It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever
produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".

	Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of
ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness
arises because airports ane full of people who are tired, cross, and have
just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk
airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule),
and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

	They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif
with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the
business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or
loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at
the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in
the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds
that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates,
presumably on the grounds that they are not.

                                 * * *

	The usual people tried to claim responsibility.

	First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British
Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was
completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that
there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the
explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a
picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to
do with them at all.

	No cause could be found for the explosion.

	It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own free will.
Explanations were advanced, but most of these were simply phrases which
restated the problem in different words, along the same principles which
had given the world "metal fatigue". In fact, a very similar phrase was
invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and
concrete into an explosive condition, which was "non-linear catastrophic
structural exasperation", or to put it another way - as a junior cabinet
minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to
haunt the rest of his career - the check-in desk had just got
"fundamentally fed up with being where it was".

	As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the casualties
varied wildly. They started at forty-seven dead, eighty-nine seriously
injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a hundred and thirty injured, and
rose as high as one hundred and seventeen dead before the figures started
to be revised downwards once more. The final figures revealed that once
all the people who could be accounted for had been accounted for, in fact
no one had been killed at all. A small number of people were in hospital
suffering from cuts and bruises and varying degrees of traumatised shock,
but that, unless anyone had any information about anybody actually being
missing, was that.

                                 * * *

	The same sun later broke in through the upper windows of a house
in North London and struck the peacefully sleeping figure of a man.

	The room in which he slept was large and bedraggled and did not
much benefit from the sudden intrusion of light. The sun crept slowly
across the bedclothes, as if nervous of what it might find amongst them,
slunk down the side of the bed, moved in a rather startled way across some
objects it encountered on the floor, toyed nervously with a couple of
motes of dust, lit briefly on a stuffed fruitbat hanging in the corner,
and fled.

	This was about as big an appearance as the sun ever put in here,
and it lasted for about an hour or so, during which time the sleeping
figure scarcely stirred.

	At eleven o'clock the phone rang, and still the figure did not
respond, any more than it had responded when the phone had rung at
twenty-five to seven in the morning, again at twenty to seven, again at
ten to seven, and again for ten minutes continuously starting at five to
seven, after which it has settled into a long and significant silence,
disturbed only by the braying of police sirens in a nearby street at
around nine o'clock, the delivery of a large eighteenth-century dual
manual harpsichord at around nine-fifteen, and the collection of same by
bailiffs at a little after ten. This was a not uncommon sort of
occurrence- the people concerned were accustomed to finding the key under
the doormat, and the man in the bed was accustomed to sleeping through it.
You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just,
unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of
someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed of a night and
turned off the light.

	The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a
name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny
enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone
to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down.
Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proponions, which were
neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry,
other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old
coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were now sharing
their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely
that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own
right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room,
would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable
river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as long
as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or "Dirk", Gently, ne‚ Cjelli.

                             * * *
                              

	All right, thought Dirk, time for a little judicious toughness. He
leant back against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets in an
OK-if-that's-the-way-you-want-to-play-it manner, stared moodily at the
floor for a few seconds, then swung his head up and let the boy have a
hard look right between the eyes.

	"I have to tell you, kid," he said tersely, "your father's dead."

	This might have worked if it hadn't been for a very popular and
long-running commercial which started at that moment. It seemed to Dirk to
be a particularly astounding example of the genre.

	The opening sequence showed the angel Lucifer being hurled from
heaven into the pit of hell where he then lay on a buming lake until a
passing demon amved and gave him a can of a fizzy soft drink called
sHades. Lucifer took it and tried it. He greedily guzzled the whole
contents of the can and then tumed to camera, slipped on some Porsche
design sunglasses, said, "Now we're really cookin'!" and lay back basking
in the glow of the burning coals being heaped around him.

	At that point an impossibly deep and growly American voice, which
sounded as if it had itself crawled from the pit of hel1, or at least from
a Soho basement drinking club to which it was keen to return as soon as
possible to marinade itself into shape for the next voice-over, said,
"sHades. The Drink from Hell... " and the can revolved a little to obscure
the initial "s", and thus spell "Hades".

	The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk, but
what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a raging
torrent?

	Lucifer then mugged at the camera again and said, "I could really
fall for this stuff... " and just in case the viewer had been rendered
completely insensate by all these goings-on, the opening shot of Lucifer
being hurled from heaven was briefly replayed in order to emphasise the
word "fall".

	The boy's attention was entirely captivated by this.

                                 * * *

	Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep
for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was
not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a good night's sleep and
wouldn't miss one for the world, but he didn't regard it as anything even
half approaching enough. He liked to be asleep by half past eleven in the
morning if possible, and if that could come directly after a nice
leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A little light breakfast and a
quick trip to the bathroom while fresh linen was applied to his bed is
really all the astivity he liked to undertake, and he took care that it
didn't jangle the sleepiness out of him and thus disturb his afternoon of
napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep, and this he
regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through the whole of 1986 and
hadn't missed it.

                              * * *

	The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. It had probably
been manufactured in whichever of the South-East Asian countries was busy
tooling up to do to South Korea what South Korea was busy doing to Japan.
GIue technology had obviously not progressed in that country to the point
where things could be successfully held together with it. Already the back
had half fallen off and needed to be stuck back on with Sellotape.

	It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that the
LCD screen was a little larger than usual, in order to accommodate the
abridged judgements of King Wen on each of the sixty-four hexagrams, and
also the commentaries of his son, the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines
of each hexagram. These were unusual texts to see marching across the
display of a pocket calculator, particularly as they had been translated
from the Chinese via the Japanese and seemed to have enjoyed many
adventures on the way.

	The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only to
a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which returned an answer
of anything up to "4".

	"1+1" it could manage ("2"), and "1+2" ("3") and "2+2" ("4") or
"tan 74" ("3.4874145"), but anything above "4" it represented merely as "A
Suffusion of Yellow". Dirk was not certain if this was a programming error
or an insight beyond his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it
anyway, enough to hand over twenty pounds of ready cash for the thing.

                                * * *

	She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope from
him.

	"I insist that you - " expostulated Dirk, incompletely.

	"What's your name?" demanded Sally.

	"My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently."

	"And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that have
been crossed out?" She frowned, briefly, looking at them.

	"No," said Dirk. "Certainly not."

	"So you mean the envelope is not yours either?"

	"I - that is - "

	"Aha! So you are also being extremely... what was it?"

	"Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a
private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as
often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and
presumptuous on a professional basis."

	"How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and
presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am merely an
amateur of Olympic standard. You don't look like a private detective."

	"No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one
of the first rules of private detection."

	"But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how
does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like?
Seems to me there's a problem there."

	"Yes, but it's not one that keeps me awake at nights," said Dirk
in exasperation. "Anyway, I am not as other private detectives. My methods
are holistic and, in a very proper sense of the word, chaotic. I operate
by investigating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things."

	Sally Mills merely blinked at him.

	"Every particle in the universe," continued Dirk, warming to his
subject and beginning to stare a bit, "affects every other particle,
however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything.
The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an
Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that
made sense to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me with the
answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked,
chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and
their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to
which I am seeking a solution.  It is only a question of knowing how to
interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know
things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you,
which I don't, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can't."

                               * * *

	"Yes, it is true," he was saying, "that sometimes unusually
intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs
Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think
that's something you might have to consider. I know it's very painful,
yes. Good day, Mrs Benson."

                               * * *

   
"So you would like to know precisely what, Miss Schechter?"

"Assume," said Kate, "that I know nothing."

Standish smiled, as if to signify that no assumption could possibly give
him greater pleasure.

"Very well," he said. "The Woodshead is a research hospital. We specialise
in the care and study of patients with unusual or previously unknown
conditions, largely in the psychological or psychiatric fields. Funds are
raised in various ways. One of our chief methods is quite simply to take
in private patients at exorbitantly high fees, which they are happy to
pay, or at least happy to complain about. There is in fact nothing to
complain about because patients who come to us privately are made fully
aware of why our fees are so high. For the money they are paying, they
are, of course, perfectly entitled to complain - the right to complain is
one of the privileges they are paying for. In some cases we come to a
special arrangement under which, in return for being made the sole
beneficiaries of a patient's estate, we will guarantee to look after that
patient for the rest of his or her life."

"So in effect you are in the business of giving scholarships to people
with particularly gifted diseases?"

"Exactly. A very good way of expressing it. We are in the business of
giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases. I must
make a note of that. Miss Mayhew!"

He had opened a drawer, which clearly contained his office intercom. In
response to his summons one of the cupboards opened, and tumed out to be a
door into a side office - a feature which must have appealed to some
architect who had conceived an ideological dislike of doors. From this
office there emerged obediently a thin and rather blank-faced woman in her
mid- forties.

"Miss Mayhew," said Mr Standish, "we are in the business of giving
scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases."

"Very good, Mr Standish," said Miss Mayhew, and retreated backwards into
her office, pulling the door closed after her. Kate wondered if it was
perhaps a cupboard after all.

                              * * *

For a fleeting instant her eyes caught Kate's, and the message Kate
received was along the lines of "I'm sorry but you'll just have to excuse
me while all this is going on". The girl took a deep breath, half-closed
her eyes in resignation and continued her relentless silent murmuring.

Kate leant forward a little in an attempt to catch any actual words, but
she couldn't make anything out. She shot an enquiring look up at Standish.

He said, simply, "Stock market prices."

A look of amazement crept over Kate's face.

Standish added with a wry shrug, "Yesterday's, I'm afraid."

Kate flinched at having her reaction so wildly misinterpreted, and
hurriedly looked back at the girl in order to cover her confusion.

"You mean," she said, rather redundantly, "she's just sitting here
reciting yesterday's stock market prices?" The girl rolled her eyes past
Kate's.

"Yes," said Standish. "It took a lip reader to work out what was going on.
We all got rather excited, of course, but then closer examination revealed
that they were only yesterday's which was a bit of a disappointment. Not
that significant a case really. Aberrant behaviour. Interesting to know
why she does it, but - "

"Hold on a moment," said Kate, trying to sound very interested rather than
absolutely horrified, "are you saying that she is reciting - what? - the
closing prices over and over, or - "

"No. That's an interesting feature of course. She pretty much keeps pace
with movements in the market over the course of a whole day. Just
twenty-four hours out of step."

"But that's extraordinary, isn't it?"

"Oh yes. Quite a feat."

"A feat?"

"Well, as a scientist, I have to take the view that since the information
is freely available, she is acquiring it through normal channels. There's
no necessity in this case to invent any supernatural or paranonnal
dimension.  Occam's razor. Shouldn't needlessly multiply entities."

"But has anyone seen her studying the newspapers, or copying stuff down
over the phone?"

She looked up at the nurse, who shook her head, dumbly.

"No, never actually caught her at it," said Standish. "As I said, it's
quite a feat. I'm sure a stage magician or memory man could tell you how
it was done."

"Have you asked one?"

"No. Don't hold with such people."

"But do you really think that she could possibly be doing this
deliberately?" insisted Kate.

"Believe me, if you understood as much about people as I do, Miss, er -
you would believe anything," said Standish, in his most professionally
reassuring tone of voice.

Kate stared into the tired, wretched face of the young girl and said
nothing.

"You have to understand," said Standish, "that we have to be rational
about this. If it was tomorrow's stock market prices, it would be a
different story. That would be a phenomenon of an entirely different
character which would merit and demand the most rigorous study. And I'm
sure we'd have no difficulty in funding the research. There would be
absolutely no problem about that."

"I see," said Kate, and meant it.

                              * * *

The man sitting in the bedside chair while his bed was being made up by a
hospital orderly was one of the most deeply and disturbingly tousled
people that Kate had ever seen. In fact it was only his hair that was
tousled, but it was tousled to such an extreme degree that it seemed to
draw all of his long face up into its distressed chaos.

He seemed quite content to sit where he was, but there was something
tremendously vacant about his contentedness - he seemed literally to be
content about nothing. There was a completely empty space hanging in the
air about eighteen inches in front of his face, and his contentedness, if
it sprang from anything, sprang from staring at that.

There was also a sense that he was waiting for something. Whether it was
something that was about to happen at any moment, or something that was
going to happen later in the week, or even something that was going to
happen some little while after hell iced over and British Telecom got the
phones fixed was by no means apparent because it seemed to be all the same
to him. If it happened he was ready for it and if it didn't- he was
content.

Kate found such contentedness almost unbearably distressing.

"What's the matter with him?" she said quietly, and then instantly
realised that she was talking as if he wasn't there when he could probably
speak perfectly well for himself. Indeed, at that moment, he suddenly did
speak.

"Oh, er, hi," he said. "OK, yeah, thank you."

"Er, hello," she said, in response, though it didn't seem quite to fit. Or
rather, what he had said didn't seem quite to fit. Standish made a gesture
to her to discourage her from speaking.

"Er, yeah, a bagel would be fine," said the contented man. He said it in a
flat kind of tone, as if merely repeating something he had been given to
say.

"Yeah, and maybe some juice," he added. "OK, thanks." He then relaxed into
his state of empty watchfulness.

"A very unusual condition," said Standish, "that is to say, we can only
believe that it is entirely unique. I've certainly never heard of anything
remotely like it. It has also proved virtually impossible to verify beyond
question that it is what it appears to be, so I'm glad to say that we have
been spared the embarrassment of attempting to give the condition a name."

"Would you like me to help Mr Elwes back to bed?" asked the orderly of
Standish. Standish nodded. He didn't bother to waste words on minions.

The orderly bent down to talk to the patient.

"Mr Elwes?" he said quietly.

Mr Elwes seemed to swim up out of a reverie.

"Mmmm?" he said, and suddenly looked around. He seemed confused.

"Oh! Oh? What?" he said faintly.

"Would you like me to help you back to bed?"

"Oh. Oh, thank you, yes. Yes, that would be kind."

Though clearly dazed and bewildered, Mr Elwes was quite able to get
himself back into bed, and all the orderly needed to supply was
reassurance and encouragement. Once Mr Elwes was well settled, the orderly
nodded politely to Standish and Kate and made his exit.

Mr Elwes quickly lapsed back into his trancelike state, lying propped up
against an escarpment of pillows. His head dropped forward slightly and he
stared at one of his knees, poking up bonily from under the covers.

"Get me New York," he said.

Kate shot a puzzled glance at Standish, hoping for some kind of
explanation, but got none.

"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."

                                 * * *

A few moments later Standish arrived at a door, knocked at it gently and
looked enquiringly into the room within. He then beckoned to Kate to
follow him in.

This was a room of an altogether different sort. Immediately within the
door was an ante-room with a very large window through which the main room
could be seen. The two rooms were clearly sound-proofed from each other,
because the ante- room was decked out with monitoring equipment and
computers, not one of which but didn't hum loudly to itself, and the main
room contained a woman lying in bed, asleep.

"Mrs Elspeth May," said Standish, and clearly felt that he was introducing
the top of the bill. Her room was obviously a very good one - spacious and
furnished comfortably and expen- sively. Fresh flowers stood on every
surface, and the bedside table on which Mrs May's knitting lay was of
mahogany.

She herself was a comfortably shaped, silver-haired lady of late middle
age, and she was lying asleep half propped up in bed on a pile of pillows,
wearing a pink woolly cardigan. Aher a moment it became clear to Kate that
though she was asleep she was by no means inactive. Her head lay back
peacefully with her eyes closed, but her right hand was clutching a pen
which was scribbling away furiously on a large pad of paper which lay
beside her. The hand, like the wheelchair girl's mouth, seemed to lead an
independent and feverishly busy existence. Some small pinkish electrodes
were taped to Mrs May's forehead just below her hairline, and Kate assumed
that these were providing some of the readings which danced across the
computer screens in the ante-room in which she and Standish stood. Two
white- coated men and a woman sat monitoring the equipment, and a nurse
stood watching through the window. Standish exchanged a couple of brief
words with them on the current state of the patient, which was universally
agreed to be excellent.

Kate could not escape the impression that she ought to know who Mrs May
was, but she didn't and was forced to ask.

"She is a medium," said Standish a little crossly, "as I assumed you would
know. A medium of prodigious powers. She is currently in a trance and
engaged in automatic writing. She is taking dictation. Virtually every
piece of dictation she receives is of inestimable value. You have not
heard of her?"

Kate admitted that she had not.

"Well, you are no doubt familiar with the lady who claimed that Mozart,
Beethoven and Schubert were dictating music to her?"

"Yes, I did hear about that. There was a lot of stuff in colour
supplements about her a few years ago."

"Her claims were, well, interesting, if that's the sort of thing you're
interested in. The music was certainly more consistent with what might be
produced by each of those gentlemen quickly and before breakfast, than it
was with what you would expect from a musically unskilled middle-aged
housewife."

Kate could not let this pomposity pass.

"That's a rather sexist viewpoint," she said, "George Eliot was a
middle-aged housewife."

"Yes, yes," said Standish testily, "but she wasn't taking musical
dictation from the deceased Wolfgang Amadeus. That's the point I'm making.
Please try and follow the logic of this argument and do not introduce
irrelevancies.  If I felt for a moment that the example of George Eliot
could shed any light on our present problem, you could rely on me to
introduce it myself.

"Where was I?"

"I don't know."

"Mabel. Doris? Was that her name? Let us call her Mabel. The point is that
the easiest way of dealing with the Doris problem was simply to ignore it.  
Nothing very important hinged on it at alI. A few concerts. Second rate
material. But here, here we have something of an altogether diffenent
nature."

He said this last in hushed tones and turned to study a TV monitor which
stood among the bank of computer screens. It showed a close-up of Mrs
May's hand scuttling across her pad of paper. Her hand largely obscured
what she had written, but it appeared to be mathematics of some kind.

"Mrs May is, or so she claims, taking dictation from some of the greatest
physicists. From Einstein and from Heisenberg and Planck. And it is very
hard to dispute her claims, because the information being produced here,
by automatic writing, by this...untutored lady, is in fact physics of a
very profound order.

"From the late Einstein we are getting more and more refinements to our
picture of how time and space work at a macroscopic level, and from the
late Heisenberg and Planck we are increasing our understanding of the
fundamental structures of matter at a quantum level. And there is
absolutely no doubt that this information is edging us closer and closer
towards the elusive goal of a Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything.

"Now this produces a very interesting, not to say somewhat embarrassing
situation for scientists because the means by which the information is
reaching us seems to be completely contrary to the meaning of the
information."

"It's like Uncle Henry," said Kate, suddenly.

Standish looked at her blankly.

"Uncle Henry thinks he's a chicken," Kate explained.

Standish looked at her blankly again.

"You must have heard it," said Kate. "`We're terribly worried about Uncle
Henry. He thinks he's a chicken.' `Well, why don't you send him to the
doctor?' `Well, we would only we need the eggs.'".

Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed elderberry tree
had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of her nose.

"Say that again," he said in a small, shocked voice.

"What, all of it?"

"All of it."

Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the voices with a
bit more dash and Southern accents this time.

"'That's brilliant," Standish breathed when she had done.

"You must have heard it before," she said, a little surprised by this
response. "It's an old joke."

"No," he said, "I have not. We need the eggs. We need the eggs. We need
the eggs. `We can't send him to the doctor because we need the eggs.' An
astounding insight into the central paradoxes of the human condition and
of our indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to
account for it. Good God."

Kate shrugged.

"And you say this is a joke?" demanded Standish incredulously.

"Yes. It's very old, really."

"And are they all like that? I never realised."

"Well - "

"I'm astounded," said Standish, "utterly astounded. I thought that jokes
were things that fat people said on television and I never listened to
them. I feel that people have been keeping something from me. Nurse!"

The nurse who had been keeping watch on Mts May through the window jumped
at being barked at unexpectedly like this.

"Er, yes, Mr Standish?" she said. He clearly made her nervous.

"Why have you never told me any jokes?"

The nurse stared at him, and quivered at the impossibility of even knowing
how to think about answering such a question.

"Er, well... "

"Make a note of it will you? In future I will require you and all the
other staff in this hospital to tell me all the jokes you have at your
disposal, is that understood?"

"Er, yes, Mr Standish - "

Standish looked at her with doubt and suspicion.

"You do know some jokes do you, nurse?" he challenged her.

"Er, yes, Mr Standish, I think, yes I do."

"Tell me one."

"What, er, now, Mr Standish?"

"This instant."

"Er, well, um - there's one which is that a patient wakes up after having,
well, that is, he's been to, er, to surgery, and he wakes up and, it's not
very good, but anyway, he's been to surgery and he says to the doctor when
he wakes up, 'Doctor, doctor, what's wrong with me, I can't feel my legs.'
And the doctor says, `Yes, I'm afraid we've had to amputate both your
arms.' And that's it really. Er, that's why he couldn't feel his legs, you
see."

Mr Standish looked at her levelly for a moment or two.

"You're on report, nurse," he said.

"Yes, Mr Standish."

He turned to Kate.

"Isn't there one about a chicken crossing a road or some such thing?"

"Er, yes," said Kate, doubtfully. She felt she was caught in a bit of a
situation here.

"And how does that go?"

"Well," said Kate, "it goes `Why did the chicken cross the road?'"

"Yes? And?"

"And the answer is `To get to the other side'."

"I see." Standish considered things for a moment. "And what does this
chicken do when it arrives at the other side of the road?."

"History does not relate," replied Kate promptly. "I think that falls
outside the scope of the joke, which really only concerns itself with the
journey of the chicken across the road and the chicken's reasons for
making it. It's a little like a Japanese haiku in that respect."

Kate suddenly found she was enjoying herself. She managed a surreptitious
wink at the nurse, who had no idea what to make of anything at all.

"I see," said Standish once again, and frowned. "And do these, er, jokes
require the preparatory use of any form of artificial stimulant?"

"Depends on the joke, depends on who it's being told to."

"Hmm, well I must say, you've certainly opened up a rich furrow for me,
Miss, er. It seems to me that the whole field of humour could benefit from
close and immediate scrutiny. Clearly we need to sort out the jokes which
have any kind of genuine psychological value from those which merely
encourage drug abuse and should be stopped. Good."

                                 * * *

	"I've been reading about you," she challenged the Thunder God.
"Where's your beard?"

	He took the book, a one volume encyclopaedia, from her hands and
glanced at it before tossing it aside contemptuously.

	"Ha," he said, "I shaved it off. When I was in Wales." He scowled
at the memory.

	"What were you doing in Wales for heaven's sake?"

	"Counting the stones," he said with a shrug, and went to stare out
of the window.

	There was a huge, moping anxiety in his bearing. It suddenly
occurred to Kate with a spasm of something not entinely unlike fear, that
sometimes when people got like that, it was because they had picked up
their mood from the weather. With a Thunder God it presumably worked the
other way round. The sky ootside certainly had a restless and disgruntled
look.

	Her reactions suddenly started to become very confused.

	"Excuse me if this sounds like a stupid question," said Kate, "but
I'm a little at sea here. I'm not used to spending the evening with
someone who's got a whole day named after them. What stones were you
counting in Wales?"

	"All of them," said Thor in a low growl. "All of them between this
size...  " he held the tip of his forefinger and thumb about a quarter of
an inch apart, "...and this size." He held his two hands about a yard
apart, and then put them down again.

	Kate stared at him blankly.

	"Well... how many were there?" she asked. It seemed only polite to
ask.

	He rounded on her angrily.

	"Count them yourself if you want to know!" he shouted. "What's the
point in my spending years and years and years counting them, so that I'm
the only person who knows, and who will ever know, if I just go and tell
somebody else? Well?"

	He turned back to the window.

	"Anyway," he said, "I've been worried about it. I think I may have
lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. But I'm not," he shouted, "going to
do it again!"

	"Well, why on earth would you do such an extraordinary thing in
the first place?"

	"It was a burden placed on me by my father. A punishment. A
penance." He glowered.

	"Your father?" said Kate. "Do you mean Odin?"

	"The All-Father," said Thor. "Father of the Gods of Asgard."

	"And you're saying he's alive?"

	Thor turned to look at her as if she was stupid.

	"We are immortals," he said, simply.

	Downstairs, Neil chose that moment to conclude his thunderous
performance on the bass, and the house seemed to sing in its aftermath
with an eerie silence.

	"Immortals are what you wanted," said Thor in a low, quiet voice.  
"Immortals are what you got. It is a little hard on us. You wanted us to
be for ever, so we are for ever. Then you forget about us. But still we
are for ever.  Now at last, many are dead, many dying," he then added in a
quiet voice, "but it takes a special effort."

	"I can't even begin to understand what you're talking about," said
Kate, "you say that I, we - "

	"You can begin to understand," said Thor, angrily, "which is why I
have come to you. Do you know that most people hardly see me? Hardly
notice me at all? It is not that we are hidden. We are here. We move among
you. My people. Your gods. You gave birth to us. You made us be what'you
would not dare to be yourselves. Yet you will not acknowledge us. If I
walk along one of your streets in this... world you have made for
yourselves without us, then barely an eye will once flicker in my
direction."


                                 * * *