but

grey snow and white noise, which he was unable to turn off.

He found he’d sunk too far into the chair and confused himself with

bits of it as he pushed and pulled himself up. He tried to amuse

himself by standing in the middle of a table, but it did little to

alleviate a mood that was sliding inexorably from despondency

downwards.

Perhaps he would sleep.

Perhaps.

He felt no tiredness or drowsiness, but just a deadly craving for

oblivion. He passed back through the closed door and into the dark

hallway, from which the wide heavy stairs led to the large gloomy

bedrooms above.

Up these, emptily, he trod.

It was for nothing, he knew. If you cannot open the door to a

bedroom you cannot sleep in its bed. He slid himself through the door

and lifted himself on to the bed which he knew to be cold though he

could not feel it. The moon seemed unable to leave him alone and shone

full on him as he lay there wide-eyed and empty, unable now to remember

what sleep was or how to do it.

The horror of hollowness lay on him, the horror of lying ceaselessly

and forever awake at four o’clock in the morning.

He had nowhere to go, nothing to do when he got there, and no one he

could go and wake up who wouldn’t be utterly horrified to see him.

The worst moment had been when he had seen Richard on the road,

Richard’s face frozen white in the windscreen. He saw again his face,

and that of the pale figure next to him.

That had been the thing which had shaken out of him the lingering

shred of warmth at the back of his mind which said that this was just a

temporary problem. It seemed terrible in the night hours, but would be

all right in the morning when he could see people and sort things out.

He fingered the memory of the moment in his mind and could not let it

go.

He had seen Richard and Richard, he knew, had seen him.

It was not going to be all right.

Usually when he felt this bad at night he popped downstairs to see

what was in the fridge, so he went now. It would be more cheerful than

this moonlit bedroom. He would hang around the kitchen going bump in

the night.

He slid down -- and partially through -- the banisters, wafted

through the kitchen door without a second thought and then devoted all

his concentration and energy for about five minutes to getting the

light switch on.

That gave him a real sense of achievement and he determined to

celebrate with a beer.

After a minute or two of repeatedly juggling and dropping a can of

Fosters he gave it up. He had not the slightest conception of how he

could manage to open a ring pull, and besides the stuff was all shaken

up by now -- and what was he going to do with the stuff even if he did

get it open?

He didn’t have a body to keep it in. He hurled the can away from him

and it scuttled off under a cupboard.

He began to notice something about himself, which was the way in

which his ability to grasp things seemed to grow and fade in a slow

rhythm, as did his visibility.

There was an irregularity in the rhythm, though, or perhaps it was

just that sometimes the effects of it would be much more pronounced

than at others. That, too, seemed to vary according to a slower rhythm.

Just at that moment it seemed to him that his strength was on the

increase.

In a sudden fever of activity he tried to see how many things in the

kitchen he could move or use or somehow get to work.

He pulled open cupboards, he yanked out drawers, scattering cutlery

on the floor. He got a brief whirr out of the food processor, he

knocked over the electric coffee grinder without getting it to work, he

turned on the gas on the cooker hob but then couldn’t light it, he

savaged a loaf of bread with a carving knife. He tried stuffing lumps

of bread into his mouth, but they simply fell through his mouth to the

floor. A mouse appeared, but scurried from the room, its coat electric

with fear.

Eventually he stopped and sat at the kitchen table, emotionally

exhausted but physically numb.

How, he wondered, would people react to his death?

Who would be most sorry to know that he had gone?

For a while there would be shock, then sadness, then they would

adjust, and he would be a fading memory as people got on with their own

lives without him, thinking that he had gone on to wherever people go.

That was a thought that filled him with the most icy dread.

He had not gone. He was still here.

He sat facing one cupboard that he hadn’t managed to open yet

because its handle was too stiff, and that annoyed him. He grappled

awkwardly with a tin of tomatoes, then went over again to the large

cupboard and attacked the handle with the tin. The door flew open and

his own missing bloodstained body fell horribly forward out of it.

Gordon hadn’t realised up till this point that it was possible for a

ghost to faint.

He realised it now and did it.

He was woken a couple of hours later by the sound of his gas cooker

exploding.

[::: CHAPTER 16 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The following morning Richard woke up twice.

The first time he assumed he had made a mistake and turned over for

a fitful few minutes more. The second time he sat up with a jolt as the

events of the previous night insisted themselves upon him.

He went downstairs and had a moody and unsettled breakfast, during

which nothing went right. He burned the toast, spilled the coffee, and

realised that though he’d meant to buy some more marmalade yesterday,

he hadn’t. He surveyed his feeble attempt at feeding himself and

thought that maybe he could at least allow himself the time to take

Susan out for an amazing meal tonight, to make up for last night.

If he could persuade her to come.

There was a restaurant that Gordon had been enthusing about at great

length and recommending that they try. Gordon was pretty good on

restaurants -- he certainly seemed to spend enough time in them. He sat

and tapped his teeth with a pencil for a couple of minutes, and then

went up to his workroom and lugged a telephone directory out from under

a pile of computer magazines.

L’Esprit d’Escalier.

He phoned the restaurant and tried to book a table, but when he said

when he wanted it for this seemed to cause a little amusement.

‘Ah, non, m’sieur,’ said the maître d’, ‘I regret that it is

impossible. At this moment it is necessary to make reservations at

least three weeks in advance. Pardon, m’sieur.’

Richard marvelled at the idea that there were people who actually

knew what they wanted to do three weeks in advance, thanked the maître

d’ and rang off. Well, maybe a pizza again instead. This thought

connected back to the appointment he had failed to keep last night, and

after a moment curiosity overcame him and he reached for the phone book

again.

Gentleman...

Gentles...

Gentry.

There was no Gently at all. Not a single one. He found the other

directories, except for the S-Z book which his cleaning lady

continually threw away for reasons he had never yet fathomed.

There was certainly no Cjelli, or anything like it. There was no

Jently, no Dgently, no Djently, no Dzently, nor anything remotely

similar. He wondered about Tjently, Tsentli or Tzentli and tried

Directory Enquiries, but they were out. He sat and tapped his teeth

with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen

of his computer.

How very peculiar it had been that it had only been hours earlier

that Reg had asked after Dirk with such urgency.

If you really wanted to find someone, how would you set about it,

what would you do?

He tried phoning the police, but they were out too. Well, that was

that. He had done all he could do for the moment short of hiring a

private detective, and he had better ways of wasting his time and

money. He would run into Dirk again, as he did every few years or so.

He found it hard to believe there were really such people, anyway,

as private detectives.

What sort of people were they? What did they look like, where did

they work?

What sort of tie would you wear if you were a private detective?

Presumably it would have to be exactly the sort of tie that people

wouldn’t expect private detectives to wear. Imagine having to sort out

a problem like that when you’d just got up.

Just out of curiosity as much as anything else, and because the only

alternative was settling down to Anthem coding, he found himself

leafing through the Yellow Pages.

Private Detectives -- see Detective Agencies.

The words looked almost odd in such a solid and businesslike

context. He flipped back through the book. Dry Cleaners, Dog Breeders,

Dental Technicians, Detective Agencies...

At that moment the phone rang and he answered it, a little curtly.

He didn’t like being interrupted.

‘Something wrong, Richard?’

‘Oh, hi, Kate, sorry, no. I was... my mind was elsewhere.’

Kate Anselm was another star programmer at WayForward Technologies.

She was working on a long-term Artificial Intelligence project, the

sort of thing that sounded like an absurd pipe dream until you heard

her talking about it. Gordon needed to hear her talking about it quite

regularly, partly because he was nervous about the money it was costing

and partly because, well, there was little doubt that Gordon liked to

hear Kate talking anyway.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you,’ she said. ‘It’s just I was trying to

contact Gordon and can’t. There’s no reply from London or the cottage,

or his car or his bleeper. It’s just that for someone as obsessively in

contact as Gordon it’s a bit odd. You heard he’s had a phone put in his

isolation tank? True.’

‘I haven’t spoken to him since yesterday,’ said Richard. He suddenly

remembered the tape he had taken from Susan’s answering machine, and

hoped to God there wasn’t anything more important in Gordon’s message

than ravings about rabbits. He said, ‘I know he was going to the

cottage. Er, I don’t know where he is. Have you tried --’ Richard

couldn’t think of anywhere else to try -- ‘...er. Good God.’

‘Richard?’

‘How extraordinary...’

‘Richard, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing, Kate. Er, I’ve just read the most astounding thing.’

‘Really, what are you reading?’

‘Well, the telephone directory, in fact...’

‘Really? I must rush out and buy one. Have the film rights gone?’

‘Look, sorry, Kate, can I get back to you? I don’t know where Gordon

is at the moment and --’

‘Don’t worry. I know how it is when you can’t wait to turn the next

page. They always keep you guessing till the end, don’t they? It must

have been Zbigniew that did it. Have a good weekend.’ She hung up.

Richard hung up too, and sat staring at the box advertisement lying

open in front of him in the Yellow Pages.

DIRK GENTLY’S

HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

We solve the /whole/ crime

We find the /whole/ person

Phone today for the /whole/ solution to your problem

(Missing cats and messy divorces a speciality)

33a Peckender St., London N1 01-354 9112

Peckender Street was only a few minutes’ walk away. Richard

scribbled down the address, pulled on his coat and trotted downstairs,

stopping to make another quick inspection of the sofa. There must, he

thought, be something terribly obvious that he was overlooking. The

sofa was jammed on a slight turn in the long narrow stairway. At this

point the stairs were interrupted for a couple of yards of flat

landing, which corresponded with the position of the flat directly

beneath Richard’s. However, his inspection produced no new insights,

and he eventually clambered on over it and out of the front door.

In Islington you can hardly hurl a brick without hitting three

antique shops, an estate agent and a bookshop.

Even if you didn’t actually hit them you would certainly set off

their burglar alarms, which wouldn’t be turned off again till after the

weekend. A police car played its regular game of dodgems down Upper

Street and squealed to a halt just past him. Richard crossed the road

behind it.

The day was cold and bright, which he liked. He walked across the

top of Islington Green, where winos get beaten up, past the site of the

old Collins Music Hall which had got burnt down, and through Camden

Passage where American tourists get ripped off. He browsed among the

antiques for a while and looked at a pair of earrings that he thought

Susan would like, but he wasn’t sure. Then he wasn’t sure that he liked

them, got confused and gave up. He looked in at a bookshop, and on an

impulse bought an anthology of Coleridge’s poems since it was just

lying there.

From here he threaded his way through the winding back streets, over

the canal, past the council estates that lined the canal, through a

number of smaller and smaller squares, till finally he reached

Peckender Street, which had turned out to be a good deal farther than

he’d thought.

It was the sort of street where property developers in large Jaguars

drive around at the weekend salivating. It was full of end-of-lease

shops, Victorian industrial architecture and a short, decaying late-

Georgian terrace, all just itching to be pulled down so that sturdy

young concrete boxes could sprout in their places. Estate agents roamed

the area in hungry packs, eyeing each other warily, their clipboards on

a hair trigger.

Number 33, when he eventually found it neatly sandwiched between 37

and 45, was in a poorish state of repair, but no worse than most of the

rest.

The ground floor was a dusty travel agent’s whose window was cracked

and whose faded BOAC posters were probably now quite valuable. The

doorway next to the shop had been painted bright red, not well, but at

least recently. A push button next to the door said, in neatly

pencilled lettering, ‘Dominique, French lessons, 3me Floor’.

The most striking feature of the door, however, was the bold and

shiny brass plaque fixed in the dead centre of it, on which was

engraved the legend ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’.

Nothing else. It looked brand new -- even the screws that held it in

place were still shiny.

The door opened to Richard’s push and he peered inside.

He saw a short and musty hallway which contained little but the

stairway that led up from it. A door at the back of the hall showed

little sign of having been opened in recent years, and had stacks of

old metal shelving, a fish tank and the carcass of a bike piled up

against it. Everything else, the walls, the floor, the stairs

themselves, and as much of the rear door as could be got at, had been

painted grey in an attempt to smarten it up cheaply, but it was all now

badly scuffed, and little cups of fungus were peeking from a damp stain

near the ceiling.

The sounds of angry voices reached him, and as he started up the

stairs he was able to disentangle the noises of two entirely separate

but heated arguments that were going on somewhere above him.

One ended abruptly -- or at least half of it did -- as an angry

overweight man came clattering down the stairs pulling his raincoat

collar straight. The other half of the argument continued in a torrent

of aggrieved French from high above them. The man pushed past Richard,

said, ‘Save your money, mate, it’s a complete washout,’ and disappeared

out into the chilly morning.

The other argument was more muffled. As Richard reached the first

corridor a door slammed somewhere and brought that too to an end. He

looked into the nearest open doorway.

It led into a small ante-office. The other, inner door leading from

it was firmly closed. A youngish plump-faced girl in a cheap blue coat

was pulling sticks of make-up and boxes of Kleenex out of her desk

drawer and thrusting them into her bag.

‘Is this the detective agency?’ Richard asked her tentatively.

The girl nodded, biting her lip and keeping her head down.

‘And is Mr Gently in?’

‘He may be,’ she said, throwing back her hair, which was too curly

for throwing back properly, ‘and then again he may not be. I am not in

a position to tell. It is not my business to know of his whereabouts.

His whereabouts are, as of now, entirely his own business.’

She retrieved her last pot of nail varnish and tried to slam the

drawer shut. A fat book sitting upright in the drawer prevented it from

closing. She tried to slam the drawer again, without success. She

picked up the book, ripped out a clump of pages and replaced it. This

time she was able to slam the drawer with ease.

‘Are you his secretary?’ asked Richard.

‘I am his ex-secretary and I intend to stay that way,’ she said,

firmly snapping her bag shut. ‘If he intends to spend his money on

stupid expensive brass plaques rather than on paying me, then let him.

But I won’t stay to stand for it, thank you very much. Good for

business, my foot. Answering the phones properly is good for business

and I’d like to see his fancy brass plaque do that. If you’ll excuse me

I’d like to storm out, please.’

Richard stood aside, and out she stormed.

‘And good riddance!’ shouted a voice from the inner office. A phone

rang and was picked up immediately.

‘Yes?’ answered the voice from the inner office, testly. The girl

popped back for her scarf, but quietly, so her ex-employer wouldn’t

hear. Then she was finally gone.

‘Yes, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. How can we be of help

to you?’

The torrent of French from upstairs had ceased. A kind of tense calm

descended.

Inside, the voice said, ‘That’s right, Mrs Sunderland, messy

divorces are our particular speciality.’

There was a pause.

‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Sunderland, not quite that messy.’ Down went

the phone again, to be replaced instantly by the ringing of another

one.

Richard looked around the grim little office. There was very little

in it. A battered chipboard veneer desk, an old grey filing cabinet and

a dark green tin wastepaper bin. On the wall was a Duran Duran poster

on which someone had scrawled in fat red felt tip, ‘Take this down

please’.

Beneath that another hand had scrawled, ‘No’.

Beneath that again the first hand had written, ‘I insist that you

take it down’.

Beneath that the second hand had written, ‘Won’t!’

Beneath that -- ‘You’re fired’.

Beneath that -- ‘Good!’

And there the matter appeared to have rested.

He knocked on the inner door, but was not answered. Instead the

voice continued, ‘I’m very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The

term “holistic” refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with

here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not

concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale

pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each

problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The

connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and

complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical

world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.

‘Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with

toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why

he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?

‘No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A

pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.’

Another phone was ringing as he put this one down.

Richard eased the door open and looked in.

It was the same Svlad, or Dirk, Cjelli. Looking a little rounder

about the middle, a little looser and redder about the eyes and the

neck, but it was still essentially the same face that he remembered

most vividly smiling a grim smile as its owner climbed into the back of

one of the Black Marias of the Cambridgeshire constabulary, eight years

previously.

He wore a heavy old light brown suit which looked as if it has been

worn extensively for bramble hacking expeditions in some distant and

better past, a red checked shirt which failed entirely to harmonise

with the suit, and a green striped tie which refused to speak to either

of them. He also wore thick metal-rimmed spectacles, which probably

accounted at least in part for his dress sense.

‘Ah, Mrs Bluthall, how thoroughly uplifting to hear from you,’ he

was saying. ‘I was so distressed to learn that Miss Tiddles has passed

over. This is desperate news indeed. And yet, and yet... Should we

allow black despair to hide from us the fairer light in which your

blessed moggy now forever dwells?

‘I think not. Hark. I think I hear Miss Tiddles miaowing even now.

She calls to you, Mrs Bluthall. She says she is content, she is at

peace. She says she’ll be even more at peace when you’ve paid some bill

or other. Does that ring a bell with you at all, Mrs Bluthall? Come to

think of it I think I sent you one myself not three months ago. I

wonder if it can be that which is disturbing her eternal rest.’

Dirk beckoned Richard in with a brisk wave and then motioned him to

pass the crumpled pack of French cigarettes that was sitting just out

of his reach.

‘Sunday night, then, Mrs Bluthall, Sunday night at eight-thirty. You

know the address. Yes, I’m sure Miss Tiddles will appear, as I’m sure

will your cheque book. Till then, Mrs Bluthall, till then.’

Another phone was already ringing as he got rid of Mrs Bluthall. He

grabbed at it, lighting his crumpled cigarette at the same time.

‘Ah, Mrs Sauskind,’ he said in answer to the caller, ‘my oldest and

may I say most valued client. Good day to you, Mrs Sauskind, good day.

Sadly, no sign as yet of young Roderick, I’m afraid, but the search is

intensifying as it moves into what I am confident are its closing

stages, and I am sanguine that within mere days from today’s date we

will have the young rascal permanently restored to your arms and mewing

prettily, ah yes the bill, I was wondering if you had received it.’

Dirk’s crumpled cigarette turned out to be too crumpled to smoke, so

he hooked the phone on his shoulder and poked around in the packet for

another, but it was empty.

He rummaged on his desk for a piece of paper and a stub of pencil

and wrote a note which he passed to Richard.

‘Yes, Mrs Sauskind,’ he assured the telephone, ‘I am listening with

the utmost attention.’

The note said ‘Tell secretary get cigs’.

‘Yes,’ continued Dirk into the phone, ‘but as I have endeavoured to

explain to you, Mrs Sauskind, over the seven years of our acquaintance,

I incline to the quantum mechanical view in this matter. My theory is

that your cat is not lost, but that his waveform has temporarily

collapsed and must be restored. Schrödinger. Planck. And so on.’

Richard wrote on the note ‘You haven’t got secretary’ and pushed it

back.

Dirk considered this for a while, then wrote ‘Damn and blast’ on the

paper and pushed it to Richard again.

‘I grant you, Mrs Sauskind,’ continued Dirk blithely, ‘that nineteen

years is, shall we say, a distinguished age for a cat to reach, yet can

we allow ourselves to believe that a cat such as Roderick has not

reached it?

‘And should we now in the autumn of his years abandon him to his

fate? This surely is the time that he most needs the support of our

continuing investigations. This is the time that we should redouble our

efforts, and with your permission, Mrs Sauskind, that is what I intend

to do. Imagine, Mrs Sauskind, how you would face him if you had not

done this simple thing for him.’

Richard fidgeted with the note, shrugged to himself, and wrote ‘I’ll

get them’ on it and passed it back once more.

Dirk shook his head in admonition, then wrote ‘I couldn’t possibly

that would be most kind’. As soon as Richard had read this, Dirk took

the note back and added ‘Get money from secretary’ to it.

Richard looked at the paper thoughtfully, took the pencil and put a

tick next to where he had previously written ‘You haven’t got

secretary’. He pushed the paper back across the table to Dirk, who

merely glanced at it and ticked ‘I couldn’t possibly that would be most

kind’.

‘Well, perhaps,’ continued Dirk to Mrs Sauskind, ‘you could just run

over any of the areas in the bill that cause you difficulty. Just the

broader areas.’

Richard let himself out.

Running down the stairs, he passed a young hopeful in a denim jacket

and close-cropped hair peering anxiously up the stairwell.

‘Any good, mate?’ he said to Richard.

‘Amazing,’ murmured Richard, ‘just amazing.’

He found a nearby newsagent’s and picked up a couple of packets of

Disque Bleu for Dirk, and a copy of the new edition of /Personal

Computer World/, which had a picture of Gordon Way on the front.

‘Pity about him, isn’t it?’ said the newsagent.

‘What? Oh, er... yes,’ said Richard. He often thought the same

himself, but was surprised to find his feelings so widely echoed. He

picked up a /Guardian/ as well, paid and left.

Dirk was still on the phone with his feet on the table when Richard

returned, and it was clear that he was relaxing into his negotiations.

‘Yes, expenses were, well, expensive in the Bahamas, Mrs Sauskind,

it is in the nature of expenses to be so. Hence the name.’ He took the

proffered packets of cigarettes, seemed disappointed there were only

two, but briefly raised his eyebrows to Richard in acknowledgement of

the favour he had done him, and then waved him to a chair.

The sounds of an argument conducted partly in French drifted down

from the floor above.

‘Of course I will explain to you again why the trip to the Bahamas

was so vitally necessary,’ said Dirk Gently soothingly. ‘Nothing could

give me greater pleasure. I believe, as you know, Mrs Sauskind, in the

fundamental interconnectedness of all things. Furthermore I have

plotted and triangulated the vectors of the interconnectedness of all

things and traced them to a beach in Bermuda which it is therefore

necessary for me to visit from time to time in the course of my

investigations. I wish it were not the case, since, sadly, I am

allergic to both the sun and rum punches, but then we all have our

crosses to bear, do we not, Mrs Sauskind?’

A babble seemed to break out from the telephone.

‘You sadden me, Mrs Sauskind. I wish I could find it in my heart to

tell you that I find your scepticism rewarding and invigorating, but

with the best will in the world I cannot. I am drained by it, Mrs

Sauskind, drained. I think you will find an item in the bill to that

effect. Let me see.’

He picked up a flimsy carbon copy lying near him.

‘“Detecting and triangulating the vectors of interconnectedness of

all things, one hundred and fifty pounds.” We’ve dealt with that.

‘“Tracing same to beach on Bahamas, fare and accommodation.” A mere

fifteen hundred. The accommodation was, of course, distressingly

modest.

‘Ah yes, here we are, “Struggling on in the face of draining

scepticism from client, drinks -- three hundred and twenty-seven pounds

fifty.”

‘Would that I did not have to make such charges, my dear Mrs

Sauskind, would that the occasion did not continually arise. Not

believing in my methods only makes my job more difficult, Mrs Sauskind,

and hence, regrettably, more expensive.’

Upstairs, the sounds of argument were becoming more heated by the

moment. The French voice seemed to be verging on hysteria.

‘I do appreciate, Mrs Sauskind,’ continued Dirk, ‘that the cost of

the investigation has strayed somewhat from the original estimate, but

I am sure that you will in your turn appreciate that a job which takes

seven years to do must clearly be more difficult than one that can be

pulled off in an afternoon and must therefore be charged at a higher

rate. I have continually to revise my estimate of how difficult the

task is in the light of how difficult it has so far proved to be.’

The babble from the phone became more frantic.

‘My dear Mrs Sauskind -- or may I call you Joyce? Very well then. My

dear Mrs Sauskind, let me say this. Do not worry yourself about this

bill, do not let it alarm or discomfit you. Do not, I beg you, let it

become a source of anxiety to you. Just grit your teeth and pay it.’

He pulled his feet down off the table and leaned forward over the

desk, inching the telephone receiver inexorably back towards its

cradle.

‘As always, the very greatest pleasure to speak with you, Mrs

Sauskind. For now, goodbye.’

He at last put down the receiver, picked it up again, and dropped it

for the moment into the waste basket.

‘My dear Richard MacDuff,’ he said, producing a large flat box from

under his desk and pushing it across the table at him, ‘your pizza.’

Richard started back in astonishment.

‘Er, no thanks,’ he said, ‘I had breakfast. Please. You have it.’

Dirk shrugged. ‘I told them you’d pop in and settle up over the

weekend,’ he said. ‘Welcome, by the way, to my offices.’

He waved a vague hand around the tatty surroundings.

‘The light works,’ he said, indicating the window, ‘the gravity

works,’ he said, dropping a pencil on the floor. ‘Anything else we have

to take our chances with.’

Richard cleared his throat. ‘What,’ he said, ‘is this?’

‘What is what?’

‘This,’ exclaimed Richard, ‘all this. You appear to have a Holistic

Detective Agency and I don’t even know what one is.’

‘I provide a service that is unique in this world,’ said Dirk. ‘The

term “holistic” refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with

here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all --’

‘Yes, I got that bit earlier,’ said Richard. ‘I have to say that it

sounded a bit like an excuse for exploiting gullible old ladies.’

‘Exploiting?’ asked Dirk. ‘Well, I suppose it would be if anybody

ever paid me, but I do assure you, my dear Richard, that there never

seems to be the remotest danger of that. I live in what are known as

hopes. I hope for fascinating and remunerative cases, my secretary

hopes that I will pay her, her landlord hopes that she will produce

some rent, the Electricity Board hopes that he will settle their bill,

and so on. I find it a wonderfully optimistic way of life.

‘Meanwhile I give a lot of charming and silly old ladies something

to be happily cross about and virtually guarantee the freedom of their

cats. Is there, you ask -- and I put the question for you because I

know you know I hate to be interrupted -- is there a single case that

exercises the tiniest part of my intellect, which, as you hardly need

me to tell you, is prodigious? No. But do I despair? Am I downcast?

Yes. Until,’ he added, ‘today.’

‘Oh, well, I’m glad of that,’ said Richard, ‘but what was all that

rubbish about cats and quantum mechanics?’

With a sigh Dirk flipped up the lid of the pizza with a single flick

of practised fingers. He surveyed the cold round thing with a kind of

sadness and then tore off a hunk of it. Pieces of pepperoni and anchovy

scattered over his desk.

‘I am sure, Richard,’ he said, ‘that you are familiar with the

notion of Schrödinger’s Cat,’ and he stuffed the larger part of the

hunk into his mouth.

‘Of course,’ said Richard. ‘Well, reasonably familiar.’

‘What is it?’ said Dirk through a mouthful.

Richard shifted irritably in his seat. ‘It’s an illustration,’ he

said, ‘of the principle that at a quantum level all events are governed

by probabilities...’

‘At a quantum level, and therefore at all levels,’ interrupted Dirk.

‘Though at any level higher than the subatomic the cumulative effect of

those probabilities is, in the normal course of events,

indistinguishable from the effect of hard and fast physical laws.

Continue.’

He put some more cold pizza into his face.

Richard reflected that Dirk’s was a face into which too much had

already been put. What with that and the amount he talked, the traffic

through his mouth was almost incessant. His ears, on the other hand,

remained almost totally unused in normal conversation.

It occurred to Richard that if Lamarck had been right and you were

to take a line through this behaviour for several generations, the

chances were that some radical replumbing of the interior of the skull

would eventually take place.

Richard continued, ‘Not only are quantum level events governed by

probabilities, but those probabilities aren’t even resolved into actual

events until they are measured. Or to use a phrase that I just heard

you use in a rather bizarre context, the act of measurement collapses

the probability waveform. Up until that point all the possible courses

of action open to, say, an electron, coexist as probability waveforms.

Nothing is decided. Until it’s measured.’

Dirk nodded. ‘More or less,’ he said, taking another mouthful. ‘But

what of the cat?’

Richard decided that there was only one way to avoid having to watch

Dirk eat his way through all the rest of the pizza, and that was to eat

the rest himself. He rolled it up and took a token nibble off the end.

It was rather good. He took another bite.

Dirk watched this with startled dismay.

‘So,’ said Richard, ‘the idea behind Schrödinger’s Cat was to try

and imagine a way in which the effects of probabilistic behaviour at a

quantum level could be considered at a macroscopic level. Or let’s say

an everyday level.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ said Dirk, regarding the rest of the pizza with a

stricken look. Richard took another bite and continued cheerfully.

‘So you imagine that you take a cat and put it in a box that you can

seal completely. Also in the box you put a small lump of radioactive

material, and a phial of poison gas. You arrange it so that within a

given period of time there is an exactly fifty-fifty chance that an

atom in the radioactive lump will decay and emit an electron. If it

does decay then it triggers the release of the gas and kills the cat.

If it doesn’t, the cat lives. Fifty-fifty. Depending on the fifty-fifty

chance that a single atom does or does not decay.

‘The point as I understand it is this: since the decay of a single

atom is a quantum level event that wouldn’t be resolved either way

until it was observed, and since you don’t make the observation until

you open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead, then there’s

a rather extraordinary consequence.

‘Until you do open the box the cat itself exists in an indeterminate

state. The possibility that it is alive, and the possibility that it is

dead, are two different waveforms superimposed on each other inside the

box. Schrödinger put forward this idea to illustrate what he thought

was absurd about quantum theory.’

Dirk got up and padded over to the window, probably not so much for

the meagre view it afforded over an old warehouse on which an

alternative comedian was lavishing his vast lager commercial fees

developing into luxury apartments, as for the lack of view it afforded

of the last piece of pizza disappearing.

‘Exactly,’ said Dirk, ‘bravo!’

‘But what’s all that got to do with this -- this Detective Agency?’

‘Oh, that. Well, some researchers were once conducting such an

experiment, but when they opened up the box, the cat was neither alive

nor dead but was in fact completely missing, and they called me in to

investigate. I was able to deduce that nothing very dramatic had

happened. The cat had merely got fed up with being repeatedly locked up

in a box and occasionally gassed and had taken the first opportunity to

hoof it through the window. It was for me the work of a moment to set a

saucer of milk by the window and call “Bernice” in an enticing voice --

the cat’s name was Bernice, you understand --’

‘Now, wait a minute --’ said Richard.

‘ -- and the cat was soon restored. A simple enough matter, but it

seemed to create quite an impression in certain circles, and soon one

thing led to another as they do and it all culminated in the thriving

career you see before you.’

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ insisted Richard, slapping the

table.

‘Yes?’ enquired Dirk innocently.

‘Now, what are you talking about, Dirk?’

‘You have a problem with what I have told you?’

‘Well, I hardly know where to begin,’ protested Richard. ‘All right.

You said that some people were performing the experiment. That’s

nonsense. Schrödinger’s Cat isn’t a real experiment. It’s just an

illustration for arguing about the idea. It’s not something you’d

actually do.’

Dirk was watching him with odd attention.

‘Oh, really?’ he said at last. ‘And why not?’

‘Well, there’s nothing you can test. The whole point of the idea is

to think about what happens before you make your observation. You can’t

know what’s going on inside the box without looking, and the very

instant you look the wave packet collapses and the probabilities

resolve. It’s self-defeating. It’s completely purposeless.’

‘You are, of course, perfectly correct as far as you go,’ replied

Dirk, returning to his seat. He drew a cigarette out of the packet,

tapped it several times on the desk, and leant across the desk and

pointed the filter at Richard.

‘But think about this,’ he continued. ‘Supposing you were to

introduce a psychic, someone with clairvoyant powers, into the

experiment -- someone who is able to divine what state of health the

cat is in without opening the box. Someone who has, perhaps, a certain

eerie sympathy with cats. What then? Might that furnish us with an

additional insight into the problem of quantum physics?’

‘Is that what they wanted to do?’

‘It’s what they did.’

‘Dirk, this is /complete nonsense/.’

Dirk raised his eyebrows challengingly.

‘All right, all right,’ said Richard, holding up his palms, ‘let’s

just follow it through. Even if I accepted -- which I don’t for one

second -- that there was any basis at all for clairvoyance, it wouldn’t

alter the fundamental undoableness of the experiment. As I said, the

whole thing turns on what happens inside the box before it’s observed.

It doesn’t matter how you observe it, whether you look into the box

with your eyes or -- well, with your mind, if you insist. If

clairvoyance works, then it’s just another way of looking into the box,

and if it doesn’t then of course it’s irrelevant.’

‘It might depend, of course, on the view you take of

clairvoyance...’

‘Oh yes? And what view do you take of clairvoyance? I should be very

interested to know, given your history.’

Dirk tapped the cigarette on the desk again and looked narrowly at

Richard.

There was a deep and prolonged silence, disturbed only by the sound

of distant crying in French.

‘I take the view I have always taken,’ said Dirk eventually.

‘Which is?’

‘That I am not clairvoyant.’

‘Really,’ said Richard. ‘Then what about the exam papers?’

The eyes of Dirk Gently darkened at the mention of this subject.

‘A coincidence,’ he said, in a low, savage voice, ‘a strange and

chilling coincidence, but none the less a coincidence. One, I might

add, which caused me to spend a considerable time in prison.

Coincidences can be frightening and dangerous things.’

Dirk gave Richard another of his long appraising looks.

‘I have been watching you carefully,’ he said. ‘You seem to be

extremely relaxed for a man in your position.’

This seemed to Richard to be an odd remark, and he tried to make

sense of it for a moment. Then the light dawned, and it was an

aggravating light.

‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘he hasn’t got to you as well, has he?’

This remark seemed to puzzle Dirk in return.

‘Who hasn’t got to me?’ he said.

‘Gordon. No, obviously not. Gordon Way. He has this habit of trying

to get other people to bring pressure on me to get on with what he sees

as important work. I thought for a moment -- oh, never mind. What did

you mean, then?’

‘Ah. Gordon Way /has/ this habit, has he?’

‘Yes. I don’t like it. Why?’

Dirk looked long and hard at Richard, tapping a pencil lightly on

the desk.

Then he leaned back in his chair and said as follows: ‘The body of

Gordon Way was discovered before dawn this morning. He had been shot,

strangled, and then his house was set on fire. Police are working on

the theory that he was not actually shot in the house because no

shotgun pellets were discovered there other than those in the body.

‘However, pellets were found near to Mr Way’s Mercedes 500 SEC,

which was found abandoned about three miles from his house. This

suggests that the body was moved after the murder. Furthermore the

doctor who examined the body is of the opinion that Mr Way was in fact

strangled after he was shot, which seems to suggest a certain confusion

in the mind of the killer.

‘By a startling coincidence it appears that the police last night

had occasion to interview a very confused-seeming gentleman who said

that he was suffering from some kind of guilt complex about having just

run over his employer.

‘That man was a Mr Richard MacDuff, and his employer was the

deceased, Mr Gordon Way. It has further been suggested that Mr Richard

MacDuff is one of the two people most likely to benefit from Mr Way’s

death, since WayForward Technologies would almost certainly pass at

least partly into his hands. The other person is his only living

relative, Miss Susan Way, into whose flat Mr Richard MacDuff was

observed to break last night. The police don’t know that bit, of

course. Nor, if we can help it, will they. However, any relationship

between the two of them will naturally come under close scrutiny. The

news reports on the radio say that they are urgently seeking Mr

MacDuff, who they believe will be able to help them with their

enquiries, but the tone of voice says that he’s clearly guilty as hell.

‘My scale of charges is as follows: two hundred pounds a day, plus

expenses. Expenses are not negotiable and will sometimes strike those

who do not understand these matters as somewhat tangential. They are

all necessary and are, as I say, not negotiable. Am I hired?’

‘Sorry,’ said Richard, nodding slightly. ‘Would you start that

again?’

[::: CHAPTER 17 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The Electric Monk hardly knew what to believe any more.

He had been through a bewildering number of belief systems in the

previous few hours, most of which had failed to provide him with the

long-term spiritual solace that it was his bounden programming

eternally to seek.

He was fed up. Frankly. And tired. And dispirited.

And furthermore, which caught him by surprise, he rather missed his

horse. A dull and menial creature, to be sure, and as such hardly

worthy of the preoccupation of one whose mind was destined forever to

concern itself with higher things beyond the understanding of a simple

horse, but nevertheless he missed it.

He wanted to sit on it. He wanted to pat it. He wanted to feel that

it didn’t understand.

He wondered where it was.

He dangled his feet disconsolately from the branch of the tree in

which he had spent the night. He had climbed it in pursuit of some wild

fantastic dream and then had got stuck and had to stay there till the

morning.

Even now, by daylight, he wasn’t certain how he was going to get

down. He came for a moment perilously close to believing that he could

fly, but a quick-thinking error-checking protocol cut in and told him

not to be so silly.

It was a problem though.

Whatever burning fire of faith had borne him, inspired on wings of

hope, upwards through the branches of the tree in the magic hours of

night, had not also provided him with instructions on how to get back

down again when, like altogether too many of these burning fiery night-

time faiths, it had deserted him in the morning.

And speaking -- or rather thinking -- of burning fiery things, there

had been a major burning fiery thing a little distance from here in the

early pre-dawn hours.

It lay, he thought, in the direction from which he himself had come

when he had been drawn by a deep spiritual compulsion towards this

inconveniently high but otherwise embarrassingly ordinary tree. He had

longed to go and worship at the fire, to pledge himself eternally to

its holy glare, but while he had been struggling hopelessly to find a

way downwards through the branches, fire engines had arrived and put

the divine radiance out, and that had been another creed out of the

window.

The sun had been up for some hours now, and though he had occupied

the time as best as he could, believing in clouds, believing in twigs,

believing in a peculiar form of flying beetle, he believed now that he

was fed up, and was utterly convinced, furthermore, that he was getting

hungry.

He wished he’d taken the precaution of providing himself with some

food from the dwelling place he had visited in the night, to which he

had carried his sacred burden for entombment in the holy broom

cupboard, but he had left in the grip of a white passion, believing

that such mundane matters as food were of no consequence, that the tree

would provide.

Well, it had provided.

It had provided twigs.

Monks did not eat twigs.

In fact, now he came to think of it, he felt a little uncomfortable

about some of the things he had believed last night and had found some

of the results a little confusing. He had been quite clearly instructed

to ‘shoot off’ and had felt strangely compelled to obey but perhaps he

had made a mistake in acting so precipitately on an instruction given

in a language he had learned only two minutes before. Certainly the

reaction of the person he had shot off at had seemed a little extreme.

In his own world when people were shot at like that they came back

next week for another episode, but he didn’t think this person would be

doing that.

A gust of wind blew through the tree, making it sway giddily. He

climbed down a little way. The first part was reasonably easy, since

the branches were all fairly close together. It was the last bit that

appeared to be an insuperable obstacle -- a sheer drop which could

cause him severe internal damage or rupture and might in turn cause him

to start believing things that were seriously strange.

The sound of voices over in a distant corner of the field suddenly

caught his attention. A lorry had pulled up by the side of the road. He

watched carefully for a moment, but couldn’t see anything particular to

believe in and so returned to his introspection.

There was, he remembered, an odd function call he had had last

night, which he hadn’t encountered before, but he had a feeling that it

might be something he’d heard of called remorse. He hadn’t felt at all

comfortable about the way the person he had shot at had just lain

there, and after initially walking away the Monk had returned to have

another look. There was definitely an expression on the person’s face

which seemed to suggest that something was up, that this didn’t fit in

with the scheme of things. The Monk worried that he might have badly

spoiled his evening.

Still, he reflected, so long as you did what you believed to be

right, that was the main thing.

The next thing he had believed to be right was that having spoiled

this person’s evening he should at least convey him to his home, and a

quick search of his pockets had produced an address, some maps and some

keys. The trip had been an arduous one, but he had been sustained on

the way by his faith.

The word ‘bathroom’ floated unexpectedly across the field.

He looked up again at the lorry in the distant comer. There was a

man in a dark blue uniform explaining something to a man in rough

working clothes, who seemed a little disgruntled about whatever it was.

The words ‘until we trace the owner’ and ‘completely batty, of course’

were gusted over on the wind. The man in the working clothes clearly

agreed to accept the situation, but with bad grace.

A few moments later, a horse was led out of the back of the lorry

and into the field. The Monk blinked. His circuits thrilled and surged

with astonishment. Now here at last was something he could believe in,

a truly miraculous event, a reward at last for his unstinting if rather

promiscuous devotion.

The horse walked with a patient, uncomplaining gait. It had long

grown used to being wherever it was put, but for once it felt it didn’t

mind this. Here, it thought, was a pleasant field. Here was grass. Here

was a hedge it could look at. There was enough space that it could go

for a trot later on if it felt the urge. The humans drove off and left

it to its own devices, to which it was quite content to be left. It

went for a little amble, and then, just for the hell of it, stopped

ambling. It could do what it liked.

What pleasure.

What very great and unaccustomed pleasure.

It slowly surveyed the whole field, and then decided to plan out a

nice relaxed day for itself. A little trot later on, it thought, maybe

around threeish. After that a bit of a lie down over on the east side

of the field where the grass was thicker. It looked like a suitable

spot to think about supper in.

Lunch, it rather fancied, could be taken at the south end of the

field where a small stream ran. Lunch by a stream, for heaven’s sake.

This was bliss.

It also quite liked the notion of spending half an hour walking

alternately a little bit to the left and then a little bit to the

right, for no apparent reason. It didn’t know whether the time between

two and three would be best spent swishing its tail or mulling things

over.

Of course, it could always do both, if it so wished, and go for its

trot a little later. And it had just spotted what looked like a fine

piece of hedge for watching things over, and that would easily while

away a pleasant pre-prandial hour or two.

Good.

An excellent plan.

And the best thing about it was that having made it the horse could

now completely and utterly ignore it. It went instead for a leisurely

stand under the only tree in the field.

From out of its branches the Electric Monk dropped on to the horse’s

back, with a cry which sounded suspiciously like ‘Geronimo’.

[::: CHAPTER 18 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Dirk Gently briefly ran over the salient facts once more while

Richard MacDuff’s world crashed slowly and silently into a dark,

freezing sea which he hadn’t even known was there, waiting inches

beneath his feet. When Dirk had finished for the second time the room

fell quiet while Richard stared fixedly at his face.

‘Where did you hear this?’ said Richard at last.

‘The radio,’ said Dirk, with a slight shrug, ‘at least the main

points. It’s all over the news of course. The details? Well, discreet

enquiries among contacts here and there. There are one or two people I

got to know at Cambridge police station, for reasons which may occur to

you.’

‘I don’t even know whether to believe you,’ said Richard quietly.

‘May I use the phone?’

Dirk courteously picked a telephone receiver out of the wastepaper

bin and handed it to him. Richard dialled Susan’s number.

The phone was answered almost immediately and a frightened voice

said, ‘Hello?’

‘Susan, it’s Ri --’

‘/Richard!/ Where are you? For God’s sake, where are you? Are you

all right?’

‘Don’t tell her where you are,’ said Dirk.

‘Susan, what’s happened?’

‘Don’t you -- ?’

‘Somebody told me that something’s happened to Gordon, but...’

‘Something’s /happened/ -- ? He’s /dead/, Richard, he’s been

/murdered/ --’

‘Hang up,’ said Dirk.

‘Susan, listen. I --’

‘Hang up,’ repeated Dirk, and then leaned forward to the phone and

cut him off.

‘The police will probably have a trace on the line,’ he explained.

He took the receiver and chucked it back in the bin.

‘But I have to go to the police,’ Richard exclaimed.

‘Go to the police?’

‘What else can I do? I have to go to the police and tell them that

it wasn’t me.’

‘Tell them that it wasn’t you?’ said Dirk incredulously. ‘Well I

expect that will probably make it all right, then. Pity Dr Crippen

didn’t think of that. Would have saved him a lot of bother.’

‘Yes, but he was guilty!’

‘Yes, so it would appear. And so it would appear, at the moment, are

you.’

‘But I didn’t do it, for God’s sake!’

‘You are talking to someone who has spent time in prison for

something he didn’t do, remember. I told you that coincidences are

strange and dangerous things. Believe me, it is a great deal better to

find cast-iron proof that you’re innocent, than to languish in a cell

hoping that the police -- who already think you’re guilty -- will find

it for you.’

‘I can’t think straight,’ said Richard, with his hand to his

forehead. ‘Just stop for a moment and let me think this out --’

‘If I may --’

‘Let me think -- !’

Dirk shrugged and turned his attention back to his cigarette, which

seemed to be bothering him.

‘It’s no good,’ said Richard shaking his head after a few moments,

‘I can’t take it in. It’s like trying to do trigonometry when someone’s

kicking your head. OK, tell me what you think I should do.’

‘Hypnotism.’

‘What?’

‘It is hardly surprising in the circumstances that you should be

unable to gather your thoughts clearly. However, it is vital that

somebody gathers them. It will be much simpler for both of us if you

will allow me to hypnotise you. I strongly suspect that there is a very

great deal of information jumbled up in your head that will not emerge

while you are shaking it up so -- that might not emerge at all because

you do not realise its significance. With your permission we can short-

cut all that.’

‘Well, that’s decided then,’ said Richard, standing up, ‘I’m going

to the police.’

‘Very well,’ said Dirk, leaning back and spreading his palms on the

desk, ‘I wish you the very best of luck. Perhaps on your way out you

would be kind enough to ask my secretary to get me some matches.’

‘You haven’t got a secretary,’ said Richard, and left.

Dirk sat and brooded for a few seconds, made a valiant but vain

attempt to fold the sadly empty pizza box into the wastepaper bin, and

then went to look in the cupboard for a metronome.

Richard emerged blinking into the daylight. He stood on the top step

rocking slightly, then plunged off down the street with an odd kind of

dancing walk which reflected the whirling dance of his mind. On the one

hand he simply couldn’t believe that the evidence wouldn’t show

perfectly clearly that he couldn’t have committed the murder; on the

other hand he had to admit that it all looked remarkably odd.

He found it impossible to think clearly or rationally about it. The

idea that Gordon had been murdered kept blowing up in his mind and

throwing all other thoughts into total confusion and disruption.

It occurred to him for a moment that whoever did it must have been a

damn fast shot to get the trigger pulled before being totally

overwhelmed by waves of guilt, but instantly he regretted the thought.

In fact he was a little appalled by the general quality of the thoughts

that sprang into his mind. They seemed inappropriate and unworthy and

mostly had to do with how it would affect his projects in the company.

He looked about inside himself for any feeling of great sorrow or

regret, and assumed that it must be there somewhere, probably hiding

behind the huge wall of shock.

He arrived back within sight of Islington Green, hardly noticing the

distance he had walked. The sudden sight of the police squad car parked

outside his house hit him like a hammer and he swung on his heel and

stared with furious concentration at the menu displayed in the window

of a Greek restaurant.

‘Dolmades,’ he thought, frantically.

‘Souvlaki,’ he thought.

‘A small spicy Greek sausage,’ passed hectically through his mind.

He tried to reconstruct the scene in his mind’s eye without turning

round. There had been a policeman standing watching the street, and as

far as he could recall from the brief glance he had, it looked as if

the side door of the building which led up to his flat was standing

open.

The police were in his flat. /In/ his flat. Fassolia Plaki! A

filling bowl of haricot beans cooked in a tomato and vegetable sauce!

He tried to shift his eyes sideways and back over his shoulder. The

policeman was looking at him. He yanked his eyes back to the menu and

tried to fill his mind with finely ground meat mixed with potato,

breadcrumbs, onions and herbs rolled into small balls and fried. The

policeman must have recognised him and was at that very moment dashing

across the road to grab him and lug him off in a Black Maria just as

they had done to Dirk all those years ago in Cambridge.

He braced his shoulders against the shock, but no hand came to grab

him. He glanced back again, but the policeman was looking unconcernedly

in another direction. Stifado.

It was very apparent to him that his behaviour was not that of one

who was about to go and hand himself in to the police.

So what else was he to do?

Trying in a stiff, awkward way to walk naturally, he yanked himself

away from the window, strolled tensely down the road a few yards, and

then ducked back down Camden Passage again, walking fast and breathing

hard. Where could he go? To Susan? No -- the police would be there or

watching. To the WFT offices in Primrose Hill? No -- same reason. What

on earth, he screamed silently at himself, was he doing suddenly as a

fugitive?

He insisted to himself, as he had insisted to Dirk, that he should

not be running away from the police. The police, he told himself, as he

had been taught when he was a boy, were there to help and protect the

innocent. This thought caused him instantly to break into a run and he

nearly collided with the proud new owner of an ugly Edwardian floor

lamp.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘sorry.’ He was startled that anyone should want

such a thing, and slowed his pace to a walk, glancing with sharp hunted

looks around him. The very familiar shop fronts full of old polished

brass, old polished wood and pictures of Japanese fish suddenly seemed

very threatening and aggressive.

Who could possibly have wanted to kill Gordon? This was the thought

that suddenly hammered at him as he turned down Charlton Place. All

that had concerned him so far was that he hadn’t.

But who had?

This was a new thought.

Plenty of people didn’t care for him much, but there is a huge

difference between disliking somebody -- maybe even disliking them a

lot -- and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them

through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference

which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.

Was it just theft? Dirk hadn’t mentioned anything being missing but

then he hadn’t asked him.

Dirk. The image of his absurd but oddly commanding figure sitting

like a large toad, brooding in his shabby office, kept insisting itself

upon Richard’s mind. He realised that he was retracing the way he had

come, and deliberately made himself turn right instead of left.

That way madness lay.

He just needed a space, a bit of time to think and collect his

thoughts together.

All right -- so where was he going? He stopped for a moment, turned

around and then stopped again. The idea of dolmades suddenly seemed

very attractive and it occurred to him that the cool, calm and

collected course of action would have been simply to walk in and have

some. That would have shown Fate who was boss.

Instead, Fate was engaged on exactly the same course of action. It

wasn’t actually sitting in a Greek restaurant eating dolmades, but it

might as well have been, because it was clearly in charge. Richard’s

footsteps drew him inexorably back through the winding streets, over

the canal.

He stopped, briefly, at a corner shop, and then hurried on past the

council estates, and into developer territory again until he was

standing once more outside 33, Peckender Street. At about the same time

as Fate would have been pouring itself the last of the retsina, wiping

its mouth and wondering if it had any room left for baklavas, Richard

gazed up at the tall ruddy Victorian building with its soot-darkened

brickwork and its heavy, forbidding windows. A gust of wind whipped

along the street and a small boy bounded up to him.

‘Fuck off,’ chirped the little boy, then paused and looked at him

again.

‘‘Ere, mister,’ he added, ‘can I have your jacket?’

‘No,’ said Richard.

‘Why not?’ said the boy.

‘Er, because I like it,’ said Richard.

‘Can’t see why,’ muttered the boy. ‘Fuck off.’ He slouched off

moodily down the street, kicking a stone at a cat.

Richard entered the building once more, mounted the stairs uneasily

and looked again into the office.

Dirk’s secretary was sitting at her desk, head down, arms folded.

‘I’m not here,’ she said.

‘I see,’ said Richard.

‘I only came back,’ she said, without looking up from the spot on

her desk at which she was staring angrily, ‘to make sure he notices

that I’ve gone. Otherwise he might just forget.’

‘Is he in?’ asked Richard.

‘Who knows? Who cares? Better ask someone who works for him, because

I don’t.’

‘Show him in!’ boomed Dirk’s voice.

She glowered for a moment, stood up, went to the inner door,

wrenched it open, said ‘Show him in yourself,’ slammed the door once

more and returned to her seat.

‘Er, why don’t I just show myself in?’ said Richard.

‘I can’t even hear you,’ said Dirk’s ex-secretary, staring

resolutely at her desk. ‘How do you expect me to hear you if I’m not

even here?’

Richard made a placatory gesture, which was ignored, and walked

through and opened the door to Dirk’s office himself. He was startled

to find the room in semi-darkness. A blind was drawn down over the

window, and Dirk was lounging back in his seat, his face bizarrely lit

by the strange arrangement of objects sitting on the desk. At the

forward edge of the desk sat an old grey bicycle lamp, facing backwards

and shining a feeble light on a metronome which was ticking softly back

and forth, with a highly polished silver teaspoon strapped to its metal

rod.

Richard tossed a couple of boxes of matches on to the desk.

‘Sit down, relax, and keep looking at the spoon,’ said Dirk, ‘you

are already feeling sleepy...’

Another police car pulled itself up to a screeching halt outside

Richard’s flat, and a grim-faced man climbed out and strode over to one

of the constables on duty outside, flashing an identity card.

‘Detective Inspector Mason, Cambridgeshire CID,’ he said. ‘This the

MacDuff place?’

The constable nodded and showed him to the side-door entrance which

opened on to the long narrow staircase leading up to the top flat.

Mason bustled in and then bustled straight out again.

‘There’s a sofa halfway up the stairs,’ he told the constable. ‘Get

it moved.’

‘Some of the lads have already tried, sir,’ the constable replied

anxiously. ‘It seems to be stuck. Everyone’s having to climb over it

for the moment, sir. Sorry, sir.’

Mason gave him another grim look from a vast repertoire he had

developed which ranged from very, very blackly grim indeed at the

bottom of the scale, all the way up to tiredly resigned and only

faintly grim, which he reserved for his children’s birthdays.

‘Get it moved,’ he repeated grimly, and bustled grimly back through

the door grimly hauling up his trousers and coat in preparation for the

grim ascent ahead.

‘No sign of him yet?’ asked the driver of the car, coming over

himself. ‘Sergeant Gilks,’ he introduced himself. He looked tired.

‘Not as far as I know,’ said the constable, ‘but no one tells me

anything.’

‘Know how you feel,’ agreed Gilks. ‘Once the CID gets involved you

just get relegated to driving them about. And I’m the only one who

knows what he looked like. Stopped him in the road last night. We just

came from Way’s house. Right mess.’

‘Bad night, eh?’

‘Varied. Everything from murder to hauling horses out of bathrooms.

No, don’t even ask. Do you have the same cars as these?’ he added,

pointing at his own. ‘This one’s been driving me crazy all the way up.

Cold even with the heater on full blast, and the radio keeps turning

itself on and off.’

[::: CHAPTER 19 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The same morning found Michael Wenton-Weakes in something of an odd

mood.

You would need to know him fairly well to know that it was an

especially odd mood, because most people regarded him as being a little

odd to start with. Few people knew him that well. His mother, perhaps,

but there existed between them a state of cold war and neither had

spoken to the other now in weeks.

He also had an elder brother, Peter, who was now tremendously senior

in the Marines. Apart from at their father’s funeral, Michael had not

seen Peter since he came back from the Falklands, covered in glory,

promotion, and contempt for his younger brother.

Peter had been delighted that their mother had taken over Magna, and

had sent Michael a regimental Christmas card to that effect. His own

greatest satisfaction still remained that of throwing himself into a

muddy ditch and firing a machine gun for at least a minute, and he

didn’t think that the British newspaper and publishing industry, even

in its current state of unrest, was likely to afford him that pleasure,

at least until some more Australians moved into it.

Michael had risen very late after a night of cold savagery and then

of troubled dreams which still disturbed him now in the late morning

daylight.

His dreams had been filled with the familiar sensations of loss,

isolation, guilt and so forth, but had also been inexplicably involved

with large quantities of mud. By the telescopic power of the night, the

nightmare of mud and loneliness had seemed to stretch on for

terrifying, unimaginable lengths of time, and had only concluded with

the appearance of slimy things with legs that had crawled on the slimy

sea. This had been altogether too much and he had woken with a start in

a cold sweat.

Though all the business with the mud had seemed strange to him, the

sense of loss, of isolation, and above all the aggrievement, the need

to undo what had been done, these had all found an easy home in his

spirit.

Even the slimy things with legs seemed oddly familiar and ticked

away irritably at the back of his mind while he made himself a late

breakfast, a piece of grapefruit and some China tea, allowed his eyes

to rest lightly on the arts pages of the /Daily Telegraph/ for a while,

and then rather clumsily changed the dressing on the cuts on his hand.

These small tasks accomplished, he was then in two minds as to what

to do next.

He was able to view the events of the previous night with a cool

detachment that he would not have expected. It had been right, it had

been proper, it had been correctly done. But it resolved nothing. All

that mattered was yet to be done.

All what? He frowned at the odd way his thoughts ebbed and flowed.

Normally he would pop along to his club at about this time. It used

to be that he would do this with a luxurious sense of the fact that

there were many other things that he should be doing. Now there was

nothing else to do, which made time spent there, as anywhere else, hang

somewhat heavy on his hands.

When he went he would do as he always did -- indulge in a gin and

tonic and a little light conversation, and then allow his eyes to rest

gently on the pages of the /Times Literary Supplement/, /Opera/, /The

New Yorker/ or whatever else fell easily to hand, but there was no

doubt that he did it these days with less verve and relish than

previously.

Then there would be lunch. Today, he had no lunch date planned --

again -- and would probably therefore have stayed at his club, and

eaten a lightly grilled Dover sole, with potatoes garnished with

parsley and boiled to bits, followed by a large heap of trifle. A glass

or two of Sancerre. And coffee. And then the afternoon, with whatever

that might bring.

But today he felt oddly impelled not to do that. He flexed the

muscles in his cut hand, poured himself another cup of tea, looked with

curious dispassion at the large kitchen knife that still lay by the

fine bone china teapot, and waited for a moment to see what he would do

next. What he did next, in fact, was to walk upstairs.

His house was rather chill in its formal perfection, and looked much

as people who buy reproduction furniture would like their houses to

look. Except of course that everything here was genuine -- crystal,

mahogany and Wilton -- and only looked as if it might be fake because

there was no life to any of it.

He walked up into his workroom, which was the only room in the house

that was not sterile with order, but here the disorder of books and

papers was instead sterile with neglect. A thin film of dust had

settled over everything. Michael had not been into it in weeks, and the

cleaner was under strict instructions to leave it well alone. He had

not worked here since he edited the last edition of /Fathom/. Not, of

course, the actual last edition, but the last proper edition. The last

edition as far as /he/ was concerned.

He set his china cup down in the fine dust and went to inspect his

elderly record player. On it he found an elderly recording of some

Vivaldi wind concertos, set it to play and sat down.

He waited again to see what he would do next and suddenly found to

his surprise that he was already doing it, and it was this: he was

/listening/ to the music.

A bewildered look crept slowly across his face as he realised that

he had never done this before. He had /heard/ it many, many times and

thought that it made a very pleasant noise. Indeed, he found that it

made a pleasant background against which to discuss the concert season,

but it had never before occurred to him that there was anything

actually to /listen/ to.

He sat thunderstruck by the interplay of melody and counterpoint

which suddenly stood revealed to him with a clarity that owed nothing

to the dust-ridden surface of the record or the fourteen-year-old

stylus.

But with this revelation came an almost immediate sense of

disappointment, which confused him all the more. The music suddenly

revealed to him was oddly unfulfilling. It was as if his capacity to

understand the music had suddenly increased up to and far beyond the

music’s ability to satisfy it, all in one dramatic moment.

He strained to listen for what was missing, and felt that the music

was like a flightless bird that didn’t even know what capacity it had

lost. It walked very well, but it walked where it should soar, it

walked where it should swoop, it walked where it should climb and bank

and dive, it walked where it should thrill with the giddiness of

flight. It never even looked up.

He looked up.

After a while he became aware that all he was doing was simply

staring stupidly at the ceiling. He shook his head, and discovered that

the perception had faded, leaving him feeling slightly sick and dizzy.

It had not vanished entirely, but had dropped deep inside him, deeper

than he could reach.

The music continued. It was an agreeable enough assortment of

pleasant sounds in the background, but it no longer stirred him.

He needed some clues as to what it was he had just experienced, and

a thought flicked momentarily at the back of his mind as to where he

might find them. He let go of the thought in anger, but it flicked at

him again, and kept on flicking at him until at last he acted upon it.

From under his desk he pulled out the large tin wastepaper bin.

Since he had barred his cleaning lady from even coming in here for the

moment, the bin had remained unemptied and he found in it the tattered

shreds of what he was looking for with the contents of an ashtray

emptied over them.

He overcame his distaste with grim determination and slowly jiggled

around the bits of the hated object on his desk, clumsily sticking them

together with bits of sticky tape that curled around and stuck the

wrong bit to the wrong bit and stuck the right bit to his pudgy fingers

and then to the desk, until at last there lay before him, crudely

reassembled, a copy of /Fathom/. As edited by the execrable creature A.

K. Ross.

Appalling.

He turned the sticky lumpish pages as if he was picking over chicken

giblets. Not a single line drawing of Joan Sutherland or Marilyn Horne

anywhere. No profiles of any of the major Cork Street art dealers, not

a one.

His series on the Rossettis: discontinued.

‘Green Room Gossip’: discontinued.

He shook his head in incredulity and then he found the article he

was after.

‘Music and Fractal Landscapes’ by Richard MacDuff.

He skipped over the first couple of paragraphs of introduction and

picked it up further on:

Mathematical analysis and computer modelling are revealing

to us that the shapes and processes we encounter in nature --

the way that plants grow, the way that mountains erode or

rivers flow, the way that snowflakes or islands achieve their

shapes, the way that light plays on a surface, the way the

milk folds and spins into your coffee as you stir it, the way

that laughter sweeps through a crowd of people -- all these

things in their seemingly magical complexity can be described

by the interaction of mathematical processes that are, if

anything, even more magical in their simplicity.

Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products

of complex shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The

very word ‘natural’ that we have often taken to mean

‘unstructured’ in fact describes shapes and processes that

appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot consciously

perceive the simple natural laws at work.

They can all be described by numbers.

Oddly, this idea seemed less revolting now to Michael than it had

done on his first, scant reading.

He read on with increasing concentration.

We know, however, that the mind is capable of understanding

these matters in all their complexity and in all their

simplicity. A ball flying through the air is responding to the

force and direction with which it was thrown, the action of

gravity, the friction of the air which it must expend its

energy on overcoming, the turbulence of the air around its

surface, and the rate and direction of the ball’s spin.

And yet, someone who might have difficulty consciously

trying to work out what 3 x 4 x 5 comes to would have no

trouble in doing differential calculus and a whole host of

related calculations so astoundingly fast that they /can

actually catch a flying ball./

People who call this ‘instinct’ are merely giving the

phenomenon a name, not explaining anything.

I think that the closest that human beings come to

expressing our understanding of these natural complexities is

in music. It is the most abstract of the arts -- it has no

meaning or purpose other than to be itself.

Every single aspect of a piece of music can be represented

by numbers. From the organisation of movements in a whole

symphony, down through the patterns of pitch and rhythm that

make up the melodies and harmonies, the dynamics that shape

the performance, all the way down to the timbres of the notes

themselves, their harmonics, the way they change over time, in

short, all the elements of a noise that distinguish between

the sound of one person piping on a piccolo and another one

thumping a drum -- all of these things can be expressed by

patterns and hierarchies of numbers.

And in my experience the more internal relationships there

are between the patterns of numbers at different levels of the

hierarchy, however complex and subtle those relationships may

be, the more satisfying and, well, whole, the music will seem

to be.

In fact the more subtle and complex those relationships,

and the further they are beyond the grasp of the conscious

mind, the more the instinctive part of your mind -- by which I

mean that part of your mind that can do differential calculus

so astoundingly fast that it will put your hand in the right

place to catch a flying ball -- the more that part of your

brain revels in it.

Music of any complexity (and even ‘Three Blind Mice’ is

complex in its way by the time someone has actually performed

it on an instrument with its own individual timbre and

articulation) passes beyond your conscious mind into the arms

of your own private mathematical genius who dwells in your

unconscious responding to all the inner complexities and

relationships and proportions that we think we know nothing

about.

Some people object to such a view of music, saying that if

you reduce music to mathematics, where does the emotion come

into it? I would say that it’s never been out of it.

The things by which our emotions can be moved -- the shape

of a flower or a Grecian urn, the way a baby grows, the way

the wind brushes across your face, the way clouds move, their

shapes, the way light dances on the water, or daffodils

flutter in the breeze, the way in which the person you love

moves their head, the way their hair follows that movement,

the curve described by the dying fall of the last chord of a

piece of music -- all these things can be described by the

complex flow of numbers.

That’s not a reduction of it, that’s the beauty of it.

Ask Newton.

Ask Einstein.

Ask the poet (Keats) who said that what the imagination

seizes as beauty must be truth.

He might also have said that what the hand seizes as a ball

must be truth, but he didn’t, because he was a poet and

preferred loafing about under trees with a bottle of laudanum

and a notebook to playing cricket, but it would have been

equally true.

This jogged a thought at the back of Michael’s memory, but he

couldn’t immediately place it.

Because that is at the heart of the relationship between on

the one hand our ‘instinctive’ understanding of shape, form,

movement, light, and on the other hand our emotional responses

to them.

And that is why I believe that there must be a form of

music inherent in nature, in natural objects, in the patterns

of natural processes. A music that would be as deeply

satisfying as any naturally occurring beauty -- and our own

deepest emotions are, after all, a form of naturally occurring

beauty...

Michael stopped reading and let his gaze gradually drift from the

page.

He wondered if he knew what such a music would be and tried to grope

in the dark recesses of his mind for it. Each part of his mind that he

visited seemed as if that music had been playing there only seconds

before and all that was left was the last dying echo of something he

was unable to catch at and hear. He laid the magazine limply aside.

Then he remembered what it was that the mention of Keats had jogged

in his memory.

The slimy things with legs from his dream.

A cold calm came over him as he felt himself coming very close to

something.

Coleridge. That man.

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea.

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’

Dazed, Michael walked over to the bookshelf and pulled down his

Coleridge anthology. He took it back to his seat and with a certain

apprehension he riffled through the pages until he found the opening

lines.

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

The words were very familiar to him, and yet as he read on through

them they awoke in him strange sensations and fearful memories that he

knew were not his. There reared up inside him a sense of loss and

desolation of terrifying intensity which, while he knew it was not his

own, resonated so perfectly now with his own aggrievements that he

could not but surrender to it absolutely.

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I.

[::: CHAPTER 20 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The blind rolled up with a sharp rattle and Richard blinked.

‘A fascinating evening you appear to have spent,’ said Dirk Gently,

‘even though the most interesting aspects of it seem to have escaped

your curiosity entirely.’

He returned to his seat and lounged back in it pressing his

fingertips together.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘do not disappoint me by saying “where am I?” A

glance will suffice.’

Richard looked around him in slow puzzlement and felt as if he were

returning unexpectedly from a long sojourn on another planet where all

was peace and light and music that went on for ever and ever. He felt

so relaxed he could hardly be bothered to breathe.

The wooden toggle on the end of the blind cord knocked a few times

against the window, but otherwise all was now silent. The metronome was

still. He glanced at his watch. It was just after one o’clock.

‘You have been under hypnosis for a little less than an hour,’ said

Dirk, ‘during which I have learned many interesting things and been

puzzled by some others which I would now like to discuss with you. A

little fresh air will probably help revive you and I suggest a bracing

stroll along the canal. No one will be looking for you there. Janice!’

Silence.

A lot of things were still not clear to Richard, and he frowned to

himself. When his immediate memory returned a moment later, it was like

an elephant suddenly barging through the door and he sat up with a

startled jolt.

‘Janice!’ shouted Dirk again. ‘Miss Pearce! Damn the girl.’

He yanked the telephone receivers out of the wastepaper basket and

replaced them. An old and battered leather briefcase stood by the desk,

and he picked this up, retrieved his hat from the floor and stood up,

screwing his hat absurdly on his head.

‘Come,’ he said, sweeping through the door to where Miss Janice

Pearce sat glaring at a pencil, ‘let us go. Let us leave this festering

hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us

prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff

it after all. Now, Janice --’

‘Shut up.’

Dirk shrugged, and then picked off her desk the book which earlier

she had mutilated when trying to slam her drawer. He leafed through it,

frowning, and then replaced it with a sigh. Janice returned to what she

had clearly been doing a moment or two earlier, which was writing a

long note with the pencil.

Richard regarded all this in silence, still feeling only semi-

present. He shook his head.

Dirk said to him, ‘Events may seem to you to be a tangled mass of

confusion at the moment. And yet we have some interesting threads to

pull on. For of all the things you have told me that have happened,

only two are actually physically impossible.’

Richard spoke at last. ‘Impossible?’ he said with a frown.

‘Yes,’ said Dirk, ‘completely and utterly impossible.’

He smiled.

‘Luckily,’ he went on, ‘you have come to exactly the right place

with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as

“impossible” in my dictionary. In fact,’ he added, brandishing the

abused book, ‘everything between “herring” and “marmalade” appears to

be missing. Thank you, Miss Pearce, you have once again rendered me

sterling service, for which I thank you and will, in the event of a

successful outcome to this endeavour, even attempt to pay you. In the

meantime we have much to think on, and I leave the office in your very

capable hands.’

The phone rang and Janice answered it.

‘Good afternoon,’ she said, ‘Wainwright’s Fruit Emporium. Mr

Wainwright is not able to take calls at this time since he is not right

in the head and thinks he is a cucumber. Thank you for calling.’

She slammed the phone down. She looked up again to see the door

closing softly behind her ex-employer and his befuddled client.

‘Impossible?’ said Richard again, in surprise.

‘Everything about it,’ insisted Dirk, ‘completely and utterly --

well, let us say inexplicable. There is no point in using the word

“impossible” to describe something that has clearly happened. But it

cannot be explained by anything we know.’

The briskness of the air along the Grand Union Canal got in among

Richard’s senses and sharpened them up again. He was restored to his

normal faculties, and though the fact of Gordon’s death kept jumping at

him all over again every few seconds, he was at least now able to think

more clearly about it. Oddly enough, though, that seemed for the moment

to be the last thing on Dirk’s mind. Dirk was instead picking on the

most trivial of the night’s sequence of bizarre incidents on which to

cross-examine him.

A jogger going one way and a cyclist going the other both shouted at

each other to get out of the way, and narrowly avoided hurling each

other into the murky, slow-moving waters of the canal. They were

watched carefully by a very slow-moving old lady who was dragging an

even slower-moving old dog.

On the other bank large empty warehouses stood startled, every

window shattered and glinting. A burned-out barge lolled brokenly in

the water. Within it a couple of detergent bottles floated on the

brackish water. Over the nearest bridge heavy-goods lorries thundered,

shaking the foundations of the houses, belching petrol fumes into the

air and frightening a mother trying to cross the road with her pram.

Dirk and Richard were walking along from the fringes of South

Hackney, a mile from Dirk’s office, back towards the heart of

Islington, where Dirk knew the nearest lifebelts were positioned.

‘But it was only a conjuring trick, for heaven’s sake,’ said

Richard. ‘He does them all the time. It’s just sleight of hand. Looks

impossible but I’m sure if you asked any conjurer he’d say it’s easy

once you know how these things are done. I once saw a man on the street

in New York doing --’

‘I know how these things are done,’ said Dirk, pulling two lighted

cigarettes and a large glazed fig out of his nose. He tossed the fig up

in to the air, but it somehow failed to land anywhere. ‘Dexterity,

misdirection, suggestion. All things you can learn if you have a little

time to waste. Excuse me, dear lady,’ he said to the elderly, slow-

moving dog-owner as they passed her. He bent down to the dog and pulled

a long string of brightly coloured flags from its bottom. ‘I think he

will move more comfortably now,’ he said, tipped his hat courteously to

her and moved on.

‘These things, you see,’ he said to a flummoxed Richard, ‘are easy.

Sawing a lady in half is easy. Sawing a lady in half and then joining

her up together again is less easy, but can be done with practice. The

trick you described to me with the two-hundred-year-old vase and the

college salt cellar is --’ he paused for emphasis -- ‘completely and

utterly inexplicable.’

‘Well there was probably some detail of it I missed, but...’

‘Oh, without question. But the benefit of questioning somebody under

hypnosis is that it allows the questioner to see the scene in much

greater detail than the subject was even aware of at the time. The girl

Sarah, for instance. Do you recall what she was wearing?’

‘Er, no,’ said Richard, vaguely, ‘a dress of some kind, I suppose --

’

‘Colour? Fabric?’

‘Well, I can’t remember, it was dark. She was sitting several places

away from me. I hardly glimpsed her.’

‘She was wearing a dark blue cotton velvet dress gathered to a

dropped waist. It had raglan sleeves gathered to the cuffs, a white

Peter Pan collar and six small pearl buttons down the front -- the

third one down had a small thread hanging off it. She had long dark

hair pulled back with a red butterfly hairgrip.’

‘If you’re going to tell me you know all that from looking at a

scuff mark on my shoes, like Sherlock Holmes, then I’m afraid I don’t

believe you.’

‘No, no,’ said Dirk, ‘it’s much simpler than that. You told me

yourself under hypnosis.’

Richard shook his head.

‘Not true,’ he said, ‘I don’t even know what a Peter Pan collar is.’

‘But I do and you described it to me perfectly accurately. As you

did the conjuring trick. And that trick was not possible in the form in

which it occurred. Believe me. I know whereof I speak. There are some

other things I would like to discover about the Professor, like for

instance who wrote the note you discovered on the table and how many

questions George III actually asked, but --’

‘What?’

‘-- but I think I would do better to question the fellow directly.

Except...’ He frowned deeply in concentration. ‘Except,’ he added,

‘that being rather vain in these matters I would prefer to know the

answers before I asked the questions. And I do not. I absolutely do

not.’ He gazed abstractedly into the distance, and made a rough

calculation of the remaining distance to the nearest lifebelt.

‘And the second impossible thing,’ he added, just as Richard was

about to get a word in edgeways, ‘or at least, the next completely

inexplicable thing, is of course the matter of your sofa.’

‘Dirk,’ exclaimed Richard in exasperation, ‘may I remind you that

Gordon Way is dead, and that I appear to be under suspicion of his

murder! None of these things have the remotest connection with that,

and I --’

‘But I am extremely inclined to believe that they are connected.’

‘That’s absurd!’

‘I believe in the fundamental inter--’

‘Oh, yeah, yeah,’ said Richard, ‘the fundamental interconnectedness

of all things. Listen, Dirk, I am not a gullible old lady and you won’t

be getting any trips to Bermuda out of me. If you’re going to help me

then let’s stick to the point.’

Dirk bridled at this. ‘I believe that all things are fundamentally

interconnected, as anyone who follows the principles of quantum

mechanics to their logical extremes cannot, if they are honest, help

but accept. But I also believe that some things are a great deal more

interconnected than others. And when two apparently impossible events

and a sequence of highly peculiar ones all occur to the same person,

and when that person suddenly becomes the suspect of a highly peculiar

murder, then it seems to me that we should look for the solution in the

connection between these events. You are the connection, and you

yourself have been behaving in a highly peculiar and eccentric way.’

‘I have not,’ said Richard. ‘Yes, some odd things have happened to

me, but I --’

‘You were last night observed, by me, to climb the outside of a

building and break into the flat of your girlfriend, Susan Way.’

‘It may have been unusual,’ said Richard, ‘it may not even have been

wise. But it was perfectly logical and rational. I just wanted to undo

something I had done before it caused any damage.’

Dirk thought for a moment, and slightly quickened his pace.

‘And what you did was a perfectly reasonable and normal response to

the problem of the message you had left on the tape -- yes, you told me

all about that in our little session -- it’s what anyone would have

done?’

Richard frowned as if to say that he couldn’t see what all the fuss

was about. ‘I don’t say anyone would have done it,’ he said, ‘I

probably have a slightly more logical and literal turn of mind than

many people, which is why I can write computer software. It was a

logical and literal solution to the problem.’

‘Not a little disproportionate, perhaps?’

‘It was very important to me not to disappoint Susan yet again.’

‘So you are absolutely satisfied with your own reasons for doing

what you did?’

‘Yes,’ insisted Richard angrily.

‘Do you know,’ said Dirk, ‘what my old maiden aunt who lived in

Winnipeg used to tell me?’

‘No,’ said Richard. He quickly took off all his clothes and dived

into the canal. Dirk leapt for the lifebelt, with which they had just

drawn level, yanked it out of its holder and flung it to Richard, who

was floundering in the middle of the canal looking completely lost and

disoriented.

‘Grab hold of this,’ shouted Dirk, ‘and I’ll haul you in.’

‘It’s all right,’ spluttered Richard, ‘I can swim --’

‘No, you can’t,’ yelled Dirk, ‘now grab it.’

Richard tried to strike out for the bank, but quickly gave up in

consternation and grabbed hold of the lifebelt. Dirk pulled on the rope

till Richard reached the edge, and then bent down to give him a hand

out. Richard came up out of the water puffing and spitting, then turned

and sat shivering on the edge with his hands in his lap.

‘God, it’s foul in there!’ he exclaimed and spat again. ‘It’s

absolutely disgusting. Yeuchh. Whew. God. I’m usually a pretty good

swimmer. Must have got some kind of cramp. Lucky coincidence we were so

close to the lifebelt. Oh thanks.’ This last he said in response to the

large towel which Dirk handed him.

He rubbed himself down briskly, almost scraping himself with the

towel to get the filthy canal water off him. He stood up and looked

about. ‘Can you find my pants?’

‘Young man,’ said the old lady with the dog, who had just reached

them. She stood looking at them sternly, and was about to rebuke them

when Dirk interrupted.

‘A thousand apologies, dear lady,’ he said, ‘for any offence my

friend may inadvertently have caused you. Please,’ he added, drawing a

slim bunch of anemones from Richard’s bottom, ‘accept these with my

compliments.’

The lady dashed them out of Dirk’s hand with her stick, and hurried

off, horror-struck, yanking her dog after her.

‘That wasn’t very nice of you,’ said Richard, pulling on his clothes

underneath the towel that was now draped strategically around him.

‘I don’t think she’s a very nice woman,’ replied Dirk, ‘she’s always

down here, yanking her poor dog around and telling people off. Enjoy

your swim?’

‘Not much, no,’ said Richard, giving his hair a quick rub. ‘I hadn’t

realised how filthy it would be in there. And cold. Here,’ he said,

handing the towel back to Dirk, ‘thanks. Do you always carry a towel

around in your briefcase?’

‘Do you always go swimming in the afternoons?’

‘No, I usually go in the mornings, to the swimming pool on Highbury

Fields, just to wake myself up, get the brain going. It just occurred

to me I hadn’t been this morning.’

‘And, er -- that was why you just dived into the canal?’

‘Well, yes. I just thought that getting a bit of exercise would

probably help me deal with all this.’

‘Not a little disproportionate, then, to strip off and jump into the

canal.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it may not have been wise given the state of the

water, but it was perfectly --’

‘You were perfectly satisfied with your own reasons for doing what

you did.’

‘Yes --’

‘And it was nothing to do with my aunt, then?’

Richard’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What on earth are you talking

about?’ he said.

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Dirk. He went and sat on a nearby bench and

opened his case again. He folded the towel away into it and took out

instead a small Sony tape recorder. He beckoned Richard over and then

pushed the Play button. Dirk’s own voice floated from the tiny speaker

in a lilting sing-song voice. It said, ‘In a minute I will click my

fingers and you will wake and forget all of this except for the

instructions I shall now give you.

‘In a little while we will go for a walk along the canal, and when

you hear me say the words “my old maiden aunt who lived in Winnipeg” --

’

Dirk suddenly grabbed Richard’s arm to restrain him.

The tape continued, ‘You will take off all your clothes and dive

into the canal. You will find that you are unable to swim, but you will

not panic or sink, you will simply tread water until I throw you the

lifebelt...’

Dirk stopped the tape and looked round at Richard’s face which for

the second time that day was pale with shock.

‘I would be interested to know exactly what it was that possessed

you to climb into Miss Way’s flat last night,’ said Dirk, ‘and why.’

Richard didn’t respond -- he was continuing to stare at the tape

recorder in some confusion. Then he said in a shaking voice, ’There was

a message from Gordon on Susan’s tape. He phoned from the car. The

tape’s in my flat. Dirk, I’m suddenly very frightened by all this.’

[::: CHAPTER 21 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Dirk watched the police officer on duty outside Richard’s house from

behind a van parked a few yards away. He had been stopping and

questioning everyone who tried to enter the small side alley down which

Richard’s door was situated, including, Dirk was pleased to note, other

policemen if he didn’t immediately recognise them. Another police car

pulled up and Dirk started to move.

A police officer climbed out of the car carrying a saw and walked

towards the doorway. Dirk briskly matched his pace with him, a step or

two behind, striding authoritatively.

‘It’s all right, he’s with me,’ said Dirk, sweeping past at the

exact moment that the one police officer stopped the other.

And he was inside and climbing the stairs.

The officer with the saw followed him in.

‘Er, excuse me, sir,’ he called up after Dirk.

Dirk had just reached the point where the sofa obstructed the

stairway. He stopped and twisted round.

‘Stay here,’ he said, ‘guard this sofa. Do not let anyone touch it,

and I mean anyone. Understood?’

The officer seemed flummoxed for a moment.

‘I’ve had orders to saw it up,’ he said.

‘Countermanded,’ barked Dirk. ‘Watch it like a hawk. I shall want a

full report.’

He turned back and climbed up over the thing. A moment or two later

he emerged into a large open area. This was the lower of the two floors

that comprised Richard’s flat.

‘Have you searched that?’ snapped Dirk at another officer who was

sitting at Richard’s dining table looking through some notes. The

officer looked up in surprise and started to stand up. Dirk was

pointing at the wastepaper basket.

‘Er, yes --’

‘Search it again. Keep searching it. Who’s here?’

‘Er, well --’

‘I haven’t got all day.’

‘Detective Inspector Mason just left, with --’

‘Good, I’m having him pulled off. I’ll be upstairs if I’m needed,

but I don’t want any interruptions unless it’s very important.

Understood?’

‘Er, who --’

‘I don’t see you searching the wastepaper basket.’

‘Er, right, sir. I’ll --’

‘I want it deep-searched. You understand?’

‘Er --’

‘Get cracking.’ Dirk swept on upstairs and into Richard’s workroom.

The tape was lying exactly where Richard had told him it would be,

on the long desk on which the six Macintoshes sat. Dirk was about to

pocket it when his curiosity was caught by the image of Richard’s sofa

slowly twisting and turning on the big Macintosh screen, and he sat

down at the keyboard.

He explored the program Richard had written for a short while, but

quickly realised that in its present form it was less than self-

explanatory and he learned little. He managed at last to get the sofa

unstuck and move it back down the stairs, but he realised that he had

had to turn part of the wall off in order to do it. With a grunt of

irritation he gave up.

Another computer he looked at was displaying a steady sine wave.

Around the edges of the screen were the small images of other waveforms

which could be selected and added to the main one or used to modify it

in other ways. He quickly discovered that this enabled you to build up

very complex waveforms from simple ones and he played with this for a

while. He added a simple sine wave to itself, which had the effect of

doubling the height of the peaks and troughs of the wave. Then he slid

one of the waves half a step back with respect to the other, and the

peaks and troughs of one simply cancelled out the peaks and troughs of

the other, leaving a completely flat line. Then he changed the

frequency of one of the sine waves by a small extent.

The result of this was that at some positions along the combined

waveform the two waves reinforced each other, and at others they

cancelled each other out. Adding a third simple wave of yet another

frequency resulted in a combined wave in which it was hard to see any

pattern at all. The line danced up and down seemingly at random,

staying quite low for some periods and then suddenly building into very

large peaks and troughs as all three waves came briefly into phase with

each other.

Dirk assumed that there must be amongst this array of equipment a

means for translating the waveform dancing on the Macintosh screen into

an actual musical tone and hunted among the menus available in the

program. He found one menu item which invited him to transfer the wave

sample into an Emu.

This puzzled him. He glanced around the room in search of a large

flightless bird, but was unable to locate any such thing. He activated

the process anyway, and then traced the cable which led from the back

of the Macintosh, down behind the desk, along the floor, behind a

cupboard, under a rug until it fetched up plugged into the back of a

large grey keyboard called an Emulator II.

This, he assumed, was where his experimental waveform has just

arrived. Tentatively he pushed a key.

The nasty farting noise that surged instantly out of the speakers

was so loud that for a moment he didn’t hear the words ‘Svlad Cjelli!’

that were barked simultaneously from the doorway.

Richard sat in Dirk’s office and threw tiny screwed-up balls of

paper at the wastepaper bin which was already full of telephones. He

broke pencils. He played major extracts from an old Ginger Baker solo

on his knees.

In a word, he fretted.

He had been trying to write down on a piece of Dirk’s notepaper all

that he could remember of the events of the previous evening and, as

far as he could pinpoint them, the times at which each had occurred. He

was astonished at how difficult it was, and how feeble his conscious

memory seemed to be in comparison with his unconscious memory, as Dirk

had demonstrated it to him.

‘Damn Dirk,’ he thought. He wanted to talk to Susan.

Dirk had told him he must not do so on any account as there would be

a trace on the phone lines.

‘Damn Dirk,’ he said suddenly, and sprang to his feet.

‘Have you got any ten-pence pieces?’ he said to the resolutely glum

Janice.

Dirk turned.

Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.

The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it

saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It

appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads

off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.

It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant

Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.

‘Do you know,’ said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire

Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, ‘that when I arrive

back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and

another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself

certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense

that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.

‘I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition,

Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I

might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can’t shed

any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to

have an air of you about it.’

‘I cannot,’ said Dirk, ‘as yet. Though it interests me strangely.’

‘I should think it bloody did. It would have interested you

strangely if you’d had to get the bloody thing down a bloody winding

staircase at one o’clock in the morning as well. What the hell are you

doing here?’ said Sergeant Gilks, wearily.

‘I am here,’ said Dirk, ‘in pursuit of justice.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t mix with me then,’ said Gilks, ‘and I certainly

wouldn’t mix with the Met. What do you know of MacDuff and Way?’

‘Of Way? Nothing beyond what is common knowledge. MacDuff I knew at

Cambridge.’

‘Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.’

‘Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a

preying mantis that doesn’t prey -- a non-preying mantis if you like. A

sort of pleasant genial mantis that’s given up preying and taken up

tennis instead.’

‘Hmm,’ said Gilks gruffly, turning away and looking about the room.

Dirk pocketed the tape.

‘Sounds like the same one,’ said Gilks.

‘And of course,’ said Dirk, ‘completely incapable of murder.’

‘That’s for us to decide.’

‘And of course a jury.’

‘Tchah! Juries!’

‘Though, of course, it will not come to that, since the facts will

speak for themselves long before it comes to a court of law for my

client.’

‘Your bleeding client, eh? All right, Cjelli, where is he?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘I’ll bet you’ve got a billing address.’

Dirk shrugged.

‘Look, Cjelli, this is a perfectly normal, harmless murder enquiry,

and I don’t want you mucking it up. So consider yourself warned off as

of now. If I see a single piece of evidence being levitated I’ll hit

you so hard you won’t know if it’s tomorrow or Thursday. Now get out,

and give me that tape on the way.’ He held out his hand.

Dirk blinked, genuinely surprised. ‘What tape?’

Gilks sighed. ‘You’re a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,’ he

said, ‘but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of

thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it’s for a reason, and

the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn’t need to see you pick

it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards. We are trained

you know. We used to get half an hour Observation Training on Tuesday

afternoons. Just as a break after four hours solid of Senseless

Brutality.’

Dirk hid his anger with himself behind a light smile. He fished in

the pocket of his leather overcoat and handed over the tape.

‘Play it,’ said Gilks, ‘let’s see what you didn’t want us to hear.’

‘It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to hear it,’ said Dirk, with a

shrug. ‘I just wanted to hear it first.’ He went over to the shelf

which carried Richard’s hi-fi equipment and slipped the tape into the

cassette player.

‘So do you want to give me a little introduction?’

‘It’s a tape,’ said Dirk, ‘from Susan Way’s telephone answering

machine. Way apparently had this habit of leaving long...’

‘Yeah, I know about that. And his secretary goes round picking up

his prattlings in the morning, poor devil.’

‘Well, I believe there may be a message on the tape from Gordon

Way’s car last night.’

‘I see. OK. Play it.’

With a gracious bow Dirk pressed the Play button.

‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ said the tape once again. ‘Just on my

way to the cottage --’

‘Cottage!’ exclaimed Gilks, satirically.

‘It’s, er, Thursday night, and it’s, er... 8.47. Bit misty on the

roads. Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this

weekend...’

Gilks raised his eyebrows, looked at his watch, and made a note on

his pad.

Both Dirk and the police sergeant experienced a chill as the dead

man’s voice filled the room.

‘-- it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead in the ditch, that would be

something wouldn’t it, leaving your famous last words on somebody’s

answering machine, there’s no reason --’

They listened in a tense silence as the tape played on through the

entire message.

‘That’s the problem with crunch-heads -- they have one great idea

that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them

for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their

navels. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the boot

properly. Won’t be a moment.’

Next came the muffled bump of the telephone receiver being dropped

on the passenger seat, and a few seconds later the sound of the car

door being opened. In the meantime, the music from the car’s sound

system could be heard burbling away in the background.

A few seconds later still came the distant, muffled, but

unmistakable double blam of a shotgun.

‘Stop the tape,’ said Gilks sharply and glanced at his watch. ‘Three

minutes and twenty-five seconds since he said it was 8.47.’ He glanced

up at Dirk again. ‘Stay here. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. I’ve

made a note of the position of every particle of air in this room, so I

shall know if you’ve been breathing.’

He turned smartly and left. Dirk heard him saying as he went down

the stairs, ‘Tuckett, get on to WayForward’s office, get the details of

Way’s carphone, what number, which network...’ The voice faded away

downstairs.

Quickly Dirk twisted down the volume control on the hi-fi, and

resumed playing the tape.

The music continued for a while. Dirk drummed his fingers in

frustration. Still the music continued.

He flicked the Fast Forward button for just a moment. Still music.

It occurred to him that he was looking for something, but that he

didn’t know what. That thought stopped him in his tracks.

He was very definitely looking for something.

He very definitely didn’t know what.

The realisation that he didn’t know exactly why he was doing what he

was doing suddenly chilled and electrified him. He turned slowly like a

fridge door opening.

There was no one there, at least no one that he could see. But he

knew the chill prickling through his skin and detested it above all

things.

He said in a low savage whisper, ‘If anyone can hear me, hear this.

My mind is my centre and everything that happens there is my

responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to

believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know

it clearly. If you want something then let me know, but do not you dare

touch my mind.’

He was trembling with a deep and old rage. The chill dropped slowly

and almost pathetically from him and seemed to move off into the room.

He tried to follow it with his senses, but was instantly distracted by

a sudden voice that seemed to come at him on the edge of his hearing,

on a distant howl of wind.

It was a hollow, terrified, bewildered voice, no more than an

insubstantial whisper, but it was there, audible, on the telephone-

answering machine tape.

It said, ‘Susan! Susan, help me! Help me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m

dead --’

Dirk whirled round and stopped the tape.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said under his breath, ‘but I have the welfare of my

client to consider.’

He wound the tape back a very short distance, to just before where

the voice began, twisted the Record Level knob to zero and pressed

Record. He left the tape to run, wiping off the voice and anything that

might follow it. If the tape was going to establish the time of Gordon

Way’s death, then Dirk didn’t want any embarrassing examples of Gordon

speaking to turn up on the tape after that point, even if it was only

to confirm that he was, in fact, dead.

There seemed to be a great eruption of emotion in the air near to

him. A wave of something surged through the room, causing the furniture

to flutter in its wake. Dirk watched where it seemed to go, towards a

shelf near the door on which, he suddenly realised, stood Richard’s own

telephone-answering machine. The machine started to jiggle fitfully

where it sat, but then sat still as Dirk approached it. Dirk reached

out slowly and calmly and pushed the button which set the machine to

Answer.

The disturbance in the air then passed back through the room to

Richard’s long desk where two old-fashioned rotary-dial telephones

nestled among the piles of paper and micro floppy disks. Dirk guessed

what would happen, but elected to watch rather than to intervene.

One of the telephone receivers toppled off its cradle. Dirk could

hear the dialling tone. Then, slowly and with obvious difficulty, the

dial began to turn. It moved unevenly round, further round, slower and

slower, and then suddenly slipped back.

There was a moment’s pause. Then the receiver rests went down and up

again to get a new dialling tone. The dial began to turn again, but

creaking even more fitfully than the last time.

Again it slipped back.

There was a longer pause this time, and then the entire process was

repeated once more.

When the dial slipped back a third time there was a sudden explosion

of fury -- the whole phone leapt into the air and hurtled across the

room. The receiver cord wrapped itself round an Anglepoise lamp on the

way and brought it crashing down in a tangle of cables, coffee cups and

floppy disks. A pile of books erupted off the desk and on to the floor.

The figure of Sergeant Gilks stood stony-faced in the doorway.

‘I’m going to come in again,’ he said, ‘and when I do, I don’t want

to see anything of that kind going on whatsoever. Is that understood?’

He turned and disappeared.

Dirk leapt for the cassette player and hit the Rewind button. Then

he turned and hissed at the empty air, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I

can guess. If you want my help, don’t you ever embarrass me like that

again!’

A few moments later, Gilks walked in again. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he

said.

He surveyed the wreckage with an even gaze. ‘I’ll pretend I can’t

see any of this, so that I won’t have to ask any questions the answers

to which would, I know, only irritate me.’

Dirk glowered.

In the moment or two of silence that followed, a slight ticking

whirr could be heard which caused the sergeant to look sharply at the

cassette player.

‘What’s that tape doing?’

‘Rewinding.’

‘Give it to me.’

The tape reached the beginning and stopped as Dirk reached it. He

took it out and handed it to Gilks.

‘Irritatingly, this seems to put your client completely in the

clear,’ said the sergeant. ‘Cellnet have confirmed that the last call

made from the car was at 8.46 pm last night, at which point your client

was lightly dozing in front of several hundred witnesses. I say

witnesses, in fact they were mostly students, but we will probably be

forced to assume that they can’t all be lying.’

‘Good,’ said Dirk, ‘well, I’m glad that’s all cleared up.’

‘We never thought he had actually done it, of course. Simply didn’t

fit. But you know us -- we like to get results. Tell him we still want

to ask him some questions, though.’

‘I shall be sure to mention it if I happen to run into him.’

‘You just do that little thing.’

‘Well, I shan’t detain you any longer, Sergeant,’ said Dirk, airily

waving at the door.

‘No, but I shall bloody detain you if you’re not out of here in

thirty seconds, Cjelli. I don’t know what you’re up to, but if I can

possibly avoid finding out I shall sleep easier in my office. Out.’

‘Then I shall bid you good day, Sergeant. I won’t say it’s been a

pleasure because it hasn’t.’

Dirk swept out of the room, and made his way out of the flat, noting

with sorrow that where there had been a large chesterfield sofa wedged

magnificently in the staircase, there was now just a small, sad pile of

sawdust.

With a jerk Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up from his book.

His mind suddenly was alive with purpose. Thoughts, images,

memories, intentions, all crowded in upon him, and the more they seemed

to contradict each other the more they seemed to fit together, to pair

and settle.

The match at last was perfect, the teeth of one slowly aligned with

the teeth of another.

A pull and they were zipped.

Though the waiting had seemed an eternity of eternities when it was

filled with failure, with fading waves of weakness, with feeble groping

and lonely impotence, the match once made cancelled it all. Would

cancel it all. Would undo what had been so disastrously done.

Who thought that? It did not matter, the match was made, the match

was perfect.

Michael gazed out of the window across the well-manicured Chelsea

street and did not care whether what he saw were slimy things with legs

or whether they were all Mr A. K. Ross. What mattered was what they had

stolen and what they would be compelled to return. Ross now lay in the

past. What he was now concerned with lay still further in it.

His large soft cowlike eyes returned to the last few lines of ‘Kubla

Khan’, which he had just been reading. The match was made, the zip was

pulled.

He closed the book and put it in his pocket.

His path back now was clear. He knew what he must do. It only

remained to do a little shopping and then do it.

[::: CHAPTER 22 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘You? Wanted for murder? Richard what are you talking about?’

The telephone wavered in Richard’s hand. He was holding it about

half an inch away from his ear anyway because it seemed that somebody

had dipped the earpiece in some chow mein recently, but that wasn’t so

bad. This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it

was working at all. But Richard was beginning to feel as if the whole

world had shifted about half an inch away from him, like someone in a

deodorant commercial.

‘Gordon,’ said Richard, hesitantly, ‘Gordon’s been murdered --

hasn’t he?’

Susan paused before she answered.

‘Yes, Richard,’ she said in a distressed voice, ‘but no one thinks

you did it. They want to question you of course, but --’

‘So there are no police with you now?’

‘No, Richard,’ insisted Susan, ‘Look, why don’t you come here?’

‘And they’re not out searching for me?’

‘No! Where on earth did you get the idea that you were wanted for --

that they thought you had done it?’

‘Er -- well, this friend of mine told me.’

‘Who?’

‘Well, his name is Dirk Gently.’

‘You’ve never mentioned him. Who is he? Did he say anything else?’

‘He hypnotised me and, er, made me jump in the canal, and, er, well,

that was it really --’

There was a terribly long pause at the other end.

‘Richard,’ said Susan at last with the sort of calmness that comes

over people when they realise that however bad things may seem to be,

there is absolutely no reason why they shouldn’t simply get worse and

worse, ‘come over here. I was going to say I need to see you, but I

think you need to see me.’

‘I should probably go to the police.’

‘Go to the police later. Richard, please. A few hours won’t make any

difference. I... I can hardly even think. Richard, it’s so awful. It

would just help if you were here. Where are you?’

‘OK,’ said Richard, ‘I’ll be with you in about twenty minutes.’

‘Shall I leave the window open or would you like to try the door?’

she said with a sniff.

[::: CHAPTER 23 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘No, please,’ said Dirk, restraining Miss Pearce’s hand from opening

a letter from the Inland Revenue, ‘there are wilder skies than these.’

He had emerged from a spell of tense brooding in his darkened office

and there was an air of excited concentration about him. It had taken

his actual signature on an actual salary cheque to persuade Miss Pearce

to forgive him for the latest unwarrantable extravagance with which he

had returned to the office and he felt that just to sit there blatantly

opening letters from the taxman was to take his magnanimous gesture in

entirely the wrong spirit.

She put the envelope aside.

‘Come!’ he said. ‘I have something I wish you to see. I shall

observe your reactions with the very greatest of interest.’

He bustled back into his own office and sat at his desk.

She followed him in patiently and sat opposite, pointedly ignoring

the new unwarrantable extravagance sitting on the desk.

The flashy brass plaque for the door had stirred her up pretty badly

but the silly phone with big red push buttons she regarded as being

beneath contempt. And she certainly wasn’t going to do anything rash

like smile until she knew for certain that the cheque wouldn’t bounce.

The last time he signed a cheque for her he cancelled it before the end

of the day, to prevent it, as he explained, ‘falling into the wrong

hands’. The wrong hands presumably, being those of her bank manager.

He thrust a piece of paper across the desk.

She picked it up and looked at it. Then she turned it round and

looked at it again. She looked at the other side and then she put it

down.

‘Well?’ demanded Dirk. ‘What do you make of it? Tell me!’

Miss Pearce sighed.

‘It’s a lot of meaningless squiggles done in blue felt tip on a

piece of typing paper,’ she said. ‘It looks like you did them

yourself.’

‘No!’ barked Dirk, ‘Well, yes,’ he admitted, ‘but only because I

believe that it is the answer to the problem!’

‘What problem?’

‘The problem,’ insisted Dirk, slapping the table, ‘of the conjuring

trick! I told you!’

‘Yes, Mr Gently, several times. I think it was just a conjuring

trick. You see them on the telly.’

‘With this difference -- that this one was completely impossible!’

‘Couldn’t have been impossible or he wouldn’t have done it. Stands

to reason.’

‘Exactly!’ said Dirk excitedly. ‘Exactly! Miss Pearce, you are a

lady of rare perception and insight.’

‘Thank you, sir, can I go now?’

‘Wait! I haven’t finished yet! Not by a long way, not by a

bucketful! You have demonstrated to me the depth of your perception and

insight, allow me to demonstrate mine!’

Miss Pearce slumped patiently in her seat.

‘I think,’ said Dirk, ‘you will be impressed. Consider this. An

intractable problem. In trying to find the solution to it I was going

round and round in little circles in my mind, over and over the same

maddening things. Clearly I wasn’t going to be able to think of

anything else until I had the answer, but equally clearly I would have

to think of something else if I was ever going to get the answer. How

to break this circle? Ask me how.’

‘How?’ said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthusiasm.

‘By writing down what the answer is!’ exclaimed Dirk. ‘And here it

is!’ He slapped the piece of paper triumphantly and sat back with a

satisfied smile.

Miss Pearce looked at it dumbly.

‘With the result,’ continued Dirk, ‘that I am now able to turn my

mind to fresh and intriguing problems, like, for instance...’

He took the piece of paper, covered with its aimless squiggles and

doodlings, and held it up to her.

‘What language,’ he said in a low, dark voice, ‘is this written in?’

Miss Pearce continued to look at it dumbly.

Dirk flung the piece of paper down, put his feet up on the table,

and threw his head back with his hands behind it.

‘You see what I have done?’ he asked the ceiling, which seemed to

flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. ‘I

have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly

quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. Albeit,’ he

muttered, after a long moment of silent pondering, ‘an intractably

difficult and possibly insoluble one.’

He swung back to gaze intently at Janice Pearce.

‘Go on,’ he urged, ‘say that it’s insane -- but it might just work!’

Janice Pearce cleared her throat.

‘It’s insane,’ she said, ‘trust me.’

Dirk turned away and sagged sideways off his chair, much as the

sitter for The Thinker probably did when Rodin went off to be excused.

He suddenly looked profoundly tired and depressed.

‘I know,’ he said in a low, dispirited voice, ‘that there is

something profoundly wrong somewhere. And I know that I must go to

Cambridge to put it right. But I would feel less fearful if I knew what

it was...’

‘Can I get on now, please, then?’ said Miss Pearce.

Dirk looked up at her glumly.

‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh, ‘but just -- just tell me --’ he flicked

at the piece of paper with his fingertips -- ‘what do you think of

this, then?’

‘Well, I think it’s childish,’ said Janice Pearce, frankly.

‘But -- but -- but!’ said Dirk thumping the table in frustration.

‘Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to

understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it

hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things

that we don’t expect to see?’

‘Then why don’t you go and ask one?’

‘Thank you, Miss Pearce,’ said Dirk reaching for his hat, ‘once

again you have rendered me an inestimable service for which I am

profoundly grateful.’

He swept out.

[::: CHAPTER 24 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The weather began to bleaken as Richard made his way to Susan’s

flat. The sky which had started out with such verve and spirit in the

morning was beginning to lose its concentration and slip back into its

normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth. Richard

took a taxi, which got him there in a few minutes.

‘They should all be deported,’ said the taxi driver as they drew to

a halt.

‘Er, who should?’ said Richard, who realised he hadn’t been

listening to a word the driver said.

‘Er --’said the driver, who suddenly realised he hadn’t been

listening either, ‘er, the whole lot of them. Get rid of the whole

bloody lot, that’s what I say. And their bloody newts,’ he added for

good measure.

‘Expect you’re right,’ said Richard, and hurried into the house.

Arriving at the front door of her flat he could hear from within the

sounds of Susan’s cello playing a slow, stately melody. He was glad of

that, that she was playing. She had an amazing emotional self

sufficiency and control provided she could play her cello. He had

noticed an odd and extraordinary thing about her relationship with the

music she played. If ever she was feeling emotional or upset she could

sit and play some music with utter concentration and emerge seeming

fresh and calm.

The next time she played the same music, however, it would all burst

from her and she would go completely to pieces.

He let himself in as quietly as possible so as not to disturb her

concentration.

He tiptoed past the small room she practised in, but the door was

open so he paused and looked at her, with the slightest of signals that

she shouldn’t stop. She was looking pale and drawn but gave him a

flicker of a smile and continued bowing with a sudden intensity.

With an impeccable timing of which it is very rarely capable the sun

chose that moment to burst briefly through the gathering rainclouds,

and as she played her cello a stormy light played on her and on the

deep old brown of the wood of the instrument. Richard stood transfixed.

The turmoil of the day stood still for a moment and kept a respectful

distance.

He didn’t know the music, but it sounded like Mozart and he

remembered her saying she had some Mozart to learn. He walked quietly

on and sat down to wait and listen.

Eventually she finished the piece, and there was about a minute of

silence before she came through. She blinked and smiled and gave him a

long, trembling hug, then released herself and put the phone back on

the hook. It usually got taken off when she was practising.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to stop.’ She briskly brushed away

a tear as if it was a slight irritation. ‘How are you Richard?’

He shrugged and gave her a bewildered look. That seemed about to

cover it.

‘And I’m going to have to carry on, I’m afraid,’ said Susan with a

sigh ‘I’m sorry. I’ve just been...’ She shook her head. ‘Who would do

it?’

‘I don’t know. Some madman. I’m not sure that it matters who.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Look, er, have you had any lunch?’

‘No. Susan, you keep playing and I’ll see what’s in the fridge. We

can talk about it all over some lunch.’

Susan nodded.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘except...’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, just for the moment I don’t really want to talk about Gordon.

Just till it sinks in. I feel sort of caught out. It would be easier if

I’d been closer to him, but I wasn’t and I’m sort of embarrassed by not

having a reaction ready. Talking about it would be all right except

that you have to use the past tense and that’s what’s...’

She clung to him for a moment and then quieted herself with a sigh.

‘There’s not much in the fridge at the moment,’ she said, ‘some

yoghurt, I think, and a jar of roll-mop herrings you could open. I’m

sure you’ll be able to muck it up if you try, but it’s actually quite

straightforward. The main trick is not to throw them all over the floor

or get jam on them.’

She gave him a hug, a kiss and a glum smile and then retreated back

to her music room.

The phone rang and Richard answered it.

‘Hello?’ he said. There was nothing, just a faint sort of windy

noise on the line.

‘Hello?’ he said again, waited, shrugged and put the phone back

down.

‘Was there anybody there?’ called Susan.

‘No, no one,’ said Richard.

‘That’s happened a couple of times,’ said Susan. ‘I think it’s a

sort of minimalist heavy breather.’ She resumed playing.

Richard went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He was less of

a health-conscious eater than Susan and was therefore less than

thrilled by what he found there, but he managed to put some roll-mop

herrings, some yoghurt, some rice and some oranges on a tray without

difficulty and tried not to think that a couple of fat hamburgers and

fries would round it off nicely.

He found a bottle of white wine and carried it all through to the

small dining table.

After a minute or two Susan joined him there. She was at her most

calm and composed, and after a few mouthsful she asked him about the

canal.

Richard shook his head in bemusement and tried to explain about it,

and about Dirk.

‘What did you say his name was?’ said Susan with a frown when he had

come, rather lamely, to a conclusion.

‘It’s, er, Dirk Gently,’ said Richard, ‘in a way.’

‘In a way?’

‘Er, yes,’ said Richard with a difficult sigh. He reflected that

just about anything you could say about Dirk was subject to these kind

of vague and shifty qualifications. There was even, on his letter

heading, a string of vague and shifty-looking qualifications after his

name. He pulled out the piece of paper on which he had vainly been

trying to organise his thoughts earlier in the day.

‘I...’ he started, but the doorbell rang. They looked at each other.

‘If it’s the police,’ said Richard, ‘I’d better see them. Let’s get

it over with.’

Susan pushed back her chair, went to the front door and picked up

the Entryphone.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Who?’ she said after a moment. She frowned as she listened then

swung round and frowned at Richard.

‘You’d better come up,’ she said in a less than friendly tone of

voice and then pressed the button. She came back and sat down.

‘Your friend,’ she said evenly, ‘Mr Gently.’

The Electric Monk’s day was going tremendously well and he broke

into an excited gallop. That is to say that, excitedly, he spurred his

horse to a gallop and, unexcitedly, his horse broke into it.

This world, the Monk thought, was a good one. He loved it. He didn’t

know whose it was or where it had come from, but it was certainly a

deeply fulfilling place for someone with his unique and extraordinary

gifts.

He was appreciated. All day he had gone up to people, fallen into

conversation with them, listened to their troubles, and then quietly

uttered those three magic words, ‘I believe you.’

The effect had invariably been electrifying. It wasn’t that people

on this world didn’t occasionally say it to each other, but they

rarely, it seemed, managed to achieve that deep timbre of sincerity

which the Monk had been so superbly programmed to reproduce.

On his own world, after all, he was taken for granted. People would

just expect him to get on and believe things for them without bothering

them. Someone would come to the door with some great new idea or

proposal or even a new religion, and the answer would be ‘Oh, go and

tell that to the Monk.’ And the Monk would sit and listen and patiently

believe it all, but no one would take any further interest.

Only one problem seemed to arise on this otherwise excellent world.

Often, after he had uttered the magic words, the subject would rapidly

change to that of money, and the Monk of course didn’t have any -- a

shortcoming that had quickly blighted a number of otherwise very

promising encounters.

Perhaps he should acquire some -- but where?

He reined his horse in for a moment, and the horse jerked gratefully

to a halt and started in on the grass on the roadside verge. The horse

had no idea what all this galloping up and down was in aid of, and

didn’t care. All it did care about was that it was being made to gallop

up and down past a seemingly perpetual roadside buffet. It made the

best of its moment while it had it.

The Monk peered keenly up and down the road. It seemed vaguely

familiar. He trotted a little further up it for another look. The horse

resumed its meal a few yards further along.

Yes. The Monk had been here last night.

He remembered it clearly, well, sort of clearly. He believed that he

remembered it clearly, and that, after all, was the main thing. Here

was where he had walked to in a more than usually confused state of

mind, and just around the very next corner, if he was not very much

mistaken, again, lay the small roadside establishment at which he had

jumped into the back of that nice man’s car -- the nice man who had

subsequently reacted so oddly to being shot at.

Perhaps they would have some money there and would let him have it.

He wondered. Well, he would find out. He yanked the horse from its

feast once again and galloped towards it.

As he approached the petrol station he noticed a car parked there at

an arrogant angle. The angle made it quite clear that the car was not

there for anything so mundane as to have petrol put into it, and was

much too important to park itself neatly out of the way. Any other car

that arrived for petrol would just have to manoeuvre around it as best

it could. The car was white with stripes and badges and important

looking lights.

Arriving at the forecourt the Monk dismounted and tethered his horse

to a pump. He walked towards the small shop building and saw that

inside it there was a man with his back to him wearing a dark blue

uniform and a peaked cap. The man was dancing up and down and twisting

his fingers in his ears, and this was clearly making a deep impression

on the man behind the till.

The Monk watched in transfixed awe. The man, he believed with an

instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist,

must be a God of some kind to arouse such fervour. He waited with bated

breath to worship him. In a moment the man turned around and walked out

of the shop, saw the Monk and stopped dead.

The Monk realised that the God must be waiting for him to make an

act of worship, so he reverently danced up and down twisting his

fingers in his ears.

His God stared at him for a moment, caught hold of him, twisted him

round, slammed him forward spreadeagled over the car and frisked him

for weapons.

Dirk burst into the flat like a small podgy tornado.

‘Miss Way,’ he said, grasping her slightly unwilling hand and

doffing his absurd hat, ‘it is the most inexpressible pleasure to meet

you, but also the matter of the deepest regret that the occasion of our

meeting should be one of such great sorrow and one which bids me extend

to you my most profound sympathy and commiseration. I ask you to

believe me that I would not intrude upon your private grief for all the

world if it were not on a matter of the gravest moment and magnitude.

Richard -- I have solved the problem of the conjuring trick and it’s

extraordinary.’

He swept through the room and deposited himself on a spare chair at

the small dining table, on which he put his hat.

‘You will have to excuse us, Dirk --’ said Richard, coldly.

‘No, I am afraid you will have to excuse me,’ returned Dirk. ‘The

puzzle is solved, and the solution is so astounding that it took a

seven-year-old child on the street to give it to me. But it is

undoubtedly the correct one, absolutely undoubtedly. “What, then, is

the solution?” you ask me, or rather would ask me if you could get a

word in edgeways, which you can’t, so I will save you the bother and

ask the question for you, and answer it as well by saying that I will

not tell you, because you won’t believe me. I shall instead show you,

this very afternoon.

‘Rest assured, however, that it explains everything. It explains the

trick. It explains the note you found -- that should have made it

perfectly clear to me but I was a fool. And it explains what the

missing third question was, or rather -- and this is the significant

point -- it explains what the missing first question was!’

‘What missing question?’ exclaimed Richard, confused by the sudden

pause, and leaping in with the first phrase he could grab.

Dirk blinked as if at an idiot. ‘The missing question that George

III asked, of course,’ he said.

‘Asked who?’

‘Well, the Professor,’ said Dirk impatiently. ‘Don’t you listen to

anything you say? The whole thing was obvious!’ he exclaimed, thumping

the table, ‘So obvious that the only thing which prevented me from

seeing the solution was the trifling fact that it was completely

impossible. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the

impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the

answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. Now. Let

us go.’

‘No.’

‘What?’ Dirk glanced up at Susan, from whom this unexpected -- or at

least, unexpected to him -- opposition had come.

‘Mr Gently,’ said Susan in a voice you could notch a stick with,

‘why did you deliberately mislead Richard into thinking that he was

wanted by the police?’

Dirk frowned.

‘But he was wanted by the police,’ he said, ‘and still is.’

‘Yes, but just to answer questions! Not because he’s a suspected

murderer.’

Dirk looked down.

‘Miss Way,’ he said, ‘the police are interested in knowing who

murdered your brother. I, with the very greatest respect, am not. It

may, I concede, turn out to have a bearing on the case, but it may just

as likely turn out to be a casual madman. I wanted to know, still need

desperately to know, /why Richard climbed into this flat last night/.’

‘I told you,’ protested Richard.

‘What you told me is immaterial -- it only reveals the crucial fact

that you do not know the reason yourself! For heaven’s sake I thought I

had demonstrated that to you clearly enough at the canal!’

Richard simmered.

‘It was perfectly clear to me watching you,’ pursued Dirk, ‘that you

had very little idea what you were doing, and had absolutely no concern

about the physical danger you were in. At first I thought, watching,

that it was just a brainless thug out on his first and quite possibly

last burgle. But then the figure looked back and I realised it was you

-- and I know you to be an intelligent, rational, and moderate man.

Richard MacDuff? Risking his neck carelessly climbing up drainpipes at

night? It seemed to me that you would only behave in such a reckless

and extreme way if you were desperately worried about something of

terrible importance. Is that not true, Miss Way?’

He looked sharply up at Susan, who slowly sat down, looking at him

with an alarm in her eyes which said that he had struck home.

‘And yet, when you came to see me this morning you seemed perfectly

calm and collected. You argued with me perfectly rationally when I

talked a lot of nonsense about Schrödinger’s Cat. This was not the

behaviour of someone who had the previous night been driven to extremes

by some desperate purpose. I confess that it was at that moment that I

stooped to, well, exaggerating your predicament, simply in order to

keep hold of you.’

‘You didn’t. I left.’

‘With certain ideas in your head. I knew you would be back. I

apologise most humbly for having misled you, er, somewhat, but I knew

that what I had to find out lay far beyond what the police would

concern themselves with. And it was this -- if you were not quite

yourself when you climbed the wall last night... then /who were you, --

and why/?’

Richard shivered. A silence lengthened.

‘What has it got to do with conjuring tricks?’ he said at last.

‘That is what we must go to Cambridge to find out.’

‘But what makes you so sure -- ?’

‘It disturbs me,’ said Dirk, and a dark and heavy look came into his

face.

For one so garrulous he seemed suddenly oddly reluctant to speak.

He continued, ‘It disturbs me very greatly when I find that I know

things and do not know why I know them. Maybe it is the same

instinctive processing of data that allows you to catch a ball almost

before you’ve seen it. Maybe it is the deeper and less explicable

instinct that tells you when someone is watching you. It is a very

great offence to my intellect that the very things that I despise other

people for being credulous of actually occur to me. You will remember

the... unhappiness surrounding certain exam questions.’

He seemed suddenly distressed and haggard. He had to dig deep inside

himself to continue speaking.

He said, ‘The ability to put two and two together and come up

instantly with four is one thing. The ability to put the square root of

five hundred and thirty-nine point seven together with the cosine of

twenty-six point four three two and come up with... with whatever the

answer to that is, is quite another. And I... well, let me give you an

example.’

He leant forward intently. ‘Last night I saw you climbing into this

flat. I /knew/ that something was wrong. Today I got you to tell me

every last detail you knew about what happened last night, and already,

as a result, using my intellect alone, I have uncovered possibly the

greatest secret lying hidden on this planet. I swear to you that this

is true and that I can prove it. Now you must believe me when I tell

you that I know, I know that there is something terribly, desperately,

appallingly wrong and that we must find it. Will you go with me now, to

Cambridge?’

Richard nodded dumbly.

‘Good,’ said Dirk. ‘What is this?’ he added, pointing at Richard’s

plate.

‘A pickled herring. Do you want one?’

‘Thank you, no,’ said Dirk, rising and buckling his coat. ‘There

is,’ he added as he headed towards the door, steering Richard with him,

‘no such word as “herring” in my dictionary. Good afternoon, Miss Way,

wish us God speed.’

[::: CHAPTER 25 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

There was a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable

tight drizzle from the north-east by which so many of the world’s most

momentous events seem to be accompanied.

Dirk turned up the collar of his leather overcoat against the

weather, but nothing could dampen his demonic exuberance as he and

Richard approached the great twelfth-century gates.

‘St Cedd’s College, Cambridge,’ he exclaimed, looking at them for

the first time in eight years. ‘Founded in the year something or other,

by someone I forget in honour of someone whose name for the moment

escapes me.’

‘St Cedd?’ suggested Richard.

‘Do you know, I think it very probably was? One of the duller

Northumbrian saints. His brother Chad was even duller. Has a cathedral

in Birmingham if that gives you some idea. Ah, Bill, how good to see

you again,’ he added, accosting the porter who was just walking into

the college as well. The porter looked round.

‘Mr Cjelli, nice to see you back, sir. Sorry you had a spot of

bother, hope that’s all behind you now.’

‘Indeed, Bill, it is. You find me thriving. And Mrs Roberts? How is

she? Foot still troubling her?’

‘Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and

me, sir, I would’ve been just as happy to have had her amputated and

kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantelpiece, but

there we are, we have to take things as we find them.

‘Mr MacDuff, sir,’ he added, nodding curtly at Richard. ‘Oh that

horse you mentioned, sir, when you were here last night, I’m afraid we

had to have it removed. It was bothering Professor Chronotis.’

‘I was only curious, er, Bill,’ said Richard. ‘I hope it didn’t

disturb you.’

‘Nothing ever disturbs me, sir, so long as it isn’t wearing a dress.

Can’t abide it when the young fellers wear dresses, sir.’

‘If the horse bothers you again, Bill,’ interrupted Dirk, patting

him on the shoulder, ‘send it up to me and I shall speak with it. Now,

you mention the good Professor Chronotis. Is he in at the moment? We’ve

come on an errand.’

‘Far as I know, sir. Can’t check for you because his phone’s out of

order. Suggest you go and look yourself. Far left corner of Second

Court.’

‘I know it well, Bill, thank you, and my best to what remains of Mrs

Roberts.’

They swept on through into First Court, or at least Dirk swept, and

Richard walked in his normal heron-like gait, wrinkling up his face

against the measly drizzle.

Dirk had obviously mistaken himself for a tour guide.

‘St Cedd’s,’ he pronounced, ‘the college of Coleridge, and the

college of Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin

and the catflap!’

‘The what?’ said Richard.

‘The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and

invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a...’

‘Yes,’ said Richard, ‘there was also the small matter of gravity.’

‘Gravity,’ said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, ‘yes, there

was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a

discovery. It was there to be discovered.’

He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually on to the

pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.

‘You see?’ he said, ‘They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was

bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap... ah, there is a very

different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.’

‘I would have thought it was quite obvious. Anyone could have

thought of it.’

‘Ah,’ said Dirk, ‘it is a rare mind indeed that can render the

hitherto non-existent blindingly obvious. The cry “I could have thought

of that” is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that

they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too. This

if I am not mistaken is the staircase we seek. Shall we ascend?’

Without waiting for an answer he plunged on up the stairs. Richard,

following uncertainly, found him already knocking on the inner door.

The outer one stood open.

‘Come in!’ called a voice from within. Dirk pushed the door open,

and they were just in time to see the back of Reg’s white head as he

disappeared into the kitchen.

‘Just making some tea,’ he called out. ‘Like some? Sit down, sit

down, whoever you are.’

‘That would be most kind,’ returned Dirk. ‘We are two.’ Dirk sat,

and Richard followed his lead.

‘Indian or China?’ called Reg.

‘Indian, please.’

There was a rattle of cups and saucers.

Richard looked around the room. It seemed suddenly humdrum. The fire

was burning quietly away to itself, but the light was that of the grey

afternoon. Though everything about it was the same, the old sofa, the

table burdened with books, there seemed nothing to connect it with the

hectic strangeness of the previous night. The room seemed to sit there

with raised eyebrows, innocently saying ‘Yes?’

‘Milk?’ called out Reg from the kitchen.

‘Please,’ replied Dirk. He gave Richard a smile which seemed to him

to be half-mad with suppressed excitement.

‘One lump or two?’ called Reg again.

‘One, please,’ said Dirk, ‘...and two spoons of sugar if you would.’

There was a suspension of activity in the kitchen. A moment or two

passed and Reg stuck his head round the door.

‘Svlad Cjelli!’ he exclaimed. ‘Good heavens! Well, that was quick

work, young MacDuff, well done. My dear fellow, how very excellent to

see you, how good of you to come.’

He wiped his hands on a tea towel he was carrying and hurried over

to shake hands.

‘My dear Svlad.’

‘Dirk, please, if you would,’ said Dirk, grasping his hand warmly,

‘I prefer it. It has more of a sort of Scottish dagger feel to it, I

think. Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are

certain events in the past, I’m afraid, from which I would wish to

disassociate myself.’

‘Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century,

for instance, was pretty grim,’ agreed Reg earnestly.

Dirk was about to correct the misapprehension, but thought that it

might be somewhat of a long trek and left it.

‘So how have you been, then, my dear Professor?’ he said instead,

decorously placing his hat and scarf upon the arm of the sofa.

‘Well,’ said Reg, ‘it’s been an interesting time recently, or

rather, a dull time. But dull for interesting reasons. Now, sit down

again, warm yourselves by the fire, and I will get the tea and

endeavour to explain.’ He bustled out again, humming busily, and left

them to settle themselves in front of the fire.

Richard leant over to Dirk. ‘I had no idea you knew him so well,’ he

said with a nod in the direction of the kitchen.

‘I don’t,’ said Dirk instantly. ‘We met once by chance at some

dinner, but there was an immediate sympathy and rapport.’

‘So how come you never met again?’

‘He studiously avoided me, of course. Close rapports with people are

dangerous if you have a secret to hide. And as secrets go, I fancy that

this is somewhat of a biggie. If there is a bigger secret anywhere in

the world I would very much care,’ he said quietly, ‘to know what it

is.’

He gave Richard a significant look and held his hands out to the

fire. Since Richard had tried before without success to draw him out on

exactly what the secret was, he refused to rise to the bait on this

occasion, but sat back in his armchair and looked about him.

‘Did I ask you,’ said Reg, returning at that moment, ‘if you wanted

any tea?’

‘Er, yes,’ said Richard, ‘we spoke about it at length. I think we

agreed in the end that we would, didn’t we?’

‘Good,’ said Reg, vaguely, ‘by a happy chance there seems to be some

ready in the kitchen. You’ll have to forgive me. I have a memory like

a... like a... what are those things you drain rice in? What am I

talking about?’

With a puzzled look he turned smartly round and disappeared once

more into the kitchen.

‘Very interesting,’ said Dirk quietly, ‘I wondered if his memory

might be poor.’

He stood, suddenly, and prowled around the room. His eyes fell on

the abacus which stood on the only clear space on the large mahogany

table.

‘Is this the table,’ he asked Richard in a low voice, ‘where you

found the note about the salt cellar?’

‘Yes,’ said Richard, standing, and coming over, ‘tucked into this

book.’ He picked up the guide to the Greek islands and flipped through

it.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Dirk, impatiently. ‘We know about all

that. I’m just interested that this was the table.’ He ran his fingers

along its edge, curiously.

‘If you think it was some sort of prior collaboration between Reg

and the girl,’ Richard said, ‘then I must say that I don’t think it

possibly can have been.’

‘Of course it wasn’t,’ said Dirk testily, ‘I would have thought that

was perfectly clear.’

Richard shrugged in an effort not to get angry and put the book back

down again.

‘Well, it’s an odd coincidence that the book should have been...’

‘Odd coincidence!’ snorted Dirk. ‘Ha! We shall see how much of a

coincidence. We shall see exactly how odd it was. I would like you,

Richard, to ask our friend how he performed the trick.’

‘I thought you said you knew already.’

‘I do,’ said Dirk airily. ‘I would like to hear it confirmed.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Richard, ‘yes, that’s rather easy, isn’t it? Get

him to explain it, and then say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I thought it

was!” Very good, Dirk. Have we come all the way up here in order to

have him explain how he did a conjuring trick? I think I must be mad.’

Dirk bridled at this.

‘Please do as I ask,’ he snapped angrily. ‘You saw him do the trick,

you must ask how he did it. Believe me, there is an astounding secret

hidden within it. I know it, but I want you to hear it from him.’

He spun round as Reg re-entered, bearing a tray, which he carried

round the sofa and put on to the low coffee table that sat in front of

the fire.

‘Professor Chronotis...’ said Dirk.

‘Reg,’ said Reg, ‘please.’

‘Very, well,’ said Dirk, ‘Reg...’

‘Sieve!’ exclaimed Reg.

‘What?’

‘Thing you drain rice in. A sieve. I was trying to remember the

word, though I forget now the reason why. No matter. Dirk, dear fellow,

you look as if you are about to explode about something. Why don’t you

sit down and make yourself comfortable?’

‘Thank you, no, I would rather feel free to pace up and down

fretfully if I may. Reg...’

He turned to face him square on, and raised a single finger.

‘I must tell you,’ he said, ‘that I know your secret.’

‘Ah, yes, er -- do you indeed?’ mumbled Reg, looking down awkwardly

and fiddling with the cups and teapot. ‘I see.’

The cups rattled violently as he moved them. ‘Yes, I was afraid of

that.’

‘And there are some questions that we would like to ask you. I must

tell you that I await the answers with the very greatest apprehension.’

‘Indeed, indeed,’ Reg muttered. ‘Well, perhaps it is at last time. I

hardly know myself what to make of recent events and am... fearful

myself. Very well. Ask what you will.’ He looked up sharply, his eyes

glittering.

Dirk nodded curtly at Richard, turned, and started to pace, glaring

at the floor.

‘Er,’ said Richard, ‘well. I’d be... interested to know how you did

the conjuring trick with the salt cellar last night.’

Reg seemed surprised and rather confused by the question. ‘The

/conjuring/ trick?’ he said.

‘Er, yes,’ said Richard, ‘the conjuring trick.’

‘Oh,’ said Reg, taken aback, ‘well, the conjuring part of it, I’m

not sure I should -- Magic Circle rules, you know, very strict about

revealing these secrets. Very strict. Impressive trick, though, don’t

you think?’ he added slyly.

‘Well, yes,’ said Richard, ‘it seemed very natural at the time, but

now that I... think about it, I have to admit that it was a bit

dumbfounding.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Reg, ‘it’s skill. you see. Practice. Make it look

natural.’

‘It did look very natural,’ continued Richard, feeling his way, ‘I

was quite taken in.’

‘You liked it?’

‘It was very impressive.’

Dirk was getting a little impatient. He shot a look to that effect

at Richard.

‘And I can quite see,’ said Richard firmly, ‘why it’s impossible for

you to tell me. I was just interested, that’s all. Sorry I asked.’

‘Well,’ said Reg in a sudden seizure of doubt, ‘I suppose... well,

so long as you absolutely promise not to tell anyone else.’ he carried

on, ‘I suppose you can probably work out for yourself that I used two

of the salt cellars on the table. No one was going to notice the

difference between one and another. The quickness of the hand, you

know, deceives the eye, particularly some of the eyes around that

table. While I was fiddling with my woolly hat, giving, though I say so

myself, a very cunning simulation of clumsiness and muddle, I simply

slipped the salt cellar down my sleeve. You see?’

His earlier agitation had been swept away completely by his pleasure

in showing off his craft.

‘It’s the oldest trick in the world, in fact,’ he continued, ‘but

nevertheless takes a great deal of skill and deftness. Then a little

later, of course, I returned it to the table with the appearance of

simply passing it to someone else. Takes years of practice, of course,

to make it look natural, but I much prefer it to simply slipping the

thing down to the floor. Amateur stuff that. You can’t pick it up, and

the cleaners never notice it for at least a fortnight. I once had a

dead thrush under my seat for a month. No trick involved there, of

course. Cat killed it.’

Reg beamed.

Richard felt he had done his bit, but hadn’t the faintest idea where

it was supposed to have got them. He glanced at Dirk, who gave him no

help whatsoever, so he plunged on blindly.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I understand that that can be done by sleight

of hand. What I don’t understand is how the salt cellar got embedded in

the pot.’

Reg looked puzzled once again, as if they were all talking at cross

purposes. He looked at Dirk, who stopped pacing and stared at him with

bright, expectant eyes.

‘Well, that’s... perfectly straightforward,’ said Reg, ‘didn’t take

any conjuring skill at all. I nipped out for my hat, you remember?’

‘Yes,’ said Richard, doubtfully.

‘Well,’ said Reg, ‘while I was out of the room I went to find the

man who made the pot. Took some time, of course. About three weeks of

detective work to track him down and another couple of days to sober

him up, and then with a little difficulty I persuaded him to bake the

salt cellar into the pot for me. After that I briefly stopped off

somewhere to find some, er, powder to disguise the suntan, and of

course I had to time the return a little carefully so as to make it all

look natural. I bumped into myself in the ante-room, which I always

find embarrassing, I never know where to look, but, er... well, there

you have it.’

He smiled a rather bleak and nervous smile.

Richard tried to nod, but eventually gave up.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said.

Reg looked at him in surprise.

‘I thought you said you knew my secret,’ he said.

‘I do,’ said Dirk, with a beam of triumph. ‘He, as yet, does not,

though he furnished all the information I needed to discover it. Let

me,’ he added, ‘fill in a couple of little blanks. In order to help

disguise the fact that you had in fact been away for weeks when as far

as anyone sitting at the table was concerned you had only popped out of

the door for a couple of seconds, you had to write down for your own

reference the last thing you said, in order that you could pick up the

thread of conversation again as naturally as possible. An important

detail if your memory is not what it once was. Yes?’

‘What it once was,’ said Reg, slowly shaking his white head, ‘I can

hardly remember what it once was. But yes, you are very sharp to pick

up such a detail.’

‘And then there is the little matter,’ continued Dirk, ‘of the

questions that George III asked. Asked you.’

This seemed to catch Reg quite by surprise.

‘He asked you,’ continued Dirk, consulting a small notebook he had

pulled from his pocket, ‘if there was any particular reason why one

thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it.

Did he not also ask you, and ask you first, if it was possible to move

backwards in time, or something of that kind?’

Reg gave Dirk a long and appraising look.

‘I was right about you,’ he said, ‘you have a very remarkable mind,

young man.’ He walked slowly over to the window that looked out on to

Second Court. He watched the odd figures scuttling through it hugging

themselves in the drizzle or pointing at things.

‘Yes,’ said Reg at last in a subdued voice, ‘that is precisely what

he said.’

‘Good,’ said Dirk, snapping shut his notebook with a tight little

smile which said that he lived for such praise, ‘then that explains why

the answers were yes, no and maybe -- in that order. Now. Where is it?’

‘Where is what?’

‘The time machine.’

‘You’re standing in it.’ said Reg.

[::: CHAPTER 26 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

A party of noisy people spilled into the train at Bishop’s

Stortford. Some were wearing morning suits with carnations looking a

little battered by a day’s festivity. The women of the party were in

smart dresses and hats, chattering excitedly about how pretty Julia had

looked in all that silk taffeta, how Ralph still looked like a smug oaf

even done up in all his finery, and generally giving the whole thing

about two weeks.

One of the men stuck his head out of the window and hailed a passing

railway employee just to check that this was the right train and was

stopping at Cambridge. The porter confirmed that of course it bloody

was. The young man said that they didn’t all want to find they were

going off in the wrong direction, did they, and made a sound a little

like that of a fish barking, as if to indicate that this was a

pricelessly funny remark, and then pulled his head back in, banging it

on the way.

The alcohol content of the atmosphere in the carriage rose sharply.

There seemed to be a general feeling in the air that the best way of

getting themselves in the right mood for the post-wedding reception

party that evening was to make a foray to the bar so that any members

of the party who were not already completely drunk could finish the

task. Rowdy shouts of acclamation greeted this notion, the train

restarted with a jolt and a lot of those still standing fell over.

Three young men dropped into the three empty seats round one table,

of which the fourth was already taken by a sleekly overweight man in an

old-fashioned suit. He had a lugubrious face and his large, wet,

cowlike eyes gazed into some unknown distance.

Very slowly his eyes began to refocus all the way from infinity and

gradually to home in on his more immediate surroundings, his new and

intrusive companions. There was a need he felt, as he had felt before.

The three men were discussing loudly whether they would all go to

the bar, whether some of them would go to the bar and bring back drinks

for the others, whether the ones who went to the bar would get so

excited by all the drinks there that they would stay put and forget to

bring any back for the others who would be sitting here anxiously

awaiting their return, and whether even if they did remember to come

back immediately with the drinks they would actually be capable of

carrying them and wouldn’t simply throw them all over the carriage on

the way back, incommoding other passengers.

Some sort of consensus seemed to be reached, but almost immediately

none of them could remember what it was. Two of them got up, then sat

down again as the third one got up. Then he sat down. The two other

ones stood up again, expressing the idea that it might be simpler if

they just bought the entire bar.

The third was about to get up again and follow them, when slowly,

but with unstoppable purpose, the cow-eyed man sitting opposite him

leant across, and gripped him firmly by the forearm.

The young man in his morning suit looked up as sharply as his

somewhat bubbly brain would allow and, startled, said, ‘What do you

want?’

Michael Wenton-Weakes gazed into his eyes with terrible intensity,

and said, in a low voice, ‘I was on a ship...’

‘What?’

‘A ship...’ said Michael.

‘What ship, what are you talking about? Get off me. Let go!’

‘We came,’ continued Michael, in a quiet, almost inaudible, but

compelling voice, ‘a monstrous distance. We came to build a paradise. A

paradise. Here.’

His eyes swam briefly round the carriage, and then gazed briefly out

through the spattered windows at the gathering gloom of a drizzly East

Anglian evening. He gazed with evident loathing. His grip on the

other’s forearm tightened.

‘Look, I’m going for a drink,’ said the wedding guest, though

feebly, because he clearly wasn’t.

‘We left behind those who would destroy themselves with war,’

murmured Michael. ‘Ours was to be a world of peace, of music, of art,

of enlightenment. All that was petty, all that was mundane, all that

was contemptible would have no place in our world...’

The stilled reveller looked at Michael wonderingly. He didn’t look

like an old hippy. Of course, you never could tell. His own elder

brother had once spent a couple of years living in a Druidic commune,

eating LSD doughnuts and thinking he was a tree, since when he had gone

on to become a director of a merchant bank. The difference, of course,

was that he hardly ever still thought he was a tree, except just

occasionally, and he had long ago learnt to avoid the particular claret

which sometimes triggered off that flashback.

‘There were those who said we would fail,’ continued Michael in his

low tone that carried clearly under the boisterous noise that filled

the carriage, ‘who prophesied that we too carried in us the seed of

war, but it was our high resolve and purpose that only art and beauty

should flourish, the highest art, the highest beauty -- music. We took

with us only those who believed, who wished it to be true.’

‘But what are you talking about?’ asked the wedding guest though not

challengingly, for he had fallen under Michael’s mesmeric spell. ‘When

was this? Where was this?’

Michael breathed hard. ‘Before you were born --’ he said at last,

‘be still, and I will tell you.’

[::: CHAPTER 27 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

There was a long startled silence during which the evening gloom

outside seemed to darken appreciably and gather the room into its grip.

A trick of the light wreathed Reg in shadows.

Dirk was, for one of the few times in a life of exuberantly prolific

loquacity, wordless. His eyes shone with a child’s wonder as they

passed anew over the dull and shabby furniture of the room, the

panelled walls, the threadbare carpets. His hands were trembling.

Richard frowned faintly to himself for a moment as if he was trying

to work out the square root of something in his head, and then looked

back directly at Reg.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Reg brightly, ‘much of my memory’s

gone completely. I am very old, you see. Startlingly old. Yes, I think

if I were to tell you how old I was it would be fair to say that you

would be startled. Odds are that so would I, because I can’t remember.

I’ve seen an awful lot, you know. Forgotten most of it, thank God.

Trouble is, when you start getting to my age, which, as I think I

mentioned earlier, is a somewhat startling one -- did I say that?’

‘Yes, you did mention it.’

‘Good. I’d forgotten whether I had or not. The thing is that your

memory doesn’t actually get any bigger, and a lot of stuff just falls

out. So you see, the major difference between someone of my age and

someone of yours is not how much I know, but how much I’ve forgotten.

And after a while you even forget what it is you’ve forgotten, and

after that you even forget that there was something to remember. Then

you tend to forget, er, what it was you were talking about.’

He stared helplessly at the teapot.

‘Things you remember...’ prompted Richard gently.

‘Smells and earrings.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Those are things that linger for some reason,’ said Reg, shaking

his head in a puzzled way. He sat down suddenly. ‘The earrings that

Queen Victoria wore on her Silver Jubilee. Quite startling objects.

Toned down in the pictures of the period, of course. The smell of the

streets before there were cars in them. Hard to say which was worse.

That’s why Cleopatra remains so vividly in the memory, of course. A

quite devastating combination of earrings and smell. I think that will

probably be the last thing that remains when all else has finally fled.

I shall sit alone in a darkened room, /sans/ teeth, /sans/ eyes, /sans/

taste, /sans/ everything but a little grey old head, and in that little

grey old head a peculiar vision of hideous blue and gold dangling

things flashing in the light, and the smell of sweat, catfood and

death. I wonder what I shall make of it...’

Dirk was scarcely breathing as he began to move slowly round the

room, gently brushing his fingertips over the walls, the sofa, the

table.

‘How long,’ he said, ‘has this been --’

‘Here?’ said Reg. ‘Just about two hundred years. Ever since I

retired.’

‘Retired from what?’

‘Search me. Must have been something pretty good, though, what do

you think?’

‘You mean you’ve been in this same set of rooms here for... two

hundred years?’ murmured Richard. ‘You’d think someone would notice, or

think it was odd.’

‘Oh, that’s one of the delights of the older Cambridge colleges,’

said Reg, ‘everyone is so discreet. If we all went around mentioning

what was odd about each other we’d be here till Christmas. Svlad, er --

Dirk, my dear fellow, please don’t touch that just at the moment.’

Dirk’s hand was reaching out to touch the abacus standing on its own

on the only clear spot on the big table.

‘What is it?’ said Dirk sharply.

‘It’s just what it looks like, an old wooden abacus,’ said Reg.

‘I’ll show you in a moment, but first I must congratulate you on your

powers of perception. May I ask how you arrived at the solution?’

‘I have to admit,’ said Dirk with rare humility, ‘that I did not. In

the end I asked a child. I told him the story of the trick and asked

him how he thought it had been done, and he said and I quote, “It’s

bleedin’ obvious, innit, he must’ve ‘ad a bleedin’ time machine.’ I

thanked the little fellow and gave him a shilling for his trouble. He

kicked me rather sharply on the shin and went about his business. But

he was the one who solved it. My only contribution to the matter was to

see that he /must/ be right. He had even saved me the bother of kicking

myself.’

‘But you had the perception to think of asking a child,’ said Reg.

‘Well then, I congratulate you on that instead.’

Dirk was still eyeing the abacus suspiciously.

‘How... does it work?’ he said, trying to make it sound like a

casual enquiry.

‘Well, it’s really terribly simple,’ said Reg, ‘it works any way you

want it to. You see, the computer that runs it is a rather advanced

one. In fact it is more powerful than the sum total of all the

computers on this planet including -- and this is the tricky part --

including itself. Never really understood that bit myself, to be honest

with you. But over ninety-five per cent of that power is used in simply

understanding what it is you want it to do. I simply plonk my abacus

down there and it understands the way I use it. I think I must have

been brought up to use an abacus when I was a... well, a child, I

suppose.

‘Richard, for instance, would probably want to use his own personal

computer. If you put it down there, where the abacus is the machine’s

computer would simple take charge of it and offer you lots of nice

user-friendly time-travel applications complete with pull-down menus

and desk accessories if you like. Except that you point to 1066 on the

screen and you’ve got the Battle of Hastings going on outside your

door, er, if that’s the sort of thing you’re interested in.’

Reg’s tone of voice suggested that his own interests lay in other

areas.

‘It’s, er, really quite fun in its way,’ he concluded. ‘Certainly

better than television and a great deal easier to use than a video

recorder. If I miss a programme I just pop back in time and watch it.

I’m hopeless fiddling with all those buttons.’

Dirk reacted to this revelation with horror.

‘You have a time machine and you use it for... watching television?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t use it at all if I could get the hang of the video

recorder. It’s a very delicate business, time travel, you know. Full of

appalling traps and dangers, if you should change the wrong thing in

the past, you could entirely disrupt the course of history.

‘Plus, of course, it mucks up the telephone. I’m sorry,’ he said to

Richard a little sheepishly, ‘that you were unable to phone your young

lady last night. There seems to be something fundamentally inexplicable

about the British telephone system, and my time machine doesn’t like

it. There’s never any problem with the plumbing, the electricity, or

even the gas. The connection interfaces are taken care of at some

quantum level I don’t entirely understand, and it’s never been a

problem.

‘The phone on the other hand is definitely a problem. Every time I

use the time machine, which is, of course, hardly at all, partly

because of this very problem with the phone, the phone goes haywire and

I have to get some lout from the phone company to come and fix it, and

he starts asking stupid questions the answers to which he has no hope

of understanding.

‘Anyway, the point is that I have a very strict rule that I must not

change anything in the past at all --’ Reg sighed -- ‘whatever the

temptation.’

‘What temptation?’ said Dirk, sharply.

‘Oh, it’s just a little, er, thing I’m interested in,’ said Reg,

vaguely, ‘it is perfectly harmless because I stick very strictly to the

rule. It makes me sad, though.’

‘But you broke your own rule!’ insisted Dirk. ‘Last night! You

changed something in the past --’

‘Well, yes,’ said Reg, a little uncomfortably, ‘but that was

different. Very different. If you had seen the look on the poor child’s

face. So miserable. She thought the world should be a marvellous place,

and all those appalling old dons were pouring their withering scorn on

her just because it wasn’t marvellous for them anymore.

‘I mean,’ he added, appealing to Richard, ‘remember Cawley. What a

bloodless old goat. Someone should get some humanity into him even if

they have to knock it in with a brick. No, that was perfectly

justifiable. Otherwise, I make it a very strict rule --’

Richard looked at him with dawning recognition of something.

‘Reg,’ he said politely, ‘may I give you a little advice?’

‘Of course you may, my dear fellow, I should adore you to,’ said

Reg.

‘If our mutual friend here offers to take you for a stroll along the

banks of the River Cam, /don’t go/.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘He means,’ said Dirk earnestly, ‘that he thinks there may be

something a little disproportionate between what you actually did, and

your stated reasons for doing it.’

‘Oh. Well, odd way of saying it --’

‘Well, he’s a very odd fellow. But you see, there sometimes may be

other reasons for things you do which you are not necessarily aware of.

As in the case of post-hypnotic suggestion -- or possession.’

Reg turned very pale.

‘Possession --’ he said.

‘Professor -- Reg -- I believe there was some reason you wanted to

see me. What exactly was it?’

‘Cambridge! this is... Cambridge!’ came the lilting squawk of the

station public address system.

Crowds of noisy revellers spewed out on to the platform barking and

honking at each other.

‘Where’s Rodney?’ said one, who had clambered with difficulty from

the carriage in which the bar was situated. He and his companion looked

up and down the platform, totteringly. The large figure of Michael

Wenton-Weakes loomed silently past them and out to the exit.

They jostled their way down the side of the train, looking in

through the dirty carriage windows. They suddenly saw their missing

companion still sitting, trance-like, in his seat in the now almost

empty compartment. They banged on the window and hooted at him. For a

moment or two he didn’t react, and when he did he woke suddenly in a

puzzled way as if seeming not to know where he was.

‘He’s pie-eyed!’ his companions bawled happily, bundling themselves

on to the train again and bundling Rodney back off.

He stood woozily on the platform and shook his head. Then glancing

up he saw through the railings the large bulk of Michael Wenton-Weakes

heaving himself and a large heavy bag into a taxi- cab, and he stood

for a moment transfixed.

‘’Straordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that man. Telling me a long story

about some kind of shipwreck.’

‘Har har,’ gurgled one of his two companions, ‘get any money off

you?’

‘What?’ said Rodney, puzzled. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Except it

wasn’t a shipwreck, more an accident, an explosion -- ? He seems to

think he caused it in some way. Or rather there was an accident, and he

caused an explosion trying to put it right and killed everybody. Then

he said there was an awful lot of rotting mud for years and years, and

then slimy things with legs. It was all a bit peculiar.’

‘Trust Rodney! Trust Rodney to pick a madman!’

‘I think he must have been mad. He suddenly went off on a tangent

about some bird. He said the bit about the bird was all nonsense. He

wished he could get rid of the bit about the bird. But then he said it

would be put right. It would all be put right. For some reason I didn’t

like it when he said that.’

‘Should have come along to the bar with us. Terribly funny, we --’

‘I also didn’t like the way he said goodbye. I didn’t like that at

all.’

[::: CHAPTER 28 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘You remember,’ said Reg, ‘when you arrived this afternoon I said

that times recently had been dull, but for... interesting reasons?’

‘I remember it vividly,’ said Dirk, ‘it happened a mere ten minutes

ago. You were standing exactly there as I recall. Indeed you were

wearing the very clothes with which you are currently apparelled, and -

-’

‘Shut up, Dirk,’ said Richard, ‘let the poor man talk, will you?’

Dirk made a slight, apologetic bow.

‘Quite so,’ said Reg. ‘Well, the truth is that for many weeks,

months even, I have not used the time machine at all, because I had the

oddest feeling that someone or something was trying to make me do it.

It started as the very faintest urge, and then it seemed to come at me

in stronger and stronger waves. It was extremely disturbing. I had to

fight it very hard indeed because it was trying to make me do something

I actually wanted to do. I don’t think I would have realised that it

was something outside of me creating this pressure and not just my own

wishes asserting themselves if it wasn’t for the fact that I was so

wary of allowing myself to do any such thing. As soon as I began to

realise that it was something else trying to invade me things got

really bad and the furniture began to fly about. Quite damaged my

little Georgian writing desk. Look at the marks on the --’

‘Is that what you were afraid of last night, upstairs?’ asked

Richard.

‘Oh yes,’ said Reg in a hushed voice, ‘most terribly afraid. But it

was only that rather nice horse, so that was all right. I expect it

just wandered in when I was out getting some powder to cover up my

suntan.’

‘Oh?’ said Dirk, ‘And where did you go for that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t

think of many chemists that a horse would be likely to visit.’

‘Oh, there’s a planet off in what’s known here as the Pleiades where

the dust is exactly the right --’

‘You went,’ said Dirk in a whisper, ‘to another planet? To get face

powder?’

‘Oh, it’s no distance,’ said Reg cheerfully. ‘You see, the actual

distance between two points in the whole of the space\time continuum is

almost infinitely smaller than the apparent distance between adjacent

orbits of an electron. Really, it’s a lot less far than the chemist,

and there’s no waiting about at the till. I never have the right

change, do you? Go for the quantum jump is always my preference. Except

of course that you then get all the trouble with the telephone.

Nothing’s ever that easy, is it?’

He looked bothered for a moment.

‘I think you may be right in what I think you’re thinking, though,’

he added quietly.

‘Which is?’

‘That I went through a rather elaborate bit of business to achieve a

very small result. Cheering up a little girl, charming, delightful and

sad though she was, doesn’t seem to be enough explanation for -- well,

it was a fairly major operation in time-engineering, now that I come to

face up to it. There’s no doubt that it would have been simpler to

compliment her on her dress. Maybe the... ghost -- we are talking of a

ghost here, aren’t we?’

‘I think we are, yes,’ said Dirk slowly.

‘A ghost?’ said Richard, ‘Now come on --’

‘Wait!’ said Dirk, abruptly. ‘Please continue,’ he said to Reg.

‘It’s possible that the... ghost caught me off my guard. I was

fighting so strenuously against doing one thing that it easily tripped

me into another --’

‘And now?’

‘Oh, it’s gone completely. The ghost left me last night.’

‘And where, we wonder,’ said Dirk, turning his gaze on Richard, ‘did

it go?’

‘No, please,’ said Richard, ‘not this. I’m not even sure I’ve agreed

we’re talking about time machines yet, and now suddenly it’s ghosts?’

‘So what was it,’ hissed Dirk, ‘that got into you to make you climb

the wall?’

‘Well, you suggested that I was under post-hypnotic suggestion from

someone --’

‘I did not! I demonstrated the power of post-hypnotic suggestion to

you. But I believe that hypnosis and possession work in very, very

similar ways. You can be made to do all kinds of absurd things, and

will then cheerfully invent the most transparent rationalisations to

explain them to yourself. But -- you cannot be made to do something

that runs against the fundamental grain of your character. You will

fight. You will resist!’

Richard remembered then the sense of relief with which he had

impulsively replaced the tape in Susan’s machine last night. It had

been the end of a struggle which he had suddenly won. With the sense of

another struggle that he was now losing he sighed and related this to

the others.

‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Dirk. ‘You wouldn’t do it! Now we’re getting

somewhere! You see, hypnosis works best when the subject has some

fundamental sympathy with what he or she is being asked to do. Find the

right subject for your task and the hypnosis can take a very, very deep

hold indeed. And I believe the same to be true of possession. So. What

do we have?

‘We have a ghost that wants something done and is looking for the

right person to take possession of to do that for him. Professor --’

‘Reg --’ said Reg.

‘Reg -- may I ask you something that may be terribly personal? I

will understand perfectly if you don’t want to answer, but I will just

keep pestering you until you do. Just my methods, you see. You said

there was something that you found to be a terrible temptation to you.

That you wanted to do but would not allow yourself, and that the ghost

was trying to make you do? Please. This may be difficult for you, but I

think it would be very helpful if you would tell us what it is.’

‘I will not tell you.’

‘You must understand how important --’

‘I’ll show you instead,’ said Reg.

Silhouetted in the gates of St Cedd’s stood a large figure carrying

a large heavy black nylon bag. The figure was that of Michael Wenton-

Weakes, the voice that asked the porter if Professor Chronotis was

currently in his room was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, the ears that

heard the porter say he was buggered if he knew because the phone

seemed to be on the blink again was that of Michael Wenton-Weakes, but

the spirit that gazed out of his eyes was his no longer.

He had surrendered himself completely. All doubt, disparity and

confusion had ceased.

A new mind had him in full possession.

The spirit that was not Michael Wenton-Weakes surveyed the college

which lay before it, to which it had grown accustomed in the last few

frustrating, infuriating weeks.

Weeks! Mere microsecond blinks.

Although the spirit -- the ghost -- that now inhabited Michael

Wenton-Weakes’ body had known long periods of near oblivion, sometimes

even for centuries at a stretch, the time for which it had wandered the

earth was such that it seemed only minutes ago that the creatures which

had erected these walls had arrived. Most of his personal eternity --

not really eternity, but a few billion years could easily seem like it

-- had been spent wandering across interminable mud, wading through

ceaseless seas, watching with stunned horror when the slimy things with

legs suddenly had begun to crawl from those rotting seas -- and here

they were, suddenly walking around as if they owned the place and

complaining about the phones.

Deep in a dark and silent part of himself he knew that he was now

mad, had been driven mad almost immediately after the accident by the

knowledge of what he had done and of the existence he faced, by the

memories of his fellows who had died and who for a while had haunted

him even as he had haunted the Earth.

He knew that what he now had been driven to would have revolted the

self he only infinitesimally remembered, but that it was the only way

for him to end the ceaseless nightmare in which each second of billions

of years had been worse than the previous one.

He hefted the bag and started to walk.

[::: CHAPTER 29 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Deep in the rain forest it was doing what it usually does in rain

forests, which was raining: hence the name.

It was a gentle, persistent rain, not the heavy slashing which would

come later in the year, in the hot season. It formed a fine dripping

mist through which the occasional shaft of sunlight would break, be

softened and pass through on its way towards the wet bark of a calvaria

tree on which it would settle and glisten. Sometimes it would do this

next to a butterfly or a tiny motionless sparkling lizard, and then the

effect would be almost unbearable.

Away up in the high canopy of the trees an utterly extraordinary

thought would suddenly strike a bird, and it would go flapping wildly

through the branches and settle at last in a different and altogether

better tree where it would sit and consider things again more calmly

until the same thought came along and struck it again, or it was time

to eat.

The air was full of scents -- the light fragrance of flowers, and

the heavy odour of the sodden mulch with which the floor of the forest

was carpeted.

Confusions of roots tangled through the mulch, moss grew on them,

insects crawled.

In a space in the forest, on an empty patch of wet ground between a

circle of craning trees, appeared quietly and without fuss a plain

white door. After a few seconds it opened a little way with a slight

squeak. A tall thin man looked out, looked around, blinked in surprise,

and quietly pulled the door closed again.

A few seconds later the door opened again and Reg looked out.

‘It’s real,’ he said, ‘I promise you. Come out and see for

yourself.’ Walking out into the forest, he turned and beckoned the

other two to follow him.

Dirk stepped boldly through, seemed disconcerted for about the

length of time it takes to blink twice, and then announced that he saw

exactly how it worked, that it was obviously to do with the unreal

numbers that lay between minimum quantum distances and defined the

fractal contours of the enfolded Universe and he was only astonished at

himself for not having thought of it himself.

‘Like the catflap,’ said Richard from the doorway behind him.

‘Er, yes, quite so,’ said Dirk, taking off his spectacles and

leaning against a tree wiping them, ‘you spotted of course that I was

lying. A perfectly natural reflex in the circumstances as I think

you’ll agree. Perfectly natural.’ He squinted slightly and put his

spectacles back on. They began to mist up again almost immediately.

‘Astounding,’ he admitted.

Richard stepped through more hesitantly and stood rocking for a

moment with one foot still on the floor in Reg’s room and the other on

the wet earth of the forest. Then he stepped forward and committed

himself fully.

His lungs instantly filled with the heady vapours and his mind with

the wonder of the place. He turned and looked at the doorway through

which he had walked. It was still a perfectly ordinary door frame with

a perfectly ordinary little white door swinging open in it, but it was

standing free in the open forest, and through it could clearly he seen

the room he had just stepped out of.

He walked wonderingly round the back of the door, testing each foot

on the muddy ground, not so much for fear of slipping as for fear that

it might simply not be there. From behind it was just a perfectly

ordinary open door frame, such as you might fail to find in any

perfectly ordinary rain forest. He walked through the door from behind,

and looking back again could once more see, as if he had just stepped

out of them again, the college rooms of Professor Urban Chronotis of St

Cedd’s College, Cambridge, which must be thousands of miles away.

Thousands? Where were they?

He peered off through the trees and thought he caught a slight

shimmer in the distance, between the trees.

‘Is that the sea?’ he asked.

‘You can see it a little more clearly from up here,’ called Reg, who

had walked on a little way up a slippery incline and was now leaning,

puffing, against a tree. He pointed.

The other two followed him up, pulling themselves noisily through

the branches and causing a lot of cawing and complaining from unseen

birds high above.

‘The Pacific?’ asked Dirk.

‘The Indian Ocean,’ said Reg.

Dirk wiped his glasses again and had another look.

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he said.

‘Not Madagascar?’ said Richard. ‘I’ve been there --’

‘Have you?’ said Reg. ‘One of the most beautiful and astonishing

places on Earth, and one that is also full of the most appalling...

temptations for me. No.’

His voice trembled slightly, and he cleared his throat.

‘No,’ he continued, ‘Madagascar is -- let me see, which direction

are we -- where’s the sun? Yes. That way. Westish. Madagascar is about

five hundred miles roughly west of here. The island of Réunion lies

roughly in-between.’

‘Er, what’s the place called?’ said Dirk suddenly, rapping his

knuckles on the tree and frightening a lizard. ‘Place where that stamp

comes from, er -- Mauritius.’

‘Stamp?’ said Reg.

‘Yes, you must know,’ said Dirk, ‘very famous stamp. Can’t remember

anything about it, but it comes from here. Mauritius. Famous for its

very remarkable stamp, all brown and smudged and you could buy Blenheim

Palace with it. Or am I thinking of British Guiana?’

‘Only you,’ said Richard, ‘know what you are thinking of.’

‘Is it Mauritius?’

‘It is,’ said Reg, ‘it is Mauritius.’

‘But you don’t collect stamps?’

‘No.’

‘What on /earth/’s that?’ said Richard suddenly, but Dirk carried on

with his thought to Reg, ‘Pity, you could get some nice first-day

covers, couldn’t you?’

Reg shrugged. ‘Not really interested,’ he said.

Richard slithered back down the slope behind them.

‘So what’s the great attraction here?’ said Dirk. ‘It’s not, I have

to confess, what I was expecting. Very nice in its way, of course, all

this nature, but I’m a city boy myself, I’m afraid.’ He cleaned his

glasses once again and pushed them back up his nose.

He started backwards at what he saw, and heard a strange little

chuckle from Reg. Just in front of the door back into Reg’s room, the

most extraordinary confrontation was taking place.

A large cross bird was looking at Richard and Richard was looking at

a large cross bird. Richard was looking at the bird as if it was the

most extraordinary thing he had ever seen in his life, and the bird was

looking at Richard as if defying him to find its beak even remotely

funny.

Once it had satisfied itself that Richard did not intend to laugh,

the bird regarded him instead with a sort of grim irritable tolerance

and wondered if he was just going to stand there or actually do

something useful and feed it. It padded a couple of steps back and a

couple of steps to the side and then just a single step forward again,

on great waddling yellow feet. It then looked at him again,

impatiently, and squarked an impatient squark.

The bird then bent forward and scraped its great absurd red beak

across the ground as if to give Richard the idea that this might be a

good area to look for things to give it to eat.

‘It eats the nuts of the calvaria tree,’ called out Reg to Richard.

The big bird looked sharply up at Reg in annoyance, as if to say

that it was perfectly clear to any idiot what it ate. It then looked

back at Richard once more and stuck its head on one side as if it had

suddenly been struck by the thought that perhaps it was an idiot it had

to deal with, and that it might need to reconsider its strategy

accordingly.

‘There are one or two on the ground behind you,’ called Reg softly.

In a trance of astonishment Richard turned awkwardly and saw one or

two large nuts lying on the ground. He bent and picked one up, glancing

up at Reg, who gave him a reassuring nod.

Tentatively Richard held the thing out to the bird, which leant

forward and pecked it sharply from between his fingers. Then, because

Richard’s hand was still stretched out, the bird knocked it irritably

aside with its beak.

Once Richard had withdrawn to a respectful distance, it stretched

its neck up, closed its large yellow eyes and seemed to gargle

gracelessly as it shook the nut down its neck into its maw.

It appeared then to be at least partially satisfied. Whereas before

it had been a cross dodo, it was at least now a cross, fed dodo, which

was probably about as much as it could hope for in this life.

It made a slow, waddling, on-the-spot turn and padded back into the

forest whence it had come, as if defying Richard to find the little

tuft of curly feathers stuck up on top of its backside even remotely

funny.

‘I only come to look,’ said Reg in a small voice, and glancing at

him Dirk was discomfited to see that the old man’s eyes were brimming

with tears which he quickly brushed away. ‘Really, it is not for me to

interfere --’

Richard came scurrying breathlessly up to them.

‘Was that a /dodo/?’ he exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ said Reg, ‘one of only three left at this time. The year is

1676. They will all be dead within four years, and after that no one

will ever see them again. Come,’ he said, ‘let us go.’

Behind the stoutly locked outer door in the corner staircase in the

Second Court of St Cedd’s College, where only a millisecond earlier

there had been a slight flicker as the inner door departed, there was

another slight flicker as the inner door now returned.

Walking through the dark evening towards it the large figure of

Michael Wenton-Weakes looked up at the corner windows. If any slight

flicker had been visible, it would have gone unnoticed in the dim

dancing firelight that spilled from the window.

The figure then looked up into the darkness of the sky, looking for

what it knew to be there though there was not the slightest chance of

seeing it, even on a clear night which this was not. The orbits of

Earth were now so cluttered with pieces of junk and debris that one

more item among them -- even such a large one as this was -- would pass

perpetually unnoticed. Indeed, it had done so, though its influence had

from time to time exerted itself. From time to time. When the waves had

been strong. Not for nearly two hundred years had they been so strong

as now they were again.

And all at last was now in place. The perfect carrier had been

found.

The perfect carrier moved his footsteps onwards through the court.

The Professor himself had seemed the perfect choice at first, but

that attempt had ended in frustration, fury, and then -- inspiration!

Bring a Monk to Earth! They were designed to believe anything, to be

completely malleable. It could be suborned to undertake the task with

the greatest of ease.

Unfortunately, however, this one had proved to be completely

hopeless. Getting it to believe something was very easy. Getting it to

continue to believe the same thing for more than five minutes at a time

had proved to be an even more impossible task than that of getting the

Professor to do what he fundamentally wanted to do but wouldn’t allow

himself.

Then another failure and then, miraculously, the perfect carrier had

come at last.

The perfect carrier had already proved that it would have no

compunction in doing what would have to be done.

Damply, clogged in mist, the moon struggled in a corner of the sky

to rise. At the window, a shadow moved.

[::: CHAPTER 30 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

From the window overlooking Second Court Dirk watched the moon. ‘We

shall not,’ he said, ‘have long to wait.’

‘To wait for what?’ said Richard.

Dirk turned.

‘For the ghost,’ he said, ‘to return to us. Professor --’ he added

to Reg, who was sitting anxiously by the fire, ‘do you have any brandy,

French cigarettes or worry beads in your rooms?’

‘No,’ said Reg.

‘Then I shall have to fret unaided,’ said Dirk and returned to

staring out of the window.

‘I have yet to be convinced,’ said Richard, ‘that there is not some

other explanation than that of... ghosts to --’

‘Just as you required actually to see a time machine in operation

before you could accept it,’ returned Dirk. ‘Richard, I commend you on

your scepticism, but even the sceptical mind must be prepared to accept

the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck,

and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility

that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.’

‘Then what is a ghost?’

‘I think that a ghost...’ said Dirk, ‘is someone who died either

violently or unexpectedly with unfinished business on his, her -- or

its -- hands. Who cannot rest until it has been finished, or put

right.’

He turned to face them again.

‘Which is why,’ he said, ‘a time machine would have such a

fascination for a ghost once it knew of its existence. A time machine

provides the means to put right what, in the ghost’s opinion, went

wrong in the past. To free it.

‘Which is why it will be back. It tried first to take possession of

Reg himself, but he resisted. Then came the incident with the conjuring

trick, the face powder and the horse in the bathroom which I --’ he

paused -- ‘which even I do not understand, though I intend to if it

kills me. And then you, Richard, appear on the scene. The ghost deserts

Reg and concentrates instead on you. Almost immediately there occurs an

odd but significant incident. You do something that you then wish you

hadn’t done.

‘I refer, of course, to the phone call you made to Susan and left on

her answering machine.

‘The ghost seizes its chance and tries to induce you to undo it. To,

as it were, go back into the past and erase that message -- to change

the mistake you had made. Just to see if you would do it. Just to see

if it was in your character.

‘If it had been, you would now be totally under its control. But at

the very last second your nature rebelled and you would not do it. And

so the ghost gives you up as a bad job and deserts you in turn. It must

find someone else.

‘How long has it been doing this? I do not know. Does this now make

sense to you? Do you recognise the truth of what I am saying?’

Richard turned cold.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think you must be absolutely right.’

‘And at what moment, then,’ said Dirk, ‘did the ghost leave you?’

Richard swallowed.

‘When Michael Wenton-Weakes walked out of the room,’ he said.

‘So I wonder,’ said Dirk quietly, ‘what possibilities the ghost saw

in him. I wonder whether this time it found what it wanted. I believe

we shall not have long to wait.’

There was a knock on the door.

When it opened, there stood Michael Wenton-Weakes.

He said simply, ‘Please, I need your help.’

Reg and Richard stared at Dirk, and then at Michael.

‘Do you mind if I put this down somewhere?’ said Michael. ‘It’s

rather heavy. Full of scuba-diving equipment.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Susan, ‘oh well, thanks, Nicola, I’ll try that

fingering. I’m sure he only put the E flat in there just to annoy

people. Yes, I’ve been at it solidly all afternoon. Some of those

semiquaver runs in the second movement are absolute bastards. Well,

yes, it helped take my mind off it all. No, no news. It’s all just

mystifying and absolutely horrible. I don’t want even to -- look, maybe

I’ll give you a call again later and see how you’re feeling. I know,

yes, you never know which is worse, do you, the illness, the

antibiotics, or the doctor’s bedside manner. Look after yourself, or at

least, make sure Simon does. Tell him to bring you gallons of hot

lemon. OK. Well, I’ll talk to you later. Keep warm. Bye now.’

She put the phone down and returned to her cello. She had hardly

started to reconsider the problem of the irritating E flat when the

phone went again. She had simply left it off the hook for the

afternoon, but had forgotten to do so again after making her own call.

With a sigh she propped up the cello, put down the bow, and went to

the phone again.

‘Hello?’ she demanded.

Again, there was nothing, just a distant cry of wind. Irritably, she

slammed the receiver back down once more.

She waited a few seconds for the line to clear, and then was about

to take the phone off the hook once more when she realised that perhaps

Richard might need her.

She hesitated.

She admitted to herself that she hadn’t been using the answering

machine, because she usually just put it on for Gordon’s convenience,

and that was something of which she did not currently wish to be

reminded.

Still, she put the answering machine on, turned the volume right

down, and returned again to the E flat that Mozart had put in only to

annoy cellists.

In the darkness of the offices of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective

Agency, Gordon Way clumsily fumbled the telephone receiver back on to

its rest and sat slumped in the deepest dejection. He didn’t even stop

himself slumping all the way through the seat until he rested lightly

on the floor.

Miss Pearce had fled the office the first time the telephone had

started actually using itself, her patience with all this sort of thing

finally exhausted again, since which time Gordon had had the office to

himself. However, his attempts to contact anybody had failed

completely.

Or rather, his attempts to contact Susan, which was all he cared

about. It was Susan he had been speaking to when he died and he knew he

had somehow to speak to her again. But she had left her phone off the

hook most of the afternoon and even when she had answered she could not

hear him.

He gave up. He roused himself from the floor, stood up, and slipped

out and down into the darkening streets. He drifted aimlessly for a

while, went for a walk on the canal, which was a trick that palled very

quickly, and then wandered back up to the street again.

The houses with light and life streaming from them upset him most

particularly since the welcome they seemed to extend would not be

extended to him. He wondered if anyone would mind if he simply slipped

into their house and watched television for the evening. He wouldn’t be

any trouble.

Or a cinema.

That would be better, he could go to the cinema.

He turned with more positive, if still insubstantial, footsteps into

Noel Road and started to walk up it.

Noel Road, he thought. It rang a vague bell. He had a feeling that

he had recently had some dealings with someone in Noel Road. Who was

it?

His thoughts were interrupted by a terrible scream of horror that

rang through the street. He stood stock still. A few seconds later a

door flew open a few yards from him and a woman ran out of it, wild-

eyed and howling.

[::: CHAPTER 31 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Richard had never liked Michael Wenton-Weakes and he liked him even

less with a ghost in him. He couldn’t say why, he had nothing against

ghosts personally, didn’t think a person should be judged adversely

simply for being dead, but -- he didn’t like it.

Nevertheless, it was hard not to feel a little sorry for him.

Michael sat forlornly on a stool with his elbow resting on the large

table and his head resting on his fingers. He looked ill and haggard.

He looked deeply tired. He looked pathetic. His story had been a

harrowing one, and concluded with his attempts to possess first Reg and

then Richard.

‘You were,’ he concluded, ‘right. Entirely.’

He said this last to Dirk, and Dirk grimaced as if trying not to

beam with triumph too many times in a day.

The voice was Michael’s and yet it was not Michael’s. Whatever

timbre a voice acquires through a billion or so years of dread and

isolation, this voice had acquired it, and it filled those who heard it

with a dizzying chill akin to that which clutches the mind and stomach

when standing on a cliff at night.

He turned his eyes on Reg and on Richard, and the effect of the

eyes, too, was one that provoked pity and terror. Richard had to look

away.

‘I owe you both an apology,’ said the ghost within Michael ‘which I

offer you from the depths of my heart, and only hope that as you come

to understand the desperation of my predicament, and the hope which

this machine offers me, you will understand why I have acted as I have,

and that you will find it within yourselves to forgive me. And to help

me. I beg you.’

‘Give the man a whisky,’ said Dirk gruffly.

‘Haven’t got any whisky,’ said Reg. ‘Er, port? There’s a bottle or

so of Margaux I could open. Very fine one. Should be chambréd for an

hour, but I can do that of course, it’s very easy, I --’

‘Will you help me?’ interrupted the ghost.

Reg bustled to fetch some port and some glasses.

‘Why have you taken over the body of this man?’ said Dirk.

‘I need to have a voice with which to speak and a body with which to

act. No harm will come to him, no harm --’

‘Let me ask the question again. Why have you taken over the body of

this man?’ insisted Dirk.

The ghost made Michael’s body shrug.

‘He was willing. Both of these two gentlemen quite understandably

resisted being... well, hypnotised -- your analogy is fair. This one?

Well, I think his sense of self is at a low ebb, and he has acquiesced.

I am very grateful to him and will not do him any harm.’

‘His sense of self,’ repeated Dirk thoughtfully, ‘is at a low ebb.’

‘I suppose that is probably true,’ said Richard quietly to Dirk. ‘He

seemed very depressed last night. The one thing that was important to

him had been taken away because he, well, he wasn’t really very good at

it. Although he’s proud I expect he was probably quite receptive to the

idea of actually being wanted for something.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Dirk, and said it again. He said it a third time with

feeling. Then he whirled round and barked at the figure on the stool.

‘Michael Wenton-Weakes!’

Michael’s head jolted back and he blinked.

‘Yes?’ he said, in his normal lugubrious voice. His eyes followed

Dirk as he moved.

‘You can hear me,’ said Dirk, ‘and you can answer for yourself?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Michael, ‘most certainly I can.’

‘This... being, this spirit. You know he is in you? You accept his

presence? You are a willing party to what he wishes to do?’

‘That is correct. I was much moved by his account of himself, and am

very willing to help him. In fact I think it is right for me to do so.’

‘All right,’ said Dirk with a snap of his fingers, ‘you can go.’

Michael’s head slumped forward suddenly, and then after a second or

so it slowly rose again, as if being pumped up from inside like a tyre.

The ghost was back in possession.

Dirk took hold of a chair, spun it round and sat astride it facing

the ghost in Michael, peering intently into its eyes.

‘Again,’ he said, ‘tell me again. A quick snap account.’

Michael’s body tensed slightly. It reached out to Dirk’s arm.

‘Don’t -- touch me!’ snapped Dirk. ‘Just tell me the facts. The

first time you try and make me feel sorry for you I’ll poke you in the

eye. Or at least, the one you’ve borrowed. So leave out all the stuff

that sounded like... er --’

‘Coleridge,’ said Richard suddenly, ‘it sounded exactly like

Coleridge. It was like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Well bits of

it were.’

Dirk frowned. ‘Coleridge?’ he said.

‘I tried to tell him my story,’ admitted the ghost, ‘I --’

‘Sorry,’ said Dirk, ‘you’ll have to excuse me -- I’ve never cross-

examined a four-billion-year-old ghost before. Are we talking Samuel

Taylor here? Are you saying you told your story to Samuel Taylor

Coleridge?’

‘I was able to enter his mind at... certain times. When he was in an

impressionable state.’

‘You mean when he was on laudanum?’ said Richard.

‘That is correct. He was more relaxed then.’

‘I’ll say,’ snorted Reg, ‘I sometimes encountered him when he was

quite astoundingly relaxed. Look, I’ll make some coffee.’

He disappeared into the kitchen, where he could be heard laughing to

himself.

‘It’s another world,’ muttered Richard to himself, sitting down and

shaking his head.

‘But unfortunately when he was fully in possession of himself I, so

to speak, was not,’ said the ghost, ‘and so that failed. And what he

wrote was very garbled.’

‘Discuss,’ said Richard, to himself, raising his eyebrows.

‘Professor,’ called out Dirk, ‘this may sound absurd. Did --

Coleridge ever try to... er... use your time machine? Feel free to

discuss the question in any way which appeals to you.’

‘Well, do you know,’ said Reg, looking round the door, ‘he did come

in prying around on one occasion, but I think he was in a great deal

too relaxed a state to do anything.’

‘I see,’ said Dirk. ‘But why,’ he added turning back to the strange

figure of Michael slumped on its stool, ‘why has it taken you so long

to find someone?’

‘For long, long periods I am very weak, almost totally non-existent,

and unable to influence anything at all. And then, of course, before

that time there was no time machine here, and... no hope for me at all

--’

‘Perhaps ghosts exist like wave patterns,’ suggested Richard, ‘like

interference patterns between the actual with the possible. There would

be irregular peaks and troughs, like in a musical waveform.’

The ghost snapped Michael’s eyes around to Richard.

‘You...’ he said, ‘you wrote that article...’

‘Er, yes --’

‘It moved me very greatly,’ said the ghost, with a sudden remorseful

longing in his voice which seemed to catch itself almost as much by

surprise as it did its listeners.

‘Oh. I see,’ said Richard, ‘Well, thank you. You didn’t like it so

much last time you mentioned it. Well, I know that wasn’t you as such -

-’

Richard sat back frowning to himself.

‘So,’ said Dirk, ‘to return to the beginning --’

The ghost gathered Michael’s breath for him and started again. ‘We

were on a ship --’ it said.

‘A spaceship.’

‘Yes. Out from Salaxala, a world in... well, very far from here. A

violent and troubled place. We -- a party of some nine dozen of us --

set out, as people frequently did, to find a new world for ourselves.

All the planets in this system were completely unsuitable for our

purpose, but we stopped on this world to replenish some necessary

mineral supplies.

‘Unfortunately our landing ship was damaged on its way into the

atmosphere. Damaged quite badly, but still quite reparable.

‘I was the engineer on board and it fell to me to supervise the task

of repairing the ship and preparing it to return to our main ship. Now,

in order to understand what happened next you must know something of

the nature of a highly-automated society. There is no task that cannot

be done more easily with the aid of advanced computerisation. And there

were some very specific problems associated with a trip with an aim

such as ours --’

‘Which was?’ said Dirk sharply.

The ghost in Michael blinked as if the answer was obvious.

‘Well, to find a new and better world on which we could all live in

freedom, peace and harmony forever, of course,’ he said.

Dirk raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘You’d thought this all out carefully, I

assume.’

‘We’d had it thought out for us. We had with us some very

specialised devices for helping us to continue to believe in the

purpose of the trip even when things got difficult. They generally

worked very well, but I think we probably came to rely on them too

much.’

‘What on earth were they?’ said Dirk.

‘It’s probably hard for you to understand how reassuring they were.

And that was why I made my fatal mistake. When I wanted to know whether

or not it was safe to take off, I didn’t want to know that it might

/not/ be safe. I just wanted to be reassured that it /was/. So instead

of checking it myself, you see, I sent out one of the Electric Monks.’

[::: CHAPTER 32 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The brass plaque on the red door in Peckender Street glittered as it

reflected the yellow light of a street lamp. It glared for a moment as

it reflected the violent flashing light of a passing police car

sweeping by.

It dimmed slightly as a pale, pale wraith slipped silently through

it. It glimmered as it dimmed, because the wraith was trembling with

such terrible agitation.

In the dark hallway the ghost of Gordon Way paused. He needed

something to lean on for support, and of course there was nothing. He

tried to get a grip on himself, but there was nothing to get a grip on.

He retched at the horror of what he had seen, but there was, of course,

nothing in his stomach. He half stumbled, half swam up the stairs, like

a drowning man trying to grapple for a grip on the water.

He staggered through the wall, through the desk, through the door,

and tried to compose and settle himself in front of the desk in Dirk’s

office.

If anyone had happened into the office a few minutes later -- a

night cleaner perhaps, if Dirk Gently had ever employed one, which he

didn’t on the grounds that they wished to be paid and he did not wish

to pay them, or a burglar, perhaps, if there had been anything in the

office worth burgling, which there wasn’t -- they would have seen the

following sight and been amazed by it.

The receiver of the large red telephone on the desk suddenly rocked

and tumbled off its rest on to the desk top.

A dialling tone started to burr. Then, one by one, seven of the

large, easily pushed buttons depressed themselves, and after the very

long pause which the British telephone system allows you within which

to gather your thoughts and forget who it is you’re phoning, the sound

of a phone ringing at the other end of the line could be heard.

After a couple of rings there was a click, a whirr, and a sound as

of a machine drawing breath. Then a voice started to say, ‘Hello, this

is Susan. I can’t come to the phone right at the moment because I’m

trying to get an E flat right, but if you’d like to leave your name...’

‘So then, on the say so of an -- I can hardly bring myself to utter

the words -- Electric Monk,’ said Dirk in a voice ringing with

derision, ‘you attempt to launch the ship and to your utter

astonishment it explodes. Since when -- ?’

‘Since when,’ said the ghost, abjectly, ‘I have been alone on this

planet. Alone with the knowledge of what I had done to my fellows on

the ship. All, all alone...’

‘Yes, skip that, I said,’ snapped Dirk angrily. ‘What about the main

ship? That presumably went on and continued its search for --’

‘No.’

‘Then what happened to it?’

‘Nothing. It’s still there.’

‘Still /there/?’

Dirk leapt to his feet and whirled off to pace the room, his brow

furiously furrowed.

‘Yes.’ Michael’s head drooped a little, but he looked up pitieously

at Reg and at Richard. ‘All of us were aboard the landing craft. At

first I felt myself to be haunted by the ghosts of the rest, but it was

only in my imagination. For millions of years, and then billions, I

stalked the mud utterly alone. It is impossible for you to conceive of

even the tiniest part of the torment of such eternity. Then,’ he added,

‘just recently life arose on the planet. Life. Vegetation, things in

the sea, then, at last, you. Intelligent life. I turn to you to release

me from the torment I have endured.’

Michael’s head sank abjectly on to his chest for some few seconds.

Then slowly, wobblingly, it rose and stared at them again, with yet

darker fires in his eyes.

‘Take me back,’ he said, ‘I beg you, take me back to the landing

craft. Let me undo what was done. A word from me, and it can be undone,

the repairs properly made, the landing craft can then return to the

main ship, we can be on our way, my torment will be extinguished, and I

will cease to be a burden to you. I beg you.’

There was a short silence while his plea hung in the air.

‘But that can’t work, can it?’ said Richard. ‘If we do that, then

this won’t have happened. Don’t we generate all sorts of paradoxes?’

Reg stirred himself from thought. ‘No worse than many that exist

already,’ he said. ‘If the Universe came to an end every time there was

some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got

beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a

human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt

it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just

the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and

people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as

they require it to make.

‘That isn’t to say that if you get involved in a paradox a few

things won’t strike you as being very odd, but if you’ve got through

life without that already happening to you, then I don’t know which

Universe you’ve been living in, but it isn’t this one.’

‘Well, if that’s the case,’ said Richard, ‘why were you so fierce

about not doing anything to save the dodo?’

Reg sighed. ‘You don’t understand at all. The dodo wouldn’t have

died if I hadn’t worked so hard to save the coelacanth.’

‘The coelacanth? The prehistoric fish? But how could one possibly

affect the other?’

‘Ah. Now there you’re asking. The complexities of cause and effect

defy analysis. Not only is the continuum like a human body, it is also

very like a piece of badly put up wallpaper. Push down a bubble

somewhere, another one pops up somewhere else. There are no more dodos

because of my interference. In the end I imposed the rule on myself

because I simply couldn’t bear it any more. The only thing that really

gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.’ He smiled bleakly,

and looked away.

Then he added, after a long moment’s reflection, ‘No, it can be

done. I’m just cynical because it’s gone wrong so many times. This poor

fellow’s story is a very pathetic one, and it can do no harm to put an

end to his misery. It happened so very, very long ago on a dead planet.

If we do this we will each remember whatever it is that has happened to

us individually. Too bad if the rest of the world doesn’t quite agree.

It will hardly be the first time.’

Michael’s head bowed.

‘You’re very silent, Dirk,’ said Richard.

Dirk glared angrily at him. ‘I want to see this ship,’ he demanded.

In the darkness, the red telephone receiver slipped and slid

fitfully back across the desk. If anybody had been there to see it they

might just have discerned a shape that moved it.

It shone only very faintly, less than would the hands of a luminous

watch. It seemed more as if the darkness around it was just that much

darker and the ghostly shape sat within it like thickened scar tissue

beneath the surface of the night.

Gordon grappled one last time with the recalcitrant receiver. At

length he got a final grip and slipped it up on to the top of the

instrument.

From there it fell back on to its rest and disconnected the call. At

the same moment the ghost of Gordon Way, his last call finally

completed, fell back to his own rest and vanished.

[::: CHAPTER 33 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Swinging slowly round in the shadow of the Earth, just one more

piece of debris among that which floated now forever in high orbit, was

one dark shape that was larger and more regularly formed than the rest.

And far, far older.

For four billion years it had continued to absorb data from the

world below it, scanning, analysing, processing. Occasionally it sent

pieces back if it thought they would help, if it thought they might be

received. But otherwise, it watched, it listened, it recorded. Not the

lapping of a wave nor the beating of a heart escaped its attention.

Otherwise, nothing inside it had moved for four billion years,

except for the air which circulated still, and the motes of dust within

the air that danced and danced and danced and danced... and danced.

It was only a very slight disturbance that occurred now. Quietly,

without fuss, like a dew drop precipitating from the air on to a leaf,

there appeared in a wall which had stood blank and grey for four

billion years, a door. A plain, ordinary white-panelled door with a

small dented brass handle.

This quiet event, too, was recorded and incorporated in the

continual stream of data processing that the ship ceaselessly

performed. Not only the arrival of the door, but the arrival of those

behind the door, the way they looked, the way they moved, the way they

felt about being there. All processed, all recorded, all transformed.

After a moment or two had passed, the door opened.

Within it could be seen a room unlike any on the ship. A room of

wooden floors, of shabby upholstery, a room in which a fire danced. And

as the fire danced, its data danced within the ship’s computers, and

the motes of dust in the air also danced with it.

A figure stood in the doorway -- a large lugubrious figure with a

strange light that danced now in its eyes. It stepped forward across

the threshold into the ship, and its face was suddenly suffused with a

calm for which it had longed but had thought never again to experience.

Following him stepped out a smaller, older man with hair that was

white and wayward. He stopped and blinked with wonder as he passed from

out of the realm of his room and into the realm of the ship. Following

him came a third man, impatient and tense, with a large leather

overcoat that flapped about him. He, too, stopped and was momentarily

bewildered by something he didn’t understand. With a look of deepest

puzzlement on his face he walked forward and looked around at the grey

and dusty walls of the ancient ship.

At last came a fourth man, tall and thin. He stooped as he walked

out of the door, and then instantly stopped as if he had walked into a

wall.

He had walked into a wall, of a kind.

He stood transfixed. If anyone had been looking at his face at that

moment, it would have been abundantly clear to them that the single

most astonishing event of this man’s entire existence was currently

happening to him.

When slowly he began to move it was with a curious gait, as if he

was swimming very slowly. Each tiniest movement of his head seemed to

bring fresh floods of awe and astonishment into his face. Tears welled

in his eyes, and he became breathless with gasping wonder.

Dirk turned to look at him, to hurry him along.

‘What’s the matter?’ he called above the noise.

‘The... music...’ whispered Richard.

The air was full of music. So full it seemed there was room for

nothing else. And each particle of air seemed to have its own music, so

that as Richard moved his head he heard a new and different music,

though the new and different music fitted quite perfectly with the

music that lay beside it in the air.

The modulations from one to another were perfectly accomplished --

astonishing leaps to distant keys made effortlessly in the mere

shifting of the head. New themes, new strands of melody, all perfectly

and astoundingly proportioned, constantly involved themselves into the

continuing web. Huge slow waves of movement, faster dances that

thrilled through them, tiny scintillating scampers that danced on the

dances, long tangled tunes whose ends were so like their beginnings

that they twisted around upon themselves, turned inside out, upside

down, and then rushed off again on the back of yet another dancing

melody in a distant part of the ship.

Richard staggered against the wall.

Dirk hurried to grab him.

‘Come on,’ he said, brusquely, ‘what’s the matter? Can’t you stand

the music? It’s a bit loud, isn’t it? For God’s sake, pull yourself

together. There’s something here I still don’t understand. It’s not

right. Come on --’

He tugged Richard after him, and then had to support him as

Richard’s mind sank further and further under the overwhelming weight

of music. The visions that were woven in his mind by the million

thrilling threads of music as they were pulled through it, were

increasingly a welter of chaos, but the more the chaos burgeoned the

more it fitted with the other chaos, and the next greater chaos, until

it all became a vast exploding ball of harmony expanding in his mind

faster than any mind could deal with.

And then it was all much simpler.

A single tune danced through his mind and all his attention rested

upon it. It was a tune that seethed through the magical flood, shaped

it, formed it, lived through it hugely, lived through it minutely, was

its very essence. It bounced and trilled along, at first a little

tripping tune, then it slowed, then it danced again but with more

difficulty, seemed to founder in eddies of doubt and confusion, and

then suddenly revealed that the eddies were just the first ripples of a

huge new wave of energy surging up joyfully from beneath.

Richard began very, very slowly to faint.

He lay very still.

He felt he was an old sponge steeped in paraffin and left in the sun

to dry.

He felt like the body of an old horse burning hazily in the sun. He

dreamed of oil, thin and fragrant, of dark heaving seas. He was on a

white beach, drunk with fish, stupefied with sand, bleached, drowsing,

pummelled with light, sinking, estimating the density of vapour clouds

in distant nebulae, spinning with dead delight. He was a pump spouting

fresh water in the springtime, gushing into a mound of reeking newmown

grass. Sounds, almost unheard, burned away like distant sleep.

He ran and was falling. The lights of a harbour spun into night. The

sea like a dark spirit slapped infinitesimally at the sand, glimmering,

unconscious. Out where it was deeper and colder he sank easily with the

heavy sea swelling like oil around his ears, and was disturbed only by

a distant burr burr as of the phone ringing.

He knew he had been listening to the music of life itself. The music

of light dancing on water that rippled with the wind and the tides, of

the life that moved through the water, of the life that moved on the

land, warmed by the light.

He continued to lie very still. He continued to be disturbed by a

distant burr burr as of a phone ringing.

Gradually he became aware that the distant burr burr as of a phone

ringing was a phone ringing.

He sat up sharply.

He was lying on a small crumpled bed in a small untidy panelled room

that he knew he recognised but couldn’t place. It was cluttered with

books and shoes. He blinked at it and was blank.

The phone by the bed was ringing. He picked it up.

‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Richard!’ It was Susan’s voice, utterly distraught. He shook his

head and had no recollection of anything useful.

‘Hello?’ he said again.

‘Richard, is that you? /Where are you?/’

‘Er, hold on, I’ll go and look.’

He put the receiver down on the crumpled sheets, where it lay

squawking, climbed shakily off the bed, staggered to the door and

opened it.

Here was a bathroom. He peered at it suspiciously. Again, he

recognised it but felt that there was something missing. Oh yes. There

should be a horse in it. Or at least, there had been a horse in it the

last time he had seen it. He crossed the bathroom floor and went out of

the other door. He found his way shakily down the stairs and into Reg’s

main room.

He was surprised by what he saw when he got there.

[::: CHAPTER 34 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the

floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged

with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom

was a dreary kind of prickle.

Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the

low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a

kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.

It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of

magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at

a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible

than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages

dead.

The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly

along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on,

the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.

But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was

not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering

deep within it.

It was this scene that Richard was surprised to see from a small

white doorway set in the side of the valley wall, a few hundred yards

from the tower.

‘Don’t step out!’ said Dirk, putting up an arm, ‘The atmosphere is

poisonous. I’m not sure what’s in it but it would certainly get your

carpets nice and clean.’

Dirk was standing in the doorway watching the valley with deep

mistrust.

‘Where are we?’ asked Richard.

‘Bermuda,’ said Dirk. ‘It’s a bit complicated.’

‘Thank you,’ said Richard and walked groggily back across the room.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Reg, who was busy fussing round Michael

Wenton-Weakes, making sure that the scuba diving suit he was wearing

fitted snuggly everywhere, that the mask was secure and that the

regulator for the air supply was working properly.

‘Sorry, can I just get past?’ said Richard. ‘Thanks.’

He climbed back up the stairs, went back into Reg’s bedroom, sat

shakily on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone again.

‘Bermuda,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit complicated.’

Downstairs, Reg finished smearing Vaseline on all the joins of the

suit and the few pieces of exposed skin around the mask, and then

announced that all was ready.

Dirk swung himself away from the door and stood aside with the

utmost bad grace.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘be off with you. Good riddance. I wash my

hands of the whole affair. I suppose we will have to wait here for you

to send back the empty, for what it’s worth.’ He stalked round the sofa

with an angry gesture. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of it.

He particularly didn’t like Reg knowing more about space\time than he

did. It made him angry that he didn’t know why he didn’t like it.

‘My dear fellow,’ said Reg in a conciliatory tone, ‘consider what a

very small effort it is for us to help the poor soul. I’m sorry if it

seems to you an anti-climax after all your extraordinary feats of

deduction. I know you feel that a mere errand of mercy seems not enough

for you, but you should be more charitable.’

‘Charitable, ha!’ said Dirk. ‘I pay my taxes, what more do you

want?’

He threw himself on to the sofa, ran his hands through his hair and

sulked.

The possessed figure of Michael shook hands with Reg and said a few

words of thanks. Then he walked stiffly to the door, turned and bowed

to them both.

Dirk flung his head round and glared at him, his eyes flashing

behind their spectacles and his hair flying wildly. The ghost looked at

Dirk, and for a moment shivered inside with apprehension. A

superstitious instinct suddenly made the ghost wave. He waved Michael’s

hand round in a circle, three times, and then said a single word.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

With that he turned again, gripped the sides of the doorway and

stepped resolutely out into the mud, and into the foul and poisonous

wind.

He paused for a moment to be sure that his footing was solid, that

he had his balance, and then without another look back he walked away

from them, out of the reach of the slimy things with legs, towards his

ship.

‘Now, what on earth did /that/ mean?’ said Dirk, irritably mimicking

the odd triple wave.

Richard came thundering down the stairs, threw open the door and

plunged into the room, wild-eyed.

‘Ross has been murdered!’ he shouted.

‘Who the hell’s Ross?’ shouted Dirk back at him.

‘Whatsisname Ross, for God’s sake,’ exclaimed Richard, ‘the new

editor of /Fathom/.’

‘What’s /Fathom/?’ shouted Dirk again.

‘Michael’s bloody magazine, Dirk! Remember? Gordon chucked Michael

off the magazine and gave it to this Ross guy to fun instead. Michael

hated him for that. Well, last night Michael went and bloody murdered

him!’

He paused, panting. ‘At least,’ he said, ‘he was murdered. And

Michael was the only one with any reason to.’

He ran to the door, looked out at the retreating figure disappearing

into the gloom, and spun round again.

‘Is he coming back?’ said Richard.

Dirk leapt to his feet and stood blinking for a moment.

‘That’s it...’ he said, ‘/that’s/ why Michael was the perfect

subject. /That’s/ what I should have been looking for. The thing the

ghost made him do in order to establish his hold, the thing he had to

be fundamentally /willing/ to do, the thing that would match the

ghost’s own purpose. Oh my dear God. He thinks we’ve supplanted them

and that’s what he wants to reverse.

‘He thinks this is their world not ours. /This/ was where they were

going to settle and build their blasted paradise. It matches every step

of the way.

‘You see,’ he said, turning on Reg, ‘what we have done? I would not

be surprised to discover that the accident your poor tormented soul out

there is trying to reverse is the very thing which started life on this

planet!’

He turned his eyes suddenly from Reg, who was white and trembling,

back to Richard.

‘When did you hear this?’ he said, puzzled.

‘Er, just now,’ said Richard, ‘on... on the phone. Upstairs.’

‘What?’

‘It was Susan, I don’t know how -- said she had a message on her

answering machine telling her about it. She said the message... was

from -- she said it was from Gordon, but I think she was hysterical.

Dirk, what the hell is happening? Where are we?’

‘We are four billion years in the past,’ said Reg in a shaking

voice, ‘please don’t ask me why it is that the phone works when we are

anywhere in the Universe other than where it’s actually connected,

that’s a matter you will have to take up with British Telecom, but --’

‘Damn and blast British Telecom,’ shouted Dirk, the words coming

easily from force of habit. He ran to the door and peered again at the

dim shadowy figure trudging through the mud towards the Salaxalan ship,

completely beyond their reach.

‘How long,’ said Dirk, quite calmly, ‘would you guess that it’s

going to take that fat self deluding bastard to reach his ship? Because

that is how long we have.

‘Come. Let us sit down. Let us think. We have two minutes in which

to decide what we are going to do. After that, I very much suspect that

the three of us, and everything we have ever known, including the

coelacanth and the dodo, dear Professor, will cease ever to have

existed.’

He sat heavily on the sofa, then stood up again and removed

Michael’s discarded jacket from under him. As he did so, a book fell

out of the pocket.

[::: CHAPTER 35 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘I think it’s an appalling act of desecration,’ said Richard to Reg,

as they sat hiding behind a hedge.

The night was full of summer smells from the cottage garden, and the

occasional whiff of sea air which came in on the light breezes that

were entertaining themselves on the coast of the Bristol Channel.

There was a bright moon playing over the sea off in the distance,

and by its light it was also possible to see some distance over Exmoor

stretching away to the south of them.

Reg sighed.

‘Yes, maybe,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid he’s right, you know, it must

be done. It was the only sure way. All the instructions were clearly

contained in the piece once you knew what you were looking for. It has

to be suppressed. The ghost will always be around. In fact two of him

now. That is, assuming this works. Poor devil. Still, I suppose he

brought it on himself.’

Richard fretfully pulled up some blades of grass and twisted them

between his fingers.

He held them up to the moonlight, turned them to different angles,

and watched the way light played on them.

‘Such music,’ he said. ‘I’m not religious, but if I were I would say

it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and I ought

to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn’t

create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the

score. And the score was life itself. And it’s all up there.’

He glanced into the sky. Unconsciously he started to quote:

‘Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me

That with music loud and long

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’

‘Hmmm,’ said Reg to himself, ‘I wonder if he arrived early enough.’

‘What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just a thought.’

‘Good God, he can talk, can’t he?’ Richard exclaimed suddenly. ‘He’s

been in there over an hour now. I wonder what’s going on.’

He got up and looked over the hedge at the small farm cottage

basking in the moonlight behind them. About an hour earlier Dirk had

walked boldly up to the front door and rapped on it.

When the door had opened, somewhat reluctantly, and a slightly dazed

face had looked out, Dirk had doffed his absurd hat and said in a loud

voice, ‘Mr Samuel Coleridge?

‘I was just passing by, on my way from Porlock, you understand, and

I was wondering if I might trouble you to vouchsafe me an interview?

It’s just for a little parish broadsheet I edit. Won’t take much of

your time I promise, I know you must be busy, famous poet like you, but

I do so admire your work, and...’

The rest was lost, because by that time Dirk had effected his entry

and closed the door behind him.

‘Would you excuse me a moment?’ said Reg.

‘What? Oh sure,’ said Richard, ‘I’m just going to have a look and

see what’s happening.’

While Reg wandered off behind a tree Richard pushed open the little

gate and was just about to make his way up the path when he heard the

sound of voices approaching the front door from within.

He hurriedly darted back, as the front door started to open.

‘Well, thank you very much indeed, Mr Coleridge,’ said Dirk, as he

emerged, fiddling with his hat and bowing, ‘you have been most kind and

generous with your time, and I do appreciate it very much, as I’m sure

will my readers. I’m sure it will work up into a very nice little

article, a copy of which you may rest assured I will send you for you

to peruse at your leisure. I will most certainly welcome your comments

if you have any, any points of style, you know, hints, tips, things of

that nature. Well, thank you again, so much, for your time, I do hope I

haven’t kept you from anything important --’

The door slammed violently behind him.

Dirk turned with another in a long succession of triumphant beams

and hurried down the path to Richard.

‘Well, that’s put a stop to that,’ he said, patting his hands

together, ‘I think he’d made a start on writing it down, but he won’t

remember another word, that’s for certain. Where’s the egregious

Professor? Ah, there you are. Good heavens, I’d no idea I’d been that

long. A most fascinating and entertaining fellow, our Mr Coleridge, or

at least I’m sure he would have been if I’d given him the chance, but I

was rather too busy being fascinating myself.

‘Oh, but I did do as you asked, Richard, I asked him at the end

about the albatross and he said what albatross? So I said, oh it wasn’t

important, the albatross did not signify. He said what albatross didn’t

signify, and I said never mind the albatross, it didn’t matter, and he

said it did matter -- someone comes to his house in the middle of the

night raving about albatrosses, he wanted to know why. I said blast the

bloody albatross and he said he had a good mind to and he wasn’t

certain that that didn’t give him an idea for a poem he was working on.

Much better, he said, than being hit by an asteroid, which he thought

was stretching credulity a bit. And so I came away.

‘Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do

with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?’

Richard didn’t offer an opinion. He was staring instead with some

puzzlement at Reg.

‘Something troubling you?’ said Reg, taken aback.

‘That’s a good trick,’ said Richard, ‘I could have sworn you didn’t

have a beard before you went behind the tree.’

‘Oh --’ Reg fingered the luxuriant three-inch growth -- ‘yes,’ he

said, ‘just carelessness,’ he said, ‘carelessness.’

‘What have you been up to?’

‘Oh, just a few adjustments. A little surgery, you understand.

Nothing drastic.’

A few minutes later as he ushered them into the extra door that a

nearby cowshed had mysteriously acquired, he looked back up into the

sky behind them, just in time to see a small light flare up and

disappear.

‘Sorry, Richard,’ he muttered, and followed them in.

[::: CHAPTER 36 :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

‘Thank you, no,’ said Richard firmly, ‘much as I would love the

opportunity to buy you a pizza and watch you eat it, Dirk, I want to go

straight home. I have to see Susan. Is that possible, Reg? Just

straight to my flat? I’ll come up to Cambridge next week and collect my

car.’

‘We are already there,’ said Reg, ‘simply step out of the door, and

you are home in your own flat. It is early on Friday evening and the

weekend lies before you.’

‘Thanks. Er, look, Dirk, I’ll see you around, OK? Do I owe you

something? I don’t know.’

Dirk waved the matter aside airily. ‘You will hear from my Miss

Pearce in due course,’ he said.

‘Fine, OK, well I’ll see you when I’ve had some rest. It’s been,

well, unexpected.’

He walked to the door and opened it. Stepping outside he found

himself halfway up his own staircase, in the wall of which the door had

materialised.

He was about to start up the stairs when he turned again as a

thought struck him. He stepped back in, closing the door behind him.

‘Reg, could we make one tiny detour?’ he said. ‘I think it would be

a good move if I took Susan out for a meal tonight, only the place I

have in mind you have to book in advance. Could you manage three weeks

for me?’

‘Nothing could be easier,’ said Reg, and made a subtle adjustment to

the disposition of the beads on the abacus. ‘There,’ he said, ‘We have

travelled backwards in time three weeks. You know where the phone is.’

Richard hurried up the internal staircase to Reg’s bedroom and

phoned L’Esprit d’Escalier. The maître d’ was charmed and delighted to

take his reservation, and looked forward to seeing him in three weeks’

time. Richard went back downstairs shaking his head in wonder.

‘I need a weekend of solid reality,’ he said. ‘Who was that just

going out of the door?’

‘That,’ said Dirk, ‘was your sofa being delivered. The man asked if

we minded him opening the door so they could manoeuvre it round and I

said we would be delighted.’

It was only a few minutes later that Richard found himself hurrying

up the stairs to Susan’s flat. As he arrived at her front door he was

pleased, as he always was, to hear the deep tones of her cello coming

faintly from within. He quietly let himself in and then as he walked to

the door of her music room he suddenly froze in astonishment. The tune

she was playing was one he had heard before. A little tripping tune,

that slowed, then danced again but with more difficulty...

His face was so amazed that she stopped playing the instant she saw

him.

‘What’s wrong?’ she said, alarmed.

‘Where did you get that music?’ said Richard in a whisper.

She shrugged. ‘Well, from the music shop,’ she said, puzzled. She

wasn’t being facetious, she simply didn’t understand the question.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s from a cantata I’m playing in in a couple of weeks,’ she said,

‘Bach, number six.’

‘Who wrote it?’

‘Well, Bach I expect. If you think about it.’

‘Who?’

‘Watch my lips. Bach. B-A-C-H. Johannes Sebastian. Remember?’

‘No, never heard of him. Who is he? Did he write anything else?’

Susan put down her bow, propped up her cello, stood up and came over

to him.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Er, it’s rather hard to tell. What’s...’

He caught sight of a pile of music books sitting in a corner of the

room with the same name on the top one. BACH. He threw himself at the

pile and started to scrabble through it. Book after book -- J. S. BACH.

Cello sonatas. Brandenburg Concertos. A Mass in B Minor.

He looked up at her in blank incomprehension.

‘I’ve never seen any of this before,’ he said.

‘Richard my darling,’ she said, putting her hand to his cheek, ‘what

on earth’s the matter? It’s just Bach sheet music.’

‘But don’t you understand?’ he said, shaking a handful of the stuff.

‘I’ve never, ever seen any of this before!’

‘Well,’ she said with mock gravity, ‘perhaps if you didn’t spend all

your time playing with computer music...’

He looked at her with wild surprise, then slowly he sat back against

the wall and began to laugh hysterically.

On Monday afternoon Richard phoned Reg.

‘Reg!’ he said. ‘Your phone is working. Congratulations.’

‘Oh yes, my dear fellow,’ said Reg, ‘how delightful to hear from

you. Yes. A very capable young man arrived and fixed the phone a little

earlier. I don’t think it will go wrong again now. Good news, don’t you

think?’

‘Very good. You got back safely then.’

‘Oh yes, thank you. Oh, we had high excitement here when we returned

from dropping you off. Remember the horse? Well he turned up again with

his owner. They’d had some unfortunate encounter with the constabulary

and wished to be taken home. Just as well. Dangerous sort of chap to

have on the loose I think. So. How are you then?

‘Reg... The music --’

‘Ah, yes, I thought you’d be pleased. Took a bit of work, I can tell

you. I saved only the tiniest tiniest scrap, of course, but even so I

cheated. It was rather more than one man could actually do in a

lifetime, but I don’t suppose anybody will look at that too seriously.’

‘Reg, can’t we get some more of it?’

‘Well, no. The ship has gone, and besides --’

‘We could go back in time --’

‘No, well, I told you. They’ve fixed the phone so it won’t go wrong

again.’

‘So?’

‘Well, the time machine won’t work now. Burnt out. Dead as a dodo. I

think that’s it I’m afraid. Probably just as well, though, don’t you

think?’

On Monday, Mrs Sauskind phoned Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective

Agency to complain about her bill.

‘I don’t understand what all this is about,’ she said, ‘it’s

complete nonsense. What’s the meaning of it?’

‘My dear Mrs Sauskind,’ he said, ‘I can hardly tell you how much I

have been looking forward to having this exact same conversation with

you yet again. Where shall we begin today? Which particular item is it

that you would like to discuss?’

‘None of them, thank you very much, Mr Gently. I do not know who you

are or why you should think my cat is missing. Dear Roderick passed

away in my arms two years ago and I have not wished to replace him.’

‘Ah, well Mrs Sauskind,’ said Dirk, ‘what you probably fail to

appreciate is that it is as a direct result of my efforts that -- If I

might explain about the interconnectedness of all...’ He stopped. It

was pointless. He slowly dropped the telephone back on its cradle.

‘Miss Pearce!’ he called out, ‘Kindly send out a revised bill would

you to our dear Mrs Sauskind. The new bill reads “To saving human race

from total extinction -- no charge.”’

He put on his hat and left for the day.

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