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.
Chapter 21
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.
Chapter 22
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 fourfour, 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.
ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything Page 13