ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Page 13
out where in the book he had got to the previous night, then he
turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.
"It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.
"After that he moved restlessly in his sleep for a moment and
then turned over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after
this his eyes flickered briefly and he slightly scratched his
nose, though there was still a good twenty minutes to go before
he turned back on to his left side. And so he whiled the night
away, sleeping.
"At four he got up and went to the lavatory again. He opened the
door to the lavatory ..." and so on.
It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat
books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't
actually get you anywhere. You don't, in short, want to know.
But there are other omissions as well, beside the teethcleaning
and trying to find fresh socks variety, and in some of these
people have often seemed inordinately interested.
What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings
with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?
To which the answer is, of course, mind your own business.
And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on the planet
Krikkit? Just because the planet didn't have Fuolornis Fire
Dragons or Dire Straits doesn't mean that everyone just sat up
every night reading.
Or to take a more specific example, what about the night after
the committee meeting party on Prehistoric Earth, when Arthur
found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon rise over
the softly burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl
called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of staring every
morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit
tubes of toothpaste in the art department of an advertising
agency on the planet Golgafrincham. What then? What happened
next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.
The next one didn't resume the story till five years later, and
you can, claim some, take discretion too far. "This Arthur Dent,"
comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has
even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe
thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too
hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he
interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life?
Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a
nutshell, fuck?"
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on
to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
=================================================================
Chapter 26
Arthur Dent allowed himself for an unworthy moment to think, as
they drifted up, that he very much hoped that his friends who had
always found him pleasant but dull, or more latterly, odd but
dull, were having a good time in the pub, but that was the last
time, for a while, that he thought of them.
They drifted up, spiralling slowly around each other, like
sycamore seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except
going the other way.
And as they drifted up their minds sang with the ecstatic
knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and
utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of
catching up to do.
Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated
on keeping the cars going along the Euston Road and out towards
the Westway flyover, on keeping the streetlights lit and on
making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a
cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.
Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings of light of
London - London, Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the
strangely coloured fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the
galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky
above them, but London - swayed, swaying and turning, turned.
"Try a swoop," he called to Fenchurch.
"What?"
Her voice seemed strangely clear but distant in all the vast
empty air. It was breathy and faint with disbelief - all those
things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.
"We're flying ..." she said.
"A trifle," called Arthur, "think nothing of it. Try a swoop."
"A sw-"
Her hand caught his, and in a second her weight caught it too,
and stunningly, she was gone, tumbling beneath him, clawing
wildly at nothing.
Physics glanced at Arthur, and clotted with horror he was gone
too, sick with giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but
his voice.
They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn't do
this sort of thing here.
He couldn't catch her because this was London, and not a million
miles from here, seven hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in
Pisa, Galileo had clearly demonstrated that two falling bodies
fell at exactly the same rate of acceleration irrespective of
their relative weights.
They fell.
Arthur realized as he fell, giddily and sickeningly, that if he
was going to hang around in the sky believing everything that the
Italians had to say about physics when they couldn't even keep a
simple tower straight, that they were in dead trouble, and damn
well did fall faster than Fenchurch.
He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip on her
shoulders. He got it.
Fine. They were now falling together, which was all very sweet
and romantic, but didn't solve the basic problem, which was that
they were falling, and the ground wasn't waiting around to see if
he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to
meet them like an express train.
He couldn't support her weight, he hadn't anything he could
support it with or against. The only thing he could think was
that they were obviously going to die, and if he wanted anything
other than the obvious to happen he was going to have to do
something other than the obvious. Here he felt he was on familiar
territory.
He let go of her, pushed her away, and when she turned her face
to him in a gasp of stunned horror, caught her little finger with
his little finger and swung her back upwards, tumbling clumsily
up after her.
"Shit," she said, as she sat panting and breathless on absolutely
nothing at all, and when she had recovered herself they fled on
up into the night.
Just below cloud level they paused and scanned where they had
impossibly come. The ground was something not to regard with any
too firm or steady an eye, but merely to glance at, as it were,
in passing.
Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found that if
she judged herself just right against a body of wind she could
pull off some really quite dazzling ones with a little pirouette
at the end, followed
by a little drop which made her dress billow
around her, and this is where readers who are keen to know what
Marvin and Ford Prefect have been up to all this while should
look ahead to later chapters, because Arthur now could wait no
longer and helped her take it off.
It drifted down and away whipped by the wind until it was a speck
which finally vanished, and for various complicated reasons
revolutionized the life of a family on Hounslow, over whose
washing line it was discovered draped in the morning.
In a mute embrace, they drifted up till they were swimming
amongst the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering
around the wings of an aeroplane but never feel because you are
sitting warm inside the stuffy aeroplane and looking through the
little scratchy perspex window while somebody else's son tries
patiently to pour warm milk into your shirt.
Arthur and Fenchurch could feel them, wispy cold and thin,
wreathing round their bodies, very cold, very thin. They felt,
even Fenchurch, now protected from the elements by only a couple
of fragments from Marks and Spencer, that if they were not going
to let the force of gravity bother them, then mere cold or
paucity of atmosphere could go and whistle.
The two fragments from Marks and Spencer which, as Fenchurch rose
now into the misty body of the clouds, Arthur removed very, very
slowly, which is the only way it's possible to do it when you're
flying and also not using your hands, went on to create
considerable havoc in the morning in, respectively, counting from
top to bottom, Isleworth and Richmond.
They were in the cloud for a long time, because it was stacked
very high, and when finally they emerged wetly above it,
Fenchurch slowly spinning like a starfish lapped by a rising
tidepool, they found that above the clouds is where the night get
seriously moonlit.
The light is darkly brilliant. There are different mountains up
there, but they are mountains, with their own white arctic snows.
They had emerged at the top of the high-stacked cumulo-nimbus,
and now began lazily to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch
eased Arthur in turn from his clothes, prised him free of them
till all were gone, winding their surprised way down into the
enveloping whiteness.
She kissed him, kissed his neck, his chest, and soon they were
drifting on, turning slowly, in a kind of speechless T-shape,
which might have caused even a Fuolornis Fire Dragon, had one
flown past, replete with pizza, to flap its wings and cough a
little.
There were, however, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons in the clouds nor
could there be for, like the dinosaurs, the dodos, and the
Greater Drubbered Wintwock of Stegbartle Major in the
constellation Fraz, and unlike the Boeing 747 which is in
plentiful supply, they are sadly extinct, and the Universe shall
never know their like again.
The reason that a Boeing 747 crops up rather unexpectedly in the
above list is not unconnected with the fact that something very
similar happened in the lives of Arthur and Fenchurch a moment or
two later.
They are big things, terrifyingly big. You know when one is in
the air with you. There is a thunderous attack of air, a moving
wall of screaming wind, and you get tossed aside, if you are
foolish enough to be doing anything remotely like what Arthur and
Fenchurch were doing in its close vicinity, like butterflies in
the Blitz.
This time, however, there was a heart-sickening fall or loss of
nerve, a re-grouping moments later and a wonderful new idea
enthusiastically signalled through the buffeting noise.
Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts was an elderly lady,
indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a
lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy to
feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very
pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too
routine.
With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter and
looked out over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then
she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and
her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off
the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an
awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually
everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.
The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the
alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.
The following night they did it all over again, only this time
with Sony Walkmen.
=================================================================
Chapter 27
"This is all very wonderful," said Fenchurch a few days later.
"But I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there's
this difference between us. That you lost something and found it
again, and I found something and lost it. I need to find it
again."
She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for a day
of telephoning.
Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one of the papers with
small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say
that he was none the worse for it, but sadly, this was not the
case. He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so
Arthur phoned him anyway.
"Arthur my old soup spoon, my old silver turreen, how
particularly stunning to hear from you. Someone told me you'd
gone off into space or something."
Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he
had invented for his own use, and which no one else was able to
speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at all.
The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried
that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalance of
nonsense. The time when you did find out, later, which bits he
did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.
"What?" said Arthur.
"Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card
table, just a rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may
need a quote from you."
"Nothing to say, just pub talk."
"We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on it. Plus
it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the
other stories of the week, so it could be just to have you
denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear."
There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost Henson
came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.
"Just remembered," he said, "what an odd evening I had last
night. Anyway my old, I won't say what, how do you feel about
having ridden on Halley's Comet?"
"I haven't," said Arthur with a suppressed sigh, "ridden on
Halley's Comet."
"OK, How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley's Comet?"
"Pretty relaxed, Murray."
There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.
"Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the
chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of
the Weirdos, we're thinking of calling it. Good, eh?"
"Very good."
"Got a ring to it. First we have this man it always rains on."
"What?"
"It's the absolute stocking top truth. All documented in his
little black book, it all checks out at every single funloving
level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana whips, and
funny little men in white coats are flying in from all over the
world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man
is the bee's knees, Arthur, he is the wasp's nipples. He is, I
would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of
every major flying insect of the Western world. We're calling him
the Rain God. Nice, eh?"
"I think I've met him."
"Good ring to it. What did you say?"
"I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?"
"Incredible! You met the Rain God?"
"If it's the same guy. I told him to stop complaining and show
someone his book."
There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson's end of the
phone.