“Jumps?”

“This,” said Fenny.

Arthur whirled round in his seat and stared into her suddenly open but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn’t in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked once, and then she was sleeping peacefully.

“What did she say?” he asked anxiously.

“She said ‘this.’ ”

“This what?”

“This what? How the heck should I know? This hedgehog, that chimney pot, the other pair of Don Alfonso’s tweezers. She’s barking mad, I thought I’d mentioned that.”

“You don’t seem to care very much.” Arthur tried to say it as matter-of-factly as possible but it didn’t seem to work.

“Look, buster …”

“Okay, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean it to sound like that,” said Arthur. “I know you care a lot, obviously,” he added, lying. “I know that you have to deal with it somehow. You’ll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.”

He stared furiously out the window.

He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in his head on this night as he returned to the home that he thought had vanished into oblivion forever, the one that was compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he knew nothing other than that she had said “this” to him, and that he wouldn’t wish, her brother on a Vogon.

“So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned,” he went on to say as quickly as he could.

“Look, this is my sister, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about—”

“Okay, I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better let me out. This is …”

At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them, through a sieve.

Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as the sky blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating to pass a lorry marked “McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage.” The tension eased as the rain subsided.

“It started out with all that business of the CIA agent they found in the reservoir, when everybody had all the hallucinations and everything, you remember?”

Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitchhiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

“No,” he said.

“That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a café somewhere. Rickmansworth. Don’t know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich.”

Arthur winced.

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said a little stiffly.

Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

“So what,” said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together, “was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?”

“Bobbing up and down, of course. He was dead.”

“But what-”

“Come on you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations. Everyone said it was the CIA experimenting with drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they’d been invaded.”

“What hallucinations were those exactly …?” said Arthur in a rather quiet voice.

“What do you mean, what hallucinations? I’m talking about all that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we’re going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the effect wore off. The CIA denied it, which meant it must be true.”

Arthur’s head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something to steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little opening and closing movements as if it was on his mind to say something, but nothing emerged.

“Anyway,” continued Russell, “whatever drug it was it didn’t seem to wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana, so … “

He shrugged.

“The Vogon …” squeaked Arthur, “the yellow ships … vanished?”

“Well, of course they did, they were hallucinations,” said Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. “You trying to say you don’t remember any of this? Where have you been, for heaven’s sake?”

This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that he half leaped out of his seat with shock.

“Christ!!!” yelled Russell, fighting to control the car, which was suddenly trying to skid. He pulled it out of the path of an oncoming lorry and swerved up onto a grass bank. As the car lurched to a halt, the girl in the back was thrown against Russell’s seat and collapsed awkwardly.

Arthur twisted round in horror.

“Is she all right?” he blurted out.

Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair. He tugged at his blond mustache. He turned to Arthur.

“Would you please,” he said, “let go of the handbrake?”

Chapter 6

From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a mile farther to the exit, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a farther three miles of winding country lane.

The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.

He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some salient fact which would fall into place and make sense of an otherwise utterly bewildering Universe, but since the salient fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up to the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk and maybe even some good painful blisters would help to reassure him of at least his own existence, if not his sanity.

It was ten-thirty when he arrived, a fact he discovered from the steamed and greasy window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which there had hung for many years a battered old Guinness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.

This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished, no, damn it, had been demolished because if they hadn’t been then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how had he got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug-induced hallucinations, and yet if it had been demolished, what was he currently standing on …?

He jammed the brake on this line of thought because it wasn’t going to get him any further than it had the last twenty times he’d been over it.

He started again.

This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunchtime during which whatever it was had happened that he was going to sort out later had happened, and …

It still didn’t make sense.

He started again.

This was the pub in which …

This was a pub.

Pubs served drinks and he could certainly do with one.

Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last arrived at a conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with even if it wasn’t the one he had set out to achieve, he strode toward the door.

And stopped.

A small black wirehaired terrior ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur clearly, began to snarl.