by So Long
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 fo
r 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.
=================================================================
Chapter 8
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.
=================================================================
Chapter 9
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.