The Salmon of Doubt

He had collected a representative sample of the newspapers of the last few weeks from under the dog, under the sofa, under his bed, scattered around the bathroom, and, crucially, had managed to secure two damp but vital copies of the Financial Times from an old tramp in return for a blanket, some cider, and a copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. An odd request, he thought, as he walked back from the tiny scrap of park, but probably no odder than his. He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

Using the figures from the papers, he was able to construct a map of the movements of each of the world’s major currencies over the last few weeks and see how they compared with the fluctuations in the amounts that had been paid into his account every week. The answer sprang into focus immediately. U.S.

dollars. Five thousand of them, to be precise. If $5,000 had been transferred from the U.S. to the U.K.

every week, then it would have arrived as more or less exactly the amounts that had been showing up in his account. Eureka. Time for a celebratory fridge raid.

Dirk hunkered down in front of the TV with three slices of cold pizza and a can of beer, put on the radio as well, and also a ZZ Top CD. He needed to think. Someone was paying him $5,000 a week, and had been doing so for seven weeks. This was astounding news. He ruminated on his pizza. Not only that, but he was being paid by someone in America. He took another bite, rich in cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. He hadn’t spent much time in America and didn’t know anyone there—or indeed anywhere else on the Earth’s crust—who would be wantonly shoveling unsolicited bucks at him like this. Another thought struck him, but this time it wasn’t about the money. A ZZ Top song about TV

dinners made him think for a moment about his pizza, and he looked at it with sudden puzzlement.

Cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. No wonder he’d had indigestion today. The other three slices were what he’d had for breakfast. It was a combination to which he, probably uniquely in all the world, was addicted, and which he had some months ago forsworn because his gut couldn’t cope with it anymore. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d blundered across it in the fridge this morning because it was exactly the sort of thing a person liked to find in a fridge. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask who had put it there. But it hadn’t been him.

He disposed of the half-masticated gungey bits and then examined the two remaining slices. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them at all. It was exactly the pizza he regularly used to eat until he made himself give it up. He phoned his local pizza restaurant and asked them if anybody else had been in to buy a pizza with that particular combination of toppings. “Ah, you’re the bloke who has the gastricciana, are you?” said the pizza chef.

“The what?”

“It’s what we call it. No, mate, nobody else has ever bought that wonderful combination, believe me.”

Dirk felt somewhat dissatisfied with aspects of this conversation, but he let it pass. He put the phone down thoughtfully. He felt that something very strange was going on and he didn’t know what.

“No one knows anything.”

The words caught his attention and he glanced up at the TV. A breezy Californian in the sort of Hawaiian shirt that could serve, if needed, as a distress signal was standing in the bright sunshine and answering questions, Dirk quickly worked out, about the approaching meteor. He called the meteor Toodle Pip. “Toodle Pip?” asked his interviewer, the BBC’s California correspondent. “Yeah. We call it Toodle Pip because anything it hits, you could pretty much say good-bye to.”

The Californian grinned.

“So you’re saying it is going to hit?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.” “Well, the scientists at NASA are saying ...”

“NASA,” said the Californian genially, “is talking shit. They don’t know. If we don’t know, they sure as hell don’t know. Here at Similarity Engines we have the most massively powerful parallel computers on Earth, so when I say we don’t know, I know what I’m talking about. We know that we don’t know, and we know why we don’t know. NASA doesn’t even know that.”

The next item on the news was also from California, and was about a lobby group called Green Shoots, which was attracting a lot of support. Its view, and it was one that spoke to the battered psyches of many Americans, was that the world was much better able to take care of itself than we were, so there was no point in getting all worked up about it or trying to moderate our natural behaviour. “Don’t worry,” said their slogan, quoting the title of a popular song. “Be happy.”