The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time dg-3

by Douglas Adams

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had indigestion. I’m always bad tempered when I’ve got indigestion.”

  “And just because of that you—”

  “It was more than that. I’d lost the piece of paper, too.”

  “What piece of paper?”

  “That I wrote down her appointment on. Turned up under a pile of bank statements.”

  “Which you never open or look at.”

  Dirk frowned and opened his notebook again.

  “‘Never ... open ... bank ... statements,’” he wrote thoughtfully. “So, when she arrived,” he continued after he put the book back in his pocket, “I wasn’t expecting her, so I wasn’t in command of the situation. Which meant that ...”

  he fished out his notebook and wrote in it again.

  “Now what are you putting?” asked Kate.

  “Control freak,” said Dirk. “My first instinct was to make her sit down, then pretend to get on with something while I composed myself.”

  “So?”

  “I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair—God knows where it had gone—which meant that she had to stand over me, which I also hate. That’s when I turned really ratty.” He peered at his notebook again and flipped through it. “Strange convergence and tiny little events, don’t you think?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, here was a case of the most extraordinary kind. A beautiful, intelligent, and obviously well-off woman arrives and offers to pay me to investigate a phenomenon that challenges the very foundation of everything that we know of physics and biology, and I ... turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”

  “Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”

  “Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?”

  “No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper all the time. I can see you’re probably in the mood to construct some massive space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”

  “You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”

  “Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”

  “I don’t wear contact lenses.”

  “Maybe it’s time you did.”

  Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that it was working. Kate ... ?”

  “Yes, Dirk?”

  “You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”

  “That’s what friends are for.”

  “Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I ask is that when I phoned myself up ...”

  “Yes?”

  “I answered.”

  “Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”

  “I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.

  “In which case you need something to do.”

  “Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”

  Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.”

  “Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again. “Now that is an interesting one.”

  Chapter 4

  “Josh,” said a voice in a kind-of Swedish-Irish accent.

  Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small freezer cabinet, which mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.

  “Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.

  “Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.

  “Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely not.

  More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what was going to happen. Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA scientists said that it would burn up in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do whatever the Americans said it would do.

  “Julio,” said the voice. No response.

  Dirk missed the next thing the radio said because of the noise of his front wall flapping. His front wall was made of large, thick sheets of polythene these days, because of an incident a few weeks earlier when, in a radical departure from the sort of behaviour that Dirk’s neighbours liked to see, a Tornado jet fighter had exploded out of the front of Dirk’s house and then plunged screaming into Finsbury.

  There was, of course, a perfectly logical explanation for this, and Dirk was tired of giving it. The reason that Dirk had had a Tornado jet fighter in his hallway was that he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. Of course he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. As far as he was concerned, it was merely a large and bad-tempered eagle that he had trapped in his hallway the same way anybody would to stop it dive-bombing him the whole time. That a large Tornado jet fighter had, for a brief while, taken on the shape of an eagle was on account of an unfortunate airborne encounter with the Thunder God, Thor, of legend, and ...

  This was the part of the story where Dirk usually had to struggle a little to sustain his audience’s patient attention, which he would, if successful, further strain by explaining that the Thunder God, Thor, had then thought better of his fit of temper and decided to put things right by returning the Tornado to its proper shape. Unfortunately, Thor, being a god, had had his mind on higher or at least other things, and hadn’t called up, as any mere mortal might have done, to check if this was a convenient moment. He had just decreed it done and it was done, bang.

  Devastation.

  And also the insurance problem from hell. The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway. And so on.

  Meanwhile, Dirk’s house—not an especially grand place to start with—was propped up with scaffolding and tented with polythene, and Dirk had no idea when he was going to be able to get it repaired. If the insurance company failed to pay up—which seemed increasingly likely in light of the strategy that insurance companies had adopted in recent years, of merely advertising their services rather than actually providing them—Dirk was going to have to ... well, he didn’t quite know what. He had no money. None of his own, at least. He had some of the bank’s money, but how much he had no idea.

  “Justin,” intoned the little voice. There was no answering response.

  Dirk tipped his unopened bank statements on to the kitchen table, and stared at them with
loathing. It seemed to him for a moment that the envelopes were vibrating slightly, and even that the whole of space and time was beginning to revolve slowly around them and get sucked into their event horizon, but he was probably imagining it.

  “Karl.” Nothing. “Karel. Keir.” Nothing. Nothing.

  Dirk made some coffee, taking the long route round his kitchen, in order to avoid coming too close to his bank statements, now that he had put them down. Viewed in a certain light, the entire structure of his adult life could be seen as a means of avoiding opening his bank statements. Someone else’s bank statements—now that was a different matter. He was rarely happier than when poring over someone else’s bank statements: he always found them to be rich in colour and narrative drive, particularly if he’d had to steam them open. But the prospect of opening his own gave him the screaming heebie-jeebies.

  “Keith,” said the voice, hopefully, nasally. Nothing.

  “Kelvin.” No.

  Dirk poured his coffee as slowly as he could, for he realised that the time had finally come. He had to open the statements and learn the worst. He selected the largest knife he could find and advanced on them, threateningly.

  “Kendall.” Silence.

  In the end he did it almost nonchalantly, with a sadistic little flick-slit movement. He quite enjoyed it, in fact, and even felt fashionably vicious. In a few seconds the four envelopes—his financial history of the last four months—were open. Dirk laid their contents out before him.

  “Kendrick.” Nothing.

  “Kennedy.” The tinny little voice was beginning to get on Dirk’s nerves. He glanced at the corner of the room. Two mournful eyes looked at him in silent bewilderment.

  As Dirk at last looked at the figures at the bottom of the last sheet of paper, a kind of swimmy feeling assailed him. He gasped sharply. The table began to bend and sway. He felt as if the hands of fate had started kneading his shoulders. He had imagined it was bad, in fact for the last few weeks he had imagined little else other than how bad it might be, but even in his worst imaginings he had no idea it might be this bad.

  Clammy things happened in his throat. He could not possibly, possibly be over £22,000 overdrawn. He pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, and for a few moments just sat there, throbbing. £22,000 ...

  The word “Kenneth” floated mockingly through the room.

  As he rapidly cast his mind back over what he could remember of his expenditures over the last few weeks—an ill-considered shirt here, a reckless bun there, a wild weekend in the Isle of Wight—he realised that he must be right. He could not possibly be £22,000 overdrawn.

  He took a deep breath and looked at the figures once more.

  There it was again. £22,347.43.

  There must be some mistake. Some terrible, terrible mistake. The chances were, of course, that he had made it, and as he stared, trembling, at the paper he realised, quite suddenly, that he had.

  He had been looking for a negative number and had therefore assumed that that was what he was looking at. In fact his account stood at £22,347.43. In credit.

  Credit ...

  He’d never known such a thing. Didn’t even know what it looked like. Hadn’t recognised it. Slowly, carefully, almost as if the figures might fall off the page and get lost on the floor, he sifted through the sheets one by one to try to find out where on earth all this money had come from. “Kenny,” “Kentigern,” and “Kermit” slipped by unheard.

  It was immediately clear that it was regular amounts that had been coming in, once a week. There had been seven of them—so far. The most recent one had come in the Friday before last, which was as far as these statements went. The odd thing was that though the amounts were regular, they were untidy amounts, similar each week, but not exactly the same. The previous Friday’s payment was £3,267.34. The previous Thursday’s (they had each come in at the end of the week, three of them on a Thursday, four on a Friday) was for £3,232.57. The week before it had been £3,319.14. And so on.

  Dirk stood up and took a deep breath. What the hell was going on? He felt that his whole world was spinning very slowly in what was, as far as he could judge, an anticlockwise direction. That prompted a vague recollection that the last time he had drunk any tequila, it had made his world spin slowly in a clockwise direction. That was obviously what he needed if he was going to be able to think about this clearly. He rummaged hurriedly through a cupboard full of dusty nine-tenths empty bottles of half-forgotten rums and whiskies and found some. A half-full bottle of mezcal. He poured himself a finger in the bottom of a teacup and hurriedly returned to his statements, suddenly panicking in case the figures vanished while he wasn’t looking.

  They were still there. Irregularly large sums regularly paid in. His head began to swim again. What were they? Interest payments that had been accidentally credited to the wrong account? If they were interest payments, that would account for the fluctuations in the amounts. But it still didn’t make sense for the simple reason that over £3,000 interest a week represented the interest on two or three million pounds and was not the sort of thing that the owner of such an amount of money was going to allow to be misplaced, let alone for seven weeks in a row. He took a pull on the mezcal. It marched around his mouth waving its fists, waited a moment or two, and then started to beat up his brain.

  He wasn’t thinking rationally about this, he realised. The problem was that they were his own accounts, and he was used to reading other people’s. Since they were his own, it was in fact possible for him just to phone up the bank and ask. Except that, of course, they’d be closed now. And he had a horrible feeling that if he phoned them up, the response would be “Whoops, sorry, wrong account. Thank you for bringing this error to our attention. How stupid of us to imagine that this money could possibly belong to you.” Obviously he had to try to work out where it was from before he asked the bank. In fact he had to get the money out of the bank before he asked them. He probably had to get to Fiji or somewhere before he asked them. Except—suppose the money continued to come in?

  On reapplying his attention to the papers, he realised something else that would have occurred to him straightaway if he hadn’t been so flustered. There was, of course, a code next to each entry. The purpose of the code was to tell him what kind of entry it was. He looked the code up. Easy. Each payment had reached his account by international transfer.

  Hmmm.

  That would also account for the fluctuations. International exchange rates. If the same amount of a foreign currency was being transferred each week, then the variations in the rate would ensure that a slightly differing amount actually arrived on each occasion. It would also explain why it didn’t arrive on exactly the same day each week. Although it only took less than a second to make a computerised international transfer of money, the banks liked to make as much fuss as they possibly could about it so that the funds would swill around profitably in their system for a while.

  But which country were the payments coming from? And why?

  “Kevin,” said the Irish-Swedish voice. “Kieran.”

  “Oh, shut up!” shouted Dirk suddenly.

  That provoked a response. The small border terrier lying, perplexed, in a basket in the corner of the room looked up excitedly and yipped with pleasure. It had not reacted at all to any of the names that the elderly computer on the table next to it had been reciting from a text file of babies’ names, but the creature obviously just enjoyed being told to shut up and was keen for more.

  “Kimberly,” said the computer. Nothing. The dog with no name looked disappointed.

  “Kirby.”

  “Kirk.” The dog slowly settled back down into its basket of old newspapers and resumed its previous posture of baffled distress.

  Old newspapers. That was what Dirk needed.

  A couple of hours later he had the answer, or at least some kind of an answer. Nothing that went so far as to make any kind of actual sense, but enough to make Dirk feel an encouraging surge o
f excitement: he had managed to unlock a part of the puzzle. How big a part he didn’t know. As yet he had no idea how big a puzzle he was dealing with. No idea at all.

  He had collected a representative sample of the newspapers of the last few weeks from under the dog, under the sofa, under his bed, scattered around the bathroom, and, crucially, had managed to secure two damp but vital copies of the Financial Times from an old tramp in return for a blanket, some cider, and a copy of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. An odd request, he thought, as he walked back from the tiny scrap of park, but probably no odder than his. He was constantly reminded of how startlingly different a place the world was when viewed from a point only three feet to the left.

  Using the figures from the papers, he was able to construct a map of the movements of each of the world’s major currencies over the last few weeks and see how they compared with the fluctuations in the amounts that had been paid into his account every week. The answer sprang into focus immediately. U.S. dollars. Five thousand of them, to be precise. If $5,000 had been transferred from the U.S. to the U.K. every week, then it would have arrived as more or less exactly the amounts that had been showing up in his account. Eureka. Time for a celebratory fridge raid.

  Dirk hunkered down in front of the TV with three slices of cold pizza and a can of beer, put on the radio as well, and also a ZZ Top CD. He needed to think.

  Someone was paying him $5,000 a week, and had been doing so for seven weeks. This was astounding news. He ruminated on his pizza. Not only that, but he was being paid by someone in America. He took another bite, rich in cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. He hadn’t spent much time in America and didn’t know anyone there—or indeed anywhere else on the Earth’s crust—who would be wantonly shoveling unsolicited bucks at him like this.

  Another thought struck him, but this time it wasn’t about the money. A ZZ Top song about TV dinners made him think for a moment about his pizza, and he looked at it with sudden puzzlement. Cheese, pepperoni, spicy minced beef, anchovy, and egg. No wonder he’d had indigestion today. The other three slices were what he’d had for breakfast. It was a combination to which he, probably uniquely in all the world, was addicted, and which he had some months ago forsworn because his gut couldn’t cope with it anymore. He hadn’t thought twice about it when he’d blundered across it in the fridge this morning because it was exactly the sort of thing a person liked to find in a fridge. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask who had put it there. But it hadn’t been him.