“She’s not a junkie,” said Russell suddenly, as if he clearly thought that someone else in the car might be. “She’s under sedation.”

“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur, twisting round to look at her again. She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across her face, obscuring it.

“What’s the matter with her, is she ill?”

“No,” said Russell, “merely barking mad.”

“What?” said Arthur, horrified.

“Loopy, completely bananas. I’m taking her back to the hospital and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog.”

“A hedgehog?”

Russell hooted his horn fiercely at the car that came round the corner towards them half-way on to their side of the road, making them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.

“Well, maybe not a hedgehog,” he said after he’d settled down again. “Though it would probably be simpler to deal with if she did. If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel better. At least medical science could deal with it, that’s the point. Seems that’s no good enough for Fenny, though.”

“Fenny…?”

“You know what I got her for Christmas?”

“Well, no.”

“Black’s Medical Dictionary.”

“Nice present.”

“I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical order.”

“You say her name is Fenny?”

“Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like that at school, you know.”

“Was she?”

“She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of.”

“I can see how that would be irritating,” said Arthur doubtfully. He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.

“Not that I wasn’t sympathetic,” continued Russell, “but it did get a bit irritating. She was limping for months.”

He slowed down.

“This is your turning isn’t it?”

“Ah, no,” said Arthur, “five miles further on. If that’s all right.”

“OK,” said Russell after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.

It was in fact Arthur’s turning, but he couldn’t leave without finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could take either of the next two turnings.

They led back to the village that had been his home, though what he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise to the shudders that only very normal things can create, when seen where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar light.

By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.

Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it no more than a parking offence.

“Delusions,” said Russell.

“What?” said Arthur, started out of his train of thought.

“She says she suffers from strange delusions that she’s living in the real world. It’s no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that’s why the delusions are so strange. Don’t know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off for a beer is my answer. I mean you can only muck about so much can’t you?”

Arthur frowned, not for the first time.

“Well…”

“And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going on about strange jumps in her brainwave patterns.”

“Jumps?”

“This,” said Fenny.

Arthur whirled round in his seat and stared into her suddenly open but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn’t in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked once, and then she was sleeping peacefully.

“What did she say?” he asked anxiously.

“She said ‘this’.”

“This what?”

“This what? How the heck should I know? This hedgehog, that chimney pot, the other pair of Don Alfonso’s tweezers. She’s barking mad, I thought I’d mentioned that.”

“You don’t seem to care very much.” Arthur tried to say it as matter-of-factly as possible but it didn’t seem to work.

“Look, buster…”

“OK, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean it to sound like that,” said Arthur. “I know you care a lot, obviously,” he added, lying. “I know that you have to deal with it somehow. You’ll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.”

He stared furiously out of the window.

He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in his head on this night as he returned to the home that he had thought had vanished into oblivion for ever, the one that was compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he knew nothing other than that she had said “this” to him, and that he wouldn’t wish her brother on a Vogon.

“So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned?” he went on to say as quickly as he could.

“Look, this is my sister, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about…”

“OK, I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better let me out. This is…”

At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them through a sieve.

Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as the sky blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating to pass a lorry marked “McKeena’s All-Weather Haulage”. The tension eased as the rain subsided.

“It started with all that business of the CIA agent they found in the reservoir, when everybody had all the hallucinations and everything, you remember?”

Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitch-hiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

“No,” he said.

“That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a café somewhere. Rickmansworth. Don’t know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich.”

Arthur winced. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said a little stiffly.

Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

“So what,” said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together, “was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?”

“Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead.”

“But what…”

“Come on, you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations. Everyone said it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they’d been invaded.”

“What hallucinations were those exactly…?” said Arthur in a rather quiet voice.