ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Page 6
"Only," he said, "it's in a much more useful form than that which
in ..." He paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble
in his head. "In which the ancients used to practise it. Or at
least," he added, "failed to practise it. They couldn't get it to
work you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn't cut it."
"Nostradamus?" said one of his audience.
"I didn't think he was an alchemist," said another.
"I thought," said a third, "he was a seer."
"He became a seer," said Arthur to his audience, the component
parts of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, "because
he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that."
He took another pull at his beer. It was something he had not
tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.
"What has alchemy got to do," asked a bit of the audience, "with
losing weight?"
"I'm glad you asked that," said Arthur. "Very glad. And I will
now tell you what the connection is between ..." He paused.
"Between those two things. The things you mentioned. I'll tell
you."
He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like watching oil
tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.
"They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold," he
said, in a sudden blur of coherence.
"You're kidding."
"Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."
He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of
it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.
"Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort
of stuff they do there?"
Three members of his audience said they had and that he was
talking nonsense.
"You haven't seen anything," insisted Arthur. "Oh yes," he added,
because someone was offering to buy another round.
"The evidence," he said, pointing at himself, and not missing by
more than a couple of inches, "is before your eyes. Fourteen
hours in a trance," he said, "in a tank. In a trance. I was in a
tank. I think," he added after a thoughtful pause, "I already
said that."
He waited patiently while the next round was duly distributed. He
composed the next bit of his story in his mind, which was going
to be something about the tank needing to be orientated along a
line dropped perpendicularly from the Pole Star to a baseline
drawn between Mars and Venus, and was about to start trying to
say it when he decided to give it a miss.
"Long time," he said instead, "in a tank. In a trance." He looked
round severely at his audience, to make sure it was all following
attentively.
He resumed.
"Where was I?" he said.
"In a trance," said one.
"In a tank," said another.
"Oh yes," said Arthur. "Thank you. And slowly," he said pressing
onwards, "slowly, slowly slowly, all your excess body fat ...
turns ... to ..." he paused for effect, "subcoo ... subyoo ...
subtoocay ..." - he paused for breath - "subcutaneous gold, which
you can have surgically removed. Getting out of the tank is hell.
What did you say?"
"I was just clearing my throat."
"I think you doubt me."
"I was clearing my throat."
"She was clearing her throat," confirmed a significant part of
the audience in a low rumble.
"Oh yes," said Arthur, "all right. And you then split the
proceeds ..." he paused again for a maths break, "fifty-fifty
with the alchemist. Make a lot of money!"
He looked swayingly around at his audience, and could not help
but be aware of an air of scepticism about their jumbled faces.
He felt very affronted by this.
"How else," he demanded, "could I afford to have my face
dropped?"
Friendly arms began to help him home. "Listen," he protested, as
the cold February breeze brushed his face, "looking lived-in is
all the rage in California at the moment. You've got to look as
if you've seen the Galaxy. Life, I mean. You've got to look as if
you've seen life. That's what I got. A face drop. Give me eight
years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn't come back into fashion
or I've wasted a lot of money."
He lapsed into silence for a while as the friendly arms continued
to help him along the lane to his house.
"Got in yesterday," he mumbled. "I'm very happy to be home. Or
somewhere very like it ..."
"Jet lag," muttered one of his friends. "Long trip from
California. Really mucks you up for a couple of days."
"I don't think he's been there at all," muttered another. "I
wonder where he has been. And what's happened to him."
After a little sleep Arthur got up and pottered round the house a
bit. He felt woozy and a little low, still disoriented by the
journey. He wondered how he was going to find Fenny.
He sat and looked at the fish bowl. He tapped it again, and
despite being full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which
was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its
deep and resonant chime as clearly and mesmerically as before.
Someone is trying to thank me, he thought to himself. He wondered
who, and for what.
=================================================================
Chapter 10
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and twenty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction,
realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out
loud, a wicked laugh.
He switched the incoming signal through from the Sub-Etha Net to
the ship's hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted, sing-song
voice spoke out with remarkable clarity round the cabin.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and thirty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He tweaked the volume up just a little while keeping a careful
eye on a rapidly changing table of figures on the ship's computer
display. For the length of time he had in mind, the question of
power consumption became significant. He didn't want a murder on
his conscience.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and forty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He checked around the small ship. He walked down the short
corridor. "At the third stroke ..."
He stuck his head into the small, functional, gleaming steel
bathroom.
"it will be ..."
It sounded fine in there.
He looked into the tiny sleeping quarters.
"... one ... thirty-two ..."
It sounded a bit muffled. There was a towel hanging over one of
the speakers. He took down the towel.
"... and fifty seconds."
Fine.
He checked out the packed cargo hold, and wasn't at all satisfied
with the sound. There was altogether too much crated junk in the
way. He stepped back out and waited for the door to seal. He
broke open a closed control panel
and pushed the jettison button.
He didn't know why he hadn't thought of that before. A whooshing
rumbling noise died away quickly into silence. After a pause a
slight hiss could be heard again.
It stopped.
He waited for the green light to show and then opened the door
again on the now empty cargo hold.
"... one ... thirty-three ... and fifty seconds."
Very nice.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He then went and had a last thorough examination of the emergency
suspended animation chamber, which was where he particularly
wanted it to be heard.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty ... four ...
precisely."
He shivered as he peered down through the heavily frosted
covering at the dim bulk of the form within. One day, who knew
when, it would wake, and when it did, it would know what time it
was. Not exactly local time, true, but what the heck.
He double-checked the computer display above the freezer bed,
dimmed the lights and checked it again.
"At the third stroke it will be ..."
He tiptoed out and returned to the control cabin.
"... one ... thirty-four and twenty seconds."
The voice sounded as clear as if he was hearing it over a phone
in London, which he wasn't, not by a long way.
He gazed out into the inky night. The star the size of a
brilliant biscuit crumb he could see in the distance was
Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather
stilted, sing-song voice was being received, Pleiades Zeta.
The bright orange curve that filled over half the visible area
was the giant gas planet Sesefras Magna, where the Xaxisian
battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a small
cool blue moon, Epun.
"At the third stroke it will be ..."
For twenty minutes he sat and watched as the gap between the ship
and Epun closed, as the ship's computer teased and kneaded the
numbers that would bring it into a loop around the little moon,
close the loop and keep it there, orbiting in perpetual
obscurity.
"One ... fifty-nine ..."
His original plan had been to close down all external signalling
and radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as
possible unless you were actually looking at it, but then he'd
had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous
beam, pencil-thin, broadcasting the incoming time signal to the
planet of the signal's origin, which it would not reach for four
hundred years, travelling at light speed, but where it would
probably cause something of a stir when it did.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He sniggered.
He didn't like to think of himself as the sort of person who
giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been
giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an
hour now.
"At the third stroke ..."
The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit
round a little known and never visited moon. Almost perfect.
One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation of
the launching of the ship's little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing
actions, reactions, tangential forces, all the mathematical
poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.
Before he left, he turned out the lights.
As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft zipped out on
the beginning of its three-day journey to the orbiting space
station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a long pencil-
thin beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey
still.
"At the third stroke, it will be two ... thirteen ... and fifty
seconds."
He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he
didn't have the room.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
=================================================================
Chapter 11
"April showers I hate especially."
However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined
to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to
another table, but there didn't seem to be one free in the whole
cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.
"Bloody April showers. Hate hate hate."
Arthur stared, frowning, out of the window. A light, sunny spray
of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he'd been back now.
Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy.
People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him.
Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to
him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped
from the tv and now kept in the back of a cupboard without
bothering to watch.
One effect that still lingered though, was his joy at being back.
Now that the Earth's atmosphere had closed over his head for
good, he thought, wrongly, everything within it gave him
extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the
raindrops he felt he had to protest.
"Well, I like them," he said suddenly, "and for all the obvious
reasons. They're light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you
feel good."
The man snorted derisively.
"That's what they all say," he said, and glowered darkly from his
corner seat.
He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening,
unprovoked remark had been, "I'm a lorry driver. I hate driving
in the rain. Ironic isn't it? Bloody ironic."
If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not
been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt,
affable but not encouraging.
But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now.
"They all say that about bloody April showers," he said. "So
bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather."
He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say
something about the government.
"What I want to know is this," he said, "if it's going to be nice
weather, why," he almost spat, "can't it be nice without bloody
raining?"
Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot
to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.
"Well, there you go," he said and instead got up himself. "Bye."
He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back
through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of
rain on his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow
glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.
He climbed into his battered but adored old black Golf GTi,
squealed the tyres, and headed out past the islands of petrol
pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.
He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had
closed finally and for ever above his head.
He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put
behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his
galactic travels had dragged him.<
br />
He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard,
oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a
microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable
infinity of the Universe.
He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.
The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a
small umbrella.
His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and
skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.
"Fenny!" he shouted.
Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit
her instead with the car door as he leant across and flung it
open at her.
It caught her hand and knocked away her umbrella, which then
bowled wildly away across the road.
"Shit!" yelled Arthur as helpfully as he cold, leapt out of his
own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKeena's All-
Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny's