Another thought struck him, but this time it wasn’t about the money. A ZZ Top song about TV dinners made him think for a moment about his pizza, and he looked at it with sudden puzzlement. Cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. No wonder he’d had indigestion today. The other three slices were what he’d had for breakfast. It was a combination to which he, probably uniquely in all the world, was addicted, and which he had some months ago forsworn because his gut couldn’t cope with it anymore. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d blundered across it in the fridge this morning because it was exactly the sort of thing a person liked to find in a fridge. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask who had put it there. But it hadn’t been him.

Slowly, disgustingly, he removed the half-chewed portion from his mouth. He didn’t believe in the pizza fairy.

He disposed of the half-masticated gungey bits and then examined the two remaining slices. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them at all. It was exactly the pizza he regularly used to eat until he made himself give it up. He phoned his local pizza restaurant and asked them if anybody else had been in to buy a pizza with that particular combination of toppings.

“Ah, you’re the bloke who has the gastricciana, are you?” said the pizza chef.

“The what?”

“It’s what we call it. No, mate, nobody else has ever bought that wonderful combination, believe me.”

Dirk felt somewhat dissatisfied with aspects of this conversation, but he let it pass. He put the phone down thoughtfully. He felt that something very strange was going on and he didn’t know what.

“No one knows anything.”

The words caught his attention and he glanced up at the TV. A breezy Californian in the sort of Hawaiian shirt that could serve, if needed, as a distress signal was standing in the bright sunshine and answering questions, Dirk quickly worked out, about the approaching meteor. He called the meteor Toodle Pip.

“Toodle Pip?” asked his interviewer, the BBC’s California correspondent.

“Yeah. We call it Toodle Pip because anything it hits, you could pretty much say good-bye to.”

The Californian grinned.

“So you’re saying it is going to hit?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

“Well, the scientists at NASA are saying . . .”

“NASA,” said the Californian genially, “is talking shit. They don’t know. If we don’t know, they sure as hell don’t know. Here at Similarity Engines we have the most massively powerful parallel computers on Earth, so when I say we don’t know, I know what I’m talking about. We know that we don’t know, and we know why we don’t know. NASA doesn’t even know that.”