He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city, and once clear of them, hurtled through the black-and-red pall of smoke that hung permanently above it.

Ten minutes later, with all the copter’s sirens blaring and its rapid-fire cannon blasting at random into the clouds, Ford Prefect brought it careening down among the gantries and landing lights at Han Dold City spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic, startled, and very noisy gnat.

Since he hadn’t damaged it too much he was able to trade it in for a first-class ticket on the next ship leaving the system, and he settled into one of its huge, voluptuous, body-hugging seats.

This was going to be fun, he thought to himself, as the ship blinked silently across the insane distances of deep space and the cabin service got into its full extravagant swing.

“Yes, please,” he said to the cabin attendants whenever they glided up to offer him anything at all.

He smiled with a curious kind of manic joy as he flipped again through the mysteriously reinstated entry on the planet Earth. He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now be able to attend to, and he was terribly pleased that life had suddenly furnished him with a serious goal to achieve.

It suddenly occurred to him to wonder where Arthur Dent was, and if he knew.

Arthur Dent was one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven light-years away in a Saab and anxious.

Behind him in the back seat was a girl who had made him crack his head on the door as he had climbed in. He didn’t know if it was just because she was the first female of his own species that he had laid eyes on in years, or what it was, but he felt stupefied with … with … This is absurd, he told himself. Calm down, he told himself. You are not, he continued to himself in the firmest internal voice he could muster, in a fit and rational state. You have just hitchhiked over a hundred thousand light-years across the Galaxy, you are very tired, a little confused, and extremely vulnerable. Relax, don’t panic, concentrate on breathing deeply.

He twisted round in his seat.

“Are you sure she’s all right?” he said again.

Beyond the fact that she was, to him, heart-thumpingly beautiful, he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was, the exact shading of her hair. And he couldn’t ask her anything about herself because, sadly, she was completely unconscious.

“She’s just drugged,” said her brother, shrugging, not moving his eyes from the road ahead.

“And that’s all right, is it?” said Arthur, in alarm.

“Suits me,” he said.

“Ah,” said Arthur. “Er,” he added after a moment’s thought.

The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.

After an initial flurry of opening helios, he and Russell — the wonderful girl’s brother’s name was Russell, a name which to Arthur’s mind always suggested burly men with blond mustaches and blow-dried hair who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirt fronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on billiards matches — had quickly discovered they didn’t like each other at all.

Russell was a burly man. He had a blond mustache. His hair was fine and blow-dried. To be fair to him — though Arthur didn’t see any necessity for this beyond the sheer mental exercise of it — he, Arthur, was himself looking pretty grim. A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light-years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

“She’s not a junkie,” said Russell suddenly, as if he clearly thought that someone else in the car might be, “she’s under sedation.”

“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur, twisting round to look at her again. She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across her face, obscuring it.

“What’s the matter with her, is she ill?”

“No,” said Russell, “merely barking mad.”

“What?” said Arthur, horrified.

“Loopy, completely bananas. I’m taking her back to the hospital and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog.”

“A hedgehog?”

Russell hooted his horn fiercely at a car that came round the corner toward them halfway across on to their side of the road, making them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.

“Well, maybe not a hedgehog,” he said after he’d settled down again, “though it would probably be simpler to deal with if she did. If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel better. At least medical science could deal with it, that’s the point. Seems that’s not good enough for Fenny, though.”

“Fenny …?”

“You know what I got her for Christmas?”

“Well, no.”

“Black’s Medical Dictionary.”

“Nice present.”

“I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical order.”

“You say her name is Fenny?”

“Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like that at school, you know.”

“Was she?”

“She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of.”

“I can see how that would be irritating,” said Arthur doubtfully. He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.

“Not that I wasn’t sympathetic,” continued Russell, “but it did get a bit irritating. She was limping for months.”

He slowed down.

“This is your exit, isn’t it?”

“Ah no,” said Arthur, “five miles farther on. If that’s all right.”

“Okay,” said Russell, after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.

It was in fact Arthur’s exit, but he couldn’t leave without finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could take either of the next two exits.

They led back to the village that had been his home, though what he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise in him to the shudders that only very very normal things can create, when seen where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar light.

By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.

Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it no more than just a parking offense.

“Delusions,” said Russell.

“What?” said Arthur, startled out of his train of thought.

“She says she suffers from strange delusions that she’s living in the real world. It’s no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that’s why the delusions are so strange. Don’t know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off for a beer is my answer. I mean, you can only muck about so much, can’t you?”

Arthur frowned, not for the first time. “Well …”

“And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going on about strange jumps in her brain-wave patterns.”