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

by Douglas Adams

  Slowly, disgustingly, he removed the half-chewed portion from his mouth. He didn’t believe in the pizza fairy.

  He disposed of the half-masticated gungey bits and then examined the two remaining slices. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about them at all. It was exactly the pizza he regularly used to eat until he made himself give it up. He phoned his local pizza restaurant and asked them if anybody else had been in to buy a pizza with that particular combination of toppings.

  “Ah, you’re the bloke who has the gastricciana, are you?” said the pizza chef.

  “The what?”

  “It’s what we call it. No, mate, nobody else has ever bought that wonderful combination, believe me.”

  Dirk felt somewhat dissatisfied with aspects of this conversation, but he let it pass. He put the phone down thoughtfully. He felt that something very strange was going on and he didn’t know what.

  “No one knows anything.”

  The words caught his attention and he glanced up at the TV. A breezy Californian in the sort of Hawaiian shirt that could serve, if needed, as a distress signal was standing in the bright sunshine and answering questions, Dirk quickly worked out, about the approaching meteor. He called the meteor Toodle Pip.

  “Toodle Pip?” asked his interviewer, the BBC’s California correspondent.

  “Yeah. We call it Toodle Pip because anything it hits, you could pretty much say good-bye to.”

  The Californian grinned.

  “So you’re saying it is going to hit?”

  “I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

  “Well, the scientists at NASA are saying ...”

  “NASA,” said the Californian genially, “is talking shit. They don’t know. If we don’t know, they sure as hell don’t know. Here at Similarity Engines we have the most massively powerful parallel computers on Earth, so when I say we don’t know, I know what I’m talking about. We know that we don’t know, and we know why we don’t know. NASA doesn’t even know that.”

  The next item on the news was also from California, and was about a lobby group called Green Shoots, which was attracting a lot of support. Its view, and it was one that spoke to the battered psyches of many Americans, was that the world was much better able to take care of itself than we were, so there was no point in getting all worked up about it or trying to moderate our natural behaviour. “Don’t worry,” said their slogan, quoting the title of a popular song. “Be happy.”

  “Great Balls of Fire,” thought Dirk to himself, quoting another.

  “Scientists in Australia,” said someone on the radio “are trying to teach kangaroos to speak.” Dirk decided that what he most needed was a good night’s sleep.

  In the morning, things suddenly seemed wonderfully clear and simple. He didn’t know the answer to anything, but he knew what to do about it. A few phone calls to the bank had established that tracing the money back to its origins was going to be hideously difficult, partly because it was an inherently complicated business anyway, partly because it quickly became clear that whoever had been paying the money to him had taken some trouble to cover his or her tracks, but mostly because the man on the foreign desk at his bank had a cleft palate.

  Life was too short, the weather too fine, and the world too full of interesting and exciting pitfalls. Dirk would go sailing.

  Life, he was fond of telling himself, was like an ocean. You can either grind your way across it like a motorboat or you can follow the winds and the currents—in other words, go sailing. He had the wind: he was being paid by someone. Presumably that someone was paying him to do something, but what he had omitted to say. Well, that was a client’s privilege. But Dirk felt that he should respond to this generous urge to pay him, that he should do something. But what? Well, he was a private detective, and what private detectives did when they were being paid was mostly to follow people.

  So that was simple. Dirk would follow someone.

  Which meant that now he had to find a good current: someone to follow. Well, there was his office window, with a whole world surging by outside it—or a few people at least. He would pick one. He began to tingle with excitement that his investigation was finally under way, or would be as soon as the next person—no, not the next person, the ... fifth next person walked around the corner that he could see on the other side of the road.

  He was immediately glad that he had decided to build in a brief period of mental preparation. Almost immediately number one, a large duvet of a woman, came around the corner with numbers two and three being dragged unwillingly along with her—her children, whom she nagged and scolded with every step. Dirk breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t going to be her.

  He stood by the side of his window, quiet with anticipation. For a few minutes no one further came round the corner. Dirk watched as the large woman bullied her two children into the newsagent opposite, despite their wails that they wanted to go home and watch TV. A minute or two later she bullied them back out into the sunshine again despite their wails that they wanted an ice cream and a Judge Dredd comic.

  She yanked them away up the road, and the scene fell quiet.

  The scene was a triangular-shaped one, because of the angle at which two roads collided with each other. Dirk had recently moved to this new office—new to him, that was; the actual building was old and dilapidated and remained standing more out of habit than from any inherent structural integrity—and much preferred it to his previous one, which was miles from anywhere. In his old one he could have waited all week for five people to walk around a corner.

  Number four appeared.

  Number four was a postman with a pushcart. A small bead of perspiration appeared on Dirk’s forehead as he began to realise how badly wrong his plan could go.

  And here was number five.

  Number five almost lurched into sight. He was in his late twenties, tallish, with ginger hair and a black leather bomber jacket. Having arrived round the corner, he then stopped and stood still for a moment. He looked around as if half-expecting to meet somebody. Dirk started to move, when suddenly number six walked round the corner.

  Number six was a different proposition altogether: a rather delicious-looking woman in jeans, with short, thick black hair. Dirk swore to himself and wondered if he hadn’t secretly meant six instead of five. But no. An undertaking was an undertaking, and he was being paid a lot of money. He owed it to whoever was paying the money to stick to whatever agreement it was that they hadn’t actually got. Number five was still standing there dithering on the street corner, and Dirk hurried quickly downstairs to take up the chase.

  As he opened the cracked front door he was met by number four, the postman with the pushcart, who handed him a small bundle of letters. Dirk pocketed them and hurried out into the street and the spring sunshine.

  He hadn’t followed anybody for quite a while, and discovered that he had lost the knack. He set off so enthusiastically in pursuit of his quarry that he realised he was walking far too quickly and would in fact have to walk straight past him. He did so, paused for a few confused seconds, turned round, and started to walk back, which caused him to collide directly with his quarry. Dirk was so flummoxed to find that he had actually physically hit the person he was supposed to be stealthily tailing that in order to allay any suspicion he jumped onto a passing bus and headed off down Rosebery Avenue.

  This, he felt, was not an auspicious beginning. He sat on the bus for a few seconds, completely stunned at his own ineptness. He was being paid $5,000 a week for this. Well, in a sense he was. He became aware that people were looking at him slightly oddly. But not nearly as oddly, he reflected, as they would do if they had the slightest idea about what he was actually doing.

  He twisted round in his seat and squinted back down the road, wondering what would be a good next move. Normally, if you were tailing somebody, it was a problem if they unexpectedly jumped onto a bus, but it was almost more of a problem if you unexpectedly jumped on one yourself. It was
probably best if he just got off again and tried to resume the trail, though how on earth he was going to look unobtrusive now, he didn’t know. As soon as the bus next came to a halt, he jumped off again and started walking back up Rosebery Avenue. Before he had gone very far, he noticed his quarry walking down the road in his direction. He reflected that he had managed to pick a remarkably helpful and cooperative subject, and better than he deserved. Time to get a grip and be a little more circumspect. He was almost at the door of a small café, so he ducked inside it. He stood at the counter pretending to dither for a moment over the sandwiches until he sensed that the subject had passed.

  The subject didn’t pass. The subject walked in and stood behind him at the counter. In a panic, Dirk ordered a tuna and sweetcorn roll, which he hated, and a cappuccino, which went particularly badly with fish, and hurried off to sit at one of the small tables. He wanted to be able to bury himself in a newspaper, but he didn’t have one, so he had to make do with his post. He pored over it intently. Various bills of the usual preposterous and wildly overoptimistic kind. Various circulars of the strange type that private detectives tended to receive—catalogues full of tiny electronic gadgets all designed to counteract each other; ads for peculiar grades of film or revolutionary new types of thin plastic strips. Dirk couldn’t be bothered with any of it, though he did pause for a moment over a flyer for a newly published book on advanced surveillance techniques. He screwed it up crossly and threw it on the floor.

  The last envelope was another bank statement. His bank had long ago got into the habit of sending them to him on a weekly basis, just to make the point, really. They hadn’t yet adjusted to his new sheen of solvency, or didn’t trust it. Probably hadn’t even noticed it, in fact. He opened the statement, still only half-believing.

  Yes.

  Another £3,253.29. Last Friday. Incredible. Inexplicable. But there.

  There was also something else odd, though. It took him a moment or two to spot it, because he was keeping half an eye expertly trained on his subject, who was buying coffee and a doughnut and paying for it out of a fan of twenties.

  The last entry on Dirk’s statement was for a cash withdrawal on his debit card: £500. Yesterday. The statement had obviously been sent out at close of business yesterday, and it had the day’s transactions up to date. That was all very excellent and efficient and a fine testimony to the efficacy of modern computer technology, of course, but the fact was that Dirk hadn’t withdrawn £500 yesterday, or any other day for that matter. His card must have been stolen. Hell’s bells! He fished anxiously for his wallet.

  No. His cards were there. Safe.

  He thought about it. He couldn’t envisage any way in which a fraudster could make an actual cash withdrawal without the actual card. A horrible clammy thought suddenly grabbed his stomach. These were his own bank statements he’d been getting, weren’t they? He checked in alarm. Yes. His name, his address, his account number. He had double-checked the other ones last night, several times. Definitely his statements. They just didn’t seem to be his financial transactions, that was all.

  Time to concentrate on the job in hand. He looked up. His quarry was sitting two tables away, patiently munching his bun and staring into the middle distance.

  After a moment or two he stood up, brushed some crumbs off his leather jacket, turned, and walked to the door. He paused for a moment, as if considering which way to go, and then set off the way he had been going, strolling casually. Dirk slipped his mail into his pocket and quietly followed.

  He had picked a good subject, he soon realised. The man’s ginger hair shone like a beacon in the spring sunshine, so whenever he was briefly swallowed up in a crowd, it would only be a matter of seconds before Dirk would catch sight of him again, meandering idly along the street.

  Dirk wondered what he did for a living. Not a lot, it seemed—or at least, not a lot today. A pleasant walk through Holborn and into the West End. Loafing around in a couple of bookshops for half an hour (Dirk made a note of the titles his quarry browsed through), stopping for (another) coffee in an Italian café to glance through a copy of The Stage (which probably explained why he had so much free time for loafing around in bookshops and Italian cafés), and then a long, leisurely amble up through Regent’s Park and then across Camden and back toward Islington—Dirk began to think that this business of following people was really a rather congenial one. Fresh air, exercise—he was feeling in such tremendously good spirits by the end of the day that as soon he strode back in through his front door—or rather, his front polythene flap—it was instantly clear to him that the dog’s name was Kierkegaard.

  Chapter 5

  Solutions nearly always come from the direction you least expect, which means there’s no point trying to look in that direction because it won’t be coming from there.

  This was an observation that Dirk mentioned a lot to people, and he mentioned it again to Kate that evening when he phoned her.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,” she said, trying to wedge a phrase into his monologue and wiggle it about. “Are you telling me ...”

  “I’m telling you that the late husband of the woman who’s forgotten her dog’s name was a biographer.”

  “But ...”

  “And I expect you know that biographers often name their pets after their subjects.”

  “No. I ...”

  “It’s so they’ve got someone to shout at when they get fed up. You spend hours wading through someone banging on about the teleological suspension of the ethical or whatever and sometimes you just need to be able to shout ‘Oh, shut up, Kierkegaard, for Christ’s sake.’ Hence the dog.”

  “Dir ...”

  “Some biographers use a small wooden ornament or a potted plant, but most prefer something you can get a good yap out of. Feedback, you see. Speaking of which, do I sense that you have an observation to make?”

  “Dirk, are you telling me that you spent all day following a total stranger?”

  “Absolutely. And I intend to do the same tomorrow. I shall be skulking near his front door bright and early. Well, bright at least. No point in being early. He’s an actor.”

  “You could get locked up for that!”

  “Occupational hazard. Kate, I’m being paid $5,000 a week. You have to be prepared to ...”

  “But not to follow a total stranger!”

  “Whoever is employing me knows my methods. I am applying them.”

  “You don’t know anything about the person who’s employing you.”

  “On the contrary, I know a great deal.”

  “All right, what’s his name?”

  “Frank.”

  “Frank what?”

  “No idea. Look, I don’t know that his name is Frank. His—or her—name has nothing to do with it. The point is that they have a problem. The problem is serious, or they wouldn’t be paying me a substantial amount of money to solve it. And the problem is ineffable or they’d tell me what it is. Whoever it is knows who I am, where I am, and precisely how best to reach me.”

  “Or maybe the bank’s just made an error. Hard to believe, I know, but ...”

  “Kate, you think I’m talking nonsense, but I’m not. Listen. In the past, people would stare into the fire for hours when they wanted to think. Or stare at the sea. The endless dancing shapes and patterns would reach far deeper into our minds than we could manage by reason and logic. You see, logic can only proceed from the premises and assumptions we already make, so we just drive round and round in little circles like little clockwork cars. We need dancing shapes to lift us and carry us, but they’re harder to find these days. You can’t stare into a radiator. You can’t stare into the sea. Well, you can, but it’s covered with plastic bottles and used condoms, so you just sit there getting cross. All we have to stare into is the white noise. The stuff we sometimes call information, but which is really just a babble rising in the air.”

  “But without logic ...”

  “Log
ic comes afterwards. It’s how we retrace our steps. It’s being wise after the event. Before the event you have to be very silly.”

  “Ah. So that’s what you’re doing.”

  “Yes. Well, it’s solved one problem already. I’ve no idea how long it would have taken me to work out that the wretched dog was called Kierkegaard. It was only by the happiest of chances that my surveillance subject happened to pick out a biography of Kierkegaard, which I then discovered, when I checked it out myself, had been written by the man who subsequently threw himself off a crane with elastic round his legs.”

  “But the two cases had nothing to do with each other.”

  “Have I mentioned that I believe in the fundamental connectedness of all things? I think I have.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which is why I must now go and investigate some of the other books he was interested in before getting myself ready for tomorrow’s expedition.”

  “...”

  “I can hear you shaking your head in sorrow and bewilderment. Don’t worry. Everything is getting nicely out of control.”

  “If you say so, Dirk. Oh, by the way, what does ‘ineffable’ actually mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dirk tersely, “but I intend to find out.”

  Chapter 6

  The following morning the weather was so foul it hardly deserved the name, and Dirk decided to call it Stanley instead.