The Salmon of Doubt

everything that we know of physics and biology, and I ... turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”

”

“Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”

“Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”

“Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?” “No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper all the time. I can see you’re probably in the mood to construct some massive space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”

“You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”

“Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”

“I don’t wear contact lenses.”

“Maybe it’s time you did.”

Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that it was working. Kate ... ?”

“Yes, Dirk?”

“You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I ask is that when I phoned myself up ...”

“Yes?”

“I answered.”

“Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”

“I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.

“In which case you need something to do.”

“Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”

Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.” “Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again.

“Now that is an interesting one.”

“JOSH,” said a voice in a kind-of Swedish-Irish accent.

Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small freezer cabinet, which mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.

“Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.

“Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.

“Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely not.

More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what was going to happen.

Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA

scientists said that it would burn up in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do whatever the Americans said it would do.

“Julio,” said the voice. No response.

Dirk missed the next thing the radio said because of the noise of his front wall flapping. His front wall was made of large, thick sheets of polythene these days, because of an incident a few weeks earlier when, in a radical departure from the sort of behaviour that Dirk’s neighbours liked to see, a Tornado jet fighter had exploded out of the front of Dirk’s house and then plunged screaming into Finsbury.

There was, of course, a perfectly logical explanation for this, and Dirk was tired of giving it. The reason that Dirk had had a Tornado jet fighter in his hallway was that he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. Of course he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. As far as he was concerned, it was merely a large and bad-tempered eagle that he had trapped in his hallway the same way anybody would to stop it dive-bombing him the whole time. That a large Tornado jet fighter had, for a brief while, taken on the shape of an eagle was on account of an unfortunate airborne encounter with the Thunder God, Thor, of legend, and ...