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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
"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."
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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."
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 fo