«Oh, OK,» said Mr Elwes, «it's 541 something. Hold on.» He spoke another four digits of a number in his dead, flat voice.

«What is happening here?» asked Kate at last.

«It took us rather a long time to work it out. It was only quite by the remotest chance that someone discovered it. That television was on in the room…»

He pointed to the small portable set off to one side of the bed.

«…tuned to one of those chat programme things, which happened to be going out live. Most extraordinary thing. Mr Elwes was sitting here muttering about how much he hated the BBC — don't know if it was the BBC, perhaps it was one of those other channels they have now — and was expressing an opinion about the host of the programme, to the effect that he considered him to be a rectum of some kind, and saying furthermore that he wished the whole thing was over and that, yes, all right he was coming, and then suddenly what he was saying and what was on the television began in some extraordinary way almost to synchronise.»

«I don't understand what you mean,» said Kate.

«I'd be surprised if you did,» said Standish. «Everything that Elwes said was then said just a moment later on the television by a gentleman by the name of Mr Dustin Hoffman. It seems that Mr Elwes here knows everything that this Mr Hoffman is going to say just a second or so before he says it. It is not, I have to say, something that Mr Hoffman would be very pleased about if he knew. Attempts have been made to alert the gentleman to the problem, but he has proved to be somewhat difficult to reach.»

«Just what the shit is going on here?» asked Mr Elwes placidly.

«Mr Hoffman is, we believe, currently making a film on location somewhere on the west coast of America.»

He looked at his watch.

«I think he has probably just woken up in his hotel and is making his early morning phone calls,» he added.

Kate was gazing with astonishment between Standish and the extraordinary Mr Elwes.

«How long has the poor man been like this?»

«Oh, about five years I think. Started absolutely out of the blue. He was sitting having dinner with his family one day as usual when suddenly he started complaining about his caravan. And then shortly afterwards about how he was being shot. He then spent the entire night talking in his sleep, repeating the same apparently meaningless phrases over and over again and also saying that he didn't think much of the way they were written. It was a very trying time for his family, as you can imagine, living with such a perfectionist actor and not even realising it. It now seems very surprising how long it took them to identify what was occurring. Particularly when he once woke them all up in the early hours of the morning to thank them and the producer and the director for his Oscar.»

Kate, who didn't realise that the day was still only softening her up for what was to come, made the mistake of thinking that it had just reached a climax of shock.

«The poor man,» she said in a hushed voice. «What a pathetic state to be in. He's just living as someone else's shadow.»

«I don't think he's in any pain.»

Mr Elwes appeared to be quietly locked in a bitter argument which seemed to touch on the definitions of the words «points» «gross», «profits» and «limo».

«But the implications of this are extraordinary aren't they?» said Kate. «He's actually saying these things moments before Dustin Hoffman?»

«Well, it's all conjecture of course. We've only got a few clear instances of absolute correlation and we just haven't got the opportunity to do more thorough research. One has to recognise that those few instances of direct correlation were not rigorously documented and could more simply be explained as coincidence. The rest could be merely the product of an elaborate fantasy.»

«But if you put this case next to that of the girl we just saw…»

«Ah, well we can't do that you see. We have to judge each case on its own merits.»

«But they're both in the same world…»

«Yes, but there are separate issues. Obviously, if Mr Elwes here could demonstrate significant precognition of, for instance, the head of the Soviet Union or, better still, the President of the United States, then clearly there would be important defence issues involved and one might be prepared to stretch a point on the question of what is and what is not coincidence and fantasy, but for a mere screen actor — that is, a screen actor with no apparent designs on political office — I think that, no, we have to stick to the principles of rigorous science.»

«So,» he added, turning to leave, and drawing Kate with him, «I think that in the cases of both Mr Elwes and, er, what-was-her-name, the charming girl in the wheelchair, it may be that we are not able to be of much more help to them, and we may need the space and facilities for more deserving cases.»

Kate could think of nothing to say to this and followed, seething dumbly.

«Ah, now here we have an altogether much more interesting and promising case,» said Standish, forging on ahead through the next set of double doors.

Kate was trying to keep her reactions under control, but nevertheless even someone as glassy and Martian as Mr Standish could not help but detect that his audience was not absolutely with him. A little extra brusqueness and impatience crept into his demeanour, to join forces with the large quantities of brusqueness and impatience which were already there.

They paced down the corridor for a few seconds in silence. Kate was looking for other ways of casually introducing the subject of recent admissions, but was forced to concede to herself that you cannot attempt to introduce the same subject three times in a row without beginning to lose that vital quality of casualness. She glanced as surreptitiously as she could at each door they passed, but most were firmly closed, and the ones that were not revealed nothing of interest.

She glanced out of a window as they walked past it and noticed a van turning into a roar courtyard. It caught her attention in the brief instant that it was within her view because it very clearly wasn't a baker's van or a laundry van. Baker's vans and laundry vans advertise their business and have words like «Bakery» and «Laundry» painted on them, whereas this van was completely blank. It had absolutely nothing to say to anyone and it said it loudly and distinctly.

It was a large, heavy, serious-looking van that was almost on the verge of being an actual lorry, and it was painted in a uniform dark metallic grey. It reminded Kate of the huge gun-metal-grey freight lorries which thunder through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia on their way from Albania with nothing but the word «Albania» stencilled on their sides. She remembered wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found that their only export was electricity — which, if she remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to be moved around in lorries.