Tricia looked around in surprise. There was a man standing there in a chauffeur’s hat.

“Yes,” she said, instantly pulling herself back together again.

“Lady, I been looking for you for about an hour. Hotel said they didn’t have anybody of that name, but I checked back with Mr. Martin’s office and they said that this was definitely where you were staying. So I ask again, they still say they never heard of you, so I get them to page you anyway and they can’t find you. In the end I get the office to fax a picture of you through to the car and have a look myself.”

He looked at his watch.

“May be a bit late now, but do you want to go anyway?”

Tricia was stunned.

“Mr. Martin? You mean Andy Martin at NBS?”

“That’s correct, lady. Screen test for ‘U.S./A.M.’ ”

Tricia shot up out of her seat. She couldn’t even bear to think of all the messages she’d heard for Mr. MacManus and Mr. Miller.

“Only we have to hurry,” said the chauffeur. “As I heard it Mr. Martin thinks it might be worth trying a British accent. His boss at the network is dead against the idea. That’s Mr. Zwingler, and I happen to know he’s flying out to the coast this evening because I’m the one has to pick him up and take him to the airport.”

“Okay,” said Tricia, “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

“Okay, lady. It’s the big limo out the front.”

Tricia turned back to Gail. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Go! Go!” said Gail. “And good luck. I’ve enjoyed meeting you.”

Tricia made to reach for her bag for some cash.

“Damn,” she said. She’d left it upstairs.

“Drinks are on me,” insisted Gail. “Really. It’s been very interesting.”

Tricia sighed.

“Look, I’m really sorry about this morning and …”

“Don’t say another word. I’m fine. It’s only astrology. It’s harmless. It’s not the end of the world.”

“Thanks.” On an impulse, Tricia gave her a hug.

“You got everything?” said the chauffeur. “You don’t want to pick up your bag or anything?”

“If there’s one thing that life’s taught me,” said Tricia, “it’s never go back for your bag.”

• • •

Just a little over an hour later, Tricia sat on one of the pair of beds in her hotel room. For a few minutes she didn’t move. She just stared at her bag, which was sitting innocently on top of the other bed.

In her hand was a note from Gail Andrews, saying, “Don’t be too disappointed. Do ring if you want to talk about it. If I were you I’d stay in at home tomorrow night. Get some rest. But don’t mind me, and don’t worry. It’s only astrology. It’s not the end of the world. Gail.”

The chauffeur had been dead right. In fact the chauffeur seemed to know more about what was going on inside NBS than any other single person she had encountered in the organization. Martin had been keen, Zwingler had not. She had had her one shot at proving Martin right and she had blown it.

Oh well. Oh well, oh well, oh well.

Time to go home. Time to phone the airline and see if she could still get the red-eye back to Heathrow tonight. She reached for the big phone directory.

Oh. First things first.

She put down the directory again, picked up her handbag and took it through to the bathroom. She put it down and took out the small plastic case that held her contact lenses, without which she had been unable to properly read either the script or the autocue.

As she dabbed each tiny plastic cup into her eyes, she reflected that if there was one thing life had taught her, it was that there are some times when you do not go back for your bag and other times when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the two types of occasions.

Chapter 3

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well established that all known gods came into existence a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.

One encouraging thing the Guide does have to say on the subject of parallel universes is that you don’t stand the remotest chance of understanding it. You can therefore say “What?” and “Eh?” and even go cross-eyed and start to blither if you like without any fear of making a fool of yourself.

The first thing to realize about parallel universes, the Guide says, is that they are not parallel.

It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either, but it is easiest if you don’t try to realize that until a little later, after you’ve realized that everything you’ve realized up to that moment is not true.

The reason they are not universes is that any given universe is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash doesn’t actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.

The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the sea is not parallel. It doesn’t mean anything. You can slice the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will generally come up with something that someone will call home.

Please feel free to blither now.

• • •

The Earth with which we are here concerned, because of its particular orientation in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash, was hit by a neutrino that other Earths were not.

A neutrino is not a big thing to be hit by.

In fact it’s hard to think of anything much smaller by which one could reasonably hope to be hit. And it’s not as if being hit by neutrinos was in itself a particularly unusual event for something the size of the Earth. Far from it. It would be an unusual nanosecond in which the Earth was not hit by several billion passing neutrinos.

It all depends on what you mean by “hit,” of course, seeing as matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, an egg sandwich.

Anyway, this neutrino hit something. Nothing terribly important in the scale of things, you might say. But the problem with saying something like that is that you would be talking cross-eyed badger spit. Once something actually happens somewhere in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows where it will all end up — where “Kevin” is any random entity that doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin’.

This neutrino struck an atom.

The atom was part of a molecule. The molecule was part of a nucleic acid. The nucleic acid was part of a gene. The gene was part of a genetic recipe for growing … and so on. The upshot was that a plant ended up growing an extra leaf. In Essex. Or what would, after a lot of palaver and local difficulties of a geological nature, become Essex.

The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed, around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world’s dominant type of clover. The precise causal connection between this tiny biological happenstance and a few other minor variations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash — such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavored ice cream and the fact that the Earth on which all this occurred did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132 on the research project priority list at what was once the history department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one currently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any sense of urgency about the problem.