Black’s Medical Dictionary.
Nice present.
I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical order.
You say her name is Fenny?
Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like that at school, you know.
Was she?
She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of.
I can see how that would be irritating, said Arthur doubtfully. He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.
Not that I wasn’t sympathetic, continued Russell, but it did get a bit irritating. She was limping for months.
He slowed down.
This is your turning isn’t it?
Ah, no, said Arthur, five miles further on. If that’s all right.
OK, said Russell after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.
It was in fact Arthur’s turning, but he couldn’t leave without finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could take either of the next two turnings.
They led back to the village that had been his home, though what he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise to the shudders that only very very normal things can create, when seen where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar light.
By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.
Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it no more than a parking offence.
Delusions, said Russell.
What? said Arthur, started out of his train of thought.
She says she suffers from strange delusions that she’s living in the real world. It’s no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that’s why the delusions are so strange. Don’t know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off for a beer is my answer. I mean you can only muck about so much can’t you?
Arthur frowned, not for the first time.
Well…
And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going on about strange jumps in her brainwave patterns.
Jumps?