“One … fifty-nine …”

His original plan had been to close down all external signaling and radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as possible unless you were actually looking at it, but then he’d had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous beam, pencil thin, broadcasting the incoming time signal to the planet of the signal’s origin, which it would not reach for four hundred years, traveling at light-speed, but where it would probably cause something of a stir when it did.

“Beep … beep … beep …”

He sniggered.

He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

“At the third stroke …”

The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit round a little-known and never-visited moon. Almost perfect.

One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation of the launching of the ship’s little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing actions, reactions, tangential forces, all the mathematical poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.

Before he left, he turned out the lights.

As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft zipped out on the beginning of its three-day journey to the orbiting space station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a long pencil-thin beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey still.

“At the third stroke, it will be two … thirteen … and fifty seconds.”

He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he didn’t have room.

“Beep … beep … beep.”

Chapter 11

April showers I hate especially.”

However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn’t seem to be one free in the whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.

“Bloody April showers. Hate, hate, hate.”

Arthur stared, frowning, out the window. A light, sunny spray of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he’d been back now. Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped off television and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.

One effect that still lingered, though, was his joy at being back. Now that the Earth’s atmosphere had closed over his head for good, he thought wrongly, everything within it gave him extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.

“Well, I like them,” he said suddenly, “and for all the obvious reasons. They’re light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good.”

The man snorted derisively.

“That’s what they all say,” he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.

He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening, unprovoked remark had been, “I’m a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic, isn’t it? Bloody ironic.”

If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.

But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now. “They all say that about bloody April showers,” he said, “so bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather.”

He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something extraordinary about the government.

“What I want to know is this,” he said, “if it’s going to be nice weather, why,” he almost spat, “can’t it be nice without bloody raining?”

Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

“Well, there you go,” he said, and instead got up himself. “’Bye.”

He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back through the parking lot, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain in his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that, too.

He climbed into his battered but adored old black VW Rabbit, squealed the tires, and headed out past the islands of gas pumps and along the slip road to the motorway.

He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and forever above his head.

He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him.

He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.

He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.

The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a small umbrella.

His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.

“Fenny!” he shouted.

Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit her instead with the car door as he leaned across and flung it open.

It caught her hand and knocked away the umbrella from it, which then bowled wildly away across the road.

“Shit!” yelled Arthur as helpfully as he could, leaped out of his own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny’s umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.

The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy longlegs, expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a little.

He picked it up.

“Er,” he said. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in offering the thing back to her.

“How did you know my name?” she said.

“Er, well,” he said, “look, I’ll get you another one.”

He looked at her and tailed off.

She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost somber, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.

But when she smiled, as she did now, suddenly, it was as if she had just arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.

She grinned, tossed her bag into the back, and swiveled herself into the front seat.

“Don’t worry about the umbrella,” she said to him as she climbed in, “it was my brother’s and he can’t have liked it or he wouldn’t have given it to me.” She laughed and pulled on her seat belt. “You’re not a friend of my brother’s, are you?”

“No.”

Her voice was the only part of her which didn’t say “Good.”

Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that neither of these functions was vital to his driving or they were in trouble.

So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother’s car, the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his nightmare years in the stars had not been the unbalance of the moment or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.

“So …” he said, hoping to kick the conversation off to an exciting start.

“He was supposed to pick me up — my brother — but phoned to say he couldn’t make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look at a calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided to hitch. So.”