Wouldn’t.

Couldn’t bear it.

In fact he had gone some of the way back to it the very next day, while he was still numb and spinning with shock. He had a broken leg, a couple of broken ribs, some bad burns and was not really thinking coherently but had insisted that the villagers take him, which, uneasily, they had. He had not managed to get right to the actual spot where the ground had bubbled and melted, however, and had at last hobbled away from the horror forever.

Soon, word had got around that the whole area was haunted and no one had ventured back there ever since. The land was full of beautiful, verdant and delightful valleys — no point in going to a highly worrying one. Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

Random cradled the watch in her hands, slowly turning it to let the long light of the evening sun shine warmly in the scratches and scuffs of the thick glass. It fascinated her watching the spidery little second hand ticking its way around. Every time it completed a full circle, the longer of the two main hands had moved on exactly to the next of the sixty small divisions around the dial. And when the long hand had made its own full circle, the smaller hand had moved on to the next of the main digits.

“You’ve been watching it for over an hour,” said Arthur, quietly.

“I know,” she said. “An hour is when the big hand has gone all the way around, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I’ve been watching it for an hour and seventeen … minutes.”

She smiled with a deep and mysterious pleasure and moved very slightly so that she was resting just a little against his arm. Arthur felt that a small sigh escaped from him that had been pent up inside his chest for weeks. He wanted to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders, but felt it was too early yet and that she would shy away from him. But something was working. Something was easing inside her. The watch meant something to her that nothing in her life had so far managed to do. Arthur was not sure that he had really understood what it was yet, but he was profoundly pleased and relieved that something had reached her.

“Explain to me again,” said Random.

“There’s nothing really to it,” said Arthur. “Clockwork was something that developed over hundreds of years—”

“Earth years.”

“Yes. It became finer and finer and more and more intricate. It was highly skilled and delicate work. It had to be made very small, and it had to carry on working accurately however much you waved it around or dropped it.”

“But only on one planet?”

“Well, that was where it was made, you see. It was never expected to go anywhere else and deal with different suns and moons and magnetic fields and things. I mean the thing still goes perfectly well, but it doesn’t really mean much this far from Switzerland.”

“From where?”

“Switzerland. That’s where these were made. Small hilly country. Tiresomely neat. The people who made them didn’t really know there were other worlds.”

“Quite a big thing not to know.”

“Well, yes.”

“So where did they come from?”

“They, that is we … we just sort of grew there. We evolved on the Earth. From, I don’t know, some kind of sludge or something.”

“Like this watch.”

“Um. I don’t think the watch grew out of sludge.”

“You don’t understand!”

Random suddenly leapt to her feet, shouting.

“You don’t understand! You don’t understand me, you don’t understand anything! I hate you for being so stupid!”

She started to run hectically down the hill, still clutching the watch and shouting that she hated him.

Arthur jumped up, startled and at a loss. He started to run after her through the stringy and clumpy grass. It was hard and painful for him. When he had broken his leg in the crash, it had not been a clean break, and it had not healed cleanly. He was stumbling and wincing as he ran.

Suddenly she turned and faced him, her face dark with anger.

She brandished the watch at him. “You don’t understand that there’s somewhere this belongs? Somewhere it works? Somewhere that it fits?”

She turned and ran again. She was fit and fleet-footed and Arthur could not remotely keep up with her.

It wasn’t that he had not expected being a father to be this difficult, it was that he hadn’t expected to be a father at all, particularly not suddenly and unexpectedly on an alien planet.

Random turned to shout at him again. For some reason he stopped each time she did.

“Who do you think I am?” she demanded angrily. “Your upgrade? Who do you think Mum thought I was? Some sort of ticket to the life she didn’t have?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Arthur, panting and hurting.

“You don’t know what anybody means by anything!”

“What do you mean?” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

“Tell me! Please tell me! What does she mean by saying ‘the life she didn’t have’?”

“She wished she’d stayed on Earth! She wished she hadn’t gone off with that stupid brain-dead fruit gum, Zaphod! She thinks she would have had a different life!”

“But,” said Arthur, “she would have been killed! She would have been killed when the world was destroyed!”

“That’s a different life, isn’t it?”

“That’s …”

“She wouldn’t have had to have me! She hates me!”

“You can’t mean that! How could anyone possibly, er, I mean …”

“She had me because I was meant to make things fit for her. That was my job. But I fitted even worse than she did! So she just shut me off and carried on with her stupid life.”

“What’s stupid about her life? She’s fantastically successful, isn’t she? She’s all over time and space, all over the Sub-Etha TV networks …”

“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

Random turned and ran off again. Arthur couldn’t keep up with her and at last he had to sit down for a bit and let the pain in his leg subside. The turmoil in his head he didn’t know what to do with at all.

He hobbled into the village an hour later. It was getting dark. The villagers he passed said hello, but there was a sense of nervousness and of not quite knowing what was going on or what to do about it in the air. Old Thrashbarg had been seen pulling on his beard a fair bit and looking at the moon, and that was not a good sign either.

Arthur went into his hut.

Random was sitting hunched quietly over the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s all right,” said Arthur as gently as he knew how. “It’s good to, well, to have a little chat. There’s so much we have to learn and understand about each other, and life isn’t, well, it isn’t all just tea and sandwiches …”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again, sobbing.

Arthur went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t resist or pull away. Then Arthur saw what it was she was so sorry about.

In the pool of light thrown by a Lamuellan lantern lay Arthur’s watch. Random had forced the back off it with the back edge of the butter-spreading knife and all of the minute cogs and springs and levers were lying in a tiny cockeyed mess where she’d been fiddling with them.

“I just wanted to see how it worked,” said Random, “how it all fitted together. I’m so sorry! I can’t get it back together. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. I’ll get it repaired! Really! I’ll get it repaired!”

The following day Thrashbarg came around and said all sorts of Bob stuff. He tried to exert a calming influence by inviting Random to let her mind dwell on the ineffable mystery of the giant earwig, and Random said there was no giant earwig and Thrashbarg went very cold and silent and said she would be cast into outer darkness. Random said good, she had been born there, and the next day the parcel arrived.