ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

by So Long

  this narrative's purpose to suggest was the case, though it is

  sometimes hard, looking at his pictures, particularly the one

  with the awkward steps, not to wonder, might have dreamed up

  after having been on one, for the little chandeliers which should

  have been hanging inside were on the outside pointing up.

  Confusing.

  The sign above the front door said, "Come Outside", and so,

  nervously, they had.

  Inside, of course, was where the Outside was. Rough brickwork,

  nicely done painting, guttering in good repair, a garden path, a

  couple of small trees, some rooms leading off.

  And the inner walls stretched down, folded curiously, and opened

  at the end as if, by an optical illusion which would have had

  Maurits C. Escher frowning and wondering how it was done, to

  enclose the Pacific Ocean itself.

  "Hello," said John Watson, Wonko the Sane.

  Good, they thought to themselves, "Hello" is something we can

  cope with.

  "Hello," they said, and all surprisingly was smiles.

  For quite a while he seemed curiously reluctant to talk about the

  dolphins, looking oddly distracted and saying, "I forget ..."

  whenever they were mentioned, and had shown them quite proudly

  round the eccentricities of his house.

  "It gives me pleasure," he said, "in a curious kind of way, and

  does nobody any harm," he continued, "that a competent optician

  couldn't correct."

  They liked him. He had an open, engaging quality and seemed able

  to mock himself before anybody else did.

  "Your wife," said Arthur, looking around, "mentioned some

  toothpicks." He said it with a hunted look, as if he was worried

  that she might suddenly leap out from behind the door and mention

  them again.

  Wonko the Sane laughed. It was a light easy laugh, and sounded

  like one he had used a lot before and was happy with.

  "Ah yes," he said, "that's to so with the day I finally realized

  that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put

  it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."

  This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous

  again.

  "Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He

  pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing and the

  guttering. "Go through that door," he pointed at the first door

  through which they had originally entered, "and you go into the

  Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates

  happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there

  now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I

  simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away."

  "That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue

  plaque with some instructions written on it.

  "Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I

  have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what

  I had to do."

  The sign said:

  Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in

  mouth. insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle

  in-out motion.

  "It seemed to me," said Wonko the sane, "that any civilization

  that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of

  detailed instructions for use in a packet of toothpicks, was no

  longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."

  He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and

  gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the

  sandpipers.

  "And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it

  possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself

  Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is

  what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked

  things over, and sane is what I am, and how," he added, with one

  of his smiles that made you feel, "Oh. Well that's all right

  then." "I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach and see

  what we have to talk about?"

  They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking

  about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl

  sandals.

  "About the dolphins ..." said Fenchurch gently, hopefully.

  "I can show you the sandals," said Wonko the Sane.

  "I wonder, do you know ..."

  "Would you like me to show you," said Wonko the Sane, "the

  sandals? I have them. I'll get them. They are made by the Dr

  Scholl company, and the angels say that they particularly suit

  the terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession

  stand by the message. When I say I don't know what that means

  they say no, you don't, and laugh. Well, I'll get them anyway."

  As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on

  how you looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other

  in a wondering and slightly desperate sort of way, then each

  shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand.

  "How are the feet today?" said Arthur quietly.

  "OK. It doesn't feel so odd in the sand. Or in the water. The

  water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn't our world."

  She shrugged.

  "What do you think he meant," she said, "by the message?"

  "I don't know," said Arthur, though the memory of a man called

  Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.

  When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned

  Arthur. Not the sandals, they were perfectly ordinary wooden-

  bottomed sandals.

  "I just thought you'd like to see," he said, "what angels wear on

  their feet. Just out of curiousity. I'm not trying to prove

  anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes

  proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to

  remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a

  child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether

  it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first,

  think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will

  only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.

  I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other

  reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think

  I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You

  can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that

  you're a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see

  this."

  This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him

  carrying, for it was a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl,

  seemingly identical to the one in Arthur's bedroom.

  Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without

  success, to say, "Where did you get that?" sharply, and with a

  gasp in his voice.

  Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond.

  "Where did you get that?" said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp

  in her voice.

  Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice

  said, "What? Have you seen one of these before?"

&
nbsp; "Yes," she said, "I've got one. Or at least I did have. Russell

  nicked it to put his golfballs in. I don't know where it came

  from, just that I was angry with Russell for nicking it. Why,

  have you got one?"

  "Yes, it was ..."

  They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply

  backwards and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in

  edgeways.

  "You have one of those too?" he said to both of them.

  "Yes." They both said it.

  He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the

  bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.

  The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the

  intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around

  the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it. They could

  see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words

  "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish."

  "Do you know," asked Wonko quietly, "what it is?"

  They each shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost

  hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey

  glass.

  "It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low

  quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam

  with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language,

  a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult,

  considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly

  capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to."

  He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again

  at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.

  "Have you ..." he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours?

  May I ask you that?"

  "Er, I keep a fish in it," said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. "I

  happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and,

  er, there was this bowl." He tailed off.

  "You've done nothing else? No," he said, "if you had, you would

  know." He shook his head again.

  "My wife kept wheatgerm in ours," resumed Wonko, with some new

  tone in his voice, "until last night ..."

  "What," said Arthur slowly and hushedly, "happened last night?"

  "We ran out of wheatgerm," said Wonko, evenly. "My wife," he

  added, "has gone to get some more." He seemed lost with his own

  thoughts for a moment.

  "And what happened then?" said Fenchurch, in the same breathless

  tone.

  "I washed it," said Wonko. "I washed it very carefully, very very

  carefully, removing every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried

  it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it

  over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you ... have you

  held one to your ear?"

  They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.

  "Perhaps," he said, "you should."

  =================================================================

  Chapter 32

  The deep roar of the ocean.

  The break of waves on further shores than thought can find.

  The silent thunders of the deep.

  And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming

  trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought.

  Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the

  inarticulate, words breaking together.

  A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.

  Waves of joy on - where? A world indescribably found,

  indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.

  A fugue of voices now, clamouring explanations, of a disaster

  unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a

  spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.

  And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the

  implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of

  parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of

  it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins

  gone.

  Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.

  "This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans.

  We bid you farewell."

  And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies rolling

  away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.

  =================================================================

  Chapter 33

  That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from

  inside it.

  "This is what I wanted you to see," said Wonko the Sane when the

  news came around again, "an old colleague of mine. He's over in

  your country running an investigation. Just watch."

  It was a press conference.

  "I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present

  time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-

  Causal Meteorological Phenomenon."

  "Can you tell us what that means?"

  "I'm not altogether sure. Let's be straight here. If we find

  something we can't understand we like to call it something you

  can't understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you

  go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you

  know something we don't, and I'm afraid we couldn't have that.

  "No, first we have to call it something which says it's ours, not

  yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it's not

  what you said it is, but something we say it is.

  "And if it turns out that you're right, you'll still be wrong,

  because we will simply call him a ... er `Supernormal ...' - not

  paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those

  mean now, no, a `Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer'.

  We'll probably want to shove a `Quasi' in there somewhere to

  protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my

  life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me going on holiday with

  him. Thanks, that'll be all for now, other than to say `Hi!' to

  Wonko if he's watching."

  =================================================================

  Chapter 34

  On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the

  plane who was looking at them rather oddly.

  They talked quietly to themselves.

  "I still have to know," said Fenchurch, "and I strongly feel that

  you know something that you're not telling me."

  Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.

  "Do you have a pencil?" he said. She dug around and found one.

  "What are you doing, sweetheart?" she said, after he had spent

  twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the

  paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil

  again and grunting irritably to himself.

  "Trying to remember an address someone once gave me."

  "Your life would be an awful lot simpler," she said, "if you

  bought yourself an address book."

  Finally he passed the paper to her.

  "You look after it," he said.

  She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out

  were the words "Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry.

  Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J

  Gamma."

  "And what's there?
"

  "Apparently," said Arthur, "it's God's Final Message to His

  Creation."

  "That sounds a bit more like it," said Fenchurch. "How do we get

  there?"

  "You really ...?"

  "Yes," said Fenchurch firmly, "I really want to know."

  Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex window at the

  open sky outside.

  "Excuse me," said the woman who had been looking at them rather

  oddly, suddenly, "I hope you don't think I'm rude. I get so bored

  on these long flights, it's nice to talk to somebody. My name's

  Enid Kapelsen, I'm from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?"

  =================================================================

  Chapter 35

  They went to Arthur's house in the West Country, shoved a couple

  of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every

  Galactic hitch hiker ends up spending most of his time doing.

  They waited for a flying saucer to come by.

  "Friend of mine did this for fifteen years," said Arthur one

  night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.