ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Page 3
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
op
en 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