The Salmon of Doubt

It was about 1.2 million years since the human race had suddenly gone extinct, and the world had really perked up a lot in that time. In geological terms it was but a fleeting moment, of course, but the forces of evolution had suddenly had tons of space to play in, huge gaps to fill, and everything had started to thrive like crazy. Everybody used to talk about saving the world—well, Dave had done it. Now it was great.

The whole place was really neat now. DaveWorld. Yay. He was riding the air pretty well now, not fighting it, but flowing along it. He was beginning to get a sense, though, that just dropping himself in his own swimming pool might be a little tougher than he had expected. But that was how he liked things to be—a little tougher than he expected.

Maybe it was even going to be a lot tougher, he began to realise. It was one thing to be staying comfortably aloft, following the currents, riding gradually down, it was quite another thing to steer in any meaningful kind of way. When he tried to turn too sharply, the delicate structure around him would start to rattle and bang in quite an alarming way.

Chapter 2

“I DON’T DO CATS,” said Dirk Gently.

His tone was sharp. He felt he had come up in the world. He had no evidence to support this view, he just felt it was about time. He also had indigestion, but that had nothing whatever to do with it.

“Your advertisement says ...”

“The advertisement is out of date,” snapped Dirk. “I don’t do cats.” He waved her away and pretended to be busy with some paperwork. “Then what do you do?” she persisted.

Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women.

They upset him, with their grace, their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to out to dinner with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the room, that she wouldn’t out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemtive action. If she was not going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to dinner with him on his terms.

“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.

She raised her other eyebrow as well.

“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?” “Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow.

What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing.

Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.

He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.

He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I ...” “Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”

“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.

“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually survive a good fling at the wall.”

“What?” said Dirk.

“I mean that however respectable your business may be, it was actually respected you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”

“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am not going to look for your lost cat

“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly ...”

“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”