"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

“Solong,andthanksforallthefish”

Douglas Adams “ So long, and thanks for all the fish ”

So long, and thanks for all the fish

for Jane

with thanks

to Rick and Heidi for the loan of their stable event

to Mogens and Andy and all at Huntsham  Court  for  a  number  of

unstable events

and especially to  Sonny  Metha  for  being  stable  through  all events.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable  end  of the  western  spiral  arm  of  the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two  million  miles is  an  utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that  they  still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of  the  people  on  it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were  largely  concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't  the  small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people  were  mean,  and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a  big mistake  in  coming  down  from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move,  and  that  no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after  one  man had  been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on  her  own  in  a small  cafe  in  Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how  the world  could  be  made  a  good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would  have  to  get  nailed  to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone  to  tell  anyone about  it,  a  terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is her story.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 1

That evening it was dark early, which was normal for the time  of year. It was cold and windy, which was normal.

It started to rain, which was particularly normal.

A spacecraft landed, which was not.

There was nobody around  to  see  it  except  some  spectacularly stupid  quadrupeds  who  hadn't the faintest idea what to make of it, or whether they were meant to make anything of it, or eat it, or what. So they did what they did to everything which was to run away from it and try  to  hide  under  each  other,  which  never worked.

It slipped down out of the clouds, seemingly balanced on a single beam of light.

From a distance you would scarcely have noticed  it  through  the lightning  and  the  storm  clouds, but seen from close to it was strangely beautiful - a grey craft of  elegantly  sculpted  form: quite small.

Of course, one never has the slightest notion what size or  shape different species are going to turn out to be, but if you were to take the findings of the latest Mid-Galactic Census report as any kind of accurate guide to statistical averages you would probably guess that the craft would hold about six people, and  you  would be right.

You'd probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like  most such  surveys,  had  cost  an  awful lot of money and didn't tell anybody anything they didn't already know  -  except  that  every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since this was clearly not true the whole thing had  eventually  to  be scrapped.

The craft slid quietly down through the rain, its  dim  operating lights  wrapping it in tasteful rainbows. It hummed very quietly, a hum which became gradually louder and deeper as  it  approached the ground, and which at an altitude of six inches became a heavy throb.

At last it dropped and was quiet.

A hatchway opened. A short flight of steps unfolded itself.

A light appeared in the opening, a  bright  light  streaming  out into the wet night, and shadows moved within.

A tall figure appeared in the light, looked around, flinched, and hurried  down  the steps, carrying a large shopping bag under its arm.

It turned and gave a single abrupt wave back at the ship. Already the rain was streaming through its hair.

“Thank you,” he called out, “thank you very ...”

He was interrupted by a sharp crack of  thunder.  He  glanced  up apprehensively,  and  in  response  to  a  sudden thought quickly started to rummage through the large plastic shopping bag,  which he now discovered had a hole in the bottom.

It had large characters printed on the side which read (to anyone who  could  decipher  the  Centaurian  alphabet)  Duty free Mega-Market, Port Brasta, Alpha Centauri. Be  Like  the  Twenty-Second Elephant with Heated Value in Space - Bark!

“Hold on!” the figure called, waving at the ship.

The steps, which had started to fold themselves back through  the hatchway, stopped, re-unfolded, and allowed him back in.

He emerged again a few seconds  later  carrying  a  battered  and threadbare towel which he shoved into the bag.

He waved again, hoisted the bag under his arm, and started to run for  the shelter of some trees as, behind him, the spacecraft had already begun its ascent.

Lightning flitted through the sky and made the figure pause for a moment,  and  then  hurry  onwards, revising his path to give the trees a wide berth. He moved swiftly across the ground,  slipping here  and  there,  hunching  himself  against  the rain which was falling now  with  ever-increasing  concentration,  as  if  being pulled from the sky.

His feet sloshed through  the  mud.  Thunder  grumbled  over  the hills.  He  pointlessly  wiped the rain off his face and stumbled on.

More lights.

Not lightning this time, but  more  diffused  and  dimmer  lights which played slowly over the horizon and faded.

The figure paused again on seeing them, and  then  redoubled  his steps,  making directly towards the point on the horizon at which they had appeared.

And now the ground was becoming  steeper,  sloping  upwards,  and after  another  two  or  three hundred yards it led at last to an obstacle. The figure paused  to  examine  the  barrier  and  then dropped  the  bag  he  was  carrying over it before climbing over himself.

Hardly had the figure touched the ground on the other  side  when there came sweeping out of the rain towards him a machine, lights streaming through the wall of water. The figure pressed  back  as the  machine  streaked  towards  him. it was a low bulbous shape, like a small whale surfing - sleek, grey and rounded  and  moving at terrifying speed.

The figure instinctively threw up his hands to  protect  himself, but  was  hit only by a sluice of water as the machine swept past and off into the night.

It was  illuminated  briefly  by  another  flicker  of  lightning crossing the sky, which allowed the soaked figure by the roadside a split-second to read a small sign at the back  of  the  machine before it disappeared.

To the figure's apparent incredulous astonishment the sign  read, “My other car is also a Porsche.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 2

Rob McKeena was a miserable bastard and he knew it  because  he'd had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which  was that  he  liked  disagreeing  with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everyone.

He heaved a sigh and shoved down a gear.

The hill was beginning to steepen and his lorry  was  heavy  with Danish thermostatic radiator controls.

It wasn't that he was naturally predisposed to be  so  surly,  at least  he  hoped  not.  It  was just the rain which got him down, always the rain.

It was raining now, just for a change.

It was a  particular  type  of  rain  he  particularly  disliked, particularly  when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was rain type 17.

He had read somewhere that  the  Eskimos  had  over  two  hundred different  words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very  monotonous.  So  they  would  distinguish between  thin  snow  and  thick  snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow  that came  in  drifts,  snow  that  came  in  on  the  bottom  of your neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of  winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern  snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all  of a  sudden  just  when  you  were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies  have  pissed on.

Rob McKeena had two hundred and  thirty-one  different  types  of rain entered in his little book, and he didn't like any of them.

He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It grumbled  in  a  comfortable  sort  of  way  about all the Danish thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.

Since he had left Denmark the previous  afternoon,  he  had  been through  types  33  (light  pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery), 39 ( heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle through   to   sharply   slanting   light   to  moderate  drizzle freshening), 87 and 88 (two  finely  distinguished  varieties  of vertical  torrential  downpour),  100  (post-downpour  squalling, cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at  once,  123, 124,  126,  127  (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least favourite of all, 17.

Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen so  hard  that it didn't make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.

He tested this theory by turning them  off  briefly,  but  as  it turned  out  the  visibility  did  get quite a lot worse. It just failed to get better again when he turned them back on.

In fact one of the wiper blades began to flap off.

Swish swish swish flop swish flop swish  swish  flop  swish  flop swish flop flop flop scrape.

He pounded his steering wheel,  kicked  the  floor,  thumped  his cassette  player  till it suddenly started playing Barry Manilow, thumped it again till it stopped, and swore and swore  and  swore and swore and swore.

It was at the very moment that his fury was  peaking  that  there loomed  swimmingly  in his headlights, hardly visible through the blatter, a figure by the roadside.

A poor bedraggled figure, strangely attired, wetter than an otter in a washing machine, and hitching.

“Poor miserable sod,” thought Rob McKeena to  himself,  realizing that  here  was somebody with a better right to feel hard done by than himself, “must be chilled to the  bone.  Stupid  to  be  out hitching  on  a filthy night like this. All you get is cold, wet, and lorries driving through puddles at you.”

He shook his head grimly, heaved another sigh, gave the  wheel  a turn and hit a large sheet of water square on.

“See what I mean?” he thought to himself as he  ploughed  swiftly through it. “You get some right bastards on the road.”

Splattered in his rear mirror a couple of seconds later  was  the reflection of the hitch-hiker, drenched by the roadside.

For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or  two  later  he felt  bad  about  feeling  good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove  on into the night.

At least it made up for having been  finally  overtaken  by  that Porsche  he  had  been  diligently  blocking  for the last twenty miles.

And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged  down  the  sky  after him,  for, though he did not know it, Rob McKeena was a Rain God.  All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession  of  lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 3

The next two lorries were not driven by Rain Gods, but  they  did exactly the same thing.

The figure trudged, or rather  sloshed,  onwards  till  the  hill resumed and the treacherous sheet of water was left behind.

After a while the rain began to ease and the moon put in a  brief appearance from behind the clouds.

A Renault drove by, and  its  driver  made  frantic  and  complex signals  to  the  trudging  figure to indicate that he would have been delighted to give the figure a lift, only he  couldn't  this time  because  he  wasn't  going in the direction that the figure wanted to go, whatever direction that might be, and he  was  sure the  figure  would understand. He concluded the signalling with a cheery thumbs-up sign, as if to say that he hoped the figure felt really  fine  about  being cold and almost terminally wet, and he would catch him the next time around.

The figure trudged on. A Fiat passed and did exactly the same  as the Renault.

A Maxi passed on the other side  of  the  road  and  flashed  its lights  at  the  slowly  plodding figure, though whether this was meant to convey a “Hello” or a “Sorry we're going the other  way” or  a  “Hey  look,  there's someone in the rain, what a jerk” was entirely unclear. A green strip across the top of the  windscreen indicated  that  whatever the message was, it came from Steve and Carola.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder  there  was now  grumbled  over  more  distant  hills, like a man saying “And another thing ...” twenty minutes after admitting he's  lost  the argument.

The air was clearer now, the night cold. Sound  travelled  rather well. The lost figure, shivering desperately, presently reached a junction, where a side road turned off to the left. Opposite  the turning stood a signpost which the figure suddenly hurried to and studied with feverish curiosity, only twisting away  from  it  as another car passed suddenly.

And another.

The first whisked by with complete disregard, the second  flashed meaninglessly. A Ford Cortina passed and put on its brakes.

Lurching with surprise, the figure bundled his bag to  his  chest and  hurried  forward towards the car, but at the last moment the Cortina span its wheels in the wet and carreered off up the  road rather amusingly.

The figure slowed to a stop and stood there, lost and dejected.

As it chanced, the following day the driver of the  Cortina  went into  hospital  to  have  his  appendix out, only due to a rather amusing mix up the surgeon removed his leg in error,  and  before the   appendectomy   could   be   rescheduled,  the  appendicitis complicated into an entertainingly serious  case  of  peritonitis and justice, in its way, was served.

The figure trudged on.

A Saab drew to a halt beside him.

Its window wound down and a friendly voice said, “Have  you  come far?”

The figure turned toward it. He stopped and grasped the handle of the door.

The figure, the car and its door handle  were  all  on  a  planet called the Earth, a world whose entire entry in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy comprised the two words “Mostly harmless”.

The man who wrote this entry was called Ford Prefect, and he  was at this precise moment on a far from harmless world, sitting in a far from harmless bar, recklessly causing trouble.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 4

Whether it was because he was drunk,  ill  or  suicidally  insane would  not  have  been  apparent to a casual observer, and indeed there were no casual observers in the Old Pink  Dog  Bar  on  the lower  South  Side of Han Dold City because it wasn't the sort of place you could afford to do things casually in if you wanted  to stay  alive.  Any  observers  in  the  place would have been mean hawklike observers, heavily armed,  with  painful  throbbings  in their  heads  which  caused  them  to  do  crazy things when they observed things they didn't like.

One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a  sort  of missile crisis sort of hush.

Even the evil-looking bird perched  on  a  rod  in  the  bar  had stopped  screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free.

All eyes were on Ford Prefect. Some of them were on stalks.

The particular way in which he was choosing  to  dice  recklessly with  death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defence budget with an American  Express  Card,  which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.

“What are you worried about?” he asked in a cheery kind of voice.  “The expiration date? Have you guys never heard of Neo-Relativity out here? There's whole new areas of physics which can take  care of   this   sort   of  thing.  Time  dilation  effects,  temporal relastatics ...”

“We are not worried about the expiration date,” said the  man  to whom  he addressed these remarks, who was a dangerous barman in a dangerous city. His voice was a low soft purr, like the low  soft purr  made  by the opening of an ICBM silo. A hand like a side of meat tapped on the bar top, lightly denting it.

“Well, that's good then,” said  Ford,  packing  his  satchel  and preparing to leave.

The tapping finger reached out and rested lightly on the shoulder of Ford Prefect. It prevented him from leaving.

Although the finger was attached to a slablike hand, and the hand was  attached  to a clublike forearm, the forearm wasn't attached to anything at all, except in the metaphorical sense that it  was attached  by  a  fierce  doglike loyalty to the bar which was its home. It had previously been more conventionally attached to  the original  owner  of the bar, who on his deathbed had unexpectedly bequeathed it to medical science.  Medical  science  had  decided they  didn't like the look of it and had bequeathed it right back to the Old Pink Dog Bar.

The new barman didn't believe in the supernatural or poltergeists or  anything kooky like that, he just knew an useful ally when he saw one. The hand sat on the  bar.  It  took  orders,  it  served drinks,  it  dealt murderously with people who behaved as if they wanted to be murdered. Ford Prefect sat still.

“We are not worried about  the  expiration  date,”  repeated  the barman,  satisfied that he now had Ford Prefect's full attention.  “We are worried about the entire piece of plastic.”

“What?” said Ford. He seemed a little taken aback.

“This,” said the barman, holding out the card  as  if  it  was  a small  fish  whose soul had three weeks earlier winged its way to the Land Where Fish are Eternally Blessed, “we don't accept it.”

Ford wondered briefly whether to raise the fact  that  he  didn't have  any  other  means  of  payment  on him, but decided for the moment to soldier on. The disembodied hand was now  grasping  his shoulder lightly but firmly between its finger and thumb.

“But you don't understand,”  said  Ford,  his  expression  slowly ripening  from  a  little  taken abackness into rank incredulity.  “This is the American Express Card.  It  is  the  finest  way  of settling bills known to man. Haven't you read their junk mail?”

The cheery quality of Ford's voice was beginning to grate on  the barman's  ears.  It sounded like someone relentlessly playing the kazoo during one of the more sombre passages of a War Requiem.

One of the bones  in  Ford's  shoulder  began  to  grate  against another one of the bones in his shoulder in a way which suggested that the hand had learnt the principles of  pain  from  a  highly skilled chiropracter. He hoped he could get this business settled before the hand started to grate one of the bones in his shoulder against any of the bones in different parts of his body. Luckily, the shoulder it was holding was not the one he  had  his  satchel slung over.

The barman slid the card back across the bar at Ford.

“We have never,” he said with  muted  savagery,  “heard  of  this thing.”

This was hardly surprising.

Ford had only  acquired  it  through  a  serious  computer  error towards the end of the fifteen years' sojourn he had spent on the planet Earth. Exactly how serious, the American  Express  Company had  got  to know very rapidly, and the increasingly strident and panic-stricken demands of its  debt  collection  department  were only  silenced  by the unexpected demolition of the entire planet by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

He had kept it ever since because he found it useful to  carry  a form of currency that no one would accept.

“Credit?” he said. “Aaaargggh ...”

These two words were usually coupled together in the Old Pink Dog Bar.

“I thought,” gasped Ford, “that this was  meant  to  be  a  class establishment ...”

He glanced around at the motley collection of  thugs,  pimps  and record  company  executives  that skulked on the edges of the dim pools of light with which the dark shadows  of  the  bar's  inner recesses  were pitted. They were all very deliberately looking in any direction but his now, carefully picking up  the  threads  of their  former  conversations  about murders, drug rings and music publishing deals. They knew what would happen now and didn't want to watch in case it put them off their drinks.

“You gonna  die,  boy,”  the  barman  murmured  quietly  at  Ford Prefect,  and  the evidence was on his side. The bar used to have one of those signs hanging up which said, “Please don't  ask  for credit  as  a  punch  in  the  mouth  often  offends”, but in the interest of strict accuracy this was altered  to,  “Please  don't ask  for  credit  because having your throat torn out by a savage bird while a disembodied hand smashes your head against  the  bar often  offends”.  However,  this  made  an unreadable mess of the notice, and anyway didn't have the same ring to  it,  so  it  was taken  down  again. It was felt that the story would get about of its own accord, and it had.

“Lemme look at the bill again,” said Ford. He picked  it  up  and studied  it thoughtfully under the malevolent gaze of the barman, and the equally malevolent gaze of the bird, which was  currently gouging great furrows in the bar top with its talons.

It was a rather lengthy piece of paper.

At the bottom of it was a number which looked like one  of  those serial  numbers  you  find  on the underside of stereo sets which always takes so long to copy on to the registration form. He had, after all, been in the bar all day, he had been drinking a lot of stuff with bubbles in it, and he  had  bought  an  awful  lot  of rounds  for  all  the  pimps,  thugs  and  record  executives who suddenly couldn't remember who he was.

He cleared his throat rather  quietly  and  patted  his  pockets.  There  was,  as he knew, nothing in them. He rested his left hand lightly but firmly on the half-opened flap of  his  satchel.  The disembodied hand renewed its pressure on his right shoulder.

“You see,” said the barman, and his face seemed to wobble  evilly in  front  of  Ford's,  “I have a reputation to think of. You see that, don't you?”

This is it, thought Ford. There was nothing else for it.  He  had obeyed  the  rules,  he  had  made a bona fide attempt to pay his bill, it had been rejected. He was now in danger of his life.

“Well,” he said quietly, “if it's your reputation ...”

With a sudden flash of speed he opened his  satchel  and  slapped down  on  the  bar top his copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the official card which  said  that  he  was  a  field researcher for the Guide and absolutely not allowed to do what he was now doing.

“Want a write-up?”

The barman's  face  stopped  in  mid-wobble.  The  bird's  talons stopped in mid-furrow. The hand slowly released its grip.

“That,” said the barman in a barely audible whisper, from between dry lips, “will do nicely, sir.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 5

The Hitch Hiker's Guide  to  the  Galaxy  is  a  powerful  organ.  Indeed, its influence is so prodigious that strict rules have had to be drawn up by its editorial staff to prevent its  misuse.  So none  of  its field researchers are allowed to accept any kind of services, discounts or preferential  treatment  of  any  kind  in return for editorial favours unless:

a) they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the normal way;

b) their lives would be otherwise in danger;

c) they really want to.

Since invoking the third rule always involved giving the editor a cut, Ford always preferred to much about with the first two.

He stepped out along the street, walking briskly.

The air was stifling, but he liked it  because  it  was  stifling city  air,  full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music and the sound of warring police tribes.

He carried his satchel with an easy swaying  motion  so  that  he could  get  a good swing at anybody who tried to take it from him without asking. It contained everything he owned,  which  at  the moment wasn't much.

A limousine careered down the street, dodging between  the  piles of  burning  garbage,  and  frightening  an old pack animal which lurched, screeching, out of its way, stumbled against the  window of a herbal remedies shop, set off a wailing alarm, blundered off down the street, and then pretended to fall down the steps  of  a small  pasta  restaurant  where it knew it would get photographed and fed.

Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way  to the  spaceport,  but  he  had thought that before. He knew he was going through that part of the city where  people's  plans  often changed quite abruptly.

“Do you want to have a good time?” said a voice from a doorway.

“As far as I can tell,” said Ford, “I'm having one. Thanks.”

“Are you rich?” said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in  a  wide  gesture.  “Do  I  look rich?” he said.

“Don't know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll  get rich. I have a very special service for rich people ...”

“Oh yes?” said Ford, intrigued but careful. “And what's that?”

“I tell them it's OK to be rich.”

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only  a bass  player  getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.

“You what?” he said.

The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the  shadow.  She  was  tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.

“It's my big number,” she said. “I  have  a  Master's  degree  in Social  Economics  and  can  be  very convincing. People love it.  Especially in this city.”

“Goosnargh,” said Ford Prefect, which was a special  Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

He sat on a step, took from his satchel a bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit  and a towel. He opened the bottle and wiped the top of it with the  towel,  which  had  the  opposite  effect  to  the  one intended,  in  that  the  Ol'  Janx  Spirit  instantly killed off millions of the germs which had been slowly building up  quite  a complex  and  enlightened civilization on the smellier patches of the towel.

“Want some?” he said, after he'd had a swig himself.

She shrugged and took the proffered bottle.

They sat for a while, peacefully  listening  to  the  clamour  of burglar alarms in the next block.

“As it happens, I'm owed a lot of money,” said  Ford,  “so  if  I ever get hold of it, can I come and see you then maybe?”

“Sure, I'll be here,” said the girl. “So how much is a lot?”

“Fifteen years' back pay.”

“For?”

“Writing two words.”

“Zarquon,” said the girl. “Which one took the time?”

“The first one. Once I'd got that the second one  just  came  one afternoon after lunch.”

A huge electronic drum kit hurtled through the window high  above them and smashed itself to bits in the street in front of them.

It soon became apparent that some of the burglar  alarms  on  the next  block  had been deliberately set off by one police tribe in order to lay an ambush for the other. Cars with screaming  sirens converged  on  the area, only to find themselves being picked off by copters which came thudding through the air between the city's mountainous tower blocks.

“In fact,” said Ford, having to shout  now  above  the  din,  “it wasn't  quite  like that. I wrote an awful lot, but they just cut it down.”

He took his copy of the Guide back out of his satchel.

“Then the planet got demolished,” he shouted. “Really  worthwhile job, eh? They've still got to pay me, though.”

“You work for that thing?” the girl yelled back.

“Yeah.”

“Good number.”

“You want to see the stuff I wrote?” he shouted. “Before it  gets erased? The new revisions are due to be released tonight over the net. Someone must have found out that the planet I spent  fifteen years  on  has been demolished by now. They missed it on the last few revisions, but it can't escape their notice for ever.”

“It's getting impossible to talk isn't it?”

“What?”

She shrugged and pointed upwards.

There was a copter above them now which seemed to be involved  in a  side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from the building. The sound engineer was hanging out of the window by his  fingertips,  and  a  maddened  guitarist  was beating on his fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing  at  all of them.

“Can we move?”

They wandered down the street, away from the noise. They ran into a  street  theatre  group which tried to do a short play for them about the problems of the  inner  city,  but  then  gave  up  and disappeared into the small restaurant most recently patronized by the pack animal.

All the time, Ford was poking  at  the  interface  panel  of  the Guide.  They  ducked into an alleyway. Ford squatted on a garbage can while information began to  flood  over  the  screen  of  the Guide.

He located his entry.

“Earth: Mostly harmless.”

Almost immediately the screen became a mass of system messages.

“Here it comes,” he said.

“Please wait,” said the messages. “Entries are being updated over the Sub.Etha Net. This entry is being revised. The system will be down for ten seconds.”

At the end of the alley a steel grey limousine crawled past.

“Hey look,” said the girl, “if you get paid, look me  up.  I'm  a working  girl,  and  there  are  people over there who need me. I gotta go.”

She brushed aside Ford's half-articulated protests, and left  him sitting  dejectedly on his garbage can preparing to watch a large swathe of his working life being swept away  electronically  into the ether.

Out in the street things had calmed down  a  little.  The  police battle  had  moved  off  to  other  sectors  of the city, the few surviving members of the rock band had agreed to recognize  their musical  differences  and pursue solo careers, the street theatre group were re-emerging from the pasta restaurant  with  the  pack animal, telling it they would take it to a bar they knew where it would be treated with a little respect, and a little way  further on the steel grey limousine was parked silently by the kerbside.

The girl hurried towards it.

Behind her, in the darkness of the alley, a green flickering glow was  bathing  Ford  Prefect's  face,  and  his  eyes  were slowly widening in astonishment.

For where he had expected to find nothing, an erased,  closed-off entry,  there  was  instead  a  continuous stream of data - text, diagrams, figures and images,  moving  descriptions  of  surf  on Australian  beaches,  Yoghurt  on  Greek  islands, restaurants to avoid in Los  Angeles,  currency  deals  to  avoid  in  Istanbul, weather  to  avoid  in  London,  bars to go everywhere. Pages and pages of it. It was all there, everything he had written.

With a deepening frown of blank incomprehension he went backwards and  forwards  through  it,  stopping  here  and there at various entries.

"Tips for aliens  in  New  York:  Land  anywhere,  Central  Park, anywhere. No one will care, or indeed even notice.

"Surviving: get a job as cab driver immediately. A  cab  driver's job  is  to  drive  people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don't worry if  you  don't  know  how  the machine  works and you can't speak the language, don't understand the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area,  and  have large  green  antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous.

"If your body is really weird try showing it  to  people  in  the streets for money.

"Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds  in  the  Swulling, Noxios  or  Nausalia  systems  will  particularly  enjoy the East River, which is said to be richer  in  those  lovely  life-giving nutrients  then the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved.

“Having fun: This is the big section. It is  impossible  to  have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure centres ...”

Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked “Mode Execute Ready”  instead  of  the now old-fashioned “Access Standby” which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged “Off”.

This was a planet he had seen completely destroyed, seen with his own  two  eyes  or  rather, blinded as he had been by the hellish disruption of air and light, felt with his own two  feet  as  the ground  had  started  to  pound  at  him  like a hammer, bucking, roaring, gripped by tidal waves of  energy  pouring  out  of  the loathsome  yellow  Vogon  ships.  And  then at last, five seconds after the moment he had determined as  being  the  last  possible moment   had  already  passed,  the  gently  swinging  nausea  of dematerialization as he  and  Arthur  Dent  had  been  beamed  up through the atmosphere like a sports broadcast.

There was no mistake, there couldn't have  been.  The  Earth  had definitely  been  destroyed.  Definitely, definitely. Boiled away into space.

And yet here - he activated the Guide again - was his  own  entry on  how  you  would  set about having a good time in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, which he had always prided himself on  as  being one  of  the  most  baroque  pieces  of  invention  he  had  ever delivered. He read it again and shook his head in sheer wonder.

Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was,  and  it was  this,  that  something  very  weird  was  happening;  and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted  it  to be happening to him.

He stashed the Guide back in his satchel and hurried  out  on  to the street again.

Walking north he again passed a steel grey  limousine  parked  by

the  kerbside,  and  from  a nearby doorway he heard a soft voice

saying, "It's OK, honey, it's really OK, you got to learn to feel

good  about  it.  Look at the way the whole economy is structured

..."

Ford grinned, detoured round the next  block  which  was  now  in flames,  found  a police helicopter which was standing unattended in the street, broke into it, strapped himself  in,  crossed  his fingers and sent it hurtling inexpertly into the sky.

He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city, and once clear of them, hurtled through the black and red pall of smoke which hung permanently above it.

Ten minutes later, with all the copter's sirens blaring  and  its rapid-fire  cannon  blasting  at  random  into  the  clouds, Ford Prefect brought it careering down among the gantries and  landing lights  at  Han Dold spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic, startled and very noisy gnat.

Since he hadn't damaged it too much he was able to  trade  it  in for a first class ticket on the next ship leaving the system, and settled into one of its huge, voluptuous body-hugging seats.

This was going to be fun, he thought  to  himself,  as  the  ship blinked  silently  across  the insane distances of deep space and the cabin service got into its full extravagant swing.

“Yes please,” he said  to  the  cabin  attendants  whenever  they glided up to offer him anything at all.

He smiled with a curious kind of manic joy as  he  flipped  again through  the  mysteriously re-instated entry on the planet Earth.  He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now  be able  to  attend  to,  and  was  terribly  pleased  that life had suddenly furnished him with a serious goal to achieve.

It suddenly occurred to him to wonder where Arthur Dent was,  and if he knew.

Arthur Dent was one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven light years away in a Saab, and anxious.

Behind him in the backseat was a girl who had made him crack  his head  on the door as he climbed in. He didn't know if it was just because she was the first female of his own species that  he  had laid  eyes  on  in  years,  or what it was, but he felt stupefied with, with ... This is absurd, he told  himself.  Calm  down,  he told himself. You are not, he continued to himself in the firmest internal voice he could muster, in a fit and rational state.  You have  just hitch-hiked over a hundred thousand light years across the galaxy, you are very tired, a little confused  and  extremely vulnerable. Relax, don't panic, concentrate on breathing deeply.

He twisted round in his seat.

“Are you sure she's all right?” he said again.

Beyond the fact that she was, to him, heartthumpingly  beautiful, he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was, the exact shading of her hair. And nor could he ask her  anything about herself because, sadly, she was completely unconscious.

“She's just drugged,” said her brother, shrugging, not moving his eyes from the road ahead.

“And that's all right, is it?” said Arthur, in alarm.

“Suits me,” he said.

“Ah,” said Arthur. “Er,” he added after a moment's thought.

The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.

After an initial flurry of opening hellos, he and Russell  -  the wonderful  girl's  brother's  name  was Russell, a name which, to Arthur's mind, always suggested burly men with  blond  moustaches and blow-dried hair, who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirtfronts and would then have to  be forcibly restrained from commentating on snooker matches - had quickly discovered they didn't like each other at all.

Russell was a burly man. He had a blond moustache. His  hair  was fine and blow dried. To be fair to him - though Arthur didn't see any necessity for this beyond the sheer mental exercise of  it  - he,  Arthur, was looking pretty grim himself. A man can't cross a hundred thousand light years, mostly in  other  people's  baggage compartments,  without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

“She's not a junkie,” said Russell suddenly,  as  if  he  clearly thought  that  someone  else  in  the  car might be. “She's under sedation.”

“But that's terrible,” said Arthur, twisting round to look at her again.  She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across  her  face,  obscuring it.

“What's the matter with her, is she ill?”

“No,” said Russell, “merely barking mad.”

“What?” said Arthur, horrified.

“Loopy, completely bananas. I'm taking her back to  the  hospital and  telling  them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog.”

“A hedgehog?”

Russell hooted his horn fiercely at the car that came  round  the corner towards them half-way on to their side of the road, making them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.

“Well, maybe not a hedgehog,” he said  after  he'd  settled  down again.  “Though  it would probably be simpler to deal with if she did. If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably  you  just give  'em  a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down  again  when  they  feel better.  At  least medical science could deal with it, that's the point. Seems that's no good enough for Fenny, though.”

“Fenny ...?”

“You know what I got her for Christmas?”

“Well, no.”

“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?”

“This,” said Fenny.

Arthur whirled round in his seat and  stared  into  her  suddenly open  but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn't in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked  once,  and  then she was sleeping peacefully.

“What did she say?” he asked anxiously.

“She said `this'.”

“This what?”

“This what? How the heck  should  I  know?  This  hedgehog,  that chimney  pot,  the  other  pair  of Don Alfonso's tweezers. She's barking mad, I thought I'd mentioned that.”

“You don't seem to care very much.” Arthur tried  to  say  it  as matter-of-factly as possible but it didn't seem to work.

“Look, buster ...”

“OK, I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I  didn't  mean  it  to sound   like  that,”  said  Arthur.  “I  know  you  care  a  lot, obviously,” he added, lying. “I know that you have to  deal  with it  somehow.  You'll  have  to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.”

He stared furiously out of the window.

He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in his  head  on  this  night as he returned to the home that he had thought had vanished into oblivion for ever,  the  one  that  was compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he knew nothing other than that she had said “this” to him, and that he wouldn't wish her brother on a Vogon.

“So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned?” he went on to say as quickly as he could.

“Look, this is my sister, I don't even know why  I'm  talking  to you about ...”

“OK, I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd better let me out. This is ...”

At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them through a sieve.

Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as  the  sky blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating to pass a  lorry  marked  “McKeena's  All-Weather  Haulage”.  The tension eased as the rain subsided.

“It started with all that business of the CIA agent they found in the  reservoir,  when  everybody  had  all the hallucinations and everything, you remember?”

Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitch-hiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

“No,” he said.

“That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a cafe somewhere.  Rickmansworth.  Don't know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up,  calmly  announced that   she   had   undergone  some  extraordinary  revelation  or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally  collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich.”

Arthur winced. “I'm very sorry to hear that,” he  said  a  little stiffly.

Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

“So what,” said Arthur in an attempt to  piece  things  together, “was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?”

“Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead.”

“But what ...”

“Come on,  you  remember  all  that  stuff.  The  hallucinations.  Everyone  said  it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that  instead  of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they'd been invaded.”

“What hallucinations were those exactly ...?” said  Arthur  in  a rather quiet voice.

“What do you mean, what hallucinations?  I'm  talking  about  all that  stuff  with  the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we're going to die, and then pop,  they  vanished  as  the effect wore off. The CIA denied it which meant it must be true.”

Arthur's head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something to  steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little opening and closing movements as if it was on  his  mind  to  say something, but nothing emerged.

“Anyway,” continued Russell, “whatever drug it was it didn't seem to  wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack  a lunatic asylum with a banana, so ...” He shrugged.

“The Vogon ...” squeaked Arthur. “The yellow ships ... vanished?”

“Well, of  course  they  did,  they  were  hallucinations,”  said Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. “You trying to say you don't remember any of this? Where have you been for heaven's sake?”

This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that  he half-leapt out of his seat with shock.

“Christ!!!” yelled Russell, fighting to control the car which was suddenly  trying  to  skid.  He  pulled  it out of the path of an oncoming lorry and swerved up on to a  grass  bank.  As  the  car lurched  to  a  halt,  the  girl  in  the back was thrown against Russell's seat and collapsed awkwardly.

Arthur twisted round in horror.

“Is she all right?” he blurted out.

Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair.

He tugged at his blond moustache. He turned to Arthur.

“Would you please,” he said, “let go of the handbrake?”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 6

From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a further  mile to  the turning, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a  further  three  miles  of winding country lane.

The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur  watched  it  go,  as stunned  as  a  man  might  be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years,  suddenly  discovers  that  he  had merely been wearing too large a hat.

He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some salient  fact  which  would  fall into place and make sense of an otherwise utterly bewildering Universe,  but  since  the  salient fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk, and maybe  even some good painful blisters, would help to reassure him of his own existence at least, if not his sanity.

It was 10.30 when he arrived,  a  fact  he  discovered  from  the steamed  and  greasy  window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which there had hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock  which featured  a  picture  of  an  emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.

This was the pub at which he had  passed  the  fateful  lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire planet Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished. No,  damn it,  had  been  demolished,  because  if it hadn't then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he  had got  there  if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling  him  were  merely  drug-induced  hallucinations,  and yet if it had been demolished, what was he currently standing on ...?

He jammed the brake on this line of  thought  because  it  wasn't going  to  get  him any further than it had the last twenty times he'd been over it.

He started again.

This was the pub at which he had  passed  the  fateful  lunchtime during  which  whatever  it was had happened that he was going to sort out later had happened, and ...

It still didn't make sense.

He started again.

This was the pub in which ...

This was a pub.

Pubs served drinks and he couldn't half do with one.

Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last  arrived at  a  conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with, even if it wasn't the one he had set out to achieve, he strode  towards  the door.

And stopped.

A small black wire-haired terrier ran out from behind a low  wall and then, catching sight of Arthur, began to snarl.

Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to  an advertising  friend  of  his,  and  was  called Know-Nothing-Bozo because the way its hair stood up on its head it reminded  people of  the  President of the United States, and the dog knew Arthur, or at least should do. It was a stupid dog, could not  even  read an  autocue,  which  way  why some people had protested about its name, but it should at least have been able to  recognize  Arthur instead  of  standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur was the most fearful apparition ever to intrude  upon  its  feeble-witted life.

This prompted Arthur to go and peer at  the  window  again,  this time with an eye not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.

Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context, he had to admit that the dog had a point.

He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare  birds with,  and  there was no doubt but that to go into the pub in his present condition would excite comments of a  raucous  kind,  and worse  still, there would doubtless be several people in there at the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be  bound  to  bombard him  with questions which, at the moment, he felt ill-equipped to deal with.

Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of  Know-Nothing-Bozo  the Non-Wonder  Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from one of Will's own commercials  for  being  incapable  of  knowing which  dog  food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that the meat in all the other bowls had had engine  oil  poured  over it.

Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, here was his car,  a  grey  Porsche  928S with a sign in the back window which read, “My other car is also a Porsche.” Damn him.

He stared at it and realized that he had just  learned  something he hadn't known before.

Will Smithers, like most of  the  overpaid  and  under-scrupulous bastards  Arthur knew in advertising made a point of changing his car every August so that he could tell people his accountant made him  do  it,  though the truth was that his accountant was trying like hell to stop him, what with all the alimony he had  to  pay, and  so  on  -  and  this  was the same car Arthur remembered him having before. The number plate proclaimed its year.

Given that it was now winter, and that the event which had caused Arthur  so  much  trouble  eight  of  his  personal years ago had occurred at the beginning of September, less than  six  or  seven months could have passed here.

He stood terribly still for a moment  and  let  Know-Nothing-Bozo jump  up  and  down  yapping at him. He was suddenly stunned by a realization he could no longer avoid, which was this: he was  now an alien on his own world. Try as he might, no one was even to be able to believe his story. Not only did it sound perfectly potty, but it was flatly contradicted by the simplest observable facts.

Was this really the Earth? Was there  the  slightest  possibility that he had made some extraordinary mistake?

The pub in front of him was unbearably familiar to him  in  every detail - every brick, every piece of peeling paint; and inside he could sense its familiar stuffy, noisy warmth, its exposed beams, its  unauthentic  cast-iron  light  fittings, its bar sticky with beer that people he knew had put their elbows in,  overlooked  by cardboard  cutouts  of  girls with packets of peanuts stapled all over their breasts. It was all the stuff of his home, his world.

He even knew this blasted dog.

“Hey, Know-Nothing!”

The sound of Will Smithers' voice meant he had to decide what  do to quickly. If he stood his ground he would be discovered and the whole circus would begin. To hide would only postpone the moment, and it was bitterly cold now.

The fact that it was Will made the choice easier. It wasn't  that Arthur  disliked  him  as  such - Will was quite fun. It was just that he was fun in such  an  exhausting  way  because,  being  in advertising,  he  always  wanted  you to know how much fun he was having and where he had got his jacket from.

Mindful of this, Arthur hid behind a van.

“Hey, Know-Nothing, what's up?”

The door opened and Will  came  out,  wearing  a  leather  flying jacket  that  he'd  got  a  mate  of  his  at  the  Road Research Laboratory to crash a car into specially, in order  to  get  that battered  look.  Know-Nothing yelped with delight and, having got the attention it wanted, was happy to forget Arthur.

Will was with some friends, and they had a game they played  with the dog.

“Commies!” they all shouted  at  the  dog  in  chorus.  “Commies, commies, commies!!!”

The dog went berserk with barking, prancing up and down,  yapping its  little  heart  out,  beside itself in transports of ecstatic rage.  They  all  laughed  and  cheered  it  on,  then  gradually dispersed to their various cars and disappeared into the night.

Well that clears one thing up, thought  Arthur  from  behind  the van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 7

His house was still there.

How or why, he had no idea. He had decided to go and have a  look while  he  was  waiting for the pub to empty, so that he could go and ask the landlord for a bed for the night when  everyone  else had gone. And there it was.

He hurriedly let himself in with the key he kept  under  a  stone frog in the garden, because, astoundingly, the phone was ringing.

He had heard it faintly all the way up the lane and  had  started to run as soon as he realized where the sound was coming from.

The door had  to  be  forced  open  because  of  the  astonishing accumulation  of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck on  what  he  would  later  discover  were  fourteen   identical, personally  addressed  invitations  to apply for a credit card he already had, seventeen identical  threatening  letters  for  non-payment  of  bills  on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three identical letters saying that he personally  had  been  specially selected  as  a  man of taste and discrimination who knew what he wanted and where he  was  going  in  today's  sophisticated  jet-setting  world  and  would  he  therefore like to buy some grotty wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten.

He rammed himself through the relatively narrow opening  afforded by  all  this,  stumbled  through  a  pile of wine offers that no discriminating connoisseur would want to miss, slithered  over  a heap of beach villa holidays, blundered up the dark stairs to his bedroom and got to the phone just as it stopped ringing.

He collapsed, panting, on to his cold, musty-smelling bed and for a  few  minutes stopped trying to prevent the world from spinning round his head in the way it obviously wanted to.

When it had enjoyed its little spin and had calmed  down  a  bit, Arthur  reached  out  for  the bedside light, not expecting it to come on. To his surprise it did. This appealed to Arthur's  sense of  logic.  Since  the Electricity Board cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that  they should  leave  him  connected  when he didn't. Sending them money obviously only drew attention to yourself.

The room was much as he had left  it,  i.e.  festeringly  untidy, though  the  effect  was muted a little by a thick layer of dust.  Half-read books and magazines nestled amongst piles of  half-used towels.  Half  pairs  of  socks  reclined  in  half-drunk cups of coffee. What was once a half-eaten sandwich had  now  half-turned into  something  that  Arthur entirely didn't want to know about.  Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you'd start the evolution of life all over again.

There was only one thing in the room that was different.

For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one  thing  that  was different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.

It was next to a battered old television on  which  it  was  only possible  to  watch  Open University Study Courses, because if it tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.

It was a box.

Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.

It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to  it.  It  was  a cubic  grey  box,  just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.

He got up, walked over and touched it in  surprise.  Whatever  it was  was  clearly  gift-wrapped,  neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it.

Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to  the  bed.  He brushed  the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box.

He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass  globe, nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom,  or,  as Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fish bowl.

It was made of the most wonderful  glass  perfectly  transparent, yet  with  an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making.

Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the  most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into  the  box,  but  other  than  the tissue  paper  there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing.

He turned  the  bowl  round  again.  It  was  wonderful.  It  was exquisite. But it was a fish bowl.

He tapped it with his thumbnail and  it  rang  with  a  deep  and glorious  chime  which  was  sustained  for  longer  than  seemed possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream.

Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and  this  time  the light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different angle and glittered on some fine abrasions  on  the  fish  bowl's surface.  He  held  it  up, adjusting the angle to the light, and suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed on the glass.

“So Long,” they said, “and Thanks ...”

And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing.

For fully five more  minutes  he  turned  the  object  round  and around,  held  it to the light at different angles, tapped it for its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the  shadowy letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to  the television.  He  shook  the  little  Babel  fish from his ear and dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be  needing  it any more, except for watching foreign movies.

He returned to lie on his bed, and turned out the light.

He lay still and quiet.  He  absorbed  the  enveloping  darkness, slowly relaxed his limbs from end to end, eased and regulated his breathing, gradually cleared his mind of all thought, closed  his eyes and was completely incapable of getting to sleep.

The night was uneasy with rain. The rain  clouds  themselves  had now  moved on and were currently concentrating their attention on a small transport cafe just  outside  Bournemouth,  but  the  sky through  which they had passed had been disturbed by them and now wore a damply ruffled air, as if it  didn't  know  what  else  it might not do it further provoked.

The moon was out in a watery way. It looked like a ball of  paper from  the  back  pocket  of  jeans that have just come out of the washing machine, and which only time and ironing would tell if it was an old shopping list or a five pound note.

The wind flicked about a little, like the tail of a horse  that's trying  to  decide  what sort of mood it's in tonight, and a bell somewhere chimed midnight.

A skylight creaked open.

It was stiff and had to be jiggled and persuaded a little because the  frame was slightly rotten and the hinges had at some time in its life been rather sensibly painted over, but eventually it was open.

A strut was found to prop it and a figure struggled out into  the narrow gully between the opposing pitches of the roof.

It stood and watched the sky in silence.

The figure was  completely  unrecognizable  as  the  wild-looking creature  who had burst crazily into the cottage a little over an hour ago. Gone was the ragged threadbare dressing  gown,  smeared with  the  mud  of  a  hundred  worlds,  stained  with  junk food condiment from a hundred grimy spaceports, gone was  the  tangled mane  of  hair,  gone  the  long  and  knotted beard, flourishing ecosystem and all.

Instead,  there  was  Arthur  Dent  the  smooth  and  casual,  in corduroys  and a chunky sweater. His hair was cropped and washed, his chin clean shaven. Only the eyes still said that whatever  it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop.

They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out  at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the  same  brain.  There  had  been  no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.

The night seemed like an alive thing to him at this  moment,  the dark earth around him a being in which he was rooted.

He could feel like a tingle on distant nerve ends the flood of  a far  river,  the  roll  of  invisible  hills,  the  knot of heavy rainclouds parked somewhere away to the south.

He could sense, too, the  thrill  of  being  a  tree,  which  was something  he  hadn't expected. He knew that it felt good to curl your toes in the earth, but he'd never  realized  it  could  feel quite  as good as that. He could sense an almost unseemly wave of pleasure reaching out to him all the way from the New Forest.  He must try this summer, he thought, and see what having leaves felt like.

From another direction he felt the sensation  of  being  a  sheep startled   by   a   flying   saucer,   but   it   was   virtually indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep  startled  by anything  else  it  ever encountered, for they were creatures who learned very little on their journey through life, and  would  be startled  to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by all the green stuff in the fields.

He was surprised to find he could feel the sheep  being  startled by  the  sun  that  morning,  and  the  morning before, and being startled by a clump of trees the day before  that.  He  could  go further  and  further  back,  but  it  got  dull  because  all it consisted of was sheep  being  startled  by  things  they'd  been startled by the day before.

He left the sheep and let his mind  drift  outwards  sleepily  in developing ripples. It felt the presence of other minds, hundreds of them, thousands in a web, some  sleepy,  some  sleeping,  some terribly excited, one fractured.

One fractured.

He passed it fleetingly and tried to feel for it  again,  but  it eluded  him like the other card with an apple on it in Pelmanism.  He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew  instinctively  who it  was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to  be  true,  instinct  is  a  very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

He instinctively knew that it was Fenny and  that  he  wanted  to find  her;  but  he  could  not. By straining too much for it, he could feel he was losing this strange new faculty, so he  relaxed the search and let his mind wander more easily once more.

And again, he felt the fracture.

Again he couldn't find it. This time, whatever his  instinct  was busy  telling  him it was all right to believe, he wasn't certain that it was Fenny - or perhaps it was a different  fracture  this time.  It  had  the  same disjointed quality but it seemed a more general feeling of fracture, deeper, not a single mind, maybe not a mind at all. It was different.

He let his mind sink slowly and widely into the Earth,  rippling, seeping, sinking.

He was following the Earth through its days,  drifting  with  the rhythms  of  its  myriad  pulses, seeping through the webs of its life, swelling with its tides, turning with  its  weight.  Always the fracture kept returning, a dull disjointed distant ache.

And now he was flying through a land  of  light;  the  light  was time,  the  tides  of  it were days receding. The fracture he had sensed, the second fracture,  lay  in  the  distance  before  him across  the  land,  the  thickness  of  a  single hair across the dreaming landscape of the days of Earth.

And suddenly he was upon it.

He danced dizzily over the edge as the  dreamland  dropped  sheer away beneath him, a stupefying precipice into nothing, him wildly twisting, clawing  at  nothing,  flailing  in  horrifying  space, spinning, falling.

Across the jagged chasm had been another land, another  time,  an older  world,  not fractured from, but hardly joined: two Earths.  He woke.

A  cold  breeze  brushed  the  feverish  sweat  standing  on  his forehead.  The  nightmare  was spent and so, he felt, was he. His shoulders dropped, he gently rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers.  At last he was sleepy as well as very tired. As to what it meant, if it meant anything at all, he would think about it in the  morning;  for now he would go to bed and sleep. His own bed, his own sleep.

He could see his house in the distance and wondered why this was.  It  was  silhouetted  against the moonlight and he recognized its rather dull blockish shape. He looked about him and noticed  that he  was about eighteen inches above the rose bushes of one of his neighbours,  John  Ainsworth.  His  rose  bushes  were  carefully tended,  pruned  back  for  the  winter,  strapped  to  canes and labelled, and Arthur wondered what he was doing  above  them.  He wondered  what was holding him there, and when he discovered that nothing was holding him there he crashed awkwardly to the ground.

He picked himself up, brushed himself down and  hobbled  back  to his house on a sprained ankle. He undressed and toppled into bed.

While he was asleep the phone  rang  again.  It  rang  for  fully fifteen  minutes  and  caused  him  to turn over twice. It never, however, stood a chance of waking him up.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 8

Arthur awoke feeling wonderful, absolutely  fabulous,  refreshed, overjoyed  to  be home, bouncing with energy, hardly disappointed at all to discover it was the middle of February.

He almost danced to the  fridge,  found  the  three  least  hairy things  in  it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that  time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he's picked up without knowing it  in  the Flargathon  Gas  Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of  the  Western  Hemisphere, blinded  the  other  half  and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.

He felt strong, he felt healthy. He vigorously cleared  away  the junk mail with a spade and then buried the cat.

Just as he was finishing that, the phone went, but he let it ring while he maintained a moment's respectful silence. Whoever it was would ring back if it was important.

He kicked the mud off his shoes and went back inside.

There had been a small number of significant letters in the piles of  junk  -  some  documents  from the council, dated three years earlier, relating to the proposed demolition of  his  house,  and some  other letters about the setting up of a public inquiry into the whole bypass scheme in the area; there was also an old letter from  Greenpeace,  the  ecological  pressure  group  to  which he occasionally made  contributions,  asking  for  help  with  their scheme  to  release  dolphins  and orcas from captivity, and some postcards from friends, vaguely complaining that he never got  in touch these days.

He collected these together and put  them  in  a  cardboard  file which  he marked “Things To Do”. Since he was feeling so vigorous and dynamic that morning, he even added the word “Urgent!”

He unpacked his towel and another few odd bits  and  pieces  from the  plastic  bag he had acquired at the Port Brasta Mega-Market.  The slogan on the side was a clever and elaborate pun  in  Lingua Centauri  which  was  completely  incomprehensible  in  any other language and therefore entirely pointless for a Duty Free Shop at a spaceport. The bag also had a hole in it so he threw it away.

He realized with a sudden twinge that something  else  must  have dropped  out  in  the  small  spacecraft  that had brought him to Earth, kindly going out of its way to drop him right  beside  the A303.  He  had  lost his battered and spaceworn copy of the thing which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable  wastes of space he had traversed. He had lost the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Well, he told himself, this time I really  won't  be  needing  it again.

He had some calls to make.

He had decided how to deal with the mass  of  contradictions  his return  journey  precipitated,  which  was  that  he would simply brazen it out.

He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to  his  department head.

“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven't been  in  for six months but I've gone mad.”

"Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something  like  that.

Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?"

“When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?”

“Sometime in spring I think.”

“I'll be in shortly after that.”

“Rightyho.”

He flipped through the Yellow Pages and  made  a  short  list  of numbers to try.

“Oh hello, is that the Old Elms Hospital? Yes, I was just phoning to see if I could have a word with Fenella, er ... Fenella - Good Lord, silly me, I'll forget my own name next, er, Fenella - isn't this ridiculous? Patient of yours, dark haired girl, came in last night ...”

“I'm afraid we don't have any patients called Fenella.”

“Oh, don't you? I mean Fiona of course, we just call her Fen ...”

“I'm sorry, goodbye.”

Click.

Six conversations along these lines began to take their  toll  on his  mood  of  vigorous,  dynamic  optimism,  and he decided that before it deserted him entirely he would take it down to the  pub and parade it a little.

He  had  had  the  perfect  idea  for   explaining   away   every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled to himself as he pushed open the door which had  so  daunted  him last night.

“Arthur!!!!”

He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes  that  stared  at  him from  all  corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he'd had in Southern California.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 9

He accepted another pint and took a pull at it.

“Of course, I had my own personal alchemist too.”

“You what?”

He was getting silly and he knew  it.  Exuberance  and  Hall  and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it had is to stop you being wary of things, and the point  at  which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.

“Oh yes,” he insisted with a happy glazed smile. “It's  why  I've lost so much weight.”

“What?” said his audience.

“Oh yes,” he said  again.  “The  Californians  have  rediscovered alchemy. Oh yes.”

He smiled again.

“Only,” he said, “it's in a much more useful form than that which in  ...”  He paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble in his head. “In which the ancients used to practise  it.  Or  at least,” he added, “failed to practise it. They couldn't get it to work you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn't cut it.”

“Nostradamus?” said one of his audience.

“I didn't think he was an alchemist,” said another.

“I thought,” said a third, “he was a seer.”

“He became a seer,” said Arthur to his  audience,  the  component parts  of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, “because he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that.”

He took another pull at his beer. It was  something  he  had  not tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.

“What has alchemy got to do,” asked a bit of the audience,  “with losing weight?”

“I'm glad you asked that,” said Arthur. “Very glad.  And  I  will now  tell  you  what  the  connection  is between ...” He paused.  “Between those two things. The things you  mentioned.  I'll  tell you.”

He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like  watching  oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.

“They've discovered how to turn excess body fat  into  gold,”  he said, in a sudden blur of coherence.

“You're kidding.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “no,” he corrected himself, “they have.”

He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.

“Have you been to California?” he demanded. “Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?”

Three members of his audience said  they  had  and  that  he  was talking nonsense.

“You haven't seen anything,” insisted Arthur. “Oh yes,” he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.

“The evidence,” he said, pointing at himself, and not missing  by more  than  a  couple  of  inches, “is before your eyes. Fourteen hours in a trance,” he said, “in a tank. In a trance. I was in  a tank.  I  think,”  he  added after a thoughtful pause, “I already said that.”

He waited patiently while the next round was duly distributed. He composed  the  next bit of his story in his mind, which was going to be something about the tank needing to be orientated  along  a line  dropped  perpendicularly  from  the Pole Star to a baseline drawn between Mars and Venus, and was about to  start  trying  to say it when he decided to give it a miss.

“Long time,” he said instead, “in a tank. In a trance.” He looked round severely at his audience, to make sure it was all following attentively.

He resumed.

“Where was I?” he said.

“In a trance,” said one.

“In a tank,” said another.

“Oh yes,” said Arthur. “Thank you. And slowly,” he said  pressing onwards,  “slowly,  slowly  slowly,  all your excess body fat ...  turns ... to ...” he paused for effect, “subcoo  ...  subyoo  ...  subtoocay ...” - he paused for breath - “subcutaneous gold, which you can have surgically removed. Getting out of the tank is hell.  What did you say?”

“I was just clearing my throat.”

“I think you doubt me.”

“I was clearing my throat.”

“She was clearing her throat,” confirmed a  significant  part  of the audience in a low rumble.

“Oh yes,” said  Arthur,  “all  right.  And  you  then  split  the proceeds  ...”  he  paused  again for a maths break, “fifty-fifty with the alchemist. Make a lot of money!”

He looked swayingly around at his audience, and  could  not  help but be aware of an air of scepticism about their jumbled faces.

He felt very affronted by this.

“How else,”  he  demanded,  “could  I  afford  to  have  my  face dropped?”

Friendly arms began to help him home. “Listen,” he protested,  as the  cold  February breeze brushed his face, “looking lived-in is all the rage in California at the moment. You've got to  look  as if you've seen the Galaxy. Life, I mean. You've got to look as if you've seen life. That's what I got. A face drop. Give  me  eight years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn't come back into fashion or I've wasted a lot of money.”

He lapsed into silence for a while as the friendly arms continued to help him along the lane to his house.

“Got in yesterday,” he mumbled. “I'm very happy to  be  home.  Or somewhere very like it ...”

“Jet  lag,”  muttered  one  of  his  friends.  “Long  trip   from California. Really mucks you up for a couple of days.”

“I don't think he's been there  at  all,”  muttered  another.  “I wonder where he has been. And what's happened to him.”

After a little sleep Arthur got up and pottered round the house a bit.  He  felt  woozy  and a little low, still disoriented by the journey. He wondered how he was going to find Fenny.

He sat and looked at the fish  bowl.  He  tapped  it  again,  and despite  being  full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its deep and resonant chime as clearly and mesmerically as before.

Someone is trying to thank me, he thought to himself. He wondered who, and for what.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 10

"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and twenty seconds.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

Ford Prefect suppressed a little  giggle  of  evil  satisfaction, realized  that  he  had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

He switched the incoming signal through from the Sub-Etha Net  to the  ship's  hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted, sing-song voice spoke out with remarkable clarity round the cabin.

"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and thirty seconds.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

He tweaked the volume up just a little while  keeping  a  careful eye on a rapidly changing table of figures on the ship's computer display. For the length of time he had in mind, the  question  of power  consumption became significant. He didn't want a murder on his conscience.

"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and  forty seconds.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

He checked around the  small  ship.  He  walked  down  the  short corridor. “At the third stroke ...”

He stuck his head into  the  small,  functional,  gleaming  steel bathroom.

“it will be ...”

It sounded fine in there.

He looked into the tiny sleeping quarters.

“... one ... thirty-two ...”

It sounded a bit muffled. There was a towel hanging over  one  of the speakers. He took down the towel.

“... and fifty seconds.”

Fine.

He checked out the packed cargo hold, and wasn't at all satisfied with  the sound. There was altogether too much crated junk in the way. He stepped back out and waited for  the  door  to  seal.  He broke open a closed control panel and pushed the jettison button.  He didn't know why he hadn't thought of that before. A  whooshing rumbling  noise  died  away quickly into silence. After a pause a slight hiss could be heard again.

It stopped.

He waited for the green light to show and then  opened  the  door again on the now empty cargo hold.

“... one ... thirty-three ... and fifty seconds.”

Very nice.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

He then went and had a last thorough examination of the emergency suspended  animation  chamber,  which  was  where he particularly wanted it to be heard.

“At the third stroke it will be  one  ...  thirty  ...  four  ...  precisely.”

He shivered  as  he  peered  down  through  the  heavily  frosted covering  at  the  dim bulk of the form within. One day, who knew when, it would wake, and when it did, it would know what time  it was. Not exactly local time, true, but what the heck.

He double-checked the computer display  above  the  freezer  bed, dimmed the lights and checked it again.

“At the third stroke it will be ...”

He tiptoed out and returned to the control cabin.

“... one ... thirty-four and twenty seconds.”

The voice sounded as clear as if he was hearing it over  a  phone in London, which he wasn't, not by a long way.

He gazed out into  the  inky  night.  The  star  the  size  of  a brilliant  biscuit  crumb  he  could  see  in  the  distance  was Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather stilted, sing-song voice was being received, Pleiades Zeta.

The bright orange curve that filled over half  the  visible  area was  the  giant  gas  planet  Sesefras  Magna, where the Xaxisian battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a  small cool blue moon, Epun.

“At the third stroke it will be ...”

For twenty minutes he sat and watched as the gap between the ship and  Epun  closed,  as the ship's computer teased and kneaded the numbers that would bring it into a loop around the  little  moon, close   the  loop  and  keep  it  there,  orbiting  in  perpetual obscurity.

“One ... fifty-nine ...”

His original plan had been to close down all external  signalling and  radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as possible unless you were actually looking at it,  but  then  he'd had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous beam, pencil-thin, broadcasting the incoming time signal  to  the planet  of the signal's origin, which it would not reach for four hundred years, travelling at light  speed,  but  where  it  would probably cause something of a stir when it did.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

He sniggered.

He didn't like to think of himself as  the  sort  of  person  who giggled  or  sniggered,  but  he  had  to  admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

“At the third stroke ...”

The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit round a little known and never visited moon. Almost perfect.

One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation  of the  launching  of  the  ship's  little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing actions,  reactions,  tangential  forces,  all  the  mathematical poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.

Before he left, he turned out the lights.

As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft  zipped  out  on the  beginning  of  its  three-day  journey to the orbiting space station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a  long  pencil-thin  beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey still.

“At the third stroke, it will be two ... thirteen ...  and  fifty seconds.”

He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud  but  he didn't have the room.

“Beep ... beep ... beep.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 11

“April showers I hate especially.”

However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed  determined to  talk  to  him.  He  wondered  if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn't seem to be one free in the  whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.

“Bloody April showers. Hate hate hate.”

Arthur stared, frowning, out of the window. A light, sunny  spray of  rain  hung  over the motorway. Two months he'd been back now.  Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably  easy.

People  had  such  extraordinarily short memories, including him.  Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now  seemed  to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped from the tv and now kept  in  the  back  of  a  cupboard  without bothering to watch.

One effect that still lingered though, was his joy at being back.  Now  that  the  Earth's  atmosphere  had closed over his head for good,  he  thought,  wrongly,  everything  within  it  gave   him extraordinary  pleasure.  Looking  at  the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.

“Well, I like them,” he said suddenly, “and for all  the  obvious reasons.  They're light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good.”

The man snorted derisively.

“That's what they all say,” he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.

He was a lorry driver. Arthur  knew  this  because  his  opening, unprovoked  remark  had been, “I'm a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic isn't it? Bloody ironic.”

If there was a sequitur hidden in this  remark,  Arthur  had  not been  able  to  divine  it  and  had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.

But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now.  “They  all  say  that  about  bloody April showers,” he said. “So bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather.”

He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something about the government.

“What I want to know is this,” he said, “if it's going to be nice weather,  why,”  he almost spat, “can't it be nice without bloody raining?”

Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

“Well, there you go,” he said and instead got up himself. “Bye.”

He stopped off at the service  station  shop,  then  walked  back through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain on his face. There was even, he  noticed,  a  faint  rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.

He climbed into his battered  but  adored  old  black  Golf  GTi, squealed  the  tyres,  and  headed out past the islands of petrol pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.

He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere  of  the  Earth  had closed finally and for ever above his head.

He was wrong to think that it  would  ever  be  possible  to  put behind  him  the  tangled  web  of  irresolutions  into which his galactic travels had dragged him.

He was wrong to think he could now forget  that  the  big,  hard, oily,   dirty,  rainbow-hung  Earth  on  which  he  lived  was  a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot  lost  in  the  unimaginable infinity of the Universe.

He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.

The reason he was wrong was standing by the  slip  road  under  a small umbrella.

His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.

“Fenny!” he shouted.

Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car,  he  hit her  instead  with  the  car door as he leant across and flung it open at her.

It caught her hand and knocked  away  her  umbrella,  which  then bowled wildly away across the road.

“Shit!” yelled Arthur as helpfully as he cold, leapt out  of  his own  door,  narrowly  avoided  being  run  down by McKeena's All-Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as  it  ran  down  Fenny's umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.

The  umbrella  lay  like  a  recently  swatted   daddy-long-legs, expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a little.

He picked it up.

“Er,” he said. There didn't seem to be a lot of point in offering the thing back to her.

“How did you know my name?” she said.

“Er, well,” he said. “Look, I'll get you another one ...”

He looked at her and tailed off.

She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a  pale and  serious  face.  Standing  still,  alone,  she  seemed almost sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal  garden.  She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.

But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as  if  she  suddenly arrived  from  somewhere.  Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body.  The  effect  was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.

She grinned, tossed her bag into the back and  swivelled  herself into the front seat.

“Don't worry about the umbrella,” she said to him as she  climbed in.  “It  was  my  brother's  and  he  can't  have liked it or he wouldn't have given it to me.” She  laughed  and  pulled  on  her seatbelt. “You're not a friend of my brother's are you?”

“No.”

Her voice was the only part of her which didn't say “Good”.

Her physical presence there  in  the  car,  his  car,  was  quite extraordinary  to  Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly  think  or  breathe,  and  hoped  that neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were in trouble.

So what he had experienced in the other car, her  brother's  car, the  night  he  had  returned  exhausted  and bewildered from his nightmare years in the stars had not been the  unbalance  of  the moment,  or,  if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall  off  whatever  it  is  that  well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.

“So ...” he said, hoping to  kick  the  conversation  off  to  an exciting start.

“He was meant to pick me up - my brother - but phoned to  say  he couldn't make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look at the calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided  to  hitch.  So.”

“So.”

“So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know  my name.”

“Perhaps we ought to first sort out,” said Arthur,  looking  back over  his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic, “where I'm taking you.”

Very close, he hoped, or long away. Close would  mean  she  lived near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.

“I'd like to go to Taunton,” she said,  “please.  If  that's  all right. It's not far. You can drop me at ...”

“You live in Taunton?” he said, hoping that he'd managed to sound merely  curious  rather  than  ecstatic.  Taunton was wonderfully close to him. He could ...

“No, London,” she said. “There's a train in just under an hour.”

It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away up the  motorway. He wondered what to do, and while he was wondering with horror heard himself saying, “Oh, I can take you to  London.  Let me take you to London ...”

Bungling idiot. Why on Earth had he said  “let”  in  that  stupid way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.

“Are you going to London?” she asked.

“I wasn't,” he said, “but ...” Bungling idiot.

“It's very kind of you,” she said, “but really no. I like  to  go by train.” And suddenly she was gone. Or rather, that part of her which brought her to life was gone. She looked  rather  distantly out of the window and hummed lightly to herself.

He couldn't believe it.

Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he'd blown it.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated  evidence  about  the  way  grown  men behave, do not behave like this.

Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.

He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled. He  was going to have to do something dramatic.

“Fenny,” he said.

She glanced round sharply at him.

“You still haven't told me how ...”

“Listen,” said Arthur, “I will tell  you,  though  the  story  is rather strange. Very strange.”

She was still looking at him, but said nothing.

“Listen ...”

“You said that.”

"Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things

I  must  tell you ... a story I must tell you which would ..." He

was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of  "Thy

knotted  and combined locks to part, and each particular quill to

stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine" but  didn't

think  he  could  carry  it  off  and  didn't  like  the hedgehog

reference.

“... which would take more than five miles,” he  settled  for  in the end, rather lamely he was afraid.

“Well ...”

“Just supposing,” he said, “just supposing” - he didn't know what was  coming  next,  so he thought he'd just sit back and listen - “that there was some extraordinary way in  which  you  were  very important  to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five  miles  and  I  was  a  stupid  idiot  at knowing how to say something very important to someone I've only just  met  and  not crash  into  lorries at the same time, what would you say ...” he paused helplessly, and looked at her, “I ... should do?”

“Watch the road!” she yelped.

“Shit!”

He narrowly avoided careering into the side of a hundred  Italian washing machines in a German lorry.

“I think,” she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, “you should buy me a drink before my train goes.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 12

There is, for some reason, something especially grim  about  pubs near  stations,  a  very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.

Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.

There is a feeling  which  persists  in  England  that  making  a sandwich  interesting,  attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

“Make 'em dry,”  is  the  instruction  buried  somewhere  in  the collective national consciousness, “make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.”

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on  Saturday  lunchtimes  that the  British  seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.

If there is  anything  worse  than  the  sandwiches,  it  is  the sausages  which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a  plastic pin in the shape of a chef's hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

The sausages are for the ones who know what their  sins  are  and wish to atone for something specific.

“There must be somewhere better,” said Arthur.

“No time,” said Fenny, glancing at her watch. “My train leaves in half an hour.”

They sat at a small wobbly table. On it were some dirty  glasses, and  some  soggy  beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas in  it.  And  a couple of sausages. He didn't know why. He bought them for something to do while the gas settled in his glass.

The barman dunked Arthur's change in a pool of beer on  the  bar, for which Arthur thanked him.

“All right,” said Fenny, glancing at her watch, “tell me what  it is you have to tell me.”

She sounded, as well she might, extremely sceptical, and Arthur's heart  sank.  Hardly, he felt, the most conductive setting to try to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and  defensive, that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense that the mental breakdown she had  suffered  had  been  connected with  the fact that, appearances to the contrary nonwithstanding, the Earth had been demolished to make way for  a  new  hyperspace bypass,  something  which  he alone on Earth knew anything about, having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon  spaceship,  and  that furthermore  both  his body and soul ached for her unbearably and he needed to got to bed with her as soon as was humanly possible.

“Fenny,” he started.

“I wonder if you'd like to buy some tickets for our raffle?  It's just a little one.”

He glanced up sharply.

“To raise money for Anjie who's retiring.”

“What?”

“And needs a kidney machine.”

He was being leant over by  a  rather  stiffly  slim  middle-aged woman with a prim knitted suit and a prim little perm, and a prim little smile that probably got licked by prim little dogs a lot.

She was holding out a small  book  of  cloakroom  tickets  and  a collecting tin.

“Only ten pence each,” she said, “so you could probably even  buy two.  Without  breaking the bank!” She gave a tinkly little laugh and then a curiously long  sigh.  Saying  “Without  breaking  the bank”  had  obviously given her more pleasure than anything since some GIs had been billeted on her in the war.

“Er, yes, all right,”  said  Arthur,  hurriedly  digging  in  his pocket and producing a couple of coins.

With infuriating slowness, and prim theatricality, if  there  was such  a  thing, the woman tore off two tickets and handed them to Arthur.

“I do hope you win,” she said with a smile that suddenly  snapped together  like  a  piece  of advanced origami, “the prizes are so nice.”

“Yes, thank you,”  said  Arthur,  pocketing  the  tickets  rather brusquely and glancing at his watch.

He turned towards Fenny.

So did the woman with the raffle tickets.

“And what about you, young lady?” she  said.  “It's  for  Anjie's kidney  machine.  She's  retiring  you see. Yes?” She hoisted the little smile even further up her face. She would have to stop and let it go soon or the skin would surely split.

“Er, look, here you are,” said Arthur, and pushed a  fifty  pence piece at her in the hope that that would see her off.

“Oh, we are in the money, aren't we?” said the woman, with a long smiling sigh. “Down from London are we?”

“No, that's all right, really,” he said with a wave of his  hand, and  she  started  with  an  awful  deliberation to peel off five tickets, one by one.

“Oh, but you must have your tickets,” insisted the woman, “or you won't  be able to claim your prize. They're very nice prizes, you know. Very suitable.”

Arthur snatched the tickets, and said thank you as sharply as  he could.

The woman turned to Fenny once again.

“And now, what about ...”

“No!” Arthur nearly yelled. “These are for  her,”  he  explained, brandishing the five new tickets.

“Oh, I see! How nice!”

She smiled sickeningly at both of them.

“Well, I do hope you ...”

“Yes,” snapped Arthur, “thank you.”

The woman finally departed to the table next  to  theirs.  Arthur turned desperately to Fenny, and was relieved to see that she was rocking with silent laughter.

He sighed and smiled.

“Where were we?”

“You were calling me Fenny, and I was about to ask you not to.”

“What do you mean?”

She twirled the little wooden cocktail stick in her tomato juice.

“It's why I asked if you were a friend of my brother's. Or  half-brother really. He's the only one who calls me Fenny, and I'm not fond of him for it.”

“So what's ...?”

“Fenchurch.”

“What?”

“Fenchurch.”

“Fenchurch.”

She looked at him sternly.

“Yes,” she said, “and I'm watching you like  a  lynx  to  see  if you're  going  to ask the same silly question that everybody asks me until I want to scream. I shall be cross and  disappointed  if you do. Plus I shall scream. So watch it.”

She smiled, shook her hair a little forward  over  her  face  and peered at him from behind it.

“Oh,” he said, “that's a little unfair, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

“All right,” she said with a laugh, “you can  ask  me.  Might  as well get it over with. Better than have you call me Fenny all the time.”

“Presumably ...” said Arthur.

“We've only got two tickets left, you see, and since you were  so generous when I spoke to you before ...”

“What?” snapped Arthur.

The woman with the perm and the smile and the  now  nearly  empty book  of cloakroom tickets was now waving the two last ones under his nose.

“I thought I'd give the opportunity to you,  because  the  prizes are so nice.”

She wrinkled up he nose a little confidentially.

“Very tasteful. I know you'll like them. And it  is  for  Anjie's retirement present you see. We want to give her ...”

“A kidney machine, yes,” said Arthur. “Here.”

He held out two more ten  pence  pieces  to  her,  and  took  the tickets.

A thought seemed to strike the woman. It struck her very  slowly.

You could watch it coming in like a long wave on a sandy beach.

“Oh dear,” she said, “I'm not interrupting anything am I?”

She peered anxiously at both of them.

“No it's fine,” said Arthur. Everything that  could  possibly  be fine,“ he insisted, ”is fine.

“Thank you,” he added.

“I say,” she said, in a delightful ecstacy of worry, “you're  not ... in love, are you?”

“It's very hard to say,” said Arthur. “We haven't had a chance to talk yet.”

He glanced at Fenchurch. She was grinning.

The woman nodded with knowing confidentiality.

“I'll let you see the prizes in a minute,” she said, and left.

Arthur turned, with a sigh, back to the girl  that  he  found  it hard to say whether he was in love with.

“You were about to ask me,” she said, “a question.”

“Yes,” said Arthur.

“We can do it together if you like,” said Fenchurch. "Was I found

..."

“... in a handbag ...” joined in Arthur.

“... in the Left Luggage Office ...” they said together.

“... at Fenchurch street station,” they finished.

“And the answer,” said Fenchurch, “is no.”

“Fine,” said Arthur.

“I was conceived there.”

“What?”

“I was con-”

“In the Left Luggage Office?” hooted Arthur.

“No, of course not. Don't be silly.  What  would  my  parents  be doing  in  the Left Luggage Office?” she said, rather taken aback by the suggestion.

“Well, I don't know,” spluttered Arthur, “or rather ...”

“It was in the ticket queue.”

“The ...”

“The ticket queue. Or so they claim. They  refuse  to  elaborate.  They  only  say  you wouldn't believe how bored it is possible to get in the ticket queue at Fenchurch Street Station.”

She sipped demurely at her tomato juice and looked at her watch.

Arthur continued to gurgle for a moment or two.

“I'm going to have to go in a minute  or  two,”  said  Fenchurch, “and  you  haven't  begun  to  tell me whatever this terrifically extraordinary thing is that you were so  keen  to  get  off  your chest.”

“Why don't you let me drive you to London?”  said  Arthur.  “It's Saturday, I've got nothing particular to do, I'd ...”

“No,” said Fenchurch, “thank you, it's sweet of you,  but  no.  I need  to  be  by  myself  for  a  couple of days.” She smiled and shrugged.

“But ...”

“You can tell me another time. I'll give you my number.”

Arthur's heart went boom boom churn churn as she scribbled  seven figures in pencil on a scrap of paper and handed it to him.

“Now we can relax,” she said  with  a  slow  smile  which  filled Arthur till he thought he would burst.

“Fenchurch,” he said, enjoying the name as he said it. “I -”

“A box,” said a trailing voice, “of cherry  liqueurs,  and  also, and  I  know  you'll  like  this, a gramophone record of Scottish bagpipe music ...”

“Yes thank you, very nice,” insisted Arthur.

“I just thought I'd let you have a look at them,” said the permed woman, “as you're down from London ...”

She was holding them out proudly for Arthur too see. He could see that  they  were  indeed  a  box  of cherry brandy liqueurs and a record of bagpipe music. That was what they were.

“I'll let you have your drink in peace now,”  she  said,  patting Arthur  lightly  on his seething shoulder, “but I knew you'd like to see.”

Arthur re-engaged his  eyes  with  Fenchurch's  once  again,  and suddenly  was  at  a loss for something to say. A moment had come and gone between the two of them, but the whole rhythm of it  had been wrecked by that stupid, blasted woman.

“Don't worry,” said Fenchurch, looking at him steadily from  over the top of her glass, “we will talk again.” She took a sip.

“Perhaps,” she added, “it wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't for  her.”  She  gave  a  wry  little  smile and dropped her hair forward over her face again.

It was perfectly true.

He had to admit it was perfectly true.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 13

That  night,  at  home,  as  he  was  prancing  round  the  house pretending  to  be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and continually exploding with sudden  laughter,  Arthur  thought  he could  even  bear  to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had won. It was eight o'clock and he decided he would  make  himself, force  himself,  to  listen  to the whole record before he phoned her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That  would  be the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.

No. No games. He wanted her and  didn't  care  who  knew  it.  He definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

He actually caught himself saying  thinks  like  “Yippee”  as  he prances  ridiculously  round  the  house. Her eyes, her hair, her voice, everything ...

He stopped.

He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he  would  call her.

Would he, perhaps, call her first?

No. What he would do was this. He would  put  on  the  record  of bagpipe  music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That  was what he would do.

He was worried about touching things in case they blew up when he did so.

He picked up the record. It failed to blow up. He slipped it  out of  its cover. He opened the record player, he turned on the amp.  They both survived. He giggled foolishly as he lowered the stylus on to the disc.

He sat and listened solemnly to “A Scottish Soldier”.

He listened to “Amazing Grace”.

He listened to something about some glen or other.

He thought about his miraculous lunchtime.

They had just been on  the  point  of  leaving,  when  they  were distracted  by an awful outbreak of “yoo-hooing”. The appallingly permed woman was waving to them across the room like some  stupid bird  with  a broken wing. Everyone in the pub turned to them and seemed to be expecting some sort of response.

They hadn't listened to the bit about how pleased and happy Anjie was  going  to  be  about the  4.30p everyone had helped to raise towards the cost of her kidney machine, had  been  vaguely  aware that  someone  from the next table had won a box of cherry brandy liqueurs, and took a moment or two to cotton on to the fact  that the  yoo-hooing  lady  was  trying to ask them if they had ticket number 37.

Arthur discovered that he had. He glanced angrily at his watch.

Fenchurch gave him a push.

“Go on,” she said, “go and get it. Don't be  bad  tempered.  Give them  a nice speech about how pleased you are and you can give me a call and tell me how it went. I'll want to hear the record.  Go on.”

She flicked his arm and left.

The  regulars  thought  his  acceptance  speech  a  little  over-effusive. It was, after all, merely an album of bagpipe music.

Arthur thought about it, and listened to the music, and  kept  on breaking into laughter.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 14

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

"Hello, yes? Yes, that's right. Yes. You'll  'ave  to  speak  up, there's an awful lot of noise in 'ere. What?

"No, I only do the bar in the  evenings.  It's  Yvonne  who  does lunch, and Jim, he's the landlord. No, I wasn't on. What?

"You'll have to speak up.

"What? No, don't know anything about no raffle. What?

“No, don't know nothing about it. 'Old on, I'll call Jim.”

The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and  called  over  the noisy bar.

“'Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about  he's  won  a raffle. He keeps on saying it's ticket 37 and he's won.”

“No, there was a guy in the  pub  here  won,”  shouted  back  the barman.

“He says 'ave we got the ticket.”

“Well how can he think he's won if he hasn't even got a ticket?”

“Jim says 'ow can you think you've won if you  ”aven't  even  got the ticket. What?"

She put her hand over the receiver again.

“Jim, 'e keeps effing and blinding at me. Says there's  a  number on the ticket.”

“Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody  raffle ticket wasn't it?”

“'E says 'e means its a telephone number on the ticket.”

“Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 15

Eight hours  West  sat  a  man  alone  on  a  beach  mourning  an inexplicable  loss.  He  could  only  think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.

He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in  along  the  sand, and  waited  and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to  happen,  it  duly  didn't happen  and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of sea, and the day was gone.

The beach was a beach we shall  not  name,  because  his  private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from  Los Angeles,  which  is  described  in  the  new edition of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky,  and  what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo”, and in another, written only hours  later  as  “being  like several  thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for  some reason, yellow.”

The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of  San  Francisco, which the Guide describes as a “good place to go. It's very easy to believe that everyone  you  meet  there  is also  a  space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying `hi'. Until you've settled  in  and  got  the hang  of  the place it is best to say `no' to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of.” The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs  and sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide as “Boffo. A good one.”

And somewhere on this good boffo stretch  of  coastline  lay  the house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being insane. But this was only, as he would tell  people,  because  he was.

One of the many many reasons why people thought  him  insane  was because  of  the  peculiarity  of his house which, even in a land where most people's houses were peculiar in one way  or  another, was quite extreme in his peculiarness.

His house was called The Outside of the Asylum.

His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called

-  and  some  of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to this - Wonko the Sane.

In his house were a number of strange things,  including  a  grey glass bowl with eight words engraved upon it.

We can talk of him much later on - this is just an  interlude  to watch the sun go down and to say that he was there watching it.

He had lost everything he cared for, and was now  simply  waiting for  the  end of the world - little realizing that it had already been and gone.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 16

After a disgusting Sunday spent emptying rubbish  bins  behind  a pub  in  Taunton,  and  finding  nothing,  no  raffle  ticket, no telephone number,  Arthur  tried  everything  he  could  to  find Fenchurch, and the more things he tried, the more weeks passed.

He raged and railed against himself, against  fate,  against  the world  and its weather. He even, in his sorrow and his fury, went and sat in the motorway service station cafeteria where he'd been just before he met her.

“It's the drizzle that makes me particularly morose.”

“Please shut up about the drizzle,” snapped Arthur.

“I would shut up if it would shut up drizzling.”

“Look ...”

“But I'll tell you what it will do when it  shuts  up  drizzling, shall I?”

“No.”

“Blatter.”

“What?”

“It will blatter.”

Arthur stared over the rim  of  his  coffee  cup  at  the  grisly outside  world.  It  was  a  completely pointless place to be, he realized, and he had been driven  there  by  superstition  rather than  logic.  However,  as if to bait him with the knowledge that such coincidences could  in  fact  happen,  fate  had  chosen  to reunite  him  with the lorry driver he had encountered there last time.

The more he tried to ignore him, the more he found himself  being dragged   back   into   the   gravitic  whirlpool  of  the  man's exasperating conversation.

“I  think,”  said  Arthur  vaguely,  cursing  himself  for   even bothering to say this, “that it's easing off.”

“Ha!”

Arthur just shrugged. He should go. That's what he should do.  He should just go.

“It never stops raining!” ranted the lorry driver. He thumped the table,  spilt his tea, and actually, for a moment, appeared to be steaming.

You can't just walk off without responding to a remark like that.

“Of course it stops raining,”  said  Arthur.  It  was  hardly  an elegant refutation, but it had to be said.

“It rains ... all ... the time,”  raved  the  man,  thumping  the table again, in time to the words.

Arthur shook his head.

“Stupid to say it rains all the time ...” he said.

The man's eyebrows shot up, affronted.

“Stupid? Why's it stupid? Why's it stupid to say it rains all the time if it rains the whole time?”

“Didn't rain yesterday.”

“Did in Darlington.”

Arthur paused, warily.

“You going to ask me where I was yesterday?” asked the man. “Eh?”

“No,” said Arthur.

“But I expect you can guess.”

“Do you.”

“Begins with a D.”

“Does it.”

“And it was pissing down there, I can tell you.”

“You don't want to sit there, mate,” said a passing  stranger  in overalls to Arthur cheerily. “That's Thundercloud Corner that is.  Reserved special for old Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head  here.  There's  one  reserved  in  every  motorway caff between here and sunny Denmark. Steer clear is my advice. 'Swhat we all do.  How's it  going,  Rob? Keeping busy? Got your wet-weather tyres on? Har har.”

He breezed by and went to tell  a  joke  about  Britt  Ekland  to someone at a nearby table.

“See, none of them bastards take me seriously,” said Rob McKeena.  “But,” he added darkly, leaning forward and screwing up his eyes, “they all know it's true!”

Arthur frowned.

“Like my wife,” hissed the sole owner  and  driver  of  McKeena's All-Weather  Haulage.  “She  says it's nonsense and I make a fuss and complain about nothing,  but,”  he  paused  dramatically  and darted  out dangerous looks from his eyes, “she always brings the washing in when I phone to say I'm on me way home!” He brandished his coffee spoon. “What do you make of that?”

“Well ...”

“I have a book,” he went on, “I have a book. A diary. Kept it for fifteen  years.  Shows  every  single place I've ever been. Every day. And also what the weather was like. And it  was  uniformly,” he  snarled, “'orrible. All over England, Scotland, Wales I been.  All round the  Continent,  Italy,  Germany,  back  and  forth  to Denmark, been to Yugoslavia. It's all marked in and charted. Even when I went to visit my brother,” he added, “in Seattle.”

“Well,” said Arthur, getting up to leave at last, “perhaps  you'd better show it to someone.”

“I will,” said Rob McKeena.

And he did.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 17

Misery, dejection. More misery and more dejection.  He  needed  a project and he gave himself one.

He would find where his cave had been.

On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice  cave,  a lousy cave, but ... There was no but. It had been a totally lousy cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for  five  years which made it home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and  so  he  went  to Exeter to buy a computer.

That was what he really wanted, of course,  a  computer.  But  he felt  he  ought  to  have  some serious purpose in mind before he simply went and lashed out a lot of readies on what people  might otherwise mistake as being just a thing to play with. So that was his serious purpose. To pinpoint the exact location of a cave  on prehistoric Earth. He explained this to the man in the shop.

“Why?” said the man in the shop.

This was a tricky one.

“OK, skip that,” said the man in the shop. “How?”

“Well, I was hoping you could help me with that.”

The man sighed and his shoulders dropped.

“Have you much experience of computers?”

Arthur wondered whether to mention Eddie the  shipboard  computer on the Heart of Gold, who could have done the job in a second, or Deep Thought, or - but decided he wouldn't.

“No,” he said.

“Looks like a fun afternoon,” said the man in the  shop,  but  he said it only to himself.

Arthur bought the Apple anyway. Over a few days he also  acquired some  astronomical software, plotted the movements of stars, drew rough little diagrams of how he seemed to remember the  stars  to have  been in the sky when he looked up out of his cave at night, and worked away busily at it for weeks,  cheerfully  putting  off the conclusion he knew he would inevitably have to come to, which was that the whole project was completely ludicrous.

Rough drawings from memory were futile. He didn't even  know  how long  it  had been, beyond Ford Prefect's rough guess at the time that it was “a couple of million years” and he simply didn't have the maths.

Still, in the end he worked out a method  which  would  at  least produce  a  result. He decided not to mind the fact that with the extraordinary jumble of rules of thumb, wild  approximations  and arcane  guesswork he was using he would be lucky to hit the right galaxy, he just went ahead and got a result.

He would call it the right result. Who would know?

As it happened, through the myriad and  unfathomable  chances  of fate,  he  got  it exactly right, though he of course would never know that.  He  just  went  up  to  London  and  knocked  on  the appropriate door.

“Oh. I thought you were going to phone me first.”

Arthur gaped in astonishment.

“You can only come in for a few minutes,”  said  Fenchurch.  “I'm just going out.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 18

A summer's day  in  Islington,  full  of  the  mournful  wail  of antique-restoring machinery.

Fenchurch was unavoidably  busy  for  the  afternoon,  so  Arthur wandered in a blissed-out haze and looked at all the shops which, in Islington, are quite an useful bunch, as anyone who  regularly needs  old  woodworking  tools,  Boer  War  helmets, drag, office furniture or fish will readily confirm.

The sun beat down over the roofgardens. It beat on architects and plumbers.  It beat on barristers and burglars. It beat on pizzas.  It beat on estate agent's particulars.

It beat on Arthur as he went into a restored furniture shop.

“It's an interesting building,” said the proprietor,  cheerfully.  “There's  a  cellar  with  a secret passage which connects with a nearby pub. It was built for the Prince Regent apparently, so  he could make his escape when he needed to.”

"You mean, in case anybody might catch him buying  stripped  pine

furniture," said Arthur

“No,” said the proprietor, “not for that reason.”

“You'll have to excuse me,” said Arthur. “I'm terribly happy.”

“I see.”

He wandered hazily on and found himself outside  the  offices  of Greenpeace. he remembered the contents of his file marked “Things to do - urgent!”, which he hadn't opened again in  the  meantime.  He marched in with a cheery smile and said he'd come to give them some money to help free the dolphins.

“Very funny,” they told him, “go away.”

This wasn't quite the response  he  had  expected,  so  he  tried again.  This  time they got quite angry with him, so he just left some money anyway and went back out into the sunshine.

Just after six he returned to Fenchurch's house in the  alleyway, clutching a bottle of champagne.

“Hold this,” she said, shoved  a  stout  rope  in  his  hand  and disappeared  inside  through  the  large  white wooden doors from which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.

The house was a small converted  stable  in  a  light  industrial alleyway   behind   the   derelict  Royal  Agricultural  Hall  of Islington. As well as its  large  stable  doors  it  also  had  a normal-looking  front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was its  doorstep,  which  was nine feet high, since the door was set into the  upper  of  the  two  floors  and  presumably  had  been originally used to haul in hay for hungry horses.

An old pulley jutted out of the brickwork above the  doorway  and it  was over this that the rope Arthur was holding was slung. The other end of the rope held a suspended 'cello.

The door opened above his head.

“OK,” said Fenchurch, “pull on the rope, steady the 'cello.  Pass it up to me.”

He pulled on the rope, he steadied the 'cello.

“I can't pull on the rope again,” he said, “without letting go of the 'cello.”

Fenchurch leant down.

“I'm steadying the 'cello,” she said. “You pull on the rope.”

The 'cello eased up level with the  doorway,  swinging  slightly, and Fenchurch manoeuvred it inside.

“Come on up yourself,” she called down.

Arthur picked up his bag of  goodies  and  went  in  through  the stable doors, tingling.

The bottom room, which he had seen  briefly  before,  was  pretty rough and full of junk. A large old cast-iron mangle stood there, a surprising number of kitchen sinks  were  piled  in  a  corner.  There  was  also,  Arthur was momentarily alarmed to see, a pram, but it was very old and uncomplicatedly full of books.

The floor was old stained concrete, excitingly cracked. And  this was  the  measure  of  Arthur's  mood as he stared up the rickety wooden steps in the far corner. Even  a  cracked  concrete  floor seemed to him an almost unbearably sensual thing.

“An architect friend of mine keeps on telling me how  he  can  do wonderful  things  with  this  place,” said Fenchurch chattily as Arthur emerged through the floor.  “He  keeps  on  coming  round, standing  in  stunned amazement muttering about space and objects and events and marvellous qualities of light, then says he  needs a  pencil  and  disappears  for  weeks.  Wonderful  things  have, therefore, so far failed to happen to it.”

In fact, thought Arthur as he looked about, the upper room was at least  reasonably  wonderful  anyway.  It  was  simply decorated, furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo  set with  speakers  which  would  have  impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge.

There were flowers  which  were  pale  and  pictures  which  were interesting.

There was a sort of gallery structure in  the  roof  space  which held  a  bed  and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you could actually swing a cat in. “But,” she added, “only if it  was a reasonably patient cat and didn't mind a few nasty cracks about the head. So. here you are.”

“Yes.”

They looked at each other for a moment.

The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly  it  was  a  very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious  if left  alone for long enough with a Swiss Cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on  the  sudden  like  a cramped  and  zoo-born  animal who awakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching grey  and  pink  to  the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.

He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed  at  her  openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.

He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a  voice that  brings  you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it  or  recognized  its  tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “Yes”.

Fenchurch dropped her eyes away at last, with a tiny shake of her head.

“I know,” she said. “I shall have to remember,” she added,  “that you  are  the sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece of paper for two minutes without winning a raffle with it.”

She turned away.

“Let's go for a walk,” she said quickly. “Hyde Park. I'll  change into something less suitable.”

She was dressed in a rather severe dark dress, not a particularly shapely one, and it didn't really suit her.

“I wear it specially for my 'cello teacher,” she  said.  “He's  a nice  boy,  but  I sometimes think all that bowing gets him a bit excited. I'll be down in a moment.”

She ran lightly up the steps to the  gallery  above,  and  called down, “Put the bottle in the fridge for later.”

He noticed as he slipped the champagne bottle into the door  that it had an identical twin to sit next to.

He walked over to the  window  and  looked  out.  He  turned  and started to look at her records. From above he heard the rustle of her dress fall to the ground. He talked to himself about the sort of  person  he  was.  He  told  himself very firmly that for this moment  at  least  he  would  keep  his  eyes  very  firmly   and steadfastly  locked  on  to  the  spines of her records, read the titles, nod appreciatively, count the blasted things  if  he  had to. He would keep his head down.

This he completely, utterly and abjectly failed to do.

She was staring down at him with such intensity that  she  seemed hardly to notice that he was looking up at her. Then suddenly she shook her head, dropped  the  light  sundress  over  herself  and disappeared quickly into the bathroom.

She emerged a moment later, all smiles and with a sunhat and came tripping  down  the  steps with extraordinary lightness. It was a strange kind of dancing motion she had. She saw that  he  noticed it and put her head slightly on one side.

“Like it?” she said.

“You look gorgeous,” he said simply, because she did.

“Hmmmm,” she said, as if he hadn't really answered her question.

She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all  this time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in a fit state to be left on its own  for  a  while.  Arthur's  eyes followed  hers  around,  and  while  he  was looking in the other direction she slipped something out of  a  drawer  and  into  the canvas bag she was carrying.

Arthur looked back at her.

“Ready?”

“Did you know,” she said with a  slightly  puzzled  smile,  “that there's something wrong with me?”

Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.

“Well,” he said, “I'd heard some vague sort of ...”

“I wonder how much you do know about me,” she said. “I you  heard it  from where I think you heard then that's not it. Russell just sort of makes stuff up, because he can't deal with what it really is.”

A pang of worry went through Arthur.

“Then what is it?” he said. “Can you tell me?”

“Don't worry,” she said, "it's nothing bad at all. Just  unusual.

Very very unusual."

She touched his hand, and  then  leant  forward  and  kissed  him briefly.

“I shall be very interested to know,” she said, “if you manage to work out what it is this evening.”

Arthur felt that if someone tapped him at  that  point  he  would have  chimed,  like  the  deep  sustained  rolling chime his grey fishbowl made when he flicked it with his thumbnail.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 19

Ford Prefect was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.

He slid himself out of the  maintenance  hatchway  which  he  had fashioned  into  a  bunk  for  himself  by  disabling some of the noisier machinery in his vicinity and padding it with towels.  He slung  himself  down  the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily.

They were claustrophobic and ill-lit, and what  light  there  was was  continually  flickering and dimming as power surged this way and that through the ship, causing heavy vibrations  and  rasping humming noises.

That wasn't it, though.

He paused and leaned back against  the  wall  as  something  that looked like a small silver power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a nasty searing screech.

That wasn't it either.

He clambered listlessly through a bulkhead door and found himself in a larger corridor, though still ill-lit.

The ship lurched. It had been doing this a fair bit, but this was heavier.  A  small  platoon  of robots weent by making a terrible clattering.

Still not it, though.

Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end of the corridor,  so  he walked along it in the other direction.

He passed a series of observation monitors  let  into  the  walls behind plates of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.

One of them showed some horrible  green  scaly  reptilian  figure ranting  and raving about the Single Transferable Vote system. It was hard to tell whether he was for or against it, but he clearly felt very strongly about it. Ford turned the sound down.

That wasn't it, though.

He passed another monitor. It was showing a commercial  for  some brand  of  toothpaste that would apparently make you feel free if you used it. There was nasty blaring music with it too, but  that wasn't it.

He came upon another, much larger three-dimensional  screen  that was monitoring the outside of the vast silver Xaxisian ship.

As he  watched,  a  thousand  horribly  beweaponed  Zirzla  robot starcruisers  came  searing  round  the  dark  shadow  of a moon, silhouetted against the blinding disc of the star Xaxis, and  the ship  simultaneously  unleashed  a  vicious  blaze  of  hideously incomprehensible forces from all its orifices against them.

That was it.

Ford shook his head irritably and rubbed his eyes. He slumped  on the  wrecked  body  of a dull silver robot which clearly had been burning earlier on, but had now cooled down enough to sit on.

He yawned and dug his copy of the  Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  to  the Galaxy  out  of his satchel. He activated the screen, and flicked idly through  some  level  three  entries  and  some  level  four entries.  He  was  looking for some good insomnia cures. He found Rest, which was what he reckoned he needed.  He  found  Rest  and Recuperation  and  was  about  to  pass on when he suddenly had a better idea. He looked up at the monitor screen. The  battle  was raging  more  fiercely  every second and the noise was appalling.  The ship juddered, screamed, and lurched  as  each  new  bolt  of stunning energy was delivered or received.

He looked back down at the Guide again and flipped through a  few likely  locations.  He suddenly laughed, and then rummaged in his satchel again.

He pulled out a small memory dump module, wiped off the fluff and biscuit  crumbs,  and plugged it into an interface on the back of the Guide.

When all the information that he could  think  was  relevant  had been  dumped  into  the  module, he unplugged it again, tossed it lightly in the palm of his  hand,  put  the  Guide  away  in  his satchel,  smirked, and went in search of the ship's computer data banks.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 20

“The purpose of having the sun go low in  the  evenings,  in  the summer,  especially  in  parks,” said the voice earnestly, “is to make girl's breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case.”

Arthur and Fenchurch giggled about this to  each  other  as  they passed. She hugged him more tightly for a moment.

“And I am certain,” said the frizzy ginger-haired youth with  the long  thin  nose  who  was epostulating from his deckchair by the side of the Serpentine, “that if one worked the argument through, one  would find that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic from everything,” he insisted to his thin  dark-haired  companion who was slumped in the next door deckchair feeling dejected about his spots, “that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This is indisputable. And,” he added, “I love it.”

He  turned  sharply  and  squinted  through  his  spectacles   at Fenchurch.  Arthur  steered  her away and could feel her silently quaking.

“Next guess,” she said, when she had stopped giggling, “come on.”

“All right,” he said,  “your  elbow.  Your  left  elbow.  There's something wrong with your left elbow.”

“Wrong again,” she said, “completely wrong. You're on  completely the wrong track.”

The summer sun was sinking through the tress in the park, looking as  if - Let's not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning. Everything about it is stunning except for the rubbish on  Monday  mornings.  Even  the ducks are stunning. Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer's evening and not feel moved by it is probably  going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled over their face.

It is a park in which people do more  extraordinary  things  than they  do  elsewhere.  Arthur  and Fenchurch found a man in shorts practising the bagpipes to himself under a tree. The piper paused to  chase  off  an  American couple who had tried, timidly to put some coins on the box his bagpipes came in.

“No!” he shouted at them, “go away! I'm only practising.”

He started resolutely to reinflate his bag, but  even  the  noise this made could not disfigure their mood.

Arthur put his arms around her and moved them slowly downwards.

“I don't think it can be your bottom,” he said  after  a  while,“ there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that at all.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “there's  absolutely  nothing  wrong  with  my bottom.”

They kissed for so  long  that  eventually  the  piper  went  and practised on the other side of the tree.

“I'll tell you a story,” said Arthur.

“Good.”

They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of  couples actually  lying  on  top  of  each  other and sat and watched the stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the  water  which ran beneath the stunning ducks.

“A story,” said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.

“Which will tell you something of the sort of things that  happen to me. It's absolutely true.”

“You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed  to be  something that happened to their wife's cousin's best friend, but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line.”

“Well, it's like one of those stories, except  that  it  actually happened,  and I know it actually happened, because the person it actually happened to was me.”

“Like the raffle ticket.”

Arthur laughed. “Yes. I had a train to catch,”  he  went  on.  “I arrived at the station ...”

“Did I ever tell you,” interrupted Fenchurch, “what  happened  to my parents in a station?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “you did.”

“Just checking.”

Arthur glanced at his watch. “I suppose we could think of getting back,” he said.

“Tell me the story,” said Fenchurch firmly. “You arrived  at  the station.”

“I was about twenty minutes early. I'd got the time of the  train wrong. I suppose it is at least equally possible,” he added after a moment's reflection, “that British Rail had got the time of the train wrong. Hadn't occurred to me before.”

“Get on with it.” Fenchurch laughed.

“So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and  went  to  the buffet to get a cup of coffee.”

“You do the crossword?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“The Guardian usually.”

“I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer  the  Times.  Did  you solve it?”

“What?”

“The crossword in the Guardian.”

“I haven't had a chance to look at it  yet,”  said  Arthur,  “I'm still trying to buy the coffee.”

“All right then. Buy the coffee.”

“I'm buying it. I am also,” said Arthur, “buying some biscuits.”

“What sort?”

“Rich Tea.”

“Good choice.”

“I like them. Laden with all these new possessions, I go and  sit at a table. And don't ask me what the table was like because this was some time ago and I can't remember. It was probably round.”

“All right.”

“So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the  table.  On  my left,  the  newspaper.  On  my  right,  the cup of coffee. In the middle of the table, the packet of biscuits.”

“I see it perfectly.”

“What you don't see,” said Arthur, “because I  haven't  mentioned him  yet,  is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting there opposite me.”

“What's he like?”

“Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He  didn't  look,” said Arthur, “as if he was about to do anything weird.”

“Ah. I know the type. What did he do?”

“He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and ...”

“What?”

“Ate it.”

“What?”

“He ate it.”

Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. “What on Earth  did  you do?”

“Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled,” said Arthur, “to ignore it.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained  for  is  it?  I searched  my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience or even primal instincts to tell  me how  to  react  to  someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits.”

“Well, you could ...” Fenchurch thought about it. “I must say I'm not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?”

“I stared furiously at the crossword,” said Arthur. “Couldn't  do a  single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so there was nothing for it. I braced  myself.  I  took  a  biscuit, trying  very  hard not to notice,” he added, “that the packet was already mysteriously open ...”

“But you're fighting back, taking a tough line.”

“After my fashion,  yes.  I  ate  the  biscuit.  I  ate  it  very deliberately  and  visibly,  so that he would have no doubt as to what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit,” Arthur said,  “it stays eaten.”

“So what did he do?”

“Took another one. Honestly,” insisted Arthur, “this  is  exactly what  happened.  He  took  another  biscuit,  he ate it. Clear as daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground.”

Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably.

“And the  problem  was,”  said  Arthur,  “that  having  not  said anything  the  first  time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second  time  around.  What  do  you  say?  `Excuse  me  ...  I couldn't help noticing, er ...' Doesn't work.  No, I ignored  it  with,  if  anything,  even  more  vigour  than previously.”

“My man ...”

“Stared at the crossword, again, still couldn't budge  a  bit  of it,  so  showing  some  of  the  spirit  that  Henry  V did on St Crispin's Day ...”

“What?”

“I went into the breach again. I  took,”  said  Arthur,  “another biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met.”

“Like this?”

“Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met.  Just  for  an instant.  And  we  both  looked away. But I am here to tell you,” said Arthur, “that there was a little  electricity  in  the  air.  There  was  a little tension building up over the table. At about this time.”

“I can imagine.”

"We went through the whole packet like this.  Him,  me,  him,  me

..."

“The whole packet?”

“Well it was only eight biscuits but it seemed like a lifetime of biscuits  we were getting through at this point. Gladiators could hardly have had a tougher time.”

“Gladiators,” said Fenchurch, “would have had to  do  it  in  the sun. More physically gruelling.”

“There is that. So. When the empty packet was lying dead  between us  the  man  at  last got up, having done his worst, and left. I heaved a sigh of relief, of course. As it happened, my train  was announced  a  moment or two later, so I finished my coffee, stood up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper ...”

“Yes?”

“Were my biscuits.”

“What?” said Fenchurch. “What?”

“True.”

“No!” She gasped and tossed herself back on the grass laughing.

She sat up again.

“You completely nitwit,” she hooted, “you almost  completely  and utterly foolish person.”

She pushed him backwards, rolled over him, kissed him and  rolled off again. He was surprised at how light she was.

“Now you tell me a story.”

“I thought,” she said putting on a low  husky  voice,  “that  you were very keen to get back.”

“No hurry,” he said airily, “I want you to tell me a story.”

She looked out over the kale and pondered.

“All right,” she said, “it's only a short one. And not funny like yours, but ... Anyway.”

She looked down. Arthur could feel that it was one of those sorts of  moments.  The air seemed to stand still around them, waiting.  Arthur wished that the  air  would  go  away  and  mind  its  own business.

“When I was a kid,” she said. “These sort of stories always start like this, don't they, `When I was a kid ...' Anyway. This is the bit where the girl suddenly says, `When I was a kid'  and  starts to  unburden herself. We have got to that bit. When I was a kid I had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed ... What do  you think of it so far?”

“I like it. I think it's moving well. You're getting the  bedroom interest  in  nice  and  early.  We  could  probably do with some development with the picture.”

“It was one of those  pictures  that  children  are  supposed  to like,”  she  said,  “but  don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?”

“I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats.”

“Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were  assorted rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer.”

“On the raft.”

“On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft.”

“Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer.”

“Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety.”

“Ugh.”

"The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter  swimming in  front  of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched animals  on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must  hurt  pulling it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the time.

“Then one day - and remember I'd been  looking  at  this  picture every  night  for  years - I suddenly noticed that the raft had a sail. Never seen it before. The  otter  was  fine,  he  was  just swimming along.”

She shrugged.

“Good story?” she said.

“Ends weakly,” said Arthur, “leaves the audience crying `Yes, but what  of  it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before the credits.”

Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs.

“It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost  unnoticed worry  just  dropping  away,  like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly  being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place.  It  is  in  fact very  easy.' You probably thing I'm saying that because I'm going to say that I felt like that this afternoon or  something,  don't you?”

“Well, I ...” said Arthur, his composure suddenly shattered.

“Well, it's all right,” she said, “I did. That's exactly  what  I felt.  But  you  see,  I've  felt  that  before,  even  stronger.  Incredibly strongly. I'm afraid I'm a bit of  a  one,”  she  said gazing off into the distance, “for sudden startling revelations.”

Arthur was at  sea,  could  hardly  speak,  and  felt  it  wiser, therefore, for the moment not to try.

“It was very  odd,”  she  said,  much  as  one  of  the  pursuing Egyptians  might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side.

“Very odd,” she repeated, “for days before, the strangest feeling had  been building in me, as if I was going to give birth. No, it wasn't like that in fact, it was more as if I was being connected into  something,  bit by bit. No, not even that; it was as if the whole of the Earth, through me, was going to ...”

“Does the number,” said Arthur gently, “forty-two  mean  anything to you at all?”

“What? No, what are you talking about?” exclaimed Fenchurch.

“Just a thought,” murmured Arthur.

“Arthur, I mean this, this is very real to me, this is serious.”

“I was being perfectly serious,”  said  Arthur.  “It's  just  the Universe I'm never quite sure about.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Tell me the rest of it,” he said. “Don't worry if it sounds odd.  Believe  me,  you  are  talking  to someone who has seen a lot of stuff,” he added, “that is odd. And I don't mean biscuits.”

She nodded, and seemed to believe him. Suddenly, she gripped  his arm.

“It was so simple,” she said, “so wonderfully and extraordinarily simple, when it came.”

“What was it?” said Arthur quietly.

“Arthur, you see,” she said, “that's what I no longer  know.  And the loss is unbearable. If I try to think back to it, it all goes flickery and jumpy, and if I try too hard, I get as  far  as  the teacup and I just black out.”

“What?”

“Well, like your story,” she said, “the best bit  happened  in  a cafe.  I  was  sitting there, having a cup of tea. This was after days of this build up, the feeling of becoming  connected  up.  I think I was buzzing gently. And there was some work going on at a building site opposite the cafe, and I was  watching  it  through the window, over the rim of my teacup, which I always find is the nicest way of watching other people working. And suddenly,  there it  was  in  my  mind, this message from somewhere. And it was so simple. It made such sense of  everything.  I  just  sat  up  and thought,  `Oh! Oh, well that's all right then.' I was so startled I almost dropped my teacup, in fact I think I did drop it.  Yes,” she  added  thoughtfully,  “I'm  sure  I did. How much sense am I making?”

“It was fine up to the bit about the teacup.”

She shook her head, and shook it again, as if trying to clear it, which is what she was trying to do.

“Well that's it,” she said. “Fine up to the bit about the teacup.  That was the point at which it seemed to me quite literally as if the world exploded.”

“What ...?”

“I  know  it  sounds   crazy,   and   everybody   says   it   was hallucinations,  but  if  that  was  hallucinations  then  I have hallucinations in big screen 3D with 16-track  Dolby  Stereo  and should  probably  hire  myself  out  to people who are bored with shark movies. It was as if the ground was literally  ripped  from under my feet, and ... and ...”

She patted the grass lightly, as if  for  reassurance,  and  then seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say.

“And I woke up in hospital. I suppose I've been in and  out  ever since.  And  that's  why  I have an instinctive nervousness,” she said, “of sudden startling revelations that's everything's  going to be all right.” She looked up at him.

Arthur had simply ceased  to  worry  himself  about  the  strange anomalies surrounding his return to his home world, or rather had consigned them to that part of his mind marked “Things  to  think about - Urgent.” “Here is the world,” he had told himself. “Here, for whatever reason, is the world, and here it stays. With me  on it.”  But  now  it seemed to go swimmy around him, as it had that night in the car when Fenchurch's brother had told him the  silly stories  about  the  CIA  agent  in the reservoir. The trees went swimmy. The lake went swimmy, but this was perfectly natural  and nothing  to be alarmed by because a grey goose had just landed on it. The geese were having a great relaxed time and had  no  major answers they wished to know the questions to.

“Anyway,” said Fenchurch, suddenly and brightly and with a  wide-eyed smile, “there is something wrong with part of me, and you've got to find out what it is. We'll go home.”

Arthur shook his head.

“What's the matter?” she said.

Arthur had shaken his head, not to disagree with  her  suggestion which  he  thought  was a truly excellent one, one of the world's great suggestions, but because he was just for a moment trying to free himself of the recurring impression he had that just when he was least expecting it the Universe would suddenly leap out  from behind a door and go boo at him.

“I'm just trying to get this entirely clear  in  my  mind,”  said

Arthur,  "you  say you felt as if the Earth actually ... exploded

..."

“Yes. More than felt.”

“Which is what everybody else  says,”  he  said  hesitantly,  “is hallucinations?”

“Yes, but Arthur that's ridiculous. People think that if you just say  `hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will  just  go away.  It's  just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain why the dolphins disappeared.”

“No,” said Arthur. “No,” he added thoughtfully.  “No,”  he  added again, even more thoughtfully. “What?” he said at last.

“Doesn't explain the dolphins disappearing.”

“No,” said Arthur, “I see that. Which dolphins do you mean?”

“What do you mean which dolphins? I'm talking about when all  the dolphins disappeared.”

She put her hand on his knee, which made  him  realize  that  the tingling  going up and down his spine was not her gently stroking his back, and must instead be one of the nasty creepy feelings he so often got when people were trying to explain things to him.

“The dolphins?”

“Yes.”

“All the dolphins,” said Arthur, “disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“The dolphins? You're saying the  dolphins  all  disappeared?  Is this,”  said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point, “what you're saying?”

“Arthur where have you been for heaven's sake? The  dolphins  all disappeared on the same day I ...”

She stared him intently in his startled eyes.

“What ...?”

“No dolphins. All gone. Vanished.”

She searched his face.

“Did you really not know that?”

It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

“No one knows. That's what vanished means.”  She  paused.  “Well, there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he lives in California,” she said, “and is mad. I  was  thinking  of going  to see him because it seems the only lead I've got on what happened to me.”

She shrugged, and then looked at him long and  quietly.  She  lay her hand on the side of his face.

“I really would like to know where you've  been,”  she  said.  “I think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that's why we recognized each other.”

She glanced around the park, which was now  being  gathered  into the clutches of dusk.

“Well,” she said, “now you've got someone you can tell.”

Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.

“It is,” he said, “a very long story.”

Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.

“Is it anything to do with this?” she said. The  thing  she  took out  of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on  the  deserts  of  Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the  glaciers  of  the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and  since  its  makers had  thought  that  these  were  exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a  sturdy plastic  cover  and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words “Don't Panic”.

“Where did you get this?” said Arthur, startled, taking  it  from her.

“Ah,” she said, “I thought it was yours. In  Russell's  car  that night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?”

Arthur drew the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from its cover.  It  was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.

“A few,” he said.

“Can we go to them?”

“What? No,” said Arthur abruptly,  then  relented,  but  relented warily.  “Do  you want to?” he said, hoping for the answer no. It was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, “You don't want to, do you?” which expects it.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to know what  the  message  was  that  I lost,  and where it came from. Because I don't think,” she added, standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of  the  park, “that it came from here.”

“I'm not even sure,” she further added, slipping her  arm  around Arthur's waist, “that I know where here is.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 21

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, as  has  been  remarked before  often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing.  It is, essentially, as the  title  implies,  a  guide  book.  The problem  is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable portion of which are continually clogging up the  civil, commercial  and  criminal  courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.

The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.

This is:

Change.

Read it through again and you'll get it.

The Galaxy is a rapidly changing place.  There  is,  frankly,  so much  of  it,  every  bit  of  which  is continually on the move, continually changing. A bit of a nightmare, you might think,  for a scrupulous and conscientious editor diligently striving to keep this massively detailed and complex electronic  tome  abreast  of all  the  changing  circumstances  and conditions that the Galaxy throws up every minute of every hour of every day, and you  would be wrong. Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize that the editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever  had, has  no  real  grasp  of  the meanings of the words “scrupulous”, “conscientious” or “diligent”, and tends to  get  his  nightmares through a straw.

Entries tend to get  updated  or  not  across  the  Sub-Etha  Net according to if they read good.

Take for example, the case of Brequinda on the Foth  of  Avalars, famed  in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-d mini-serieses as home of the magnificent and magical Fuolornis Fire Dragon.

In Ancient days, when Fragilis sang and Saxaquine of the Quenelux held  sway,  when  the air was sweet and the nights fragrant, but everyone somehow managed to be, or so they claimed, though how on earth  they  could  have  thought  that  anyone was even remotely likely to believe such a preposterous claim  what  with  all  the sweet  air  and  fragrant  nights  and whatnot is anyone's guess, virgins, it was not possible to heave a brick on Brequinda in the Foth  of  Avalars without hitting at least half a dozen Fuolornis Fire Dragons.

Whether you would want to do that is another matter.

Not  that  Fire  Dragons  weren't  an  essentially   peace-loving species,  because  they  were.  They  adored it to bits, and this wholesale adoring of things to  bits  was  often  in  itself  the problem:  one so often hurts the one one loves, especially if one is a Fuolornis Fire Dragon with breath like a rocket booster  and teeth  like a park fence. Another problem was that once they were in the mood they often went on to hurt quite a lot  of  the  ones that  other  people loved as well. Add to all that the relatively small number of madmen who actually went around the place heaving bricks,  and  you end up with a lot of people on Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars getting seriously hurt by dragons.

But did they mind? They did not.

Were they heard to bemoan their fate? No.

The Fuolornis Fire Dragons were revered throughout the  lands  of Brequinda  in  the  Foth of valors for their savage beauty, their noble ways and their habit of biting  people  who  didn't  revere them.

Why was this?

The answer was simple.

Sex.

There is, for some unfathomed reason, something almost unbearably sexy  about having huge fire-breathing magical dragons flying low about the sky on moonlit nights which were already dangerously on the sweet and fragrant side.

Why this should be so, the romance-besotted people  of  Brequinda in  the  Foth  of  Avalars could not have told you, and would not have stopped to discuss the matter once the  effect  was  up  and going,  for  no  sooner would a flock of half a dozen silk-winged leather-bodied Fuolornis Fire Dragons heave into sight across the evening  horizon  than half the people of Brequinda are scurrying off into the woods with the other half, there  to  spend  a  busy breathless  night together and emerge with the first rays of dawn all smiling and happy and still claiming, rather endearingly,  to be virgins, if rather flushed and sticky virgins.

Pheromones, some researchers said.

Something sonic, others claimed.

The place was always stiff with researchers trying to get to  the bottom of it all and taking a very long time about it.

Not surprisingly, the Guide's graphically enticing description of the  general  state  of  affairs  on this planet has proved to be astonishingly popular amongst hitch-hikers who  allow  themselves to  be  guided  by it, and so it has simply never been taken out, and it is therefore left to latter-day travellers to find out for themselves  that  today's  modern  Brequinda in the City State of Avalars is now little more than concrete, strip joints and Dragon Burger Bars.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 22

The night in Islington was sweet and fragrant.

There were, of course, no Fuolornis Fire  Dragons  about  in  the alley,  but  if  any  had chanced by they might just as well have sloped off across the road for a pizza, for they were  not  going to be needed.

Had an emergency cropped up while they were still in  the  middle of  their American Hots with extra anchovy they could always have sent across a message to put Dire Straits on the stereo, which is now known to have much the same effect.

“No,” said Fenchurch, “not yet.”

Arthur put Dire Straits on the stereo. Fenchurch pushed ajar  the upstairs front door to let in a little more of the sweet fragrant night air. They both sat on some of the  furniture  made  out  of cushions, very close to the open bottle of champagne.

“No,” said Fenchurch, “not till you've  found  out  what's  wrong with  me,  which  bit. But I suppose,” she added very, very, very quietly, “that we may as well start with where your hand is now.”

Arthur said, “So which way do I go?”

“Down,” said Fenchurch, “on this occasion.”

He moved his hand.

“Down,” she said, “is in fact the other way.”

“Oh yes.”

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability  to  make  a  Schecter Custom  Stratocaster  hoot  and  sing  like  angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week  and  needing  a  stiff beer  -  which  is  not strictly relevant at this point since the record hadn't yet got to that bit, but there  will  be  too  much else  going  on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch,  so  it seems  best  to  mention  it  now  while  things are still moving slowly.

“And so we come,” said Arthur, “to your knee. There is  something terribly and tragically wrong with your left knee.”

“My left knee,” said Fenchurch, “is absolutely fine.”

“Do it is.”

“Did you know that ...”

“What?”

“Ahm, it's all right. I can tell you do. No, keep going.”

“So it has to be something to do with your feet ...”

She  smiled  in  the  dim  light,  and  wriggled  her   shoulders noncommittally  against the cushions. Since there are cushions in the Universe, on Squornshellous Beta to be exact, two  worlds  in from  the  swampland of the mattresses, that actively enjoy being wriggled against, particularly if it's noncommittally because  of the  syncopated way in which the shoulders move, it's a pity they weren't there. They weren't, but such is life.

Arthur held  her  left  foot  in  his  lap  and  looked  it  over carefully.  All  kinds of stuff about the way her dress fell away from  her  legs  was  making  it  difficult  for  him  to   think particularly clearly at this point.

“I have to admit,” he said, “that I really don't  know  what  I'm looking for.”

“You'll know when you find it,”  she  said.  “Really  you  will.”

There was a slight catch in her voice. “It's not that one.”

Feeling increasingly puzzled, Arthur let her left  foot  down  on the  floor  and  moved  himself  around so that he could take her right foot. She moved forward, put her arms round and kissed him, because  the  record  had  got to that bit which, if you knew the record, you would know made it impossible not to do this.

Then she gave him her right foot.

He stroked it, ran his fingers round her ankle, under  her  toes, along her instep, could find nothing wrong with it.

She watched him with great amusement, laughed and shook her head.

“No, don't stop,” she said, but it's not that one now."

Arthur stopped, and frowned at her left foot on the floor.

“Don't stop.”

He stroked her right foot, ran  his  fingers  around  her  ankle, under  her  toes,  along  her  instep  and  said,  “You mean it's something to do with which leg I'm holding ...?”

She did another of the shrugs which would have brought  such  joy into the life of a simple cushion from Squornshellous Beta.

He frowned.

“Pick me up,” she said quietly.

He let her right foot down to the floor and stood up. So did she.  He  picked her up in his arms and they kissed again. This went on for a while, then she said, “Now put me down again.”

Still puzzled, he did so.

“Well?”

She looked at him almost challengingly.

“So what's wrong with my feet?” she said.

Arthur still did not understand. He sat on the  floor,  then  got down  on  his hands and knees to look at her feet, in situ, as it were,  in  their  normal  habitat.  And  as  he  looked  closely, something  odd  struck  him.  He  pit  his head right down to the ground and peered. There was a long pause. He sat back heavily.

“Yes,” he said, “I see what's wrong with your  feet.  They  don't touch the ground.”

“So ... so what do you think ...?”

Arthur looked up at her quickly and  saw  the  deep  apprehension making her eyes suddenly dark. She bit her lip and was trembling.

“What do ...” she stammered. “Are you ...?” She  shook  the  hair forwards over her eyes that were filling with dark fearful tears.

He stood up quickly, put his arms  around  her  and  gave  her  a single kiss.

“Perhaps you can do what I can do,” he said, and walked  straight out of her upstairs front door.

The record got to the good bit.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 23

The battle raged on about the star  of  Xaxis.  Hundreds  of  the fierce  and horribly beweaponed Zirzla ships had now been smashed and wrenched to atoms by the withering  forces  the  huge  silver Xaxisian ship was able to deploy.

Part of the moon had gone too, blasted away by those same blazing forceguns  that  ripped  the  very fabric of space as they passed through it.

The Zirzla ships that remained, horribly beweaponed  though  they were,  were now hopelessly outclassed by the devastating power of the Xaxisian ship, and were fleeing for cover behind the  rapidly disintegrating  moon, when the Xaxisian ship, in hurtling pursuit behind them, suddenly announced that it needed a holiday and left the field of battle.

All was redoubled fear and consternation for a  moment,  but  the ship was gone.

With the stupendous powers at its command it flitted across  vast tracts  of  irrationally shaped space, quickly, effortlessly, and above all, quietly.

Deep in his greasy, smelly bunk, fashioned out of  a  maintenance hatchway,  Ford  Prefect  slept among his towels, dreaming of old haunts. He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York.

In his dream he was walking late at night along  the  East  Side, beside  the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously,  demanding welfare and voting rights.

One of those now floated past, waving. Ford waved back.

The thing thrashed to the shore and struggled up the bank.

“Hi,” it said, “I've just been created. I'm completely new to the Universe in all respects. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Phew,” said Ford, a little nonplussed, “I  can  tell  you  where some bars are, I guess.”

“What about love and happiness. I sense  deep  needs  for  things like that,” it said, waving its tentacles. “Got any leads there?”

“You can get some like what you require,” said Ford, “on  Seventh Avenue.”

“I instinctively feel,” said the creature, urgently, “that I need to be beautiful. Am I?”

“You're pretty direct, aren't you?”

“No point in mucking about. Am I?”

“To me?” said Ford. “No. But listen,” he added  after  a  moment, “most  people  make  out,  you  know. Are there and like you down there?”

“Search me, buster,” said the creature, "as I said, I'm new here.

Life is entirely strange to me. What's it like?"

Here was something that Ford  felt  he  could  speak  about  with authority.

“Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”

“Er, how so?”

“Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled  on  the  outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”

“Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?”

“I expect so,” said Ford. “Ask a policeman.”

Deep in his bunk, Ford Prefect wriggled  and  turned  on  to  his other  side.  It  wasn't  his  favourite type of dream because it didn't have Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Triple-Breasted  Whore  of Eroticon  VI  in  it, whom many of his dreams did feature. But at least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 24

Luckily there was a strong updraft in the  alley  because  Arthur hadn't  done  this  sort  of  thing  for  a  while, at least, not deliberately, and deliberately is exactly the  way  you  are  not meant to do it.

He swung down sharply, nearly catching himself a nasty  crack  on the  jaw  with  the  doorstep  and  tumbled  through  the air, so suddenly stunned with what a profoundly stupid thing he had  just done  that  he completely forgot the bit about hitting the ground and didn't.

A nice trick, he thought to himself, if you can do it.

The ground was hanging menacingly above his head.

He tried not to think about the ground, what  an  extraordinarily big  thing it was and how much it would hurt him if it decided to stop hanging there and suddenly fell on him. He  tried  to  think nice  thoughts  about lemurs instead, which was exactly the right thing to do because he couldn't at that moment remember precisely what  a  lemur  was,  if it was one of those things that sweep in great majestic herds across the plains of wherever it was  or  if that  was  wildebeests, so it was a tricky kind of thing to think nice thoughts about without simply resorting to an icky  sort  of general  well-disposedness  towards things, and all this kept his mind well occupied while his body tried to  adjust  to  the  fact that it wasn't touching anything.

A Mars bar wrapper fluttered down the alleyway.

After a seeming moment of  doubt  and  indecision  it  eventually allowed  the  wind  to  ease  it, fluttering, between him and the ground.

“Arthur ...”

The ground was still hanging menacingly above his  head,  and  he thought  it was probably time to do something about that, such as fall away from it, which is  what  he  did.  Slowly.  Very,  very slowly.

As he fell slowly, very,  very  slowly,  he  closed  his  eyes  - carefully, so as not to jolt anything.

The feel of his eyes closing ran down his whole body. Once it had reached  his  feet,  and the whole of his body was alerted to the fact that his eyes were now closed and was not panicked by it, he slowly, very, very slowly, revolved his body one way and his mind the other.

That should sort the ground out.

He could feel the air clear about him now,  breezing  around  him quite  cheerfully,  untroubled  by  his  being there, and slowly, very, very slowly, as from a deep and distant  sleep,  he  opened his eyes.

He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until all the birdtalk had driven him scatty, but this was different.

Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a slight  trembling  which could have been attributable to a number of things, being in the air.

Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.

Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was  supposed to  see it through the night was on an ingenious timeswitch which meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as  the evening  was  beginning  to  draw  in.  He was, therefore, safely shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.

He slowly, very, very slowly, lifted his head to  Fenchurch,  who was  standing  in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her upstairs doorway.

Her face was inches from his.

“I was about to ask you,” she said in a low trembly voice,  “what you  were  doing.  But  then I realized that I could see what you were doing. You were flying. So it seemed,” she went on  after  a slight wondering pause, “like a bit of a silly question.”

Arthur said, “Can you do it?”

“No.”

“Would you like to try?”

She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to  say  no,  but just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.

“It's quite easy,” urged Arthur, “if you don't know  how.  That's the important bit. Be not at all sure how you're doing it.”

Just to demonstrate how easy it was  he  floated  away  down  the alley,  fell  upwards  quite dramatically and bobbed back down to her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

“Ask me how I did that.”

“How ... did you do that?”

“No idea. Not a clue.”

She shrugged in bewilderment. “So how can I ...?”

Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.

“I want you to try,” he said, “to  step  on  my  hand.  Just  one foot.”

“What?”

“Try it.”

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as  if  she  was trying  to  step on the hand of someone who was floating in front of her in midair, she stepped on to his hand.

“Now the other.”

“What?”

“Take the weight off your back foot.”

“I can't.”

“Try it.”

“Like this?”

“Like that.”

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told  herself,  as  if  -  She stopped  telling herself what what she was doing was like because she had a feeling she didn't altogether want to know.

She fixed her eyes very very firmly on the guttering of the  roof of  the  decrepit  warehouse opposite which had been annoying her for weeks because it was  clearly  going  to  fall  off  and  she wondered  if  anyone was going to do anything about it or whether she ought to say something to somebody, and didn't  think  for  a moment  about  the  fact  that  she  was standing on the hands of someone who wasn't standing on anything at all.

“Now,” said Arthur, “take your weight off your left foot.”

She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company who had  their  offices round the corner, and took the weight off her left foot, so she should probably  go  and  see  them  about  the gutter.

“Now,” said Arthur, “take the weight off your right foot.”

“I can't.”

“Try.”

She hadn't seen the guttering from quite this angle  before,  and it  looked to her now as if as well as the mud and gunge up there there might also be a bird's nest. If she leaned forward  just  a little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably see it more clearly.

Arthur was alarmed to see that someone  down  in  the  alley  was trying  to  steal her bicycle. He particularly didn't want to get involved in an argument at the moment  and  hoped  that  the  guy would do it quietly and not look up.

He had the quiet shifty look  of  someone  who  habitually  stole bicycles  in  alleys  and  habitually didn't expect to find their owners hovering several feet above them. He was relaxed  by  both these   habits,   and   went  about  his  job  with  purpose  and concentration, and when he found that  the  bike  was  unarguably bound  by  hoops  of  tungsten carbide to an iron bar embedded in concrete, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.

Arthur let out a long-held breath.

“See what a piece of eggshell I have found you,”  said  Fenchurch in his ear.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 25

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent  may have  received  an  impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth  and,  of  course,  nothing  but  the truth,  falls  somewhat  short,  in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects.

And the reasons for this are  obvious.  Editing,  selection,  the need  to  balance  that  which  is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

Like this for instance. "Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up  the stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room, took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes one  by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor.  He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe.  He  washed his  face  and  hands,  cleaned  his teeth, went to the lavatory, realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong  order, had  to wash his hands again and went to bed. He read for fifteen minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that  trying  to  work out  where  in the book he had got to the previous night, then he turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.

"It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.

"After that he moved restlessly in his sleep  for  a  moment  and then  turned  over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after this his eyes flickered briefly and  he  slightly  scratched  his nose,  though  there was still a good twenty minutes to go before he turned back on to his left side. And so he  whiled  the  night away, sleeping.

“At four he got up and went to the lavatory again. He opened  the door to the lavatory ...” and so on.

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for  nice  fat books  such  as  the  American  market thrives on, but it doesn't actually get you anywhere. You don't, in short, want to know.

But there are other omissions as well, beside  the  teethcleaning and  trying  to  find  fresh  socks variety, and in some of these people have often seemed inordinately interested.

What, they want to know, about all that stuff off  in  the  wings with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?

To which the answer is, of course, mind your own business.

And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on  the  planet Krikkit?  Just  because  the  planet  didn't  have Fuolornis Fire Dragons or Dire Straits doesn't mean that everyone  just  sat  up every night reading.

Or to take a more specific example, what about  the  night  after the  committee  meeting  party  on Prehistoric Earth, when Arthur found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon  rise  over the  softly  burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of  staring  every morning  at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in  the  art  department  of  an  advertising agency  on  the  planet  Golgafrincham.  What then? What happened next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.

The next one didn't resume the story till five years  later,  and you can, claim some, take discretion too far. “This Arthur Dent,” comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the  galaxy,  and  has even  now  been  found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe thought to originate from an  alien  galaxy  at  a  distance  too hideous  to  contemplate,  “what  is  he,  man  or  mouse?  Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life?  Has  he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”

Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 26

Arthur Dent allowed himself for an unworthy moment to  think,  as they drifted up, that he very much hoped that his friends who had always found him pleasant but dull, or  more  latterly,  odd  but dull,  were  having a good time in the pub, but that was the last time, for a while, that he thought of them.

They drifted  up,  spiralling  slowly  around  each  other,  like sycamore  seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except going the other way.

And as they  drifted  up  their  minds  sang  with  the  ecstatic knowledge  that  either  what  they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or  that  physics  had  a  lot  of catching up to do.

Physics shook its head and, looking the other  way,  concentrated on  keeping  the cars going along the Euston Road and out towards the Westway flyover, on  keeping  the  streetlights  lit  and  on making  sure  that  when  somebody  on  Baker  Street  dropped  a cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.

Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings  of  light  of London  -  London,  Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the strangely coloured fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky above them, but London - swayed, swaying and turning, turned.

“Try a swoop,” he called to Fenchurch.

“What?”

Her voice seemed strangely clear but  distant  in  all  the  vast empty  air.  It  was breathy and faint with disbelief - all those things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.

“We're flying ...” she said.

“A trifle,” called Arthur, “think nothing of it. Try a swoop.”

“A sw-”

Her hand caught his, and in a second her weight  caught  it  too, and  stunningly,  she  was  gone,  tumbling  beneath him, clawing wildly at nothing.

Physics glanced at Arthur, and clotted with horror  he  was  gone too,  sick  with  giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but his voice.

They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn't do this sort of thing here.

He couldn't catch her because this was London, and not a  million miles  from  here,  seven  hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in Pisa, Galileo had clearly demonstrated that  two  falling  bodies fell  at  exactly  the  same rate of acceleration irrespective of their relative weights.

They fell.

Arthur realized as he fell, giddily and sickeningly, that  if  he was going to hang around in the sky believing everything that the Italians had to say about physics when they couldn't even keep  a simple  tower  straight, that they were in dead trouble, and damn well did fall faster than Fenchurch.

He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip  on  her shoulders. He got it.

Fine. They were now falling together, which was  all  very  sweet and  romantic, but didn't solve the basic problem, which was that they were falling, and the ground wasn't waiting around to see if he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to meet them like an express train.

He couldn't support her  weight,  he  hadn't  anything  he  could support  it  with  or  against. The only thing he could think was that they were obviously going to die, and if he wanted  anything other  than  the  obvious  to  happen  he was going to have to do something other than the obvious. Here he felt he was on familiar territory.

He let go of her, pushed her away, and when she turned  her  face to him in a gasp of stunned horror, caught her little finger with his little finger and swung her back upwards,  tumbling  clumsily up after her.

“Shit,” she said, as she sat panting and breathless on absolutely nothing  at  all, and when she had recovered herself they fled on up into the night.

Just below cloud level they paused and  scanned  where  they  had impossibly  come. The ground was something not to regard with any too firm or steady an eye, but merely to glance at, as  it  were, in passing.

Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found  that  if she  judged  herself  just right against a body of wind she could pull off some really quite dazzling ones with a little  pirouette at the end, followed by a little drop which made her dress billow around her, and this is where readers who are keen to  know  what Marvin  and  Ford  Prefect  have been up to all this while should look ahead to later chapters, because Arthur now  could  wait  no longer and helped her take it off.

It drifted down and away whipped by the wind until it was a speck which  finally  vanished,  and  for  various  complicated reasons revolutionized the life of  a  family  on  Hounslow,  over  whose washing line it was discovered draped in the morning.

In a mute embrace,  they  drifted  up  till  they  were  swimming amongst the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering around the wings of an aeroplane but never feel because  you  are sitting  warm inside the stuffy aeroplane and looking through the little scratchy perspex window while somebody  else's  son  tries patiently to pour warm milk into your shirt.

Arthur and Fenchurch  could  feel  them,  wispy  cold  and  thin, wreathing  round  their  bodies, very cold, very thin. They felt, even Fenchurch, now protected from the elements by only a  couple of  fragments from Marks and Spencer, that if they were not going to let the force of  gravity  bother  them,  then  mere  cold  or paucity of atmosphere could go and whistle.

The two fragments from Marks and Spencer which, as Fenchurch rose now  into the misty body of the clouds, Arthur removed very, very slowly, which is the only way it's possible to do it when  you're flying  and  also  not  using  your  hands,  went  on  to  create considerable havoc in the morning in, respectively, counting from top to bottom, Isleworth and Richmond.

They were in the cloud for a long time, because  it  was  stacked very  high,  and  when  finally  they  emerged  wetly  above  it, Fenchurch slowly spinning like a  starfish  lapped  by  a  rising tidepool, they found that above the clouds is where the night get seriously moonlit.

The light is darkly brilliant. There are different  mountains  up there, but they are mountains, with their own white arctic snows.

They had emerged at the top of  the  high-stacked  cumulo-nimbus, and  now  began  lazily  to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch eased Arthur in turn from his clothes, prised him  free  of  them till  all  were  gone,  winding their surprised way down into the enveloping whiteness.

She kissed him, kissed his neck, his chest, and  soon  they  were drifting  on,  turning  slowly,  in a kind of speechless T-shape, which might have caused even a Fuolornis  Fire  Dragon,  had  one flown  past,  replete  with  pizza, to flap its wings and cough a little.

There were, however, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons in the clouds  nor could  there  be  for,  like  the  dinosaurs,  the dodos, and the Greater  Drubbered  Wintwock   of   Stegbartle   Major   in   the constellation  Fraz,  and  unlike  the  Boeing  747  which  is in plentiful supply, they are sadly extinct, and the Universe  shall never know their like again.

The reason that a Boeing 747 crops up rather unexpectedly in  the above  list  is not unconnected with the fact that something very similar happened in the lives of Arthur and Fenchurch a moment or two later.

They are big things, terrifyingly big. You know when  one  is  in the  air  with you. There is a thunderous attack of air, a moving wall of screaming wind, and you get  tossed  aside,  if  you  are foolish enough to be doing anything remotely like what Arthur and Fenchurch were doing in its close vicinity, like  butterflies  in the Blitz.

This time, however, there was a heart-sickening fall or  loss  of nerve,  a  re-grouping  moments  later  and  a wonderful new idea enthusiastically signalled through the buffeting noise.

Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts  was  an  elderly  lady, indeed,  she  felt  her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy  to feel  at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a  little  too  explicable,  a  little  too routine.

With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter  and looked out over the wing.

At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess,  but  then she  thought  no,  damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.

By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back  off the  wing  and  tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.

She  was  mostly  immensely  relieved  to  think  that  virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.

The following night they did it all over again,  only  this  time with Sony Walkmen.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 27

“This is all very wonderful,” said Fenchurch a  few  days  later.  “But  I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there's this difference between us. That you lost something and found  it again,  and  I  found  something  and  lost it. I need to find it again.”

She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for  a  day of telephoning.

Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one  of  the  papers  with small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say that he was none the worse for it, but sadly, this  was  not  the case.  He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so Arthur phoned him anyway.

“Arthur  my  old  soup  spoon,  my  old   silver   turreen,   how particularly  stunning  to  hear  from you. Someone told me you'd gone off into space or something.”

Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he had  invented  for his own use, and which no one else was able to speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at  all.  The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalance of nonsense.  The  time  when you did find out, later, which bits he did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green  baize  card table,  just  a  rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may need a quote from you.”

“Nothing to say, just pub talk.”

“We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on  it.  Plus it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the other stories of the week, so  it  could  be  just  to  have  you denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear.”

There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost  Henson came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.

“Just remembered,” he said, “what  an  odd  evening  I  had  last night.  Anyway  my  old,  I won't say what, how do you feel about having ridden on Halley's Comet?”

“I haven't,” said Arthur  with  a  suppressed  sigh,  “ridden  on Halley's Comet.”

“OK, How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley's Comet?”

“Pretty relaxed, Murray.”

There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.

“Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of the Weirdos, we're thinking of calling it. Good, eh?”

“Very good.”

“Got a ring to it. First we have this man it always rains on.”

“What?”

“It's the absolute stocking top  truth.  All  documented  in  his little  black  book,  it all checks out at every single funloving level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana  whips,  and funny  little  men in white coats are flying in from all over the world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man is  the  bee's  knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous  zones  of every major flying insect of the Western world. We're calling him the Rain God. Nice, eh?”

“I think I've met him.”

“Good ring to it. What did you say?”

“I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?”

“Incredible! You met the Rain God?”

“If it's the same guy. I told him to stop  complaining  and  show someone his book.”

There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson's end of the phone.

"Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has  absolutely  been done  by  you.  Listen,  do  you know how much a tour operator is paying that guy not to go to Malaga  this  year?  I  mean  forget irrigating  the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding  places  for  money.  The  man's  turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to make him win the bingo.

“Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man  Who Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?”

“A nice one, but ...”

“We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that'll be OK. Where are you?”

“Er, I'm in Islington. Listen, Murray ...”

“Islington!”

“Yes ...”

“Well, what about the  real  weirdness  of  the  week,  the  real seriously  loopy  stuff.  You  know  anything  about these flying people?”

“No.”

“You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy  one.  This  is the  real  meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the time to say there's this couple who go flying nights.  We've  got guys  down  in  our  photo  labs working through the night to put together a genuine photograph. You must have heard.”

“No.”

“Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote.  But  that  was  months  ago.  Listen, it's night after night this week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple  just fly  around  the  sky  and  start doing all kinds of stuff. And I don't mean looking through walls or pretending to be  box  girder bridges. You don't know anything?”

“No.”

“Arthur, it's been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with you, chumbum, but I have to go. I'll send the guy with the camera and the hose. Give me the address, I'm ready and writing.”

“Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something.”

“I have a lot to do.”

“I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins.”

“No story. Last year's news. Forget 'em. They're gone.”

“It's important.”

“Listen, no one will touch it. You can't  sustain  a  story,  you know,  when  the  only news is the continuing absence of whatever the story's about. Not our territory  anyway,  try  the  Sundays.  Maybe  they'll  run  a  little  `Whatever  Happened  to ”Whatever Happened to the Dolphins“' story in a  couple  of  years,  around August.  But  what's  anybody  going  to  do now? `Dolphins still gone'? `Continuing Dolphin Absence'?  `Dolphins  -  Further  Days Without Them'? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its little feet in the air and presently goes  to  the  great  golden spike in the sky, my old fruitbat.”

“Murray, I'm not interested in whether it's a story. I just  want to  find  out  how I can get in touch with that guy in California who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 28

“People are beginning to  talk,”  said  Fenchurch  that  evening, after they had hauled her 'cello in.

“Not only talk,” said Arthur, “but print,  in  big  bold  letters under  the  bingo  prizes.  Which is why I thought I'd better get these.”

He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.

“Arthur!” she said, hugging him. “Does that mean you  managed  to talk to him?”

“I  have  had  a  day,”  said  Arthur,  “of  extreme   telephonic exhaustion.  I  have  spoken  to  virtually  every  department of virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked  his number down.”

“You've obviously been working hard, you're drenched  with  sweat poor darling.”

“Not with sweat,” said Arthur  wearily.  “A  photographer's  just been. I tried to argue, but - never mind, the point is, yes.”

“You spoke to him.”

“I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to  come  to  the phone right now and could I call back.”

He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something  and  went to the fridge to find it.

“Want a drink?”

“Would commit murder to get one. I always know I'm in for a tough time  when  my  'cello teacher looks me up and down and says, `Ah yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.'.”

“I called again,” said Arthur, “and she  said  that  he  was  3.2 light years from the phone and I should call back.”

“Ah.”

“I called again. ”She said the situation had improved. He was now a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way to shout."

“You don't suppose,” said Fenchurch,  doubtfully,  “that  there's anyone else we can talk to?”

“It gets worse,” said Arthur, “I spoke to someone  on  a  science magazine  who  actually  knows  him, and he said that John Watson will not only believe, but will  actually  have  absolute  proof, often  dictated  to  him  by  angels with golden beards and green wings  and  Doctor  Scholl  footwear,  that  the   month's   most fashionable  silly  theory  is  true. For people who question the validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the  clogs in question, and that's as far as you get.”

“I didn't realize it was that bad,” said Fenchurch  quietly.  She fiddled listlessly with the tickets.

“I phoned Mrs Watson again,” said Arthur. “Her name, by the  way, and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill.”

“I see.”

“I'm glad you see. I thought you mightn't believe any of this, so when  I  called  her  this  time  I  used the telephone answering machine to record the call.”

He went across to the telephone machine  and  fiddled  and  fumed with  all  its  buttons for a while, because it was the one which was particularly recommended by Which?  magazine  and  is  almost impossible to use without going mad.

“Here it is,” he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.

The  voice  was  thin  and  crackly  with  its   journey   to   a geostationary  satellite  and  back,  but  it was also hauntingly calm.

“Perhaps I should explain,”  Arcane  Jill  Watson's  voice  said, “that  the  phone  is in fact in a room that he never comes into.  It's in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter the  Asylum  and  so  he  does  not.  I feel you should know this because it may save you phoning. If you would like to  meet  him, this  is  very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He will only meet people outside the Asylum.”

Arthur's voice, at  its  most  mystified:  “I'm  sorry,  I  don't understand. Where is the asylum?”

“Where is the Asylum?” Arcane Jill Watson again. “Have  you  ever read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?”

On the tape, Arthur's voice had to admit that he had not.

“You may want to do that. You may find that it  clarifies  things for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the Asylum is. Thank you.”

The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the  machine off.

“Well, I suppose we can regard that as an  invitation,”  he  said with a shrug. “I actually managed to get the address from the guy on the science magazine.”

Fenchurch looked up at him again with  a  thoughtful  frown,  and looked at the tickets again.

“Do you think it's worth it?” she said.

“Well,” said Arthur, “the one thing  that  everyone  I  spoke  to agrees  on,  apart  from  the  fact  that they all thought he was barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living  about dolphins.”

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

Chapter 29

“This is an important announcement. This is  flight  121  to  Los Angeles.  If  your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark.”

Chapter 30

They rented a car in Los Angeles from  one  of  the  places  that rents out cars that other people have thrown away.

“Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem,” said  the guy  behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, “sometimes it's simpler just to get out and find a car that's going in  that direction.”

They stayed for one night in a hotel on  Sunset  Boulevard  which someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.

“Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They've  got  a swimming  pool  where  you  can  go  and watch English rock stars reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers.”

It was true. There was one and  that  was  exactly  what  he  was doing.

The garage attendant didn't think much of their car, but that was fine because they didn't either.

Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills  along Mulholland  Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later  stopped  to look  across  the  dazzling sea of floating light that is the San Fernando Valley. They agreed that the  sense  of  dazzle  stopped immediately  at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other part  of  them  and  came  away  strangely  unsatisfied  by   the spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through  what this  particularly  dramatic  sea  of light was illuminating they didn't think much of it.

They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was stupidly hot.

They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their  first look  at  the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.

“Someone told me,” said Fenchurch, “that they once overheard  two old  ladies on this beach, doing what we're doing, looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And  apparently, after  a  long  pause,  one of them said to the other, `You know, it's not as big as I expected.'”

Their mood lifted further as the  sun  began  to  move  down  the western  half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their rattling car and driving towards a sunset  that  no  one  of  any sensibility  would  dream  of building a city like Los Angeles on front  of,  they  were   suddenly   feeling   astonishingly   and irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously.  So what, they were both playing good rock and roll.

“I know he will be able to help us,” said Fenchurch determinedly.  “I  know  he  will.  What's  his  name again, that he likes to be called?”

“Wonko the Sane.”

“I know that he will be able to help us.”

Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he  would,  and  hoped that  what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth, whatever this Earth might prove to be.

He hoped, as he had hoped continually  and  fervently  since  the time  they  had  talked  together on the banks of the Serpentine, that he would not be called upon to  try  to  remember  something that  he  had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to  nag  at him.

In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed to be a converted warehouse.

Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.

Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry.

He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.

“Why's this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.

“Please  excuse  my  friend,”  said  Fenchurch  to  the  startled waitress. “I think he's having a nice day at last.”

Chapter 31

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of  the  David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the  upper  of  the first  two  David  Bowies  and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you  would  then  have  something  which  didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not  so  much with  any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell  exactly  where  the deckchair  ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the  whole  structure  suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite  remarkable.  It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you,  but  which,  when  he  briefly  reassembled  them  in  that particular  order  on  his face, made you suddenly fee, “Oh. Well that's all right then.”

When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you feel like that pretty often.

“Oh yes,” he said, "they come and see me. They  sit  right  here.

They sit right where you're sitting."

He was talking of the angels with the  golden  beards  and  green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

“They eat nachos which they say they can't get  where  they  come from.  They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole range of things.”

“Do they?” said Arthur. "Are they? So, er ... when is this  then?

When do they come?"

He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers running  along  the margin of the shore which seemed to have this problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a  wave had  just  washed  over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet wet. To deal with this problem they  ran  with  an  odd  kind  of movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in Switzerland.

Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing  patterns  in  it with her fingers.

“Weekends, mostly,” said Wonko the  Sane,  "on  little  scooters.

They are great machines." He smiled.

“I see,” said Arthur. “I see.”

A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked round  at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in the sand of the two of them  in  the  clouds.  For  a  moment  he thought  she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that she was rebuking him. “Who are we,” she was saying, “to say  he's mad?”

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this  was  the  first thing  that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to know what it was like.

What it was like was this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park  on  the carpet.

All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which  was decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves, also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular tops  which  stand  in such a way as to suggest that someone just dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures  which  were clearly designed to soothe.

Where it got really odd was the roof.

It folded back on itself like something that Maurits  C.  Escher, had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case,  though  it  is sometimes  hard,  looking  at  his pictures, particularly the one with the awkward steps, not to  wonder,  might  have  dreamed  up after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

Confusing.

The sign above the front  door  said,  “Come  Outside”,  and  so, nervously, they had.

Inside, of course, was where the Outside  was.  Rough  brickwork, nicely  done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and  opened at  the  end  as  if, by an optical illusion which would have had Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering  how  it  was  done,  to enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.

“Hello,” said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.

Good, they thought to themselves, “Hello”  is  something  we  can cope with.

“Hello,” they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.

For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the dolphins,  looking  oddly  distracted  and saying, “I forget ...” whenever they were mentioned, and had shown  them  quite  proudly round the eccentricities of his house.

“It gives me pleasure,” he said, “in a curious kind of  way,  and does  nobody  any harm,” he continued, “that a competent optician couldn't correct.”

They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed  able to mock himself before anybody else did.

“Your  wife,”  said  Arthur,  looking  around,  “mentioned   some toothpicks.”  He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention them again.

Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy  laugh,  and  sounded like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.

“Ah yes,” he said, “that's to so with the day I finally  realized that  the  world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better.”

This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.

“Here,” said Wonko the Sane, “we  are  outside  the  Asylum.”  He pointed  again  at  the  rough  brickwork,  the  pointing and the guttering. “Go through that door,” he pointed at the  first  door through  which  they had originally entered, “and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it  nicely  to  keep  the  inmates happy,  but  there's  very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away.”

“That one?” said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at  a  blue plaque with some instructions written on it.

“Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do.”

The sign said:

Hold stick near centre of its  length.  Moisten  pointed  end  in mouth.  insert  in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.

“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the sane,  “that  any  civilization that  had  so  far  lost  its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks,  was  no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it  to  rave  and gibber  at  him,  but  it  lay  there  calmly and played with the sandpipers.

“And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how  it possibly  might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point.  Wonko  is what  my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how,” he added, with  one of  his  smiles  that  made  you feel, “Oh. Well that's all right then.” “I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach  and  see what we have to talk about?”

They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about  angels  with  golden  beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

“About the dolphins ...” said Fenchurch gently, hopefully.

“I can show you the sandals,” said Wonko the Sane.

“I wonder, do you know ...”

“Would you like me to  show  you,”  said  Wonko  the  Sane,  “the sandals?  I  have  them.  I'll  get them. They are made by the Dr Scholl company, and the angels say that  they  particularly  suit the  terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession stand by the message. When I say I don't  know  what  that  means they say no, you don't, and laugh. Well, I'll get them anyway.”

As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on how  you  looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other in a wondering and slightly desperate  sort  of  way,  then  each shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand.

“How are the feet today?” said Arthur quietly.

“OK. It doesn't feel so odd in the sand. Or  in  the  water.  The water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn't our world.”

She shrugged.

“What do you think he meant,” she said, “by the message?”

“I don't know,” said Arthur, though the memory of  a  man  called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.

When Wonko  returned  he  was  carrying  something  that  stunned Arthur.  Not  the  sandals,  they were perfectly ordinary wooden-bottomed sandals.

“I just thought you'd like to see,” he said, “what angels wear on their  feet.  Just  out  of  curiousity.  I'm not trying to prove anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof.  But  the  reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also  be  absolutely  like  a child.  If  he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see  or  not.  See  first, think  later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most  scientists  forget  that.  I'll  show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will  think I  am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind  people  thinking  that you're  a  fool.  Anyway,  I  also  thought you might like to see this.”

This was the thing that  Arthur  had  been  stunned  to  see  him carrying,  for  it  was  a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur's bedroom.

Arthur had been trying  for  some  thirty  seconds  now,  without success,  to  say,  “Where did you get that?” sharply, and with a gasp in his voice.

Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond.

“Where did you get that?” said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice.

Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his  voice said, “What? Have you seen one of these before?”

“Yes,” she said, “I've got one. Or at least I did  have.  Russell nicked  it  to  put  his golfballs in. I don't know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell  for  nicking  it.  Why, have you got one?”

“Yes, it was ...”

They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was  glancing  sharply backwards  and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways.

“You have one of those too?” he said to both of them.

“Yes.” They both said it.

He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he  held  up  the bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.

The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to  chime  with  the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it.  They  could see  quite  clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words “So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.”

“Do you know,” asked Wonko quietly, “what it is?”

They each shook their  heads  slowly,  and  with  wonder,  almost hypnotized  by  the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey glass.

“It is a farewell gift from the dolphins,” said Wonko  in  a  low quiet  voice,  “the  dolphins  whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their  language, a   task   which   they  seemed  to  make  impossibly  difficult, considering the fact that  I  now  realize  they  were  perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.”

He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked  again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.

“Have you ...” he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours?

May I ask you that?"

“Er, I keep a fish in it,” said Arthur, slightly embarrassed.  “I happened  to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl.” He tailed off.

“You've done nothing else? No,” he said, “if you had,  you  would know.” He shook his head again.

“My wife kept wheatgerm in ours,” resumed Wonko,  with  some  new tone in his voice, “until last night ...”

“What,” said Arthur slowly and hushedly, “happened last night?”

“We ran out of wheatgerm,” said  Wonko,  evenly.  “My  wife,”  he added,  “has  gone to get some more.” He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.

“And what happened then?” said Fenchurch, in the same  breathless tone.

“I washed it,” said Wonko. “I washed it very carefully, very very carefully,  removing  every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully,  turning  it over  and  over.  Then I held it to my ear. Have you ... have you held one to your ear?”

They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you should.”

Chapter 32

The deep roar of the ocean.

The break of waves on further shores than thought can find.

The silent thunders of the deep.

And from among it, voices calling, and yet  not  voices,  humming trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought.

Greetings,  waves  of  greetings,  sliding  back  down  into  the inarticulate, words breaking together.

A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.

Waves  of  joy  on  -  where?  A   world   indescribably   found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.

A fugue of voices now, clamouring  explanations,  of  a  disaster unavertable,  a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.

And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in  the implications  of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.

Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.

"This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans.

We bid you farewell."

And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies  rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.

Chapter 33

That night they stayed Outside the Asylum  and  watched  TV  from inside it.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” said Wonko the Sane when  the news  came  around again, “an old colleague of mine. He's over in your country running an investigation. Just watch.”

It was a press conference.

“I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this  present time,  and  we  are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon.”

“Can you tell us what that means?”

"I'm not altogether sure. Let's be  straight  here.  If  we  find something  we  can't  understand we like to call it something you can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let  you go  around  calling  him  a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that.

"No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not yours,  then  we  set  about finding some way of proving it's not what you said it is, but something we say it is.

“And if it turns out that you're right, you'll  still  be  wrong, because  we will simply call him a ... er `Supernormal ...' - not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what  those mean  now, no, a `Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer'.  We'll probably want to shove a  `Quasi'  in  there  somewhere  to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me  going  on  holiday  with him.  Thanks,  that'll be all for now, other than to say `Hi!' to Wonko if he's watching.”

Chapter 34

On the way home there was a woman sitting next  to  them  on  the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.

They talked quietly to themselves.

“I still have to know,” said Fenchurch, “and I strongly feel that you know something that you're not telling me.”

Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.

“Do you have a pencil?” he said. She dug around and found one.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?” she said, after  he  had  spent twenty  minutes  frowning,  chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the  pencil again and grunting irritably to himself.

“Trying to remember an address someone once gave me.”

“Your life would be an awful lot  simpler,”  she  said,  “if  you bought yourself an address book.”

Finally he passed the paper to her.

“You look after it,” he said.

She looked at it. Among all the  scratchings  and  crossings  out were  the  words  “Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains.  Sevorbeupstry.  Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector  QQ7  Active  J Gamma.”

“And what's there?”

“Apparently,” said Arthur,  “it's  God's  Final  Message  to  His Creation.”

“That sounds a bit more like it,” said Fenchurch. “How do we  get there?”

“You really ...?”

“Yes,” said Fenchurch firmly, “I really want to know.”

Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex  window  at  the open sky outside.

“Excuse me,” said the woman who had been looking at  them  rather oddly, suddenly, “I hope you don't think I'm rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it's nice to talk to somebody.  My  name's Enid Kapelsen, I'm from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?”

Chapter 35

They went to Arthur's house in the West Country, shoved a  couple of  towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every Galactic hitch hiker ends up spending most of his time doing.

They waited for a flying saucer to come by.

“Friend of mine did this for  fifteen  years,”  said  Arthur  one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.

“Who was that?”

“Called Ford Prefect.”

He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again.

He wondered where Ford Prefect was.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the following day there were two reports  in  the  paper,  one  concerning  the  most  astonishing incidents with a flying saucer, and the other about a  series  of unseemly riots in pubs.

Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung  over  and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.

In fact he looked extremely ill,  not  merely  as  if  he'd  been pulled  through  a hedge backwards, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine  harvester.  He staggered  into Arthur's sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the  effort  caused  him  to lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually to drag him to the sofa.

“Thank you,” said Ford, “thank you very much. Have  you  ...”  he said, and fell asleep for three hours.

“... the faintest idea” he continued suddenly, when  he  revived, “how  hard  it  is  to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven't, so I'll tell you,” he said, “over  the  very  large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me.”

He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.

“Stupid operators keep asking you where you're calling  from  and you  try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn't be if you're coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?”

“Making you some black coffee.”

“Oh.” Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about  the  place forlornly.

“What's this?” he said.

“Rice Crispies.”

“And this?”

“Paprika.”

“I see,” said Ford, solemnly, and put the two  items  back  down, one  on  top  of  the  other,  but  that  didn't  seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and  that  seemed to work.

“A little space-lagged,” he said. “What was I saying?”

“About not phoning from Letchworth.”

“I wasn't. I explained this to the lady. `Bugger  Letchworth,'  I said, `if that's your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed  leg of a journey between the stars known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.' - I said  `dear lady',”  explained Ford Prefect, “because I didn't want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin ...”

“Tactful,” said Arthur Dent.

“Exactly,” said Ford, “tactful.”

He frowned.

“Space-lag,” he said, “is very bad for sub-clauses.  You'll  have to  assist  me  again,” he continued, “by reminding me what I was talking about.”

“`Between the stars,'” said Arthur, “`known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as ...'”

“`Pleiades  Epsilon   and   Pleiades   Zeta,'”   concluded   Ford triumphantly. “This conversation lark is quite gas isn't it?”

“Have some coffee.”

“Thank you, no. `And the reason,' I said, `why I am bothering you with  it  rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications  equipment  out here  in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son  of  a  starbeast  spaceship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?'”

“And could she?”

“I don't know. She had hung up,” said Ford, "by  this  time.  So!

What do you suppose,“ he asked fiercely, ”I did next?"

“I've no idea, Ford,” said Arthur.

“Pity,” said Ford, “I was hoping you could remind  me.  I  really hate  those  guys  you  know.  They  really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite  with  their  junky little  machines  that  never  work  properly  or,  when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and,” he added savagely, “go beep to tell you when they've done it!”

This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely  held by  right  thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a  moment  of  reasoned lucidity  which  is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine  pages,  says  of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential  uselessness of  them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

“In other words - and this is the rock solid principle  on  which the  whole  of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are  completely  hidden  by  their superficial design flaws.”

“And this guy,” ranted Ford, “was on a  drive  to  sell  more  of them!  His  five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell  Advanced  Music  Substitute  Systems  to  their restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars!  Or if they didn't have restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars  yet,  to   artificially accelerate  their  civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where's that coffee!”

“I threw it away.”

“Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next.  I  saved civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that.”

He stumbled determinedly back into the  sitting  room,  where  he seemed  to  carry  on  talking  to  himself,  tripping  over  the furniture and making beep beep noises.

A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid  face,  Arthur followed him.

Ford looked stunned.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Making some coffee,” said Arthur, still wearing his very  placid face.  He  had  long  ago  realized that the only way of being in Ford's company successfully was to keep a  large  stock  of  very placid faces and wear them at all times.

“You missed the best bit!” raged Ford. “You missed the bit  where I  jumped  the guy! Now,” he said, “I shall have to jump him, all over him!”

He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.

“It was better,” he said sullenly, “last time,” and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table.

“I see,” said Arthur, casting a placid eye over  the  trussed  up wreckage, “and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?”

“What?” screamed Ford. “What? You missed that bit too? That's the suspended  animation  facility!  I  put  the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well I had to didn't I?”

“So it would seem,” said Arthur, in his placid voice.

“Don't touch that!!!” yelled Ford.

Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which  was  for  some mysterious  reason  lying  on  the  table,  off the hook, paused, placidly.

“OK,” said Ford, calming down, “listen to it.”

Arthur put the phone to his ear.

“It's the speaking clock,” he said.

“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “is exactly what  is  being  heard all  over  that  guy's  ship,  while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras  Magna.  The  London Speaking Clock!”

“I see,” said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time  to ask the big one.

“Why?” he said, placidly.

“With a bit of luck,” said Ford, “the phone  bill  will  bankrupt the buggers.”

He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa.

“Anyway,” he said, “dramatic arrival don't you think?”

Chapter 36

The flying saucer in which  Ford  Prefect  had  stowed  away  had stunned the world.

Finally there  was  no  doubt,  no  possibility  of  mistake,  no hallucinations,  no  mysterious  CIA  agents  found  floating  in reservoirs.

This time it was real, it was definite. It was  quite  definitely definite.

It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything  beneath it  and  crushed  a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods.

The thing was massive, nearly a  mile  across,  some  said,  dull silver  in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces  by the light of suns unknown to man.

A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods  Food  Halls, demolished  Harvey  Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.

After a long,  heart-stopping  moment  of  internal  crashes  and grumbles  of  rending  machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.

It held up a hand.

“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as  he  sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had  anything  to  say  other  than  to record  that  the  thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had  killed  this totally  other  number  of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more  than  standing  there,  swaying very   slightly,   and   emitting  short  incomprehensible  error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see ...”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational  and coherent  than  he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down  him,  “nothing  so  simple.  Nothing   anything   like   so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards role the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don't people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn't occur to them,” said Ford. “They've all  got the  vote,  so  they  all  pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn't vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of  urgency  creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I'll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best  thing  that  ever happened  to them,” he said. “They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it.”

“But that's terrible,” said Arthur.

“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairan dollar for every time  I  heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say `That's terrible' I  wouldn't  be  sitting  here like  a  lemon looking for a gin. But I haven't and I am. Anyway, what are you looking so placid and  moon-eyed  for?  Are  you  in love?”

Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.

“With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?”

He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with  a  pile  of newspapers  she'd  been  into  the village to buy. She stopped in astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the  wreckage  from Betelgeuse on the sofa.

“Where's the gin?” said Ford to Fenchurch. And to  Arthur,  “What happened to Trillian by the way?”

“Er, this is  Fenchurch,”  said  Arthur,  awkwardly.  “There  was nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Ford, “she went off with Zaphod somewhere.  They had  some kids or something. At least,” he added, “I think that's what they were. Zaphod's calmed down a lot you know.”

“Really?” said Arthur, clustering hurriedly  round  Fenchurch  to relieve her of the shopping.

“Yeah,” said Ford, “at least one of his heads is now  saner  than an emu on acid.”

“Arthur, who is this?” said Fenchurch.

“Ford Prefect,”  said  Arthur.  “I  may  have  mentioned  him  in passing.”

Chapter 37

For a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood in  stunned  amazement  straddling  the remains of Knightsbridge, swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things.

Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the truckload  asked  each other questions on the air about what they thought of it, flights of fighter bombers tried  pathetically  to attack  it  -  but  no  lizards  appeared. It scanned the horizon slowly.

At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of television  crews  who covered it continuously as it continuously did nothing.

It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.

It would have to send out its service robots.

It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number of problems.

The tiny flying robots came screeching out of  the  hatchway  one afternoon  in  a  terrifying  cloud  of  metal.  They  roamed the surrounding  terrain,  frantically  attacking  some  things   and defending others.

One of them at last found a pet shop with some  lizards,  but  it

instantly  defended  the  pet shop for democracy so savagely that

little in the area survived.

A turning point came when  a  crack  team  of  flying  screechers discovered  the  Zoo  in Regent's Park, and most particularly the reptile house.

Learning a little caution from their  previous  mistakes  in  the petshop,  the  flying  drills  and  fretsaws  brought some of the larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to conduct high-level talks with them.

Eventually the robot announced to  the  world  that  despite  the full,  frank  and  wide-ranging  exchange of views the high level talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it, the  robot  would  take  a  short holiday somewhere, and for some reason selected Bournemouth.

Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another beer.

Immediate preparations were made for its departure.

The flying toolkits screeched and sawed  and  drilled  and  fried things  with  light throughout that day and all through the night time, and in the  morning,  stunningly,  a  giant  mobile  gantry started  to  roll  westwards on several roads simultaneously with the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.

Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its servants  and  helicopters and news coaches, scything through the land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly freed itself from it transport system's embraces and went and lay for ten days on the beach.

It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that  had  ever happened to Bournemouth.

Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which  was  staked  out and guarded as the robot's recreation area, and tried to see what it was doing.

It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was  lying  a little awkwardly on its face.

It was a journalist from a  local  paper  who,  late  one  night, managed  to  do what no one else in the world had so far managed, which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one of the service robots guarding the perimeter.

It was an extraordinary breakthrough.

“I think there's a story in it,” confided the journalist  over  a cigarette  shared  through  the steel link fence, “but it needs a good local angle. I've got a little list of questions  here,”  he went  on,  rummaging  awkwardly  in an inner pocket, “perhaps you could get him, it, whatever you call him,  to  run  through  them quickly.”

The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see  what  it cold do and screeched off.

A reply was never forthcoming.

Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper  more  or less  exactly  matched  the questions that were going through the massive battle-scarred industrial quality circuits of the robot's mind. They were these:

“How do you feel about being a robot?”

“How does it feel to be from outer space?” and

“How do you like Bournemouth?”

Early the following day things started to be packed up and within a  few  days  it  became apparent that the robot was preparing to leave for good.

“The point is,” said Fenchurch  to  Ford,  “can  you  get  us  on board?”

Ford looked wildly at his watch.

“I have some  serious  unfinished  business  to  attend  to,”  he exclaimed.

Chapter 38

Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft, which  wasn't  very.  The  immediate perimeter was fenced off and patrolled by the tiny flying service robots.  Staked  out  around that  was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going  to  breach them.  They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from  the  army  or the  army  from  the  public,  or  to  guarantee the giant ship's diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting  parking  tickets  was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.

The inner perimeter fence was  now  being  dismantled.  The  army stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that the reason for their being there seemed as if it was simply going to get up and go.

The giant robot had lurched back aboard the  ship  at  lunchtime, and  now it was five o'clock in the afternoon and no further sign had been seen of it. Much had been heard  -  more  grindings  and rumblings  from  deep  within  the  craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions; but the sense of  tense  expectation  among the  crowd  was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing  had  come  into their lives, an now it was simply going to go without them.

Two people were particularly aware of this sensation. Arthur  and Fenchurch  scanned  the  crowd  anxiously,  unable  to  find Ford Prefect in it anywhere, or any sign that  he  had  the  slightest intention of being there.

“How reliable is he?” asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice.

“How reliable?” said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. “How shallow is the ocean?” he said. “How cold is the sun?”

The last parts of the robot's gantry transport were being carried on  board,  and the few remaining sections of the perimeter fence were now stacked at the bottom of  the  ramp  waiting  to  follow them. The soldiers on guard round the ramp bristled meaningfully, orders were barked back and forth, hurried conferences were held, but nothing, of course, could be done about any of it.

Hopelessly, and with no clear  plan  now,  Arthur  and  Fenchurch pushed  forward  through the crowd, but since the whole crowd was also trying to push forward through  the  crowd,  this  got  them nowhere.

And within a few minutes more nothing remained outside the  ship, every  last link of the fence was aboard. A couple of flying fret saws and a spirit level seemed to do one last  check  around  the site, and then screamed in through the giant hatchway themselves.

A few seconds passed.

The  sounds  of  mechanical  disarray  from  within  changed   in intensity, and slowly, heavily, the huge steel ramp began to lift itself back out  of  the  Harrods  Food  Halls.  The  sound  that accompanied  it  was  the  sound  of  thousands of tense, excited people being completely ignored.

“Hold it!”

A megaphone barked from a taxi which screeched to a halt  on  the edge of the milling crowd.

“There has been,”  barked  the  megaphone,  “a  major  scientific break-in!  Through.  Breakthrough,” it corrected itself. The door flew open and a small man  from  somewhere  in  the  vicinity  of Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat.

“Hold it!” he shouted again, and this  time  brandished  a  short squad black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to  the  signals from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the galaxy are constantly trying to find fresh ways of  jamming,  while  the other  half  are  constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downwards again.

Ford Prefect grabbed his megaphone  from  out  of  the  taxi  and started bawling at the crowd through it.

“Make way,” he shouted,  “make  way,  please,  this  is  a  major scientific  breakthrough. You and you, get the equipment from the taxi.”

Completely at random he pointed  at  Arthur  and  Fenchurch,  who wrestled  their  way back out of the crowd and clustered urgently round the taxi.

“All right, I want you to  clear  a  passage,  please,  for  some important  pieces  of  scientific  equipment,” boomed Ford. “Just everybody keep calm. It's all under control, there's  nothing  to see. It is merely a major scientific breakthrough. Keep calm now.  Important scientific equipment. Clear the way.”

Hungry for new excitement, delighted at this sudden reprieve from disappointment,  the crowd enthusiastically fell back and started to open up.

Arthur was a little surprised to see  what  was  printed  on  the boxes of important scientific equipment in the back of the taxi.

“Hang your coat over them,” he muttered to Fenchurch as he heaved them   out   to  her.  Hurriedly  he  manoeuvred  out  the  large supermarket trolley that was also jammed against the  back  seat.  It  clattered  to  the ground, and together they loaded the boxes into it.

“Clear a path, please,” shouted Ford again.  “Everything's  under proper scientific control.”

“He said you'd pay,” said the taxi-driver to Arthur, who dug  out some  notes  and  paid him. There was the distant sound of police sirens.

“Move along there,” shouted Ford, “and no one will get hurt.”

The crowd surged and closed behind  them  again,  as  frantically they  pushed  and hauled the rattling supermarket trolley through the rubble towards the ramp.

“It's all right,” Ford continued to bellow. “There's  nothing  to see, it's all over. None of this is actually happening.”

“Clear the way, please,” boomed a police megaphone from the  back of the crowd. “There's been a break-in, clear the way.”

“Breakthrough,”  yelled  Ford  in  competition.   “A   scientific breakthrough!”

“This is the police! Clear the way!”

“Scientific equipment! Clear the way!”

“Police! Let us through!”

“Walkmen!” yelled Ford, and pulled half a  dozen  miniature  tape players  from  his  pockets  and  tossed them into the crowd. The resulting seconds of utter confusion  allowed  them  to  get  the supermarket trolley to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up on to the lip of it.

“Hold tight,”  muttered  Ford,  and  released  a  button  on  his Electronic  Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp juddered and began slowly to heave its way upwards.

“Ok, kids,” he said as the milling  crowd  dropped  away  beneath them  and  they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp into the bowels of the ship, “looks like we're on our way.”

Chapter 39

Arthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the  sound of gunfire.

Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was  still  managing  to sleep  fitfully,  he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway which they had fashioned into a  kind  of  bunk  for  themselves, slung  himself  down  the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily.

They were  claustrophobic  and  ill-lit.  The  lighting  circuits buzzed annoyingly.

This wasn't it, though.

He paused and leaned backwards as a flying power drill flew  past him  down  the  dim  corridor  with a nasty screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee as it did so.

That wasn't it either.

He clambered through a bulkhead  door  and  found  himself  in  a larger  corridor.  Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked towards the other.

He came to an observation monitor let  into  the  wall  behind  a plate of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.

“Would you turn it down please?” he said to Ford Prefect who  was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he'd taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court  Road, having  first  hurled  a small brick through it, and also a nasty heap of empty beer cans.

“Shhhh!” hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at  the screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.

“Just a bit,” said Arthur.

“No!” shouted Ford. “We're just getting to the good bit!  Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!”

With a sigh and a  headache,  Arthur  sat  down  beside  him  and watched  the good bit. He listened to Ford's whoops and yells and “yeehay!”s as placidly as he could.

“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over,  and  Ford  was hunting  through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, “how come, if ...”

“This is the big one,” said Ford. "This is the one  I  came  back for.  Do  you realize I never saw it all through? Always I missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came.  When  they  blew  the place up I thought I'd never get to see it.

Hey, what happened with all that anyway?"

“Just life,” said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.

“Oh, that again,” said Ford. “I thought  it  might  be  something like  that. I prefer this stuff,” he said as Rick's Bar flickered on to the screen. “How come if what?”

“What?”

“You started to say, `how come if ...'”

“How come if you're so rude about the  Earth,  that  you  ...  oh never mind, let's just watch the movie.”

“Exactly,” said Ford.

Chapter 40

There remains little still to tell.

Beyond what used to be known  as  the  Limitless  Lightfields  of Flanux   until  the  Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of  Saxaquine  were discovered lying behind them, lie the Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of Saxaquine. Within the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet  Preliumtarn  in which  is  the  land  of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at  last,  a  little tired by the journey.

And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they  came  to  the  Great  Red Plain  of  Rars,  which  was  bounded  on  the  South side by the Quentulus Quazgar  Mountains,  on  the  further  side  of  which, according  to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-foot-high letters of fire God's Final Message to His Creation.

According to Prak, if Arthur's memory saved him right, the  place was  guarded  by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and he sold them a ticket.

“Keep to the left, please,” he said,  “keep  to  the  left,”  and hurried on past them on a little scooter.

They realized they were not the first to pass that way,  for  the path  that  led  around the left of the Great Plain was well-worn and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge,  which had  been  baked  in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was heated by the fire of the letters that formed God's Final Message to  His  Creation.  At  another  they  bought some postcards. The letters had been blurred with an airbrush, “so as  not  to  spoil the Big Surprise!” it said on the reverse.

“Do you know what the message is?” they asked the wizened  little lady in the booth.

“Oh yes,” she piped cheerily, “oh yes!”

She waved them on.

Every twenty miles or so  there  was  a  little  stone  hut  with showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain,  and  the  Great  Red Plain rippled in the heat.

“Is it possible,” asked Arthur at one of the larger  booths,  “to rent  one  of  those  little  scooters?  Like  the  one  Lajestic Ventrawhatsit had.”

“The scooters,” said the little lady who was serving  at  an  ice cream bar, “are not for the devout.”

“Oh  well,  that's  easy  then,”  said  Fenchurch,   “we're   not particularly devout. We're just interested.”

“Then you must turn back now,” said the little lady severely, and when  they  demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sunhats and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around  each other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.

They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth  and  then trudged out into the sun again.

“We're running out of border cream,” said Fenchurch after  a  few more miles. “We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the previous one which is nearer, but means we have  to  retrace  our steps again.”

They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the  heat haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.

They then discovered that they were not only not the  first  ones to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making it now.

Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape  was  heaving  itself wretchedly  along  the  ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half-limping, half-crawling.

It was moving so slowly that before  too  long  they  caught  the creature  up  and could see that it was made of worn, scarred and twisted metal.

It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in  the  hot dry dust.

“So much time,” it groaned, “oh so much time. And pain  as  well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It's the  two  together that really get me down. Oh hello, you again.”

“Marvin?” said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. “Is that you?”

“You were always one,” groaned the aged husk of the  robot,  “for the super-intelligent question, weren't you?”

“What is it?” whispered  Fenchurch  in  alarm,  crouching  behind Arthur, and grasping on to his arm. “He's sort of an old friend,” said Arthur. “I ...”

“Friend!” croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a kind of crackle and flakes of rust fell out of its mouth. “You'll have to excuse me while I try and remember what the  word  means.  My  memory  banks  are  not what they were you know, and any word which falls into disuse for  a  few  zillion  years  has  to  get shifted down into auxiliary memory back-up. Ah, here it comes.”

The robot's battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.

“Hmm,” he said, “what a curious concept.”

He thought a little longer.

“No,” he said at last, “don't think I ever  came  across  one  of those. Sorry, can't help you there.”

He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, an  then  tried to twist himself up on his misshapen elbows.

“Is there any last service you would like me to perform  for  you perhaps?”  he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. “A piece of paper that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or  maybe  you would like me,” he continued, “to open a door?”

His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to scan the distant horizon.

“Don't seem to be any doors around at present,” he said, “but I'm sure  that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And then,” he said slowly twisting his  head  around  to  see  Arthur again,  “I  could  open it for you. I'm quite used to waiting you know.”

“Arthur,” hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, “you never told me of this. What have you done to this poor creature?”

“Nothing,” insisted Arthur sadly, “he's always like this ...”

“Ha!” snapped Marvin. “Ha!” he repeated. “What  do  you  know  of always?  You say `always' to me, who, because of the silly little errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending  me  through  time on,  am  now  thirty-seven  times older than the Universe itself?  Pick your words with a little more care,” he coughed, “and tact.”

He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.

“Leave me,” he said, “go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully on  my  way.  My  time at last has nearly come. My race is nearly run. I fully expect,” he said,  feebly  waving  them  on  with  a broken  finger, “to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am, brain the size ...”

Between them they picked him up despite his feeble  protests  and insults.  The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers, but he weighed surprisingly little, and hung limply between their arms.

They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of Quentulus Quazgar.

Arthur attempted to explain  to  Fenchurch,  but  was  too  often interrupted by Marvin's dolorous cybernetic ravings.

They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts  at  one of the booths, but Marvin would have none of it.

“I'm all spare parts,” he droned.

“Let me be!” he groaned.

“Every part of me,” he moaned, “has been replaced at least  fifty times  ... except ...” He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten for a moment. His head bobbed between them  with  the  effort  of memory.  “Do  you  remember,  the first time you ever met me,” he said at  last  to  Arthur.  “I  had  been  given  the  intellect-stretching  task  of  taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my  left side?  That  I  had  asked for them to be replaced but they never were?”

He left a longish pause before he continued. They carried him  on between  them,  under  the  baking sun that hardly ever seemed to move, let alone set.

“See if you can guess,” said Marvin,  when  he  judged  that  the pause  had  become  embarrassing  enough, "which parts of me were never replaced? Go on, see if you can guess.

“Ouch,” he added, “ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch.”

At last they reached the last of  the  little  booths,  set  down Marvin  between  them  and  rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought some cufflinks for Russell, cufflinks that had set in them little polished  pebbles  which  had  been  picked up from the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the  letters  of  fire  in which was written God's Final Message to His Creation.

Arthur flipped through a little rack of devotional tracts on  the counter, little meditations on the meaning of the Message.

“Ready?” he said to Fenchurch, who nodded.

They heaved up Marvin between them.

They rounded the foot of the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains,  and there  was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest of the Mountain. There was a  little  observation  vantage  point with  a  rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from which you could get a good view. It had  a  little  pay-telescope for  looking  at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance  of  the heavens  and  would,  if  seen through a telescope, have severely damaged the retina and optic nerve.

They gazed at God's Final Message in wonderment, and were  slowly and  ineffably  filled  with a great sense of peace, and of final and complete understanding.

Fenchurch sighed. “Yes,” she said, “that was it.”

They had been staring at it for fully  ten  minutes  before  they became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his  head,  had  not read  the  message.  They lifted his head, but he complained that his vision circuits had almost gone.

They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He  complained and  insulted  them,  but they helped him look at each individual letter in turn, The first letter was a “w”, the  second  an  “e”.  Then  there was a gap. An “a” followed, then a “p”, an “o” and an “l”.

Marvin paused for a rest.

After a few moments they resumed and let him  see  the  “o”,  the “g”, the “i”, the “s” and the “e”.

The next two words were “for” and “the”. The last one was a  long one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.

It started with an “i”, then “n” then a “c”. Next came an “o” and an “n”, followed by a “v”, an “e”, another “n” and an “i”.

After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength  for  the  last stretch.

He read the “e”, the “n”, the “c” and at last the final “e”,  and staggered back into their arms.

“I think,” he murmured at last, from deep  within  his  corroding rattling thorax, “I feel good about it.”

The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time ever.

Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could  rent  scooters from guys with green wings.

Epilogue

One of the greatest benefactors of all lifekind  was  a  man  who couldn't keep his mind on the job in hand.

Brilliant?

Certainly.

One of the  foremost  genetic  engineers  of  his  or  any  other generation, including a number he had designed himself?

Without a doubt.

The problem was that he was far too interested in things which he shouldn't  be  interested in, at least, as people would tell him, not now.

He was also, partly  because  of  this,  of  a  rather  irritable disposition.

So when his world was threatened  by  terrible  invaders  from  a distant  star, who were still a fair way off but travelling fast, he, Blart Versenwald III (his  name  was  Blart  Versenwald  III, which  is  not strictly relevant, but quite interesting because - never mind, that was his name and we  can  talk  about  why  it's interesting  later),  was  sent  into  guarded  seclusion  by the masters of his race  with  instructions  to  design  a  breed  of fanatical   superwarriors  to  resist  and  vanquish  the  feared invaders, do it quickly and, they told him, “Concentrate!”

So he sat by a window  and  looked  out  at  a  summer  lawn  and designed  and  designed and designed, but inevitably got a little distracted  by  things,  and  by  the  time  the  invaders   were practically  in  orbit  round them, had come up with a remarkable new breed of super-fly that could, unaided, figure out how to fly through  the  open  half  of a half-open window, and also an off-switch   for   children.   Celebrations   of   these   remarkable achievements  seemed doomed to be shortlived because disaster was imminent as the alien ships were landing. But  astoundingly,  the fearsome  invaders  who, like most warlike races were only on the rampage because they couldn't cope  with  things  at  home,  were stunned  by  Versenwald's  extraordinary breakthroughs, joined in the celebrations and were instantly  prevailed  upon  to  sign  a wide-ranging  series of trading agreements and set up a programme of cultural exchanges. And, in an astonishing reversal of  normal practice  in  the  conduct  of  such matters, everybody concerned lived happily ever after.

There was a point to this story, but it has  temporarily  escaped the chronicler's mind.