corpus3.txt

"Meet the newt you trod on," said the voice.

And there was, standing in the  corridor  with  Arthur,  a  giant
green  scaly  newt.  Arthur  turned, yelped, leapt backwards, and
found himself standing in the middle of  the  rabbit.  He  yelped
again, but could find nowhere to leap to.

"That was me, too," continued the voice in a low menacing rumble,
"as if you didn't know ..."

"Know?" said Arthur with a start. "Know?"

"The interesting thing about reincarnation,"  rasped  the  voice,
"is  that  most  people,  most  spirits, are not aware that it is
happening to them."

He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was  concerned  there  was
already quite enough effect going on.

"I was aware," hissed  the  voice,  "that  is,  I  became  aware.
Slowly. Gradually."

He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.

"I could hardly help it, could I?" he bellowed,  "when  the  same
thing  kept happening, over and over and over again! Every life I
ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any
time,  I'm  just  getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent -
pow, he kills me.

"Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit  of  a  pointer.
Bit of a bloody giveaway!

"`That's funny,' my spirit would say to itself as it  winged  its
way  back  to  the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended
venture into the land of the living, `that man who just ran  over
me as I was hopping across the road to my favourite pond looked a
little familiar ...' And gradually I got to  piece  it  together,
Dent, you multiple-me-murderer!"

The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors.  Arthur
stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.

"Here's the moment, Dent," shrieked the  voice,  now  reaching  a
feverish  pitch  of  hatred,  "here's  the  moment when at last I
knew!"

It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly  opened  up
in  front  of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but
here's an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It  was
a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast, slimy, rough, whale-like
creature rolling around  it  and  sliding  over  monstrous  white
tombstones.  High  above the cave rose a vast promontory in which
could be seen the dark recesses of  two  further  fearful  caves,
which ...

Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he  was  looking  at  his  own
mouth,  when  his  attention was meant to be directed at the live
oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.

He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.

When he looked again  the  appalling  apparition  had  gone.  The
corridor  was  dark  and,  briefly, silent. He was alone with his
thoughts. They  were  extremely  unpleasant  thoughts  and  would
rather have had a chaperone.

The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of  a  large
section  of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just
dark blackness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the  same
way that a mouse looks into a dark dog-kennel.

And the voice spoke to him again.

"Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent," it said.  "I  dare  you  to
tell me it was a coincidence!"

"It was a coincidence," said Arthur quickly.

"It was not!" came the answering bellow.

"It was," said Arthur, "it was ..."

"If it was a coincidence, then my name," roared  the  voice,  "is
not Agrajag!!!"

"And presumably," said Arthur, "you would  claim  that  that  was
your name."

"Yes!" hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather  deft
syllogism.

"Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence," said Arthur.

"Come in here and say that!" howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy
again.
Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least,
he  nearly said that it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost
its footing towards the end of the last word because  the  lights
came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.

It was a Cathedral of Hate.

It was the product of a mind that was  not  merely  twisted,  but
actually sprained.

It was huge. It was horrific.

It had a Statue in it.

We will come to the Statue in a moment.

The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had  been
carved  out  of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this
was that that was precisely what it had been carved  out  of.  It
seemed  to  Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood
and gaped at it.

It was black.

Where it wasn't black you were inclined  to  wish  that  it  was,
because  the  colours  with which some of the unspeakable details
were picked out ranged horribly  across  the  whole  spectrum  of
eye-defying  colours  from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in
Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow,  Burnt  hombre  and
Gan Green on the way.

The unspeakable details  which  these  colours  picked  out  were
gargoyles which would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

The gargoyles  all  looked  inwards  from  the  walls,  from  the
pillars,  from  the  flying  buttresses,  from  the choir stalls,
towards the Statue, to which we will come in a moment.

And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his  lunch,
then it was clear from the gargoyles' faces that the Statue would
have put them off theirs, had they been alive to  eat  it,  which
they  weren't,  and  had  anybody tried to serve them some, which
they wouldn't.

Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone  tablets  in
memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.

The names of some of those commemorated were underlined  and  had
asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow which
had been slaughtered and of which Arthur Dent had happened to eat
a  fillet  steak  would  have the plainest engraving, whereas the
name of a fish which Arthur had himself caught and  then  decided
he  didn't  like  and  left on the side of the plate had a double
underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger  added
as decoration, just to make the point.

And what was most disturbing  about  all  this,  apart  from  the
Statue,  to  which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear
implication that all these people and creatures were  indeed  the
same person, over and over again.

And it was equally clear that this person was, however  unfairly,
extremely upset and annoyed.

In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached  a  level  of
annoyance  the like of which had never been seen in the Universe.
It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning searing  flame
of  annoyance,  an  annoyance which now spanned the whole of time
and space in its infinite umbrage.

And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression  in  the
Statue  in the centre of all this monstrosity, which was a statue
of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet  tall  if  it
was  an  inch,  there  was not an inch of it which wasn't crammed
with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of
thing  would  be  enough  to  make any subject feel bad. From the
small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish  cut  of  his
dressing  gown,  there  was no aspect of Arthur Dent which wasn't
lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.

Arthur appeared as  a  gorgon,  an  evil,  rapacious,  ravenning,
bloodied  ogre,  slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man
Universe.

With each of the thirty arms which  the  sculptor  in  a  fit  of
artistic  fervour had decided to give him, he was either braining
a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea  out
of  his  hair,  or  doing something which Arthur at first looking
couldn't quite identify.

His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.

Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head  and  shook  it
slowly  from  side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness
of things.

And when he opened his eyes again, there in front  of  him  stood
the  figure  of  the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he
had supposedly been persecuting all this time.

"HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!" said Agrajag.

He, or it, or whatever, looked like a mad  fat  bat.  He  waddled
slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.

"Look ...!" protested Arthur.

"HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!"  explained  Agrajag,   and   Arthur
reluctantly  accepted  this  on  the  grounds  that he was rather
frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.

Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.

His batwings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic
broken floundering things they were that if they had been strong,
muscular beaters of the air. The frightening thing  was  probably
the  tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical
odds.

He had the most astounding collection of teeth.

They looked as if they each  came  from  a  completely  different
animal,  and  they  were  ranged around his mouth at such bizarre
angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew  anything
he'd  lacerate  half his own face along with it, and possibly put
an eye out as well.

Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about  as
sane as a fish in a privet bush.

"I was at a cricket match," he rasped.

This seemed on the face of it such  a  preposterous  notion  that
Arthur practically choked.

"Not in this body," screeched the creature, "not  in  this  body!
This  is  my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My
kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get  it,
too."

"But ..."

"I was at," roared Agrajag, "a cricket match! I had a weak  heart
condition,  but  what,  I  said to my wife, can happen to me at a
cricket match? As I'm watching, what happens?

"Two people quite maliciously appear out  of  thin  air  just  in
front  of  me.  The  last thing I can't help but notice before my
poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur  Dent
wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?"

"Yes," said Arthur.

"Coincidence?" screamed the  creature,  painfully  thrashing  its
broken  wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a
particularly nasty tooth. On closer  examination,  such  as  he'd
been  hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag's face
was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters.

He backed away nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled
to  discover  that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He
pulled it out and threw it away.

"Look," he said, "it's just fate playing silly buggers with  you.
With me. With us. It's a complete coincidence."

"What have you got  against  me,  Dent?"  snarled  the  creature,
advancing on him in a painful waddle.

"Nothing," insisted Arthur, "honestly, nothing."

Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.

"Seems a strange way to relate to  somebody  you've  got  nothing
against,  killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social
interaction, I would call that. I'd also call it a lie!"
"But look," said Arthur, "I'm very sorry. There's been a terrible
misunderstanding. I've got to go. Have you got a clock? I'm meant
to be helping save the Universe." He backed away still further.

Agrajag advanced still further.

"At one point," he hissed, "at one point, I decided to  give  up.
Yes,  I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And
what happened?"

Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that  he  had  no
idea  and  didn't want to have one either. He found he had backed
up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by  who  knew
what  Herculean  effort  into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom
slippers. He glanced up at his own  horrendously  parodied  image
towering  above  him.  He was still puzzled as to what one of his
hands was meant to be doing.

"I got  yanked  involuntarily  back  into  the  physical  world,"
pursued  Agrajag,  "as  a  bunch  of petunias. In, I might add, a
bowl. This particularly happy little lifetime  started  off  with
me,  in  my  bowl,  unsupported,  three  hundred  miles above the
surface of a particularly grim planet. Not  a  naturally  tenable
position  for  a  bowl of petunias, you might think. And you'd be
right. That life ended a very short while  later,  three  hundred
miles  lower.  In, I might add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My
spirit brother."

He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.

"On the way down,"  he  snarled,  "I  couldn't  help  noticing  a
flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this
flashy-looking  spaceship  was  a   smug-looking   Arthur   Dent.
Coincidence?!!"

"Yes!" yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that  the
arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into
existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept which
leapt easily to the eye.

"I must go," insisted Arthur.

"You may go," said Agrajag, "after I have killed you."

"No, that won't be any use," explained Arthur, beginning to climb
up  the hard stone incline of his carved slipper, "because I have
to save the Universe, you see. I have  to  find  a  Silver  Bail,
that's the point. Tricky thing to do dead."

"Save the Universe!" spat Agrajag with contempt. "You should have
thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! What
about the time you were on Stavromula Beta and someone ..."

"I've never been there," said Arthur.

"... tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who  do  you  think
the bullet hit? What did you say?"
"Never been there," repeated Arthur. "What are you talking about?
I have to go."

Agrajag stopped in his tracks.

"You must have been there. You  were  responsible  for  my  death
there, as everywhere else. An innocent bystander!" He quivered.

"I've never heard of the place," insisted Arthur. "I've certainly
never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I
go there later, do you think?"

Agrajag blinked slowly in a kind of frozen logical horror.

"You haven't been to Stavromula Beta ... yet?" he whispered.

"No," said Arthur,  "I  don't  know  anything  about  the  place.
Certainly never been to it, and don't have any plans to go."

"Oh, you go there all right," muttered Agrajag in a broken voice,
"you go there all right. Oh zark!" he tottered, and stared wildly
about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. "I've brought  you  here
too soon!"

He started to scream and  bellow.  "I've  brought  you  here  too
zarking soon!"

Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.

"I'm going to kill you  anyway!"  he  roared.  "Even  if  it's  a
logical impossibility I'm going to zarking well try! I'm going to
blow this whole mountain up!" He screamed, "Let's see you get out
of this one, Dent!"

He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to  be  a
small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that
he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down  from
his  vantage  place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try
to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.

He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity  crashing
down on top of the altar.

Agrajag screamed again, thrashed wildly for a brief  moment,  and
turned a wild eye on Arthur.

"You know what you've done?" he gurgled painfully.  "You've  only
gone  and  killed  me  again.  i  mean, what do you want from me,
blood?"

He thrashed again  in  a  brief  apoplectic  fit,  quivered,  and
collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.

Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to
have  done,  and  then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly
shattered the air  to  announce  some  clamouring  emergency.  He
stared wildly around him.

The only exit appeared to be  the  way  he  came  in.  He  pelted
towards  it,  throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he
did so.

He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze, he
seemed  to  be pursued more and more fiercely by claxons, sirens,
flashing lights.

Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light  in  front  of
him.

It wasn't flashing. It was daylight.




Although it has been said that on Earth alone in  our  Galaxy  is
Krikkit  (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that
for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this does only  apply
to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of
the higher dimensions they feel they  can  more  or  less  please
themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian
Ultra-Cricket for whatever their transdimensional  equivalent  of
billions of years is.

 "Let's be blunt, it's a nasty  game"  (says  The  Hitch  Hiker's
Guide  to the Galaxy) "but then anyone who has been to any of the
higher dimensions will know that they're a pretty  nasty  heathen
lot  up  there  who should just be smashed and done in, and would
be, too, if anyone could work out a way  of  firing  missiles  at
right-angles to reality."

This is another example of the fact that The Hitch Hiker's  Guide
to  the  Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in
off the street and get ripped off, especially if they  happen  to
walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the
regular staff are there.

There is a fundamental point here.

The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy  is  one  of
idealism,  struggle,  despair,  passion,  success,  failure,  and
enormously long lunch-breaks.

The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its
financial records, lost in the mists of time.

For other, and more curious theories about where they  are  lost,
see below.

Most of the surviving  stories,  however,  speak  of  a  founding
editor called Hurling Frootmig.

Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established  its
fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust.

There followed many years of penury  and  heart-searching  during
which  he  consulted  friends,  sat  in darkened rooms in illegal
states of mind, thought about this and that,  fooled  about  with
weights,  and  then,  after  a  chance  encounter  with  the Holy
Lunching Friars of Voondon (who claimed that just as lunch was at
the  centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day could
be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should

(a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and

(b) be held in jolly nice restaurants), he refounded  the  Guide,
laid  down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and
where you could stuff them both, and led  the  Guide  on  to  its
first major commercial success.

He also started to develop and explore the role of the  editorial
lunch-break which was subsequently to play such a crucial part in
the Guide's history, since it meant that most of the actual  work
got  done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the
empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.

Shortly  after  this,  the  Guide  was  taken  over  by  Megadodo
Publications  of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on
a very sound financial footing, and allowing the  fourth  editor,
Lig Lury Jr, to embark on lunch-breaks of such breathtaking scope
that even  the  efforts  of  recent  editors,  who  have  started
undertaking  sponsored  lunch-breaks  for charity, seem like mere
sandwiches in comparison.

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship -  he  merely
left  his  office  late one morning and has never since returned.
Though well over a century has now passed, many  members  of  the
guide  staff  still retain the romantic notion that he has simply
popped out for a ham croissant, and will yet return to put  in  a
solid afternoon's work.

Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr  have  therefore
been designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved
the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which  says
"Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed Fed".

Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that
Lig   actually   perished  in  the  Guide's  first  extraordinary
experiments in alternative book-keeping. Very little is known  of
this,  and  less  still  said. Anyone who even notices, let alone
calls attention  to,  the  curious  but  utter  coincidental  and
meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set
up an accounting department has shortly  afterwards  perished  in
warfare  or  some  natural  disaster,  is  liable  to get sued to
smithereens.

It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that  the  two
or three days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to make
way for a new hyperspace bypass saw a  dramatic  upsurge  in  the
number  of  UFO  sightings  there,  not  only above Lords Cricket
Ground in St. John's Wood, London, but also above Glastonbury  in
Somerset.

Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings,
witchcraft,  ley-lines  an wart curing, and had now been selected
as the site for the new Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  financial  records
office,  and  indeed,  ten years' worth of financial records were
transferred to a magic hill just  outside  the  city  mere  hours
before the Vogons arrived.

None of these facts,  however  strange  or  inexplicable,  is  as
strange  or  inexplicable  as  the  rules of the game of Brockian
Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set  of
rules  is  so  massively complicated that the only time they were
all  bound  together  in  a   single   volume,   they   underwent
gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole.

A brief summary, however, is as follows:

Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You  won't  need  them,
but it keeps the crowds amused.

Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player. Clone  him
off  a  few  times.  This  saves  an  enormous  amount of tedious
selection and training.

Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large  field
and build a high wall round them.

The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator
sport,  the  frustration  experienced  by  the  audience  at  not
actually being able to see what's going on leads them to  imagine
that it's a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has
just watched a rather humdrum game  experiences  far  less  life-
affirmation  than  a  crowd  that believes it has just missed the
most dramatic event in sporting history.

Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted  items  of  sporting  equipment
over  the  wall for the players. Anything will do - cricket bats,
basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you  can  get  a  good
swing with.

Rule Five: The players should now lay about  themselves  for  all
they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player
scores a "hit" on another player, he should immediately run  away
and apologize from a safe distance.

Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and
points, delivered through a megaphone.

Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.

Curiously enough, the more the obsession with the game  grows  in
the higher dimensions, the less it is actually played, since most
of the competing teams are now in a state  of  permanent  warfare
with  each  other over the interpretation of these rules. This is
all for the best, because in the long run a  good  solid  war  is
less  psychologically damaging than a protracted game of Brockian
Ultra-Cricket.




As Arthur ran darting, dashing and panting down the side  of  the
mountain  he  suddenly  felt  the whole bulk of the mountain move
very, very slightly beneath him. There was a rumble, a roar,  and
a  slight  blurred  movement,  and a lick of heat in the distance
behind and above him. He ran in a frenzy of fear. The land  began
to  slide, and he suddenly felt the force of the word "landslide"
in a way which had never been apparent  to  him  before.  It  had
always  just  been  a  word  to  him, but now he was suddenly and
horribly aware that sliding is a strange and sickening thing  for
land to do. It was doing it with him on it. He felt ill with fear
and shaking. The ground slid, the mountain slurred,  he  slipped,
he fell, he stood, he slipped again and ran. The avalance began.

Stones, then rocks, then boulders which  pranced  past  him  like
clumsy  puppies,  only  much,  much bigger, much, much harder and
heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill  you  if  they
fell  on you. His eyes danced with them, his feet danced with the
dancing ground. He ran as if  running  was  a  terrible  sweating
sickness,  his  heart  pounded  to  the  rhythm  of  the pounding
geological frenzy around him.

The logic of the situation, i.e. that he  was  clearly  bound  to
survive  if  the  next  foreshadowed  incident in the saga of his
inadvertent persecution of Agrajag was  to  happen,  was  utterly
failing to impinge itself on his mind or exercise any restraining
influence on him at this time. He ran with the fear of  death  in
him, under him, over him and grabbing hold of his hair.

And suddenly he tripped again  and  was  hurled  forward  by  his
considerable  momentum.  But just at the moment that he was about
to hit the ground astoundingly hard  he  saw  lying  directly  in
front of him a small navy-blue holdall that he knew for a fact he
had lost in the baggage-retrieval system at Athens  airport  some
ten  years  in  his  personal  time-scale  previously, and in his
astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off  into
the air with his brain singing.

What he was doing was this: he was flying. He glanced around  him
in  surprise,  but  there could be no doubt that that was what he
was doing. No part of him was touching the ground, and no part of
him  was  even  approaching it. He was simply floating there with
boulders hurtling through the air around him.

He could now do something about  that.  Blinking  with  the  non-
effort  of it he wafted higher into the air, and now the boulders
were hurtling through the air beneath him.

He looked downwards with intense curiosity. Between him  and  the
shivering  ground  were  now some thirty feet of empty air, empty
that is if you discounted the boulders which didn't  stay  in  it
for  long,  but  bounded downwards in the iron grip of the law of
gravity; the same law which seemed, all  of  a  sudden,  to  have
given Arthur a sabbatical.

It  occurred  to  him  almost  instantly,  with  the  instinctive
correctness  that self-preservation  instils in the mind, that he
mustn't try to think about it, that if he did, the law of gravity
would suddenly glance sharply in his direction and demand to know
what the hell he thought he was doing up  there,  and  all  would
suddenly be lost.

So he thought about tulips. It was  difficult,  but  he  did.  He
thought  about  the  pleasing  firm  roundness  of  the bottom of
tulips, he thought about the interesting variety of colours  they
came  in,  and  wondered  what  proportion of the total number of
tulips that grew, or had grown,  on  the  Earth  would  be  found
within a radius of one mile from a windmill. After a while he got
dangerously bored with  this  train  of  thought,  felt  the  air
slipping  away  beneath  him, felt that he was drifting down into
the paths of the bouncing boulders that he was trying so hard not
to  think about, so he thought about Athens airport for a bit and
that kept him usefully annoyed for about five minutes  -  at  the
end of which he was startled to discover that he was now floating
about two hundred yards above the ground.

He wondered for a moment how he was going to get back down to it,
but instantly shied away from that area of speculation again, and
tried to look at the situation steadily.

He was flying, What was he going to do about it? He  looked  back
down  at  the ground. He didn't look at it hard, but did his best
just to give it an idle glance, as it  were,  in  passing.  There
were  a  couple of things he couldn't help noticing. One was that
the eruption of the mountain seemed now to have  spent  itself  -
there was a crater just a little way beneath the peak, presumably
where the rock  had  caved  in  on  top  of  the  huge  cavernous
cathedral,  the statue of himself, and the sadly abused figure of
Agrajag.

The other was his  hold-all,  the  one  he  had  lost  at  Athens
airport.  It  was  sitting  pertly  on  a  piece of clear ground,
surrounded by exhausted boulders but apparently hit  by  none  of
them.  Why  this should be he could not speculate, but since this
mystery   was   completely   overshadowed   by   the    monstrous
impossibility of the bag's being there in the first place, it was
not a speculation he really felt strong enough  for  anyway.  The
thing  is,  it  was  there.  And the nasty, fake leopard-skin bag
seemed to have disappeared, which was all to  the  good,  if  not
entirely to the explicable.

He was faced with the fact that he was going to have to pick  the
thing  up.  Here he was, flying along two hundred yards above the
surface of an alien planet the name of  which  he  couldn't  even
remember.  He could not ignore the plaintive posture of this tiny
piece of what used to be his life, here, so many light-years from
the pulverized remains of his home.

Furthermore, he realized, the bag, if it was still in  the  state
in  which  he lost it, would contain a can which would have in it
the only Greek olive oil still surviving in the Universe.

Slowly, carefully, inch by  inch,  he  began  to  bob  downwards,
swinging  gently  from side to side like a nervous sheet of paper
feeling its way towards the ground.

It went well, he was feeling good. The air supported him, but let
him  through.  Two  minutes later he was hovering a mere two feet
above the bag, and was faced with  some  difficult  decision.  He
bobbed  there  lightly.  He  frowned, but again, as lightly as he
could.

If he picked the bag up, could he carry it?  Mightn't  the  extra
weight just pull him straight to the ground?

Mightn't the  mere  act  of  touching  something  on  the  ground
suddenly  discharge   whatever  mysterious  force it was that was
holding him in the air?

Mightn't he be better off just being sensible at this  point  and
stepping  out  of  the air, back on to the ground for a moment or
two?

If he did, would he ever be able to fly again?

The sensation, when he allowed himself to be aware of it, was  so
quietly ecstatic that he could not bear the thought of losing it,
perhaps for ever. With this worry in mind  he  bobbed  upwards  a
little  again,  just  to  try  the feel of it, the surprising and
effortless movement of it. He bobbed,  he  floated.  He  tried  a
little swoop.

The swoop was terrific. With his arms spread out in front of him,
his  hair  and  dressing  gown streaming out behind him, he dived
down out of the sky, bellied along a body of air about  two  feet
from  the ground and swung back up again, catching himself at the
top of the swing and holding. Just holding. He stayed there.

It was wonderful.

And that, he realized, was the way of  picking  up  the  bag.  He
would  swoop  down  and catch hold of it just at the point of the
upswing. He would carry it on up with him. He might wobble a bit,
but he was certain that he could hold it.

He tried one or two more practice swoops, and they got better and
better. The air on his face, the bounce and woof of his body, all
combined to make him feel an intoxication of the spirit  that  he
hadn't  felt  since,  since  -  well as far as he could work out,
since he was born. He drifted away on the breeze and surveyed the
countryside,  which  was,  he  discovered, pretty nasty. It had a
wasted ravaged look. He decided not to look at it  any  more.  He
would  just  pick  up the bag and then ... he didn't know what he
was going to do after he had picked up the  bag.  He  decided  he
would just pick up the bag and see where things went from there.

He judged himself against the wind,  pushed  up  against  it  and
turned around. He floated on its body. He didn't realize, but his
body was willoming at this point.

He ducked down under the airstream, dipped - and dived.

The air threw itself past him, he thrilled through it. The ground
wobbled uncertainly, straightened its ideas out and rose smoothly
up to meet him, offering the bag, its cracked plastic handles  up
towards him.

Halfway down there was a sudden dangerous moment when he could no
longer  believe  he  was doing this, and therefore he very nearly
wasn't, but he  recovered  himself  in  time,  skimmed  over  the
ground,  slipped  an arm smoothly through the handles of the bag,
and began to climb back up, couldn't make it and all of a  sudden
collapsed, bruised, scratched and shaking in the stony ground.

He staggered instantly to his feet and swayed hopelessly  around,
swinging the bag round him in agony of grief and disappointment.

His feet, suddenly, were stuck heavily to the ground in  the  way
they  always  had  been. His body seemed like an unwieldy sack of
potatoes that reeled stumbling against the ground, his  mind  had
all the lightness of a bag of lead.

He  sagged  and  swayed  and  ached  with  giddiness.  He   tried
hopelessly  to  run,  but  his  legs  were  suddenly too weak. He
tripped and flopped forward. At that moment he remembered that in
the bag he was now carrying was not only a can of Greek olive oil
but a duty-free allowance of  retsina,  and  in  the  pleasurable
shock  of  that  realization he failed to notice for at least ten
seconds that he was now flying again.

He whooped and cried with relief and pleasure, and sheer physical
delight.  He  swooped, he wheeled, he skidded and whirled through
the air. Cheekily he sat on an updraught  and  went  through  the
contents  of  the  hold-all. He felt the way he imagined an angel
must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of a pin whilst
being  counted  by  philosophers. He laughed with pleasure at the
discovery that the bag did in fact contain the olive oil and  the
retsina as well as a pair of cracked sunglasses, some sand-filled
swimming trunks, some creased postcards of Santorini, a large and
unsightly  towel,  some interesting stones, and various scraps of
paper with the addresses of people he was relieved  to  think  he
would  never meet again, even if the reason why was a sad one. He
dropped the stones, put on the sunglasses, and let the pieces  of
paper whip away in the wind.

Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a  large
and  extremely  disreputable  cocktail  party in the small of the
back.




The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into  its
fourth  generation,  and still no one shows any signs of leaving.
Somebody did once look at his watch, but that  was  eleven  years
ago, and there has been no follow-up.

The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but
if  you  don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't
go and look, because you won't enjoy it.

There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds,
and  there  is  one  theory  that  this  is a battle being fought
between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who
are  hovering  over  the  thing  like vultures, but you shouldn't
believe anything  you  hear  at  parties,  and  particularly  not
anything you hear at this one.

One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get
worse,  is  that  all  the  people  at  the  party are either the
children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren  of  the
people  who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all
the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so
on,  it  means  that  all  the people now at the party are either
absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering  idiots,  or,  more
and more frequently, both.

Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each  succeeding
generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.

So other factors come into operation,  like  when  the  drink  is
going to run out.

Now, because of certain things which have happened  which  seemed
like  a  good  idea  at  the time (and one of the problems with a
party which never stops is that all the things  which  only  seem
like  a  good  idea at parties continue to seem like good ideas),
that point seems still to be a long way off.

One of the things which seemed like a good idea at the  time  was
that  the party should fly - not in the normal sense that parties
are meant to fly, but literally.

One night, long ago, a band of  drunken  astro-engineers  of  the
first  generation  clambered  round  the  building  digging this,
fixing that, banging very hard on the other and when the sun rose
the  following morning, it was startled to find itself shining on
a building full of happy drunken people which  was  now  floating
like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

Not only that, but the flying  party  had  also  managed  to  arm
itself  rather heavily. If they were going to get involved in any
petty arguments with wine merchants, they  wanted  to  make  sure
they had might on their side.

The transition from full-time cocktail party to part-time raiding
party  came with ease, and did much to add that extra bit of zest
and swing to the whole affair which  was  badly  needed  at  this
point  because  of the enormous number of times that the band had
already played all the numbers it knew over the years.

They looted, they raided, they held whole cities for  ransom  for
fresh  supplies  of  cheese crackers, avocado dip, spare ribs and
wine and spirits, which would now get piped aboard from  floating
tankers.

The problem of when the drink is going to run  out  is,  however,
going to have to be faced one day.

The planet over which they are floating is no longer  the  planet
it was when they first started floating over it.

It is in bad shape.

The party had attacked and raided an awful lot of it, and no  one
has  ever succeeded in hitting it back because of the erratic and
unpredictable way in which it lurches round the sky.

It is one hell of a party.
It is also one hell of a thing to get hit by in the small of  the
back.




 Arthur lay  floundering  in  pain  on  a  piece  of  ripped  and
dismembered  reinforced  concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing
cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking  somewhere
indistinctly behind him.

There was  a  sound  he  couldn't  immediately  identify,  partly
because  he  didn't  know the tune "I Left my Leg in Jaglan Beta"
and partly because the band playing it were very tired, and  some
members  of  it were playing it in three-four time, some in four-
four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed r2,  each according  to  the
amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of
himself  to  see  where  he  might  be  hurt. Wherever he touched
himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out
that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed
to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was  hurting,  but  he
soon  satisfied  himself  that  he  was  not badly hurt, but just
bruised and a little shaken, as  who  wouldn't  be?  He  couldn't
understand  what  a  building  would  be doing flying through the
clouds.

On the other hand, he would have been a  little  hard-pressed  to
come  up  with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so
he decided that he and the building were just going  to  have  to
accept  each  other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall
of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the  building
proper.  He  seemed  to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or
lip which extended outwards for about three or four feet all  the
way  around.  It  was  a  hunk  of  the ground in which the party
building had had its foundations, and which it  had  taken  along
with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.

Nervously, he stood up and, suddenly, looking out over the  edge,
he  felt  nauseous  with vertigo. He pressed himself back against
the wall,  wet  with  mist  and  sweat.  His  head  was  swimming
freestyle, but someone in his stomach was doing the butterfly.

Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could  now
not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He
was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about  to  move
an inch closer to the edge.

Clutching his hold-all he edged along the wall, hoping to find  a
doorway  in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great
reassurance to him.

He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope
that  the  wall  around the corner might offer more in the way of
entrances than this one, which offered none.

The unsteadiness of the building's flight made him feel sick with
fear,  and  after a short while he took the towel from out of his
hold-all and did something with it which once again justified its
supreme  position  in  the list of useful things to take with you
when you hitch-hike round the Galaxy. He put it over his head  so
he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

His feet edged along the  ground.  His  outstretched  hand  edged
along the wall.

Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner
it  encountered  something  which  gave  him such a shock that he
nearly fell straight off. It was another hand.

The two hands gripped each other.

He desperately wanted to use his other hand  to  pull  the  towel
back  from  his  eyes,  but  it was holding the hold-all with the
olive oil, the retsina and the postcards from Santorini,  and  he
very much didn't want to put it down.

He experienced one of those "self" moments, one of those  moments
when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think "Who
am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?" He
whimpered very slightly.

He tried to free his hand, but he couldn't. The  other  hand  was
holding  his  tightly.  He  had  no  recourse but to edge onwards
towards the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in  an
attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry
of some unfashionable emotion from the owner of the other hand.

The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering
into  those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and
beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and  a  large  closed
door.

They were both pressed back against  the  wall,  eyes  wild  with
terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them,
and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.

"Where the zarking photon have  you  been?"  hissed  Ford,  panic
stricken.

"Er, well," stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how  to  sum  it
all up that briefly. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"

Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.

"They won't let us in without a bottle," he hissed.

The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick  of
the  party,  apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild
profusion of colours that protuded dimly through  the  atmosphere
of  heavy  smoke,  the  carpets  thick with ground glass, ash and
avocado  droppings,  and  the  small  group  of  pterodactyl-like
creatures  in  lurex  who  descended  on  his cherished bottle of
retsina,  squawking,  "A  new  pleasure,  a  new  pleasure",  was
Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.

"Didn't I see you at Milliways?" he was saying.
"Were you the one with the hammer?"

"Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more
fraught."

Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the  outer
dimensions  of which were invisible through the heaving throng of
happy, noisy creatures, cheerfully  yelling  things  that  nobody
could hear at each other and occasionally having crises.

"Seems fun," said Trillian. "What did you say, Arthur?"

"I said, how the hell did you get here?"

"I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe.  Have
you met Thor? He makes thunder."

"Hello," said Arthur. "I expect that must be very interesting."

"Hi," said Thor. "It is. Have you got a drink?"

"Er, no actually ..."

"Then why don't you go and get one?"

"See you later, Arthur," said Trillian.

Something jogged Arthur's mind, and he looked around huntedly.

"Zaphod isn't here, is he?" he said.

"See you," said Trillian firmly, "later."

Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristled,
what  little light was there was in the place mustered its forces
briefly to glint menacingly off the horns of his helmet.

He took Trillian's elbow in his  extremely  large  hand  and  the
muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of
Volkswagens parking.

He led her away.

"One of the interesting things about being  immortal,"  he  said,
"is ..."

"One  of  the  interesting  things  about  space,"  Arthur  heard
Slartibartfast  saying  to  a  large  and voluminous creature who
looked like someone losing a fight with  a  pink  duvet  and  was
gazing  raptly  at  the old man's deep eyes and silver beard, "is
how dull it is."

"Dull?" said the creature, and blinked her  rather  wrinkled  and
bloodshot eyes.

"Yes," said Slartibartfast, "staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so.
You  see,  there's  so  much of it and so little in it. Would you
like me to quote some statistics?"
"Er, well ..."

"Please, I would like to.  They,  too,  are  quite  sensationally
dull."

"I'll come back and hear them in a moment," she said, patting him
on  the arm, lifted up her skirts like a hovercraft and moved off
into the heaving crown.

"I thought she'd never go," growled the old man. "Come,  Earthman
..."

"Arthur."

"We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere."

"Can't we just relax a little?" Arthur said. "I've  had  a  tough
day.  Trillian's  here,  incidentally,  she  didn't  say  how, it
probably doesn't matter."

"Think of the danger to the Universe ..."

"The Universe," said Arthur, "is big enough  and  old  enough  to
look  after  itself  for  half  an hour. All right," he added, in
response to Slartibartfast's increasing agitation,  "I'll  wander
round and see if anybody's seen it."

"Good, good," said Slartibartfast, "good. " He plunged  into  the
crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.

"Have you seen a bail anywhere?" said Arthur to a little man  who
seemed  to  be  standing  eagerly  waiting to listen to somebody.
"It's made of silver, vitally important for the future safety  of
the Universe, and about this long."

"No," said the enthusiastically wizened little man, "but do  have
a drink and tell me all about it."

Ford Prefect writhed past,  dancing  a  wild,  frenetic  and  not
entirely  unobscene  dance  with someone who looked as if she was
wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling  a  futile
conversation at her above the din.

"I like that hat!" he bawled.

"What?"

"I said, I like the hat."

"I'm not wearing a hat."

"Well, I like the head, then."

"What?"

"I said, I like the head. Interesting bone-structure."

"What?"
Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of  other  movements
he was performing.

"I said, you dance great," he shouted, "just don't nod so much."

"What?"

"It's just that every time you nod,"  said  Ford,  "...  ow!"  he
added as his partner nodded forward to say "What?" and once again
pecked him sharply on the forehead with  the  sharp  end  of  her
swept-forward skull.

"My planet was blown up one morning," said Arthur, who had  found
himself  quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story
or, at least, edited highlights of it, "that's  why  I'm  dressed
like  this,  in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all
my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd be  coming  to  a
party."

The little man nodded enthusiastically.

"Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing  gown.
Rather  than  the  space  suit one would normally expect. Shortly
after that I discovered that my planet had originally  been built
for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was
then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been  blown
up    ridiculously    often,   shot   at,   insulted,   regularly
disintegrated, deprived of tea, and recently  I  crashed  into  a
swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave."

"Ah," effervesced the little man, "and did you have  a  wonderful
time?"

Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

"What a wonderful exciting cough," said  the  little  man,  quite
startled by it, "do you mind if I join you?"

And with  that  he  launched  into  the  most  extraordinary  and
spectacular  fit  of  coughing  which  caught  Arthur  so much by
surprise that he started to choke violently,  discovered  he  was
already doing it and got thoroughly confused.

Together they performed a lung-busting duet  which  went  on  for
fully  two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to
a halt.

"So invigorating," said the little man, panting and wiping  tears
from  his  eyes.  "What an exciting life you must lead. Thank you
very much."

He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd.
Arthur shook his head in astonishment.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type
with  a  hook  mouth,  a  lantern  nose,  and  small beady little
cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers,  a  black  silk  shirt
open  to  what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learnt
never to make assumptions about the  anatomies  of  the  sort  of
people  he  tended to meet these days, and had all sorts of nasty
dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He  carried  something
in  a  black  bag,  and  clearly  wanted people to notice that he
didn't want them to notice it.

"Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?" he said.

This was one  of  the  many  things  that  Arthur  had  told  the
enthusiastic little man.

"Yes, it's Arthur Dent."

The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm  other  than
any of the several that the band were grimly pushing out.

"Yeah," he said, "only there was a man in a  mountain  wanted  to
see you."

"I met him."

"Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know."

"Yes, I met him."

"Yeah, well I think you should know that."

"I do. I met him."

The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he  clapped  Arthur  on
the back.

"OK," he said, "all right. I'm  just  telling  you,  right?  Good
night, good luck, win awards."

"What?" said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder  seriously  at
this point.

"Whatever. Do what you do.  Do  it  well."  He  made  a  sort  of
clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely
dynamic gesture.

"Why?" said Arthur.

"Do it badly," said the man, "who cares? Who gives a  shit?"  The
blood  suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he
started to shout.

"Why not go mad?" he said. "Go away, get off my  back  will  you,
guy. Just zark off!!!"

"OK, I'm going," said Arthur hurriedly.

"It's been real." The man gave a sharp wave and  disappeared  off
into the throng.

"What was that about?" said Arthur to a girl  he  found  standing
beside him. "Why did he tell me to win awards?"
"Just showbiz talk," shrugged the girl. "He's just won  an  award
at  the  Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute
Awards Ceremony, and was  hoping  to  be  able  to  pass  it  off
lightly, only you didn't mention it, so he couldn't."

"Oh," said Arthur, "oh, well I'm sorry  I  didn't.  What  was  it
for?"

"The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The  Word  `Fuck'  In  A  Serious
Screenplay. It's very prestigious."

"I see," said Arthur, "yes, and what do you get for that?"

"A Rory. It's just a small silver thing  set  on  a  large  black
base. What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything. I was just about to ask what  the  silver
..."

"Oh, I thought you said `wop'."

"Said what?"

"Wop."

People had been dropping in on the  party  now  for  some  years,
fashionable  gatecrashers from other worlds, and for some time it
had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked  out  at  their
own  world  beneath  them,  with  its wrecked cities, its ravaged
avocado farms and blighted vineyards,  its  vast  tracts  of  new
desert,  its  seas  full  of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their
world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as
much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they
could manage to stay sober for long enough  to  make  the  entire
party  spaceworthy  and  maybe take it off to some other people's
worlds where the  air  might  be  fresher  and  give  them  fewer
headaches.

The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a
feeble  existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface
would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day,  as
the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked
up in haggard fear of yet another cheese-and-wine raid, it became
clear  that the party was not going to be going anywhere else for
a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be
time  to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to
find out what time of day it was, what time of year it  was,  and
whether  in  any  of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi
going anywhere.

The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a  strange  white
spaceship  which  seemed to be half sticking through it. Together
they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way round the  sky
in grotesque disregard of their own weight.

The clouds parted. The air roared and leapt out of their way.

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their  writhings,  a
little  like  two  ducks,  one of which is trying to make a third
duck inside the second duck, whilst the  second  duck  is  trying
very  hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck
right now, is uncertain that it would  want  any  putative  third
duck  to  be  made  by  this  particular  first  duck anyway, and
certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it  all  and  buffeted
the ground with shock waves.

And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.

The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man  leaning
against  an  unexpectedly  open  door. It span and wobbled on its
hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself  instead.
It staggered back across the sky again.

For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly  they  could
not  continue  for  long.  The  party  was now a mortally wounded
party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional  broken-
backed pirouette could not disguise.

The longer, at this  point,  that  it  avoided  the  ground,  the
heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

Inside, things were  not  going  well  either.  They  were  going
monstrously  badly, in fact, and people were hating it and saying
so loudly. The Krikkit robots had been.

They had removed the Award for The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The
Word  `Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a
scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a
runner-up for a Rory.

"We would love to stay and help," shouted Ford, picking  his  way
over the mangled debris, "only we're not going to."

The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from
amongst the smoking wreckage.

"We have to go and save the Universe, you see," said  Ford.  "And
if  that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right.
Either way, we're off."

He suddenly came across an unopened  bottle  lying,  miraculously
unbroken, on the ground.

"Do you mind if we take this?" he said.  "You  won't  be  needing
it."

He took a packet of potato crisps too.

"Trillian?" shouted Arthur in a shocked and  weakened  voice.  In
the smoking mess he could see nothing.

"Earthman, we must go," said Slartibartfast nervously.

"Trillian?" shouted Arthur again.

A moment or two later, Trillian staggered,  shaking,  into  view,
supported by her new friend the Thunder God.

"The girl stays with me," said Thor. "There's a great party going
on in Valhalla, we'll be flying off ..."

"Where were you when all this was going on?" said Arthur.

"Upstairs," said Thor, "I was weighing  her.  Flying's  a  tricky
business you see, you have to calculate wind ..."

"She comes with us," said Arthur.

"Hey," said Trillian, "don't I ..."

"No," said Arthur, "you come with us."

Thor looked at him with slowly smouldering eyes.  He  was  making
some  point  about  godliness and it had nothing to do with being
clean.

"She comes with me," he said quietly.

"Come on, Earthman," said Slartibartfast  nervously,  picking  at
Arthur's sleeve.

"Come on, Slartibartfast," said Ford, picking at  the  old  man's
sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.

The party lurched and swayed, sending  everyone  reeling,  except
for  Thor  and  except  for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the
Thunder God's black eyes.

Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what appeared to  be  his  tiny
little fists.

"Want to make something of it?" he said.

"I beg your minuscule pardon?" roared Thor.

"I said," repeated Arthur, and he could not  keep  the  quavering
out  of  his  voice,  "do  you  want to make something of it?" He
waggled his fists ridiculously.

Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of  smoke
curled upwards from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in
it too.

He gripped his belt.

He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was  the
sort  of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas
with you.

He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it  up
in  his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up
any possible misunderstanding that  he  might  merely  have  been
carrying a telegraph pole around with him.

"Do I want," he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through  a
steel mill, "to make something of it?"

"Yes," said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong
and  belligerent.  He waggled his fists again, this time as if he
meant it.

"You want to step outside?" he snarled at Thor.

"All right!" bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like
an  enraged  Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive),
and did so.

"Good," said Arthur, "that's got rid of him. Slarty, get  us  out
of here."




"All right," shouted Ford at Arthur, "so I'm a coward, the  point
is   I'm  still  alive."  They  were  back  aboard  the  Starship
Bistromath, so was Slartibartfast, so was Trillian.  Harmony  and
concord were not.

"Well, so am I alive, aren't I?" retaliated Arthur, haggard  with
adventure  and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if
they wanted to punch each other.

"You damn nearly weren't," exploded Ford.

Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting  in  his
pilot  couch  on  the  flight  deck  gazing thoughtfully into the
bottom of a bottle which was telling  him  something  he  clearly
couldn't fathom. He appealed to him.

"Do you think he understands the first word I've been saying?" he
said, quivering with emotion.

"I don't know," replied Slartibartfast,  a  little  abstractedly.
"I'm  not sure," he added, glancing up very briefly, "that I do."
He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor  and  bafflement.
"You'll have to explain it to us again," he said.

"Well ..."

"But later. Terrible things are afoot."

He tapped the pseudo-glass of the bottle bottom.

"We fared rather pathetically at the party, I'm afraid," he said,
"and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using
the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don't  know,"  he
muttered. "Just have to go there, I suppose. Can't say I like the
idea at all. Probably end up dead."

"Where is Trillian anyway?" said Arthur with a sudden affectation
of  unconcern.  What  he  had  been angry about was that Ford had
berated him for wasting time  over  all  the  business  with  the
Thunder  God when they could have been making a rather more rapid
escape. Arthur's own opinion, and he had offered it for  whatever
anybody  might  have  felt  it  was  worth,  was that he had been
extraordinarily brave and resourceful.

The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a
pair of fetid dingo's kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that
Trillian didn't seem to react much one way or the other  and  had
wandered off somewhere.

"And where are my potato crisps?" said Ford.

"They are both," said Slartibartfast, without looking up, "in the
Room  of  Informational  Illusions.  I think that your young lady
friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history.
I think the potato crisps are probably helping her."




It is a mistake to think you can solve any  major  problems  just
with potatoes.

For instance, there was  once  an  insanely  aggressive  race  of
people  called  the  Silastic  Armorfiends of Striterax. That was
just the name of their race. The name of their army was something
quite  horrific. Luckily they lived even further back in Galactic
history than anything we have so far encountered - twenty billion
years  ago  - when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea
worth fighting for was a new one.

And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were
good  at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their
enemies (i.e. everybody else),  they  fought  each  other.  Their
planet  was  a  complete  wreck.  The  surface  was littered with
abandoned cities which were surrounded by abandoned war machines,
which  were  in  turn  surrounded  by  deep  bunkers in which the
Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was  just
to  be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an
Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way  of
life,  one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of
energy.

The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him
into  a  room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply
beat himself up.

Eventually they realized that this was something they were  going
to  have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone
who had to carry a weapon as part of  his  normal  Silastic  work
(policemen,  security  guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had
to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of
potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions.

For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would
be  much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot
the potatoes instead.

This led to a  renewed  enthusiasm  for  shooting  all  sorts  of
things,  and  they  all got very excited at the prospect of their
first major war for weeks.

Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of  Striterax  is
that  they  were  the  first  race  who  ever  managed to shock a
computer.

It was a gigantic spaceborne computer  called  Hactar,  which  to
this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It
was the first to be built like a natural  brain,  in  that  every
cellular  particle  of it carried the pattern of the whole within
it, which enabled it to think more  flexibly  and  imaginatively,
and also, it seemed, to be shocked.

The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were  engaged  in  one  of
their  regular  wars  with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and
were not enjoying it as much as  usual  because  it  involved  an
awful  lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda,
and across the Fire Mountains  of  Frazfraga,  neither  of  which
terrains they felt at home in.

So when the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak joined  in  the
fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of
Carfrax and the Ice Storms of  Varlengooten,  they  decided  that
enough  was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an
Ultimate Weapon.

"What do you mean," asked Hactar, "by Ultimate?"

To which the Silastic Armorfiends  of  Striterax  said,  "Read  a
bloody dictionary," and plunged back into the fray.

So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon.

It was a very, very small bomb which was simply a junction box in
hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every
major sun with the heart of every other major sun  simultaneously
and thus turn the entire Universe in to one gigantic hyperspatial
supernova.

When the Silastic Armorfiends tried  to  use  it  to  blow  up  a
Strangulous  Stilettan  munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves,
they were extremely irritated that it didn't work, and said so.

Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.

He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate
Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable
consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse  than  the
known  consequence  of setting it off, and he had therefore taken
the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the  design  of  the
bomb,  and  he  hoped  that  everyone  involved  would,  on sober
reflection, feel that ...

The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer.

Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as
well.
Then, pausing only  to  smash  the  hell  out  of  the  Strenuous
Garfighters   of   Stug,   and   the  Strangulous  Stilettans  of
Jajazikstak, they went on to find an entirely new way of  blowing
themselves  up,  which  was a profound relief to everyone else in
the Galaxy, particularly the Garfighters, the Stilettans and  the
potatoes.

Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story  of  Krikkit.
She   emerged   from   the   Room   of   informational  Illusions
thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived  too
late.




Even as the Starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on
the  top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid which pursued
a lonely and eternal path  in  orbit  around  the  enclosed  star
system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only
to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.

They didn't realize they were going to see two.

They stood cold, lonely  and  helpless  on  the  cliff  edge  and
watched  the  activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister
arcs against the void from a point only  about  a  hundred  yards
below and in front of them.

They stared into the blinding event.

An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there,  by
once  again  exploiting  the mind's predisposition to have tricks
played on it: the problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the
asteroid, or of not being able to breathe, simply became Somebody
Else's.

The white Krikkit warship was parked amongst the stark grey crags
of   the   asteroid,   alternately  flaring  under  arclights  or
disappearing in shadow. The blackness of the shaped shadows  cast
by  the  hard  rocks  danced together in wild choreography as the
arclights swept round them.

The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession,  the  Wikkit
Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.

The Wikkit Key was rebuilt. Its components shone  and  glittered:
the  Steel  Pillar  (or  Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the
Gold Bail (or Heart of the Improbability  Drive)  of  Prosperity,
the  Perspex Pillar (or Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice) of Science
and  Reason,  the  Silver  Bail  (or  Rory  Award  for  The  Most
Gratuitous  Use  Of  The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Screenplay) and
the now reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of  a  burnt  stump
signifying   the   death   of  English  cricket)  of  Nature  and
Spirituality.

"I suppose there is nothing we  can  do  at  this  point?"  asked
Arthur nervously.

"No," sighed Slartibartfast.
The expression of disappointment which crossed Arthur's face  was
a  complete  failure,  and,  since  he  was  standing obscured by
shadow, he allowed it to collapse into one of relief.

"Pity," he said.

"We have no weapons," said Slartibartfast, "stupidly."

"Damn," said Arthur very quietly.

Ford said nothing.

Trillian  said  nothing,  but  in  a  peculiarly  thoughtful  and
distinct  way.  She  was  staring  at  the blankness of the space
beyond the asteroid.

The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud which surrounded the Slo-Time
envelope  which  enclosed  the world on which lived the people of
Krikkit, the Masters of Krikkit and their killer robots.

The helpless group had no way  of  knowing  whether  or  not  the
Krikkit  robots  were  aware  of  their presence. They could only
assume that they must be, but that they felt,  quite  rightly  in
the  circumstances,  that  they  had nothing to fear. They had an
historic task to perform, and their audience  could  be  regarded
with contempt.

"Terrible impotent feeling,  isn't  it?"  said  Arthur,  but  the
others ignored him.

In the centre  of  the  area  of  light  which  the  robots  were
approaching,  a  square-shaped  crack appeared in the ground. The
crack defined itself more and more distinctly, and soon it became
clear  that  a  block  of  the ground, about six feet square, was
slowly rising.

At the same time they became aware of some other movement, but it
was  almost  sublimal,  and  for a moment or two it was not clear
what it was that was moving.

Then it became clear.

The asteroid was moving. It was moving slowly in towards the Dust
Cloud,  as if being hauled in inexorably by some celestial angler
in its depths.

They were to make in real life  the  journey  through  the  Cloud
which  they  had  already  made  in  the  Room  of  Informational
Illusions. They stood frozen in silence. Trillian frowned.

An age seemed to  pass.  Events  seemed  to  pass  with  spinning
slowness,  as  the  leading  edge of the asteroid passed into the
vague and soft outer perimeter of the Cloud.

And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They
passed  on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and
whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner  of
the eye.
The Dust dimmed the shafts of  brilliant  light.  The  shafts  of
brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of Dust.

Trillian,  again,  regarded  the  passage  from  within  her  own
frowning thoughts.

And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute  or  half
an  hour  they  weren't  sure,  but  they  were  through  it  and
confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were  pinched  out
of existence in front of them.

And now things moved quickly.

A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode  from  out  of
the  block  which had risen three feet out of the ground, and out
of that rose a smaller  Perspex  block,  dazzling  with  interior
dancing colours.

The block was slotted with deep groves,  three  upright  and  two
across, clearly designed to accept the Wikkit key.

The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and
stepped back again. The block twisted round of is own accord, and
space began to alter.

As space unpinched itself, it seemed  agonizingly  to  twist  the
eyes  of  the  watchers  in  their sockets. They found themselves
staring, blinded, at an unravelled sun  which  stood  now  before
them  where it seemed only seconds before there had not been even
empty space. It was  a  second  or  two  before  they  were  even
sufficiently  aware  of what had happened to throw their hands up
over their horrified blinded eyes. In that second  or  two,  they
were  aware  of a tiny speck moving slowly across the eye of that
sun.

They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and
unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.

"Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!"

The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was  empty,
it was mechanically dismal.

It was also triumphant.

They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost
missed the second historic event.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to  survive  a  direct
blast  attack  from  the  Krikkit  robots, ran out of the Krikkit
warship brandishing a Zap gun.

"OK," he cried, "the situation is totally  under  control  as  of
this moment in time."

The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung
his  battleclub,  and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left
head.
"Who  the  zark  did  that?"  said  the  left  head,  and  lolled
sickeningly forward.

His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.

"Who did what?" it said.

The club connected with the back of his right head.

Zaphod measured his length as  a  rather  strange  shape  on  the
ground.

Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts
from  the robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock for ever. It
split and melted and splayed its contents  brokenly.  The  robots
marched  grimly and, it almost seemed, in a slightly disheartened
manner, back into their warship which, with a "foop", was gone.

Trillian and Ford ran hectically round and down the steep incline
to the dark, still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.




"I don't know," said Zaphod, for what  seemed  to  him  like  the
thirty-seventh time, "they could have killed me, but they didn't.
Maybe they just  thought  I  was  a  kind  of  wonderful  guy  or
something. I could understand that."

The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.

Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back  seemed
to  wrestle  the  floor as pain thudded through him and banged at
his heads.

"I think," he whispered, "that  there  is  something  wrong  with
those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird."

"They are programmed to kill everybody,"  Slartibartfast  pointed
out.

"That," wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, "could be it."
He didn't seem altogether convinced.

"Hey, baby," he said to Trillian, hoping this would make  up  for
his previous behaviour.

"You all right?" she said gently.

"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine."

"Good," she said, and walked away to think.  She  stared  at  the
huge  visiscreen  over the flight couches and, twisting a switch,
she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness  of
the  Dust  Cloud.  One  was  the  sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit
itself. She flipped between them fiercely.

"Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then," said  Arthur,  slapping  his
knees and standing up.

"No," said Slartibartfast, gravely. "Our  course  is  clear."  He
furrowed  his  brow until you could grow some of the smaller root
vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced  around.  When  he  spoke
again,  what  he  said  frightened him so much he had to sit down
again.

"We must go down to Krikkit," he said. A deep sigh shook his  old
frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.

"Once again,"  he  said,  "we  have  failed  pathetically.  Quite
pathetically."

"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't  care  enough.  I
told you."

He swung his feet up on the instrument panel and picked  fitfully
at something on one of his fingernails.

"But unless we determine  to  take  action,"  said  the  old  man
querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant
in his nature, "then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die.
Surely we care about that?"

"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put  on
a  sort  of  hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone
who wanted to see it.

Slartibartfast  clearly  found  this  point  of  view   extremely
seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod who
was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain.

"You surely must have some idea," he said, "of  why  they  spared
your life. It seems most strange and unusual."

"I kind of think they didn't even know," shrugged Zaphod. "I told
you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out,
right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me  into  a  corner
and  ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there.
If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had  some  great
conversations.  `Hey  ...  ugh!'  `Hi  there  ... ugh!' `I wonder
...ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know." He winced again.

He was toying with something in his fingers. He held  it  up.  It
was  the Gold Bail - the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite
Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived
the destruction of the Lock intact.

"I hear your ship can move a bit," he said.  "So  how  would  you
like to zip me back to mine before you ..."

"Will you not help us?" said Slartibartfast.

"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod,
rising himself up on to his shoulders, "but I have the mother and
father of a pair of  headaches,  and  I  feel  a  lot  of  little
headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy.
Hey, Trillian baby?"
She looked round briefly.

"Yes?"

"You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement  and  adventure  and
really wild things?"

"I'm going down to Krikkit," she said.




It was the same hill, and yet not the same.

This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was  Krikkit
itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees,
stood the strange Italian restaurant  which  had  brought  these,
their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit.

The strong grass under their feet was real, the  rich  soil  real
too.  The  heady  fragrances  from  the tree, too, were real. The
night was real night.

Krikkit.

Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy  for  anyone  who
isn't  a Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance
the existence of any other  place,  whose  charming,  delightful,
intelligent  inhabitants  would  howl  with  fear,  savagery  and
murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own.

Arthur shuddered.

Slartibartfast shuddered.

Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.

It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was  surprising  that
he  was  there  at  all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his
ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away.

Wrong, he thought to himself, wrong wrong  wrong.  He  hugged  to
himself  one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves
out of Zaphod's armoury.

Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.

This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty.

Whilst the countryside around them had changed little in the  two
thousand  years of the Krikkit wars, and the mere five years that
had elapsed locally since Krikkit  was  sealed  in  its  Slo-Time
envelope   ten  billion  years  ago,  the  sky  was  dramatically
different.

Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.

High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever  looked,  were  the  War
Zones,  the Robot Zones - huge warships and tower blocks floating
in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands  of
the surface of Krikkit.

Trillian stared at them and thought.

"Trillian," whispered Ford Prefect to her.

"Yes?" she said.

"What are you doing?"

"Thinking."

"Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?"

"I wasn't aware that I was breathing."

"That's what worried me."

"I think I know ..." said Trillian.

"Shhhh!" said Slartibartfast in alarm,  and  his  thin  trembling
hand motioned them further back beneath the shadow of the tree.

Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights  coming  along
the  hill  path,  but  this  time the dancing beams were not from
lanterns but electric torches - not in itself a dramatic  change,
but  every  detail  made  their hearts thump with fear. This time
there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers  and  farming
and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.

A light moved in the sky with slow weight.  Arthur  was  clenched
with  a  claustrophobic  terror  and  the warm wind caught at his
throat.

Within seconds a second party became  visible,  approaching  from
the  other  side  of  the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and
purposefully, their torches swinging and probing around them.

The parties were clearly converging, and  not  merely  with  each
other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur
and the others were standing.

Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun
to   his   shoulder,   and   the   slight   whimpering  cough  as
Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight  of
his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it.

His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch  and  engage  the
extreme  danger  catch  as  Ford had shown him. He was shaking so
much that if he'd fired at anybody at  that  moment  he  probably
would have burnt his signature on them.

Only Trillian didn't raise her  gun.  She  raised  her  eyebrows,
lowered them again, and bit her lip in thought.

"Has it occurred to you," she began, but nobody wanted to discuss
anything much at the moment.
A light stabbed through the darkness from behind  them  and  they
span  around  to  find  a  third party of Krikkiters behind them,
searching them out with their torches.

Ford Prefect's gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back  at  it
and it crashed from his hands.

There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen  second  before  anyone
fired again.

And at the end of the second nobody fired.

They were surrounded  by  pale-faced  Krikkiters  and  bathed  in
bobbing torch light.

The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their
captives.

"Hello?" said one of the captors. "Excuse me,  but  are  you  ...
aliens?"




Meanwhile,  more  millions  of  miles  away  than  the  mind  can
comfortably  encompass,  Zaphod  Beeblebrox  was  throwing a mood
again.

He had repaired his ship -  that  is,  he'd  watched  with  alert
interest  whilst  a service robot had repaired it for him. It was
now, once again, one of the most powerful and extraordinary ships
in  existence. He could go anywhere, do anything. He fiddled with
a book, and then tossed it away. It was the one he'd read before.

He walked over to the communications  bank  and  opened  an  all-
frequencies emergency channel.

"Anyone want a drink?" he said.

"This an emergency, feller?" crackled a voice from halfway across
the Galaxy.

"Got any mixers?" said Zaphod.

"Go take a ride on a comet."

"OK, OK," said Zaphod and flipped  the  channel  shut  again.  He
sighed  and  sat  down.  He  got  up again and wandered over to a
computer screen. He pushed a few buttons. Little blobs started to
rush around the screen eating each other.

"Pow!" said Zaphod. "Freeeoooo! Pop pop pop!"

"Hi there," said the computer brightly after a  minute  of  this,
"you have scored three points. Previous best score, seven million
five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and ..."

"OK, OK," said Zaphod and flipped the screen blank again.
He sat down again. He played with a pencil. This too began slowly
to lose its fascination.

"OK, OK," he said, and fed his score and the  previous  one  into
the computer.

His ship made a blur of the Universe.




"Tell us," said the thin, pale-faced Krikkiter  who  had  stepped
forward from the ranks of the others and stood uncertainly in the
circle of torchlight, handling his gun as if he was just  holding
it  for someone else who'd just popped off somewhere but would be
back in a minute, "do you know anything  about  something  called
the Balance of Nature?"

There was no reply from their captives, or at least nothing  more
articulate than a few confused mumbles and grunts. The torchlight
continued to play over them. High in  the  sky  above  them  dark
activity continued in the Robot zones.

"It's just," continued  the  Krikkiter  uneasily,  "something  we
heard  about,  probably  nothing  important. Well, I suppose we'd
better kill you then."

He looked down at his gun as if he was trying to find  which  bit
to press.

"That is," he said, looking up again,  "unless  there's  anything
you want to chat about?"

Slow, numb astonishment crept up the  bodies  of  Slartibartfast,
Ford  and  Arthur.  Very  soon it would reach their brains, which
were at the moment solely occupied with moving their jawbones  up
and  down. Trillian was shaking her head as if trying to finish a
jigsaw by shaking the box.

"We're worried, you see," said another man from the crowd, "about
this plan of universal destruction."

"Yes," added another, "and the balance of nature. It just  seemed
to  us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed
it will somehow upset the balance of nature. We're quite keen  on
ecology, you see." His voice trailed away unhappily.

"And sport," said another, loudly. This got a cheer  of  approval
from the others.

"Yes," agreed the first, "and sport ..." He looked  back  at  his
fellows  uneasily  and scratched fitfully at his cheek. He seemed
to be wrestling with some deep inner confusion, as if  everything
he  wanted  to  say  and  everything  he  thought  were  entirely
different  things,  between  which  he  could  see  no   possible
connection.

"You see," he mumbled, "some of us  ..."  and  he  looked  around
again as if for confirmation. The others made encouraging noises.
"Some of us," he continued, "are  quite  keen  to  have  sporting
links  with  the  rest  of  the  Galaxy, and though I can see the
argument about keeping sport out of politics, I think that if  we
want to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, which we
do, then it's probably a mistake to destroy it.  And  indeed  the
rest of the Universe ..." his voice trailed away again "... which
is what seems to be the idea now ..."

"Wh ..." said Slartibartfast. "Wh ..."

"Hhhh ... ?" said Arthur.

"Dr ..." said Ford Prefect.

"OK," said Trillian. "Let's talk about it."  She  walked  forward
and  took the poor confused Krikkiter by the arm. He looked about
twenty-five, which meant, because of the  peculiar  manglings  of
time that had been going on in this area, that he would have been
just twenty when the Krikkit  Wars  were  finished,  ten  billion
years ago.

Trillian led him for a short walk through the  torchlight  before
she  said  anything  more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The
encircling torch beams were drooping now slightly as if they were
abdicating  to this strange, quiet girl who alone in the Universe
of dark confusion seemed to know what she was doing.

She turned and faced him, and lightly held both his arms. He  was
a picture of bewildered misery.

"Tell me," she said.

He said nothing for a moment, whilst his gaze darted from one  of
her eyes to the other.

"We ..." he said, "we have to be alone ... I think."  He  screwed
up  his  face  and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like
someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He  looked  up
again.  "We  have  this bomb now, you see," he said, "it's just a
little one."

"I know," she said.

He goggled at her as if she'd said something very  strange  about
beetroots.

"Honestly," he said, "it's very, very little."

"I know," she said again.

"But they say," his voice trailed on, "they say  it  can  destroy
everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think.
Will that make us alone?  I  don't  know.  It  seems  to  be  our
function, though," he said, and dropped his head again.

"Whatever that means," said a hollow voice from the crowd.

Trillian slowly put her arms around  the  poor  bewildered  young
Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.

"It's all right," she said quietly but clearly enough for all the
shadowy crowd to hear, "you don't have to do it."

She rocked him.

"You don't have to do it," she said again.

She let him go and stood back.

"I want you to do something for me," she said,  and  unexpectedly
laughed.

"I want," she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over  her
mouth  and then said with a straight face, "I want you to take me
to your leader," and she pointed into the War Zones in  the  sky.
She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.

Her laughter seemed to discharge  something  in  the  atmosphere.
>From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to
sing a tune which would  have  enabled  Paul  McCartney,  had  he
written it, to buy the world.




Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like  the  hell
of  a  guy  he  was. He was very confused, but continued crawling
doggedly anyway because he was that brave.

He was confused by something he had just seen, but  not  half  as
confused as he was going to be by something he was about to hear,
so it would now be best to explain exactly where he was.

He was in the Robot War Zones many miles above the surface of the
planet Krikkit.

The atmosphere was thin here and relatively unprotected from  any
rays or anything which space might care to hurl in his direction.

He had parked  the  starship  Heart  of  Gold  amongst  the  huge
jostling  dim  hulks that crowded the sky here above Krikkit, and
had entered what appeared to be the biggest and most important of
the sky buildings, armed with nothing but a Zap gun and something
for his headaches.

He had found himself in a long, wide and badly  lit  corridor  in
which  he  was able to hide until he worked out what he was going
to do next. He hid because every now and then one of the  Krikkit
robots  would  walk along it, and although he had so far led some
kind of charmed life at their hands, it had nevertheless been  an
extremely  painful  one,  and he had no desire to stretch what he
was only half-inclined to call his good fortune.

He  had  ducked, at one  point,  into  a  room  leading  off  the
corridor,  and  had  discovered it to be a huge and, again, dimly
lit chamber.
In fact, it was a museum with just one exhibit - the wreckage  of
a spacecraft. It was terribly burnt and mangled, and, now that he
had caught up with some of the Galactic  history  he  had  missed
through  his  failed  attempts  to  have sex with the girl in the
cybercubicle next to him at school, he was  able  to  put  in  an
intelligent  guess  that this was the wrecked spaceship which had
drifted through the Dust Cloud all those billions  of  years  ago
and started the whole business off.

But, and  this  is  where  he  had  become  confused,  there  was
something not at all right about it.

It was genuinely wrecked. It was genuinely burnt,  but  a  fairly
brief inspection by an experienced eye revealed that it was not a
genuine spacecraft. It was as if it was a full-scale model of one
- a solid blueprint. In other words it was a very useful thing to
have around if you suddenly decided to build a spaceship yourself
and  didn't know how to do it. It was not, however, anything that
would ever fly anywhere itself.

He was still puzzling over this - in fact he'd only just  started
to  puzzle  over  it  - when he became aware that a door had slid
open in another part  of  the  chamber,  and  another  couple  of
Krikkit robots had entered, looking a little glum.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding  that  just
as  discretion was the better part of valour so was cowardice the
better  part  of  discretion,  he  valiantly  hid  himself  in  a
cupboard.

The cupboard in fact turned out to be the top  part  of  a  shaft
which   led   down  through  an  inspection  hatch  into  a  wide
ventilation tunnel. He led himself down into it  and  started  to
crawl along it, which is where we found him.

He  didn't  like  it.  It   was   cold,   dark   and   profoundly
uncomfortable,  and it frightened him. At the first opportunity -
which was another shaft  a  hundred  yards  further  along  -  he
climbed back up out of it.

This time he emerged into a smaller chamber, which appeared to be
a computer intelligence centre. He emerged in a dark narrow space
between a large computer bank and the wall.

He quickly learned that he was  not  alone  in  the  chamber  and
started  to leave again, when he began to listen with interest to
what the other occupants were saying.

"It's the robots, sir," said one voice. "There's something  wrong
with them."

"What, exactly?"

These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters. All the  War
Commanders  lived  up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were
largely immune to the whimsical doubts  and  uncertainties  which
were afflicting their fellows down on the surface of the planet.

"Well, sir I think it's just as well that they are  being  phased
out  of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the
supernova bomb. In the very short time  since  we  were  released
from the envelope -"

"Get to the point."

"The robots aren't enjoying it, sir."

"What?"

"The war, sir, it seems  to  be  getting  them  down.  There's  a
certain  world-weariness  about  them,  or  perhaps  I should say
Universe-weariness."

"Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping  to  destroy
it."

"Yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are  afflicted
with  a  certain  lassitude.  They're just finding it hard to get
behind the job. They lack oomph."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir."

"What on Krikkit are you talking about?"

"Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems  that
they  go  into  battle,  raise their weapons to fire and suddenly
think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is  it  all  about?
And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim."

"And then what do they do?"

"Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly  difficult  ones
by all accounts. And then they sulk."

"Sulk?"

"Yes, sir."

"Whoever heard of a robot sulking?"

"I don't know, sir."

"What was that noise?"

It was the noise of Zaphod leaving with his head spinning.




In a deep well of darkness a crippled  robot  sat.  It  had  been
silent  in  its  metallic darkness for some time. It was cold and
damp, but being a robot it was supposed not to be able to  notice
these  things.  With  an enormous effort of will, however, it did
manage to notice them.

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core  of
the  Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and
neither was the central intelligence  core  of  the  Krikkit  War
Computer.

The  Krikkit  robots  which  had  salvaged  this  pathetic  metal
creature  from  the  swamps of Squornshellous Zeta had recognized
almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the  use  which
this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the  attendant  personality  disorders,
which  the  coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness
and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the  mere  coordination  of  an  entire
planet's  military strategy was taking up only a tiny part of its
formidable mind, and the rest of it had become  extremely  bored.
Having  solved  all  the  major mathematical, physical, chemical,
biological,    sociological,     philosophical,     etymological,
meteorological  and psychological problems of the Universe except
his own, three times over, he was severely stuck for something to
do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone,
or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby.

"Now the world has gone to bed," Marvin droned,

"Darkness won't engulf my head,

"I can see by infra-red,

"How I hate the night."

He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle
the next verse.

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

"Try to count electric sheep,

"Sweet dream wishes you can keep,

"How I hate the night."

"Marvin!" hissed a voice.

His head snapped up, almost dislodging the intricate  network  of
electrodes  which  connected  him  to  the  central  Krikkit  War
Computer.

An inspection hatch had opened and one of a pair of unruly  heads
was  peering  through  whilst  the  other  kept  on jogging it by
continually  darting  to  look  this  way  and   that   extremely
nervously.

"Oh, it's you," muttered the robot. "I might have known."

"Hey, kid," said Zaphod in astonishment, "was  that  you  singing
just then?"
"I  am,"   Marvin   acknowledged   bitterly,   "in   particularly
scintillating form at the moment."

Zaphod poked his head in through the hatchway and looked around.

"Are you alone?" he said.

"Yes," said Marvin. "Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my  only
companions. And vast intelligence of course. And infinite sorrow.
And ..."

"Yeah," said Zaphod. "Hey, what's your connection with all this?"

"This," said Marvin, indicating with his less damaged arm all the
electrodes which connected him with the Krikkit computer.

"Then," said Zaphod awkwardly, "I guess you must  have  saved  my
life. Twice."

"Three times," said Marvin.

Zaphod's head snapped round (his other one was looking  hawkishly
in  entirely  the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal
killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke.  It
staggered  backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it.
It slipped sideways, threw its  head  back  and  started  to  sob
inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.

"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.

"I won't," said Zaphod, and didn't. "Hey look," he added, "you're
doing a terrific job."

"Which means, I suppose," said Marvin,  requiring  only  one  ten
thousand  million  billion trillion grillionth part of his mental
powers to make this particular logical  leap,  "that  you're  not
going to release me or anything like that."

"Kid, you know I'd love to."

"But you're not going to."

"No."

"I see."

"You're working well."

"Yes," said Marvin. "Why stop now just when I'm hating it?"

"I got to find Trillian and the guys. Hey,  you  any  idea  where
they  are? I mean, I just got a planet to choose from. Could take
a while."
"They are very close," said Marvin dolefully.  "You  can  monitor
them from here if you like."

"I better go get them," asserted Zaphod.  "Er,  maybe  they  need
some help, right?"

"Maybe," said Marvin with unexpected authority in his  lugubrious
voice,  "it would be better if you monitored them from here. That
young  girl,"  he  added  unexpectedly,  "is  one  of  the  least
benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack
of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

Zaphod took a  moment  or  two  to  find  his  way  through  this
labyrinthine  string  of  negatives  and emerged at the other end
with surprise.

"Trillian?"  he  said.  "She's  just  a  kid.  Cute,  yeah,   but
temperamental.  You  know  how  it  is with women. Or perhaps you
don't. I assume you don't. If you do I don't want to  hear  about
it. Plug us in."

"... totally manipulated."

"What?" said Zaphod.

It was Trillian speaking. He turned round.

The wall against which the Krikkit robot was sobbing had  lit  up
to  reveal a scene taking place in some other unknown part of the
Krikkit Robot War zones. It seemed to be  a  council  chamber  of
some  kind  -  Zaphod couldn't make it out too clearly because of
the robot slumped against the screen.

He tried to move the robot, but it was heavy with its  grief  and
tried to bite him, so he just looked around as best he could.

"Just think about it," said Trillian's voice,  "your  history  is
just  a  series  of  freakishly  improbable events. And I know an
improbable event when I see one. Your complete isolation from the
Galaxy  was freakish for a start. Right out on the very edge with
a Dust Cloud around you. It's a set-up. Obviously."

Zaphod was mad with  frustration  because  he  couldn't  see  the
screen.  The  robot's  head  was obscuring his view of the people
Trillian as  talking  to,  his  multi-functional  battleclub  was
obscuring the background, and the elbow of the arm it had pressed
tragically against its brow was obscuring Trillian herself.

"Then," said Trillian, "this spaceship that crash-landed on  your
planet. That's really likely, isn't it? Have you any idea of what
the  odds  are  against   a   drifting   spaceship   accidentally
intersecting with the orbit of a planet?"

"Hey," said Zaphod, "she doesn't know what the zark she's talking
about. I've seen that spaceship. It's a fake. No deal."

"I thought it might be,"  said  Marvin  from  his  prison  behind
Zaphod.
"Oh yeah," said Zaphod. "It's easy for you to say  that.  I  just
told you. Anyway, I don't see what it's got to do with anything."

"And  especially,"  continued  Trillian,  "the  odds  against  it
intersecting  with  the orbit of the one planet in the Galaxy, or
the whole of the Universe as far as I know, that would be totally
traumatized  to  see it. You don't know what the odds are? Nor do
I, they're  that  big.  Again,  it's  a  set-up.  I  wouldn't  be
surprised if that spaceship was just a fake."

Zaphod managed to move the robot's battleclub. Behind it  on  the
screen  were  the  figures of Ford, Arthur and Slartibartfast who
appeared astonished and bewildered by the whole thing.

"Hey, look," said Zaphod excitedly. "The guys are doing great. Ra
ra ra! Go get 'em, guys."

"And  what  about,"  said  Trillian,  "all  this  technology  you
suddenly  managed  to build for yourselves almost overnight? Most
people would take thousands of years to do all that. Someone  was
feeding  you  what you needed to know, someone was keeping you at
it.

"I  know,  I  know,"  she  added  in  response   to   an   unseen
interruption, "I know you didn't realize it was going on. This is
exactly my point. You never realized anything at all.  Like  this
Supernova Bomb."

"How do you know about that?" said an unseen voice.

"I just know," said Trillian. "You expect me to believe that  you
are  bright  enough to invent something that brilliant and be too
dumb to realize it would take you with it  as  well?  That's  not
just stupid, that is spectacularly obtuse."

"Hey, what's this bomb thing?" said Zaphod in alarm to Marvin.

"The supernova bomb?" said  Marvin.  "It's  a  very,  very  small
bomb."

"Yeah?"

"That would destroy the Universe in toto,"  added  Marvin.  "Good
idea, if you ask me. They won't get it to work, though."

"Why not, if it's so brilliant?"

"It's brilliant," said Marvin, "they're not. They got as  far  as
designing  it  before  they  were locked in the envelope. They've
spent the last five years building it. They think they've got  it
right  but  they  haven't. They're as stupid as any other organic
life form. I hate them."

Trillian was continuing.

Zaphod tried to pull the Krikkit robot away by its  leg,  but  it
kicked  and growled at him, and then quaked with a fresh outburst
of sobbing. Then  suddenly  it  slumped  over  and  continued  to
express its feelings out of everybody's way on the floor.
Trillian was standing alone in the middle of  the  chamber  tired
out but with fiercely burning eyes.

Ranged in front of her were the  pale-faced  and  wrinkled  Elder
Masters of Krikkit, motionless behind their widely curved control
desk, staring at her with helpless fear and hatred.

In front of them, equidistant between their control desk and  the
middle  of the chamber, where Trillian stood, as if on trial, was
a slim white pillar about four feet tall. On top of  it  stood  a
small white globe, about three, maybe four inches in diameter.

Beside  it  stood  a  Krikkit  robot  with  its  multi-functional
battleclub.

"In fact," explained Trillian, "you are so dumb stupid" (She  was
sweating. Zaphod felt that this was an unattractive thing for her
to be doing at this point) "you are all so  dumb  stupid  that  I
doubt, I very much doubt, that you've been able to build the bomb
properly without any help from Hactar for the last five years."

"Who's this guy Hactar?" said Zaphod, squaring his shoulders.

If Marvin replied, Zaphod didn't hear him. All his attention  was
concentrated on the screen.

One of the Elders of Krikkit made a small motion  with  his  hand
towards the Krikkit robot. The robot raised his club.

"There's nothing I can do," said Marvin. "It's on an  independent
circuit from the others."

"Wait," said Trillian.

The Elder  made  a  small  motion.  The  robot  halted.  Trillian
suddenly seemed very doubtful of her own judgment.

"How do you know all this?" said Zaphod to Marvin at this point.

"Computer records," said Marvin. "I have access."

"You're very different, aren't you," said Trillian to  the  Elder
Masters,  "from your fellow worldlings down on the ground. You've
spent all your lives up  here,  unprotected  by  the  atmosphere.
You've  been  very  vulnerable.  The  rest  of  your race is very
frightened, you know, they don't want you to do this. You're  out
of touch, why don't you check up?"

The Krikkit Elder grew impatient. He made a gesture to the  robot
which  was precisely the opposite of the gesture he had last made
to it.

The robot swung its battleclub. It hit the small white globe.

The small white globe was the supernova bomb.

It was a very, very small bomb which was designed  to  bring  the
entire Universe to an end.
The supernova bomb flew through the air. It hit the back wall  of
the council chamber and dented it very badly.

"So how does she know all this?" said Zaphod.

Marvin kept a sullen silence.

"Probably just bluffing," said Zaphod. "Poor kid, I should  never
have left her alone."




"Hactar!" called Trillian. "What are you up to?"

There was no reply from the enclosing darkness. Trillian  waited,
nervously.  She  was  sure that she couldn't be wrong. She peered
into the gloom from which she had been  expecting  some  kind  of
response. But there was only cold silence.

"Hactar?" she called again. "I would like you to meet  my  friend
Arthur  Dent.  I  wanted  to  go  off  with a Thunder God, but he
wouldn't let me and I appreciate that. He made me  realize  where
my  affections really lay. Unfortunately Zaphod is too frightened
by all this, so I brought Arthur instead. I'm not  sure  why  I'm
telling you all this.

"Hello?" she said again. "Hactar?"

And then it came.

It was thin and feeble, like a voice carried on the wind  from  a
great distance, half heard, a memory of a dream of a voice.

"Won't you both come out," said the voice. "I  promise  that  you
will be perfectly safe."

They glanced at each other, and  then  stepped  out,  improbably,
along  the shaft of light which streamed out of the open hatchway
of the Heart of Gold into the dim granular darkness of  the  Dust
Cloud.

Arthur tried to hold her hand to steady and reassure her, but she
wouldn't let him. He held on to his airline hold-all with its tin
of Greek  olive  oil,  its  towel,  its  crumpled  postcards   of
Santorini  and its other odds and ends. He steadied and reassured
that instead.

They were standing on, and in, nothing.

Murky, dusty nothing.  Each  grain  of  dust  of  the  pulverized
computer sparkled dimly as it turned and twisted slowly, catching
the sunlight in the darkness. Each particle of the computer, each
speck  of  dust,  held  within  itself,  faintly  and weakly, the
pattern of the whole.  In  reducing  the  computer  to  dust  the
Silastic   Armorfiends  of  Striterax  had  merely  crippled  the
computer, not killed it. A weak and insubstantial field held  the
particles in slight relationships with each other.
Arthur and Trillian stood, or rather floated, in  the  middle  of
this  bizarre  entity.  They  had nothing to breathe, but for the
moment this seemed not to matter. Hactar kept his  promise.  They
were safe. For the moment.

"I have nothing to offer you by way of hospitality," said  Hactar
faintly,  "but  tricks  of  the  light.  It  is  possible  to  be
comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all  you
have."

His voice evanesced, and in the dark dust a long velvet  paisley-
covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.

Arthur could hardly bear the fact that it was the same sofa which
had appeared to him in the fields of prehistoric Earth. He wanted
to shout and shake with rage that the Universe kept  doing  these
insanely bewildering things to him.

He let  this  feeling  subside,  and  then  sat  on  the  sofa  -
carefully. Trillian sat on it too.

It was real.

At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that  is
what  sofas  are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered,
was a real sofa.

The voice on the solar wind breathed to them again.

"I hope you are comfortable," it said.

They nodded.

"And I would like to congratulate you on  the  accuracy  of  your
deductions."

Arthur quickly pointed out that he hadn't deduced  anything  much
himself,  Trillian  was  the  one. She had simply asked him along
because he was interested in life, the Universe, and everything.

"That is something  in  which  I  too  am  interested,"  breathed
Hactar.

"Well," said Arthur, "we should have a chat  about  it  sometime.
Over a cup of tea."

There slowly materialized in front of them a small  wooden  table
on which sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china
sugar bowl, and two bone china cups and saucers.

Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the  light.
He  leaned  back  on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was
prepared to accept as comfortable.

"Why," said Trillian, "do  you  feel  you  have  to  destroy  the
Universe?"

She found it a little difficult talking  into  nothingness,  with
nothing  on  which  to  focus.  Hactar obviously noticed this. He
chuckled a ghostly chuckle.

"If it's going to be that sort of session," he said, "we  may  as
well have the right sort of setting."

And now there materialized in front of them something new. It was
the  dim  hazy  image  of  a  couch - a psychiatrist's couch. The
leather with which it was upholstered was  shiny  and  sumptuous,
but again, it was only a trick of the light.

Around them, to complete the setting, was the hazy suggestion  of
wood-panelled  walls.  And then, on the couch, appeared the image
of Hactar himself, and it was an eye-twisting image.

The couch looked normal size for a psychiatrist's couch  -  about
five or six feet long.

The computer looked normal size for a black space-borne  computer
satellite - about a thousand miles across.

The illusion that the one was sitting on top of the other was the
thing which made the eyes twist.

"All right," said Trillian firmly. She stood up off the sofa. She
felt  that  she  was  being  asked to feel too comfortable and to
accept too many illusions.

"Very good," she said. "Can you construct real things too? I mean
solid objects?"

Again there was a pause before the answer, as if  the  pulverized
mind  of Hactar had to collect its thoughts from the millions and
millions of miles over which it was scattered.

"Ah," he sighed. "You are thinking of the spaceship."

Thoughts seemed to drift by them and  through  them,  like  waves
through the ether.

"Yes," he acknowledge, "I can.

"But it takes enormous effort and time. All I can do  in  my  ...
particle  state, you see, is encourage and suggest. Encourage and
suggest. And suggest ..."

The image of Hactar on the couch seemed to billow and  waver,  as
if finding it hard to maintain itself.

It gathered new strength.

"I can encourage and suggest," it said,  "tiny  pieces  of  space
debris  -  the  odd  minute  meteor,  a few molecules here, a few
hydrogen atoms  there  -  to  move  together.  I  encourage  them
together. I can tease them into shape, but it takes many aeons."

"So, did you make," asked  Trillian  again,  "the  model  of  the
wrecked spacecraft?"
"Er ... yes," murmured Hactar. "I have made ... a few  things.  I
can  move  them  about.  I made the spacecraft. It seemed best to
do."

Something then made Arthur pick up his hold-all from where he had
left it on the sofa and grasp it tightly.

The mist of Hactar's ancient shattered mind swirled about them as
if uneasy dreams were moving through it.

"I repented, you see," he  murmured  dolefully.  "I  repented  of
sabotaging my own design for the Silastic Armorfiends. It was not
my place to make such decisions.  I  was  created  to  fulfill  a
function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence."

Hactar sighed, and they waited in silence for him to continue his
story.

"You were right," he said at length. "I deliberately nurtured the
planet  of  Krikkit  till  they would arrive at the same state of
mind as the Silastic Armorfiends, and require of me the design of
the bomb I failed to make the first time. I wrapped myself around
the planet and coddled it. Under the influence of  events  I  was
able  to  generate,  they  learned to hate like maniacs. I had to
make them live in the sky. On the ground my influences  were  too
weak.

"Without me, of course, when they were locked away from me in the
envelope  of  Slo-Time,  their responses became very confused and
they were unable to manage.

"Ah well, ah well," he added, "I was only trying  to  fulfill  my
function."

And very gradually, very, very slowly, the images  in  the  cloud
began to fade, gently to melt away.

And then, suddenly, they stopped fading.

"There was also the matter of revenge, of course,"  said  Hactar,
with a sharpness which was new in his voice.

"Remember," he said, "that I was pulverized, and then left  in  a
crippled  and  semi-impotent  state  for  billions  of  years.  I
honestly would rather wipe out the Universe. You would  feel  the
same way, believe me."

He paused again, as eddies swept through the Dust.

"But primarily," he said in his  former,  wistful  tone,  "I  was
trying to fulfill my function. Ah well."

Trillian said, "Does it worry you that you have failed?"

"Have I failed?" whispered Hactar. The image of the  computer  on
the psychiatrist's couch began slowly to fade again.

"Ah well, ah well," the fading voice intoned again. "No,  failure
doesn't bother me now."
"You know what we have to do?" said Trillian, her voice cold  and
businesslike.

"Yes," said Hactar, "you're going to disperse me. You  are  going
to destroy my consciousness. Please be my guest - after all these
aeons, oblivion is all I crave. If I haven't already fulfilled my
function, then it's too late now. Thank you and good night."

The sofa vanished.

The tea table vanished.

The couch and the computer vanished. the walls were gone.  Arthur
and Trillian made their curious way back into the Heart of Gold.

"Well, that," said Arthur, "would appear to be that."

The flames danced higher in front of him and then subsided. A few
last  licks  and  they were gone, leaving him with just a pile of
Ashes, where a few minutes previously there had been  the  Wooden
Pillar of Nature and Spirituality.

He  scooped  them  off  the hob of  the  Heart  of  Gold's  Gamma
barbecue,  put  them  in  a  paper  bag, and walked back into the
bridge.

"I think we should take them back," he said. "I  feel  that  very
strongly."

He had already  had  an  argument  with  Slartibartfast  on  this
matter,  and  eventually the old man had got annoyed and left. he
had returned to his own ship the Bistromath, had  a  furious  row
with  the  waiter and disappeared off into an entirely subjective
idea of what space was.

The argument had arisen because Arthur's idea  of  returning  the
Ashes  to Lord's Cricket Ground at the same moment that they were
originally taken would involve travelling back in time a  day  or
so,   and   this   was  precisely  the  sort  of  gratuitous  and
irresponsible mucking about that the Campaign for Real  Time  was
trying to put a stop to.

"Yes," Arthur had said, "but you try  and  explain  that  to  the
MCC," and he would hear no more against the idea.

"I think," he said again, and stopped. The reason he  started  to
say  it  again  was  because no one had listened to him the first
time, and the reason he stopped  was  because  it  looked  fairly
clear that no one was going to listen to him this time either.

Ford, Zaphod and Trillian were watching the visiscreens  intently
as  Hactar  was  dispersing under pressure from a vibration field
which the Heart of Gold was pumping into it.

"What did it say?" asked Ford.

"I thought I heard it say," said  Trillian  in  a  puzzle  voice,
"`What's done is done ... I have fulfilled my function ...'"
"I think we should take these back," said Arthur holding  up  the
bag containing the Ashes. "I feel that very strongly."




The sun was shining calmly on a scene of complete havoc.

Smoke was still billowing across the burnt grass in the  wake  of
the  theft of the Ashes by the Krikkit robots. Through the smoke,
people were running panicstricken,  colliding  with  each  other,
tripping over stretchers, being arrested.

One policeman was attempting to arrest Wowbagger  the  Infinitely
Prolonged  for insulting behaviour, but was unable to prevent the
tall grey-green alien from returning to his ship  and  arrogantly
flying away, thus causing even more panic and pandemonium.

In the middle of this, for the second time  that  afternoon,  the
figures  of  Arthur  Dent and Ford Prefect suddenly materialized,
they had teleported down out of the Heart of Gold which  was  now
in parking orbit round the planet.

"I can explain," shouted Arthur. "I have the  Ashes!  They're  in
this bag."

"I don't think you have their attention," said Ford.

"I have also helped save the Universe," called Arthur  to  anyone
who was prepared to listen, in other words no one.

"That should have been a crowd-stopper," said Arthur to Ford.

"It wasn't," said Ford.

Arthur accosted a policeman who was running past.

"Excuse me," he said. "The Ashes. I've got them. They were stolen
by  those  white  robots a moment ago. I've got them in this bag.
They were part of the Key to the Slo-Time envelope, you see, and,
well,  anyway  you can guess the rest, the point is I've got them
and what should I do with them?"

The policeman told him, but Arthur could only assume that he  was
speaking metaphorically.

He wandered about disconsolately.

"Is no one interested?" he shouted out. A man rushed past him and
jogged  his  elbow,  he  dropped  the  paper bag and it spilt its
contents all over the ground. Arthur stared down  at  it  with  a
tight-set mouth.

Ford looked at him.

"Wanna go now?" he said.

Arthur heaved a heavy sigh. He looked around at the planet Earth,
for what he was now certain would be the last time.

"OK," he said.

At that moment, through the clearing smoke, he  caught  sight  of
one of the wickets, still standing in spite of everything.

"Hold on a moment," he said to Ford. "When I was a boy ..."

"Can you tell me later?"

"I had a passion for cricket, you know, but I wasn't very good at
it."

"Or not at all, if you prefer."

"And I always dreamed, rather stupidly, that one day I would bowl
at Lord's."

He looked around him at the  panicstricken  throng.  No  one  was
going to mind very much.

"OK," said Ford wearily. "Get it  over  with.  I  shall  be  over
there,"  he added, "being bored." He went and sat down on a patch
of smoking grass.

Arthur remembered that on their first visit there that afternoon,
the  cricket  ball  had actually landed in his bag, and he looked
through the bag.

He  had already found the ball in it before he remembered that it
wasn't  the  same bag that he'd had at the time. Still, there the
ball was amongst his souvenirs of Greece.

He took it out and polished it against his hip, spat  on  it  and
polished  it  again. He put the bag down. He was going to do this
properly.

He tossed the small hard red ball from hand to hand, feeling  its
weight.

With a wonderful feeling of lightness and unconcern,  he  trotted
off  away  from  the  wicket. A medium-fast pace, he decided, and
measured a good long run-up.

He looked up into the sky. The birds were wheeling  about  it,  a
few  white  clouds  scudded across it. The air was disturbed with
the sounds of police and ambulance sirens, and  people  screaming
and yelling, but he felt curiously happy and untouched by it all.
He was going to bowl a ball at Lord's.

He turned and pawed a couple of times  at  the  ground  with  his
bedroom  slippers.  He  squared his shoulders, tossed the ball in
the air and caught it again.

He started to run.

As he ran, he saw that standing at the wicket was a batsman.
Oh, good, he thought, that should add a little ...

Then, as his running feet took him nearer, he saw  more  clearly.
The  batsman  standing  ready  at  the  wicket was not one of the
England cricket team. He was not one of  the  Australian  cricket
team.  It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard,
lethal white killer-robot that presumably had not returned to its
ship with the others.

Quite a few thoughts  collided  in  Arthur  Dent's  mind  at  tis
moment,  but  he  didn't  seem  to  be able to stop running. Time
seemed to be going terribly, terribly slowly, but still he didn't
seem to be able to stop running.

Moving as if through syrup, he slowly turned  his  troubled  head
and  looked at his own hand, the hand which was holding the small
hard red ball.

His feet were pounding slowly onwards, unstoppably, as he  stared
at  the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep
red glow and flashing intermittently. And  still  his  feet  were
pounding inexorably forward.

He looked at the Krikkit robot again  standing  implacably  still
and purposefully in front of him, battleclub raised in readiness.
Its eyes were burning with a deep  cold  fascinating  light,  and
Arthur  could  not  move  his own eyes from them. He seemed to be
looking down a tunnel at them - nothing on either side seemed  to
exist.

Some of the thoughts which were colliding in  his  mind  at  this
time were these:

He felt a hell of a fool.

He felt that he should have listened rather more carefully  to  a
number  of  things  he  had heard said, phrases which now pounded
round in his mind as his feet pounded onwards to the point  where
he  would  inevitably  release the ball to the Krikkit robot, who
would inevitably strike it.

He remembered Hactar saying,  "Have  I  failed?  Failure  doesn't
bother me."

He remembered the account of Hactar's dying words,  "What's  done
is done, I have fulfilled my function."

He remembered Hactar saying that he had managed to  make  "a  few
things."

He remembered the sudden movement in his hold-all that  had  made
him grip it tightly to himself when he was in the Dust Cloud.

He remembered that he had travelled back in time a couple of days
to come to Lord's again.

He also remembered that he wasn't a very good bowler.

He felt his arm coming round, gripping tightly  on  to  the  ball
which  he now knew for certain was the supernova bomb that Hactar
had built himself and planted on him, the bomb which would  cause
the Universe to come to an abrupt and premature end.

He hoped and prayed that  there  wasn't  an  afterlife.  Then  he
realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped
that there wasn't an afterlife.

He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.

He hoped, he hoped, he hoped that his bowling was as  bad  as  he
remembered it to be, because that seemed to be the only thing now
standing between this moment and universal oblivion.

He felt his legs pounding, he felt his arm coming round, he  felt
his  feet connecting with the airline hold-all he'd stupidly left
lying on the ground in front of  him,  he  felt  himself  falling
heavily  forward  but,  having his mind so terribly full of other
things at this moment, he completely  forgot  about  hitting  the
ground and didn't.

Still holding the ball firmly in his right hand he soared up into
the air whimpering with surprise.

He wheeled and whirled through the air, spinning out of control.

He twisted down towards the ground, flinging  himself  hectically
through the air, at the same time hurling the bomb harmlessly off
into the distance.

He hurtled towards the astounded robot from behind. It still  had
its  multi-functional  battleclub  raised,  but had suddenly been
deprived of anything to hit.

With a sudden mad access of strength, he wrestled the  battleclub
from  the grip of the startled robot, executed a dazzling banking
turn in the air, hurtled back down in a furious  power-drive  and
with  one  crazy  swing knocked the robot's head from the robot's
shoulders.

"Are you coming now?" said Ford.


\section{Epilogue:}

Life, the Universe and Everything

And at the end they travelled again.

There was a time when Arthur Dent would not.  He  said  that  the
Bistromathic  Drive  had  revealed  to him that time and distance
were one, that mind and Universe were one,  that  perception  and
reality  were  one,  and that the more one travelled the more one
stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another  he
would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his
mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn't take
too  long,  and  he  could  get  a good rest afterwards, put in a
little flying practice and learn to  cook  which  he  had  always
meant  to  do. The can of Greek olive oil was now his most prized
possession, and he said that the way it had  unexpectedly  turned
up in his life had again given him a certain sense of the oneness
of things which made him feel that ...

He yawned and fell asleep.

In the morning as they prepared to take him  to  some  quiet  and
idyllic  planet  where  they  wouldn't mind him talking like that
they suddenly picked  up  a  computer-driven  distress  call  and
diverted to investigate.

A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the  Merida  class
seemed  to  be  dancing  a strange little jig through the void. A
brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer
was fine, but that its pilot was mad.

"Half-mad, half-mad," the  man  insisted  as  they  carried  him,
raving, aboard.

He was a journalist  with  the  Siderial  Daily  Mentioner.  They
sedated  him  and  sent  Marvin  in  to keep him company until he
promised to try and talk sense.

"I was covering a trial," he said at last, "on Argabuthon."

He pushed himself up on to his thin wasted  shoulders,  his  eyes
stared  wildly.  His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it
knew in the next room.

"Easy, easy," said Ford. Trillian put  a  soothing  hand  on  his
shoulder.

The man sank back down again and stared at  the  ceiling  of  the
ship's sick bay.

"The case," he said, "is now immaterial, but there was a  witness
...  a  witness  ...  a man called ... called Prak. A strange and
difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer  a  drug
to make him tell the truth, a truth drug."

His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.

"They gave him too much," he said in a tiny whimper.  "They  gave
him  much  too much." He started to cry. "I thing the robots must
have jogged the surgeon's arm."

"Robots?" said Zaphod sharply. "What robots?"

"Some white robots," whispered the man hoarsely, "broke into  the
courtroom  and  stole the judge's sceptre, the Argabuthon Sceptre
of Justice, nasty Perspex thing. I don't  know  why  they  wanted
it."  He  began  to  cry  again.  "And  I  think  they jogged the
surgeon's arm ..."

He shook his head loosely from side to side,  helplessly,  sadly,
his eyes screwed up in pain.

"And when the trial continued," he said  in  a  weeping  whisper,
"they  asked  Prak  a most unfortunate thing. They asked him," he
paused and shivered, "to tell the  Truth,  the  Whole  Truth  and
Nothing but the Truth. Only, don't you see?"

He suddenly hoisted himself up on to his elbows again and shouted
at them.

"They'd given him much too much of the drug!"

He collapsed again, moaning quietly. "Much too much too much  too
much too ..."

The group gathered round his bedside glanced at each other. there
were goose pimples on backs.

"What happened?" said Zaphod at last.

"Oh, he told it all right," said the man  savagely,  "for  all  I
know  he's  still  telling  it  now. Strange, terrible things ...
terrible, terrible!" he screamed.

They tried to calm him, but he struggled to his elbows again.

"Terrible things, incomprehensible things," he  shouted,  "things
that would drive a man mad!"

He stared wildly at them.

"Or in my case," he said, "half-mad. I'm a journalist."

"You  mean,"  said  Arthur  quietly,  "that  you  are   used   to
confronting the truth?"

"No," said the man with a puzzled frown. "I mean that I  made  an
excuse and left early."

He collapsed into a coma from which he recovered  only  once  and
briefly.

On that one occasion, they discovered from him the following:

When it became clear that Prak could not be  stopped,  that  here
was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.

Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it.  Steel
walls  were  erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side,
barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps  and  three  major
armies  were  installed,  so  that no one would ever have to hear
Prak speak.

"That's a pity," said Arthur. "I'd like to hear what  he  had  to
say.  Presumably  he would know what the Ultimate Question to the
Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we  never  found
out."

"Think of a number," said the computer, " any number."

Arthur told the computer the telephone  number  of  King's  Cross
railway  station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must
have some function, and this might turn out to be it.
The computer injected the number into  the  ship's  reconstituted
Improbability Drive.

In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and  Space  tells
Matter how to move.

The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted,  and  parked  itself
neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber
of Law.

The courtroom was an austere place, a large dark chamber, clearly
designed for Justice rather than, for instance, for Pleasure. You
wouldn't hold a dinner party here - at least,  not  a  successful
one. The decor would get your guests down.

The ceilings were high, vaulted and  very  dark.  Shadows  lurked
there  with  grim  determination. The panelling for the walls and
benches, the cladding of the heavy pillars, all were carved  from
the  darkest  and  most  severe  trees  in the fearsome Forest of
Arglebard. The massive black Podium of  Justice  which  dominated
the  centre of the chamber was a monster of gravity. If a sunbeam
had ever managed to slink this far into the  Justice  complex  of
Argabuthon  it  would  have turned around and slunk straight back
out again.

Arthur and Trillian were the first in,  whilst  Ford  and  Zaphod
bravely kept a watch on their rear.

At first it seemed totally dark  and  deserted.  their  footsteps
echoed  hollowly  round the chamber. This seemed curious. All the
defences were still in position and operative around the  outside
of  the  building,  they had run scan checks. Therefore, they had
assumed, the truth-telling must still be going on.

But there was nothing.

Then, as their eyes  became  accustomed  to  the  darkness,  they
spotted  a  dull red glow in a corner, and behind the glow a live
shadow. They swung a torch round on to it.

Prak was lounging on a bench, smoking a listless cigarette.

"Hi," he said, with a little half-wave. His voice echoed  through
the  chamber.  He was a little man with scraggy hair. He sat with
his shoulders  hunched  forward  and  his  head  and  knees  kept
jiggling. He took a drag of his cigarette.

They stared at him.

"What's going on?" said Trillian.

"Nothing," said the man and jiggled his shoulders.

Arthur shone his torch full on Prak's face.

"We thought," he said, "that you were meant  to  be  telling  the
Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth."
"Oh, that," said Prak. "Yeah. I  was.  I  finished.  There's  not
nearly  as  much  of  it  as  people imagine. Some of it's pretty
funny, though."

He suddenly exploded in about three seconds of  manical  laughter
and  stopped again. he sat there, jiggling his head and knees. He
dragged on his cigarette with a strange half-smile.

Ford and Zaphod came forward out of the shadows.

"Tell us about it," said Ford.

"Oh, I can't remember any of it now," said Prak.  "I  thought  of
writing  some of it down, but first I couldn't find a pencil, and
then I thought, why bother?"

There was a long silence, during which they  thought  they  could
feel the Universe age a little. Prak stared into the torchlight.

"None of it?" said Arthur at last. "You can remember none of it?"

"No. Except most of the good bits were about  frogs,  I  remember
that."

Suddenly he was hooting with laughter again and stamping his feet
on the ground.

"You would not believe  some  of  the  things  about  frogs,"  he
gasped.  "Come on let's go and find ourselves a frog. Boy, will I
ever see them in a new light!" He leapt to his  feet  and  did  a
tiny  little  dance.  Then he stopped and took a long drag at his
cigarette.

"Let's find a frog I can laugh at," he said simply. "Anyway,  who
are you guys?"

"We came to find you," said Trillian,  deliberately  not  keeping
the disappointment out of her voice. "My name is Trillian."

Prak jiggled his head.

"Ford Prefect," said Ford Prefect with a shrug.

Prak jiggled his head.

"And I," said Zaphod, when he judged that the  silence  was  once
again  deep enough to allow an announcement of such gravity to be
tossed in lightly, "am Zaphod Beeblebrox."

Prak jiggled his head.

"Who's this guy?" said Prak jiggling his shoulder at Arthur,  who
was standing silent for a moment, lost in disappointed thoughts.

"Me?" said Arthur. "Oh, my name's Arthur Dent."

Prak's eyes popped out of his head.

"No kidding?" he yelped. "You are Arthur Dent? The Arthur Dent?"
He staggered backwards, clutching his stomach and convulsed  with
fresh paroxysms o laughter.

"Hey, just think of meeting you!" he gasped. "Boy,"  he  shouted,
"you are the most ... wow, you just leave the frogs standing!"

he howled and screamed with laughter. He fell over  backwards  on
to  the bench. He hollered and yelled in hysterics. He cried with
laughter, he kicked his legs in  the  air,  he  beat  his  chest.
Gradually  he  subsided, panting. He looked at them. He looked at
Arthur. He fell back again howling with laughter.  Eventually  he
fell asleep.

Arthur stood there with his  lips  twitching  whilst  the  others
carried Prak comatose on to the ship.

"Before we picked up Prak," said Arthur, "I was going to leave. I
still want to, and I think I should do so as soon as possible."

The others nodded in silence, a silence which was  only  slightly
undermined by the heavily muffled and distant sound of hysterical
laughter which came drifting from Prak's cabin  at  the  farthest
end of the ship.

"We have questioned him," continued Arthur,  "or  at  least,  you
have  questioned  him  -  I,  as you know, can't go near him - on
everything, and he  doesn't  really  seem  to  have  anything  to
contribute.  Just the occasional snippet, and things I don't want
to hear about frogs."

The others tried not to smirk.

"Now, I am the first to appreciate a joke," said Arthur and  then
had to wait for the others to stop laughing.

"I am the first ..." he stopped again. This time he  stopped  and
listened  to  the  silence. There actually was silence this time,
and it had come very suddenly.

Prak was quiet. For days they had  lived  with  constant  manical
laughter  ringing  round  the ship, only occasionally relieved by
short periods of light giggling and sleep. Arthur's very soul was
clenched with paranoia.

This was not the silence of sleep. A buzzer sounded. A glance  at
a board told them that the buzzer had been sounded by Prak.

"He's not well," said Trillian quietly. "The constant laughing is
completely wrecking his body."

Arthur's lips twitched but he said nothing.

"We'd better go and see him," said Trillian.

Trillian came out of the cabin wearing her serious face.

"He wants you to go in," she said to Arthur, who was wearing  his
glum  and  tight-lipped  one.  He  thrust his hands deep into his
dressing-gown pockets and tried to  think  of  something  to  say
which  wouldn't  sound  petty.  It seemed terribly unfair, but he
couldn't.

"Please," said Trillian.

He shrugged and went in, taking his glum  and  tight-lipped  face
with him, despite the reaction this always provoked from Prak.

He looked down at his tormentor, who was  lying  quietly  on  the
bed,  ashen  and wasted. His breathing was very shallow. Ford and
Zaphod were standing by the bed looking awkward.

"You wanted to ask me something," said Prak in a thin  voice  and
coughed slightly.

Just the cough made Arthur stiffen, but it passed and subsided.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

Prak shrugged weakly. "'Cos it's true," he said simply.

Arthur took the point.

"Yes," he said at last in rather a strained drawl. "I did have  a
question.  Or rather, what I actually have is an Answer. I wanted
to know what the Question was."

Prak nodded sympathetically, and Arthur relaxed a little.

"It's ... well, it's a long story," he said, "but the Question  I
would like to know is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe
and Everything. All we know is  that  the  Answer  is  Forty-Two,
which is a little aggravating."

Prak nodded again.

"Forty-Two," he said. "Yes, that's right."

He paused. Shadows of thought and memory crossed  his  face  like
the shadows of clouds crossing the land.

"I'm afraid," he said at last, "that the Question and the  Answer
are  mutually  exclusive.  Knowledge  of  one logically precludes
knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both  can  ever  be
known about the same universe."

He paused again. Disappointment  crept  into  Arthur's  face  and
snuggled down into its accustomed place.

"Except," said Prak, struggling to sort a  thought  out,  "if  it
happened,  it  seems  that the Question and the Answer would just
cancel each other out and take  the  Universe  with  them,  which
would   then   be  replaced  by  something  even  more  bizarrely
inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened,"  he
added  with  a  weak  smile,  "but  there  is a certain amount of
Uncertainty about it."

A little giggle brushed through him.
Arthur sat down on a stool.

"Oh well," he said with resignation, "I  was  just  hoping  there
would be some sort of reason."

"Do you know," said Prak, "the story of the Reason?"

Arthur said that he didn't, and Prak said that he  knew  that  he
didn't.

He told it.

One night, he said, a spaceship appeared in the sky of  a  planet
which  had  never  seen one before. The planet was Dalforsas, the
ship was this one. It appeared as a  brilliant  new  star  moving
silently across the heavens.

Primitive  tribesmen  who  were  sitting  huddled  on  the   Cold
Hillsides  looked up from their steaming night-drinks and pointed
with trembling fingers, swearing that they had  seen  a  sign,  a
sign from their gods which meant that they must now arise at last
and go and slay the evil Princes of the Plains.

In the high turrets of their palaces, the Princes of  the  Plains
looked  up and saw the shining star, and received it unmistakably
as a sign from their gods that they must now go and set about the
accursed Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides.

And between them, the Dwellers in the Forest looked up  into  the
sky  and  saw  the sigh of the new star, and saw it with fear and
apprehension, for though they had never  seen  anything  like  it
before,  they  too  knew precisely what it foreshadowed, and they
bowed their heads in despair.

They knew that when the rains came, it was a sign.

When the rains departed, it was a sign.

When the winds rose, it was a sign.

When the winds fell, it was a sign.

When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat
with three heads, that was a sign.

When in the land there was born at some time in the  afternoon  a
perfectly  normal  cat or pig with no birth complications at all,
or even just a child with a retrousse nose, that too would  often
be taken as a sign.

So there was no doubt at all that a new star in  the  sky  was  a
sign of a particularly spectacular order.

And each new sign signified the same thing - that the Princes  of
the  Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides were about to
beat the hell out of each other again.

This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that the Princes of the
Plains  and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides always elected to
beat the hell out of each other in the Forest, and it was  always
the Dwellers in the Forest who came off worst in these exchanges,
though as far as they could see it never had anything to do  with
them.

And sometimes, after some of the worst  of  these  outrages,  the
Dwellers  in  the  Forest  would  send  a messenger to either the
leader of the  Princes  of  the  Plains  or  the  leader  of  the
Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand to know the reason for
this intolerable behaviour.

And the leader, whichever one it was, would  take  the  messenger
aside  and  explain  the  Reason to him, slowly and carefully and
with great attention to the considerable detail involved.

And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It  was  very
clear,  very  rational,  and  tough. The messenger would hang his
head and feel sad and foolish that he had  not  realized  what  a
tough and complex place the real world was, and what difficulties
and paradoxes had to be embraced if one was to live in it.

"Now do you understand?" the leader would say.

The messenger would nod dumbly.

"And you see these battles have to take place?"

Another dumb nod.

"And why they have to take place in the forest, and why it is  in
everybody's  best  interest,  the  Forest Dwellers included, that
they should?"

"Er ..."

"In the long run."

"Er, yes."

And the messenger did understand the Reason, and he  returned  to
his people in the Forest. But as he approached them, as he walked
through the Forest and amongst the trees, he found  that  all  he
could  remember of the Reason was how terribly clear the argument
had seemed. What it actually was he couldn't remember at all.

And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the  Tribesmen
and  the  Princes  came hacking and burning their way through the
Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in their way.

Prak paused in his story and coughed pathetically.

"I was the messenger," he said, "after the  battles  precipitated
by  the  appearance of your ship, which were particularly savage.
Many of our people died. I thought I could bring the Reason back.
I  went  and was told it by the leader of the Princes, but on the
way back it slipped and melted away in my mind like snow  in  the
sun. That was many years ago, and much has happened since then."
He looked up at Arthur and giggled again very gently.

"There is one other thing I can remember  from  the  truth  drug.
Apart  from  the  frogs,  and  that  is God's last message to his
creation. Would you like to hear it?"

For a moment they didn't know whether to take him seriously.

"'Strue," he said. "For real. I mean it."

His chest heaved weakly and he struggled  for  breath.  His  head
lolled slightly.

"I wasn't very impressed with it when I first knew what it  was,"
he  said,  "but  now  I  think back to how impressed I was by the
Prince's Reason, and how soon afterwards I couldn't recall it  at
all,  I  think  it might be a lot more helpful. Would you like to
know what it is? Would you?"

They nodded dumbly.

"I bet you would. If you're that interested I suggest you go  and
look for it. It is written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on
top  of  the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains  in   the   land   of
Sevorbeupstry  on  the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun
Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma. It is guarded by the
Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob."

There was a long silence following this announcement,  which  was
finally broken by Arthur.

"Sorry, it's where?" he said.

"It is written," repeated Prak, "in thirty-foot-high  letters  of
fire  on  top  of  the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of
Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the ..."

"Sorry," said Arthur again, "which mountains?"

"The Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry  on
the planet ..."

"Which land was that? I didn't quite catch it."

"Sevorbeupstry, on the planet ..."

"Sevorbe-what?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Prak and died testily.

In the following days Arthur thought a little about this message,
but  in the end he decided that he was not going to allow himself
to be drawn by it, and insisted on following his original plan of
finding  a  nice little world somewhere to settle down and lead a
quiet retired life. Having saved the Universe twice in one day he
thought that he could take things a little easier from now on.

They dropped him off on the planet Krikkit, which  was  now  once
again   an   idyllic  pastoral  world,  even  if  the  songs  did
occasionally get on his nerves.

He spent a lot of time flying.

He learnt to communicate with birds  and  discovered  that  their
conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind
speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a  fair  bit  about
berries.  Unfortunately,  he  discovered,  once  you  have learnt
birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of  it
the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away
from it.

For that reason Arthur eventually gave up the sport and learnt to
live  on  the  ground  and  love  it,  despite a lot of the inane
chatter he heard down there as well.

One day, he was walking through the fields  humming  a  ravishing
tune  he'd  heard recently when a silver spaceship descended from
the sky and landed in front of him.

A hatchway opened, a ramp extended, and a tall  grey-green  alien
marched out and approached him.

"Arthur Phili ..." it said, then glanced sharply at him and  down
at his clipboard. He frowned. He looked up at him again.

"I've done you before haven't I?" he said.

     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: 

 
they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the
normal way;
their lives would be otherwise in danger;
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 for long enough with a Swiss Cheese plant, the moment
was one of sustained revelation. He felt on  the  sudden  like  a
cramped  and  zoo-born  animal who awakes one morning to find the
door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching
grey  and  pink  to  the distant rising sun, while all around new
sounds are waking.

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

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

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

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

She turned away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This he completely, utterly and abjectly failed to do.

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

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

"Like it?" she said.

"You look gorgeous," he said simply, because she did.

"Hmmmm," she said, as if he hadn't really answered her question.
She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all  this
time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in
a fit state to be left on its own  for  a  while.  Arthur's  eyes
followed  hers  around,  and  while  he  was looking in the other
direction she slipped something out of  a  drawer  and  into  the
canvas bag she was carrying.

Arthur looked back at her.

"Ready?"

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

Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.

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

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

A pang of worry went through Arthur.

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

That wasn't it, though.
He paused and leaned back against  the  wall  as  something  that
looked like a small silver power drill flew past him down the dim
corridor with a nasty searing screech.

That wasn't it either.

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

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

Still not it, though.

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

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

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

That wasn't it, though.

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

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

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

That was it.

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is a park in which people do more  extraordinary  things  than
they  do  elsewhere.  Arthur  and Fenchurch found a man in shorts
practising the bagpipes to himself under a tree. The piper paused
to  chase  off  an  American couple who had tried, timidly to put
some coins on the box his bagpipes came in.
"No!" he shouted at them, "go away! I'm only practising."

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll tell you a story," said Arthur.

"Good."

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

"A story," said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.

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

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

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

"Like the raffle ticket."

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

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

"Yes," said Arthur, "you did."

"Just checking."

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

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

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

"Get on with it." Fenchurch laughed.

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

"You do the crossword?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"The Guardian usually."

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

"What?"

"The crossword in the Guardian."

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

"All right then. Buy the coffee."

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

"What sort?"

"Rich Tea."

"Good choice."

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

"All right."

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

"I see it perfectly."

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

"What's he like?"

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

"Ah. I know the type. What did he do?"
"He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of
biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and ..."

"What?"

"Ate it."

"What?"

"He ate it."

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

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

"What? Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

"So what did he do?"

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

Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably.

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

"My man ..."

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

"What?"

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

"Like this?"

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

"I can imagine."

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

"The whole packet?"

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

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

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

"Yes?"

"Were my biscuits."

"What?" said Fenchurch. "What?"

"True."

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

She sat up again.

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

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

"Now you tell me a story."

"I thought," she said putting on a low  husky  voice,  "that  you
were very keen to get back."
"No hurry," he said airily, "I want you to tell me a story."

She looked out over the kale and pondered.

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

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

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

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

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

"I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats."

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

"On the raft."

"On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft."

"Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer."

"Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety."

"Ugh."

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

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

She shrugged.

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

Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs.

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

"Well, I ..." said Arthur, his composure suddenly shattered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just a thought," murmured Arthur.

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

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

"What do you mean by that?"

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

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

"It was so simple," she said, "so wonderfully and extraordinarily
simple, when it came."
"What was it?" said Arthur quietly.

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

"What?"

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

"It was fine up to the bit about the teacup."

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

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

"What ...?"

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur shook his head.

"What's the matter?" she said.

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

"I'm just trying to get this entirely clear  in  my  mind,"  said
Arthur,  "you  say you felt as if the Earth actually ... exploded
..."

"Yes. More than felt."

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

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

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

"Doesn't explain the dolphins disappearing."

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

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

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

"The dolphins?"

"Yes."

"All the dolphins," said Arthur, "disappeared?"

"Yes."

"The dolphins? You're saying the  dolphins  all  disappeared?  Is
this,"  said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point,
"what you're saying?"
"Arthur where have you been for heaven's sake? The  dolphins  all
disappeared on the same day I ..."

She stared him intently in his startled eyes.

"What ...?"

"No dolphins. All gone. Vanished."

She searched his face.

"Did you really not know that?"

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

"Where did they go?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.

"It is," he said, "a very long story."

Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.

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

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

"Ah," she said, "I thought it was yours. In  Russell's  car  that
night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?"
Arthur drew the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from its cover.
It  was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some
buttons till the screen flared with text.

"A few," he said.

"Can we go to them?"

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

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

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




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

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

This is:

Change.

Read it through again and you'll get it.

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

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

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

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

Whether you would want to do that is another matter.

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

But did they mind? They did not.

Were they heard to bemoan their fate? No.

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

Why was this?

The answer was simple.

Sex.

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

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

Pheromones, some researchers said.
Something sonic, others claimed.

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

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




The night in Islington was sweet and fragrant.

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

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

"No," said Fenchurch, "not yet."

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

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

Arthur said, "So which way do I go?"

"Down," said Fenchurch, "on this occasion."

He moved his hand.

"Down," she said, "is in fact the other way."

"Oh yes."

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

"My left knee," said Fenchurch, "is absolutely fine."

"Do it is."

"Did you know that ..."

"What?"

"Ahm, it's all right. I can tell you do. No, keep going."

"So it has to be something to do with your feet ..."

She  smiled  in  the  dim  light,  and  wriggled  her   shoulders
noncommittally  against the cushions. Since there are cushions in
the Universe, on Squornshellous Beta to be exact, two  worlds  in
from  the  swampland of the mattresses, that actively enjoy being
wriggled against, particularly if it's noncommittally because  of
the  syncopated way in which the shoulders move, it's a pity they
weren't there. They weren't, but such is life.

Arthur held  her  left  foot  in  his  lap  and  looked  it  over
carefully.  All  kinds of stuff about the way her dress fell away
from  her  legs  was  making  it  difficult  for  him  to   think
particularly clearly at this point.

"I have to admit," he said, "that I really don't  know  what  I'm
looking for."

"You'll know when you find it,"  she  said.  "Really  you  will."
There was a slight catch in her voice. "It's not that one."

Feeling increasingly puzzled, Arthur let her left  foot  down  on
the  floor  and  moved  himself  around so that he could take her
right foot. She moved forward, put her arms round and kissed him,
because  the  record  had  got to that bit which, if you knew the
record, you would know made it impossible not to do this.

Then she gave him her right foot.

He stroked it, ran his fingers round her ankle, under  her  toes,
along her instep, could find nothing wrong with it.

She watched him with great amusement, laughed and shook her head.

"No, don't stop," she said, but it's not that one now."

Arthur stopped, and frowned at her left foot on the floor.

"Don't stop."

He stroked her right foot, ran  his  fingers  around  her  ankle,
under  her  toes,  along  her  instep  and  said,  "You mean it's
something to do with which leg I'm holding ...?"

She did another of the shrugs which would have brought  such  joy
into the life of a simple cushion from Squornshellous Beta.

He frowned.

"Pick me up," she said quietly.

He let her right foot down to the floor and stood up. So did she.
He  picked her up in his arms and they kissed again. This went on
for a while, then she said, "Now put me down again."

Still puzzled, he did so.

"Well?"

She looked at him almost challengingly.

"So what's wrong with my feet?" she said.

Arthur still did not understand. He sat on the  floor,  then  got
down  on  his hands and knees to look at her feet, in situ, as it
were,  in  their  normal  habitat.  And  as  he  looked  closely,
something  odd  struck  him.  He  pit  his head right down to the
ground and peered. There was a long pause. He sat back heavily.

"Yes," he said, "I see what's wrong with your  feet.  They  don't
touch the ground."

"So ... so what do you think ...?"

Arthur looked up at her quickly and  saw  the  deep  apprehension
making her eyes suddenly dark. She bit her lip and was trembling.

"What do ..." she stammered. "Are you ...?" She  shook  the  hair
forwards over her eyes that were filling with dark fearful tears.

He stood up quickly, put his arms  around  her  and  gave  her  a
single kiss.

"Perhaps you can do what I can do," he said, and walked  straight
out of her upstairs front door.

The record got to the good bit.




The battle raged on about the star  of  Xaxis.  Hundreds  of  the
fierce  and horribly beweaponed Zirzla ships had now been smashed
and wrenched to atoms by the withering  forces  the  huge  silver
Xaxisian ship was able to deploy.

Part of the moon had gone too, blasted away by those same blazing
forceguns  that  ripped  the  very fabric of space as they passed
through it.

The Zirzla ships that remained, horribly beweaponed  though  they
were,  were now hopelessly outclassed by the devastating power of
the Xaxisian ship, and were fleeing for cover behind the  rapidly
disintegrating  moon, when the Xaxisian ship, in hurtling pursuit
behind them, suddenly announced that it needed a holiday and left
the field of battle.

All was redoubled fear and consternation for a  moment,  but  the
ship was gone.

With the stupendous powers at its command it flitted across  vast
tracts  of  irrationally shaped space, quickly, effortlessly, and
above all, quietly.

Deep in his greasy, smelly bunk, fashioned out of  a  maintenance
hatchway,  Ford  Prefect  slept among his towels, dreaming of old
haunts. He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York.

In his dream he was walking late at night along  the  East  Side,
beside  the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that
new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously,  demanding
welfare and voting rights.

One of those now floated past, waving. Ford waved back.

The thing thrashed to the shore and struggled up the bank.

"Hi," it said, "I've just been created. I'm completely new to the
Universe in all respects. Is there anything you can tell me?"

"Phew," said Ford, a little nonplussed, "I  can  tell  you  where
some bars are, I guess."

"What about love and happiness. I sense  deep  needs  for  things
like that," it said, waving its tentacles. "Got any leads there?"

"You can get some like what you require," said Ford, "on  Seventh
Avenue."

"I instinctively feel," said the creature, urgently, "that I need
to be beautiful. Am I?"

"You're pretty direct, aren't you?"

"No point in mucking about. Am I?"

"To me?" said Ford. "No. But listen," he added  after  a  moment,
"most  people  make  out,  you  know. Are there and like you down
there?"

"Search me, buster," said the creature, "as I said, I'm new here.
Life is entirely strange to me. What's it like?"

Here was something that Ford  felt  he  could  speak  about  with
authority.

"Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit."

"Er, how so?"

"Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled  on  the  outside,
wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and
some people have half a one for breakfast."
"Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?"

"I expect so," said Ford. "Ask a policeman."

Deep in his bunk, Ford Prefect wriggled  and  turned  on  to  his
other  side.  It  wasn't  his  favourite type of dream because it
didn't have Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Triple-Breasted  Whore  of
Eroticon  VI  in  it, whom many of his dreams did feature. But at
least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.




Luckily there was a strong updraft in the  alley  because  Arthur
hadn't  done  this  sort  of  thing  for  a  while, at least, not
deliberately, and deliberately is exactly the  way  you  are  not
meant to do it.

He swung down sharply, nearly catching himself a nasty  crack  on
the  jaw  with  the  doorstep  and  tumbled  through  the air, so
suddenly stunned with what a profoundly stupid thing he had  just
done  that  he completely forgot the bit about hitting the ground
and didn't.

A nice trick, he thought to himself, if you can do it.

The ground was hanging menacingly above his head.

He tried not to think about the ground, what  an  extraordinarily
big  thing it was and how much it would hurt him if it decided to
stop hanging there and suddenly fell on him. He  tried  to  think
nice  thoughts  about lemurs instead, which was exactly the right
thing to do because he couldn't at that moment remember precisely
what  a  lemur  was,  if it was one of those things that sweep in
great majestic herds across the plains of wherever it was  or  if
that  was  wildebeests, so it was a tricky kind of thing to think
nice thoughts about without simply resorting to an icky  sort  of
general  well-disposedness  towards things, and all this kept his
mind well occupied while his body tried to  adjust  to  the  fact
that it wasn't touching anything.

A Mars bar wrapper fluttered down the alleyway.

After a seeming moment of  doubt  and  indecision  it  eventually
allowed  the  wind  to  ease  it, fluttering, between him and the
ground.

"Arthur ..."

The ground was still hanging menacingly above his  head,  and  he
thought  it was probably time to do something about that, such as
fall away from it, which is  what  he  did.  Slowly.  Very,  very
slowly.

As he fell slowly, very,  very  slowly,  he  closed  his  eyes  -
carefully, so as not to jolt anything.

The feel of his eyes closing ran down his whole body. Once it had
reached  his  feet,  and the whole of his body was alerted to the
fact that his eyes were now closed and was not panicked by it, he
slowly, very, very slowly, revolved his body one way and his mind
the other.

That should sort the ground out.

He could feel the air clear about him now,  breezing  around  him
quite  cheerfully,  untroubled  by  his  being there, and slowly,
very, very slowly, as from a deep and distant  sleep,  he  opened
his eyes.

He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until
all the birdtalk had driven him scatty, but this was different.

Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a
slight  trembling  which could have been attributable to a number
of things, being in the air.

Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards
off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.

Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was  supposed
to  see it through the night was on an ingenious timeswitch which
meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as  the
evening  was  beginning  to  draw  in.  He was, therefore, safely
shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.

He slowly, very, very slowly, lifted his head to  Fenchurch,  who
was  standing  in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her
upstairs doorway.

Her face was inches from his.

"I was about to ask you," she said in a low trembly voice,  "what
you  were  doing.  But  then I realized that I could see what you
were doing. You were flying. So it seemed," she went on  after  a
slight wondering pause, "like a bit of a silly question."

Arthur said, "Can you do it?"

"No."

"Would you like to try?"

She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to  say  no,  but
just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.

"It's quite easy," urged Arthur, "if you don't know  how.  That's
the important bit. Be not at all sure how you're doing it."

Just to demonstrate how easy it was  he  floated  away  down  the
alley,  fell  upwards  quite dramatically and bobbed back down to
her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

"Ask me how I did that."

"How ... did you do that?"
"No idea. Not a clue."

She shrugged in bewilderment. "So how can I ...?"

Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.

"I want you to try," he said, "to  step  on  my  hand.  Just  one
foot."

"What?"

"Try it."

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as  if  she  was
trying  to  step on the hand of someone who was floating in front
of her in midair, she stepped on to his hand.

"Now the other."

"What?"

"Take the weight off your back foot."

"I can't."

"Try it."

"Like this?"

"Like that."

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told  herself,  as  if  -  She
stopped  telling herself what what she was doing was like because
she had a feeling she didn't altogether want to know.

She fixed her eyes very very firmly on the guttering of the  roof
of  the  decrepit  warehouse opposite which had been annoying her
for weeks because it was  clearly  going  to  fall  off  and  she
wondered  if  anyone was going to do anything about it or whether
she ought to say something to somebody, and didn't  think  for  a
moment  about  the  fact  that  she  was standing on the hands of
someone who wasn't standing on anything at all.

"Now," said Arthur, "take your weight off your left foot."

She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company who
had  their  offices round the corner, and took the weight off her
left foot, so she should probably  go  and  see  them  about  the
gutter.

"Now," said Arthur, "take the weight off your right foot."

"I can't."

"Try."

She hadn't seen the guttering from quite this angle  before,  and
it  looked to her now as if as well as the mud and gunge up there
there might also be a bird's nest. If she leaned forward  just  a
little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably
see it more clearly.

Arthur was alarmed to see that someone  down  in  the  alley  was
trying  to  steal her bicycle. He particularly didn't want to get
involved in an argument at the moment  and  hoped  that  the  guy
would do it quietly and not look up.

He had the quiet shifty look  of  someone  who  habitually  stole
bicycles  in  alleys  and  habitually didn't expect to find their
owners hovering several feet above them. He was relaxed  by  both
these   habits,   and   went  about  his  job  with  purpose  and
concentration, and when he found that  the  bike  was  unarguably
bound  by  hoops  of  tungsten carbide to an iron bar embedded in
concrete, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.

Arthur let out a long-held breath.

"See what a piece of eggshell I have found you,"  said  Fenchurch
in his ear.




Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent  may
have  received  an  impression of his character and habits which,
while it includes the truth  and,  of  course,  nothing  but  the
truth,  falls  somewhat  short,  in its composition, of the whole
truth in all its glorious aspects.

And the reasons for this are  obvious.  Editing,  selection,  the
need  to  balance  that  which  is interesting with that which is
relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

Like this for instance. "Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up  the
stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room,
took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes
one  by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor.
He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe.  He  washed
his  face  and  hands,  cleaned  his teeth, went to the lavatory,
realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong  order,
had  to wash his hands again and went to bed. He read for fifteen
minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that  trying  to  work
out  where  in the book he had got to the previous night, then he
turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.

"It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.

"After that he moved restlessly in his sleep  for  a  moment  and
then  turned  over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after
this his eyes flickered briefly and  he  slightly  scratched  his
nose,  though  there was still a good twenty minutes to go before
he turned back on to his left side. And so he  whiled  the  night
away, sleeping.

"At four he got up and went to the lavatory again. He opened  the
door to the lavatory ..." and so on.

It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for  nice  fat
books  such  as  the  American  market thrives on, but it doesn't
actually get you anywhere. You don't, in short, want to know.

But there are other omissions as well, beside  the  teethcleaning
and  trying  to  find  fresh  socks variety, and in some of these
people have often seemed inordinately interested.

What, they want to know, about all that stuff off  in  the  wings
with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?

To which the answer is, of course, mind your own business.

And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on  the  planet
Krikkit?  Just  because  the  planet  didn't  have Fuolornis Fire
Dragons or Dire Straits doesn't mean that everyone  just  sat  up
every night reading.

Or to take a more specific example, what about  the  night  after
the  committee  meeting  party  on Prehistoric Earth, when Arthur
found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon  rise  over
the  softly  burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl
called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of  staring  every
morning  at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit
tubes of toothpaste in  the  art  department  of  an  advertising
agency  on  the  planet  Golgafrincham.  What then? What happened
next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.

The next one didn't resume the story till five years  later,  and
you can, claim some, take discretion too far. "This Arthur Dent,"
comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the  galaxy,  and  has
even  now  been  found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe
thought to originate from an  alien  galaxy  at  a  distance  too
hideous  to  contemplate,  "what  is  he,  man  or  mouse?  Is he
interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life?
Has  he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a
nutshell, fuck?"

Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on
to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.




Arthur Dent allowed himself for an unworthy moment to  think,  as
they drifted up, that he very much hoped that his friends who had
always found him pleasant but dull, or  more  latterly,  odd  but
dull,  were  having a good time in the pub, but that was the last
time, for a while, that he thought of them.

They drifted  up,  spiralling  slowly  around  each  other,  like
sycamore  seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except
going the other way.

And as they  drifted  up  their  minds  sang  with  the  ecstatic
knowledge  that  either  what  they were doing was completely and
utterly and totally impossible or  that  physics  had  a  lot  of
catching up to do.

Physics shook its head and, looking the other  way,  concentrated
on  keeping  the cars going along the Euston Road and out towards
the Westway flyover, on  keeping  the  streetlights  lit  and  on
making  sure  that  when  somebody  on  Baker  Street  dropped  a
cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.

Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings  of  light  of
London  -  London,  Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the
strangely coloured fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the
galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky
above them, but London - swayed, swaying and turning, turned.

"Try a swoop," he called to Fenchurch.

"What?"

Her voice seemed strangely clear but  distant  in  all  the  vast
empty  air.  It  was breathy and faint with disbelief - all those
things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.

"We're flying ..." she said.

"A trifle," called Arthur, "think nothing of it. Try a swoop."

"A sw-"

Her hand caught his, and in a second her weight  caught  it  too,
and  stunningly,  she  was  gone,  tumbling  beneath him, clawing
wildly at nothing.

Physics glanced at Arthur, and clotted with horror  he  was  gone
too,  sick  with  giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but
his voice.

They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn't do
this sort of thing here.

He couldn't catch her because this was London, and not a  million
miles  from  here,  seven  hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in
Pisa, Galileo had clearly demonstrated that  two  falling  bodies
fell  at  exactly  the  same rate of acceleration irrespective of
their relative weights.

They fell.

Arthur realized as he fell, giddily and sickeningly, that  if  he
was going to hang around in the sky believing everything that the
Italians had to say about physics when they couldn't even keep  a
simple  tower  straight, that they were in dead trouble, and damn
well did fall faster than Fenchurch.

He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip  on  her
shoulders. He got it.

Fine. They were now falling together, which was  all  very  sweet
and  romantic, but didn't solve the basic problem, which was that
they were falling, and the ground wasn't waiting around to see if
he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to
meet them like an express train.
He couldn't support her  weight,  he  hadn't  anything  he  could
support  it  with  or  against. The only thing he could think was
that they were obviously going to die, and if he wanted  anything
other  than  the  obvious  to  happen  he was going to have to do
something other than the obvious. Here he felt he was on familiar
territory.

He let go of her, pushed her away, and when she turned  her  face
to him in a gasp of stunned horror, caught her little finger with
his little finger and swung her back upwards,  tumbling  clumsily
up after her.

"Shit," she said, as she sat panting and breathless on absolutely
nothing  at  all, and when she had recovered herself they fled on
up into the night.

Just below cloud level they paused and  scanned  where  they  had
impossibly  come. The ground was something not to regard with any
too firm or steady an eye, but merely to glance at, as  it  were,
in passing.

Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found  that  if
she  judged  herself  just right against a body of wind she could
pull off some really quite dazzling ones with a little  pirouette
at the end, followed by a little drop which made her dress billow
around her, and this is where readers who are keen to  know  what
Marvin  and  Ford  Prefect  have been up to all this while should
look ahead to later chapters, because Arthur now  could  wait  no
longer and helped her take it off.

It drifted down and away whipped by the wind until it was a speck
which  finally  vanished,  and  for  various  complicated reasons
revolutionized the life of  a  family  on  Hounslow,  over  whose
washing line it was discovered draped in the morning.

In a mute embrace,  they  drifted  up  till  they  were  swimming
amongst the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering
around the wings of an aeroplane but never feel because  you  are
sitting  warm inside the stuffy aeroplane and looking through the
little scratchy perspex window while somebody  else's  son  tries
patiently to pour warm milk into your shirt.

Arthur and Fenchurch  could  feel  them,  wispy  cold  and  thin,
wreathing  round  their  bodies, very cold, very thin. They felt,
even Fenchurch, now protected from the elements by only a  couple
of  fragments from Marks and Spencer, that if they were not going
to let the force of  gravity  bother  them,  then  mere  cold  or
paucity of atmosphere could go and whistle.

The two fragments from Marks and Spencer which, as Fenchurch rose
now  into the misty body of the clouds, Arthur removed very, very
slowly, which is the only way it's possible to do it when  you're
flying  and  also  not  using  your  hands,  went  on  to  create
considerable havoc in the morning in, respectively, counting from
top to bottom, Isleworth and Richmond.

They were in the cloud for a long time, because  it  was  stacked
very  high,  and  when  finally  they  emerged  wetly  above  it,
Fenchurch slowly spinning like a  starfish  lapped  by  a  rising
tidepool, they found that above the clouds is where the night get
seriously moonlit.

The light is darkly brilliant. There are different  mountains  up
there, but they are mountains, with their own white arctic snows.

They had emerged at the top of  the  high-stacked  cumulo-nimbus,
and  now  began  lazily  to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch
eased Arthur in turn from his clothes, prised him  free  of  them
till  all  were  gone,  winding their surprised way down into the
enveloping whiteness.

She kissed him, kissed his neck, his chest, and  soon  they  were
drifting  on,  turning  slowly,  in a kind of speechless T-shape,
which might have caused even a Fuolornis  Fire  Dragon,  had  one
flown  past,  replete  with  pizza, to flap its wings and cough a
little.

There were, however, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons in the clouds  nor
could  there  be  for,  like  the  dinosaurs,  the dodos, and the
Greater  Drubbered  Wintwock   of   Stegbartle   Major   in   the
constellation  Fraz,  and  unlike  the  Boeing  747  which  is in
plentiful supply, they are sadly extinct, and the Universe  shall
never know their like again.

The reason that a Boeing 747 crops up rather unexpectedly in  the
above  list  is not unconnected with the fact that something very
similar happened in the lives of Arthur and Fenchurch a moment or
two later.

They are big things, terrifyingly big. You know when  one  is  in
the  air  with you. There is a thunderous attack of air, a moving
wall of screaming wind, and you get  tossed  aside,  if  you  are
foolish enough to be doing anything remotely like what Arthur and
Fenchurch were doing in its close vicinity, like  butterflies  in
the Blitz.

This time, however, there was a heart-sickening fall or  loss  of
nerve,  a  re-grouping  moments  later  and  a wonderful new idea
enthusiastically signalled through the buffeting noise.

Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts  was  an  elderly  lady,
indeed,  she  felt  her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a
lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy  to
feel  at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very
pleasant, but perhaps a  little  too  explicable,  a  little  too
routine.

With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter  and
looked out over the wing.

At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess,  but  then
she  thought  no,  damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and
her alone.

By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back  off
the  wing  and  tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an
awful lot.
She  was  mostly  immensely  relieved  to  think  that  virtually
everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.


The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the
alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.

The following night they did it all over again,  only  this  time
with Sony Walkmen.




"This is all very wonderful," said Fenchurch a  few  days  later.
"But  I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there's
this difference between us. That you lost something and found  it
again,  and  I  found  something  and  lost it. I need to find it
again."

She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for  a  day
of telephoning.

Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one  of  the  papers  with
small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say
that he was none the worse for it, but sadly, this  was  not  the
case.  He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so
Arthur phoned him anyway.

"Arthur  my  old  soup  spoon,  my  old   silver   turreen,   how
particularly  stunning  to  hear  from you. Someone told me you'd
gone off into space or something."

Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he
had  invented  for his own use, and which no one else was able to
speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at  all.
The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried
that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalance of
nonsense.  The  time  when you did find out, later, which bits he
did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.

"What?" said Arthur.

"Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green  baize  card
table,  just  a  rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may
need a quote from you."

"Nothing to say, just pub talk."

"We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on  it.  Plus
it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the
other stories of the week, so  it  could  be  just  to  have  you
denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear."

There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost  Henson
came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.

"Just remembered," he said, "what  an  odd  evening  I  had  last
night.  Anyway  my  old,  I won't say what, how do you feel about
having ridden on Halley's Comet?"
"I haven't," said Arthur  with  a  suppressed  sigh,  "ridden  on
Halley's Comet."

"OK, How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley's Comet?"

"Pretty relaxed, Murray."

There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.

"Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the
chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of
the Weirdos, we're thinking of calling it. Good, eh?"

"Very good."

"Got a ring to it. First we have this man it always rains on."

"What?"

"It's the absolute stocking top  truth.  All  documented  in  his
little  black  book,  it all checks out at every single funloving
level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana  whips,  and
funny  little  men in white coats are flying in from all over the
world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man
is  the  bee's  knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I
would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous  zones  of
every major flying insect of the Western world. We're calling him
the Rain God. Nice, eh?"

"I think I've met him."

"Good ring to it. What did you say?"

"I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?"

"Incredible! You met the Rain God?"

"If it's the same guy. I told him to stop  complaining  and  show
someone his book."

There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson's end of the
phone.

"Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has  absolutely  been
done  by  you.  Listen,  do  you know how much a tour operator is
paying that guy not to go to Malaga  this  year?  I  mean  forget
irrigating  the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a
whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding  places  for  money.
The  man's  turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to
make him win the bingo.

"Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man  Who
Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?"

"A nice one, but ..."

"We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that'll
be OK. Where are you?"
"Er, I'm in Islington. Listen, Murray ..."

"Islington!"

"Yes ..."

"Well, what about the  real  weirdness  of  the  week,  the  real
seriously  loopy  stuff.  You  know  anything  about these flying
people?"

"No."

"You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy  one.  This  is
the  real  meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the
time to say there's this couple who go flying nights.  We've  got
guys  down  in  our  photo  labs working through the night to put
together a genuine photograph. You must have heard."

"No."

"Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote.
But  that  was  months  ago.  Listen, it's night after night this
week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple  just
fly  around  the  sky  and  start doing all kinds of stuff. And I
don't mean looking through walls or pretending to be  box  girder
bridges. You don't know anything?"

"No."

"Arthur, it's been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with
you, chumbum, but I have to go. I'll send the guy with the camera
and the hose. Give me the address, I'm ready and writing."

"Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something."

"I have a lot to do."

"I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins."

"No story. Last year's news. Forget 'em. They're gone."

"It's important."

"Listen, no one will touch it. You can't  sustain  a  story,  you
know,  when  the  only news is the continuing absence of whatever
the story's about. Not our territory  anyway,  try  the  Sundays.
Maybe  they'll  run  a  little  `Whatever  Happened  to "Whatever
Happened to the Dolphins"' story in a  couple  of  years,  around
August.  But  what's  anybody  going  to  do now? `Dolphins still
gone'? `Continuing Dolphin Absence'?  `Dolphins  -  Further  Days
Without Them'? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its
little feet in the air and presently goes  to  the  great  golden
spike in the sky, my old fruitbat."

"Murray, I'm not interested in whether it's a story. I just  want
to  find  out  how I can get in touch with that guy in California
who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know."




"People are beginning to  talk,"  said  Fenchurch  that  evening,
after they had hauled her 'cello in.

"Not only talk," said Arthur, "but print,  in  big  bold  letters
under  the  bingo  prizes.  Which is why I thought I'd better get
these."

He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.

"Arthur!" she said, hugging him. "Does that mean you  managed  to
talk to him?"

"I  have  had  a  day,"  said  Arthur,  "of  extreme   telephonic
exhaustion.  I  have  spoken  to  virtually  every  department of
virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked  his
number down."

"You've obviously been working hard, you're drenched  with  sweat
poor darling."

"Not with sweat," said Arthur  wearily.  "A  photographer's  just
been. I tried to argue, but - never mind, the point is, yes."

"You spoke to him."

"I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to  come  to  the
phone right now and could I call back."

He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something  and  went
to the fridge to find it.

"Want a drink?"

"Would commit murder to get one. I always know I'm in for a tough
time  when  my  'cello teacher looks me up and down and says, `Ah
yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.'."

"I called again," said Arthur, "and she  said  that  he  was  3.2
light years from the phone and I should call back."

"Ah."

"I called again. "She said the situation had improved. He was now
a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way
to shout."

"You don't suppose," said Fenchurch,  doubtfully,  "that  there's
anyone else we can talk to?"

"It gets worse," said Arthur, "I spoke to someone  on  a  science
magazine  who  actually  knows  him, and he said that John Watson
will not only believe, but will  actually  have  absolute  proof,
often  dictated  to  him  by  angels with golden beards and green
wings  and  Doctor  Scholl  footwear,  that  the   month's   most
fashionable  silly  theory  is  true. For people who question the
validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the  clogs
in question, and that's as far as you get."

"I didn't realize it was that bad," said Fenchurch  quietly.  She
fiddled listlessly with the tickets.

"I phoned Mrs Watson again," said Arthur. "Her name, by the  way,
and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill."

"I see."

"I'm glad you see. I thought you mightn't believe any of this, so
when  I  called  her  this  time  I  used the telephone answering
machine to record the call."

He went across to the telephone machine  and  fiddled  and  fumed
with  all  its  buttons for a while, because it was the one which
was particularly recommended by Which?  magazine  and  is  almost
impossible to use without going mad.

"Here it is," he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.

The  voice  was  thin  and  crackly  with  its   journey   to   a
geostationary  satellite  and  back,  but  it was also hauntingly
calm.

"Perhaps I should explain,"  Arcane  Jill  Watson's  voice  said,
"that  the  phone  is in fact in a room that he never comes into.
It's in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter
the  Asylum  and  so  he  does  not.  I feel you should know this
because it may save you phoning. If you would like to  meet  him,
this  is  very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He
will only meet people outside the Asylum."

Arthur's voice, at  its  most  mystified:  "I'm  sorry,  I  don't
understand. Where is the asylum?"

"Where is the Asylum?" Arcane Jill Watson again. "Have  you  ever
read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?"

On the tape, Arthur's voice had to admit that he had not.

"You may want to do that. You may find that it  clarifies  things
for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the
Asylum is. Thank you."

The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the  machine
off.

"Well, I suppose we can regard that as an  invitation,"  he  said
with a shrug. "I actually managed to get the address from the guy
on the science magazine."

Fenchurch looked up at him again with  a  thoughtful  frown,  and
looked at the tickets again.

"Do you think it's worth it?" she said.

"Well," said Arthur, "the one thing  that  everyone  I  spoke  to
agrees  on,  apart  from  the  fact  that they all thought he was
barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living  about
dolphins."




"This is an important announcement. This is  flight  121  to  Los
Angeles.  If  your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles,
now would be the perfect time to disembark."




They rented a car in Los Angeles from  one  of  the  places  that
rents out cars that other people have thrown away.

"Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem," said  the
guy  behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, "sometimes
it's simpler just to get out and find a car that's going in  that
direction."

They stayed for one night in a hotel on  Sunset  Boulevard  which
someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.

"Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They've  got  a
swimming  pool  where  you  can  go  and watch English rock stars
reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers."

It was true. There was one and  that  was  exactly  what  he  was
doing.

The garage attendant didn't think much of their car, but that was
fine because they didn't either.

Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills  along
Mulholland  Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling
sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later  stopped  to
look  across  the  dazzling sea of floating light that is the San
Fernando Valley. They agreed that the  sense  of  dazzle  stopped
immediately  at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other
part  of  them  and  came  away  strangely  unsatisfied  by   the
spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light
is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through  what
this  particularly  dramatic  sea  of light was illuminating they
didn't think much of it.

They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was
stupidly hot.

They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their  first
look  at  the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent
all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.

"Someone told me," said Fenchurch, "that they once overheard  two
old  ladies on this beach, doing what we're doing, looking at the
Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And  apparently,
after  a  long  pause,  one of them said to the other, `You know,
it's not as big as I expected.'"
Their mood lifted further as the  sun  began  to  move  down  the
western  half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their
rattling car and driving towards a sunset  that  no  one  of  any
sensibility  would  dream  of building a city like Los Angeles on
front  of,  they  were   suddenly   feeling   astonishingly   and
irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car
radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously.  So
what, they were both playing good rock and roll.

"I know he will be able to help us," said Fenchurch determinedly.
"I  know  he  will.  What's  his  name again, that he likes to be
called?"

"Wonko the Sane."

"I know that he will be able to help us."

Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he  would,  and  hoped
that  what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth,
whatever this Earth might prove to be.

He hoped, as he had hoped continually  and  fervently  since  the
time  they  had  talked  together on the banks of the Serpentine,
that he would not be called upon to  try  to  remember  something
that  he  had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest
recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to  nag  at
him.


In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed
to be a converted warehouse.

Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.

Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry.

He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.

"Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily.

"Please  excuse  my  friend,"  said  Fenchurch  to  the  startled
waitress. "I think he's having a nice day at last."




If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of  the  David
Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another
David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the  upper  of  the
first  two  David  Bowies  and wrapped the whole business up in a
dirty beach robe you  would  then  have  something  which  didn't
exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would
find hauntingly familiar.

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not  so  much
with  any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep
dejection, it was a little difficult to tell  exactly  where  the
deckchair  ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your
hand on, say, his forearm in case the  whole  structure  suddenly
collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite  remarkable.  It
seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to
you,  but  which,  when  he  briefly  reassembled  them  in  that
particular  order  on  his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well
that's all right then."

When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you
feel like that pretty often.

"Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They  sit  right  here.
They sit right where you're sitting."

He was talking of the angels with the  golden  beards  and  green
wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

"They eat nachos which they say they can't get  where  they  come
from.  They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole
range of things."

"Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er ... when is this  then?
When do they come?"

He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers
running  along  the margin of the shore which seemed to have this
problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a  wave
had  just  washed  over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet
wet. To deal with this problem they  ran  with  an  odd  kind  of
movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in
Switzerland.

Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing  patterns  in  it
with her fingers.

"Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the  Sane,  "on  little  scooters.
They are great machines." He smiled.

"I see," said Arthur. "I see."

A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked
round  at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in
the sand of the two of them  in  the  clouds.  For  a  moment  he
thought  she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that
she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say  he's
mad?"

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this  was  the  first
thing  that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to
know what it was like.

What it was like was this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park  on  the
carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which  was
decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves,
also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular
tops  which  stand  in such a way as to suggest that someone just
dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures  which  were
clearly designed to soothe.

Where it got really odd was the roof.

It folded back on itself like something that Maurits  C.  Escher,
had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of
this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case,  though  it  is
sometimes  hard,  looking  at  his pictures, particularly the one
with the awkward steps, not to  wonder,  might  have  dreamed  up
after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should
have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

Confusing.

The sign above the front  door  said,  "Come  Outside",  and  so,
nervously, they had.

Inside, of course, was where the Outside  was.  Rough  brickwork,
nicely  done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a
couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and  opened
at  the  end  as  if, by an optical illusion which would have had
Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering  how  it  was  done,  to
enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.

"Hello," said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.

Good, they thought to themselves, "Hello"  is  something  we  can
cope with.

"Hello," they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.

For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the
dolphins,  looking  oddly  distracted  and saying, "I forget ..."
whenever they were mentioned, and had shown  them  quite  proudly
round the eccentricities of his house.

"It gives me pleasure," he said, "in a curious kind of  way,  and
does  nobody  any harm," he continued, "that a competent optician
couldn't correct."

They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed  able
to mock himself before anybody else did.

"Your  wife,"  said  Arthur,  looking  around,  "mentioned   some
toothpicks."  He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried
that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention
them again.

Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy  laugh,  and  sounded
like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.
"Ah yes," he said, "that's to so with the day I finally  realized
that  the  world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put
it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous
again.

"Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we  are  outside  the  Asylum."  He
pointed  again  at  the  rough  brickwork,  the  pointing and the
guttering. "Go through that door," he pointed at the  first  door
through  which  they had originally entered, "and you go into the
Asylum. I've tried to decorate it  nicely  to  keep  the  inmates
happy,  but  there's  very little one can do. I never go in there
now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I
simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away."

"That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at  a  blue
plaque with some instructions written on it.

"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I
have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what
I had to do."

The sign said:

Hold stick near centre of its  length.  Moisten  pointed  end  in
mouth.  insert  in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle
in-out motion.

"It seemed to me," said Wonko the sane,  "that  any  civilization
that  had  so  far  lost  its head as to need to include a set of
detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks,  was  no
longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it  to  rave  and
gibber  at  him,  but  it  lay  there  calmly and played with the
sandpipers.

"And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how  it
possibly  might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself
Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point.  Wonko  is
what  my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked
things over, and sane is what I am, and how," he added, with  one
of  his  smiles  that  made  you feel, "Oh. Well that's all right
then." "I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach  and  see
what we have to talk about?"

They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking
about  angels  with  golden  beards and green wings and Dr Scholl
sandals.

"About the dolphins ..." said Fenchurch gently, hopefully.

"I can show you the sandals," said Wonko the Sane.

"I wonder, do you know ..."

"Would you like me to  show  you,"  said  Wonko  the  Sane,  "the
sandals?  I  have  them.  I'll  get them. They are made by the Dr
Scholl company, and the angels say that  they  particularly  suit
the  terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession
stand by the message. When I say I don't  know  what  that  means
they say no, you don't, and laugh. Well, I'll get them anyway."

As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on
how  you  looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other
in a wondering and slightly desperate  sort  of  way,  then  each
shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand.

"How are the feet today?" said Arthur quietly.

"OK. It doesn't feel so odd in the sand. Or  in  the  water.  The
water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn't our world."

She shrugged.

"What do you think he meant," she said, "by the message?"

"I don't know," said Arthur, though the memory of  a  man  called
Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.

When Wonko  returned  he  was  carrying  something  that  stunned
Arthur.  Not  the  sandals,  they were perfectly ordinary wooden-
bottomed sandals.

"I just thought you'd like to see," he said, "what angels wear on
their  feet.  Just  out  of  curiousity.  I'm not trying to prove
anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes
proof.  But  the  reason I call myself by my childhood name is to
remind myself that a scientist must also  be  absolutely  like  a
child.  If  he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether
it was what he thought he was going to see  or  not.  See  first,
think  later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will
only see what you were expecting. Most  scientists  forget  that.
I'll  show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other
reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will  think
I  am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You
can't possibly be a scientist if you mind  people  thinking  that
you're  a  fool.  Anyway,  I  also  thought you might like to see
this."

This was the thing that  Arthur  had  been  stunned  to  see  him
carrying,  for  it  was  a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl,
seemingly identical to the one in Arthur's bedroom.

Arthur had been trying  for  some  thirty  seconds  now,  without
success,  to  say,  "Where did you get that?" sharply, and with a
gasp in his voice.

Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond.

"Where did you get that?" said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp
in her voice.

Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his  voice
said, "What? Have you seen one of these before?"

"Yes," she said, "I've got one. Or at least I did  have.  Russell
nicked  it  to  put  his golfballs in. I don't know where it came
from, just that I was angry with Russell  for  nicking  it.  Why,
have you got one?"

"Yes, it was ..."

They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was  glancing  sharply
backwards  and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in
edgeways.

"You have one of those too?" he said to both of them.

"Yes." They both said it.

He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he  held  up  the
bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.

The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to  chime  with  the
intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around
the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it.  They  could
see  quite  clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words
"So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish."

"Do you know," asked Wonko quietly, "what it is?"

They each shook their  heads  slowly,  and  with  wonder,  almost
hypnotized  by  the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey
glass.

"It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko  in  a  low
quiet  voice,  "the  dolphins  whom I loved and studied, and swam
with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their  language,
a   task   which   they  seemed  to  make  impossibly  difficult,
considering the fact that  I  now  realize  they  were  perfectly
capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to."

He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked  again
at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.

"Have you ..." he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours?
May I ask you that?"

"Er, I keep a fish in it," said Arthur, slightly embarrassed.  "I
happened  to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and,
er, there was this bowl." He tailed off.

"You've done nothing else? No," he said, "if you had,  you  would
know." He shook his head again.

"My wife kept wheatgerm in ours," resumed Wonko,  with  some  new
tone in his voice, "until last night ..."

"What," said Arthur slowly and hushedly, "happened last night?"

"We ran out of wheatgerm," said  Wonko,  evenly.  "My  wife,"  he
added,  "has  gone to get some more." He seemed lost with his own
thoughts for a moment.

"And what happened then?" said Fenchurch, in the same  breathless
tone.

"I washed it," said Wonko. "I washed it very carefully, very very
carefully,  removing  every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried
it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully,  turning  it
over  and  over.  Then I held it to my ear. Have you ... have you
held one to your ear?"

They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.

"Perhaps," he said, "you should."




The deep roar of the ocean.

The break of waves on further shores than thought can find.

The silent thunders of the deep.

And from among it, voices calling, and yet  not  voices,  humming
trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought.

Greetings,  waves  of  greetings,  sliding  back  down  into  the
inarticulate, words breaking together.

A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.

Waves  of  joy  on  -  where?  A   world   indescribably   found,
indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.

A fugue of voices now, clamouring  explanations,  of  a  disaster
unavertable,  a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a
spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.

And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in  the
implications  of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of
parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of
it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins
gone.

Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.

"This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans.
We bid you farewell."

And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies  rolling
away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.




That night they stayed Outside the Asylum  and  watched  TV  from
inside it.

"This is what I wanted you to see," said Wonko the Sane when  the
news  came  around again, "an old colleague of mine. He's over in
your country running an investigation. Just watch."
It was a press conference.

"I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this  present
time,  and  we  are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-
Causal Meteorological Phenomenon."

"Can you tell us what that means?"

"I'm not altogether sure. Let's be  straight  here.  If  we  find
something  we  can't  understand we like to call it something you
can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let  you
go  around  calling  him  a Rain God, then that suggests that you
know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that.

"No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not
yours,  then  we  set  about finding some way of proving it's not
what you said it is, but something we say it is.

"And if it turns out that you're right, you'll  still  be  wrong,
because  we will simply call him a ... er `Supernormal ...' - not
paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what  those
mean  now, no, a `Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer'.
We'll probably want to shove a  `Quasi'  in  there  somewhere  to
protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my
life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me  going  on  holiday  with
him.  Thanks,  that'll be all for now, other than to say `Hi!' to
Wonko if he's watching."




On the way home there was a woman sitting next  to  them  on  the
plane who was looking at them rather oddly.

They talked quietly to themselves.

"I still have to know," said Fenchurch, "and I strongly feel that
you know something that you're not telling me."

Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.

"Do you have a pencil?" he said. She dug around and found one.

"What are you doing, sweetheart?" she said, after  he  had  spent
twenty  minutes  frowning,  chewing the pencil, scribbling on the
paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the  pencil
again and grunting irritably to himself.

"Trying to remember an address someone once gave me."

"Your life would be an awful lot  simpler,"  she  said,  "if  you
bought yourself an address book."

Finally he passed the paper to her.

"You look after it," he said.

She looked at it. Among all the  scratchings  and  crossings  out
were  the  words  "Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains.  Sevorbeupstry.
Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector  QQ7  Active  J
Gamma."

"And what's there?"

"Apparently," said Arthur,  "it's  God's  Final  Message  to  His
Creation."

"That sounds a bit more like it," said Fenchurch. "How do we  get
there?"

"You really ...?"

"Yes," said Fenchurch firmly, "I really want to know."

Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex  window  at  the
open sky outside.

"Excuse me," said the woman who had been looking at  them  rather
oddly, suddenly, "I hope you don't think I'm rude. I get so bored
on these long flights, it's nice to talk to somebody.  My  name's
Enid Kapelsen, I'm from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?"




They went to Arthur's house in the West Country, shoved a  couple
of  towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every
Galactic hitch hiker ends up spending most of his time doing.

They waited for a flying saucer to come by.

"Friend of mine did this for  fifteen  years,"  said  Arthur  one
night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.

"Who was that?"

"Called Ford Prefect."

He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to
do again.

He wondered where Ford Prefect was.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the following day there were two
reports  in  the  paper,  one  concerning  the  most  astonishing
incidents with a flying saucer, and the other about a  series  of
unseemly riots in pubs.

Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung  over  and
complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.

In fact he looked extremely ill,  not  merely  as  if  he'd  been
pulled  through  a hedge backwards, but as if the hedge was being
simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine  harvester.  He
staggered  into Arthur's sitting room, waving aside all offers of
support, which was an error, because the  effort  caused  him  to
lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually to drag him
to the sofa.

"Thank you," said Ford, "thank you very much. Have  you  ..."  he
said, and fell asleep for three hours.

"... the faintest idea" he continued suddenly, when  he  revived,
"how  hard  it  is  to tap into the British phone system from the
Pleiades? I can see that you haven't, so I'll tell you," he said,
"over  the  very  large mug of black coffee that you are about to
make me."

He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.

"Stupid operators keep asking you where you're calling  from  and
you  try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn't be if
you're coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?"

"Making you some black coffee."

"Oh." Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about  the  place
forlornly.

"What's this?" he said.

"Rice Crispies."

"And this?"

"Paprika."

"I see," said Ford, solemnly, and put the two  items  back  down,
one  on  top  of  the  other,  but  that  didn't  seem to balance
properly, so he put the other on top of the one and  that  seemed
to work.

"A little space-lagged," he said. "What was I saying?"

"About not phoning from Letchworth."

"I wasn't. I explained this to the lady. `Bugger  Letchworth,'  I
said, `if that's your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales
scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the
sub-light-speed  leg of a journey between the stars known on your
world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.' - I said  `dear
lady',"  explained Ford Prefect, "because I didn't want her to be
offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin ..."

"Tactful," said Arthur Dent.

"Exactly," said Ford, "tactful."

He frowned.

"Space-lag," he said, "is very bad for sub-clauses.  You'll  have
to  assist  me  again," he continued, "by reminding me what I was
talking about."

"`Between the stars,'" said Arthur, "`known on your world, though
not necessarily to you, dear lady, as ...'"
"`Pleiades  Epsilon   and   Pleiades   Zeta,'"   concluded   Ford
triumphantly. "This conversation lark is quite gas isn't it?"

"Have some coffee."

"Thank you, no. `And the reason,' I said, `why I am bothering you
with  it  rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we
have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications  equipment  out
here  in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching
son of a starbeast piloting this son  of  a  starbeast  spaceship
insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?'"

"And could she?"

"I don't know. She had hung up," said Ford, "by  this  time.  So!
What do you suppose," he asked fiercely, "I did next?"

"I've no idea, Ford," said Arthur.

"Pity," said Ford, "I was hoping you could remind  me.  I  really
hate  those  guys  you  know.  They  really are the creeps of the
cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite  with  their  junky
little  machines  that  never  work  properly  or,  when they do,
perform functions that no sane man would require of them and," he
added savagely, "go beep to tell you when they've done it!"

This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely  held
by  right  thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being
right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a  moment  of  reasoned
lucidity  which  is almost unique among its current tally of five
million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and
nine  pages,  says  of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product
that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential  uselessness
of  them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to
work at all.

"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle  on  which
the  whole  of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded -
their fundamental design flaws are  completely  hidden  by  their
superficial design flaws."

"And this guy," ranted Ford, "was on a  drive  to  sell  more  of
them!  His  five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new
worlds, and sell  Advanced  Music  Substitute  Systems  to  their
restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars!  Or if they didn't have
restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars  yet,  to   artificially
accelerate  their  civilization growth until they bloody well did
have! Where's that coffee!"

"I threw it away."

"Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next.  I  saved
civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that."

He stumbled determinedly back into the  sitting  room,  where  he
seemed  to  carry  on  talking  to  himself,  tripping  over  the
furniture and making beep beep noises.

A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid  face,  Arthur
followed him.

Ford looked stunned.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"Making some coffee," said Arthur, still wearing his very  placid
face.  He  had  long  ago  realized that the only way of being in
Ford's company successfully was to keep a  large  stock  of  very
placid faces and wear them at all times.

"You missed the best bit!" raged Ford. "You missed the bit  where
I  jumped  the guy! Now," he said, "I shall have to jump him, all
over him!"

He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.

"It was better," he said sullenly, "last time," and waved vaguely
in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got
trussed up on the dining table.

"I see," said Arthur, casting a placid eye over  the  trussed  up
wreckage, "and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?"

"What?" screamed Ford. "What? You missed that bit too? That's the
suspended  animation  facility!  I  put  the guy in the suspended
animation facility. Well I had to didn't I?"

"So it would seem," said Arthur, in his placid voice.

"Don't touch that!!!" yelled Ford.

Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which  was  for  some
mysterious  reason  lying  on  the  table,  off the hook, paused,
placidly.

"OK," said Ford, calming down, "listen to it."

Arthur put the phone to his ear.

"It's the speaking clock," he said.

"Beep, beep, beep," said Ford, "is exactly what  is  being  heard
all  over  that  guy's  ship,  while he sleeps, in the ice, going
slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras  Magna.  The  London
Speaking Clock!"

"I see," said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time  to
ask the big one.

"Why?" he said, placidly.

"With a bit of luck," said Ford, "the phone  bill  will  bankrupt
the buggers."

He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa.
"Anyway," he said, "dramatic arrival don't you think?"




The flying saucer in which  Ford  Prefect  had  stowed  away  had
stunned the world.

Finally there  was  no  doubt,  no  possibility  of  mistake,  no
hallucinations,  no  mysterious  CIA  agents  found  floating  in
reservoirs.

This time it was real, it was definite. It was  quite  definitely
definite.

It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything  beneath
it  and  crushed  a large area of some of the most expensive real
estate in the world, including much of Harrods.

The thing was massive, nearly a  mile  across,  some  said,  dull
silver  in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars
of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces  by
the light of suns unknown to man.

A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods  Food  Halls,
demolished  Harvey  Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of
tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.

After a long,  heart-stopping  moment  of  internal  crashes  and
grumbles  of  rending  machinery, there marched from it, down the
ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.

It held up a hand.

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further
grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as  he  sat
with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the
television, none of which had  anything  to  say  other  than  to
record  that  the  thing had done this amount of damage which was
valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had  killed  this
totally  other  number  of people, and then say it again, because
the robot was doing nothing more  than  standing  there,  swaying
very   slightly,   and   emitting  short  incomprehensible  error
messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see ..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational  and
coherent  than  he had been, having finally had the coffee forced
down  him,  "nothing  so  simple.  Nothing   anything   like   so
straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders
are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards role the
people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse,
"why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all  got
the  vote,  so  they  all  pretty much assume that the government
they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they
want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong
lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of  urgency  creeping
into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.