‘And then we ought to do something about the High Street,’ said someone.

‘And get some decent playgrounds and things again, instead of all these Amenities all over the place.’

‘And blow up Joshua N’Clement and get some proper houses built—’

‘Yo!’ said Bigmac.

‘Here here,’ said Yo-less.

Mr Atterbury waved his hands calmly.

‘One thing at a time,’ he said. ‘Let’s rebuild Blackbury first. We can see about Jerusalem tomorrow.’

‘And we ought to find a name for ourselves!’

‘The Blackbury Preservation Society?’

‘Sounds like something you put in a jar.’

‘All right, the Blackbury Conservation Society.’

‘Still sounds like jam to me.’

‘The Blackbury Pals,’ said Johnny.

Mr Atterbury hesitated.

‘It’s a good name,’ he said eventually, while lots of people in the hall started asking one another who the Blackbury Pals were. ‘But . . . no. Not now. But they were officially the Blackbury Volunteers. That’s a good name.’

‘But that doesn’t say what we’re going to do, does it?’

‘If we start off not knowing what we’re going to do, we could do anything,’ said Johnny. ‘Einstein said that,’ he added, proudly.

‘What, Albert Einstein?’ said Yo-less.

‘No, Solomon Einstein,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘Hah! Know about him too, do you?’

‘Er . . . yes.’

‘I remember him. He used to keep a taxidermist and fishing tackle shop in Cable Street when I was a lad. He was always saying that sort of thing. A bit of a philosopher, was Solomon Einstein.’

‘And all he did was stuff things?’ said Yo-less.

‘And think,’ said Johnny.

‘Well, that kind of cogitation runs in the family, you might say,’ said Mr Atterbury. ‘Besides, you’ve got a lot of time for abstract thought when you’ve got your hand stuck up a dead badger.’

‘Yes, you certainly wouldn’t want to think about what you were doing,’ said Wobbler.

‘Blackbury Volunteers it is, then,’ said Mr Atterbury.

Frost formed on the receiver of the public phone in The White Swan.

‘Ready, Mr Einstein?’

‘Let’s go, Mr Fletcher!’

The telephone clicked, and was silent. The air warmed up again.

Thirty seconds later, the air grew cold in the little wooden hut twenty miles away that housed the controls of Blackbury University’s radio telescope.

‘It works!’

‘Off course. Off all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison.’

‘When did you think of that?’

‘It came to me ven I was working on a particularly large trout.’

‘Really? Well . . . let’s see what we can do . . .’

Mr Fletcher looked around the little room. It was currently occupied only by Adrian ‘Nozzer’ Miller, who’d wanted to be an astronomer because he thought it was all to do with staying up late looking through telescopes, and hadn’t bargained on it being basically about adding columns of figures in a little shed in the middle of a windy field.

The figures the telescope was producing were all that was left of an exploding star twenty million years ago. A billion small rubbery things on two planets who had been getting on with life in a quiet sort of way had been totally destroyed, but they were certainly helping Adrian get his Ph.D. and, who knows, they might have thought it all worthwhile if anyone had asked them.