“Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”

“I don’t wear contact lenses.”

“Maybe it’s time you did.”

Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that it was working. Kate . . . ?”

“Yes, Dirk?”

“You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I ask is that when I phoned myself up . . .”

“Yes?”

“I answered.”

“Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”

“I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.

“In which case you need something to do.”

“Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”

Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.”

“Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again. “Now that is an interesting one.”

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

“JOSH,” said a voice in a kind of Swedish-Irish accent.

Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small freezer cabinet, which was mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.

“Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.

“Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.

“Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely not.

More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what was going to happen. Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA scientists said that it would burn up in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do whatever the Americans said it would do.

“Julio,” said the voice. No response.