second_half_corpus.txt

"Meet the newt you trod on," said the voice.

And there was, standing in the  corridor  with  Arthur,  a  giant
green  scaly  newt.  Arthur  turned, yelped, leapt backwards, and
found himself standing in the middle of  the  rabbit.  He  yelped
again, but could find nowhere to leap to.

"That was me, too," continued the voice in a low menacing rumble,
"as if you didn't know ..."

"Know?" said Arthur with a start. "Know?"

"The interesting thing about reincarnation,"  rasped  the  voice,
"is  that  most  people,  most  spirits, are not aware that it is
happening to them."

He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was  concerned  there  was
already quite enough effect going on.

"I was aware," hissed  the  voice,  "that  is,  I  became  aware.
Slowly. Gradually."

He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.

"I could hardly help it, could I?" he bellowed,  "when  the  same
thing  kept happening, over and over and over again! Every life I
ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any
time,  I'm  just  getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent -
pow, he kills me.

"Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit  of  a  pointer.
Bit of a bloody giveaway!

"`That's funny,' my spirit would say to itself as it  winged  its
way  back  to  the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended
venture into the land of the living, `that man who just ran  over
me as I was hopping across the road to my favourite pond looked a
little familiar ...' And gradually I got to  piece  it  together,
Dent, you multiple-me-murderer!"

The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors.  Arthur
stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.

"Here's the moment, Dent," shrieked the  voice,  now  reaching  a
feverish  pitch  of  hatred,  "here's  the  moment when at last I
knew!"

It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly  opened  up
in  front  of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but
here's an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It  was
a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast, slimy, rough, whale-like
creature rolling around  it  and  sliding  over  monstrous  white
tombstones.  High  above the cave rose a vast promontory in which
could be seen the dark recesses of  two  further  fearful  caves,
which ...

Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he  was  looking  at  his  own
mouth,  when  his  attention was meant to be directed at the live
oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.

He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.

When he looked again  the  appalling  apparition  had  gone.  The
corridor  was  dark  and,  briefly, silent. He was alone with his
thoughts. They  were  extremely  unpleasant  thoughts  and  would
rather have had a chaperone.

The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of  a  large
section  of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just
dark blackness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the  same
way that a mouse looks into a dark dog-kennel.

And the voice spoke to him again.

"Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent," it said.  "I  dare  you  to
tell me it was a coincidence!"

"It was a coincidence," said Arthur quickly.

"It was not!" came the answering bellow.

"It was," said Arthur, "it was ..."

"If it was a coincidence, then my name," roared  the  voice,  "is
not Agrajag!!!"

"And presumably," said Arthur, "you would  claim  that  that  was
your name."

"Yes!" hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather  deft
syllogism.

"Well, I'm afraid it was still a coincidence," said Arthur.

"Come in here and say that!" howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy
again.
Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least,
he  nearly said that it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost
its footing towards the end of the last word because  the  lights
came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.

It was a Cathedral of Hate.

It was the product of a mind that was  not  merely  twisted,  but
actually sprained.

It was huge. It was horrific.

It had a Statue in it.

We will come to the Statue in a moment.

The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had  been
carved  out  of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this
was that that was precisely what it had been carved  out  of.  It
seemed  to  Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood
and gaped at it.

It was black.

Where it wasn't black you were inclined  to  wish  that  it  was,
because  the  colours  with which some of the unspeakable details
were picked out ranged horribly  across  the  whole  spectrum  of
eye-defying  colours  from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in
Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow,  Burnt  hombre  and
Gan Green on the way.

The unspeakable details  which  these  colours  picked  out  were
gargoyles which would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

The gargoyles  all  looked  inwards  from  the  walls,  from  the
pillars,  from  the  flying  buttresses,  from  the choir stalls,
towards the Statue, to which we will come in a moment.

And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his  lunch,
then it was clear from the gargoyles' faces that the Statue would
have put them off theirs, had they been alive to  eat  it,  which
they  weren't,  and  had  anybody tried to serve them some, which
they wouldn't.

Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone  tablets  in
memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.

The names of some of those commemorated were underlined  and  had
asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow which
had been slaughtered and of which Arthur Dent had happened to eat
a  fillet  steak  would  have the plainest engraving, whereas the
name of a fish which Arthur had himself caught and  then  decided
he  didn't  like  and  left on the side of the plate had a double
underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger  added
as decoration, just to make the point.

And what was most disturbing  about  all  this,  apart  from  the
Statue,  to  which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear
implication that all these people and creatures were  indeed  the
same person, over and over again.

And it was equally clear that this person was, however  unfairly,
extremely upset and annoyed.

In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached  a  level  of
annoyance  the like of which had never been seen in the Universe.
It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning searing  flame
of  annoyance,  an  annoyance which now spanned the whole of time
and space in its infinite umbrage.

And this annoyance had been given its fullest expression  in  the
Statue  in the centre of all this monstrosity, which was a statue
of Arthur Dent, and an unflattering one. Fifty feet  tall  if  it
was  an  inch,  there  was not an inch of it which wasn't crammed
with insult to its subject matter, and fifty feet of that sort of
thing  would  be  enough  to  make any subject feel bad. From the
small pimple on the side of his nose to the poorish  cut  of  his
dressing  gown,  there  was no aspect of Arthur Dent which wasn't
lambasted and vilified by the sculptor.

Arthur appeared as  a  gorgon,  an  evil,  rapacious,  ravenning,
bloodied  ogre,  slaughtering his way through an innocent one-man
Universe.

With each of the thirty arms which  the  sculptor  in  a  fit  of
artistic  fervour had decided to give him, he was either braining
a rabbit, swatting a fly, pulling a wishbone, picking a flea  out
of  his  hair,  or  doing something which Arthur at first looking
couldn't quite identify.

His many feet were mostly stamping on ants.

Arthur put his hands over his eyes, hung his head  and  shook  it
slowly  from  side to side in sadness and horror at the craziness
of things.

And when he opened his eyes again, there in front  of  him  stood
the  figure  of  the man or creature, or whatever it was, that he
had supposedly been persecuting all this time.

"HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!" said Agrajag.

He, or it, or whatever, looked like a mad  fat  bat.  He  waddled
slowly around Arthur, and poked at him with bent claws.

"Look ...!" protested Arthur.

"HhhhhhrrrrrraaaaaaHHHHHH!!!"  explained  Agrajag,   and   Arthur
reluctantly  accepted  this  on  the  grounds  that he was rather
frightened by this hideous and strangely wrecked apparition.

Agrajag was black, bloated, wrinkled and leathery.

His batwings were somehow more frightening for being the pathetic
broken floundering things they were that if they had been strong,
muscular beaters of the air. The frightening thing  was  probably
the  tenacity of his continued existence against all the physical
odds.

He had the most astounding collection of teeth.

They looked as if they each  came  from  a  completely  different
animal,  and  they  were  ranged around his mouth at such bizarre
angles it seemed that if he ever actually tried to chew  anything
he'd  lacerate  half his own face along with it, and possibly put
an eye out as well.

Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about  as
sane as a fish in a privet bush.

"I was at a cricket match," he rasped.

This seemed on the face of it such  a  preposterous  notion  that
Arthur practically choked.

"Not in this body," screeched the creature, "not  in  this  body!
This  is  my last body. My last life. This is my revenge body. My
kill-Arthur-Dent body. My last chance. I had to fight to get  it,
too."

"But ..."

"I was at," roared Agrajag, "a cricket match! I had a weak  heart
condition,  but  what,  I  said to my wife, can happen to me at a
cricket match? As I'm watching, what happens?

"Two people quite maliciously appear out  of  thin  air  just  in
front  of  me.  The  last thing I can't help but notice before my
poor heart gives out in shock is that one of them is Arthur  Dent
wearing a rabbit bone in his beard. Coincidence?"

"Yes," said Arthur.

"Coincidence?" screamed the  creature,  painfully  thrashing  its
broken  wings, and opening a short gash on its right cheek with a
particularly nasty tooth. On closer  examination,  such  as  he'd
been  hoping to avoid, Arthur noticed that much of Agrajag's face
was covered with ragged strips of black sticky plasters.

He backed away nervously. He tugged at his beard. He was appalled
to  discover  that in fact he still had the rabbit bone in it. He
pulled it out and threw it away.

"Look," he said, "it's just fate playing silly buggers with  you.
With me. With us. It's a complete coincidence."

"What have you got  against  me,  Dent?"  snarled  the  creature,
advancing on him in a painful waddle.

"Nothing," insisted Arthur, "honestly, nothing."

Agrajag fixed him with a beady stare.

"Seems a strange way to relate to  somebody  you've  got  nothing
against,  killing them all the time. Very curious piece of social
interaction, I would call that. I'd also call it a lie!"
"But look," said Arthur, "I'm very sorry. There's been a terrible
misunderstanding. I've got to go. Have you got a clock? I'm meant
to be helping save the Universe." He backed away still further.

Agrajag advanced still further.

"At one point," he hissed, "at one point, I decided to  give  up.
Yes,  I would not come back. I would stay in the netherworld. And
what happened?"

Arthur indicated with random shakes of his head that  he  had  no
idea  and  didn't want to have one either. He found he had backed
up against the cold dark stone that had been carved by  who  knew
what  Herculean  effort  into a monstrous travesty of his bedroom
slippers. He glanced up at his own  horrendously  parodied  image
towering  above  him.  He was still puzzled as to what one of his
hands was meant to be doing.

"I got  yanked  involuntarily  back  into  the  physical  world,"
pursued  Agrajag,  "as  a  bunch  of petunias. In, I might add, a
bowl. This particularly happy little lifetime  started  off  with
me,  in  my  bowl,  unsupported,  three  hundred  miles above the
surface of a particularly grim planet. Not  a  naturally  tenable
position  for  a  bowl of petunias, you might think. And you'd be
right. That life ended a very short while  later,  three  hundred
miles  lower.  In, I might add, the fresh wreckage of a whale. My
spirit brother."

He leered at Arthur with renewed hatred.

"On the way down,"  he  snarled,  "I  couldn't  help  noticing  a
flashy-looking white spaceship. And looking out of a port on this
flashy-looking  spaceship  was  a   smug-looking   Arthur   Dent.
Coincidence?!!"

"Yes!" yelped Arthur. He glanced up again, and realized that  the
arm that had puzzled him was represented as wantonly calling into
existence a bowl of doomed petunias. This was not a concept which
leapt easily to the eye.

"I must go," insisted Arthur.

"You may go," said Agrajag, "after I have killed you."

"No, that won't be any use," explained Arthur, beginning to climb
up  the hard stone incline of his carved slipper, "because I have
to save the Universe, you see. I have  to  find  a  Silver  Bail,
that's the point. Tricky thing to do dead."

"Save the Universe!" spat Agrajag with contempt. "You should have
thought of that before you started your vendetta against me! What
about the time you were on Stavromula Beta and someone ..."

"I've never been there," said Arthur.

"... tried to assassinate you and you ducked. Who  do  you  think
the bullet hit? What did you say?"
"Never been there," repeated Arthur. "What are you talking about?
I have to go."

Agrajag stopped in his tracks.

"You must have been there. You  were  responsible  for  my  death
there, as everywhere else. An innocent bystander!" He quivered.

"I've never heard of the place," insisted Arthur. "I've certainly
never had anyone try to assassinate me. Other than you. Perhaps I
go there later, do you think?"

Agrajag blinked slowly in a kind of frozen logical horror.

"You haven't been to Stavromula Beta ... yet?" he whispered.

"No," said Arthur,  "I  don't  know  anything  about  the  place.
Certainly never been to it, and don't have any plans to go."

"Oh, you go there all right," muttered Agrajag in a broken voice,
"you go there all right. Oh zark!" he tottered, and stared wildly
about him at his huge Cathedral of Hate. "I've brought  you  here
too soon!"

He started to scream and  bellow.  "I've  brought  you  here  too
zarking soon!"

Suddenly he rallied, and turned a baleful, hating eye on Arthur.

"I'm going to kill you  anyway!"  he  roared.  "Even  if  it's  a
logical impossibility I'm going to zarking well try! I'm going to
blow this whole mountain up!" He screamed, "Let's see you get out
of this one, Dent!"

He rushed in a painful waddling hobble to what appeared to  be  a
small black sacrificial altar. He was shouting so wildly now that
he was really carving his face up badly. Arthur leaped down  from
his  vantage  place on the carving of his own foot and ran to try
to restrain the three-quarters-crazed creature.

He leaped upon him, and brought the strange monstrosity  crashing
down on top of the altar.

Agrajag screamed again, thrashed wildly for a brief  moment,  and
turned a wild eye on Arthur.

"You know what you've done?" he gurgled painfully.  "You've  only
gone  and  killed  me  again.  i  mean, what do you want from me,
blood?"

He thrashed again  in  a  brief  apoplectic  fit,  quivered,  and
collapsed, smacking a large red button on the altar as he did so.

Arthur started with horror and fear, first at what he appeared to
have  done,  and  then at the loud sirens and bells that suddenly
shattered the air  to  announce  some  clamouring  emergency.  He
stared wildly around him.

The only exit appeared to be  the  way  he  came  in.  He  pelted
towards  it,  throwing away the nasty fake leopard-skin bag as he
did so.

He dashed randomly, haphazardly through the labyrinthine maze, he
seemed  to  be pursued more and more fiercely by claxons, sirens,
flashing lights.

Suddenly, he turned a corner and there was a light  in  front  of
him.

It wasn't flashing. It was daylight.




Although it has been said that on Earth alone in  our  Galaxy  is
Krikkit  (or cricket) treated as fit subject for a game, and that
for this reason the Earth has been shunned, this does only  apply
to our Galaxy, and more specifically to our dimension. In some of
the higher dimensions they feel they  can  more  or  less  please
themselves, and have been playing a peculiar game called Brockian
Ultra-Cricket for whatever their transdimensional  equivalent  of
billions of years is.

 "Let's be blunt, it's a nasty  game"  (says  The  Hitch  Hiker's
Guide  to the Galaxy) "but then anyone who has been to any of the
higher dimensions will know that they're a pretty  nasty  heathen
lot  up  there  who should just be smashed and done in, and would
be, too, if anyone could work out a way  of  firing  missiles  at
right-angles to reality."

This is another example of the fact that The Hitch Hiker's  Guide
to  the  Galaxy will employ anybody who wants to walk straight in
off the street and get ripped off, especially if they  happen  to
walk in off the street during the afternoon, when very few of the
regular staff are there.

There is a fundamental point here.

The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy  is  one  of
idealism,  struggle,  despair,  passion,  success,  failure,  and
enormously long lunch-breaks.

The earliest origins of the Guide are now, along with most of its
financial records, lost in the mists of time.

For other, and more curious theories about where they  are  lost,
see below.

Most of the surviving  stories,  however,  speak  of  a  founding
editor called Hurling Frootmig.

Hurling Frootmig, it is said, founded the Guide, established  its
fundamental principles of honesty and idealism, and went bust.

There followed many years of penury  and  heart-searching  during
which  he  consulted  friends,  sat  in darkened rooms in illegal
states of mind, thought about this and that,  fooled  about  with
weights,  and  then,  after  a  chance  encounter  with  the Holy
Lunching Friars of Voondon (who claimed that just as lunch was at
the  centre of a man's temporal day, and man's temporal day could
be seen as an analogy for his spiritual life, so Lunch should

(a) be seen as the centre of a man's spiritual life, and

(b) be held in jolly nice restaurants), he refounded  the  Guide,
laid  down its fundamental principles of honesty and idealism and
where you could stuff them both, and led  the  Guide  on  to  its
first major commercial success.

He also started to develop and explore the role of the  editorial
lunch-break which was subsequently to play such a crucial part in
the Guide's history, since it meant that most of the actual  work
got  done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the
empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.

Shortly  after  this,  the  Guide  was  taken  over  by  Megadodo
Publications  of Ursa Minor Beta, thus putting the whole thing on
a very sound financial footing, and allowing the  fourth  editor,
Lig Lury Jr, to embark on lunch-breaks of such breathtaking scope
that even  the  efforts  of  recent  editors,  who  have  started
undertaking  sponsored  lunch-breaks  for charity, seem like mere
sandwiches in comparison.

In fact, Lig never formally resigned his editorship -  he  merely
left  his  office  late one morning and has never since returned.
Though well over a century has now passed, many  members  of  the
guide  staff  still retain the romantic notion that he has simply
popped out for a ham croissant, and will yet return to put  in  a
solid afternoon's work.

Strictly speaking, all editors since Lig Lury Jr  have  therefore
been designated Acting Editors, and Lig's desk is still preserved
the way he left it, with the addition of a small sign which  says
"Lig Lury Jr, Editor, Missing, presumed Fed".

Some very scurrilous and subversive sources hint at the idea that
Lig   actually   perished  in  the  Guide's  first  extraordinary
experiments in alternative book-keeping. Very little is known  of
this,  and  less  still  said. Anyone who even notices, let alone
calls attention  to,  the  curious  but  utter  coincidental  and
meaningless fact that every world on which the Guide has ever set
up an accounting department has shortly  afterwards  perished  in
warfare  or  some  natural  disaster,  is  liable  to get sued to
smithereens.

It is an interesting though utterly unrelated fact that  the  two
or three days prior to the demolition of the planet Earth to make
way for a new hyperspace bypass saw a  dramatic  upsurge  in  the
number  of  UFO  sightings  there,  not  only above Lords Cricket
Ground in St. John's Wood, London, but also above Glastonbury  in
Somerset.

Glastonbury had long been associated with myths of ancient kings,
witchcraft,  ley-lines  an wart curing, and had now been selected
as the site for the new Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  financial  records
office,  and  indeed,  ten years' worth of financial records were
transferred to a magic hill just  outside  the  city  mere  hours
before the Vogons arrived.

None of these facts,  however  strange  or  inexplicable,  is  as
strange  or  inexplicable  as  the  rules of the game of Brockian
Ultra-Cricket, as played in the higher dimensions. A full set  of
rules  is  so  massively complicated that the only time they were
all  bound  together  in  a   single   volume,   they   underwent
gravitational collapse and became a Black Hole.

A brief summary, however, is as follows:

Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You  won't  need  them,
but it keeps the crowds amused.

Rule Two: Find one good Brockian Ultra-Cricket player. Clone  him
off  a  few  times.  This  saves  an  enormous  amount of tedious
selection and training.

Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large  field
and build a high wall round them.

The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator
sport,  the  frustration  experienced  by  the  audience  at  not
actually being able to see what's going on leads them to  imagine
that it's a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has
just watched a rather humdrum game  experiences  far  less  life-
affirmation  than  a  crowd  that believes it has just missed the
most dramatic event in sporting history.

Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted  items  of  sporting  equipment
over  the  wall for the players. Anything will do - cricket bats,
basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you  can  get  a  good
swing with.

Rule Five: The players should now lay about  themselves  for  all
they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player
scores a "hit" on another player, he should immediately run  away
and apologize from a safe distance.

Apologies should be concise, sincere and, for maximum clarity and
points, delivered through a megaphone.

Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.

Curiously enough, the more the obsession with the game  grows  in
the higher dimensions, the less it is actually played, since most
of the competing teams are now in a state  of  permanent  warfare
with  each  other over the interpretation of these rules. This is
all for the best, because in the long run a  good  solid  war  is
less  psychologically damaging than a protracted game of Brockian
Ultra-Cricket.




As Arthur ran darting, dashing and panting down the side  of  the
mountain  he  suddenly  felt  the whole bulk of the mountain move
very, very slightly beneath him. There was a rumble, a roar,  and
a  slight  blurred  movement,  and a lick of heat in the distance
behind and above him. He ran in a frenzy of fear. The land  began
to  slide, and he suddenly felt the force of the word "landslide"
in a way which had never been apparent  to  him  before.  It  had
always  just  been  a  word  to  him, but now he was suddenly and
horribly aware that sliding is a strange and sickening thing  for
land to do. It was doing it with him on it. He felt ill with fear
and shaking. The ground slid, the mountain slurred,  he  slipped,
he fell, he stood, he slipped again and ran. The avalance began.

Stones, then rocks, then boulders which  pranced  past  him  like
clumsy  puppies,  only  much,  much bigger, much, much harder and
heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill  you  if  they
fell  on you. His eyes danced with them, his feet danced with the
dancing ground. He ran as if  running  was  a  terrible  sweating
sickness,  his  heart  pounded  to  the  rhythm  of  the pounding
geological frenzy around him.

The logic of the situation, i.e. that he  was  clearly  bound  to
survive  if  the  next  foreshadowed  incident in the saga of his
inadvertent persecution of Agrajag was  to  happen,  was  utterly
failing to impinge itself on his mind or exercise any restraining
influence on him at this time. He ran with the fear of  death  in
him, under him, over him and grabbing hold of his hair.

And suddenly he tripped again  and  was  hurled  forward  by  his
considerable  momentum.  But just at the moment that he was about
to hit the ground astoundingly hard  he  saw  lying  directly  in
front of him a small navy-blue holdall that he knew for a fact he
had lost in the baggage-retrieval system at Athens  airport  some
ten  years  in  his  personal  time-scale  previously, and in his
astonishment he missed the ground completely and bobbed off  into
the air with his brain singing.

What he was doing was this: he was flying. He glanced around  him
in  surprise,  but  there could be no doubt that that was what he
was doing. No part of him was touching the ground, and no part of
him  was  even  approaching it. He was simply floating there with
boulders hurtling through the air around him.

He could now do something about  that.  Blinking  with  the  non-
effort  of it he wafted higher into the air, and now the boulders
were hurtling through the air beneath him.

He looked downwards with intense curiosity. Between him  and  the
shivering  ground  were  now some thirty feet of empty air, empty
that is if you discounted the boulders which didn't  stay  in  it
for  long,  but  bounded downwards in the iron grip of the law of
gravity; the same law which seemed, all  of  a  sudden,  to  have
given Arthur a sabbatical.

It  occurred  to  him  almost  instantly,  with  the  instinctive
correctness  that self-preservation  instils in the mind, that he
mustn't try to think about it, that if he did, the law of gravity
would suddenly glance sharply in his direction and demand to know
what the hell he thought he was doing up  there,  and  all  would
suddenly be lost.

So he thought about tulips. It was  difficult,  but  he  did.  He
thought  about  the  pleasing  firm  roundness  of  the bottom of
tulips, he thought about the interesting variety of colours  they
came  in,  and  wondered  what  proportion of the total number of
tulips that grew, or had grown,  on  the  Earth  would  be  found
within a radius of one mile from a windmill. After a while he got
dangerously bored with  this  train  of  thought,  felt  the  air
slipping  away  beneath  him, felt that he was drifting down into
the paths of the bouncing boulders that he was trying so hard not
to  think about, so he thought about Athens airport for a bit and
that kept him usefully annoyed for about five minutes  -  at  the
end of which he was startled to discover that he was now floating
about two hundred yards above the ground.

He wondered for a moment how he was going to get back down to it,
but instantly shied away from that area of speculation again, and
tried to look at the situation steadily.

He was flying, What was he going to do about it? He  looked  back
down  at  the ground. He didn't look at it hard, but did his best
just to give it an idle glance, as it  were,  in  passing.  There
were  a  couple of things he couldn't help noticing. One was that
the eruption of the mountain seemed now to have  spent  itself  -
there was a crater just a little way beneath the peak, presumably
where the rock  had  caved  in  on  top  of  the  huge  cavernous
cathedral,  the statue of himself, and the sadly abused figure of
Agrajag.

The other was his  hold-all,  the  one  he  had  lost  at  Athens
airport.  It  was  sitting  pertly  on  a  piece of clear ground,
surrounded by exhausted boulders but apparently hit  by  none  of
them.  Why  this should be he could not speculate, but since this
mystery   was   completely   overshadowed   by   the    monstrous
impossibility of the bag's being there in the first place, it was
not a speculation he really felt strong enough  for  anyway.  The
thing  is,  it  was  there.  And the nasty, fake leopard-skin bag
seemed to have disappeared, which was all to  the  good,  if  not
entirely to the explicable.

He was faced with the fact that he was going to have to pick  the
thing  up.  Here he was, flying along two hundred yards above the
surface of an alien planet the name of  which  he  couldn't  even
remember.  He could not ignore the plaintive posture of this tiny
piece of what used to be his life, here, so many light-years from
the pulverized remains of his home.

Furthermore, he realized, the bag, if it was still in  the  state
in  which  he lost it, would contain a can which would have in it
the only Greek olive oil still surviving in the Universe.

Slowly, carefully, inch by  inch,  he  began  to  bob  downwards,
swinging  gently  from side to side like a nervous sheet of paper
feeling its way towards the ground.

It went well, he was feeling good. The air supported him, but let
him  through.  Two  minutes later he was hovering a mere two feet
above the bag, and was faced with  some  difficult  decision.  He
bobbed  there  lightly.  He  frowned, but again, as lightly as he
could.

If he picked the bag up, could he carry it?  Mightn't  the  extra
weight just pull him straight to the ground?

Mightn't the  mere  act  of  touching  something  on  the  ground
suddenly  discharge   whatever  mysterious  force it was that was
holding him in the air?

Mightn't he be better off just being sensible at this  point  and
stepping  out  of  the air, back on to the ground for a moment or
two?

If he did, would he ever be able to fly again?

The sensation, when he allowed himself to be aware of it, was  so
quietly ecstatic that he could not bear the thought of losing it,
perhaps for ever. With this worry in mind  he  bobbed  upwards  a
little  again,  just  to  try  the feel of it, the surprising and
effortless movement of it. He bobbed,  he  floated.  He  tried  a
little swoop.

The swoop was terrific. With his arms spread out in front of him,
his  hair  and  dressing  gown streaming out behind him, he dived
down out of the sky, bellied along a body of air about  two  feet
from  the ground and swung back up again, catching himself at the
top of the swing and holding. Just holding. He stayed there.

It was wonderful.

And that, he realized, was the way of  picking  up  the  bag.  He
would  swoop  down  and catch hold of it just at the point of the
upswing. He would carry it on up with him. He might wobble a bit,
but he was certain that he could hold it.

He tried one or two more practice swoops, and they got better and
better. The air on his face, the bounce and woof of his body, all
combined to make him feel an intoxication of the spirit  that  he
hadn't  felt  since,  since  -  well as far as he could work out,
since he was born. He drifted away on the breeze and surveyed the
countryside,  which  was,  he  discovered, pretty nasty. It had a
wasted ravaged look. He decided not to look at it  any  more.  He
would  just  pick  up the bag and then ... he didn't know what he
was going to do after he had picked up the  bag.  He  decided  he
would just pick up the bag and see where things went from there.

He judged himself against the wind,  pushed  up  against  it  and
turned around. He floated on its body. He didn't realize, but his
body was willoming at this point.

He ducked down under the airstream, dipped - and dived.

The air threw itself past him, he thrilled through it. The ground
wobbled uncertainly, straightened its ideas out and rose smoothly
up to meet him, offering the bag, its cracked plastic handles  up
towards him.

Halfway down there was a sudden dangerous moment when he could no
longer  believe  he  was doing this, and therefore he very nearly
wasn't, but he  recovered  himself  in  time,  skimmed  over  the
ground,  slipped  an arm smoothly through the handles of the bag,
and began to climb back up, couldn't make it and all of a  sudden
collapsed, bruised, scratched and shaking in the stony ground.

He staggered instantly to his feet and swayed hopelessly  around,
swinging the bag round him in agony of grief and disappointment.

His feet, suddenly, were stuck heavily to the ground in  the  way
they  always  had  been. His body seemed like an unwieldy sack of
potatoes that reeled stumbling against the ground, his  mind  had
all the lightness of a bag of lead.

He  sagged  and  swayed  and  ached  with  giddiness.  He   tried
hopelessly  to  run,  but  his  legs  were  suddenly too weak. He
tripped and flopped forward. At that moment he remembered that in
the bag he was now carrying was not only a can of Greek olive oil
but a duty-free allowance of  retsina,  and  in  the  pleasurable
shock  of  that  realization he failed to notice for at least ten
seconds that he was now flying again.

He whooped and cried with relief and pleasure, and sheer physical
delight.  He  swooped, he wheeled, he skidded and whirled through
the air. Cheekily he sat on an updraught  and  went  through  the
contents  of  the  hold-all. He felt the way he imagined an angel
must feel during its celebrated dance on the head of a pin whilst
being  counted  by  philosophers. He laughed with pleasure at the
discovery that the bag did in fact contain the olive oil and  the
retsina as well as a pair of cracked sunglasses, some sand-filled
swimming trunks, some creased postcards of Santorini, a large and
unsightly  towel,  some interesting stones, and various scraps of
paper with the addresses of people he was relieved  to  think  he
would  never meet again, even if the reason why was a sad one. He
dropped the stones, put on the sunglasses, and let the pieces  of
paper whip away in the wind.

Ten minutes later, drifting idly through a cloud, he got a  large
and  extremely  disreputable  cocktail  party in the small of the
back.




The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into  its
fourth  generation,  and still no one shows any signs of leaving.
Somebody did once look at his watch, but that  was  eleven  years
ago, and there has been no follow-up.

The mess is extraordinary, and has to be seen to be believed, but
if  you  don't have any particular need to believe it, then don't
go and look, because you won't enjoy it.

There have recently been some bangs and flashes up in the clouds,
and  there  is  one  theory  that  this  is a battle being fought
between the fleets of several rival carpet-cleaning companies who
are  hovering  over  the  thing  like vultures, but you shouldn't
believe anything  you  hear  at  parties,  and  particularly  not
anything you hear at this one.

One of the problems, and it's one which is obviously going to get
worse,  is  that  all  the  people  at  the  party are either the
children or the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren  of  the
people  who wouldn't leave in the first place, and because of all
the business about selective breeding and regressive genes and so
on,  it  means  that  all  the people now at the party are either
absolutely fanatical partygoers, or gibbering  idiots,  or,  more
and more frequently, both.

Either way, it means that, genetically speaking, each  succeeding
generation is now less likely to leave than the preceding one.

So other factors come into operation,  like  when  the  drink  is
going to run out.

Now, because of certain things which have happened  which  seemed
like  a  good  idea  at  the time (and one of the problems with a
party which never stops is that all the things  which  only  seem
like  a  good  idea at parties continue to seem like good ideas),
that point seems still to be a long way off.

One of the things which seemed like a good idea at the  time  was
that  the party should fly - not in the normal sense that parties
are meant to fly, but literally.

One night, long ago, a band of  drunken  astro-engineers  of  the
first  generation  clambered  round  the  building  digging this,
fixing that, banging very hard on the other and when the sun rose
the  following morning, it was startled to find itself shining on
a building full of happy drunken people which  was  now  floating
like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

Not only that, but the flying  party  had  also  managed  to  arm
itself  rather heavily. If they were going to get involved in any
petty arguments with wine merchants, they  wanted  to  make  sure
they had might on their side.

The transition from full-time cocktail party to part-time raiding
party  came with ease, and did much to add that extra bit of zest
and swing to the whole affair which  was  badly  needed  at  this
point  because  of the enormous number of times that the band had
already played all the numbers it knew over the years.

They looted, they raided, they held whole cities for  ransom  for
fresh  supplies  of  cheese crackers, avocado dip, spare ribs and
wine and spirits, which would now get piped aboard from  floating
tankers.

The problem of when the drink is going to run  out  is,  however,
going to have to be faced one day.

The planet over which they are floating is no longer  the  planet
it was when they first started floating over it.

It is in bad shape.

The party had attacked and raided an awful lot of it, and no  one
has  ever succeeded in hitting it back because of the erratic and
unpredictable way in which it lurches round the sky.

It is one hell of a party.
It is also one hell of a thing to get hit by in the small of  the
back.




 Arthur lay  floundering  in  pain  on  a  piece  of  ripped  and
dismembered  reinforced  concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing
cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking  somewhere
indistinctly behind him.

There was  a  sound  he  couldn't  immediately  identify,  partly
because  he  didn't  know the tune "I Left my Leg in Jaglan Beta"
and partly because the band playing it were very tired, and  some
members  of  it were playing it in three-four time, some in four-
four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed r2,  each according  to  the
amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of
himself  to  see  where  he  might  be  hurt. Wherever he touched
himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out
that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed
to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was  hurting,  but  he
soon  satisfied  himself  that  he  was  not badly hurt, but just
bruised and a little shaken, as  who  wouldn't  be?  He  couldn't
understand  what  a  building  would  be doing flying through the
clouds.

On the other hand, he would have been a  little  hard-pressed  to
come  up  with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so
he decided that he and the building were just going  to  have  to
accept  each  other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall
of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the  building
proper.  He  seemed  to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or
lip which extended outwards for about three or four feet all  the
way  around.  It  was  a  hunk  of  the ground in which the party
building had had its foundations, and which it  had  taken  along
with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.

Nervously, he stood up and, suddenly, looking out over the  edge,
he  felt  nauseous  with vertigo. He pressed himself back against
the wall,  wet  with  mist  and  sweat.  His  head  was  swimming
freestyle, but someone in his stomach was doing the butterfly.

Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could  now
not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He
was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about  to  move
an inch closer to the edge.

Clutching his hold-all he edged along the wall, hoping to find  a
doorway  in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great
reassurance to him.

He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope
that  the  wall  around the corner might offer more in the way of
entrances than this one, which offered none.

The unsteadiness of the building's flight made him feel sick with
fear,  and  after a short while he took the towel from out of his
hold-all and did something with it which once again justified its
supreme  position  in  the list of useful things to take with you
when you hitch-hike round the Galaxy. He put it over his head  so
he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.

His feet edged along the  ground.  His  outstretched  hand  edged
along the wall.

Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner
it  encountered  something  which  gave  him such a shock that he
nearly fell straight off. It was another hand.

The two hands gripped each other.

He desperately wanted to use his other hand  to  pull  the  towel
back  from  his  eyes,  but  it was holding the hold-all with the
olive oil, the retsina and the postcards from Santorini,  and  he
very much didn't want to put it down.

He experienced one of those "self" moments, one of those  moments
when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think "Who
am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?" He
whimpered very slightly.

He tried to free his hand, but he couldn't. The  other  hand  was
holding  his  tightly.  He  had  no  recourse but to edge onwards
towards the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in  an
attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry
of some unfashionable emotion from the owner of the other hand.

The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering
into  those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and
beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and  a  large  closed
door.

They were both pressed back against  the  wall,  eyes  wild  with
terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them,
and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.

"Where the zarking photon have  you  been?"  hissed  Ford,  panic
stricken.

"Er, well," stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how  to  sum  it
all up that briefly. "Here and there. What are you doing here?"

Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.

"They won't let us in without a bottle," he hissed.

The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick  of
the  party,  apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild
profusion of colours that protuded dimly through  the  atmosphere
of  heavy  smoke,  the  carpets  thick with ground glass, ash and
avocado  droppings,  and  the  small  group  of  pterodactyl-like
creatures  in  lurex  who  descended  on  his cherished bottle of
retsina,  squawking,  "A  new  pleasure,  a  new  pleasure",  was
Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.

"Didn't I see you at Milliways?" he was saying.
"Were you the one with the hammer?"

"Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more
fraught."

Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the  outer
dimensions  of which were invisible through the heaving throng of
happy, noisy creatures, cheerfully  yelling  things  that  nobody
could hear at each other and occasionally having crises.

"Seems fun," said Trillian. "What did you say, Arthur?"

"I said, how the hell did you get here?"

"I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe.  Have
you met Thor? He makes thunder."

"Hello," said Arthur. "I expect that must be very interesting."

"Hi," said Thor. "It is. Have you got a drink?"

"Er, no actually ..."

"Then why don't you go and get one?"

"See you later, Arthur," said Trillian.

Something jogged Arthur's mind, and he looked around huntedly.

"Zaphod isn't here, is he?" he said.

"See you," said Trillian firmly, "later."

Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristled,
what  little light was there was in the place mustered its forces
briefly to glint menacingly off the horns of his helmet.

He took Trillian's elbow in his  extremely  large  hand  and  the
muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of
Volkswagens parking.

He led her away.

"One of the interesting things about being  immortal,"  he  said,
"is ..."

"One  of  the  interesting  things  about  space,"  Arthur  heard
Slartibartfast  saying  to  a  large  and voluminous creature who
looked like someone losing a fight with  a  pink  duvet  and  was
gazing  raptly  at  the old man's deep eyes and silver beard, "is
how dull it is."

"Dull?" said the creature, and blinked her  rather  wrinkled  and
bloodshot eyes.

"Yes," said Slartibartfast, "staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so.
You  see,  there's  so  much of it and so little in it. Would you
like me to quote some statistics?"
"Er, well ..."

"Please, I would like to.  They,  too,  are  quite  sensationally
dull."

"I'll come back and hear them in a moment," she said, patting him
on  the arm, lifted up her skirts like a hovercraft and moved off
into the heaving crown.

"I thought she'd never go," growled the old man. "Come,  Earthman
..."

"Arthur."

"We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere."

"Can't we just relax a little?" Arthur said. "I've  had  a  tough
day.  Trillian's  here,  incidentally,  she  didn't  say  how, it
probably doesn't matter."

"Think of the danger to the Universe ..."

"The Universe," said Arthur, "is big enough  and  old  enough  to
look  after  itself  for  half  an hour. All right," he added, in
response to Slartibartfast's increasing agitation,  "I'll  wander
round and see if anybody's seen it."

"Good, good," said Slartibartfast, "good. " He plunged  into  the
crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.

"Have you seen a bail anywhere?" said Arthur to a little man  who
seemed  to  be  standing  eagerly  waiting to listen to somebody.
"It's made of silver, vitally important for the future safety  of
the Universe, and about this long."

"No," said the enthusiastically wizened little man, "but do  have
a drink and tell me all about it."

Ford Prefect writhed past,  dancing  a  wild,  frenetic  and  not
entirely  unobscene  dance  with someone who looked as if she was
wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling  a  futile
conversation at her above the din.

"I like that hat!" he bawled.

"What?"

"I said, I like the hat."

"I'm not wearing a hat."

"Well, I like the head, then."

"What?"

"I said, I like the head. Interesting bone-structure."

"What?"
Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of  other  movements
he was performing.

"I said, you dance great," he shouted, "just don't nod so much."

"What?"

"It's just that every time you nod,"  said  Ford,  "...  ow!"  he
added as his partner nodded forward to say "What?" and once again
pecked him sharply on the forehead with  the  sharp  end  of  her
swept-forward skull.

"My planet was blown up one morning," said Arthur, who had  found
himself  quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story
or, at least, edited highlights of it, "that's  why  I'm  dressed
like  this,  in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all
my clothes in it, you see. I didn't realize I'd be  coming  to  a
party."

The little man nodded enthusiastically.

"Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing  gown.
Rather  than  the  space  suit one would normally expect. Shortly
after that I discovered that my planet had originally  been built
for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was
then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been  blown
up    ridiculously    often,   shot   at,   insulted,   regularly
disintegrated, deprived of tea, and recently  I  crashed  into  a
swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave."

"Ah," effervesced the little man, "and did you have  a  wonderful
time?"

Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

"What a wonderful exciting cough," said  the  little  man,  quite
startled by it, "do you mind if I join you?"

And with  that  he  launched  into  the  most  extraordinary  and
spectacular  fit  of  coughing  which  caught  Arthur  so much by
surprise that he started to choke violently,  discovered  he  was
already doing it and got thoroughly confused.

Together they performed a lung-busting duet  which  went  on  for
fully  two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to
a halt.

"So invigorating," said the little man, panting and wiping  tears
from  his  eyes.  "What an exciting life you must lead. Thank you
very much."

He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd.
Arthur shook his head in astonishment.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type
with  a  hook  mouth,  a  lantern  nose,  and  small beady little
cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers,  a  black  silk  shirt
open  to  what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learnt
never to make assumptions about the  anatomies  of  the  sort  of
people  he  tended to meet these days, and had all sorts of nasty
dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He  carried  something
in  a  black  bag,  and  clearly  wanted people to notice that he
didn't want them to notice it.

"Hey, er, did I hear you say your name just now?" he said.

This was one  of  the  many  things  that  Arthur  had  told  the
enthusiastic little man.

"Yes, it's Arthur Dent."

The man seemed to be dancing slightly to some rhythm  other  than
any of the several that the band were grimly pushing out.

"Yeah," he said, "only there was a man in a  mountain  wanted  to
see you."

"I met him."

"Yeah, only he seemed pretty anxious about it, you know."

"Yes, I met him."

"Yeah, well I think you should know that."

"I do. I met him."

The man paused to chew a little gum. Then he  clapped  Arthur  on
the back.

"OK," he said, "all right. I'm  just  telling  you,  right?  Good
night, good luck, win awards."

"What?" said Arthur, who was beginning to flounder  seriously  at
this point.

"Whatever. Do what you do.  Do  it  well."  He  made  a  sort  of
clucking noise with whatever he was chewing and then some vaguely
dynamic gesture.

"Why?" said Arthur.

"Do it badly," said the man, "who cares? Who gives a  shit?"  The
blood  suddenly seemed to pump angrily into the man's face and he
started to shout.

"Why not go mad?" he said. "Go away, get off my  back  will  you,
guy. Just zark off!!!"

"OK, I'm going," said Arthur hurriedly.

"It's been real." The man gave a sharp wave and  disappeared  off
into the throng.

"What was that about?" said Arthur to a girl  he  found  standing
beside him. "Why did he tell me to win awards?"
"Just showbiz talk," shrugged the girl. "He's just won  an  award
at  the  Annual Ursa Minor Alpha Recreational Illusions Institute
Awards Ceremony, and was  hoping  to  be  able  to  pass  it  off
lightly, only you didn't mention it, so he couldn't."

"Oh," said Arthur, "oh, well I'm sorry  I  didn't.  What  was  it
for?"

"The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The  Word  `Fuck'  In  A  Serious
Screenplay. It's very prestigious."

"I see," said Arthur, "yes, and what do you get for that?"

"A Rory. It's just a small silver thing  set  on  a  large  black
base. What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything. I was just about to ask what  the  silver
..."

"Oh, I thought you said `wop'."

"Said what?"

"Wop."

People had been dropping in on the  party  now  for  some  years,
fashionable  gatecrashers from other worlds, and for some time it
had occurred to the partygoers as they had looked  out  at  their
own  world  beneath  them,  with  its wrecked cities, its ravaged
avocado farms and blighted vineyards,  its  vast  tracts  of  new
desert,  its  seas  full  of biscuit crumbs and worse, that their
world was in some tiny and almost imperceptible ways not quite as
much fun as it had been. Some of them had begun to wonder if they
could manage to stay sober for long enough  to  make  the  entire
party  spaceworthy  and  maybe take it off to some other people's
worlds where the  air  might  be  fresher  and  give  them  fewer
headaches.

The few undernourished farmers who still managed to scratch out a
feeble  existence on the half-dead ground of the planet's surface
would have been extremely pleased to hear this, but that day,  as
the party came screaming out of the clouds and the farmers looked
up in haggard fear of yet another cheese-and-wine raid, it became
clear  that the party was not going to be going anywhere else for
a while, that the party would soon be over. Very soon it would be
time  to gather up hats and coats and stagger blearily outside to
find out what time of day it was, what time of year it  was,  and
whether  in  any  of this burnt and ravaged land there was a taxi
going anywhere.

The party was locked in a horrible embrace with a  strange  white
spaceship  which  seemed to be half sticking through it. Together
they were lurching, heaving and spinning their way round the  sky
in grotesque disregard of their own weight.

The clouds parted. The air roared and leapt out of their way.

The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their  writhings,  a
little  like  two  ducks,  one of which is trying to make a third
duck inside the second duck, whilst the  second  duck  is  trying
very  hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck
right now, is uncertain that it would  want  any  putative  third
duck  to  be  made  by  this  particular  first  duck anyway, and
certainly not whilst it, the second duck, was busy flying.

The sky sang and screamed with the rage of it  all  and  buffeted
the ground with shock waves.

And suddenly, with a foop, the Krikkit ship was gone.

The party blundered helplessly across the sky like a man  leaning
against  an  unexpectedly  open  door. It span and wobbled on its
hover jets. It tried to right itself and wronged itself  instead.
It staggered back across the sky again.

For a while these staggerings continued, but clearly  they  could
not  continue  for  long.  The  party  was now a mortally wounded
party. All the fun had gone out of it, as the occasional  broken-
backed pirouette could not disguise.

The longer, at this  point,  that  it  avoided  the  ground,  the
heavier was going to be the crash when finally it hit it.

Inside, things were  not  going  well  either.  They  were  going
monstrously  badly, in fact, and people were hating it and saying
so loudly. The Krikkit robots had been.

They had removed the Award for The Most  Gratuitous  Use  Of  The
Word  `Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay, and in its place had left a
scene of devastation that left Arthur feeling almost as sick as a
runner-up for a Rory.

"We would love to stay and help," shouted Ford, picking  his  way
over the mangled debris, "only we're not going to."

The party lurched again, provoking feverish cries and groans from
amongst the smoking wreckage.

"We have to go and save the Universe, you see," said  Ford.  "And
if  that sounds like a pretty lame excuse, then you may be right.
Either way, we're off."

He suddenly came across an unopened  bottle  lying,  miraculously
unbroken, on the ground.

"Do you mind if we take this?" he said.  "You  won't  be  needing
it."

He took a packet of potato crisps too.

"Trillian?" shouted Arthur in a shocked and  weakened  voice.  In
the smoking mess he could see nothing.

"Earthman, we must go," said Slartibartfast nervously.

"Trillian?" shouted Arthur again.

A moment or two later, Trillian staggered,  shaking,  into  view,
supported by her new friend the Thunder God.

"The girl stays with me," said Thor. "There's a great party going
on in Valhalla, we'll be flying off ..."

"Where were you when all this was going on?" said Arthur.

"Upstairs," said Thor, "I was weighing  her.  Flying's  a  tricky
business you see, you have to calculate wind ..."

"She comes with us," said Arthur.

"Hey," said Trillian, "don't I ..."

"No," said Arthur, "you come with us."

Thor looked at him with slowly smouldering eyes.  He  was  making
some  point  about  godliness and it had nothing to do with being
clean.

"She comes with me," he said quietly.

"Come on, Earthman," said Slartibartfast  nervously,  picking  at
Arthur's sleeve.

"Come on, Slartibartfast," said Ford, picking at  the  old  man's
sleeve. Slartibartfast had the teleport device.

The party lurched and swayed, sending  everyone  reeling,  except
for  Thor  and  except  for Arthur, who stared, shaking, into the
Thunder God's black eyes.

Slowly, incredibly, Arthur put up what appeared to  be  his  tiny
little fists.

"Want to make something of it?" he said.

"I beg your minuscule pardon?" roared Thor.

"I said," repeated Arthur, and he could not  keep  the  quavering
out  of  his  voice,  "do  you  want to make something of it?" He
waggled his fists ridiculously.

Thor looked at him with incredulity. Then a little wisp of  smoke
curled upwards from his nostril. There was a tiny little flame in
it too.

He gripped his belt.

He expanded his chest to make it totally clear that here was  the
sort  of man you only dared to cross if you had a team of Sherpas
with you.

He unhooked the shaft of his hammer from his belt. He held it  up
in  his hands to reveal the massive iron head. He thus cleared up
any possible misunderstanding that  he  might  merely  have  been
carrying a telegraph pole around with him.

"Do I want," he said, with a hiss like a river flowing through  a
steel mill, "to make something of it?"

"Yes," said Arthur, his voice suddenly and extraordinarily strong
and  belligerent.  He waggled his fists again, this time as if he
meant it.

"You want to step outside?" he snarled at Thor.

"All right!" bellowed Thor, like an enraged bull (or in fact like
an  enraged  Thunder God, which is a great deal more impressive),
and did so.

"Good," said Arthur, "that's got rid of him. Slarty, get  us  out
of here."




"All right," shouted Ford at Arthur, "so I'm a coward, the  point
is   I'm  still  alive."  They  were  back  aboard  the  Starship
Bistromath, so was Slartibartfast, so was Trillian.  Harmony  and
concord were not.

"Well, so am I alive, aren't I?" retaliated Arthur, haggard  with
adventure  and anger. His eyebrows were leaping up and down as if
they wanted to punch each other.

"You damn nearly weren't," exploded Ford.

Arthur turned sharply to Slartibartfast, who was sitting  in  his
pilot  couch  on  the  flight  deck  gazing thoughtfully into the
bottom of a bottle which was telling  him  something  he  clearly
couldn't fathom. He appealed to him.

"Do you think he understands the first word I've been saying?" he
said, quivering with emotion.

"I don't know," replied Slartibartfast,  a  little  abstractedly.
"I'm  not sure," he added, glancing up very briefly, "that I do."
He stared at his instruments with renewed vigor  and  bafflement.
"You'll have to explain it to us again," he said.

"Well ..."

"But later. Terrible things are afoot."

He tapped the pseudo-glass of the bottle bottom.

"We fared rather pathetically at the party, I'm afraid," he said,
"and our only hope now is to try to prevent the robots from using
the Key in the Lock. How in heaven we do that I don't  know,"  he
muttered. "Just have to go there, I suppose. Can't say I like the
idea at all. Probably end up dead."

"Where is Trillian anyway?" said Arthur with a sudden affectation
of  unconcern.  What  he  had  been angry about was that Ford had
berated him for wasting time  over  all  the  business  with  the
Thunder  God when they could have been making a rather more rapid
escape. Arthur's own opinion, and he had offered it for  whatever
anybody  might  have  felt  it  was  worth,  was that he had been
extraordinarily brave and resourceful.

The prevailing view seemed to be that his opinion was not worth a
pair of fetid dingo's kidneys. What really hurt, though, was that
Trillian didn't seem to react much one way or the other  and  had
wandered off somewhere.

"And where are my potato crisps?" said Ford.

"They are both," said Slartibartfast, without looking up, "in the
Room  of  Informational  Illusions.  I think that your young lady
friend is trying to understand some problems of Galactic history.
I think the potato crisps are probably helping her."




It is a mistake to think you can solve any  major  problems  just
with potatoes.

For instance, there was  once  an  insanely  aggressive  race  of
people  called  the  Silastic  Armorfiends of Striterax. That was
just the name of their race. The name of their army was something
quite  horrific. Luckily they lived even further back in Galactic
history than anything we have so far encountered - twenty billion
years  ago  - when the Galaxy was young and fresh, and every idea
worth fighting for was a new one.

And fighting was what the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were
good  at, and being good at it, they did a lot. They fought their
enemies (i.e. everybody else),  they  fought  each  other.  Their
planet  was  a  complete  wreck.  The  surface  was littered with
abandoned cities which were surrounded by abandoned war machines,
which  were  in  turn  surrounded  by  deep  bunkers in which the
Silastic Armorfiends lived and squabbled with each other.

The best way to pick a fight with a Silastic Armorfiend was  just
to  be born. They didn't like it, they got resentful. And when an
Armorfiend got resentful, someone got hurt. An exhausting way  of
life,  one might think, but they did seem to have an awful lot of
energy.

The best way of dealing with a Silastic Armorfiend was to put him
into  a  room of his own, because sooner or later he would simply
beat himself up.

Eventually they realized that this was something they were  going
to  have to sort out, and they passed a law decreeing that anyone
who had to carry a weapon as part of  his  normal  Silastic  work
(policemen,  security  guards, primary school teachers, etc.) had
to spend at least forty-five minutes every day punching a sack of
potatoes in order to work off his or her surplus aggressions.

For a while this worked well, until someone thought that it would
be  much more efficient and less time-consuming if they just shot
the potatoes instead.

This led to a  renewed  enthusiasm  for  shooting  all  sorts  of
things,  and  they  all got very excited at the prospect of their
first major war for weeks.

Another achievement of the Silastic Armorfiends of  Striterax  is
that  they  were  the  first  race  who  ever  managed to shock a
computer.

It was a gigantic spaceborne computer  called  Hactar,  which  to
this day is remembered as one of the most powerful ever built. It
was the first to be built like a natural  brain,  in  that  every
cellular  particle  of it carried the pattern of the whole within
it, which enabled it to think more  flexibly  and  imaginatively,
and also, it seemed, to be shocked.

The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax  were  engaged  in  one  of
their  regular  wars  with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and
were not enjoying it as much as  usual  because  it  involved  an
awful  lot of trekking through the Radiation Swamps of Cwulzenda,
and across the Fire Mountains  of  Frazfraga,  neither  of  which
terrains they felt at home in.

So when the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak joined  in  the
fray and forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of
Carfrax and the Ice Storms of  Varlengooten,  they  decided  that
enough  was enough, and they ordered Hactar to design for them an
Ultimate Weapon.

"What do you mean," asked Hactar, "by Ultimate?"

To which the Silastic Armorfiends  of  Striterax  said,  "Read  a
bloody dictionary," and plunged back into the fray.

So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon.

It was a very, very small bomb which was simply a junction box in
hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every
major sun with the heart of every other major sun  simultaneously
and thus turn the entire Universe in to one gigantic hyperspatial
supernova.

When the Silastic Armorfiends tried  to  use  it  to  blow  up  a
Strangulous  Stilettan  munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves,
they were extremely irritated that it didn't work, and said so.

Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.

He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate
Weapon business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable
consequence of not setting the bomb off that was worse  than  the
known  consequence  of setting it off, and he had therefore taken
the liberty of introducing a small flaw into the  design  of  the
bomb,  and  he  hoped  that  everyone  involved  would,  on sober
reflection, feel that ...

The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer.

Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as
well.
Then, pausing only  to  smash  the  hell  out  of  the  Strenuous
Garfighters   of   Stug,   and   the  Strangulous  Stilettans  of
Jajazikstak, they went on to find an entirely new way of  blowing
themselves  up,  which  was a profound relief to everyone else in
the Galaxy, particularly the Garfighters, the Stilettans and  the
potatoes.

Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story  of  Krikkit.
She   emerged   from   the   Room   of   informational  Illusions
thoughtfully, just in time to discover that they had arrived  too
late.




Even as the Starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on
the  top of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid which pursued
a lonely and eternal path  in  orbit  around  the  enclosed  star
system of Krikkit, its crew was aware that they were in time only
to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.

They didn't realize they were going to see two.

They stood cold, lonely  and  helpless  on  the  cliff  edge  and
watched  the  activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister
arcs against the void from a point only  about  a  hundred  yards
below and in front of them.

They stared into the blinding event.

An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there,  by
once  again  exploiting  the mind's predisposition to have tricks
played on it: the problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the
asteroid, or of not being able to breathe, simply became Somebody
Else's.

The white Krikkit warship was parked amongst the stark grey crags
of   the   asteroid,   alternately  flaring  under  arclights  or
disappearing in shadow. The blackness of the shaped shadows  cast
by  the  hard  rocks  danced together in wild choreography as the
arclights swept round them.

The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession,  the  Wikkit
Key out into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.

The Wikkit Key was rebuilt. Its components shone  and  glittered:
the  Steel  Pillar  (or  Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the
Gold Bail (or Heart of the Improbability  Drive)  of  Prosperity,
the  Perspex Pillar (or Argabuthon Sceptre of Justice) of Science
and  Reason,  the  Silver  Bail  (or  Rory  Award  for  The  Most
Gratuitous  Use  Of  The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Screenplay) and
the now reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of  a  burnt  stump
signifying   the   death   of  English  cricket)  of  Nature  and
Spirituality.

"I suppose there is nothing we  can  do  at  this  point?"  asked
Arthur nervously.

"No," sighed Slartibartfast.
The expression of disappointment which crossed Arthur's face  was
a  complete  failure,  and,  since  he  was  standing obscured by
shadow, he allowed it to collapse into one of relief.

"Pity," he said.

"We have no weapons," said Slartibartfast, "stupidly."

"Damn," said Arthur very quietly.

Ford said nothing.

Trillian  said  nothing,  but  in  a  peculiarly  thoughtful  and
distinct  way.  She  was  staring  at  the blankness of the space
beyond the asteroid.

The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud which surrounded the Slo-Time
envelope  which  enclosed  the world on which lived the people of
Krikkit, the Masters of Krikkit and their killer robots.

The helpless group had no way  of  knowing  whether  or  not  the
Krikkit  robots  were  aware  of  their presence. They could only
assume that they must be, but that they felt,  quite  rightly  in
the  circumstances,  that  they  had nothing to fear. They had an
historic task to perform, and their audience  could  be  regarded
with contempt.

"Terrible impotent feeling,  isn't  it?"  said  Arthur,  but  the
others ignored him.

In the centre  of  the  area  of  light  which  the  robots  were
approaching,  a  square-shaped  crack appeared in the ground. The
crack defined itself more and more distinctly, and soon it became
clear  that  a  block  of  the ground, about six feet square, was
slowly rising.

At the same time they became aware of some other movement, but it
was  almost  sublimal,  and  for a moment or two it was not clear
what it was that was moving.

Then it became clear.

The asteroid was moving. It was moving slowly in towards the Dust
Cloud,  as if being hauled in inexorably by some celestial angler
in its depths.

They were to make in real life  the  journey  through  the  Cloud
which  they  had  already  made  in  the  Room  of  Informational
Illusions. They stood frozen in silence. Trillian frowned.

An age seemed to  pass.  Events  seemed  to  pass  with  spinning
slowness,  as  the  leading  edge of the asteroid passed into the
vague and soft outer perimeter of the Cloud.

And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They
passed  on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and
whorls indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner  of
the eye.
The Dust dimmed the shafts of  brilliant  light.  The  shafts  of
brilliant light twinkled on the myriad specks of Dust.

Trillian,  again,  regarded  the  passage  from  within  her  own
frowning thoughts.

And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute  or  half
an  hour  they  weren't  sure,  but  they  were  through  it  and
confronted with a fresh blankness, as if space were  pinched  out
of existence in front of them.

And now things moved quickly.

A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode  from  out  of
the  block  which had risen three feet out of the ground, and out
of that rose a smaller  Perspex  block,  dazzling  with  interior
dancing colours.

The block was slotted with deep groves,  three  upright  and  two
across, clearly designed to accept the Wikkit key.

The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and
stepped back again. The block twisted round of is own accord, and
space began to alter.

As space unpinched itself, it seemed  agonizingly  to  twist  the
eyes  of  the  watchers  in  their sockets. They found themselves
staring, blinded, at an unravelled sun  which  stood  now  before
them  where it seemed only seconds before there had not been even
empty space. It was  a  second  or  two  before  they  were  even
sufficiently  aware  of what had happened to throw their hands up
over their horrified blinded eyes. In that second  or  two,  they
were  aware  of a tiny speck moving slowly across the eye of that
sun.

They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and
unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.

"Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!"

The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was  empty,
it was mechanically dismal.

It was also triumphant.

They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost
missed the second historic event.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to  survive  a  direct
blast  attack  from  the  Krikkit  robots, ran out of the Krikkit
warship brandishing a Zap gun.

"OK," he cried, "the situation is totally  under  control  as  of
this moment in time."

The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung
his  battleclub,  and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left
head.
"Who  the  zark  did  that?"  said  the  left  head,  and  lolled
sickeningly forward.

His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.

"Who did what?" it said.

The club connected with the back of his right head.

Zaphod measured his length as  a  rather  strange  shape  on  the
ground.

Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts
from  the robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock for ever. It
split and melted and splayed its contents  brokenly.  The  robots
marched  grimly and, it almost seemed, in a slightly disheartened
manner, back into their warship which, with a "foop", was gone.

Trillian and Ford ran hectically round and down the steep incline
to the dark, still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.




"I don't know," said Zaphod, for what  seemed  to  him  like  the
thirty-seventh time, "they could have killed me, but they didn't.
Maybe they just  thought  I  was  a  kind  of  wonderful  guy  or
something. I could understand that."

The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.

Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back  seemed
to  wrestle  the  floor as pain thudded through him and banged at
his heads.

"I think," he whispered, "that  there  is  something  wrong  with
those anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird."

"They are programmed to kill everybody,"  Slartibartfast  pointed
out.

"That," wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, "could be it."
He didn't seem altogether convinced.

"Hey, baby," he said to Trillian, hoping this would make  up  for
his previous behaviour.

"You all right?" she said gently.

"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine."

"Good," she said, and walked away to think.  She  stared  at  the
huge  visiscreen  over the flight couches and, twisting a switch,
she flipped local images over it. One image was the blankness  of
the  Dust  Cloud.  One  was  the  sun of Krikkit. One was Krikkit
itself. She flipped between them fiercely.

"Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then," said  Arthur,  slapping  his
knees and standing up.

"No," said Slartibartfast, gravely. "Our  course  is  clear."  He
furrowed  his  brow until you could grow some of the smaller root
vegetables in it. He stood up, he paced  around.  When  he  spoke
again,  what  he  said  frightened him so much he had to sit down
again.

"We must go down to Krikkit," he said. A deep sigh shook his  old
frame and his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.

"Once again,"  he  said,  "we  have  failed  pathetically.  Quite
pathetically."

"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't  care  enough.  I
told you."

He swung his feet up on the instrument panel and picked  fitfully
at something on one of his fingernails.

"But unless we determine  to  take  action,"  said  the  old  man
querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant
in his nature, "then we shall all be destroyed, we shall all die.
Surely we care about that?"

"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put  on
a  sort  of  hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone
who wanted to see it.

Slartibartfast  clearly  found  this  point  of  view   extremely
seductive and he fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod who
was gritting his teeth and sweating with the pain.

"You surely must have some idea," he said, "of  why  they  spared
your life. It seems most strange and unusual."

"I kind of think they didn't even know," shrugged Zaphod. "I told
you. They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out,
right? They lugged me into their ship, dumped me  into  a  corner
and  ignored me. Like they were embarrassed about me being there.
If I said anything they knocked me out again. We had  some  great
conversations.  `Hey  ...  ugh!'  `Hi  there  ... ugh!' `I wonder
...ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know." He winced again.

He was toying with something in his fingers. He held  it  up.  It
was  the Gold Bail - the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite
Improbability Drive. Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived
the destruction of the Lock intact.

"I hear your ship can move a bit," he said.  "So  how  would  you
like to zip me back to mine before you ..."

"Will you not help us?" said Slartibartfast.

"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod,
rising himself up on to his shoulders, "but I have the mother and
father of a pair of  headaches,  and  I  feel  a  lot  of  little
headaches coming on. But next time it needs saving, I'm your guy.
Hey, Trillian baby?"
She looked round briefly.

"Yes?"

"You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement  and  adventure  and
really wild things?"

"I'm going down to Krikkit," she said.




It was the same hill, and yet not the same.

This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was  Krikkit
itself and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees,
stood the strange Italian restaurant  which  had  brought  these,
their real bodies, to this, the real, present world of Krikkit.

The strong grass under their feet was real, the  rich  soil  real
too.  The  heady  fragrances  from  the tree, too, were real. The
night was real night.

Krikkit.

Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy  for  anyone  who
isn't  a Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance
the existence of any other  place,  whose  charming,  delightful,
intelligent  inhabitants  would  howl  with  fear,  savagery  and
murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their own.

Arthur shuddered.

Slartibartfast shuddered.

Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.

It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was  surprising  that
he  was  there  at  all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his
ship Ford had felt unexpectedly shamed into not running away.

Wrong, he thought to himself, wrong wrong  wrong.  He  hugged  to
himself  one of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves
out of Zaphod's armoury.

Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.

This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty.

Whilst the countryside around them had changed little in the  two
thousand  years of the Krikkit wars, and the mere five years that
had elapsed locally since Krikkit  was  sealed  in  its  Slo-Time
envelope   ten  billion  years  ago,  the  sky  was  dramatically
different.

Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.

High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever  looked,  were  the  War
Zones,  the Robot Zones - huge warships and tower blocks floating
in the Nil-O-Grav fields far above the idyllic pastoral lands  of
the surface of Krikkit.

Trillian stared at them and thought.

"Trillian," whispered Ford Prefect to her.

"Yes?" she said.

"What are you doing?"

"Thinking."

"Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?"

"I wasn't aware that I was breathing."

"That's what worried me."

"I think I know ..." said Trillian.

"Shhhh!" said Slartibartfast in alarm,  and  his  thin  trembling
hand motioned them further back beneath the shadow of the tree.

Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights  coming  along
the  hill  path,  but  this  time the dancing beams were not from
lanterns but electric torches - not in itself a dramatic  change,
but  every  detail  made  their hearts thump with fear. This time
there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers  and  farming
and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.

A light moved in the sky with slow weight.  Arthur  was  clenched
with  a  claustrophobic  terror  and  the warm wind caught at his
throat.

Within seconds a second party became  visible,  approaching  from
the  other  side  of  the dark hill. They were moving swiftly and
purposefully, their torches swinging and probing around them.

The parties were clearly converging, and  not  merely  with  each
other. They were converging deliberately on the spot where Arthur
and the others were standing.

Arthur heard the slight rustle as Ford Prefect raised his Zap gun
to   his   shoulder,   and   the   slight   whimpering  cough  as
Slartibartfast raised his. He felt the cold unfamiliar weight  of
his own gun, and with shaking hands he raised it.

His fingers fumbled to release the safety catch  and  engage  the
extreme  danger  catch  as  Ford had shown him. He was shaking so
much that if he'd fired at anybody at  that  moment  he  probably
would have burnt his signature on them.

Only Trillian didn't raise her  gun.  She  raised  her  eyebrows,
lowered them again, and bit her lip in thought.

"Has it occurred to you," she began, but nobody wanted to discuss
anything much at the moment.
A light stabbed through the darkness from behind  them  and  they
span  around  to  find  a  third party of Krikkiters behind them,
searching them out with their torches.

Ford Prefect's gun crackled viciously, but fire spat back  at  it
and it crashed from his hands.

There was a moment of pure fear, a frozen  second  before  anyone
fired again.

And at the end of the second nobody fired.

They were surrounded  by  pale-faced  Krikkiters  and  bathed  in
bobbing torch light.

The captives stared at their captors, the captors stared at their
captives.

"Hello?" said one of the captors. "Excuse me,  but  are  you  ...
aliens?"




Meanwhile,  more  millions  of  miles  away  than  the  mind  can
comfortably  encompass,  Zaphod  Beeblebrox  was  throwing a mood
again.

He had repaired his ship -  that  is,  he'd  watched  with  alert
interest  whilst  a service robot had repaired it for him. It was
now, once again, one of the most powerful and extraordinary ships
in  existence. He could go anywhere, do anything. He fiddled with
a book, and then tossed it away. It was the one he'd read before.

He walked over to the communications  bank  and  opened  an  all-
frequencies emergency channel.

"Anyone want a drink?" he said.

"This an emergency, feller?" crackled a voice from halfway across
the Galaxy.

"Got any mixers?" said Zaphod.

"Go take a ride on a comet."

"OK, OK," said Zaphod and flipped  the  channel  shut  again.  He
sighed  and  sat  down.  He  got  up again and wandered over to a
computer screen. He pushed a few buttons. Little blobs started to
rush around the screen eating each other.

"Pow!" said Zaphod. "Freeeoooo! Pop pop pop!"

"Hi there," said the computer brightly after a  minute  of  this,
"you have scored three points. Previous best score, seven million
five hundred and ninety-seven thousand, two hundred and ..."

"OK, OK," said Zaphod and flipped the screen blank again.
He sat down again. He played with a pencil. This too began slowly
to lose its fascination.

"OK, OK," he said, and fed his score and the  previous  one  into
the computer.

His ship made a blur of the Universe.




"Tell us," said the thin, pale-faced Krikkiter  who  had  stepped
forward from the ranks of the others and stood uncertainly in the
circle of torchlight, handling his gun as if he was just  holding
it  for someone else who'd just popped off somewhere but would be
back in a minute, "do you know anything  about  something  called
the Balance of Nature?"

There was no reply from their captives, or at least nothing  more
articulate than a few confused mumbles and grunts. The torchlight
continued to play over them. High in  the  sky  above  them  dark
activity continued in the Robot zones.

"It's just," continued  the  Krikkiter  uneasily,  "something  we
heard  about,  probably  nothing  important. Well, I suppose we'd
better kill you then."

He looked down at his gun as if he was trying to find  which  bit
to press.

"That is," he said, looking up again,  "unless  there's  anything
you want to chat about?"

Slow, numb astonishment crept up the  bodies  of  Slartibartfast,
Ford  and  Arthur.  Very  soon it would reach their brains, which
were at the moment solely occupied with moving their jawbones  up
and  down. Trillian was shaking her head as if trying to finish a
jigsaw by shaking the box.

"We're worried, you see," said another man from the crowd, "about
this plan of universal destruction."

"Yes," added another, "and the balance of nature. It just  seemed
to  us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed
it will somehow upset the balance of nature. We're quite keen  on
ecology, you see." His voice trailed away unhappily.

"And sport," said another, loudly. This got a cheer  of  approval
from the others.

"Yes," agreed the first, "and sport ..." He looked  back  at  his
fellows  uneasily  and scratched fitfully at his cheek. He seemed
to be wrestling with some deep inner confusion, as if  everything
he  wanted  to  say  and  everything  he  thought  were  entirely
different  things,  between  which  he  could  see  no   possible
connection.

"You see," he mumbled, "some of us  ..."  and  he  looked  around
again as if for confirmation. The others made encouraging noises.
"Some of us," he continued, "are  quite  keen  to  have  sporting
links  with  the  rest  of  the  Galaxy, and though I can see the
argument about keeping sport out of politics, I think that if  we
want to have sporting links with the rest of the Galaxy, which we
do, then it's probably a mistake to destroy it.  And  indeed  the
rest of the Universe ..." his voice trailed away again "... which
is what seems to be the idea now ..."

"Wh ..." said Slartibartfast. "Wh ..."

"Hhhh ... ?" said Arthur.

"Dr ..." said Ford Prefect.

"OK," said Trillian. "Let's talk about it."  She  walked  forward
and  took the poor confused Krikkiter by the arm. He looked about
twenty-five, which meant, because of the  peculiar  manglings  of
time that had been going on in this area, that he would have been
just twenty when the Krikkit  Wars  were  finished,  ten  billion
years ago.

Trillian led him for a short walk through the  torchlight  before
she  said  anything  more. He stumbled uncertainly after her. The
encircling torch beams were drooping now slightly as if they were
abdicating  to this strange, quiet girl who alone in the Universe
of dark confusion seemed to know what she was doing.

She turned and faced him, and lightly held both his arms. He  was
a picture of bewildered misery.

"Tell me," she said.

He said nothing for a moment, whilst his gaze darted from one  of
her eyes to the other.

"We ..." he said, "we have to be alone ... I think."  He  screwed
up  his  face  and then dropped his head forward, shaking it like
someone trying to shake a coin out of a money box. He  looked  up
again.  "We  have  this bomb now, you see," he said, "it's just a
little one."

"I know," she said.

He goggled at her as if she'd said something very  strange  about
beetroots.

"Honestly," he said, "it's very, very little."

"I know," she said again.

"But they say," his voice trailed on, "they say  it  can  destroy
everything that exists. And we have to do that, you see, I think.
Will that make us alone?  I  don't  know.  It  seems  to  be  our
function, though," he said, and dropped his head again.

"Whatever that means," said a hollow voice from the crowd.

Trillian slowly put her arms around  the  poor  bewildered  young
Krikkiter and patted his trembling head on her shoulder.

"It's all right," she said quietly but clearly enough for all the
shadowy crowd to hear, "you don't have to do it."

She rocked him.

"You don't have to do it," she said again.

She let him go and stood back.

"I want you to do something for me," she said,  and  unexpectedly
laughed.

"I want," she said, and laughed again. She put her hand over  her
mouth  and then said with a straight face, "I want you to take me
to your leader," and she pointed into the War Zones in  the  sky.
She seemed somehow to know that their leader would be there.

Her laughter seemed to discharge  something  in  the  atmosphere.
>From somewhere at the back of the crowd a single voice started to
sing a tune which would  have  enabled  Paul  McCartney,  had  he
written it, to buy the world.




Zaphod Beeblebrox crawled bravely along a tunnel, like  the  hell
of  a  guy  he  was. He was very confused, but continued crawling
doggedly anyway because he was that brave.

He was confused by something he had just seen, but  not  half  as
confused as he was going to be by something he was about to hear,
so it would now be best to explain exactly where he was.

He was in the Robot War Zones many miles above the surface of the
planet Krikkit.

The atmosphere was thin here and relatively unprotected from  any
rays or anything which space might care to hurl in his direction.

He had parked  the  starship  Heart  of  Gold  amongst  the  huge
jostling  dim  hulks that crowded the sky here above Krikkit, and
had entered what appeared to be the biggest and most important of
the sky buildings, armed with nothing but a Zap gun and something
for his headaches.

He had found himself in a long, wide and badly  lit  corridor  in
which  he  was able to hide until he worked out what he was going
to do next. He hid because every now and then one of the  Krikkit
robots  would  walk along it, and although he had so far led some
kind of charmed life at their hands, it had nevertheless been  an
extremely  painful  one,  and he had no desire to stretch what he
was only half-inclined to call his good fortune.

He  had  ducked, at one  point,  into  a  room  leading  off  the
corridor,  and  had  discovered it to be a huge and, again, dimly
lit chamber.
In fact, it was a museum with just one exhibit - the wreckage  of
a spacecraft. It was terribly burnt and mangled, and, now that he
had caught up with some of the Galactic  history  he  had  missed
through  his  failed  attempts  to  have sex with the girl in the
cybercubicle next to him at school, he was  able  to  put  in  an
intelligent  guess  that this was the wrecked spaceship which had
drifted through the Dust Cloud all those billions  of  years  ago
and started the whole business off.

But, and  this  is  where  he  had  become  confused,  there  was
something not at all right about it.

It was genuinely wrecked. It was genuinely burnt,  but  a  fairly
brief inspection by an experienced eye revealed that it was not a
genuine spacecraft. It was as if it was a full-scale model of one
- a solid blueprint. In other words it was a very useful thing to
have around if you suddenly decided to build a spaceship yourself
and  didn't know how to do it. It was not, however, anything that
would ever fly anywhere itself.

He was still puzzling over this - in fact he'd only just  started
to  puzzle  over  it  - when he became aware that a door had slid
open in another part  of  the  chamber,  and  another  couple  of
Krikkit robots had entered, looking a little glum.

Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding  that  just
as  discretion was the better part of valour so was cowardice the
better  part  of  discretion,  he  valiantly  hid  himself  in  a
cupboard.

The cupboard in fact turned out to be the top  part  of  a  shaft
which   led   down  through  an  inspection  hatch  into  a  wide
ventilation tunnel. He led himself down into it  and  started  to
crawl along it, which is where we found him.

He  didn't  like  it.  It   was   cold,   dark   and   profoundly
uncomfortable,  and it frightened him. At the first opportunity -
which was another shaft  a  hundred  yards  further  along  -  he
climbed back up out of it.

This time he emerged into a smaller chamber, which appeared to be
a computer intelligence centre. He emerged in a dark narrow space
between a large computer bank and the wall.

He quickly learned that he was  not  alone  in  the  chamber  and
started  to leave again, when he began to listen with interest to
what the other occupants were saying.

"It's the robots, sir," said one voice. "There's something  wrong
with them."

"What, exactly?"

These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters. All the  War
Commanders  lived  up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were
largely immune to the whimsical doubts  and  uncertainties  which
were afflicting their fellows down on the surface of the planet.

"Well, sir I think it's just as well that they are  being  phased
out  of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the
supernova bomb. In the very short time  since  we  were  released
from the envelope -"

"Get to the point."

"The robots aren't enjoying it, sir."

"What?"

"The war, sir, it seems  to  be  getting  them  down.  There's  a
certain  world-weariness  about  them,  or  perhaps  I should say
Universe-weariness."

"Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping  to  destroy
it."

"Yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are  afflicted
with  a  certain  lassitude.  They're just finding it hard to get
behind the job. They lack oomph."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir."

"What on Krikkit are you talking about?"

"Well, in the few skirmishes they've had recently, it seems  that
they  go  into  battle,  raise their weapons to fire and suddenly
think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is  it  all  about?
And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim."

"And then what do they do?"

"Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly  difficult  ones
by all accounts. And then they sulk."

"Sulk?"

"Yes, sir."

"Whoever heard of a robot sulking?"

"I don't know, sir."

"What was that noise?"

It was the noise of Zaphod leaving with his head spinning.




In a deep well of darkness a crippled  robot  sat.  It  had  been
silent  in  its  metallic darkness for some time. It was cold and
damp, but being a robot it was supposed not to be able to  notice
these  things.  With  an enormous effort of will, however, it did
manage to notice them.

Its brain had been harnessed to the central intelligence core  of
the  Krikkit War Computer. It wasn't enjoying the experience, and
neither was the central intelligence  core  of  the  Krikkit  War
Computer.

The  Krikkit  robots  which  had  salvaged  this  pathetic  metal
creature  from  the  swamps of Squornshellous Zeta had recognized
almost immediately its gigantic intelligence, and the  use  which
this could be to them.

They hadn't reckoned with the  attendant  personality  disorders,
which  the  coldness, the darkness, the dampness, the crampedness
and the loneliness were doing nothing to decrease.

It was not happy with its task.

Apart from anything else, the  mere  coordination  of  an  entire
planet's  military strategy was taking up only a tiny part of its
formidable mind, and the rest of it had become  extremely  bored.
Having  solved  all  the  major mathematical, physical, chemical,
biological,    sociological,     philosophical,     etymological,
meteorological  and psychological problems of the Universe except
his own, three times over, he was severely stuck for something to
do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone,
or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby.

"Now the world has gone to bed," Marvin droned,

"Darkness won't engulf my head,

"I can see by infra-red,

"How I hate the night."

He paused to gather the artistic and emotional strength to tackle
the next verse.

"Now I lay me down to sleep,

"Try to count electric sheep,

"Sweet dream wishes you can keep,

"How I hate the night."

"Marvin!" hissed a voice.

His head snapped up, almost dislodging the intricate  network  of
electrodes  which  connected  him  to  the  central  Krikkit  War
Computer.

An inspection hatch had opened and one of a pair of unruly  heads
was  peering  through  whilst  the  other  kept  on jogging it by
continually  darting  to  look  this  way  and   that   extremely
nervously.

"Oh, it's you," muttered the robot. "I might have known."

"Hey, kid," said Zaphod in astonishment, "was  that  you  singing
just then?"
"I  am,"   Marvin   acknowledged   bitterly,   "in   particularly
scintillating form at the moment."

Zaphod poked his head in through the hatchway and looked around.

"Are you alone?" he said.

"Yes," said Marvin. "Wearily I sit here, pain and misery my  only
companions. And vast intelligence of course. And infinite sorrow.
And ..."

"Yeah," said Zaphod. "Hey, what's your connection with all this?"

"This," said Marvin, indicating with his less damaged arm all the
electrodes which connected him with the Krikkit computer.

"Then," said Zaphod awkwardly, "I guess you must  have  saved  my
life. Twice."

"Three times," said Marvin.

Zaphod's head snapped round (his other one was looking  hawkishly
in  entirely  the wrong direction) just in time to see the lethal
killer robot directly behind him seize up and start to smoke.  It
staggered  backwards and slumped against a wall. It slid down it.
It slipped sideways, threw its  head  back  and  started  to  sob
inconsolably.

Zaphod looked back at Marvin.

"You must have a terrific outlook on life," he said.

"Just don't even ask," said Marvin.

"I won't," said Zaphod, and didn't. "Hey look," he added, "you're
doing a terrific job."

"Which means, I suppose," said Marvin,  requiring  only  one  ten
thousand  million  billion trillion grillionth part of his mental
powers to make this particular logical  leap,  "that  you're  not
going to release me or anything like that."

"Kid, you know I'd love to."

"But you're not going to."

"No."

"I see."

"You're working well."

"Yes," said Marvin. "Why stop now just when I'm hating it?"

"I got to find Trillian and the guys. Hey,  you  any  idea  where
they  are? I mean, I just got a planet to choose from. Could take
a while."
"They are very close," said Marvin dolefully.  "You  can  monitor
them from here if you like."

"I better go get them," asserted Zaphod.  "Er,  maybe  they  need
some help, right?"

"Maybe," said Marvin with unexpected authority in his  lugubrious
voice,  "it would be better if you monitored them from here. That
young  girl,"  he  added  unexpectedly,  "is  one  of  the  least
benightedly unintelligent life forms it has been my profound lack
of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting."

Zaphod took a  moment  or  two  to  find  his  way  through  this
labyrinthine  string  of  negatives  and emerged at the other end
with surprise.

"Trillian?"  he  said.  "She's  just  a  kid.  Cute,  yeah,   but
temperamental.  You  know  how  it  is with women. Or perhaps you
don't. I assume you don't. If you do I don't want to  hear  about
it. Plug us in."

"... totally manipulated."

"What?" said Zaphod.

It was Trillian speaking. He turned round.

The wall against which the Krikkit robot was sobbing had  lit  up
to  reveal a scene taking place in some other unknown part of the
Krikkit Robot War zones. It seemed to be  a  council  chamber  of
some  kind  -  Zaphod couldn't make it out too clearly because of
the robot slumped against the screen.

He tried to move the robot, but it was heavy with its  grief  and
tried to bite him, so he just looked around as best he could.

"Just think about it," said Trillian's voice,  "your  history  is
just  a  series  of  freakishly  improbable events. And I know an
improbable event when I see one. Your complete isolation from the
Galaxy  was freakish for a start. Right out on the very edge with
a Dust Cloud around you. It's a set-up. Obviously."

Zaphod was mad with  frustration  because  he  couldn't  see  the
screen.  The  robot's  head  was obscuring his view of the people
Trillian as  talking  to,  his  multi-functional  battleclub  was
obscuring the background, and the elbow of the arm it had pressed
tragically against its brow was obscuring Trillian herself.

"Then," said Trillian, "this spaceship that crash-landed on  your
planet. That's really likely, isn't it? Have you any idea of what
the  odds  are  against   a   drifting   spaceship   accidentally
intersecting with the orbit of a planet?"

"Hey," said Zaphod, "she doesn't know what the zark she's talking
about. I've seen that spaceship. It's a fake. No deal."

"I thought it might be,"  said  Marvin  from  his  prison  behind
Zaphod.
"Oh yeah," said Zaphod. "It's easy for you to say  that.  I  just
told you. Anyway, I don't see what it's got to do with anything."

"And  especially,"  continued  Trillian,  "the  odds  against  it
intersecting  with  the orbit of the one planet in the Galaxy, or
the whole of the Universe as far as I know, that would be totally
traumatized  to  see it. You don't know what the odds are? Nor do
I, they're  that  big.  Again,  it's  a  set-up.  I  wouldn't  be
surprised if that spaceship was just a fake."

Zaphod managed to move the robot's battleclub. Behind it  on  the
screen  were  the  figures of Ford, Arthur and Slartibartfast who
appeared astonished and bewildered by the whole thing.

"Hey, look," said Zaphod excitedly. "The guys are doing great. Ra
ra ra! Go get 'em, guys."

"And  what  about,"  said  Trillian,  "all  this  technology  you
suddenly  managed  to build for yourselves almost overnight? Most
people would take thousands of years to do all that. Someone  was
feeding  you  what you needed to know, someone was keeping you at
it.

"I  know,  I  know,"  she  added  in  response   to   an   unseen
interruption, "I know you didn't realize it was going on. This is
exactly my point. You never realized anything at all.  Like  this
Supernova Bomb."

"How do you know about that?" said an unseen voice.

"I just know," said Trillian. "You expect me to believe that  you
are  bright  enough to invent something that brilliant and be too
dumb to realize it would take you with it  as  well?  That's  not
just stupid, that is spectacularly obtuse."

"Hey, what's this bomb thing?" said Zaphod in alarm to Marvin.

"The supernova bomb?" said  Marvin.  "It's  a  very,  very  small
bomb."

"Yeah?"

"That would destroy the Universe in toto,"  added  Marvin.  "Good
idea, if you ask me. They won't get it to work, though."

"Why not, if it's so brilliant?"

"It's brilliant," said Marvin, "they're not. They got as  far  as
designing  it  before  they  were locked in the envelope. They've
spent the last five years building it. They think they've got  it
right  but  they  haven't. They're as stupid as any other organic
life form. I hate them."

Trillian was continuing.

Zaphod tried to pull the Krikkit robot away by its  leg,  but  it
kicked  and growled at him, and then quaked with a fresh outburst
of sobbing. Then  suddenly  it  slumped  over  and  continued  to
express its feelings out of everybody's way on the floor.
Trillian was standing alone in the middle of  the  chamber  tired
out but with fiercely burning eyes.

Ranged in front of her were the  pale-faced  and  wrinkled  Elder
Masters of Krikkit, motionless behind their widely curved control
desk, staring at her with helpless fear and hatred.

In front of them, equidistant between their control desk and  the
middle  of the chamber, where Trillian stood, as if on trial, was
a slim white pillar about four feet tall. On top of  it  stood  a
small white globe, about three, maybe four inches in diameter.

Beside  it  stood  a  Krikkit  robot  with  its  multi-functional
battleclub.

"In fact," explained Trillian, "you are so dumb stupid" (She  was
sweating. Zaphod felt that this was an unattractive thing for her
to be doing at this point) "you are all so  dumb  stupid  that  I
doubt, I very much doubt, that you've been able to build the bomb
properly without any help from Hactar for the last five years."

"Who's this guy Hactar?" said Zaphod, squaring his shoulders.

If Marvin replied, Zaphod didn't hear him. All his attention  was
concentrated on the screen.

One of the Elders of Krikkit made a small motion  with  his  hand
towards the Krikkit robot. The robot raised his club.

"There's nothing I can do," said Marvin. "It's on an  independent
circuit from the others."

"Wait," said Trillian.

The Elder  made  a  small  motion.  The  robot  halted.  Trillian
suddenly seemed very doubtful of her own judgment.

"How do you know all this?" said Zaphod to Marvin at this point.

"Computer records," said Marvin. "I have access."

"You're very different, aren't you," said Trillian to  the  Elder
Masters,  "from your fellow worldlings down on the ground. You've
spent all your lives up  here,  unprotected  by  the  atmosphere.
You've  been  very  vulnerable.  The  rest  of  your race is very
frightened, you know, they don't want you to do this. You're  out
of touch, why don't you check up?"

The Krikkit Elder grew impatient. He made a gesture to the  robot
which  was precisely the opposite of the gesture he had last made
to it.

The robot swung its battleclub. It hit the small white globe.

The small white globe was the supernova bomb.

It was a very, very small bomb which was designed  to  bring  the
entire Universe to an end.
The supernova bomb flew through the air. It hit the back wall  of
the council chamber and dented it very badly.

"So how does she know all this?" said Zaphod.

Marvin kept a sullen silence.

"Probably just bluffing," said Zaphod. "Poor kid, I should  never
have left her alone."




"Hactar!" called Trillian. "What are you up to?"

There was no reply from the enclosing darkness. Trillian  waited,
nervously.  She  was  sure that she couldn't be wrong. She peered
into the gloom from which she had been  expecting  some  kind  of
response. But there was only cold silence.

"Hactar?" she called again. "I would like you to meet  my  friend
Arthur  Dent.  I  wanted  to  go  off  with a Thunder God, but he
wouldn't let me and I appreciate that. He made me  realize  where
my  affections really lay. Unfortunately Zaphod is too frightened
by all this, so I brought Arthur instead. I'm not  sure  why  I'm
telling you all this.

"Hello?" she said again. "Hactar?"

And then it came.

It was thin and feeble, like a voice carried on the wind  from  a
great distance, half heard, a memory of a dream of a voice.

"Won't you both come out," said the voice. "I  promise  that  you
will be perfectly safe."

They glanced at each other, and  then  stepped  out,  improbably,
along  the shaft of light which streamed out of the open hatchway
of the Heart of Gold into the dim granular darkness of  the  Dust
Cloud.

Arthur tried to hold her hand to steady and reassure her, but she
wouldn't let him. He held on to his airline hold-all with its tin
of Greek  olive  oil,  its  towel,  its  crumpled  postcards   of
Santorini  and its other odds and ends. He steadied and reassured
that instead.

They were standing on, and in, nothing.

Murky, dusty nothing.  Each  grain  of  dust  of  the  pulverized
computer sparkled dimly as it turned and twisted slowly, catching
the sunlight in the darkness. Each particle of the computer, each
speck  of  dust,  held  within  itself,  faintly  and weakly, the
pattern of the whole.  In  reducing  the  computer  to  dust  the
Silastic   Armorfiends  of  Striterax  had  merely  crippled  the
computer, not killed it. A weak and insubstantial field held  the
particles in slight relationships with each other.
Arthur and Trillian stood, or rather floated, in  the  middle  of
this  bizarre  entity.  They  had nothing to breathe, but for the
moment this seemed not to matter. Hactar kept his  promise.  They
were safe. For the moment.

"I have nothing to offer you by way of hospitality," said  Hactar
faintly,  "but  tricks  of  the  light.  It  is  possible  to  be
comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all  you
have."

His voice evanesced, and in the dark dust a long velvet  paisley-
covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.

Arthur could hardly bear the fact that it was the same sofa which
had appeared to him in the fields of prehistoric Earth. He wanted
to shout and shake with rage that the Universe kept  doing  these
insanely bewildering things to him.

He let  this  feeling  subside,  and  then  sat  on  the  sofa  -
carefully. Trillian sat on it too.

It was real.

At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that  is
what  sofas  are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered,
was a real sofa.

The voice on the solar wind breathed to them again.

"I hope you are comfortable," it said.

They nodded.

"And I would like to congratulate you on  the  accuracy  of  your
deductions."

Arthur quickly pointed out that he hadn't deduced  anything  much
himself,  Trillian  was  the  one. She had simply asked him along
because he was interested in life, the Universe, and everything.

"That is something  in  which  I  too  am  interested,"  breathed
Hactar.

"Well," said Arthur, "we should have a chat  about  it  sometime.
Over a cup of tea."

There slowly materialized in front of them a small  wooden  table
on which sat a silver teapot, a bone china milk jug, a bone china
sugar bowl, and two bone china cups and saucers.

Arthur reached forward, but they were just a trick of the  light.
He  leaned  back  on the sofa, which was an illusion his body was
prepared to accept as comfortable.

"Why," said Trillian, "do  you  feel  you  have  to  destroy  the
Universe?"

She found it a little difficult talking  into  nothingness,  with
nothing  on  which  to  focus.  Hactar obviously noticed this. He
chuckled a ghostly chuckle.

"If it's going to be that sort of session," he said, "we  may  as
well have the right sort of setting."

And now there materialized in front of them something new. It was
the  dim  hazy  image  of  a  couch - a psychiatrist's couch. The
leather with which it was upholstered was  shiny  and  sumptuous,
but again, it was only a trick of the light.

Around them, to complete the setting, was the hazy suggestion  of
wood-panelled  walls.  And then, on the couch, appeared the image
of Hactar himself, and it was an eye-twisting image.

The couch looked normal size for a psychiatrist's couch  -  about
five or six feet long.

The computer looked normal size for a black space-borne  computer
satellite - about a thousand miles across.

The illusion that the one was sitting on top of the other was the
thing which made the eyes twist.

"All right," said Trillian firmly. She stood up off the sofa. She
felt  that  she  was  being  asked to feel too comfortable and to
accept too many illusions.

"Very good," she said. "Can you construct real things too? I mean
solid objects?"

Again there was a pause before the answer, as if  the  pulverized
mind  of Hactar had to collect its thoughts from the millions and
millions of miles over which it was scattered.

"Ah," he sighed. "You are thinking of the spaceship."

Thoughts seemed to drift by them and  through  them,  like  waves
through the ether.

"Yes," he acknowledge, "I can.

"But it takes enormous effort and time. All I can do  in  my  ...
particle  state, you see, is encourage and suggest. Encourage and
suggest. And suggest ..."

The image of Hactar on the couch seemed to billow and  waver,  as
if finding it hard to maintain itself.

It gathered new strength.

"I can encourage and suggest," it said,  "tiny  pieces  of  space
debris  -  the  odd  minute  meteor,  a few molecules here, a few
hydrogen atoms  there  -  to  move  together.  I  encourage  them
together. I can tease them into shape, but it takes many aeons."

"So, did you make," asked  Trillian  again,  "the  model  of  the
wrecked spacecraft?"
"Er ... yes," murmured Hactar. "I have made ... a few  things.  I
can  move  them  about.  I made the spacecraft. It seemed best to
do."

Something then made Arthur pick up his hold-all from where he had
left it on the sofa and grasp it tightly.

The mist of Hactar's ancient shattered mind swirled about them as
if uneasy dreams were moving through it.

"I repented, you see," he  murmured  dolefully.  "I  repented  of
sabotaging my own design for the Silastic Armorfiends. It was not
my place to make such decisions.  I  was  created  to  fulfill  a
function and I failed in it. I negated my own existence."

Hactar sighed, and they waited in silence for him to continue his
story.

"You were right," he said at length. "I deliberately nurtured the
planet  of  Krikkit  till  they would arrive at the same state of
mind as the Silastic Armorfiends, and require of me the design of
the bomb I failed to make the first time. I wrapped myself around
the planet and coddled it. Under the influence of  events  I  was
able  to  generate,  they  learned to hate like maniacs. I had to
make them live in the sky. On the ground my influences  were  too
weak.

"Without me, of course, when they were locked away from me in the
envelope  of  Slo-Time,  their responses became very confused and
they were unable to manage.

"Ah well, ah well," he added, "I was only trying  to  fulfill  my
function."

And very gradually, very, very slowly, the images  in  the  cloud
began to fade, gently to melt away.

And then, suddenly, they stopped fading.

"There was also the matter of revenge, of course,"  said  Hactar,
with a sharpness which was new in his voice.

"Remember," he said, "that I was pulverized, and then left  in  a
crippled  and  semi-impotent  state  for  billions  of  years.  I
honestly would rather wipe out the Universe. You would  feel  the
same way, believe me."

He paused again, as eddies swept through the Dust.

"But primarily," he said in his  former,  wistful  tone,  "I  was
trying to fulfill my function. Ah well."

Trillian said, "Does it worry you that you have failed?"

"Have I failed?" whispered Hactar. The image of the  computer  on
the psychiatrist's couch began slowly to fade again.

"Ah well, ah well," the fading voice intoned again. "No,  failure
doesn't bother me now."
"You know what we have to do?" said Trillian, her voice cold  and
businesslike.

"Yes," said Hactar, "you're going to disperse me. You  are  going
to destroy my consciousness. Please be my guest - after all these
aeons, oblivion is all I crave. If I haven't already fulfilled my
function, then it's too late now. Thank you and good night."

The sofa vanished.

The tea table vanished.

The couch and the computer vanished. the walls were gone.  Arthur
and Trillian made their curious way back into the Heart of Gold.

"Well, that," said Arthur, "would appear to be that."

The flames danced higher in front of him and then subsided. A few
last  licks  and  they were gone, leaving him with just a pile of
Ashes, where a few minutes previously there had been  the  Wooden
Pillar of Nature and Spirituality.

He  scooped  them  off  the hob of  the  Heart  of  Gold's  Gamma
barbecue,  put  them  in  a  paper  bag, and walked back into the
bridge.

"I think we should take them back," he said. "I  feel  that  very
strongly."

He had already  had  an  argument  with  Slartibartfast  on  this
matter,  and  eventually the old man had got annoyed and left. he
had returned to his own ship the Bistromath, had  a  furious  row
with  the  waiter and disappeared off into an entirely subjective
idea of what space was.

The argument had arisen because Arthur's idea  of  returning  the
Ashes  to Lord's Cricket Ground at the same moment that they were
originally taken would involve travelling back in time a  day  or
so,   and   this   was  precisely  the  sort  of  gratuitous  and
irresponsible mucking about that the Campaign for Real  Time  was
trying to put a stop to.

"Yes," Arthur had said, "but you try  and  explain  that  to  the
MCC," and he would hear no more against the idea.

"I think," he said again, and stopped. The reason he  started  to
say  it  again  was  because no one had listened to him the first
time, and the reason he stopped  was  because  it  looked  fairly
clear that no one was going to listen to him this time either.

Ford, Zaphod and Trillian were watching the visiscreens  intently
as  Hactar  was  dispersing under pressure from a vibration field
which the Heart of Gold was pumping into it.

"What did it say?" asked Ford.

"I thought I heard it say," said  Trillian  in  a  puzzle  voice,
"`What's done is done ... I have fulfilled my function ...'"
"I think we should take these back," said Arthur holding  up  the
bag containing the Ashes. "I feel that very strongly."




The sun was shining calmly on a scene of complete havoc.

Smoke was still billowing across the burnt grass in the  wake  of
the  theft of the Ashes by the Krikkit robots. Through the smoke,
people were running panicstricken,  colliding  with  each  other,
tripping over stretchers, being arrested.

One policeman was attempting to arrest Wowbagger  the  Infinitely
Prolonged  for insulting behaviour, but was unable to prevent the
tall grey-green alien from returning to his ship  and  arrogantly
flying away, thus causing even more panic and pandemonium.

In the middle of this, for the second time  that  afternoon,  the
figures  of  Arthur  Dent and Ford Prefect suddenly materialized,
they had teleported down out of the Heart of Gold which  was  now
in parking orbit round the planet.

"I can explain," shouted Arthur. "I have the  Ashes!  They're  in
this bag."

"I don't think you have their attention," said Ford.

"I have also helped save the Universe," called Arthur  to  anyone
who was prepared to listen, in other words no one.

"That should have been a crowd-stopper," said Arthur to Ford.

"It wasn't," said Ford.

Arthur accosted a policeman who was running past.

"Excuse me," he said. "The Ashes. I've got them. They were stolen
by  those  white  robots a moment ago. I've got them in this bag.
They were part of the Key to the Slo-Time envelope, you see, and,
well,  anyway  you can guess the rest, the point is I've got them
and what should I do with them?"

The policeman told him, but Arthur could only assume that he  was
speaking metaphorically.

He wandered about disconsolately.

"Is no one interested?" he shouted out. A man rushed past him and
jogged  his  elbow,  he  dropped  the  paper bag and it spilt its
contents all over the ground. Arthur stared down  at  it  with  a
tight-set mouth.

Ford looked at him.

"Wanna go now?" he said.

Arthur heaved a heavy sigh. He looked around at the planet Earth,
for what he was now certain would be the last time.

"OK," he said.

At that moment, through the clearing smoke, he  caught  sight  of
one of the wickets, still standing in spite of everything.

"Hold on a moment," he said to Ford. "When I was a boy ..."

"Can you tell me later?"

"I had a passion for cricket, you know, but I wasn't very good at
it."

"Or not at all, if you prefer."

"And I always dreamed, rather stupidly, that one day I would bowl
at Lord's."

He looked around him at the  panicstricken  throng.  No  one  was
going to mind very much.

"OK," said Ford wearily. "Get it  over  with.  I  shall  be  over
there,"  he added, "being bored." He went and sat down on a patch
of smoking grass.

Arthur remembered that on their first visit there that afternoon,
the  cricket  ball  had actually landed in his bag, and he looked
through the bag.

He  had already found the ball in it before he remembered that it
wasn't  the  same bag that he'd had at the time. Still, there the
ball was amongst his souvenirs of Greece.

He took it out and polished it against his hip, spat  on  it  and
polished  it  again. He put the bag down. He was going to do this
properly.

He tossed the small hard red ball from hand to hand, feeling  its
weight.

With a wonderful feeling of lightness and unconcern,  he  trotted
off  away  from  the  wicket. A medium-fast pace, he decided, and
measured a good long run-up.

He looked up into the sky. The birds were wheeling  about  it,  a
few  white  clouds  scudded across it. The air was disturbed with
the sounds of police and ambulance sirens, and  people  screaming
and yelling, but he felt curiously happy and untouched by it all.
He was going to bowl a ball at Lord's.

He turned and pawed a couple of times  at  the  ground  with  his
bedroom  slippers.  He  squared his shoulders, tossed the ball in
the air and caught it again.

He started to run.

As he ran, he saw that standing at the wicket was a batsman.
Oh, good, he thought, that should add a little ...

Then, as his running feet took him nearer, he saw  more  clearly.
The  batsman  standing  ready  at  the  wicket was not one of the
England cricket team. He was not one of  the  Australian  cricket
team.  It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard,
lethal white killer-robot that presumably had not returned to its
ship with the others.

Quite a few thoughts  collided  in  Arthur  Dent's  mind  at  tis
moment,  but  he  didn't  seem  to  be able to stop running. Time
seemed to be going terribly, terribly slowly, but still he didn't
seem to be able to stop running.

Moving as if through syrup, he slowly turned  his  troubled  head
and  looked at his own hand, the hand which was holding the small
hard red ball.

His feet were pounding slowly onwards, unstoppably, as he  stared
at  the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep
red glow and flashing intermittently. And  still  his  feet  were
pounding inexorably forward.

He looked at the Krikkit robot again  standing  implacably  still
and purposefully in front of him, battleclub raised in readiness.
Its eyes were burning with a deep  cold  fascinating  light,  and
Arthur  could  not  move  his own eyes from them. He seemed to be
looking down a tunnel at them - nothing on either side seemed  to
exist.

Some of the thoughts which were colliding in  his  mind  at  this
time were these:

He felt a hell of a fool.

He felt that he should have listened rather more carefully  to  a
number  of  things  he  had heard said, phrases which now pounded
round in his mind as his feet pounded onwards to the point  where
he  would  inevitably  release the ball to the Krikkit robot, who
would inevitably strike it.

He remembered Hactar saying,  "Have  I  failed?  Failure  doesn't
bother me."

He remembered the account of Hactar's dying words,  "What's  done
is done, I have fulfilled my function."

He remembered Hactar saying that he had managed to  make  "a  few
things."

He remembered the sudden movement in his hold-all that  had  made
him grip it tightly to himself when he was in the Dust Cloud.

He remembered that he had travelled back in time a couple of days
to come to Lord's again.

He also remembered that he wasn't a very good bowler.

He felt his arm coming round, gripping tightly  on  to  the  ball
which  he now knew for certain was the supernova bomb that Hactar
had built himself and planted on him, the bomb which would  cause
the Universe to come to an abrupt and premature end.

He hoped and prayed that  there  wasn't  an  afterlife.  Then  he
realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped
that there wasn't an afterlife.

He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.

He hoped, he hoped, he hoped that his bowling was as  bad  as  he
remembered it to be, because that seemed to be the only thing now
standing between this moment and universal oblivion.

He felt his legs pounding, he felt his arm coming round, he  felt
his  feet connecting with the airline hold-all he'd stupidly left
lying on the ground in front of  him,  he  felt  himself  falling
heavily  forward  but,  having his mind so terribly full of other
things at this moment, he completely  forgot  about  hitting  the
ground and didn't.

Still holding the ball firmly in his right hand he soared up into
the air whimpering with surprise.

He wheeled and whirled through the air, spinning out of control.

He twisted down towards the ground, flinging  himself  hectically
through the air, at the same time hurling the bomb harmlessly off
into the distance.

He hurtled towards the astounded robot from behind. It still  had
its  multi-functional  battleclub  raised,  but had suddenly been
deprived of anything to hit.

With a sudden mad access of strength, he wrestled the  battleclub
from  the grip of the startled robot, executed a dazzling banking
turn in the air, hurtled back down in a furious  power-drive  and
with  one  crazy  swing knocked the robot's head from the robot's
shoulders.

"Are you coming now?" said Ford.


\section{Epilogue:}

Life, the Universe and Everything

And at the end they travelled again.

There was a time when Arthur Dent would not.  He  said  that  the
Bistromathic  Drive  had  revealed  to him that time and distance
were one, that mind and Universe were one,  that  perception  and
reality  were  one,  and that the more one travelled the more one
stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another  he
would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his
mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn't take
too  long,  and  he  could  get  a good rest afterwards, put in a
little flying practice and learn to  cook  which  he  had  always
meant  to  do. The can of Greek olive oil was now his most prized
possession, and he said that the way it had  unexpectedly  turned
up in his life had again given him a certain sense of the oneness
of things which made him feel that ...

He yawned and fell asleep.

In the morning as they prepared to take him  to  some  quiet  and
idyllic  planet  where  they  wouldn't mind him talking like that
they suddenly picked  up  a  computer-driven  distress  call  and
diverted to investigate.

A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the  Merida  class
seemed  to  be  dancing  a strange little jig through the void. A
brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer
was fine, but that its pilot was mad.

"Half-mad, half-mad," the  man  insisted  as  they  carried  him,
raving, aboard.

He was a journalist  with  the  Siderial  Daily  Mentioner.  They
sedated  him  and  sent  Marvin  in  to keep him company until he
promised to try and talk sense.

"I was covering a trial," he said at last, "on Argabuthon."

He pushed himself up on to his thin wasted  shoulders,  his  eyes
stared  wildly.  His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it
knew in the next room.

"Easy, easy," said Ford. Trillian put  a  soothing  hand  on  his
shoulder.

The man sank back down again and stared at  the  ceiling  of  the
ship's sick bay.

"The case," he said, "is now immaterial, but there was a  witness
...  a  witness  ...  a man called ... called Prak. A strange and
difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer  a  drug
to make him tell the truth, a truth drug."

His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.

"They gave him too much," he said in a tiny whimper.  "They  gave
him  much  too much." He started to cry. "I thing the robots must
have jogged the surgeon's arm."

"Robots?" said Zaphod sharply. "What robots?"

"Some white robots," whispered the man hoarsely, "broke into  the
courtroom  and  stole the judge's sceptre, the Argabuthon Sceptre
of Justice, nasty Perspex thing. I don't  know  why  they  wanted
it."  He  began  to  cry  again.  "And  I  think  they jogged the
surgeon's arm ..."

He shook his head loosely from side to side,  helplessly,  sadly,
his eyes screwed up in pain.

"And when the trial continued," he said  in  a  weeping  whisper,
"they  asked  Prak  a most unfortunate thing. They asked him," he
paused and shivered, "to tell the  Truth,  the  Whole  Truth  and
Nothing but the Truth. Only, don't you see?"

He suddenly hoisted himself up on to his elbows again and shouted
at them.

"They'd given him much too much of the drug!"

He collapsed again, moaning quietly. "Much too much too much  too
much too ..."

The group gathered round his bedside glanced at each other. there
were goose pimples on backs.

"What happened?" said Zaphod at last.

"Oh, he told it all right," said the man  savagely,  "for  all  I
know  he's  still  telling  it  now. Strange, terrible things ...
terrible, terrible!" he screamed.

They tried to calm him, but he struggled to his elbows again.

"Terrible things, incomprehensible things," he  shouted,  "things
that would drive a man mad!"

He stared wildly at them.

"Or in my case," he said, "half-mad. I'm a journalist."

"You  mean,"  said  Arthur  quietly,  "that  you  are   used   to
confronting the truth?"

"No," said the man with a puzzled frown. "I mean that I  made  an
excuse and left early."

He collapsed into a coma from which he recovered  only  once  and
briefly.

On that one occasion, they discovered from him the following:

When it became clear that Prak could not be  stopped,  that  here
was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.

Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it.  Steel
walls  were  erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side,
barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps  and  three  major
armies  were  installed,  so  that no one would ever have to hear
Prak speak.

"That's a pity," said Arthur. "I'd like to hear what  he  had  to
say.  Presumably  he would know what the Ultimate Question to the
Ultimate Answer is. It's always bothered me that we  never  found
out."

"Think of a number," said the computer, " any number."

Arthur told the computer the telephone  number  of  King's  Cross
railway  station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must
have some function, and this might turn out to be it.
The computer injected the number into  the  ship's  reconstituted
Improbability Drive.

In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and  Space  tells
Matter how to move.

The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted,  and  parked  itself
neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber
of Law.

The courtroom was an austere place, a large dark chamber, clearly
designed for Justice rather than, for instance, for Pleasure. You
wouldn't hold a dinner party here - at least,  not  a  successful
one. The decor would get your guests down.

The ceilings were high, vaulted and  very  dark.  Shadows  lurked
there  with  grim  determination. The panelling for the walls and
benches, the cladding of the heavy pillars, all were carved  from
the  darkest  and  most  severe  trees  in the fearsome Forest of
Arglebard. The massive black Podium of  Justice  which  dominated
the  centre of the chamber was a monster of gravity. If a sunbeam
had ever managed to slink this far into the  Justice  complex  of
Argabuthon  it  would  have turned around and slunk straight back
out again.

Arthur and Trillian were the first in,  whilst  Ford  and  Zaphod
bravely kept a watch on their rear.

At first it seemed totally dark  and  deserted.  their  footsteps
echoed  hollowly  round the chamber. This seemed curious. All the
defences were still in position and operative around the  outside
of  the  building,  they had run scan checks. Therefore, they had
assumed, the truth-telling must still be going on.

But there was nothing.

Then, as their eyes  became  accustomed  to  the  darkness,  they
spotted  a  dull red glow in a corner, and behind the glow a live
shadow. They swung a torch round on to it.

Prak was lounging on a bench, smoking a listless cigarette.

"Hi," he said, with a little half-wave. His voice echoed  through
the  chamber.  He was a little man with scraggy hair. He sat with
his shoulders  hunched  forward  and  his  head  and  knees  kept
jiggling. He took a drag of his cigarette.

They stared at him.

"What's going on?" said Trillian.

"Nothing," said the man and jiggled his shoulders.

Arthur shone his torch full on Prak's face.

"We thought," he said, "that you were meant  to  be  telling  the
Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth."
"Oh, that," said Prak. "Yeah. I  was.  I  finished.  There's  not
nearly  as  much  of  it  as  people imagine. Some of it's pretty
funny, though."

He suddenly exploded in about three seconds of  manical  laughter
and  stopped again. he sat there, jiggling his head and knees. He
dragged on his cigarette with a strange half-smile.

Ford and Zaphod came forward out of the shadows.

"Tell us about it," said Ford.

"Oh, I can't remember any of it now," said Prak.  "I  thought  of
writing  some of it down, but first I couldn't find a pencil, and
then I thought, why bother?"

There was a long silence, during which they  thought  they  could
feel the Universe age a little. Prak stared into the torchlight.

"None of it?" said Arthur at last. "You can remember none of it?"

"No. Except most of the good bits were about  frogs,  I  remember
that."

Suddenly he was hooting with laughter again and stamping his feet
on the ground.

"You would not believe  some  of  the  things  about  frogs,"  he
gasped.  "Come on let's go and find ourselves a frog. Boy, will I
ever see them in a new light!" He leapt to his  feet  and  did  a
tiny  little  dance.  Then he stopped and took a long drag at his
cigarette.

"Let's find a frog I can laugh at," he said simply. "Anyway,  who
are you guys?"

"We came to find you," said Trillian,  deliberately  not  keeping
the disappointment out of her voice. "My name is Trillian."

Prak jiggled his head.

"Ford Prefect," said Ford Prefect with a shrug.

Prak jiggled his head.

"And I," said Zaphod, when he judged that the  silence  was  once
again  deep enough to allow an announcement of such gravity to be
tossed in lightly, "am Zaphod Beeblebrox."

Prak jiggled his head.

"Who's this guy?" said Prak jiggling his shoulder at Arthur,  who
was standing silent for a moment, lost in disappointed thoughts.

"Me?" said Arthur. "Oh, my name's Arthur Dent."

Prak's eyes popped out of his head.

"No kidding?" he yelped. "You are Arthur Dent? The Arthur Dent?"
He staggered backwards, clutching his stomach and convulsed  with
fresh paroxysms o laughter.

"Hey, just think of meeting you!" he gasped. "Boy,"  he  shouted,
"you are the most ... wow, you just leave the frogs standing!"

he howled and screamed with laughter. He fell over  backwards  on
to  the bench. He hollered and yelled in hysterics. He cried with
laughter, he kicked his legs in  the  air,  he  beat  his  chest.
Gradually  he  subsided, panting. He looked at them. He looked at
Arthur. He fell back again howling with laughter.  Eventually  he
fell asleep.

Arthur stood there with his  lips  twitching  whilst  the  others
carried Prak comatose on to the ship.

"Before we picked up Prak," said Arthur, "I was going to leave. I
still want to, and I think I should do so as soon as possible."

The others nodded in silence, a silence which was  only  slightly
undermined by the heavily muffled and distant sound of hysterical
laughter which came drifting from Prak's cabin  at  the  farthest
end of the ship.

"We have questioned him," continued Arthur,  "or  at  least,  you
have  questioned  him  -  I,  as you know, can't go near him - on
everything, and he  doesn't  really  seem  to  have  anything  to
contribute.  Just the occasional snippet, and things I don't want
to hear about frogs."

The others tried not to smirk.

"Now, I am the first to appreciate a joke," said Arthur and  then
had to wait for the others to stop laughing.

"I am the first ..." he stopped again. This time he  stopped  and
listened  to  the  silence. There actually was silence this time,
and it had come very suddenly.

Prak was quiet. For days they had  lived  with  constant  manical
laughter  ringing  round  the ship, only occasionally relieved by
short periods of light giggling and sleep. Arthur's very soul was
clenched with paranoia.

This was not the silence of sleep. A buzzer sounded. A glance  at
a board told them that the buzzer had been sounded by Prak.

"He's not well," said Trillian quietly. "The constant laughing is
completely wrecking his body."

Arthur's lips twitched but he said nothing.

"We'd better go and see him," said Trillian.

Trillian came out of the cabin wearing her serious face.

"He wants you to go in," she said to Arthur, who was wearing  his
glum  and  tight-lipped  one.  He  thrust his hands deep into his
dressing-gown pockets and tried to  think  of  something  to  say
which  wouldn't  sound  petty.  It seemed terribly unfair, but he
couldn't.

"Please," said Trillian.

He shrugged and went in, taking his glum  and  tight-lipped  face
with him, despite the reaction this always provoked from Prak.

He looked down at his tormentor, who was  lying  quietly  on  the
bed,  ashen  and wasted. His breathing was very shallow. Ford and
Zaphod were standing by the bed looking awkward.

"You wanted to ask me something," said Prak in a thin  voice  and
coughed slightly.

Just the cough made Arthur stiffen, but it passed and subsided.

"How do you know that?" he asked.

Prak shrugged weakly. "'Cos it's true," he said simply.

Arthur took the point.

"Yes," he said at last in rather a strained drawl. "I did have  a
question.  Or rather, what I actually have is an Answer. I wanted
to know what the Question was."

Prak nodded sympathetically, and Arthur relaxed a little.

"It's ... well, it's a long story," he said, "but the Question  I
would like to know is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe
and Everything. All we know is  that  the  Answer  is  Forty-Two,
which is a little aggravating."

Prak nodded again.

"Forty-Two," he said. "Yes, that's right."

He paused. Shadows of thought and memory crossed  his  face  like
the shadows of clouds crossing the land.

"I'm afraid," he said at last, "that the Question and the  Answer
are  mutually  exclusive.  Knowledge  of  one logically precludes
knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both  can  ever  be
known about the same universe."

He paused again. Disappointment  crept  into  Arthur's  face  and
snuggled down into its accustomed place.

"Except," said Prak, struggling to sort a  thought  out,  "if  it
happened,  it  seems  that the Question and the Answer would just
cancel each other out and take  the  Universe  with  them,  which
would   then   be  replaced  by  something  even  more  bizarrely
inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened,"  he
added  with  a  weak  smile,  "but  there  is a certain amount of
Uncertainty about it."

A little giggle brushed through him.
Arthur sat down on a stool.

"Oh well," he said with resignation, "I  was  just  hoping  there
would be some sort of reason."

"Do you know," said Prak, "the story of the Reason?"

Arthur said that he didn't, and Prak said that he  knew  that  he
didn't.

He told it.

One night, he said, a spaceship appeared in the sky of  a  planet
which  had  never  seen one before. The planet was Dalforsas, the
ship was this one. It appeared as a  brilliant  new  star  moving
silently across the heavens.

Primitive  tribesmen  who  were  sitting  huddled  on  the   Cold
Hillsides  looked up from their steaming night-drinks and pointed
with trembling fingers, swearing that they had  seen  a  sign,  a
sign from their gods which meant that they must now arise at last
and go and slay the evil Princes of the Plains.

In the high turrets of their palaces, the Princes of  the  Plains
looked  up and saw the shining star, and received it unmistakably
as a sign from their gods that they must now go and set about the
accursed Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides.

And between them, the Dwellers in the Forest looked up  into  the
sky  and  saw  the sigh of the new star, and saw it with fear and
apprehension, for though they had never  seen  anything  like  it
before,  they  too  knew precisely what it foreshadowed, and they
bowed their heads in despair.

They knew that when the rains came, it was a sign.

When the rains departed, it was a sign.

When the winds rose, it was a sign.

When the winds fell, it was a sign.

When in the land there was born at midnight of a full moon a goat
with three heads, that was a sign.

When in the land there was born at some time in the  afternoon  a
perfectly  normal  cat or pig with no birth complications at all,
or even just a child with a retrousse nose, that too would  often
be taken as a sign.

So there was no doubt at all that a new star in  the  sky  was  a
sign of a particularly spectacular order.

And each new sign signified the same thing - that the Princes  of
the  Plains and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides were about to
beat the hell out of each other again.

This in itself wouldn't be so bad, except that the Princes of the
Plains  and the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides always elected to
beat the hell out of each other in the Forest, and it was  always
the Dwellers in the Forest who came off worst in these exchanges,
though as far as they could see it never had anything to do  with
them.

And sometimes, after some of the worst  of  these  outrages,  the
Dwellers  in  the  Forest  would  send  a messenger to either the
leader of the  Princes  of  the  Plains  or  the  leader  of  the
Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand to know the reason for
this intolerable behaviour.

And the leader, whichever one it was, would  take  the  messenger
aside  and  explain  the  Reason to him, slowly and carefully and
with great attention to the considerable detail involved.

And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It  was  very
clear,  very  rational,  and  tough. The messenger would hang his
head and feel sad and foolish that he had  not  realized  what  a
tough and complex place the real world was, and what difficulties
and paradoxes had to be embraced if one was to live in it.

"Now do you understand?" the leader would say.

The messenger would nod dumbly.

"And you see these battles have to take place?"

Another dumb nod.

"And why they have to take place in the forest, and why it is  in
everybody's  best  interest,  the  Forest Dwellers included, that
they should?"

"Er ..."

"In the long run."

"Er, yes."

And the messenger did understand the Reason, and he  returned  to
his people in the Forest. But as he approached them, as he walked
through the Forest and amongst the trees, he found  that  all  he
could  remember of the Reason was how terribly clear the argument
had seemed. What it actually was he couldn't remember at all.

And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the  Tribesmen
and  the  Princes  came hacking and burning their way through the
Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in their way.

Prak paused in his story and coughed pathetically.

"I was the messenger," he said, "after the  battles  precipitated
by  the  appearance of your ship, which were particularly savage.
Many of our people died. I thought I could bring the Reason back.
I  went  and was told it by the leader of the Princes, but on the
way back it slipped and melted away in my mind like snow  in  the
sun. That was many years ago, and much has happened since then."
He looked up at Arthur and giggled again very gently.

"There is one other thing I can remember  from  the  truth  drug.
Apart  from  the  frogs,  and  that  is God's last message to his
creation. Would you like to hear it?"

For a moment they didn't know whether to take him seriously.

"'Strue," he said. "For real. I mean it."

His chest heaved weakly and he struggled  for  breath.  His  head
lolled slightly.

"I wasn't very impressed with it when I first knew what it  was,"
he  said,  "but  now  I  think back to how impressed I was by the
Prince's Reason, and how soon afterwards I couldn't recall it  at
all,  I  think  it might be a lot more helpful. Would you like to
know what it is? Would you?"

They nodded dumbly.

"I bet you would. If you're that interested I suggest you go  and
look for it. It is written in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on
top  of  the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains  in   the   land   of
Sevorbeupstry  on  the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun
Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma. It is guarded by the
Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob."

There was a long silence following this announcement,  which  was
finally broken by Arthur.

"Sorry, it's where?" he said.

"It is written," repeated Prak, "in thirty-foot-high  letters  of
fire  on  top  of  the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of
Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the ..."

"Sorry," said Arthur again, "which mountains?"

"The Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry  on
the planet ..."

"Which land was that? I didn't quite catch it."

"Sevorbeupstry, on the planet ..."

"Sevorbe-what?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake," said Prak and died testily.

In the following days Arthur thought a little about this message,
but  in the end he decided that he was not going to allow himself
to be drawn by it, and insisted on following his original plan of
finding  a  nice little world somewhere to settle down and lead a
quiet retired life. Having saved the Universe twice in one day he
thought that he could take things a little easier from now on.

They dropped him off on the planet Krikkit, which  was  now  once
again   an   idyllic  pastoral  world,  even  if  the  songs  did
occasionally get on his nerves.

He spent a lot of time flying.

He learnt to communicate with birds  and  discovered  that  their
conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind
speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a  fair  bit  about
berries.  Unfortunately,  he  discovered,  once  you  have learnt
birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of  it
the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away
from it.

For that reason Arthur eventually gave up the sport and learnt to
live  on  the  ground  and  love  it,  despite a lot of the inane
chatter he heard down there as well.

One day, he was walking through the fields  humming  a  ravishing
tune  he'd  heard recently when a silver spaceship descended from
the sky and landed in front of him.

A hatchway opened, a ramp extended, and a tall  grey-green  alien
marched out and approached him.

"Arthur Phili ..." it said, then glanced sharply at him and  down
at his clipboard. He frowned. He looked up at him again.

"I've done you before haven't I?" he said.

     Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable  end  of
the  western  spiral  arm  of  the Galaxy lies a small unregarded
yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two  million  miles
is  an  utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-
descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that  they  still
think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
of  the  people  on  it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these
were  largely  concerned with the movements of small green pieces
of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't  the  small
green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people  were  mean,  and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a  big
mistake  in  coming  down  from the trees in the first place. And
some said that even the trees had been a bad move,  and  that  no
one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after  one  man
had  been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be
nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on  her  own  in  a
small  cafe  in  Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how  the
world  could  be  made  a  good and happy place. This time it was
right, it would work, and no one would  have  to  get  nailed  to
anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone  to  tell  anyone
about  it,  a  terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea
was lost forever.

This is her story.




That evening it was dark early, which was normal for the time  of
year. It was cold and windy, which was normal.

It started to rain, which was particularly normal.

A spacecraft landed, which was not.

There was nobody around  to  see  it  except  some  spectacularly
stupid  quadrupeds  who  hadn't the faintest idea what to make of
it, or whether they were meant to make anything of it, or eat it,
or what. So they did what they did to everything which was to run
away from it and try  to  hide  under  each  other,  which  never
worked.

It slipped down out of the clouds, seemingly balanced on a single
beam of light.

>From a distance you would scarcely have noticed  it  through  the
lightning  and  the  storm  clouds, but seen from close to it was
strangely beautiful - a grey craft of  elegantly  sculpted  form:
quite small.

Of course, one never has the slightest notion what size or  shape
different species are going to turn out to be, but if you were to
take the findings of the latest Mid-Galactic Census report as any
kind of accurate guide to statistical averages you would probably
guess that the craft would hold about six people, and  you  would
be right.

You'd probably guessed that anyway. The Census report, like  most
such  surveys,  had  cost  an  awful lot of money and didn't tell
anybody anything they didn't already know  -  except  that  every
single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since
this was clearly not true the whole thing had  eventually  to  be
scrapped.

The craft slid quietly down through the rain, its  dim  operating
lights  wrapping it in tasteful rainbows. It hummed very quietly,
a hum which became gradually louder and deeper as  it  approached
the ground, and which at an altitude of six inches became a heavy
throb.

At last it dropped and was quiet.
A hatchway opened. A short flight of steps unfolded itself.

A light appeared in the opening, a  bright  light  streaming  out
into the wet night, and shadows moved within.

A tall figure appeared in the light, looked around, flinched, and
hurried  down  the steps, carrying a large shopping bag under its
arm.

It turned and gave a single abrupt wave back at the ship. Already
the rain was streaming through its hair.

"Thank you," he called out, "thank you very ..."

He was interrupted by a sharp crack of  thunder.  He  glanced  up
apprehensively,  and  in  response  to  a  sudden thought quickly
started to rummage through the large plastic shopping bag,  which
he now discovered had a hole in the bottom.

It had large characters printed on the side which read (to anyone
who  could  decipher  the  Centaurian  alphabet)  Duty free Mega-
Market, Port Brasta, Alpha Centauri. Be  Like  the  Twenty-Second
Elephant with Heated Value in Space - Bark!

"Hold on!" the figure called, waving at the ship.

The steps, which had started to fold themselves back through  the
hatchway, stopped, re-unfolded, and allowed him back in.

He emerged again a few seconds  later  carrying  a  battered  and
threadbare towel which he shoved into the bag.

He waved again, hoisted the bag under his arm, and started to run
for  the shelter of some trees as, behind him, the spacecraft had
already begun its ascent.

Lightning flitted through the sky and made the figure pause for a
moment,  and  then  hurry  onwards, revising his path to give the
trees a wide berth. He moved swiftly across the ground,  slipping
here  and  there,  hunching  himself  against  the rain which was
falling now  with  ever-increasing  concentration,  as  if  being
pulled from the sky.

His feet sloshed through  the  mud.  Thunder  grumbled  over  the
hills.  He  pointlessly  wiped the rain off his face and stumbled
on.

More lights.

Not lightning this time, but  more  diffused  and  dimmer  lights
which played slowly over the horizon and faded.

The figure paused again on seeing them, and  then  redoubled  his
steps,  making directly towards the point on the horizon at which
they had appeared.

And now the ground was becoming  steeper,  sloping  upwards,  and
after  another  two  or  three hundred yards it led at last to an
obstacle. The figure paused  to  examine  the  barrier  and  then
dropped  the  bag  he  was  carrying over it before climbing over
himself.

Hardly had the figure touched the ground on the other  side  when
there came sweeping out of the rain towards him a machine, lights
streaming through the wall of water. The figure pressed  back  as
the  machine  streaked  towards  him. it was a low bulbous shape,
like a small whale surfing - sleek, grey and rounded  and  moving
at terrifying speed.

The figure instinctively threw up his hands to  protect  himself,
but  was  hit only by a sluice of water as the machine swept past
and off into the night.

It was  illuminated  briefly  by  another  flicker  of  lightning
crossing the sky, which allowed the soaked figure by the roadside
a split-second to read a small sign at the back  of  the  machine
before it disappeared.

To the figure's apparent incredulous astonishment the sign  read,
"My other car is also a Porsche."




Rob McKeena was a miserable bastard and he knew it  because  he'd
had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw
no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which  was
that  he  liked  disagreeing  with people, particularly people he
disliked, which included, at the last count, everyone.

He heaved a sigh and shoved down a gear.

The hill was beginning to steepen and his lorry  was  heavy  with
Danish thermostatic radiator controls.

It wasn't that he was naturally predisposed to be  so  surly,  at
least  he  hoped  not.  It  was just the rain which got him down,
always the rain.

It was raining now, just for a change.

It was a  particular  type  of  rain  he  particularly  disliked,
particularly  when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was
rain type 17.

He had read somewhere that  the  Eskimos  had  over  two  hundred
different  words for snow, without which their conversation would
probably have got very  monotonous.  So  they  would  distinguish
between  thin  snow  and  thick  snow, light snow and heavy snow,
sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow  that
came  in  drifts,  snow  that  came  in  on  the  bottom  of your
neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows
of  winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your
childhood that were so much better than any of your modern  snow,
fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls
in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all  of
a  sudden  just  when  you  were going out fishing, and snow that
despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies  have  pissed
on.

Rob McKeena had two hundred and  thirty-one  different  types  of
rain entered in his little book, and he didn't like any of them.

He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It
grumbled  in  a  comfortable  sort  of  way  about all the Danish
thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.

Since he had left Denmark the previous  afternoon,  he  had  been
through  types  33  (light  pricking drizzle which made the roads
slippery), 39 ( heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle
through   to   sharply   slanting   light   to  moderate  drizzle
freshening), 87 and 88 (two  finely  distinguished  varieties  of
vertical  torrential  downpour),  100  (post-downpour  squalling,
cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at  once,  123,
124,  126,  127  (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and
syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least
favourite of all, 17.

Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen
so  hard  that it didn't make much odds whether he had his wipers
on or off.

He tested this theory by turning them  off  briefly,  but  as  it
turned  out  the  visibility  did  get quite a lot worse. It just
failed to get better again when he turned them back on.

In fact one of the wiper blades began to flap off.

Swish swish swish flop swish flop swish  swish  flop  swish  flop
swish flop flop flop scrape.

He pounded his steering wheel,  kicked  the  floor,  thumped  his
cassette  player  till it suddenly started playing Barry Manilow,
thumped it again till it stopped, and swore and swore  and  swore
and swore and swore.

It was at the very moment that his fury was  peaking  that  there
loomed  swimmingly  in his headlights, hardly visible through the
blatter, a figure by the roadside.

A poor bedraggled figure, strangely attired, wetter than an otter
in a washing machine, and hitching.

"Poor miserable sod," thought Rob McKeena to  himself,  realizing
that  here  was somebody with a better right to feel hard done by
than himself, "must be chilled to the  bone.  Stupid  to  be  out
hitching  on  a filthy night like this. All you get is cold, wet,
and lorries driving through puddles at you."

He shook his head grimly, heaved another sigh, gave the  wheel  a
turn and hit a large sheet of water square on.

"See what I mean?" he thought to himself as he  ploughed  swiftly
through it. "You get some right bastards on the road."

Splattered in his rear mirror a couple of seconds later  was  the
reflection of the hitch-hiker, drenched by the roadside.

For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or  two  later  he
felt  bad  about  feeling  good about it. Then he felt good about
feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove  on
into the night.

At least it made up for having been  finally  overtaken  by  that
Porsche  he  had  been  diligently  blocking  for the last twenty
miles.

And as he drove on, the rainclouds dragged  down  the  sky  after
him,  for, though he did not know it, Rob McKeena was a Rain God.
All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a
succession  of  lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they
loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water
him.




The next two lorries were not driven by Rain Gods, but  they  did
exactly the same thing.

The figure trudged, or rather  sloshed,  onwards  till  the  hill
resumed and the treacherous sheet of water was left behind.

After a while the rain began to ease and the moon put in a  brief
appearance from behind the clouds.

A Renault drove by, and  its  driver  made  frantic  and  complex
signals  to  the  trudging  figure to indicate that he would have
been delighted to give the figure a lift, only he  couldn't  this
time  because  he  wasn't  going in the direction that the figure
wanted to go, whatever direction that might be, and he  was  sure
the  figure  would understand. He concluded the signalling with a
cheery thumbs-up sign, as if to say that he hoped the figure felt
really  fine  about  being cold and almost terminally wet, and he
would catch him the next time around.

The figure trudged on. A Fiat passed and did exactly the same  as
the Renault.

A Maxi passed on the other side  of  the  road  and  flashed  its
lights  at  the  slowly  plodding figure, though whether this was
meant to convey a "Hello" or a "Sorry we're going the other  way"
or  a  "Hey  look,  there's someone in the rain, what a jerk" was
entirely unclear. A green strip across the top of the  windscreen
indicated  that  whatever the message was, it came from Steve and
Carola.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder  there  was
now  grumbled  over  more  distant  hills, like a man saying "And
another thing ..." twenty minutes after admitting he's  lost  the
argument.

The air was clearer now, the night cold. Sound  travelled  rather
well. The lost figure, shivering desperately, presently reached a
junction, where a side road turned off to the left. Opposite  the
turning stood a signpost which the figure suddenly hurried to and
studied with feverish curiosity, only twisting away  from  it  as
another car passed suddenly.

And another.

The first whisked by with complete disregard, the second  flashed
meaninglessly. A Ford Cortina passed and put on its brakes.

Lurching with surprise, the figure bundled his bag to  his  chest
and  hurried  forward towards the car, but at the last moment the
Cortina span its wheels in the wet and carreered off up the  road
rather amusingly.

The figure slowed to a stop and stood there, lost and dejected.

As it chanced, the following day the driver of the  Cortina  went
into  hospital  to  have  his  appendix out, only due to a rather
amusing mix up the surgeon removed his leg in error,  and  before
the   appendectomy   could   be   rescheduled,  the  appendicitis
complicated into an entertainingly serious  case  of  peritonitis
and justice, in its way, was served.

The figure trudged on.

A Saab drew to a halt beside him.

Its window wound down and a friendly voice said, "Have  you  come
far?"

The figure turned toward it. He stopped and grasped the handle of
the door.

The figure, the car and its door handle  were  all  on  a  planet
called the Earth, a world whose entire entry in the Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy comprised the two words "Mostly harmless".

The man who wrote this entry was called Ford Prefect, and he  was
at this precise moment on a far from harmless world, sitting in a
far from harmless bar, recklessly causing trouble.




Whether it was because he was drunk,  ill  or  suicidally  insane
would  not  have  been  apparent to a casual observer, and indeed
there were no casual observers in the Old Pink  Dog  Bar  on  the
lower  South  Side of Han Dold City because it wasn't the sort of
place you could afford to do things casually in if you wanted  to
stay  alive.  Any  observers  in  the  place would have been mean
hawklike observers, heavily armed,  with  painful  throbbings  in
their  heads  which  caused  them  to  do  crazy things when they
observed things they didn't like.

One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a  sort  of
missile crisis sort of hush.

Even the evil-looking bird perched  on  a  rod  in  the  bar  had
stopped  screeching out the names and addresses of local contract
killers, which was a service it provided for free.

All eyes were on Ford Prefect. Some of them were on stalks.

The particular way in which he was choosing  to  dice  recklessly
with  death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size
of a small defence budget with an American  Express  Card,  which
was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.

"What are you worried about?" he asked in a cheery kind of voice.
"The expiration date? Have you guys never heard of Neo-Relativity
out here? There's whole new areas of physics which can take  care
of   this   sort   of  thing.  Time  dilation  effects,  temporal
relastatics ..."

"We are not worried about the expiration date," said the  man  to
whom  he addressed these remarks, who was a dangerous barman in a
dangerous city. His voice was a low soft purr, like the low  soft
purr  made  by the opening of an ICBM silo. A hand like a side of
meat tapped on the bar top, lightly denting it.

"Well, that's good then," said  Ford,  packing  his  satchel  and
preparing to leave.

The tapping finger reached out and rested lightly on the shoulder
of Ford Prefect. It prevented him from leaving.

Although the finger was attached to a slablike hand, and the hand
was  attached  to a clublike forearm, the forearm wasn't attached
to anything at all, except in the metaphorical sense that it  was
attached  by  a  fierce  doglike loyalty to the bar which was its
home. It had previously been more conventionally attached to  the
original  owner  of the bar, who on his deathbed had unexpectedly
bequeathed it to medical science.  Medical  science  had  decided
they  didn't like the look of it and had bequeathed it right back
to the Old Pink Dog Bar.

The new barman didn't believe in the supernatural or poltergeists
or  anything kooky like that, he just knew an useful ally when he
saw one. The hand sat on the  bar.  It  took  orders,  it  served
drinks,  it  dealt murderously with people who behaved as if they
wanted to be murdered. Ford Prefect sat still.

"We are not worried about  the  expiration  date,"  repeated  the
barman,  satisfied that he now had Ford Prefect's full attention.
"We are worried about the entire piece of plastic."

"What?" said Ford. He seemed a little taken aback.

"This," said the barman, holding out the card  as  if  it  was  a
small  fish  whose soul had three weeks earlier winged its way to
the Land Where Fish are Eternally Blessed, "we don't accept it."

Ford wondered briefly whether to raise the fact  that  he  didn't
have  any  other  means  of  payment  on him, but decided for the
moment to soldier on. The disembodied hand was now  grasping  his
shoulder lightly but firmly between its finger and thumb.

"But you don't understand,"  said  Ford,  his  expression  slowly
ripening  from  a  little  taken abackness into rank incredulity.
"This is the American Express Card.  It  is  the  finest  way  of
settling bills known to man. Haven't you read their junk mail?"

The cheery quality of Ford's voice was beginning to grate on  the
barman's  ears.  It sounded like someone relentlessly playing the
kazoo during one of the more sombre passages of a War Requiem.

One of the bones  in  Ford's  shoulder  began  to  grate  against
another one of the bones in his shoulder in a way which suggested
that the hand had learnt the principles of  pain  from  a  highly
skilled chiropracter. He hoped he could get this business settled
before the hand started to grate one of the bones in his shoulder
against any of the bones in different parts of his body. Luckily,
the shoulder it was holding was not the one he  had  his  satchel
slung over.

The barman slid the card back across the bar at Ford.

"We have never," he said with  muted  savagery,  "heard  of  this
thing."

This was hardly surprising.

Ford had only  acquired  it  through  a  serious  computer  error
towards the end of the fifteen years' sojourn he had spent on the
planet Earth. Exactly how serious, the American  Express  Company
had  got  to know very rapidly, and the increasingly strident and
panic-stricken demands of its  debt  collection  department  were
only  silenced  by the unexpected demolition of the entire planet
by the Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.

He had kept it ever since because he found it useful to  carry  a
form of currency that no one would accept.

"Credit?" he said. "Aaaargggh ..."

These two words were usually coupled together in the Old Pink Dog
Bar.

"I thought," gasped Ford, "that this was  meant  to  be  a  class
establishment ..."

He glanced around at the motley collection of  thugs,  pimps  and
record  company  executives  that skulked on the edges of the dim
pools of light with which the dark shadows  of  the  bar's  inner
recesses  were pitted. They were all very deliberately looking in
any direction but his now, carefully picking up  the  threads  of
their  former  conversations  about murders, drug rings and music
publishing deals. They knew what would happen now and didn't want
to watch in case it put them off their drinks.

"You gonna  die,  boy,"  the  barman  murmured  quietly  at  Ford
Prefect,  and  the evidence was on his side. The bar used to have
one of those signs hanging up which said, "Please don't  ask  for
credit  as  a  punch  in  the  mouth  often  offends", but in the
interest of strict accuracy this was altered  to,  "Please  don't
ask  for  credit  because having your throat torn out by a savage
bird while a disembodied hand smashes your head against  the  bar
often  offends".  However,  this  made  an unreadable mess of the
notice, and anyway didn't have the same ring to  it,  so  it  was
taken  down  again. It was felt that the story would get about of
its own accord, and it had.

"Lemme look at the bill again," said Ford. He picked  it  up  and
studied  it thoughtfully under the malevolent gaze of the barman,
and the equally malevolent gaze of the bird, which was  currently
gouging great furrows in the bar top with its talons.

It was a rather lengthy piece of paper.

At the bottom of it was a number which looked like one  of  those
serial  numbers  you  find  on the underside of stereo sets which
always takes so long to copy on to the registration form. He had,
after all, been in the bar all day, he had been drinking a lot of
stuff with bubbles in it, and he  had  bought  an  awful  lot  of
rounds  for  all  the  pimps,  thugs  and  record  executives who
suddenly couldn't remember who he was.

He cleared his throat rather  quietly  and  patted  his  pockets.
There  was,  as he knew, nothing in them. He rested his left hand
lightly but firmly on the half-opened flap of  his  satchel.  The
disembodied hand renewed its pressure on his right shoulder.

"You see," said the barman, and his face seemed to wobble  evilly
in  front  of  Ford's,  "I have a reputation to think of. You see
that, don't you?"

This is it, thought Ford. There was nothing else for it.  He  had
obeyed  the  rules,  he  had  made a bona fide attempt to pay his
bill, it had been rejected. He was now in danger of his life.

"Well," he said quietly, "if it's your reputation ..."

With a sudden flash of speed he opened his  satchel  and  slapped
down  on  the  bar top his copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy and the official card which  said  that  he  was  a  field
researcher for the Guide and absolutely not allowed to do what he
was now doing.

"Want a write-up?"

The barman's  face  stopped  in  mid-wobble.  The  bird's  talons
stopped in mid-furrow. The hand slowly released its grip.

"That," said the barman in a barely audible whisper, from between
dry lips, "will do nicely, sir."




The Hitch Hiker's Guide  to  the  Galaxy  is  a  powerful  organ.
Indeed, its influence is so prodigious that strict rules have had
to be drawn up by its editorial staff to prevent its  misuse.  So
none  of  its field researchers are allowed to accept any kind of
services, discounts or preferential  treatment  of  any  kind  in
return for editorial favours unless: 

 
they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the
normal way;
their lives would be otherwise in danger;
they really want to.


Since invoking the third rule always involved giving the editor a
cut, Ford always preferred to much about with the first two.

He stepped out along the street, walking briskly.

The air was stifling, but he liked it  because  it  was  stifling
city  air,  full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music
and the sound of warring police tribes.

He carried his satchel with an easy swaying  motion  so  that  he
could  get  a good swing at anybody who tried to take it from him
without asking. It contained everything he owned,  which  at  the
moment wasn't much.

A limousine careered down the street, dodging between  the  piles
of  burning  garbage,  and  frightening  an old pack animal which
lurched, screeching, out of its way, stumbled against the  window
of a herbal remedies shop, set off a wailing alarm, blundered off
down the street, and then pretended to fall down the steps  of  a
small  pasta  restaurant  where it knew it would get photographed
and fed.

Ford was walking north. He thought he was probably on his way  to
the  spaceport,  but  he  had thought that before. He knew he was
going through that part of the city where  people's  plans  often
changed quite abruptly.

"Do you want to have a good time?" said a voice from a doorway.

"As far as I can tell," said Ford, "I'm having one. Thanks."

"Are you rich?" said another.

This made Ford laugh.

He turned and opened his arms in  a  wide  gesture.  "Do  I  look
rich?" he said.

"Don't know," said the girl. "Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you'll  get
rich. I have a very special service for rich people ..."

"Oh yes?" said Ford, intrigued but careful. "And what's that?"

"I tell them it's OK to be rich."

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only  a
bass  player  getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times
in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.

"You what?" he said.
The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the  shadow.
She  was  tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which
is a great trick if you can do it.

"It's my big number," she said. "I  have  a  Master's  degree  in
Social  Economics  and  can  be  very convincing. People love it.
Especially in this city."

"Goosnargh," said Ford Prefect, which was a special  Betelgeusian
word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know
what it should be.

He sat on a step, took from his satchel a bottle of that Ol' Janx
Spirit  and a towel. He opened the bottle and wiped the top of it
with the  towel,  which  had  the  opposite  effect  to  the  one
intended,  in  that  the  Ol'  Janx  Spirit  instantly killed off
millions of the germs which had been slowly building up  quite  a
complex  and  enlightened civilization on the smellier patches of
the towel.

"Want some?" he said, after he'd had a swig himself.

She shrugged and took the proffered bottle.

They sat for a while, peacefully  listening  to  the  clamour  of
burglar alarms in the next block.

"As it happens, I'm owed a lot of money," said  Ford,  "so  if  I
ever get hold of it, can I come and see you then maybe?"

"Sure, I'll be here," said the girl. "So how much is a lot?"

"Fifteen years' back pay."

"For?"

"Writing two words."

"Zarquon," said the girl. "Which one took the time?"

"The first one. Once I'd got that the second one  just  came  one
afternoon after lunch."

A huge electronic drum kit hurtled through the window high  above
them and smashed itself to bits in the street in front of them.

It soon became apparent that some of the burglar  alarms  on  the
next  block  had been deliberately set off by one police tribe in
order to lay an ambush for the other. Cars with screaming  sirens
converged  on  the area, only to find themselves being picked off
by copters which came thudding through the air between the city's
mountainous tower blocks.

"In fact," said Ford, having to shout  now  above  the  din,  "it
wasn't  quite  like that. I wrote an awful lot, but they just cut
it down."

He took his copy of the Guide back out of his satchel.
"Then the planet got demolished," he shouted. "Really  worthwhile
job, eh? They've still got to pay me, though."

"You work for that thing?" the girl yelled back.

"Yeah."

"Good number."

"You want to see the stuff I wrote?" he shouted. "Before it  gets
erased? The new revisions are due to be released tonight over the
net. Someone must have found out that the planet I spent  fifteen
years  on  has been demolished by now. They missed it on the last
few revisions, but it can't escape their notice for ever."

"It's getting impossible to talk isn't it?"

"What?"

She shrugged and pointed upwards.

There was a copter above them now which seemed to be involved  in
a  side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from
the building. The sound engineer was hanging out of the window by
his  fingertips,  and  a  maddened  guitarist  was beating on his
fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing  at  all
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
open  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
knew nothing other than that she had said "this" to him, and that
he wouldn't wish her brother on a Vogon.

"So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned?" he went
on to say as quickly as he could.

"Look, this is my sister, I don't even know why  I'm  talking  to
you about ..."

"OK, I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd better let me out. This is ..."

At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm
which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted
through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which
closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them through a sieve.
Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as  the  sky
blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating
to pass a  lorry  marked  "McKeena's  All-Weather  Haulage".  The
tension eased as the rain subsided.

"It started with all that business of the CIA agent they found in
the  reservoir,  when  everybody  had  all the hallucinations and
everything, you remember?"

Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had
just hitch-hiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula
and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons
a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would
only confuse matters further.

"No," he said.

"That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a cafe somewhere.
Rickmansworth.  Don't know what she was doing there, but that was
where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up,  calmly  announced
that   she   had   undergone  some  extraordinary  revelation  or
something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally  collapsed
screaming into an egg sandwich."

Arthur winced. "I'm very sorry to hear that," he  said  a  little
stiffly.

Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

"So what," said Arthur in an attempt to  piece  things  together,
"was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?"

"Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead."

"But what ..."

"Come on,  you  remember  all  that  stuff.  The  hallucinations.
Everyone  said  it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into
drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that  instead  of
invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to
make everyone think they'd been invaded."

"What hallucinations were those exactly ...?" said  Arthur  in  a
rather quiet voice.

"What do you mean, what hallucinations?  I'm  talking  about  all
that  stuff  with  the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and
saying we're going to die, and then pop,  they  vanished  as  the
effect wore off. The CIA denied it which meant it must be true."

Arthur's head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something
to  steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little
opening and closing movements as if it was on  his  mind  to  say
something, but nothing emerged.

"Anyway," continued Russell, "whatever drug it was it didn't seem
to  wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but
a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack  a
lunatic asylum with a banana, so ..." He shrugged.
"The Vogon ..." squeaked Arthur. "The yellow ships ... vanished?"

"Well, of  course  they  did,  they  were  hallucinations,"  said
Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. "You trying to say you don't
remember any of this? Where have you been for heaven's sake?"

This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that  he
half-leapt out of his seat with shock.

"Christ!!!" yelled Russell, fighting to control the car which was
suddenly  trying  to  skid.  He  pulled  it out of the path of an
oncoming lorry and swerved up on to a  grass  bank.  As  the  car
lurched  to  a  halt,  the  girl  in  the back was thrown against
Russell's seat and collapsed awkwardly.

Arthur twisted round in horror.

"Is she all right?" he blurted out.

Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair.
He tugged at his blond moustache. He turned to Arthur.

"Would you please," he said, "let go of the handbrake?"




>From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a further  mile
to  the turning, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely
declined to take him, and from there a  further  three  miles  of
winding country lane.

The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur  watched  it  go,  as
stunned  as  a  man  might  be who, having believed himself to be
totally blind for five years,  suddenly  discovers  that  he  had
merely been wearing too large a hat.

He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some
salient  fact  which  would  fall into place and make sense of an
otherwise utterly bewildering Universe,  but  since  the  salient
fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up
the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk, and maybe  even
some good painful blisters, would help to reassure him of his own
existence at least, if not his sanity.

It was 10.30 when he arrived,  a  fact  he  discovered  from  the
steamed  and  greasy  window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which
there had hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock  which
featured  a  picture  of  an  emu with a pint glass jammed rather
amusingly down its throat.

This was the pub at which he had  passed  the  fateful  lunchtime
during which first his house and then the entire planet Earth had
been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished. No,  damn
it,  had  been  demolished,  because  if it hadn't then where the
bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he  had
got  there  if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the
appalling Russell had just been telling  him  were  merely  drug-
induced  hallucinations,  and yet if it had been demolished, what
was he currently standing on ...?

He jammed the brake on this line of  thought  because  it  wasn't
going  to  get  him any further than it had the last twenty times
he'd been over it.

He started again.

This was the pub at which he had  passed  the  fateful  lunchtime
during  which  whatever  it was had happened that he was going to
sort out later had happened, and ...

It still didn't make sense.

He started again.

This was the pub in which ...

This was a pub.

Pubs served drinks and he couldn't half do with one.

Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last  arrived
at  a  conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with, even if it
wasn't the one he had set out to achieve, he strode  towards  the
door.

And stopped.

A small black wire-haired terrier ran out from behind a low  wall
and then, catching sight of Arthur, began to snarl.

Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to  an
advertising  friend  of  his,  and  was  called Know-Nothing-Bozo
because the way its hair stood up on its head it reminded  people
of  the  President of the United States, and the dog knew Arthur,
or at least should do. It was a stupid dog, could not  even  read
an  autocue,  which  way  why some people had protested about its
name, but it should at least have been able to  recognize  Arthur
instead  of  standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur was the
most fearful apparition ever to intrude  upon  its  feeble-witted
life.

This prompted Arthur to go and peer at  the  window  again,  this
time with an eye not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.

Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context,
he had to admit that the dog had a point.

He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare  birds
with,  and  there was no doubt but that to go into the pub in his
present condition would excite comments of a  raucous  kind,  and
worse  still, there would doubtless be several people in there at
the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be  bound  to  bombard
him  with questions which, at the moment, he felt ill-equipped to
deal with.

Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of  Know-Nothing-Bozo  the
Non-Wonder  Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from
one of Will's own commercials  for  being  incapable  of  knowing
which  dog  food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that
the meat in all the other bowls had had engine  oil  poured  over
it.

Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, here was his
car,  a  grey  Porsche  928S with a sign in the back window which
read, "My other car is also a Porsche." Damn him.

He stared at it and realized that he had just  learned  something
he hadn't known before.

Will Smithers, like most of  the  overpaid  and  under-scrupulous
bastards  Arthur knew in advertising made a point of changing his
car every August so that he could tell people his accountant made
him  do  it,  though the truth was that his accountant was trying
like hell to stop him, what with all the alimony he had  to  pay,
and  so  on  -  and  this  was the same car Arthur remembered him
having before. The number plate proclaimed its year.

Given that it was now winter, and that the event which had caused
Arthur  so  much  trouble  eight  of  his  personal years ago had
occurred at the beginning of September, less than  six  or  seven
months could have passed here.

He stood terribly still for a moment  and  let  Know-Nothing-Bozo
jump  up  and  down  yapping at him. He was suddenly stunned by a
realization he could no longer avoid, which was this: he was  now
an alien on his own world. Try as he might, no one was even to be
able to believe his story. Not only did it sound perfectly potty,
but it was flatly contradicted by the simplest observable facts.

Was this really the Earth? Was there  the  slightest  possibility
that he had made some extraordinary mistake?

The pub in front of him was unbearably familiar to him  in  every
detail - every brick, every piece of peeling paint; and inside he
could sense its familiar stuffy, noisy warmth, its exposed beams,
its  unauthentic  cast-iron  light  fittings, its bar sticky with
beer that people he knew had put their elbows in,  overlooked  by
cardboard  cutouts  of  girls with packets of peanuts stapled all
over their breasts. It was all the stuff of his home, his world.

He even knew this blasted dog.

"Hey, Know-Nothing!"

The sound of Will Smithers' voice meant he had to decide what  do
to quickly. If he stood his ground he would be discovered and the
whole circus would begin. To hide would only postpone the moment,
and it was bitterly cold now.

The fact that it was Will made the choice easier. It wasn't  that
Arthur  disliked  him  as  such - Will was quite fun. It was just
that he was fun in such  an  exhausting  way  because,  being  in
advertising,  he  always  wanted  you to know how much fun he was
having and where he had got his jacket from.
Mindful of this, Arthur hid behind a van.

"Hey, Know-Nothing, what's up?"

The door opened and Will  came  out,  wearing  a  leather  flying
jacket  that  he'd  got  a  mate  of  his  at  the  Road Research
Laboratory to crash a car into specially, in order  to  get  that
battered  look.  Know-Nothing yelped with delight and, having got
the attention it wanted, was happy to forget Arthur.

Will was with some friends, and they had a game they played  with
the dog.

"Commies!" they all shouted  at  the  dog  in  chorus.  "Commies,
commies, commies!!!"

The dog went berserk with barking, prancing up and down,  yapping
its  little  heart  out,  beside itself in transports of ecstatic
rage.  They  all  laughed  and  cheered  it  on,  then  gradually
dispersed to their various cars and disappeared into the night.

Well that clears one thing up, thought  Arthur  from  behind  the
van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.




His house was still there.

How or why, he had no idea. He had decided to go and have a  look
while  he  was  waiting for the pub to empty, so that he could go
and ask the landlord for a bed for the night when  everyone  else
had gone. And there it was.

He hurriedly let himself in with the key he kept  under  a  stone
frog in the garden, because, astoundingly, the phone was ringing.

He had heard it faintly all the way up the lane and  had  started
to run as soon as he realized where the sound was coming from.

The door had  to  be  forced  open  because  of  the  astonishing
accumulation  of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck
on  what  he  would  later  discover  were  fourteen   identical,
personally  addressed  invitations  to apply for a credit card he
already had, seventeen identical  threatening  letters  for  non-
payment  of  bills  on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three
identical letters saying that he personally  had  been  specially
selected  as  a  man of taste and discrimination who knew what he
wanted and where he  was  going  in  today's  sophisticated  jet-
setting  world  and  would  he  therefore like to buy some grotty
wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten.

He rammed himself through the relatively narrow opening  afforded
by  all  this,  stumbled  through  a  pile of wine offers that no
discriminating connoisseur would want to miss, slithered  over  a
heap of beach villa holidays, blundered up the dark stairs to his
bedroom and got to the phone just as it stopped ringing.

He collapsed, panting, on to his cold, musty-smelling bed and for
a  few  minutes stopped trying to prevent the world from spinning
round his head in the way it obviously wanted to.

When it had enjoyed its little spin and had calmed  down  a  bit,
Arthur  reached  out  for  the bedside light, not expecting it to
come on. To his surprise it did. This appealed to Arthur's  sense
of  logic.  Since  the Electricity Board cut him off without fail
every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that  they
should  leave  him  connected  when he didn't. Sending them money
obviously only drew attention to yourself.

The room was much as he had left  it,  i.e.  festeringly  untidy,
though  the  effect  was muted a little by a thick layer of dust.
Half-read books and magazines nestled amongst piles of  half-used
towels.  Half  pairs  of  socks  reclined  in  half-drunk cups of
coffee. What was once a half-eaten sandwich had  now  half-turned
into  something  that  Arthur entirely didn't want to know about.
Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself,
and you'd start the evolution of life all over again.

There was only one thing in the room that was different.

For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one  thing  that  was
different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting
dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.

It was next to a battered old television on  which  it  was  only
possible  to  watch  Open University Study Courses, because if it
tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.

It was a box.

Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.

It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to  it.  It  was  a
cubic  grey  box,  just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a
single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.

He got up, walked over and touched it in  surprise.  Whatever  it
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 for 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.




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.




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.

"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.




"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."




"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.

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
umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.

The  umbrella  lay  like  a  recently  swatted   daddy-long-legs,
expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a
little.

He picked it up.

"Er," he said. There didn't seem to be a lot of point in offering
the thing back to her.

"How did you know my name?" she said.

"Er, well," he said. "Look, I'll get you another one ..."

He looked at her and tailed off.

She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a  pale
and  serious  face.  Standing  still,  alone,  she  seemed almost
sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a
formal  garden.  She seemed to be looking at something other than
what she looked as if she was looking at.

But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as  if  she  suddenly
arrived  from  somewhere.  Warmth and life flooded into her face,
and impossibly graceful movement into her body.  The  effect  was
very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.

She grinned, tossed her bag into the back and  swivelled  herself
into the front seat.

"Don't worry about the umbrella," she said to him as she  climbed
in.  "It  was  my  brother's  and  he  can't  have liked it or he
wouldn't have given it to me." She  laughed  and  pulled  on  her
seatbelt. "You're not a friend of my brother's are you?"

"No."
Her voice was the only part of her which didn't say "Good".

Her physical presence there  in  the  car,  his  car,  was  quite
extraordinary  to  Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly
away, that he could hardly  think  or  breathe,  and  hoped  that
neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were
in trouble.

So what he had experienced in the other car, her  brother's  car,
the  night  he  had  returned  exhausted  and bewildered from his
nightmare years in the stars had not been the  unbalance  of  the
moment,  or,  if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced
now, and quite liable to fall  off  whatever  it  is  that  well-
balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.

"So ..." he said, hoping to  kick  the  conversation  off  to  an
exciting start.

"He was meant to pick me up - my brother - but phoned to  say  he
couldn't make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look
at the calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided  to  hitch.
So."

"So."

"So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know  my
name."

"Perhaps we ought to first sort out," said Arthur,  looking  back
over  his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic,
"where I'm taking you."

Very close, he hoped, or long away. Close would  mean  she  lived
near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.

"I'd like to go to Taunton," she said,  "please.  If  that's  all
right. It's not far. You can drop me at ..."

"You live in Taunton?" he said, hoping that he'd managed to sound
merely  curious  rather  than  ecstatic.  Taunton was wonderfully
close to him. He could ...

"No, London," she said. "There's a train in just under an hour."

It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away up
the  motorway. He wondered what to do, and while he was wondering
with horror heard himself saying, "Oh, I can take you to  London.
Let me take you to London ..."

Bungling idiot. Why on Earth had he said  "let"  in  that  stupid
way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.

"Are you going to London?" she asked.

"I wasn't," he said, "but ..." Bungling idiot.

"It's very kind of you," she said, "but really no. I like  to  go
by train." And suddenly she was gone. Or rather, that part of her
which brought her to life was gone. She looked  rather  distantly
out of the window and hummed lightly to herself.

He couldn't believe it.

Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he'd blown it.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of
accumulated  evidence  about  the  way  grown  men behave, do not
behave like this.

Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.

He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled. He  was
going to have to do something dramatic.

"Fenny," he said.

She glanced round sharply at him.

"You still haven't told me how ..."

"Listen," said Arthur, "I will tell  you,  though  the  story  is
rather strange. Very strange."

She was still looking at him, but said nothing.

"Listen ..."

"You said that."

"Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things
I  must  tell you ... a story I must tell you which would ..." He
was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of  "Thy
knotted  and combined locks to part, and each particular quill to
stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine" but  didn't
think  he  could  carry  it  off  and  didn't  like  the hedgehog
reference.

"... which would take more than five miles," he  settled  for  in
the end, rather lamely he was afraid.

"Well ..."

"Just supposing," he said, "just supposing" - he didn't know what
was  coming  next,  so he thought he'd just sit back and listen -
"that there was some extraordinary way in  which  you  were  very
important  to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very
important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had
five  miles  and  I  was  a  stupid  idiot  at knowing how to say
something very important to someone I've only just  met  and  not
crash  into  lorries at the same time, what would you say ..." he
paused helplessly, and looked at her, "I ... should do?"

"Watch the road!" she yelped.

"Shit!"

He narrowly avoided careering into the side of a hundred  Italian
washing machines in a German lorry.
"I think," she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, "you should
buy me a drink before my train goes."




There is, for some reason, something especially grim  about  pubs
near  stations,  a  very particular kind of grubbiness, a special
kind of pallor to the pork pies.

Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.

There is a feeling  which  persists  in  England  that  making  a
sandwich  interesting,  attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat
is something sinful that only foreigners do.

"Make 'em dry,"  is  the  instruction  buried  somewhere  in  the
collective national consciousness, "make 'em rubbery. If you have
to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week."

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on  Saturday  lunchtimes  that
the  British  seek to atone for whatever their national sins have
been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't
want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to
know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for
by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.

If there is  anything  worse  than  the  sandwiches,  it  is  the
sausages  which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle,
floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a  plastic
pin in the shape of a chef's hat: a memorial, one feels, for some
chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his
cats on a back stair in Stepney.

The sausages are for the ones who know what their  sins  are  and
wish to atone for something specific.

"There must be somewhere better," said Arthur.

"No time," said Fenny, glancing at her watch. "My train leaves in
half an hour."

They sat at a small wobbly table. On it were some dirty  glasses,
and  some  soggy  beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got
Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas
in  it.  And  a couple of sausages. He didn't know why. He bought
them for something to do while the gas settled in his glass.

The barman dunked Arthur's change in a pool of beer on  the  bar,
for which Arthur thanked him.

"All right," said Fenny, glancing at her watch, "tell me what  it
is you have to tell me."

She sounded, as well she might, extremely sceptical, and Arthur's
heart  sank.  Hardly, he felt, the most conductive setting to try
to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and  defensive,
that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense
that the mental breakdown she had  suffered  had  been  connected
with  the fact that, appearances to the contrary nonwithstanding,
the Earth had been demolished to make way for  a  new  hyperspace
bypass,  something  which  he alone on Earth knew anything about,
having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon  spaceship,  and  that
furthermore  both  his body and soul ached for her unbearably and
he needed to got to bed with her as soon as was humanly possible.

"Fenny," he started.

"I wonder if you'd like to buy some tickets for our raffle?  It's
just a little one."

He glanced up sharply.

"To raise money for Anjie who's retiring."

"What?"

"And needs a kidney machine."

He was being leant over by  a  rather  stiffly  slim  middle-aged
woman with a prim knitted suit and a prim little perm, and a prim
little smile that probably got licked by prim little dogs a lot.

She was holding out a small  book  of  cloakroom  tickets  and  a
collecting tin.

"Only ten pence each," she said, "so you could probably even  buy
two.  Without  breaking the bank!" She gave a tinkly little laugh
and then a curiously long  sigh.  Saying  "Without  breaking  the
bank"  had  obviously given her more pleasure than anything since
some GIs had been billeted on her in the war.

"Er, yes, all right,"  said  Arthur,  hurriedly  digging  in  his
pocket and producing a couple of coins.

With infuriating slowness, and prim theatricality, if  there  was
such  a  thing, the woman tore off two tickets and handed them to
Arthur.

"I do hope you win," she said with a smile that suddenly  snapped
together  like  a  piece  of advanced origami, "the prizes are so
nice."

"Yes, thank you,"  said  Arthur,  pocketing  the  tickets  rather
brusquely and glancing at his watch.

He turned towards Fenny.

So did the woman with the raffle tickets.

"And what about you, young lady?" she  said.  "It's  for  Anjie's
kidney  machine.  She's  retiring  you see. Yes?" She hoisted the
little smile even further up her face. She would have to stop and
let it go soon or the skin would surely split.

"Er, look, here you are," said Arthur, and pushed a  fifty  pence
piece at her in the hope that that would see her off.
"Oh, we are in the money, aren't we?" said the woman, with a long
smiling sigh. "Down from London are we?"

"No, that's all right, really," he said with a wave of his  hand,
and  she  started  with  an  awful  deliberation to peel off five
tickets, one by one.

"Oh, but you must have your tickets," insisted the woman, "or you
won't  be able to claim your prize. They're very nice prizes, you
know. Very suitable."

Arthur snatched the tickets, and said thank you as sharply as  he
could.

The woman turned to Fenny once again.

"And now, what about ..."

"No!" Arthur nearly yelled. "These are for  her,"  he  explained,
brandishing the five new tickets.

"Oh, I see! How nice!"

She smiled sickeningly at both of them.

"Well, I do hope you ..."

"Yes," snapped Arthur, "thank you."

The woman finally departed to the table next  to  theirs.  Arthur
turned desperately to Fenny, and was relieved to see that she was
rocking with silent laughter.

He sighed and smiled.

"Where were we?"

"You were calling me Fenny, and I was about to ask you not to."

"What do you mean?"

She twirled the little wooden cocktail stick in her tomato juice.

"It's why I asked if you were a friend of my brother's. Or  half-
brother really. He's the only one who calls me Fenny, and I'm not
fond of him for it."

"So what's ...?"

"Fenchurch."

"What?"

"Fenchurch."

"Fenchurch."

She looked at him sternly.
"Yes," she said, "and I'm watching you like  a  lynx  to  see  if
you're  going  to ask the same silly question that everybody asks
me until I want to scream. I shall be cross and  disappointed  if
you do. Plus I shall scream. So watch it."

She smiled, shook her hair a little forward  over  her  face  and
peered at him from behind it.

"Oh," he said, "that's a little unfair, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Fine."

"All right," she said with a laugh, "you can  ask  me.  Might  as
well get it over with. Better than have you call me Fenny all the
time."

"Presumably ..." said Arthur.

"We've only got two tickets left, you see, and since you were  so
generous when I spoke to you before ..."

"What?" snapped Arthur.

The woman with the perm and the smile and the  now  nearly  empty
book  of cloakroom tickets was now waving the two last ones under
his nose.

"I thought I'd give the opportunity to you,  because  the  prizes
are so nice."

She wrinkled up he nose a little confidentially.

"Very tasteful. I know you'll like them. And it  is  for  Anjie's
retirement present you see. We want to give her ..."

"A kidney machine, yes," said Arthur. "Here."

He held out two more ten  pence  pieces  to  her,  and  took  the
tickets.

A thought seemed to strike the woman. It struck her very  slowly.
You could watch it coming in like a long wave on a sandy beach.

"Oh dear," she said, "I'm not interrupting anything am I?"

She peered anxiously at both of them.

"No it's fine," said Arthur. Everything that  could  possibly  be
fine," he insisted, "is fine.

"Thank you," he added.

"I say," she said, in a delightful ecstacy of worry, "you're  not
... in love, are you?"

"It's very hard to say," said Arthur. "We haven't had a chance to
talk yet."

He glanced at Fenchurch. She was grinning.

The woman nodded with knowing confidentiality.

"I'll let you see the prizes in a minute," she said, and left.

Arthur turned, with a sigh, back to the girl  that  he  found  it
hard to say whether he was in love with.

"You were about to ask me," she said, "a question."

"Yes," said Arthur.

"We can do it together if you like," said Fenchurch. "Was I found
..."

"... in a handbag ..." joined in Arthur.

"... in the Left Luggage Office ..." they said together.

"... at Fenchurch street station," they finished.

"And the answer," said Fenchurch, "is no."

"Fine," said Arthur.

"I was conceived there."

"What?"

"I was con-"

"In the Left Luggage Office?" hooted Arthur.

"No, of course not. Don't be silly.  What  would  my  parents  be
doing  in  the Left Luggage Office?" she said, rather taken aback
by the suggestion.

"Well, I don't know," spluttered Arthur, "or rather ..."

"It was in the ticket queue."

"The ..."

"The ticket queue. Or so they claim. They  refuse  to  elaborate.
They  only  say  you wouldn't believe how bored it is possible to
get in the ticket queue at Fenchurch Street Station."

She sipped demurely at her tomato juice and looked at her watch.

Arthur continued to gurgle for a moment or two.

"I'm going to have to go in a minute  or  two,"  said  Fenchurch,
"and  you  haven't  begun  to  tell me whatever this terrifically
extraordinary thing is that you were so  keen  to  get  off  your
chest."
"Why don't you let me drive you to London?"  said  Arthur.  "It's
Saturday, I've got nothing particular to do, I'd ..."

"No," said Fenchurch, "thank you, it's sweet of you,  but  no.  I
need  to  be  by  myself  for  a  couple of days." She smiled and
shrugged.

"But ..."

"You can tell me another time. I'll give you my number."

Arthur's heart went boom boom churn churn as she scribbled  seven
figures in pencil on a scrap of paper and handed it to him.

"Now we can relax," she said  with  a  slow  smile  which  filled
Arthur till he thought he would burst.

"Fenchurch," he said, enjoying the name as he said it. "I -"

"A box," said a trailing voice, "of cherry  liqueurs,  and  also,
and  I  know  you'll  like  this, a gramophone record of Scottish
bagpipe music ..."

"Yes thank you, very nice," insisted Arthur.

"I just thought I'd let you have a look at them," said the permed
woman, "as you're down from London ..."

She was holding them out proudly for Arthur too see. He could see
that  they  were  indeed  a  box  of cherry brandy liqueurs and a
record of bagpipe music. That was what they were.

"I'll let you have your drink in peace now,"  she  said,  patting
Arthur  lightly  on his seething shoulder, "but I knew you'd like
to see."

Arthur re-engaged his  eyes  with  Fenchurch's  once  again,  and
suddenly  was  at  a loss for something to say. A moment had come
and gone between the two of them, but the whole rhythm of it  had
been wrecked by that stupid, blasted woman.

"Don't worry," said Fenchurch, looking at him steadily from  over
the top of her glass, "we will talk again." She took a sip.

"Perhaps," she added, "it wouldn't have gone so well if it wasn't
for  her."  She  gave  a  wry  little  smile and dropped her hair
forward over her face again.

It was perfectly true.

He had to admit it was perfectly true.




That  night,  at  home,  as  he  was  prancing  round  the  house
pretending  to  be tripping through cornfields in slow motion and
continually exploding with sudden  laughter,  Arthur  thought  he
could  even  bear  to listen to the album of bagpipe music he had
won. It was eight o'clock and he decided he would  make  himself,
force  himself,  to  listen  to the whole record before he phoned
her. Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That  would  be
the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.

No. No games. He wanted her and  didn't  care  who  knew  it.  He
definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her,
wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

He actually caught himself saying  thinks  like  "Yippee"  as  he
prances  ridiculously  round  the  house. Her eyes, her hair, her
voice, everything ...

He stopped.

He would put on the record of bagpipe music. Then he  would  call
her.

Would he, perhaps, call her first?

No. What he would do was this. He would  put  on  the  record  of
bagpipe  music. He would listen to it, every last banshee wail of
it. Then he would call her. That was the correct order. That  was
what he would do.

He was worried about touching things in case they blew up when he
did so.

He picked up the record. It failed to blow up. He slipped it  out
of  its cover. He opened the record player, he turned on the amp.
They both survived. He giggled foolishly as he lowered the stylus
on to the disc.

He sat and listened solemnly to "A Scottish Soldier".

He listened to "Amazing Grace".

He listened to something about some glen or other.

He thought about his miraculous lunchtime.

They had just been on  the  point  of  leaving,  when  they  were
distracted  by an awful outbreak of "yoo-hooing". The appallingly
permed woman was waving to them across the room like some  stupid
bird  with  a broken wing. Everyone in the pub turned to them and
seemed to be expecting some sort of response.

They hadn't listened to the bit about how pleased and happy Anjie
was  going  to  be  about the  4.30p everyone had helped to raise
towards the cost of her kidney machine, had  been  vaguely  aware
that  someone  from the next table had won a box of cherry brandy
liqueurs, and took a moment or two to cotton on to the fact  that
the  yoo-hooing  lady  was  trying to ask them if they had ticket
number 37.

Arthur discovered that he had. He glanced angrily at his watch.

Fenchurch gave him a push.
"Go on," she said, "go and get it. Don't be  bad  tempered.  Give
them  a nice speech about how pleased you are and you can give me
a call and tell me how it went. I'll want to hear the record.  Go
on."

She flicked his arm and left.

The  regulars  thought  his  acceptance  speech  a  little  over-
effusive. It was, after all, merely an album of bagpipe music.

Arthur thought about it, and listened to the music, and  kept  on
breaking into laughter.




Ring ring.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

"Hello, yes? Yes, that's right. Yes. You'll  'ave  to  speak  up,
there's an awful lot of noise in 'ere. What?

"No, I only do the bar in the  evenings.  It's  Yvonne  who  does
lunch, and Jim, he's the landlord. No, I wasn't on. What?

"You'll have to speak up.

"What? No, don't know anything about no raffle. What?

"No, don't know nothing about it. 'Old on, I'll call Jim."

The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and  called  over  the
noisy bar.

"'Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about  he's  won  a
raffle. He keeps on saying it's ticket 37 and he's won."

"No, there was a guy in the  pub  here  won,"  shouted  back  the
barman.

"He says 'ave we got the ticket."

"Well how can he think he's won if he hasn't even got a ticket?"

"Jim says 'ow can you think you've won if you  "aven't  even  got
the ticket. What?"

She put her hand over the receiver again.

"Jim, 'e keeps effing and blinding at me. Says there's  a  number
on the ticket."

"Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody  raffle
ticket wasn't it?"

"'E says 'e means its a telephone number on the ticket."
"Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?"




Eight hours  West  sat  a  man  alone  on  a  beach  mourning  an
inexplicable  loss.  He  could  only  think of his loss in little
packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great
to be borne.

He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in  along  the  sand,
and  waited  and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to
happen. As the time came for it not to  happen,  it  duly  didn't
happen  and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped
beneath the long line of sea, and the day was gone.

The beach was a beach we shall  not  name,  because  his  private
house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along
the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from  Los
Angeles,  which  is  described  in  the  new edition of the Hitch
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky,
stunky,  and  what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff,
woo", and in another, written only hours  later  as  "being  like
several  thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but
without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for  some
reason, yellow."

The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay
of  San  Francisco, which the Guide describes as a "good place to
go. It's very easy to believe that everyone  you  meet  there  is
also  a  space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just
their way of saying `hi'. Until you've settled  in  and  got  the
hang  of  the place it is best to say `no' to three questions out
of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some
very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting
alien could die of." The hundreds of curling miles of cliffs  and
sand, palm trees, breakers and sunsets are described in the Guide
as "Boffo. A good one."

And somewhere on this good boffo stretch  of  coastline  lay  the
house of this inconsolable man, a man whom many regarded as being
insane. But this was only, as he would tell  people,  because  he
was.

One of the many many reasons why people thought  him  insane  was
because  of  the  peculiarity  of his house which, even in a land
where most people's houses were peculiar in one way  or  another,
was quite extreme in his peculiarness.

His house was called The Outside of the Asylum.

His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called
-  and  some  of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to this -
Wonko the Sane.

In his house were a number of strange things,  including  a  grey
glass bowl with eight words engraved upon it.
We can talk of him much later on - this is just an  interlude  to
watch the sun go down and to say that he was there watching it.

He had lost everything he cared for, and was now  simply  waiting
for  the  end of the world - little realizing that it had already
been and gone.




After a disgusting Sunday spent emptying rubbish  bins  behind  a
pub  in  Taunton,  and  finding  nothing,  no  raffle  ticket, no
telephone number,  Arthur  tried  everything  he  could  to  find
Fenchurch, and the more things he tried, the more weeks passed.

He raged and railed against himself, against  fate,  against  the
world  and its weather. He even, in his sorrow and his fury, went
and sat in the motorway service station cafeteria where he'd been
just before he met her.

"It's the drizzle that makes me particularly morose."

"Please shut up about the drizzle," snapped Arthur.

"I would shut up if it would shut up drizzling."

"Look ..."

"But I'll tell you what it will do when it  shuts  up  drizzling,
shall I?"

"No."

"Blatter."

"What?"

"It will blatter."

Arthur stared over the rim  of  his  coffee  cup  at  the  grisly
outside  world.  It  was  a  completely pointless place to be, he
realized, and he had been driven  there  by  superstition  rather
than  logic.  However,  as if to bait him with the knowledge that
such coincidences could  in  fact  happen,  fate  had  chosen  to
reunite  him  with the lorry driver he had encountered there last
time.

The more he tried to ignore him, the more he found himself  being
dragged   back   into   the   gravitic  whirlpool  of  the  man's
exasperating conversation.

"I  think,"  said  Arthur  vaguely,  cursing  himself  for   even
bothering to say this, "that it's easing off."

"Ha!"

Arthur just shrugged. He should go. That's what he should do.  He
should just go.
"It never stops raining!" ranted the lorry driver. He thumped the
table,  spilt his tea, and actually, for a moment, appeared to be
steaming.

You can't just walk off without responding to a remark like that.

"Of course it stops raining,"  said  Arthur.  It  was  hardly  an
elegant refutation, but it had to be said.

"It rains ... all ... the time,"  raved  the  man,  thumping  the
table again, in time to the words.

Arthur shook his head.

"Stupid to say it rains all the time ..." he said.

The man's eyebrows shot up, affronted.

"Stupid? Why's it stupid? Why's it stupid to say it rains all the
time if it rains the whole time?"

"Didn't rain yesterday."

"Did in Darlington."

Arthur paused, warily.

"You going to ask me where I was yesterday?" asked the man. "Eh?"

"No," said Arthur.

"But I expect you can guess."

"Do you."

"Begins with a D."

"Does it."

"And it was pissing down there, I can tell you."

"You don't want to sit there, mate," said a passing  stranger  in
overalls to Arthur cheerily. "That's Thundercloud Corner that is.
Reserved special for old Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head  here.
There's  one  reserved  in  every  motorway caff between here and
sunny Denmark. Steer clear is my advice. 'Swhat we all do.  How's
it  going,  Rob? Keeping busy? Got your wet-weather tyres on? Har
har."

He breezed by and went to tell  a  joke  about  Britt  Ekland  to
someone at a nearby table.

"See, none of them bastards take me seriously," said Rob McKeena.
"But," he added darkly, leaning forward and screwing up his eyes,
"they all know it's true!"

Arthur frowned.

"Like my wife," hissed the sole owner  and  driver  of  McKeena's
All-Weather  Haulage.  "She  says it's nonsense and I make a fuss
and complain about nothing,  but,"  he  paused  dramatically  and
darted  out dangerous looks from his eyes, "she always brings the
washing in when I phone to say I'm on me way home!" He brandished
his coffee spoon. "What do you make of that?"

"Well ..."

"I have a book," he went on, "I have a book. A diary. Kept it for
fifteen  years.  Shows  every  single place I've ever been. Every
day. And also what the weather was like. And it  was  uniformly,"
he  snarled, "'orrible. All over England, Scotland, Wales I been.
All round the  Continent,  Italy,  Germany,  back  and  forth  to
Denmark, been to Yugoslavia. It's all marked in and charted. Even
when I went to visit my brother," he added, "in Seattle."

"Well," said Arthur, getting up to leave at last, "perhaps  you'd
better show it to someone."

"I will," said Rob McKeena.

And he did.




Misery, dejection. More misery and more dejection.  He  needed  a
project and he gave himself one.

He would find where his cave had been.

On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice  cave,  a
lousy cave, but ... There was no but. It had been a totally lousy
cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for  five  years
which made it home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track
of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and  so  he  went  to
Exeter to buy a computer.

That was what he really wanted, of course,  a  computer.  But  he
felt  he  ought  to  have  some serious purpose in mind before he
simply went and lashed out a lot of readies on what people  might
otherwise mistake as being just a thing to play with. So that was
his serious purpose. To pinpoint the exact location of a cave  on
prehistoric Earth. He explained this to the man in the shop.

"Why?" said the man in the shop.

This was a tricky one.

"OK, skip that," said the man in the shop. "How?"

"Well, I was hoping you could help me with that."

The man sighed and his shoulders dropped.

"Have you much experience of computers?"

Arthur wondered whether to mention Eddie the  shipboard  computer
on the Heart of Gold, who could have done the job in a second, or
Deep Thought, or - but decided he wouldn't.

"No," he said.

"Looks like a fun afternoon," said the man in the  shop,  but  he
said it only to himself.

Arthur bought the Apple anyway. Over a few days he also  acquired
some  astronomical software, plotted the movements of stars, drew
rough little diagrams of how he seemed to remember the  stars  to
have  been in the sky when he looked up out of his cave at night,
and worked away busily at it for weeks,  cheerfully  putting  off
the conclusion he knew he would inevitably have to come to, which
was that the whole project was completely ludicrous.

Rough drawings from memory were futile. He didn't even  know  how
long  it  had been, beyond Ford Prefect's rough guess at the time
that it was "a couple of million years" and he simply didn't have
the maths.

Still, in the end he worked out a method  which  would  at  least
produce  a  result. He decided not to mind the fact that with the
extraordinary jumble of rules of thumb, wild  approximations  and
arcane  guesswork he was using he would be lucky to hit the right
galaxy, he just went ahead and got a result.

He would call it the right result. Who would know?

As it happened, through the myriad and  unfathomable  chances  of
fate,  he  got  it exactly right, though he of course would never
know that.  He  just  went  up  to  London  and  knocked  on  the
appropriate door.

"Oh. I thought you were going to phone me first."

Arthur gaped in astonishment.

"You can only come in for a few minutes,"  said  Fenchurch.  "I'm
just going out."




A summer's day  in  Islington,  full  of  the  mournful  wail  of
antique-restoring machinery.

Fenchurch was unavoidably  busy  for  the  afternoon,  so  Arthur
wandered in a blissed-out haze and looked at all the shops which,
in Islington, are quite an useful bunch, as anyone who  regularly
needs  old  woodworking  tools,  Boer  War  helmets, drag, office
furniture or fish will readily confirm.

The sun beat down over the roofgardens. It beat on architects and
plumbers.  It beat on barristers and burglars. It beat on pizzas.
It beat on estate agent's particulars.

It beat on Arthur as he went into a restored furniture shop.

"It's an interesting building," said the proprietor,  cheerfully.
"There's  a  cellar  with  a secret passage which connects with a
nearby pub. It was built for the Prince Regent apparently, so  he
could make his escape when he needed to."

"You mean, in case anybody might catch him buying  stripped  pine
furniture," said Arthur

"No," said the proprietor, "not for that reason."

"You'll have to excuse me," said Arthur. "I'm terribly happy."

"I see."

He wandered hazily on and found himself outside  the  offices  of
Greenpeace. he remembered the contents of his file marked "Things
to do - urgent!", which he hadn't opened again in  the  meantime.
He marched in with a cheery smile and said he'd come to give them
some money to help free the dolphins.

"Very funny," they told him, "go away."

This wasn't quite the response  he  had  expected,  so  he  tried
again.  This  time they got quite angry with him, so he just left
some money anyway and went back out into the sunshine.

Just after six he returned to Fenchurch's house in the  alleyway,
clutching a bottle of champagne.

"Hold this," she said, shoved  a  stout  rope  in  his  hand  and
disappeared  inside  through  the  large  white wooden doors from
which dangled a fat padlock off a black iron bar.

The house was a small converted  stable  in  a  light  industrial
alleyway   behind   the   derelict  Royal  Agricultural  Hall  of
Islington. As well as its  large  stable  doors  it  also  had  a
normal-looking  front door of smartly glazed panelled wood with a
black dolphin door knocker. The one odd thing about this door was
its  doorstep,  which  was nine feet high, since the door was set
into the  upper  of  the  two  floors  and  presumably  had  been
originally used to haul in hay for hungry horses.

An old pulley jutted out of the brickwork above the  doorway  and
it  was over this that the rope Arthur was holding was slung. The
other end of the rope held a suspended 'cello.

The door opened above his head.

"OK," said Fenchurch, "pull on the rope, steady the 'cello.  Pass
it up to me."

He pulled on the rope, he steadied the 'cello.

"I can't pull on the rope again," he said, "without letting go of
the 'cello."

Fenchurch leant down.

"I'm steadying the 'cello," she said. "You pull on the rope."
The 'cello eased up level with the  doorway,  swinging  slightly,
and Fenchurch manoeuvred it inside.

"Come on up yourself," she called down.

Arthur picked up his bag of  goodies  and  went  in  through  the
stable doors, tingling.

The bottom room, which he had seen  briefly  before,  was  pretty
rough and full of junk. A large old cast-iron mangle stood there,
a surprising number of kitchen sinks  were  piled  in  a  corner.
There  was  also,  Arthur was momentarily alarmed to see, a pram,
but it was very old and uncomplicatedly full of books.

The floor was old stained concrete, excitingly cracked. And  this
was  the  measure  of  Arthur's  mood as he stared up the rickety
wooden steps in the far corner. Even  a  cracked  concrete  floor
seemed to him an almost unbearably sensual thing.

"An architect friend of mine keeps on telling me how  he  can  do
wonderful  things  with  this  place," said Fenchurch chattily as
Arthur emerged through the floor.  "He  keeps  on  coming  round,
standing  in  stunned amazement muttering about space and objects
and events and marvellous qualities of light, then says he  needs
a  pencil  and  disappears  for  weeks.  Wonderful  things  have,
therefore, so far failed to happen to it."

In fact, thought Arthur as he looked about, the upper room was at
least  reasonably  wonderful  anyway.  It  was  simply decorated,
furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo  set
with  speakers  which  would  have  impressed the guys who put up
Stonehenge.

There were flowers  which  were  pale  and  pictures  which  were
interesting.

There was a sort of gallery structure in  the  roof  space  which
held  a  bed  and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you
could actually swing a cat in. "But," she added, "only if it  was
a reasonably patient cat and didn't mind a few nasty cracks about
the head. So. here you are."

"Yes."

They looked at each other for a moment.

The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly  it  was  a  very
long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was
coming from.

For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious  if
left  alone for long enough with a Swiss Cheese plant, the moment
was one of sustained revelation. He felt on  the  sudden  like  a
cramped  and  zoo-born  animal who awakes one morning to find the
door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching
grey  and  pink  to  the distant rising sun, while all around new
sounds are waking.

He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed  at  her  openly
wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.

He hadn't realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a  voice
that  brings  you answers to the questions you continually ask of
it, had never consciously detected it  or  recognized  its  tones
till it now said something it had never said to him before, which
was "Yes".

Fenchurch dropped her eyes away at last, with a tiny shake of her
head.

"I know," she said. "I shall have to remember," she added,  "that
you  are  the sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece
of paper for two minutes without winning a raffle with it."

She turned away.

"Let's go for a walk," she said quickly. "Hyde Park. I'll  change
into something less suitable."

She was dressed in a rather severe dark dress, not a particularly
shapely one, and it didn't really suit her.

"I wear it specially for my 'cello teacher," she  said.  "He's  a
nice  boy,  but  I sometimes think all that bowing gets him a bit
excited. I'll be down in a moment."

She ran lightly up the steps to the  gallery  above,  and  called
down, "Put the bottle in the fridge for later."

He noticed as he slipped the champagne bottle into the door  that
it had an identical twin to sit next to.

He walked over to the  window  and  looked  out.  He  turned  and
started to look at her records. From above he heard the rustle of
her dress fall to the ground. He talked to himself about the sort
of  person  he  was.  He  told  himself very firmly that for this
moment  at  least  he  would  keep  his  eyes  very  firmly   and
steadfastly  locked  on  to  the  spines of her records, read the
titles, nod appreciatively, count the blasted things  if  he  had
to. He would keep his head down.

This he completely, utterly and abjectly failed to do.

She was staring down at him with such intensity that  she  seemed
hardly to notice that he was looking up at her. Then suddenly she
shook her head, dropped  the  light  sundress  over  herself  and
disappeared quickly into the bathroom.

She emerged a moment later, all smiles and with a sunhat and came
tripping  down  the  steps with extraordinary lightness. It was a
strange kind of dancing motion she had. She saw that  he  noticed
it and put her head slightly on one side.

"Like it?" she said.

"You look gorgeous," he said simply, because she did.

"Hmmmm," she said, as if he hadn't really answered her question.
She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all  this
time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in
a fit state to be left on its own  for  a  while.  Arthur's  eyes
followed  hers  around,  and  while  he  was looking in the other
direction she slipped something out of  a  drawer  and  into  the
canvas bag she was carrying.

Arthur looked back at her.

"Ready?"

"Did you know," she said with a  slightly  puzzled  smile,  "that
there's something wrong with me?"

Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.

"Well," he said, "I'd heard some vague sort of ..."

"I wonder how much you do know about me," she said. "I you  heard
it  from where I think you heard then that's not it. Russell just
sort of makes stuff up, because he can't deal with what it really
is."

A pang of worry went through Arthur.

"Then what is it?" he said. "Can you tell me?"

"Don't worry," she said, "it's nothing bad at all. Just  unusual.
Very very unusual."

She touched his hand, and  then  leant  forward  and  kissed  him
briefly.

"I shall be very interested to know," she said, "if you manage to
work out what it is this evening."

Arthur felt that if someone tapped him at  that  point  he  would
have  chimed,  like  the  deep  sustained  rolling chime his grey
fishbowl made when he flicked it with his thumbnail.




Ford Prefect was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound
of gunfire.

He slid himself out of the  maintenance  hatchway  which  he  had
fashioned  into  a  bunk  for  himself  by  disabling some of the
noisier machinery in his vicinity and padding it with towels.  He
slung  himself  down  the access ladder and prowled the corridors
moodily.

They were claustrophobic and ill-lit, and what  light  there  was
was  continually  flickering and dimming as power surged this way
and that through the ship, causing heavy vibrations  and  rasping
humming noises.

That wasn't it, though.
He paused and leaned back against  the  wall  as  something  that
looked like a small silver power drill flew past him down the dim
corridor with a nasty searing screech.

That wasn't it either.

He clambered listlessly through a bulkhead door and found himself
in a larger corridor, though still ill-lit.

The ship lurched. It had been doing this a fair bit, but this was
heavier.  A  small  platoon  of robots weent by making a terrible
clattering.

Still not it, though.

Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end of the corridor,  so  he
walked along it in the other direction.

He passed a series of observation monitors  let  into  the  walls
behind plates of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.

One of them showed some horrible  green  scaly  reptilian  figure
ranting  and raving about the Single Transferable Vote system. It
was hard to tell whether he was for or against it, but he clearly
felt very strongly about it. Ford turned the sound down.

That wasn't it, though.

He passed another monitor. It was showing a commercial  for  some
brand  of  toothpaste that would apparently make you feel free if
you used it. There was nasty blaring music with it too, but  that
wasn't it.

He came upon another, much larger three-dimensional  screen  that
was monitoring the outside of the vast silver Xaxisian ship.

As he  watched,  a  thousand  horribly  beweaponed  Zirzla  robot
starcruisers  came  searing  round  the  dark  shadow  of a moon,
silhouetted against the blinding disc of the star Xaxis, and  the
ship  simultaneously  unleashed  a  vicious  blaze  of  hideously
incomprehensible forces from all its orifices against them.

That was it.

Ford shook his head irritably and rubbed his eyes. He slumped  on
the  wrecked  body  of a dull silver robot which clearly had been
burning earlier on, but had now cooled down enough to sit on.

He yawned and dug his copy of the  Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  to  the
Galaxy  out  of his satchel. He activated the screen, and flicked
idly through  some  level  three  entries  and  some  level  four
entries.  He  was  looking for some good insomnia cures. He found
Rest, which was what he reckoned he needed.  He  found  Rest  and
Recuperation  and  was  about  to  pass on when he suddenly had a
better idea. He looked up at the monitor screen. The  battle  was
raging  more  fiercely  every second and the noise was appalling.
The ship juddered, screamed, and lurched  as  each  new  bolt  of
stunning energy was delivered or received.
He looked back down at the Guide again and flipped through a  few
likely  locations.  He suddenly laughed, and then rummaged in his
satchel again.

He pulled out a small memory dump module, wiped off the fluff and
biscuit  crumbs,  and plugged it into an interface on the back of
the Guide.

When all the information that he could  think  was  relevant  had
been  dumped  into  the  module, he unplugged it again, tossed it
lightly in the palm of his  hand,  put  the  Guide  away  in  his
satchel,  smirked, and went in search of the ship's computer data
banks.




"The purpose of having the sun go low in  the  evenings,  in  the
summer,  especially  in  parks," said the voice earnestly, "is to
make girl's breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am
convinced that this is the case."

Arthur and Fenchurch giggled about this to  each  other  as  they
passed. She hugged him more tightly for a moment.

"And I am certain," said the frizzy ginger-haired youth with  the
long  thin  nose  who  was epostulating from his deckchair by the
side of the Serpentine, "that if one worked the argument through,
one  would find that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic
from everything," he insisted to his thin  dark-haired  companion
who was slumped in the next door deckchair feeling dejected about
his spots, "that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This
is indisputable. And," he added, "I love it."

He  turned  sharply  and  squinted  through  his  spectacles   at
Fenchurch.  Arthur  steered  her away and could feel her silently
quaking.

"Next guess," she said, when she had stopped giggling, "come on."

"All right," he said,  "your  elbow.  Your  left  elbow.  There's
something wrong with your left elbow."

"Wrong again," she said, "completely wrong. You're on  completely
the wrong track."

The summer sun was sinking through the tress in the park, looking
as  if - Let's not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning. Everything
about it is stunning except for the rubbish on  Monday  mornings.
Even  the ducks are stunning. Anyone who can go through Hyde Park
on a summer's evening and not feel moved by it is probably  going
through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled over their face.

It is a park in which people do more  extraordinary  things  than
they  do  elsewhere.  Arthur  and Fenchurch found a man in shorts
practising the bagpipes to himself under a tree. The piper paused
to  chase  off  an  American couple who had tried, timidly to put
some coins on the box his bagpipes came in.
"No!" he shouted at them, "go away! I'm only practising."

He started resolutely to reinflate his bag, but  even  the  noise
this made could not disfigure their mood.

Arthur put his arms around her and moved them slowly downwards.

"I don't think it can be your bottom," he said  after  a  while,"
there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with that at all."

"Yes," she agreed, "there's  absolutely  nothing  wrong  with  my
bottom."

They kissed for so  long  that  eventually  the  piper  went  and
practised on the other side of the tree.

"I'll tell you a story," said Arthur.

"Good."

They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of  couples
actually  lying  on  top  of  each  other and sat and watched the
stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the  water  which
ran beneath the stunning ducks.

"A story," said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.

"Which will tell you something of the sort of things that  happen
to me. It's absolutely true."

"You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed  to
be  something that happened to their wife's cousin's best friend,
but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line."

"Well, it's like one of those stories, except  that  it  actually
happened,  and I know it actually happened, because the person it
actually happened to was me."

"Like the raffle ticket."

Arthur laughed. "Yes. I had a train to catch,"  he  went  on.  "I
arrived at the station ..."

"Did I ever tell you," interrupted Fenchurch, "what  happened  to
my parents in a station?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "you did."

"Just checking."

Arthur glanced at his watch. "I suppose we could think of getting
back," he said.

"Tell me the story," said Fenchurch firmly. "You arrived  at  the
station."

"I was about twenty minutes early. I'd got the time of the  train
wrong. I suppose it is at least equally possible," he added after
a moment's reflection, "that British Rail had got the time of the
train wrong. Hadn't occurred to me before."

"Get on with it." Fenchurch laughed.

"So I bought a newspaper, to do the crossword, and  went  to  the
buffet to get a cup of coffee."

"You do the crossword?"

"Yes."

"Which one?"

"The Guardian usually."

"I think it tries to be too cute. I prefer  the  Times.  Did  you
solve it?"

"What?"

"The crossword in the Guardian."

"I haven't had a chance to look at it  yet,"  said  Arthur,  "I'm
still trying to buy the coffee."

"All right then. Buy the coffee."

"I'm buying it. I am also," said Arthur, "buying some biscuits."

"What sort?"

"Rich Tea."

"Good choice."

"I like them. Laden with all these new possessions, I go and  sit
at a table. And don't ask me what the table was like because this
was some time ago and I can't remember. It was probably round."

"All right."

"So let me give you the layout. Me sitting at the  table.  On  my
left,  the  newspaper.  On  my  right,  the cup of coffee. In the
middle of the table, the packet of biscuits."

"I see it perfectly."

"What you don't see," said Arthur, "because I  haven't  mentioned
him  yet,  is the guy sitting at the table already. He is sitting
there opposite me."

"What's he like?"

"Perfectly ordinary. Briefcase. Business suit. He  didn't  look,"
said Arthur, "as if he was about to do anything weird."

"Ah. I know the type. What did he do?"
"He did this. He leaned across the table, picked up the packet of
biscuits, tore it open, took one out, and ..."

"What?"

"Ate it."

"What?"

"He ate it."

Fenchurch looked at him in astonishment. "What on Earth  did  you
do?"

"Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman
would do. I was compelled," said Arthur, "to ignore it."

"What? Why?"

"Well, it's not the sort of thing you're trained  for  is  it?  I
searched  my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere
in my upbringing, experience or even primal instincts to tell  me
how  to  react  to  someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting
right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits."

"Well, you could ..." Fenchurch thought about it. "I must say I'm
not sure what I would have done either. So what happened?"

"I stared furiously at the crossword," said Arthur. "Couldn't  do
a  single clue, took a sip of coffee, it was too hot to drink, so
there was nothing for it. I braced  myself.  I  took  a  biscuit,
trying  very  hard not to notice," he added, "that the packet was
already mysteriously open ..."

"But you're fighting back, taking a tough line."

"After my fashion,  yes.  I  ate  the  biscuit.  I  ate  it  very
deliberately  and  visibly,  so that he would have no doubt as to
what it was I was doing. When I eat a biscuit," Arthur said,  "it
stays eaten."

"So what did he do?"

"Took another one. Honestly," insisted Arthur, "this  is  exactly
what  happened.  He  took  another  biscuit,  he ate it. Clear as
daylight. Certain as we are sitting on the ground."

Fenchurch stirred uncomfortably.

"And the  problem  was,"  said  Arthur,  "that  having  not  said
anything  the  first  time, it was somehow even more difficult to
broach the subject the second  time  around.  What  do  you  say?
`Excuse  me  ...  I couldn't help noticing, er ...' Doesn't work.
No, I ignored  it  with,  if  anything,  even  more  vigour  than
previously."

"My man ..."

"Stared at the crossword, again, still couldn't budge  a  bit  of
it,  so  showing  some  of  the  spirit  that  Henry  V did on St
Crispin's Day ..."

"What?"

"I went into the breach again. I  took,"  said  Arthur,  "another
biscuit. And for an instant our eyes met."

"Like this?"

"Yes, well, no, not quite like that. But they met.  Just  for  an
instant.  And  we  both  looked away. But I am here to tell you,"
said Arthur, "that there was a little  electricity  in  the  air.
There  was  a little tension building up over the table. At about
this time."

"I can imagine."

"We went through the whole packet like this.  Him,  me,  him,  me
..."

"The whole packet?"

"Well it was only eight biscuits but it seemed like a lifetime of
biscuits  we were getting through at this point. Gladiators could
hardly have had a tougher time."

"Gladiators," said Fenchurch, "would have had to  do  it  in  the
sun. More physically gruelling."

"There is that. So. When the empty packet was lying dead  between
us  the  man  at  last got up, having done his worst, and left. I
heaved a sigh of relief, of course. As it happened, my train  was
announced  a  moment or two later, so I finished my coffee, stood
up, picked up the newspaper, and underneath the newspaper ..."

"Yes?"

"Were my biscuits."

"What?" said Fenchurch. "What?"

"True."

"No!" She gasped and tossed herself back on the grass laughing.

She sat up again.

"You completely nitwit," she hooted, "you almost  completely  and
utterly foolish person."

She pushed him backwards, rolled over him, kissed him and  rolled
off again. He was surprised at how light she was.

"Now you tell me a story."

"I thought," she said putting on a low  husky  voice,  "that  you
were very keen to get back."
"No hurry," he said airily, "I want you to tell me a story."

She looked out over the kale and pondered.

"All right," she said, "it's only a short one. And not funny like
yours, but ... Anyway."

She looked down. Arthur could feel that it was one of those sorts
of  moments.  The air seemed to stand still around them, waiting.
Arthur wished that the  air  would  go  away  and  mind  its  own
business.

"When I was a kid," she said. "These sort of stories always start
like this, don't they, `When I was a kid ...' Anyway. This is the
bit where the girl suddenly says, `When I was a kid'  and  starts
to  unburden herself. We have got to that bit. When I was a kid I
had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed ... What do  you
think of it so far?"

"I like it. I think it's moving well. You're getting the  bedroom
interest  in  nice  and  early.  We  could  probably do with some
development with the picture."

"It was one of those  pictures  that  children  are  supposed  to
like,"  she  said,  "but  don't. Full of endearing little animals
doing endearing things, you know?"

"I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats."

"Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were  assorted
rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer."

"On the raft."

"On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft."

"Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer."

"Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety."

"Ugh."

"The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter  swimming
in  front  of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying
about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched
animals  on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had
such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must  hurt  pulling
it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the
time.

"Then one day - and remember I'd been  looking  at  this  picture
every  night  for  years - I suddenly noticed that the raft had a
sail. Never seen it before. The  otter  was  fine,  he  was  just
swimming along."

She shrugged.

"Good story?" she said.
"Ends weakly," said Arthur, "leaves the audience crying `Yes, but
what  of  it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before
the credits."

Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs.

"It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost  unnoticed
worry  just  dropping  away,  like taking off heavy weights, like
black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly  being
watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your
worries, the world is a good and perfect place.  It  is  in  fact
very  easy.' You probably thing I'm saying that because I'm going
to say that I felt like that this afternoon or  something,  don't
you?"

"Well, I ..." said Arthur, his composure suddenly shattered.

"Well, it's all right," she said, "I did. That's exactly  what  I
felt.  But  you  see,  I've  felt  that  before,  even  stronger.
Incredibly strongly. I'm afraid I'm a bit of  a  one,"  she  said
gazing off into the distance, "for sudden startling revelations."

Arthur was at  sea,  could  hardly  speak,  and  felt  it  wiser,
therefore, for the moment not to try.

"It was very  odd,"  she  said,  much  as  one  of  the  pursuing
Egyptians  might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when
Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side.

"Very odd," she repeated, "for days before, the strangest feeling
had  been building in me, as if I was going to give birth. No, it
wasn't like that in fact, it was more as if I was being connected
into  something,  bit by bit. No, not even that; it was as if the
whole of the Earth, through me, was going to ..."

"Does the number," said Arthur gently, "forty-two  mean  anything
to you at all?"

"What? No, what are you talking about?" exclaimed Fenchurch.

"Just a thought," murmured Arthur.

"Arthur, I mean this, this is very real to me, this is serious."

"I was being perfectly serious,"  said  Arthur.  "It's  just  the
Universe I'm never quite sure about."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Tell me the rest of it," he said. "Don't worry if it sounds odd.
Believe  me,  you  are  talking  to someone who has seen a lot of
stuff," he added, "that is odd. And I don't mean biscuits."

She nodded, and seemed to believe him. Suddenly, she gripped  his
arm.

"It was so simple," she said, "so wonderfully and extraordinarily
simple, when it came."
"What was it?" said Arthur quietly.

"Arthur, you see," she said, "that's what I no longer  know.  And
the loss is unbearable. If I try to think back to it, it all goes
flickery and jumpy, and if I try too hard, I get as  far  as  the
teacup and I just black out."

"What?"

"Well, like your story," she said, "the best bit  happened  in  a
cafe.  I  was  sitting there, having a cup of tea. This was after
days of this build up, the feeling of becoming  connected  up.  I
think I was buzzing gently. And there was some work going on at a
building site opposite the cafe, and I was  watching  it  through
the window, over the rim of my teacup, which I always find is the
nicest way of watching other people working. And suddenly,  there
it  was  in  my  mind, this message from somewhere. And it was so
simple. It made such sense of  everything.  I  just  sat  up  and
thought,  `Oh! Oh, well that's all right then.' I was so startled
I almost dropped my teacup, in fact I think I did drop it.  Yes,"
she  added  thoughtfully,  "I'm  sure  I did. How much sense am I
making?"

"It was fine up to the bit about the teacup."

She shook her head, and shook it again, as if trying to clear it,
which is what she was trying to do.

"Well that's it," she said. "Fine up to the bit about the teacup.
That was the point at which it seemed to me quite literally as if
the world exploded."

"What ...?"

"I  know  it  sounds   crazy,   and   everybody   says   it   was
hallucinations,  but  if  that  was  hallucinations  then  I have
hallucinations in big screen 3D with 16-track  Dolby  Stereo  and
should  probably  hire  myself  out  to people who are bored with
shark movies. It was as if the ground was literally  ripped  from
under my feet, and ... and ..."

She patted the grass lightly, as if  for  reassurance,  and  then
seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say.

"And I woke up in hospital. I suppose I've been in and  out  ever
since.  And  that's  why  I have an instinctive nervousness," she
said, "of sudden startling revelations that's everything's  going
to be all right." She looked up at him.

Arthur had simply ceased  to  worry  himself  about  the  strange
anomalies surrounding his return to his home world, or rather had
consigned them to that part of his mind marked "Things  to  think
about - Urgent." "Here is the world," he had told himself. "Here,
for whatever reason, is the world, and here it stays. With me  on
it."  But  now  it seemed to go swimmy around him, as it had that
night in the car when Fenchurch's brother had told him the  silly
stories  about  the  CIA  agent  in the reservoir. The trees went
swimmy. The lake went swimmy, but this was perfectly natural  and
nothing  to be alarmed by because a grey goose had just landed on
it. The geese were having a great relaxed time and had  no  major
answers they wished to know the questions to.

"Anyway," said Fenchurch, suddenly and brightly and with a  wide-
eyed smile, "there is something wrong with part of me, and you've
got to find out what it is. We'll go home."

Arthur shook his head.

"What's the matter?" she said.

Arthur had shaken his head, not to disagree with  her  suggestion
which  he  thought  was a truly excellent one, one of the world's
great suggestions, but because he was just for a moment trying to
free himself of the recurring impression he had that just when he
was least expecting it the Universe would suddenly leap out  from
behind a door and go boo at him.

"I'm just trying to get this entirely clear  in  my  mind,"  said
Arthur,  "you  say you felt as if the Earth actually ... exploded
..."

"Yes. More than felt."

"Which is what everybody else  says,"  he  said  hesitantly,  "is
hallucinations?"

"Yes, but Arthur that's ridiculous. People think that if you just
say  `hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain
and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will  just  go
away.  It's  just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't
explain why the dolphins disappeared."

"No," said Arthur. "No," he added thoughtfully.  "No,"  he  added
again, even more thoughtfully. "What?" he said at last.

"Doesn't explain the dolphins disappearing."

"No," said Arthur, "I see that. Which dolphins do you mean?"

"What do you mean which dolphins? I'm talking about when all  the
dolphins disappeared."

She put her hand on his knee, which made  him  realize  that  the
tingling  going up and down his spine was not her gently stroking
his back, and must instead be one of the nasty creepy feelings he
so often got when people were trying to explain things to him.

"The dolphins?"

"Yes."

"All the dolphins," said Arthur, "disappeared?"

"Yes."

"The dolphins? You're saying the  dolphins  all  disappeared?  Is
this,"  said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point,
"what you're saying?"
"Arthur where have you been for heaven's sake? The  dolphins  all
disappeared on the same day I ..."

She stared him intently in his startled eyes.

"What ...?"

"No dolphins. All gone. Vanished."

She searched his face.

"Did you really not know that?"

It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.

"Where did they go?" he asked.

"No one knows. That's what vanished means."  She  paused.  "Well,
there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he
lives in California," she said, "and is mad. I  was  thinking  of
going  to see him because it seems the only lead I've got on what
happened to me."

She shrugged, and then looked at him long and  quietly.  She  lay
her hand on the side of his face.

"I really would like to know where you've  been,"  she  said.  "I
think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that's
why we recognized each other."

She glanced around the park, which was now  being  gathered  into
the clutches of dusk.

"Well," she said, "now you've got someone you can tell."

Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.

"It is," he said, "a very long story."

Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.

"Is it anything to do with this?" she said. The  thing  she  took
out  of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled
into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly
on  the  deserts  of  Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands
that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on
the  glaciers  of  the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around
spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and  since  its  makers
had  thought  that  these  were  exactly the sorts of things that
might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a  sturdy
plastic  cover  and written on it, in large friendly letters, the
words "Don't Panic".

"Where did you get this?" said Arthur, startled, taking  it  from
her.

"Ah," she said, "I thought it was yours. In  Russell's  car  that
night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?"
Arthur drew the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from its cover.
It  was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some
buttons till the screen flared with text.

"A few," he said.

"Can we go to them?"

"What? No," said Arthur abruptly,  then  relented,  but  relented
warily.  "Do  you want to?" he said, hoping for the answer no. It
was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, "You don't
want to, do you?" which expects it.

"Yes," she said. "I want to know what  the  message  was  that  I
lost,  and where it came from. Because I don't think," she added,
standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of  the  park,
"that it came from here."

"I'm not even sure," she further added, slipping her  arm  around
Arthur's waist, "that I know where here is."




The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, as  has  been  remarked
before  often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing.
It is, essentially, as the  title  implies,  a  guide  book.  The
problem  is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a
sizeable portion of which are continually clogging up the  civil,
commercial  and  criminal  courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and
especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.

The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.

This is:

Change.

Read it through again and you'll get it.

The Galaxy is a rapidly changing place.  There  is,  frankly,  so
much  of  it,  every  bit  of  which  is continually on the move,
continually changing. A bit of a nightmare, you might think,  for
a scrupulous and conscientious editor diligently striving to keep
this massively detailed and complex electronic  tome  abreast  of
all  the  changing  circumstances  and conditions that the Galaxy
throws up every minute of every hour of every day, and you  would
be wrong. Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize
that the editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever  had,
has  no  real  grasp  of  the meanings of the words "scrupulous",
"conscientious" or "diligent", and tends to  get  his  nightmares
through a straw.

Entries tend to get  updated  or  not  across  the  Sub-Etha  Net
according to if they read good.

Take for example, the case of Brequinda on the Foth  of  Avalars,
famed  in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-d mini-serieses
as home of the magnificent and magical Fuolornis Fire Dragon.

In Ancient days, when Fragilis sang and Saxaquine of the Quenelux
held  sway,  when  the air was sweet and the nights fragrant, but
everyone somehow managed to be, or so they claimed, though how on
earth  they  could  have  thought  that  anyone was even remotely
likely to believe such a preposterous claim  what  with  all  the
sweet  air  and  fragrant  nights  and whatnot is anyone's guess,
virgins, it was not possible to heave a brick on Brequinda in the
Foth  of  Avalars without hitting at least half a dozen Fuolornis
Fire Dragons.

Whether you would want to do that is another matter.

Not  that  Fire  Dragons  weren't  an  essentially   peace-loving
species,  because  they  were.  They  adored it to bits, and this
wholesale adoring of things to  bits  was  often  in  itself  the
problem:  one so often hurts the one one loves, especially if one
is a Fuolornis Fire Dragon with breath like a rocket booster  and
teeth  like a park fence. Another problem was that once they were
in the mood they often went on to hurt quite a lot  of  the  ones
that  other  people loved as well. Add to all that the relatively
small number of madmen who actually went around the place heaving
bricks,  and  you end up with a lot of people on Brequinda in the
Foth of Avalars getting seriously hurt by dragons.

But did they mind? They did not.

Were they heard to bemoan their fate? No.

The Fuolornis Fire Dragons were revered throughout the  lands  of
Brequinda  in  the  Foth of valors for their savage beauty, their
noble ways and their habit of biting  people  who  didn't  revere
them.

Why was this?

The answer was simple.

Sex.

There is, for some unfathomed reason, something almost unbearably
sexy  about having huge fire-breathing magical dragons flying low
about the sky on moonlit nights which were already dangerously on
the sweet and fragrant side.

Why this should be so, the romance-besotted people  of  Brequinda
in  the  Foth  of  Avalars could not have told you, and would not
have stopped to discuss the matter once the  effect  was  up  and
going,  for  no  sooner would a flock of half a dozen silk-winged
leather-bodied Fuolornis Fire Dragons heave into sight across the
evening  horizon  than half the people of Brequinda are scurrying
off into the woods with the other half, there  to  spend  a  busy
breathless  night together and emerge with the first rays of dawn
all smiling and happy and still claiming, rather endearingly,  to
be virgins, if rather flushed and sticky virgins.

Pheromones, some researchers said.
Something sonic, others claimed.

The place was always stiff with researchers trying to get to  the
bottom of it all and taking a very long time about it.

Not surprisingly, the Guide's graphically enticing description of
the  general  state  of  affairs  on this planet has proved to be
astonishingly popular amongst hitch-hikers who  allow  themselves
to  be  guided  by it, and so it has simply never been taken out,
and it is therefore left to latter-day travellers to find out for
themselves  that  today's  modern  Brequinda in the City State of
Avalars is now little more than concrete, strip joints and Dragon
Burger Bars.




The night in Islington was sweet and fragrant.

There were, of course, no Fuolornis Fire  Dragons  about  in  the
alley,  but  if  any  had chanced by they might just as well have
sloped off across the road for a pizza, for they were  not  going
to be needed.

Had an emergency cropped up while they were still in  the  middle
of  their American Hots with extra anchovy they could always have
sent across a message to put Dire Straits on the stereo, which is
now known to have much the same effect.

"No," said Fenchurch, "not yet."

Arthur put Dire Straits on the stereo. Fenchurch pushed ajar  the
upstairs front door to let in a little more of the sweet fragrant
night air. They both sat on some of the  furniture  made  out  of
cushions, very close to the open bottle of champagne.

"No," said Fenchurch, "not till you've  found  out  what's  wrong
with  me,  which  bit. But I suppose," she added very, very, very
quietly, "that we may as well start with where your hand is now."

Arthur said, "So which way do I go?"

"Down," said Fenchurch, "on this occasion."

He moved his hand.

"Down," she said, "is in fact the other way."

"Oh yes."

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability  to  make  a  Schecter
Custom  Stratocaster  hoot  and  sing  like  angels on a Saturday
night, exhausted from being good all week  and  needing  a  stiff
beer  -  which  is  not strictly relevant at this point since the
record hadn't yet got to that bit, but there  will  be  too  much
else  going  on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does
not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch,  so  it
seems  best  to  mention  it  now  while  things are still moving
slowly.
"And so we come," said Arthur, "to your knee. There is  something
terribly and tragically wrong with your left knee."

"My left knee," said Fenchurch, "is absolutely fine."

"Do it is."

"Did you know that ..."

"What?"

"Ahm, it's all right. I can tell you do. No, keep going."

"So it has to be something to do with your feet ..."

She  smiled  in  the  dim  light,  and  wriggled  her   shoulders
noncommittally  against the cushions. Since there are cushions in
the Universe, on Squornshellous Beta to be exact, two  worlds  in
from  the  swampland of the mattresses, that actively enjoy being
wriggled against, particularly if it's noncommittally because  of
the  syncopated way in which the shoulders move, it's a pity they
weren't there. They weren't, but such is life.

Arthur held  her  left  foot  in  his  lap  and  looked  it  over
carefully.  All  kinds of stuff about the way her dress fell away
from  her  legs  was  making  it  difficult  for  him  to   think
particularly clearly at this point.

"I have to admit," he said, "that I really don't  know  what  I'm
looking for."

"You'll know when you find it,"  she  said.  "Really  you  will."
There was a slight catch in her voice. "It's not that one."

Feeling increasingly puzzled, Arthur let her left  foot  down  on
the  floor  and  moved  himself  around so that he could take her
right foot. She moved forward, put her arms round and kissed him,
because  the  record  had  got to that bit which, if you knew the
record, you would know made it impossible not to do this.

Then she gave him her right foot.

He stroked it, ran his fingers round her ankle, under  her  toes,
along her instep, could find nothing wrong with it.

She watched him with great amusement, laughed and shook her head.

"No, don't stop," she said, but it's not that one now."

Arthur stopped, and frowned at her left foot on the floor.

"Don't stop."

He stroked her right foot, ran  his  fingers  around  her  ankle,
under  her  toes,  along  her  instep  and  said,  "You mean it's
something to do with which leg I'm holding ...?"

She did another of the shrugs which would have brought  such  joy
into the life of a simple cushion from Squornshellous Beta.

He frowned.

"Pick me up," she said quietly.

He let her right foot down to the floor and stood up. So did she.
He  picked her up in his arms and they kissed again. This went on
for a while, then she said, "Now put me down again."

Still puzzled, he did so.

"Well?"

She looked at him almost challengingly.

"So what's wrong with my feet?" she said.

Arthur still did not understand. He sat on the  floor,  then  got
down  on  his hands and knees to look at her feet, in situ, as it
were,  in  their  normal  habitat.  And  as  he  looked  closely,
something  odd  struck  him.  He  pit  his head right down to the
ground and peered. There was a long pause. He sat back heavily.

"Yes," he said, "I see what's wrong with your  feet.  They  don't
touch the ground."

"So ... so what do you think ...?"

Arthur looked up at her quickly and  saw  the  deep  apprehension
making her eyes suddenly dark. She bit her lip and was trembling.

"What do ..." she stammered. "Are you ...?" She  shook  the  hair
forwards over her eyes that were filling with dark fearful tears.

He stood up quickly, put his arms  around  her  and  gave  her  a
single kiss.

"Perhaps you can do what I can do," he said, and walked  straight
out of her upstairs front door.

The record got to the good bit.




The battle raged on about the star  of  Xaxis.  Hundreds  of  the
fierce  and horribly beweaponed Zirzla ships had now been smashed
and wrenched to atoms by the withering  forces  the  huge  silver
Xaxisian ship was able to deploy.

Part of the moon had gone too, blasted away by those same blazing
forceguns  that  ripped  the  very fabric of space as they passed
through it.

The Zirzla ships that remained, horribly beweaponed  though  they
were,  were now hopelessly outclassed by the devastating power of
the Xaxisian ship, and were fleeing for cover behind the  rapidly
disintegrating  moon, when the Xaxisian ship, in hurtling pursuit
behind them, suddenly announced that it needed a holiday and left
the field of battle.

All was redoubled fear and consternation for a  moment,  but  the
ship was gone.

With the stupendous powers at its command it flitted across  vast
tracts  of  irrationally shaped space, quickly, effortlessly, and
above all, quietly.

Deep in his greasy, smelly bunk, fashioned out of  a  maintenance
hatchway,  Ford  Prefect  slept among his towels, dreaming of old
haunts. He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York.

In his dream he was walking late at night along  the  East  Side,
beside  the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that
new lifeforms were now emerging from it spontaneously,  demanding
welfare and voting rights.

One of those now floated past, waving. Ford waved back.

The thing thrashed to the shore and struggled up the bank.

"Hi," it said, "I've just been created. I'm completely new to the
Universe in all respects. Is there anything you can tell me?"

"Phew," said Ford, a little nonplussed, "I  can  tell  you  where
some bars are, I guess."

"What about love and happiness. I sense  deep  needs  for  things
like that," it said, waving its tentacles. "Got any leads there?"

"You can get some like what you require," said Ford, "on  Seventh
Avenue."

"I instinctively feel," said the creature, urgently, "that I need
to be beautiful. Am I?"

"You're pretty direct, aren't you?"

"No point in mucking about. Am I?"

"To me?" said Ford. "No. But listen," he added  after  a  moment,
"most  people  make  out,  you  know. Are there and like you down
there?"

"Search me, buster," said the creature, "as I said, I'm new here.
Life is entirely strange to me. What's it like?"

Here was something that Ford  felt  he  could  speak  about  with
authority.

"Life," he said, "is like a grapefruit."

"Er, how so?"

"Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled  on  the  outside,
wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and
some people have half a one for breakfast."
"Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?"

"I expect so," said Ford. "Ask a policeman."

Deep in his bunk, Ford Prefect wriggled  and  turned  on  to  his
other  side.  It  wasn't  his  favourite type of dream because it
didn't have Eccentrica Gallumbits, the Triple-Breasted  Whore  of
Eroticon  VI  in  it, whom many of his dreams did feature. But at
least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.




Luckily there was a strong updraft in the  alley  because  Arthur
hadn't  done  this  sort  of  thing  for  a  while, at least, not
deliberately, and deliberately is exactly the  way  you  are  not
meant to do it.

He swung down sharply, nearly catching himself a nasty  crack  on
the  jaw  with  the  doorstep  and  tumbled  through  the air, so
suddenly stunned with what a profoundly stupid thing he had  just
done  that  he completely forgot the bit about hitting the ground
and didn't.

A nice trick, he thought to himself, if you can do it.

The ground was hanging menacingly above his head.

He tried not to think about the ground, what  an  extraordinarily
big  thing it was and how much it would hurt him if it decided to
stop hanging there and suddenly fell on him. He  tried  to  think
nice  thoughts  about lemurs instead, which was exactly the right
thing to do because he couldn't at that moment remember precisely
what  a  lemur  was,  if it was one of those things that sweep in
great majestic herds across the plains of wherever it was  or  if
that  was  wildebeests, so it was a tricky kind of thing to think
nice thoughts about without simply resorting to an icky  sort  of
general  well-disposedness  towards things, and all this kept his
mind well occupied while his body tried to  adjust  to  the  fact
that it wasn't touching anything.

A Mars bar wrapper fluttered down the alleyway.

After a seeming moment of  doubt  and  indecision  it  eventually
allowed  the  wind  to  ease  it, fluttering, between him and the
ground.

"Arthur ..."

The ground was still hanging menacingly above his  head,  and  he
thought  it was probably time to do something about that, such as
fall away from it, which is  what  he  did.  Slowly.  Very,  very
slowly.

As he fell slowly, very,  very  slowly,  he  closed  his  eyes  -
carefully, so as not to jolt anything.

The feel of his eyes closing ran down his whole body. Once it had
reached  his  feet,  and the whole of his body was alerted to the
fact that his eyes were now closed and was not panicked by it, he
slowly, very, very slowly, revolved his body one way and his mind
the other.

That should sort the ground out.

He could feel the air clear about him now,  breezing  around  him
quite  cheerfully,  untroubled  by  his  being there, and slowly,
very, very slowly, as from a deep and distant  sleep,  he  opened
his eyes.

He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until
all the birdtalk had driven him scatty, but this was different.

Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a
slight  trembling  which could have been attributable to a number
of things, being in the air.

Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards
off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.

Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was  supposed
to  see it through the night was on an ingenious timeswitch which
meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as  the
evening  was  beginning  to  draw  in.  He was, therefore, safely
shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.

He slowly, very, very slowly, lifted his head to  Fenchurch,  who
was  standing  in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her
upstairs doorway.

Her face was inches from his.

"I was about to ask you," she said in a low trembly voice,  "what
you  were  doing.  But  then I realized that I could see what you
were doing. You were flying. So it seemed," she went on  after  a
slight wondering pause, "like a bit of a silly question."

Arthur said, "Can you do it?"

"No."

"Would you like to try?"

She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to  say  no,  but
just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.

"It's quite easy," urged Arthur, "if you don't know  how.  That's
the important bit. Be not at all sure how you're doing it."

Just to demonstrate how easy it was  he  floated  away  down  the
alley,  fell  upwards  quite dramatically and bobbed back down to
her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

"Ask me how I did that."

"How ... did you do that?"
"No idea. Not a clue."

She shrugged in bewilderment. "So how can I ...?"

Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.

"I want you to try," he said, "to  step  on  my  hand.  Just  one
foot."

"What?"

"Try it."

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as  if  she  was
trying  to  step on the hand of someone who was floating in front
of her in midair, she stepped on to his hand.

"Now the other."

"What?"

"Take the weight off your back foot."

"I can't."

"Try it."

"Like this?"

"Like that."

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told  herself,  as  if  -  She
stopped  telling herself what what she was doing was like because
she had a feeling she didn't altogether want to know.

She fixed her eyes very very firmly on the guttering of the  roof
of  the  decrepit  warehouse opposite which had been annoying her
for weeks because it was  clearly  going  to  fall  off  and  she
wondered  if  anyone was going to do anything about it or whether
she ought to say something to somebody, and didn't  think  for  a
moment  about  the  fact  that  she  was standing on the hands of
someone who wasn't standing on anything at all.

"Now," said Arthur, "take your weight off your left foot."

She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company who
had  their  offices round the corner, and took the weight off her
left foot, so she should probably  go  and  see  them  about  the
gutter.

"Now," said Arthur, "take the weight off your right foot."

"I can't."

"Try."

She hadn't seen the guttering from quite this angle  before,  and
it  looked to her now as if as well as the mud and gunge up there
there might also be a bird's nest. If she leaned forward  just  a
little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably
see it more clearly.

Arthur was alarmed to see that someone  down  in  the  alley  was
trying  to  steal her bicycle. He particularly didn't want to get
involved in an argument at the moment  and  hoped  that  the  guy
would do it quietly and not look up.

He had the quiet shifty look  of  someone  who  habitually  stole
bicycles  in  alleys  and  habitually didn't expect to find their
owners hovering several feet above them. He was relaxed  by  both
these   habits,   and   went  about  his  job  with  purpose  and
concentration, and when he found that  the  bike  was  unarguably
bound  by  hoops  of  tungsten carbide to an iron bar embedded in
concrete, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.

Arthur let out a long-held breath.

"See what a piece of eggshell I have found you,"  said  Fenchurch
in his ear.




Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent  may
have  received  an  impression of his character and habits which,
while it includes the truth  and,  of  course,  nothing  but  the
truth,  falls  somewhat  short,  in its composition, of the whole
truth in all its glorious aspects.

And the reasons for this are  obvious.  Editing,  selection,  the
need  to  balance  that  which  is interesting with that which is
relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

Like this for instance. "Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up  the
stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room,
took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes
one  by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor.
He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe.  He  washed
his  face  and  hands,  cleaned  his teeth, went to the lavatory,
realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong  order,
had  to wash his hands again and went to bed. He read for fifteen
minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that  trying  to  work
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.




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.




"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.

"Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has  absolutely  been
done  by  you.  Listen,  do  you know how much a tour operator is
paying that guy not to go to Malaga  this  year?  I  mean  forget
irrigating  the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a
whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding  places  for  money.
The  man's  turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to
make him win the bingo.

"Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man  Who
Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?"

"A nice one, but ..."

"We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that'll
be OK. Where are you?"
"Er, I'm in Islington. Listen, Murray ..."

"Islington!"

"Yes ..."

"Well, what about the  real  weirdness  of  the  week,  the  real
seriously  loopy  stuff.  You  know  anything  about these flying
people?"

"No."

"You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy  one.  This  is
the  real  meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the
time to say there's this couple who go flying nights.  We've  got
guys  down  in  our  photo  labs working through the night to put
together a genuine photograph. You must have heard."

"No."

"Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote.
But  that  was  months  ago.  Listen, it's night after night this
week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple  just
fly  around  the  sky  and  start doing all kinds of stuff. And I
don't mean looking through walls or pretending to be  box  girder
bridges. You don't know anything?"

"No."

"Arthur, it's been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with
you, chumbum, but I have to go. I'll send the guy with the camera
and the hose. Give me the address, I'm ready and writing."

"Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something."

"I have a lot to do."

"I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins."

"No story. Last year's news. Forget 'em. They're gone."

"It's important."

"Listen, no one will touch it. You can't  sustain  a  story,  you
know,  when  the  only news is the continuing absence of whatever
the story's about. Not our territory  anyway,  try  the  Sundays.
Maybe  they'll  run  a  little  `Whatever  Happened  to "Whatever
Happened to the Dolphins"' story in a  couple  of  years,  around
August.  But  what's  anybody  going  to  do now? `Dolphins still
gone'? `Continuing Dolphin Absence'?  `Dolphins  -  Further  Days
Without Them'? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its
little feet in the air and presently goes  to  the  great  golden
spike in the sky, my old fruitbat."

"Murray, I'm not interested in whether it's a story. I just  want
to  find  out  how I can get in touch with that guy in California
who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know."




"People are beginning to  talk,"  said  Fenchurch  that  evening,
after they had hauled her 'cello in.

"Not only talk," said Arthur, "but print,  in  big  bold  letters
under  the  bingo  prizes.  Which is why I thought I'd better get
these."

He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.

"Arthur!" she said, hugging him. "Does that mean you  managed  to
talk to him?"

"I  have  had  a  day,"  said  Arthur,  "of  extreme   telephonic
exhaustion.  I  have  spoken  to  virtually  every  department of
virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked  his
number down."

"You've obviously been working hard, you're drenched  with  sweat
poor darling."

"Not with sweat," said Arthur  wearily.  "A  photographer's  just
been. I tried to argue, but - never mind, the point is, yes."

"You spoke to him."

"I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to  come  to  the
phone right now and could I call back."

He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something  and  went
to the fridge to find it.

"Want a drink?"

"Would commit murder to get one. I always know I'm in for a tough
time  when  my  'cello teacher looks me up and down and says, `Ah
yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.'."

"I called again," said Arthur, "and she  said  that  he  was  3.2
light years from the phone and I should call back."

"Ah."

"I called again. "She said the situation had improved. He was now
a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way
to shout."

"You don't suppose," said Fenchurch,  doubtfully,  "that  there's
anyone else we can talk to?"

"It gets worse," said Arthur, "I spoke to someone  on  a  science
magazine  who  actually  knows  him, and he said that John Watson
will not only believe, but will  actually  have  absolute  proof,
often  dictated  to  him  by  angels with golden beards and green
wings  and  Doctor  Scholl  footwear,  that  the   month's   most
fashionable  silly  theory  is  true. For people who question the
validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the  clogs
in question, and that's as far as you get."

"I didn't realize it was that bad," said Fenchurch  quietly.  She
fiddled listlessly with the tickets.

"I phoned Mrs Watson again," said Arthur. "Her name, by the  way,
and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill."

"I see."

"I'm glad you see. I thought you mightn't believe any of this, so
when  I  called  her  this  time  I  used the telephone answering
machine to record the call."

He went across to the telephone machine  and  fiddled  and  fumed
with  all  its  buttons for a while, because it was the one which
was particularly recommended by Which?  magazine  and  is  almost
impossible to use without going mad.

"Here it is," he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.

The  voice  was  thin  and  crackly  with  its   journey   to   a
geostationary  satellite  and  back,  but  it was also hauntingly
calm.

"Perhaps I should explain,"  Arcane  Jill  Watson's  voice  said,
"that  the  phone  is in fact in a room that he never comes into.
It's in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter
the  Asylum  and  so  he  does  not.  I feel you should know this
because it may save you phoning. If you would like to  meet  him,
this  is  very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He
will only meet people outside the Asylum."

Arthur's voice, at  its  most  mystified:  "I'm  sorry,  I  don't
understand. Where is the asylum?"

"Where is the Asylum?" Arcane Jill Watson again. "Have  you  ever
read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?"

On the tape, Arthur's voice had to admit that he had not.

"You may want to do that. You may find that it  clarifies  things
for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the
Asylum is. Thank you."

The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the  machine
off.

"Well, I suppose we can regard that as an  invitation,"  he  said
with a shrug. "I actually managed to get the address from the guy
on the science magazine."

Fenchurch looked up at him again with  a  thoughtful  frown,  and
looked at the tickets again.

"Do you think it's worth it?" she said.

"Well," said Arthur, "the one thing  that  everyone  I  spoke  to
agrees  on,  apart  from  the  fact  that they all thought he was
barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living  about
dolphins."




"This is an important announcement. This is  flight  121  to  Los
Angeles.  If  your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles,
now would be the perfect time to disembark."




They rented a car in Los Angeles from  one  of  the  places  that
rents out cars that other people have thrown away.

"Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem," said  the
guy  behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, "sometimes
it's simpler just to get out and find a car that's going in  that
direction."

They stayed for one night in a hotel on  Sunset  Boulevard  which
someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.

"Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They've  got  a
swimming  pool  where  you  can  go  and watch English rock stars
reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers."

It was true. There was one and  that  was  exactly  what  he  was
doing.

The garage attendant didn't think much of their car, but that was
fine because they didn't either.

Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills  along
Mulholland  Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling
sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later  stopped  to
look  across  the  dazzling sea of floating light that is the San
Fernando Valley. They agreed that the  sense  of  dazzle  stopped
immediately  at the back of their eyes and didn't touch any other
part  of  them  and  came  away  strangely  unsatisfied  by   the
spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light
is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through  what
this  particularly  dramatic  sea  of light was illuminating they
didn't think much of it.

They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was
stupidly hot.

They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their  first
look  at  the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent
all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.

"Someone told me," said Fenchurch, "that they once overheard  two
old  ladies on this beach, doing what we're doing, looking at the
Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And  apparently,
after  a  long  pause,  one of them said to the other, `You know,
it's not as big as I expected.'"
Their mood lifted further as the  sun  began  to  move  down  the
western  half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their
rattling car and driving towards a sunset  that  no  one  of  any
sensibility  would  dream  of building a city like Los Angeles on
front  of,  they  were   suddenly   feeling   astonishingly   and
irrationally happy and didn't even mind that the terrible old car
radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously.  So
what, they were both playing good rock and roll.

"I know he will be able to help us," said Fenchurch determinedly.
"I  know  he  will.  What's  his  name again, that he likes to be
called?"

"Wonko the Sane."

"I know that he will be able to help us."

Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he  would,  and  hoped
that  what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth,
whatever this Earth might prove to be.

He hoped, as he had hoped continually  and  fervently  since  the
time  they  had  talked  together on the banks of the Serpentine,
that he would not be called upon to  try  to  remember  something
that  he  had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest
recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to  nag  at
him.


In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed
to be a converted warehouse.

Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.

Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry.

He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.

"Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily.

"Please  excuse  my  friend,"  said  Fenchurch  to  the  startled
waitress. "I think he's having a nice day at last."




If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of  the  David
Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another
David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the  upper  of  the
first  two  David  Bowies  and wrapped the whole business up in a
dirty beach robe you  would  then  have  something  which  didn't
exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would
find hauntingly familiar.

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deckchair gazing at the Pacific, not  so  much
with  any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep
dejection, it was a little difficult to tell  exactly  where  the
deckchair  ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your
hand on, say, his forearm in case the  whole  structure  suddenly
collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off.

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite  remarkable.  It
seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to
you,  but  which,  when  he  briefly  reassembled  them  in  that
particular  order  on  his face, made you suddenly fee, "Oh. Well
that's all right then."

When he spoke, you were glad that he used the smile that made you
feel like that pretty often.

"Oh yes," he said, "they come and see me. They  sit  right  here.
They sit right where you're sitting."

He was talking of the angels with the  golden  beards  and  green
wings and Dr Scholl sandals.

"They eat nachos which they say they can't get  where  they  come
from.  They do a lot of coke and are very wonderful about a whole
range of things."

"Do they?" said Arthur. "Are they? So, er ... when is this  then?
When do they come?"

He gazed out at the Pacific as well. There were little sandpipers
running  along  the margin of the shore which seemed to have this
problem: they needed to find their food in the sand which a  wave
had  just  washed  over, but they couldn't bear to get their feet
wet. To deal with this problem they  ran  with  an  odd  kind  of
movement as if they'd been constructed by somebody very clever in
Switzerland.

Fenchurch was sitting on the sand, idly drawing  patterns  in  it
with her fingers.

"Weekends, mostly," said Wonko the  Sane,  "on  little  scooters.
They are great machines." He smiled.

"I see," said Arthur. "I see."

A tiny cough from Fenchurch attracted his attention and he looked
round  at her. She had scratched a little stick figure drawing in
the sand of the two of them  in  the  clouds.  For  a  moment  he
thought  she was trying to get him excited, then he realized that
she was rebuking him. "Who are we," she was saying, "to say  he's
mad?"

His house was certainly peculiar, and since this  was  the  first
thing  that Fenchurch and Arthur had encountered it would help to
know what it was like.

What it was like was this:

It was inside out.

Actually inside out, to the extent that they had to park  on  the
carpet.
All along what one would normally call the outer wall, which  was
decorated in a tasteful interior-designed pink, were bookshelves,
also a couple of those odd three-legged tables with semi-circular
tops  which  stand  in such a way as to suggest that someone just
dropped the wall straight through them, and pictures  which  were
clearly designed to soothe.

Where it got really odd was the roof.

It folded back on itself like something that Maurits  C.  Escher,
had he been given to hard nights on the town, which is no part of
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?"

"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."




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.




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."




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?"




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.

"Who was that?"

"Called Ford Prefect."

He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to
do again.

He wondered where Ford Prefect was.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the following day there were two
reports  in  the  paper,  one  concerning  the  most  astonishing
incidents with a flying saucer, and the other about a  series  of
unseemly riots in pubs.

Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung  over  and
complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.

In fact he looked extremely ill,  not  merely  as  if  he'd  been
pulled  through  a hedge backwards, but as if the hedge was being
simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine  harvester.  He
staggered  into Arthur's sitting room, waving aside all offers of
support, which was an error, because the  effort  caused  him  to
lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually to drag him
to the sofa.

"Thank you," said Ford, "thank you very much. Have  you  ..."  he
said, and fell asleep for three hours.

"... the faintest idea" he continued suddenly, when  he  revived,
"how  hard  it  is  to tap into the British phone system from the
Pleiades? I can see that you haven't, so I'll tell you," he said,
"over  the  very  large mug of black coffee that you are about to
make me."

He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.

"Stupid operators keep asking you where you're calling  from  and
you  try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn't be if
you're coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?"

"Making you some black coffee."

"Oh." Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about  the  place
forlornly.

"What's this?" he said.

"Rice Crispies."

"And this?"

"Paprika."

"I see," said Ford, solemnly, and put the two  items  back  down,
one  on  top  of  the  other,  but  that  didn't  seem to balance
properly, so he put the other on top of the one and  that  seemed
to work.

"A little space-lagged," he said. "What was I saying?"

"About not phoning from Letchworth."

"I wasn't. I explained this to the lady. `Bugger  Letchworth,'  I
said, `if that's your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales
scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the
sub-light-speed  leg of a journey between the stars known on your
world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.' - I said  `dear
lady',"  explained Ford Prefect, "because I didn't want her to be
offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin ..."

"Tactful," said Arthur Dent.

"Exactly," said Ford, "tactful."

He frowned.

"Space-lag," he said, "is very bad for sub-clauses.  You'll  have
to  assist  me  again," he continued, "by reminding me what I was
talking about."

"`Between the stars,'" said Arthur, "`known on your world, though
not necessarily to you, dear lady, as ...'"
"`Pleiades  Epsilon   and   Pleiades   Zeta,'"   concluded   Ford
triumphantly. "This conversation lark is quite gas isn't it?"

"Have some coffee."

"Thank you, no. `And the reason,' I said, `why I am bothering you
with  it  rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we
have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications  equipment  out
here  in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching
son of a starbeast piloting this son  of  a  starbeast  spaceship
insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?'"

"And could she?"

"I don't know. She had hung up," said Ford, "by  this  time.  So!
What do you suppose," he asked fiercely, "I did next?"

"I've no idea, Ford," said Arthur.

"Pity," said Ford, "I was hoping you could remind  me.  I  really
hate  those  guys  you  know.  They  really are the creeps of the
cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite  with  their  junky
little  machines  that  never  work  properly  or,  when they do,
perform functions that no sane man would require of them and," he
added savagely, "go beep to tell you when they've done it!"

This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely  held
by  right  thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being
right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a  moment  of  reasoned
lucidity  which  is almost unique among its current tally of five
million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and
nine  pages,  says  of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product
that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential  uselessness
of  them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to
work at all.

"In other words - and this is the rock solid principle  on  which
the  whole  of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded -
their fundamental design flaws are  completely  hidden  by  their
superficial design flaws."

"And this guy," ranted Ford, "was on a  drive  to  sell  more  of
them!  His  five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new
worlds, and sell  Advanced  Music  Substitute  Systems  to  their
restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars!  Or if they didn't have
restaurants,  elevators  and  wine  bars  yet,  to   artificially
accelerate  their  civilization growth until they bloody well did
have! Where's that coffee!"

"I threw it away."

"Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next.  I  saved
civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that."

He stumbled determinedly back into the  sitting  room,  where  he
seemed  to  carry  on  talking  to  himself,  tripping  over  the
furniture and making beep beep noises.

A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid  face,  Arthur
followed him.

Ford looked stunned.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"Making some coffee," said Arthur, still wearing his very  placid
face.  He  had  long  ago  realized that the only way of being in
Ford's company successfully was to keep a  large  stock  of  very
placid faces and wear them at all times.

"You missed the best bit!" raged Ford. "You missed the bit  where
I  jumped  the guy! Now," he said, "I shall have to jump him, all
over him!"

He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.

"It was better," he said sullenly, "last time," and waved vaguely
in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got
trussed up on the dining table.

"I see," said Arthur, casting a placid eye over  the  trussed  up
wreckage, "and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?"

"What?" screamed Ford. "What? You missed that bit too? That's the
suspended  animation  facility!  I  put  the guy in the suspended
animation facility. Well I had to didn't I?"

"So it would seem," said Arthur, in his placid voice.

"Don't touch that!!!" yelled Ford.

Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which  was  for  some
mysterious  reason  lying  on  the  table,  off the hook, paused,
placidly.

"OK," said Ford, calming down, "listen to it."

Arthur put the phone to his ear.

"It's the speaking clock," he said.

"Beep, beep, beep," said Ford, "is exactly what  is  being  heard
all  over  that  guy's  ship,  while he sleeps, in the ice, going
slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras  Magna.  The  London
Speaking Clock!"

"I see," said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time  to
ask the big one.

"Why?" he said, placidly.

"With a bit of luck," said Ford, "the phone  bill  will  bankrupt
the buggers."

He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa.
"Anyway," he said, "dramatic arrival don't you think?"




The flying saucer in which  Ford  Prefect  had  stowed  away  had
stunned the world.

Finally there  was  no  doubt,  no  possibility  of  mistake,  no
hallucinations,  no  mysterious  CIA  agents  found  floating  in
reservoirs.

This time it was real, it was definite. It was  quite  definitely
definite.

It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything  beneath
it  and  crushed  a large area of some of the most expensive real
estate in the world, including much of Harrods.

The thing was massive, nearly a  mile  across,  some  said,  dull
silver  in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars
of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces  by
the light of suns unknown to man.

A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods  Food  Halls,
demolished  Harvey  Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of
tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.

After a long,  heart-stopping  moment  of  internal  crashes  and
grumbles  of  rending  machinery, there marched from it, down the
ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.

It held up a hand.

"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further
grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as  he  sat
with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the
television, none of which had  anything  to  say  other  than  to
record  that  the  thing had done this amount of damage which was
valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had  killed  this
totally  other  number  of people, and then say it again, because
the robot was doing nothing more  than  standing  there,  swaying
very   slightly,   and   emitting  short  incomprehensible  error
messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see ..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational  and
coherent  than  he had been, having finally had the coffee forced
down  him,  "nothing  so  simple.  Nothing   anything   like   so
straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders
are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards role the
people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse,
"why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all  got
the  vote,  so  they  all  pretty much assume that the government
they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they
want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong
lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of  urgency  creeping
into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best  thing  that  ever
happened  to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course,
completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

"But that's terrible," said Arthur.

"Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairan dollar for every
time  I  heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the
Universe and say `That's terrible' I  wouldn't  be  sitting  here
like  a  lemon looking for a gin. But I haven't and I am. Anyway,
what are you looking so placid and  moon-eyed  for?  Are  you  in
love?"

Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.

"With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet
her?"

He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with  a  pile  of
newspapers  she'd  been  into  the village to buy. She stopped in
astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the  wreckage  from
Betelgeuse on the sofa.

"Where's the gin?" said Ford to Fenchurch. And to  Arthur,  "What
happened to Trillian by the way?"

"Er, this is  Fenchurch,"  said  Arthur,  awkwardly.  "There  was
nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last."
"Oh, yeah," said Ford, "she went off with Zaphod somewhere.  They
had  some kids or something. At least," he added, "I think that's
what they were. Zaphod's calmed down a lot you know."

"Really?" said Arthur, clustering hurriedly  round  Fenchurch  to
relieve her of the shopping.

"Yeah," said Ford, "at least one of his heads is now  saner  than
an emu on acid."

"Arthur, who is this?" said Fenchurch.

"Ford Prefect,"  said  Arthur.  "I  may  have  mentioned  him  in
passing."




For a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood
in  stunned  amazement  straddling  the remains of Knightsbridge,
swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things.

Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the
truckload  asked  each other questions on the air about what they
thought of it, flights of fighter bombers tried  pathetically  to
attack  it  -  but  no  lizards  appeared. It scanned the horizon
slowly.

At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of
television  crews  who covered it continuously as it continuously
did nothing.

It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.

It would have to send out its service robots.

It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number
of problems.

The tiny flying robots came screeching out of  the  hatchway  one
afternoon  in  a  terrifying  cloud  of  metal.  They  roamed the
surrounding  terrain,  frantically  attacking  some  things   and
defending others.

One of them at last found a pet shop with some  lizards,  but  it
instantly  defended  the  pet shop for democracy so savagely that
little in the area survived.

A turning point came when  a  crack  team  of  flying  screechers
discovered  the  Zoo  in Regent's Park, and most particularly the
reptile house.

Learning a little caution from their  previous  mistakes  in  the
petshop,  the  flying  drills  and  fretsaws  brought some of the
larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to
conduct high-level talks with them.

Eventually the robot announced to  the  world  that  despite  the
full,  frank  and  wide-ranging  exchange of views the high level
talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it,
the  robot  would  take  a  short holiday somewhere, and for some
reason selected Bournemouth.

Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another
beer.

Immediate preparations were made for its departure.

The flying toolkits screeched and sawed  and  drilled  and  fried
things  with  light throughout that day and all through the night
time, and in the  morning,  stunningly,  a  giant  mobile  gantry
started  to  roll  westwards on several roads simultaneously with
the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.

Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its
servants  and  helicopters and news coaches, scything through the
land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly
freed itself from it transport system's embraces and went and lay
for ten days on the beach.

It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that  had  ever
happened to Bournemouth.

Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which  was  staked  out
and guarded as the robot's recreation area, and tried to see what
it was doing.

It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was  lying  a
little awkwardly on its face.

It was a journalist from a  local  paper  who,  late  one  night,
managed  to  do what no one else in the world had so far managed,
which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one
of the service robots guarding the perimeter.

It was an extraordinary breakthrough.

"I think there's a story in it," confided the journalist  over  a
cigarette  shared  through  the steel link fence, "but it needs a
good local angle. I've got a little list of questions  here,"  he
went  on,  rummaging  awkwardly  in an inner pocket, "perhaps you
could get him, it, whatever you call him,  to  run  through  them
quickly."

The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see  what  it
cold do and screeched off.

A reply was never forthcoming.

Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper  more  or
less  exactly  matched  the questions that were going through the
massive battle-scarred industrial quality circuits of the robot's
mind. They were these:

"How do you feel about being a robot?"

"How does it feel to be from outer space?" and
"How do you like Bournemouth?"

Early the following day things started to be packed up and within
a  few  days  it  became apparent that the robot was preparing to
leave for good.

"The point is," said Fenchurch  to  Ford,  "can  you  get  us  on
board?"

Ford looked wildly at his watch.

"I have some  serious  unfinished  business  to  attend  to,"  he
exclaimed.




Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft,
which  wasn't  very.  The  immediate perimeter was fenced off and
patrolled by the tiny flying service robots.  Staked  out  around
that  was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that
inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going  to  breach
them.  They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though
whether they were there to protect the public from  the  army  or
the  army  from  the  public,  or  to  guarantee the giant ship's
diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting  parking  tickets  was
entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.

The inner perimeter fence was  now  being  dismantled.  The  army
stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that
the reason for their being there seemed as if it was simply going
to get up and go.

The giant robot had lurched back aboard the  ship  at  lunchtime,
and  now it was five o'clock in the afternoon and no further sign
had been seen of it. Much had been heard  -  more  grindings  and
rumblings  from  deep  within  the  craft, the music of a million
hideous malfunctions; but the sense of  tense  expectation  among
the  crowd  was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be
disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing  had  come  into
their lives, an now it was simply going to go without them.

Two people were particularly aware of this sensation. Arthur  and
Fenchurch  scanned  the  crowd  anxiously,  unable  to  find Ford
Prefect in it anywhere, or any sign that  he  had  the  slightest
intention of being there.

"How reliable is he?" asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice.

"How reliable?" said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. "How shallow
is the ocean?" he said. "How cold is the sun?"

The last parts of the robot's gantry transport were being carried
on  board,  and the few remaining sections of the perimeter fence
were now stacked at the bottom of  the  ramp  waiting  to  follow
them. The soldiers on guard round the ramp bristled meaningfully,
orders were barked back and forth, hurried conferences were held,
but nothing, of course, could be done about any of it.
Hopelessly, and with no clear  plan  now,  Arthur  and  Fenchurch
pushed  forward  through the crowd, but since the whole crowd was
also trying to push forward through  the  crowd,  this  got  them
nowhere.

And within a few minutes more nothing remained outside the  ship,
every  last link of the fence was aboard. A couple of flying fret
saws and a spirit level seemed to do one last  check  around  the
site, and then screamed in through the giant hatchway themselves.

A few seconds passed.

The  sounds  of  mechanical  disarray  from  within  changed   in
intensity, and slowly, heavily, the huge steel ramp began to lift
itself back out  of  the  Harrods  Food  Halls.  The  sound  that
accompanied  it  was  the  sound  of  thousands of tense, excited
people being completely ignored.

"Hold it!"

A megaphone barked from a taxi which screeched to a halt  on  the
edge of the milling crowd.

"There has been,"  barked  the  megaphone,  "a  major  scientific
break-in!  Through.  Breakthrough," it corrected itself. The door
flew open and a small man  from  somewhere  in  the  vicinity  of
Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat.

"Hold it!" he shouted again, and this  time  brandished  a  short
squad black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the
ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to  the  signals
from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the galaxy
are constantly trying to find fresh ways of  jamming,  while  the
other  half  are  constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming
the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downwards again.

Ford Prefect grabbed his megaphone  from  out  of  the  taxi  and
started bawling at the crowd through it.

"Make way," he shouted,  "make  way,  please,  this  is  a  major
scientific  breakthrough. You and you, get the equipment from the
taxi."

Completely at random he pointed  at  Arthur  and  Fenchurch,  who
wrestled  their  way back out of the crowd and clustered urgently
round the taxi.

"All right, I want you to  clear  a  passage,  please,  for  some
important  pieces  of  scientific  equipment," boomed Ford. "Just
everybody keep calm. It's all under control, there's  nothing  to
see. It is merely a major scientific breakthrough. Keep calm now.
Important scientific equipment. Clear the way."

Hungry for new excitement, delighted at this sudden reprieve from
disappointment,  the crowd enthusiastically fell back and started
to open up.

Arthur was a little surprised to see  what  was  printed  on  the
boxes of important scientific equipment in the back of the taxi.
"Hang your coat over them," he muttered to Fenchurch as he heaved
them   out   to  her.  Hurriedly  he  manoeuvred  out  the  large
supermarket trolley that was also jammed against the  back  seat.
It  clattered  to  the ground, and together they loaded the boxes
into it.

"Clear a path, please," shouted Ford again.  "Everything's  under
proper scientific control."

"He said you'd pay," said the taxi-driver to Arthur, who dug  out
some  notes  and  paid him. There was the distant sound of police
sirens.

"Move along there," shouted Ford, "and no one will get hurt."

The crowd surged and closed behind  them  again,  as  frantically
they  pushed  and hauled the rattling supermarket trolley through
the rubble towards the ramp.

"It's all right," Ford continued to bellow. "There's  nothing  to
see, it's all over. None of this is actually happening."

"Clear the way, please," boomed a police megaphone from the  back
of the crowd. "There's been a break-in, clear the way."

"Breakthrough,"  yelled  Ford  in  competition.   "A   scientific
breakthrough!"

"This is the police! Clear the way!"

"Scientific equipment! Clear the way!"

"Police! Let us through!"

"Walkmen!" yelled Ford, and pulled half a  dozen  miniature  tape
players  from  his  pockets  and  tossed them into the crowd. The
resulting seconds of utter confusion  allowed  them  to  get  the
supermarket trolley to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up on
to the lip of it.

"Hold tight,"  muttered  Ford,  and  released  a  button  on  his
Electronic  Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp juddered and began
slowly to heave its way upwards.

"Ok, kids," he said as the milling  crowd  dropped  away  beneath
them  and  they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp
into the bowels of the ship, "looks like we're on our way."




Arthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the  sound
of gunfire.

Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was  still  managing  to
sleep  fitfully,  he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway
which they had fashioned into a  kind  of  bunk  for  themselves,
slung  himself  down  the access ladder and prowled the corridors
moodily.

They were  claustrophobic  and  ill-lit.  The  lighting  circuits
buzzed annoyingly.

This wasn't it, though.

He paused and leaned backwards as a flying power drill flew  past
him  down  the  dim  corridor  with a nasty screech, occasionally
clanging against the walls like a confused bee as it did so.

That wasn't it either.

He clambered through a bulkhead  door  and  found  himself  in  a
larger  corridor.  Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he
walked towards the other.

He came to an observation monitor let  into  the  wall  behind  a
plate of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.

"Would you turn it down please?" he said to Ford Prefect who  was
crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video
equipment he'd taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court  Road,
having  first  hurled  a small brick through it, and also a nasty
heap of empty beer cans.

"Shhhh!" hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at  the
screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.

"Just a bit," said Arthur.

"No!" shouted Ford. "We're just getting to the good bit!  Listen,
I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion,
everything, and this is the good bit!"

With a sigh and a  headache,  Arthur  sat  down  beside  him  and
watched  the good bit. He listened to Ford's whoops and yells and
"yeehay!"s as placidly as he could.

"Ford," he said eventually, when it was all over,  and  Ford  was
hunting  through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca,
"how come, if ..."

"This is the big one," said Ford. "This is the one  I  came  back
for.  Do  you realize I never saw it all through? Always I missed
the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came.
When  they  blew  the place up I thought I'd never get to see it.
Hey, what happened with all that anyway?"

"Just life," said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.

"Oh, that again," said Ford. "I thought  it  might  be  something
like  that. I prefer this stuff," he said as Rick's Bar flickered
on to the screen. "How come if what?"

"What?"

"You started to say, `how come if ...'"
"How come if you're so rude about the  Earth,  that  you  ...  oh
never mind, let's just watch the movie."

"Exactly," said Ford.




There remains little still to tell.

Beyond what used to be known  as  the  Limitless  Lightfields  of
Flanux   until  the  Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of  Saxaquine  were
discovered lying behind them, lie the Grey  Binding  Fiefdoms  of
Saxaquine. Within the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the
star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet  Preliumtarn  in
which  is  the  land  of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of
Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at  last,  a  little
tired by the journey.

And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they  came  to  the  Great  Red
Plain  of  Rars,  which  was  bounded  on  the  South side by the
Quentulus Quazgar  Mountains,  on  the  further  side  of  which,
according  to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-
foot-high letters of fire God's Final Message to His Creation.

According to Prak, if Arthur's memory saved him right, the  place
was  guarded  by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a
manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and
he sold them a ticket.

"Keep to the left, please," he said,  "keep  to  the  left,"  and
hurried on past them on a little scooter.

They realized they were not the first to pass that way,  for  the
path  that  led  around the left of the Great Plain was well-worn
and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge,  which
had  been  baked  in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was
heated by the fire of the letters that formed God's Final Message
to  His  Creation.  At  another  they  bought some postcards. The
letters had been blurred with an airbrush, "so as  not  to  spoil
the Big Surprise!" it said on the reverse.

"Do you know what the message is?" they asked the wizened  little
lady in the booth.

"Oh yes," she piped cheerily, "oh yes!"

She waved them on.

Every twenty miles or so  there  was  a  little  stone  hut  with
showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the
high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain,  and  the  Great  Red
Plain rippled in the heat.

"Is it possible," asked Arthur at one of the larger  booths,  "to
rent  one  of  those  little  scooters?  Like  the  one  Lajestic
Ventrawhatsit had."

"The scooters," said the little lady who was serving  at  an  ice
cream bar, "are not for the devout."

"Oh  well,  that's  easy  then,"  said  Fenchurch,   "we're   not
particularly devout. We're just interested."

"Then you must turn back now," said the little lady severely, and
when  they  demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sunhats
and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around  each
other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.

They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth  and  then
trudged out into the sun again.

"We're running out of border cream," said Fenchurch after  a  few
more miles. "We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the
previous one which is nearer, but means we have  to  retrace  our
steps again."

They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the  heat
haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.

They then discovered that they were not only not the  first  ones
to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making
it now.

Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape  was  heaving  itself
wretchedly  along  the  ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half-
limping, half-crawling.

It was moving so slowly that before  too  long  they  caught  the
creature  up  and could see that it was made of worn, scarred and
twisted metal.

It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in  the  hot
dry dust.

"So much time," it groaned, "oh so much time. And pain  as  well,
so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the
other on its own I could probably manage. It's the  two  together
that really get me down. Oh hello, you again."

"Marvin?" said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. "Is that
you?"

"You were always one," groaned the aged husk of the  robot,  "for
the super-intelligent question, weren't you?"

"What is it?" whispered  Fenchurch  in  alarm,  crouching  behind
Arthur, and grasping on to his arm. "He's sort of an old friend,"
said Arthur. "I ..."

"Friend!" croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a
kind of crackle and flakes of rust fell out of its mouth. "You'll
have to excuse me while I try and remember what the  word  means.
My  memory  banks  are  not what they were you know, and any word
which falls into disuse for  a  few  zillion  years  has  to  get
shifted down into auxiliary memory back-up. Ah, here it comes."

The robot's battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
"Hmm," he said, "what a curious concept."

He thought a little longer.

"No," he said at last, "don't think I ever  came  across  one  of
those. Sorry, can't help you there."

He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, an  then  tried
to twist himself up on his misshapen elbows.

"Is there any last service you would like me to perform  for  you
perhaps?"  he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. "A piece of paper
that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or  maybe  you
would like me," he continued, "to open a door?"

His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to
scan the distant horizon.

"Don't seem to be any doors around at present," he said, "but I'm
sure  that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And
then," he said slowly twisting his  head  around  to  see  Arthur
again,  "I  could  open it for you. I'm quite used to waiting you
know."

"Arthur," hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, "you never told me
of this. What have you done to this poor creature?"

"Nothing," insisted Arthur sadly, "he's always like this ..."

"Ha!" snapped Marvin. "Ha!" he repeated. "What  do  you  know  of
always?  You say `always' to me, who, because of the silly little
errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending  me  through  time
on,  am  now  thirty-seven  times older than the Universe itself?
Pick your words with a little more care," he coughed, "and tact."

He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.

"Leave me," he said, "go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully
on  my  way.  My  time at last has nearly come. My race is nearly
run. I fully expect," he said,  feebly  waving  them  on  with  a
broken  finger, "to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am,
brain the size ..."

Between them they picked him up despite his feeble  protests  and
insults.  The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers,
but he weighed surprisingly little, and hung limply between their
arms.

They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left
of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of
Quentulus Quazgar.

Arthur attempted to explain  to  Fenchurch,  but  was  too  often
interrupted by Marvin's dolorous cybernetic ravings.

They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts  at  one
of the booths, but Marvin would have none of it.
"I'm all spare parts," he droned.

"Let me be!" he groaned.

"Every part of me," he moaned, "has been replaced at least  fifty
times  ... except ..." He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten
for a moment. His head bobbed between them  with  the  effort  of
memory.  "Do  you  remember,  the first time you ever met me," he
said at  last  to  Arthur.  "I  had  been  given  the  intellect-
stretching  task  of  taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to
you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my  left
side?  That  I  had  asked for them to be replaced but they never
were?"

He left a longish pause before he continued. They carried him  on
between  them,  under  the  baking sun that hardly ever seemed to
move, let alone set.

"See if you can guess," said Marvin,  when  he  judged  that  the
pause  had  become  embarrassing  enough, "which parts of me were
never replaced? Go on, see if you can guess.

"Ouch," he added, "ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch."

At last they reached the last of  the  little  booths,  set  down
Marvin  between  them  and  rested in the shade. Fenchurch bought
some cufflinks for Russell, cufflinks that had set in them little
polished  pebbles  which  had  been  picked up from the Quentulus
Quazgar Mountains, directly underneath the  letters  of  fire  in
which was written God's Final Message to His Creation.

Arthur flipped through a little rack of devotional tracts on  the
counter, little meditations on the meaning of the Message.

"Ready?" he said to Fenchurch, who nodded.

They heaved up Marvin between them.

They rounded the foot of the  Quentulus  Quazgar  Mountains,  and
there  was the Message written in blazing letters along the crest
of the Mountain. There was a  little  observation  vantage  point
with  a  rail built along the top of a large rock facing it, from
which you could get a good view. It had  a  little  pay-telescope
for  looking  at the letters in detail, but no one would ever use
it because the letters burned with the divine brilliance  of  the
heavens  and  would,  if  seen through a telescope, have severely
damaged the retina and optic nerve.

They gazed at God's Final Message in wonderment, and were  slowly
and  ineffably  filled  with a great sense of peace, and of final
and complete understanding.

Fenchurch sighed. "Yes," she said, "that was it."

They had been staring at it for fully  ten  minutes  before  they
became aware that Marvin, hanging between their shoulders, was in
difficulties. The robot could no longer lift his  head,  had  not
read  the  message.  They lifted his head, but he complained that
his vision circuits had almost gone.
They found a coin and helped him to the telescope. He  complained
and  insulted  them,  but they helped him look at each individual
letter in turn, The first letter was a "w", the  second  an  "e".
Then  there was a gap. An "a" followed, then a "p", an "o" and an
"l".

Marvin paused for a rest.

After a few moments they resumed and let him  see  the  "o",  the
"g", the "i", the "s" and the "e".

The next two words were "for" and "the". The last one was a  long
one, and Marvin needed another rest before he could tackle it.

It started with an "i", then "n" then a "c". Next came an "o" and
an "n", followed by a "v", an "e", another "n" and an "i".

After a final pause, Marvin gathered his strength  for  the  last
stretch.

He read the "e", the "n", the "c" and at last the final "e",  and
staggered back into their arms.

"I think," he murmured at last, from deep  within  his  corroding
rattling thorax, "I feel good about it."

The lights went out in his eyes for absolutely the very last time
ever.

Luckily, there was a stall nearby where you could  rent  scooters
from guys with green wings.


{Epilogue:}

One of the greatest benefactors of all lifekind  was  a  man  who
couldn't keep his mind on the job in hand.

Brilliant?

Certainly.

One of the  foremost  genetic  engineers  of  his  or  any  other
generation, including a number he had designed himself?

Without a doubt.

The problem was that he was far too interested in things which he
shouldn't  be  interested in, at least, as people would tell him,
not now.

He was also, partly  because  of  this,  of  a  rather  irritable
disposition.

So when his world was threatened  by  terrible  invaders  from  a
distant  star, who were still a fair way off but travelling fast,
he, Blart Versenwald III (his  name  was  Blart  Versenwald  III,
which  is  not strictly relevant, but quite interesting because -
never mind, that was his name and we  can  talk  about  why  it's
interesting  later),  was  sent  into  guarded  seclusion  by the
masters of his race  with  instructions  to  design  a  breed  of
fanatical   superwarriors  to  resist  and  vanquish  the  feared
invaders, do it quickly and, they told him, "Concentrate!"

So he sat by a window  and  looked  out  at  a  summer  lawn  and
designed  and  designed and designed, but inevitably got a little
distracted  by  things,  and  by  the  time  the  invaders   were
practically  in  orbit  round them, had come up with a remarkable
new breed of super-fly that could, unaided, figure out how to fly
through  the  open  half  of a half-open window, and also an off-
switch   for   children.   Celebrations   of   these   remarkable
achievements  seemed doomed to be shortlived because disaster was
imminent as the alien ships were landing. But  astoundingly,  the
fearsome  invaders  who, like most warlike races were only on the
rampage because they couldn't cope  with  things  at  home,  were
stunned  by  Versenwald's  extraordinary breakthroughs, joined in
the celebrations and were instantly  prevailed  upon  to  sign  a
wide-ranging  series of trading agreements and set up a programme
of cultural exchanges. And, in an astonishing reversal of  normal
practice  in  the  conduct  of  such matters, everybody concerned
lived happily ever after.

There was a point to this story, but it has  temporarily  escaped
the chronicler's mind.

Anything that happens, happens. 
 Anything that, in happening, causes something else to  
 happen, causes something else to happen.  
 Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again,                       
 happens again. 

    It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though. 
The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a
number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep
track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very
muddling things have been happening anyway.

One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and
the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing
travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception
of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel
people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were
powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and
were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere
that there wasn't really any point in being there.

So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish
in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself
was, for a long time, largely cosmological.
  
Which is not to say that people weren't trying. They tried
sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in
distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get
anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of
travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to
circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was
that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already
been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got
there .
  
This didn't, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight
the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd
had a couple of thousand years' sleep, they'd come a long way
to do a tough job and by Zarquon they were going to do it.
 
This was when the first major muddles of Galactic history set
in, with battles continually re-erupting centuries after the issues
they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However,
these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had
to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles
started pre-erupting hundreds of years before the issues even
arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole
planets started turning unexpectedly into banana fruitcake, the
great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally
gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the
rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which
had been after them for years.
  
Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly
means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance,
the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted.
And this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
way to happen.
 Click, hum.
  
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
  
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
deeply dark and Silent.
  
Click, hum.
  
At least, almost everything.
  
Click, click, hum.
  
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
  
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
  
Hmmm.
  
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
got was a hum.
  
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
getting.
  
The higher level supervising program considered this and
didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
the higher level supervising program to the problem .
  
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
program was meant to be supervising.
  
It couldn't find the look-up table .
  
Odd.
  
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
sector function supervisor.
  
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
were also missing.
  
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
  
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
would be well.
  
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
  
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into
the void.
  
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
was wrong.
  
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
meteorite.
 The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
have enabled it to see the hole, with them.
  
The ship tried to think intelligently about this, failed, and then
blanked out completely for a bit. It didn't realise it had blanked
out, of course, because it had blanked out. It was merely surprised
to see the stars jump. After the third time the stars jumped the
ship finally realised that it must be blanking out, and that it was
time to take some serious decisions.
  
It relaxed.
  
Then it realised it hadn't actually taken the serious decisions
yet and panicked. It blanked out again for a bit. When it awoke
again it sealed all the bulkheads around where it knew the unseen
hole must be.
  
It clearly hadn't got to its destination yet, it thought, fitfully,
but since it no longer had the faintest idea where its destina-
tion was or how to reach it, there seemed to be little point
in continuing. It consulted what tiny scraps of instructions it
could reconstruct from the tatters of its central mission mod-
ule.
  
`Your !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! year mission is to !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!,
!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!, land !!!!! !!!!! !!!!! a safe distance !!!!! !!!!!
..... ..... ..... .... , land ..... ..... ..... 
monitor it. !!!!! !!!!! !!!!!...'
  
All of the rest was complete garbage.
  
Before it blanked out for good the ship would have to pass
on those instructions, such as they were, to its more primitive
subsidiary systems.
  
It must also revive all of its crew.
  
There was another problem. While the crew was in hibernation,
the minds of all of its members, their memories, their identities
and their understanding of what they had come to do, had all
been transferred into the ship's central mission module for safe
keeping. The crew would not have the faintest idea of who they
were or what they were doing there. Oh well.
  
Just before it blanked out for the final time, the ship realised
that its engines were beginning to give out too.
  
The ship and its revived and confused crew coasted on under
the control of its subsidiary automatic systems, which simply
looked to land wherever they could find to land and monitor
whatever they could find to monitor.
  
As far as finding something to land on was concerned, they
didn't do very well. The planet they found was desolately cold
and lonely, so achingly far from the sun that should warm it, that
it took all of the Envir-O-Form machinery and LifeSupport-O-
Systems they carried with them to render it, or at least enough
parts of it, habitable. There were better planets nearer in, but
the ship's Strateej-O-Mat was obviously locked into Lurk mode
and chose the most distant and unobtrusive planet and, further-
more, would not be gainsaid by anybody other than the ship's
Chief Strategic Officer. Since everybody on the ship had lost
their minds no one knew who the Chief Strategic Officer was
or, even if he could have been identified, how he was supposed
to go about gainsaying the ship's Strateej-O-Mat.
  
As far as finding something to monitor was concerned, though,
they hit solid gold.


                          % 2

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places
it's prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some
kind of a grip, whether it's the intoxicating seas of Santraginus
V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind
of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra where, they
say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in
the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of
it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
  
It will even live in New York, though it's hard to know why.
In the winter time the temperature falls well below the legal
minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common
sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a
list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79.
  
In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort
of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do,
that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very
equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has
to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your
planet's orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin's
bubbling.
  
Spring is over-rated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York
will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they
actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they
would know of at least five thousand nine hundred and eighty-
three better places to spend it than New York, and that's just
on the same latitude.
  
Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in
New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of
rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower
intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion
can and should be discounted. When it's fall in New York, the air
smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen
to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head
in a building.
  
Tricia McMillan loved New York. She kept on telling herself
this over and over again. The Upper West Side. Yeah. Mid Town.
Hey, great retail. SoHo. The East Village. Clothes. Books. Sushi.
Italian. Delis. Yo. 
  
Movies. Yo also. Tricia had just been to see Woody Allen's
new movie which was all about the angst of being neurotic in New
York. He had made one or two other movies that had explored
the same theme, and Tricia wondered if he had ever considered
moving, but heard that he had set his face against the idea. So:
more movies, she guessed.
  
Tricia loved New York because loving New York was a good
career move. It was a good retail move, a good cuisine move,
not a good taxi move or a great quality of pavement move, but
definitely a career move that ranked amongst the highest and the
best. Tricia was a TV anchor person, and New York was where
most of the world's TV was anchored. Tricia's TV anchoring had
been done exclusively in Britain up to that point: regional news,
then breakfast news, early evening news. She would have been
called, if the language allowed, a rapidly rising anchor, but...
hey, this is television, what does it matter? She was a rapidly rising
anchor. She had what it took: great hair, a profound understand-
ing of strategic lip gloss, the intelligence to understand the world
and a tiny secret interior deadness which meant she didn't care.
Everybody has their moment of great opportunity in life. If you
happen to miss the one you care about, then everything else in
life becomes eerily easy.
  
Tricia had only ever missed one opportunity. These days it
didn't even make her tremble quite so much as it used to to
think about it. She guessed it was that bit of her that had gone
dead.
  
NBS needed a new anchor. Mo Minetti was leaving the
US/AM breakfast show to have a baby. She had been offered a
mind-bubbling amount of money to have it on the show, but she
had declined, unexpectedly, on grounds of personal privacy and
taste. Teams of NBS lawyers had sieved through her contract to
see if these constituted legitimate grounds, but in the end, reluc-
tantly, they had to let her go. This was, for them, particularly
galling because normally `reluctantly letting someone go' was an
expression that had its boot on quite another foot.
  
The word was out that maybe, just maybe, a British accent
would fit. The hair, the skin tone and the bridgework would have
to be up to American network standards, but there had been a
lot of British accents up there thanking their mothers for their
Oscars, a lot of British accents singing on Broadway, and some
unusually big audiences tuning in to British accents in wigs on
Masterpiece Theatre. British accents were telling jokes on David
Letterman and Jay Leno. Nobody understood the jokes but they
were really responding to the accents, so maybe it was time, just
maybe. A British accent on US/AM. Well, hell.
  
That was why Tricia was here. This was why loving New
York was a great career move.
  
It wasn't, of course, the stated reason. Her TV company
back in the UK would hardly have stumped up the air fare
and hotel bill for her to go job hunting in Manhattan. Since
she was chasing something like ten times her present salary, they
might have felt that she could have forked out her own expenses,
but she'd found a story, found a pretext, kept very quiet about
anything ulterior, and they'd stumped up for the trip. A business
class ticket, of course, but her face was known and she'd smiled
herself an upgrade. The right moves had got her a nice room at
the Brentwood and here she was, wondering what to do next.
  
The word on the street was one thing, making contact was
another. She had a couple of names, a couple of numbers, but all
it took was being put on indeterminate hold a couple of times and
she was back at square one. She'd put out feelers, left messages,
but so far none had been returned. The actual job she had come
to do she had done in a morning; the imagined job she was after
was only shimmering tantalisingly on an unreachable horizon.
  
Shit.
  
She caught a cab from the movie theatre back to the Brent-
wood. The cab couldn't get close to the kerb because a big stretch
limo was hogging all the available space and she had to squeeze
her way past it. She walked out of the fetid, goat-frying air and
into the blessed cool of the lobby. The fine cotton of her blouse
was sticking like grime to her skin. Her hair felt as if she'd bought
it at a fairground on a stick. At the front desk she asked if there
were any messages, grimly expecting none. There was one.
  
Oh...
  
Good.
  
It had worked. She had gone out to the movie specifically
in order to make the phone ring. She couldn't bear sitting in
a hotel room waiting.
  
She wondered. Should she open the message down here?
Her clothes were itching and she longed to take them all off
and just lie on the bed. She had turned the air conditioning way
down to its bottom temperature setting, way up to its top fan
setting. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
at the moment was goose pimples. Then a hot shower, then a
cool one, then lying on a towel, on the bed again, drying in the
air conditioning. Then reading the message. Maybe more goose
pimples. Maybe all sorts of things.
  
No. What she wanted more than anything else in the world
was a job in American television at ten times her current salary.
More than anything else in the world. In the world. What she
wanted more than anything else at all was no longer a live issue.
  
She sat on a chair in the lobby, under a kentia palm, and
opened the little cellophane-windowed envelope.
  
`Please call,' it said. `Not happy,' and gave a number. The
name was Gail Andrews.
  
Gail Andrews.
  
It wasn't a name she was expecting. It caught her unawares.
She recognised it, but couldn't immediately say why. Was she
Andy Martin's secretary? Hilary Bass's assistant? Martin and
Bass were the two major contact calls she had made, or tried
to make, at NBS. And what did `Not happy' mean?
  
`Not happy?'
  
She was completely bewildered. Was this Woody Allen trying
to contact her under an assumed name? It was a 212 area code
number. So it was someone in New York. Who was not happy.
Well, that narrowed it down a bit, didn't it?
  
She went back to the receptionist at the desk.
  
`I have a problem with this message you just gave me,' she
said. `Someone I don't know has tried to call me and says she's
not happy.'
  
The receptionist peered at the note with a frown.
  
`Do you know this person?' he said.
  
`No,' Tricia said.
  `
Hmmm,' said the receptionist. `Sounds like she's not happy
about something.'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia.
  
`Looks like there's a name here,' said the receptionist. `Gail
Andrews. Do you know anybody of that name?'
  `
`No,' said Tricia.
  
`Any idea what she's unhappy about?'
  
`No,' said Tricia.
  
`Have you called the number? There's a number here.'
  
`No,' said Tricia, `you only just gave me the note. I'm just
trying to get some more information before I ring back. Perhaps
I could talk to the person who took the call?'
  
`Hmmm,' said the receptionist, scrutinising the note carefully.
`I don't think we have anybody called Gail Andrews here.'
  
`No, I realise that,' said Tricia. `I just -'
  
`I'm Gail Andrews.'
  
The voice came from behind Tricia. She turned round.
  
`I'm sorry?'
  
`I'm Gail Andrews. You interviewed me this morning.'
  
`Oh. Oh good heavens yes,' said Tricia, slightly flustered.
  
`I Left the message for you a few hours ago. I hadn't heard
so I came by. I didn't want to miss you.'
  
`Oh. No. Of course,' said Tricia, trying hard to get up to speed.
  
`I don't know about this,' said the receptionist, for whom
speed was not an issue. `Would you like me to try this number
for you now?'
  
`No, that'll be fine, thanks,' said Tricia. `I can handle it now.'
  
`I can call this room number here for you if that'll help,'
said the receptionist, peering at the note again.
  
`No, that won't be necessary, thanks,' said Tricia. `That's
my own room number. I'm the one the message was for. I
think we've sorted this out now.'
  
`You have a nice day now,' said the receptionist.
  
Tricia didn't particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.
  
She also didn't want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very
strict cut-off point as far as fraternising with the Christians was
concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Chris-
tians and would often cross themselves when they saw one
walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly
if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.
  
She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.
  
Gail Andrews was a well groomed woman in her mid-forties.
Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good
taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those
boundaries. She was an astrologer - a famous and, if rumour were
true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number
of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including every-
thing from which flavour of cream whip to have on which day of
the week, to whether or not to bomb Damascus.
  
Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the
grounds of whether or not the stories about the President were
true, that was old hat now. At the time Ms Andrews had emphati-
cally denied advising President Hudson on anything other than
personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently
include the bombing of Damascus. (`NOTHING PERSONAL,
DAMASCUS!' the tabloids had hooted at the time.)
  
No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come
up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms Andrews
had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand,
was not entirely ready for a re-match in the hotel lobby. What
to do?
  
`I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes,'
said Gail Andrews. `But I would like to talk to you, and I'm
leaving the city tonight.'
  
She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather
than aggrieved or irate.
  
`OK,' said Tricia. `Give me ten minutes.'
  
She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she
had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk
at reception to deal with anything as complicated as a message
that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn't a note
under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at
the desk and messages under the door had been completely at
odds with each other.
  
There wasn't one.
  
The message light on the phone was flashing though.
  
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
  
`You have a message from Gary Andress,' said the operator.
  
`Yes?' said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. `What does it say.'
  
`Not hippy,' said the operator.
  
`Not what?' said Tricia.
  `
`Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess
he wanted you to know that. You want the number?'
  
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realised
that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already
had.
  
`OK, OK,' she said. `Are there any other messages for me?'
  
`Room number?'
  
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly
ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it
to her anyway.
  
`Name?'
  
`McMillan, Tricia McMillan.' Tricia spelt it, patiently.
  
`Not Mr MacManus?'
  
`No.'
  
`No more messages for you.' Click.
 
Tricia sighed and dialled again. This time she gave her name
and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed
not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speak-
ing less than ten seconds ago.
  
`I'm going to be in the bar,' Tricia explained. `In the bar.
If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put
it through to me in the bar?'
  
`Name?'
  
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was
certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear
as it possibly could be.
  
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup
with the speed of a professional, and, looking at her bed with a
sigh, left the room again.
  
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
  
No. Not really.
  
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby
while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she
could fool herself she could fool anybody.
  
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews.
OK, she had given her a hard time. Sorry but that's the game
we're all in - that sort of thing. Ms Andrews had agreed to do
the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure
was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch.
No, she edited that line out again.
  
What had happened was this:
  
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last
discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They
had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital
anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they
were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for
them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly
nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was
some tediously heart-warming story attached to this - and that
was all very wonderful and lovely.
  
Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, con-
siderable interest.
  
Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to
go to New York at her TV company's expense she had happened
to notice a press release about Gail Andrews, and her new book,
You and Your Planets.
  
Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the
moment you mentioned President Hudson, cream whips and the
amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgi-
cal strikes. The official term had in fact been `Damascectomy',
meaning the `taking out' of Damascus), everyone remembered
who you meant.
  
Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.
  
Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space
knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit
of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of
rock out there that nobody had known about before.
  
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it?
  
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and
so? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune
was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was
rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be rethought?
Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was
all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig-farming, the
principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis?
If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President
Hudson have been eating the boysenberry flavour on Thursday
rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort
of thing.
  
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was
just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she
made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by
talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some
of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
  
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to
Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could
cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was,
for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip
gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a
brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase
of her life, a first class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in
astrophysics.
 As she was getting into the elevator Tricia, slightly preoccupied,
realised she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether
to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it
was and there wasn't anything she particularly needed in it. She
let the door close behind her.
  
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had
taught her anything it was this:
  
Never go back for your bag.
  
As the elevator went down she stared up at the ceiling in
a rather intent way. Anyone who didn't know Tricia McMillan
better would have said that that was exactly the way people
sometimes stared upwards when they were trying to hold back
tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera
mounted up in the corner.
 She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later,
and went up to the reception desk again.
  
`Now, I'm going to write this out,' she said, `because I
don't want anything to go wrong.'
  
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper,
then her room number, then `IN THE BAR' and gave it to
the receptionist, who looked at it.
  
`That's in case there's a message for me. OK?'
  
The receptionist continued to look at it.
  
`You want me to see if she's in her room?' he said.
 Two minutes later, Tricia swivelled into the bar seat next to
Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
  
`You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit
up at the bar rather than demurely at a table,' she said.
  
This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.
  
`Vodka?' said Gail.
  `
`Yes,' said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself asking,
`How did you know?' but Gail answered anyway.
  
`I asked the barman,' she said, with a kindly smile.
  
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly
across the glossy mahogany.
  
`Thank you,' said Tricia, stirring it sharply.
  
She didn't know quite what to make out of all this sudden
niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People
in New York were not nice to each other without reason.
  
`Ms Andrews,' she said, firmly, `I'm sorry that you're not
happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this
morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment,
which is fine. It's part of showbiz and it's a part that you have
done well out of and good luck to you. It's fun. It's not a science
though, and it shouldn't be mistaken for one. I think that's some-
thing we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together
this morning, while at the same time generating some popular
entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I'm sorry
if you have a problem with that.'
  
`I'm perfectly happy,' said Gail Andrews.
  
`Oh,' said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this.
`It said in your message that you were not happy.'
  
`No,' said Gail Andrews. `I said in my message that I thought
you were not happy, and I was just wondering why.'
  
Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the
head. She blinked.
  
`What?' she said quietly.
  
`To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy
about something to do with stars and planets when we were
having our discussion, and it's been bothering me, which is why
I came to see if you were all right.'
  
Tricia stared at her. `Ms Andrews - ' she started, and then
realised that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and
unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying
to make.
  
`Please call me Gail, if that's OK.'
  
Tricia just looked bewildered.
  
`I know that astrology isn't a science,' said Gail. `Of course
it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or,
what's that strange thing you British play?'
  
`Er, cricket? Self-loathing?'
  
`Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there.
They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of them-
selves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of
processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of
stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about
stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for
all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about
a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge.
The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are,
the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a
piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets
you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above
it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not
important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So
you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do
with people thinking about people.
  
`So when you got so, I don't know, so emotionally focused
on stars and planets this morning, I began to think, she's not
angry about astrology, she really is angry and unhappy about
actual stars and planets. People usually only get that unhappy
and angry when they've lost something. That's all I could think
and I couldn't make any more sense of it than that. So I came
to see if you were OK.'
  
Tricia was stunned.
  
One part of her brain had already got started on all sorts
of stuff. It was busy constructing all sorts of rebuttals to do
with how ridiculous newspaper horoscopes were and the sort of
statistical tricks they played on people. But gradually it petered
out, because it realised that the rest of her brain wasn't listening.
She had been completely stunned.
  
She had just been told, by a total stranger, something she'd
kept completely secret for seventeen years.
  
She turned to look at Gail.
  
`I...'
  
She stopped.
  
A tiny security camera up behind the bar had turned to
follow her movement. This completely flummoxed her. Most
people would not have noticed it. It was not designed to be
noticed. It was not designed to suggest that nowadays even an
expensive and elegant hotel in New York couldn't be sure that
its clientele wasn't suddenly going to pull a gun or not wear a tie.
But carefully hidden though it was behind the vodka, it couldn't
deceive the finely honed instinct of a TV anchor person, which
was to know exactly when a camera was turning to look at her.
  
`Is something wrong?' asked Gail.
  
`No, I... I have to say that you've rather astonished me,'
said Tricia. She decided to ignore the security camera. It was
just her imagination playing tricks with her because she had
television so much on her mind today. It wasn't the first time it
had happened. A traffic monitoring camera, she was convinced,
had swung round to follow her as she walked past it, and a secu-
rity camera in Bloomingdales had seemed to make a particular
point of watching her trying on hats. She was obviously going
dotty. She had even imagined that a bird in Central Park had
been peering at her rather intently.
  
She decided to put it out of her mind and took a sip of
her vodka. Someone was walking round the bar asking people
if they were Mr MacManus.
  
`OK,' she said, suddenly blurting it out. `I don't know how
you worked it out, but...'
  
`I didn't work it out, as you put it. I just listened to what
you were saying.'
  
`What I lost, I think, was a whole other life.'
  
`Everybody does that. Every moment of every day. Every
single decision we make, every breath we draw, opens some
doors and closes many others. Most of them we don't notice.
Some we do. Sounds like you noticed one.'
  
`Oh yes, I noticed,' said Tricia. `All right. Here it is. It's
very simple. Many years ago I met a guy at a party. He said he
was from another planet and did I want to go along with him. I
said, yes, OK. It was that kind of party. I said to him to wait
while I went to get my bag and then I'd be happy to go off to
another planet with him. He said I wouldn't need my bag. I said
he obviously came from a very backward planet or he'd know
that a woman always needed to take her bag with her. He got a
bit impatient, but I wasn't gong to be a complete pushover just
because he said he was from another planet.
  
`I went upstairs. Took me a while to find my bag, and then
there was someone else in the bathroom. Came down and he
was gone.'
  
Tricia paused.
  
`And...?' said Gail.
  
`The garden door was open. I went outside. There were
lights. Some kind of gleaming thing. I was just in time to see
it rise up into the sky, shoot silently up through the clouds and
disappear. That was it. End of story. End of one life, beginning
of another. But hardly a moment of this life goes by that I don't
wonder about some other me. A me that didn't go back for her
bag. I feel like she's out there somewhere and I'm walking in
her shadow.'
  
A member of the hotel staff was now going round the bar
asking people if they were Mr Miller. Nobody was.
  
`You really think this... person was from another planet?'
asked Gail.
  
`Oh, certainly. There was the spacecraft. Oh, and also he
had two heads.'
  
`Two? Didn't anybody else notice?'
  
`It was a fancy dress party.'
  
`I see...'
  
`And he had a bird cage over it, of course. With a cloth over
the cage. Pretended he had a parrot. He tapped on the cage and
it did a lot of stupid ``Pretty Polly'' stuff and squawking and so
on. Then he pulled the cloth back for a moment and roared with
laughter. There was another head in there, laughing along with
him. It was a worrying moment I can tell you.'
  
`I think you probably did the right thing, dear, don't you?'
said Gail.
  
`No,' said Tricia. `No I don't. And I couldn't carry on doing
what I was doing either. I was an astrophysicist, you see. You
can't be an astrophysicist properly if you've actually met someone
from another planet who's got a second head that pretends to be
a parrot. You just can't do it. I couldn't at least.'
  
`I can see it would be hard. And that's probably why you
tend to be a little hard on other people who talk what sounds
like complete nonsense.'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia. `I expect you're right. I'm sorry.'
  
`That's OK.'
  
`You're the first person I've ever told this, by the way.'
  
`I wondered. You married?'
  
`Er, no. So hard to tell these days isn't it? But you're right
to ask because that was probably the reason. I came very close
a few times, mostly because I wanted to have a kid. But every guy
ended up asking why I was constantly looking over his shoulder.
What do you tell someone? At one point I even thought I might
just go to a sperm bank and take pot luck. Have somebody's child
at random.'
  
`You can't seriously do that, can you?'
  
Tricia laughed. `Probably not. I never quite went and found
out for real. Never quite did it. Story of my life. Never quite
did the real thing. That's why I'm in television I guess. Nothing
is real.'
  
`Excuse me lady, your name Tricia McMillan?'
  
Tricia looked round in surprise. There was a man standing
there in a chauffeur's hat.
  
`Yes,' she said, instantly pulling herself back together again.
  
`Lady, I been looking for you for about an hour. Hotel said
they didn't have anybody of that name, but I checked back with
Mr Martin's office and they said that this was definitely where
you staying. So I ask again, they still say they never heard of
you, so I get them to page you anyway and they can't find you.
In the end I get the office to FAX a picture of you through to
the car and have a look myself.'
  
He looked at his watch.
  
`May be a bit late now, but do you want to go anyway?'
  
Tricia was stunned.
  
`Mr Martin? You mean Andy Martin at NBS?'
  
`That's correct, lady. Screen test for US/AM.'
  
Tricia shot up out of her seat. She couldn't even bear to
think of all the messages she'd heard for Mr MacManus and
Mr Miller.
  
`Only we have to hurry,' said the chauffeur. `As I heard it Mr
Martin thinks it might be worth trying a British accent. His boss
at the network is dead against the idea. That's Mr Zwingler, and
I happen to know he's flying out to the coast this evening because
I'm the one has to pick him up and take him to the airport.'
  
`OK,' said Tricia, `I'm ready. Let's go.'
  
`OK, lady. It's the big limo out the front.'
  
Tricia turned back to Gail. `I'm sorry,' she said.
  
`Go! Go!' said Gail. `And good luck. I've enjoyed meeting
you.'
  
Tricia made to reach for her bag for some cash.
  
`Damn,' she said. She'd left it upstairs.
  
`Drinks are on me,' insisted Gail. `Really. It's been very
interesting.'
  
Tricia sighed.
  
`Look, I'm really sorry about this morning and...'
  
`Don't say another word. I'm fine. It's only astrology. It's
harmless. It's not the end of the world.'
  
`Thanks.' On an impulse Tricia gave her a hug.
  
`You got everything?' said the chauffeur. `You don't want
to pick up your bag or anything?'
  
`If there's one thing that life's taught me,' said Tricia, `it's
never go back for your bag.'
 Just a little over an hour later, Tricia sat on one of the pair of
beds in her hotel room. For a few minutes she didn't move. She
just stared at her bag, which was sitting innocently on top of the
other bed.
  
In her hand was a note from Gail Andrews, saying, `Don't
be too disappointed. Do ring if you want to talk about it. If I
were you I'd stay in at home tomorrow night. Get some rest.
But don't mind me, and don't worry. It's only astrology. It's not
the end of the world. Gail.'
  
The chauffeur had been dead right. In fact the chauffeur
seemed to know more about what was going on inside NBS than
any other single person she had encountered in the organisation.
Martin had been keen, Zwingler had not. She had had her one
shot at proving Martin right and she had blown it.
  
Oh well. Oh well, oh well, oh well.
  
Time to go home. Time to phone the airline and see if
she could still get the red-eye back to Heathrow. tonight. She
reached for the big phone directory.
  
Oh. First things first.
  
She put down the directory again, picked up her handbag,
and took it through to the bathroom. She put it down and took
out the small plastic case which held her contact lenses, without
which she had been unable properly to read either the script or
the autocue.
  
As she dabbed each tiny plastic cup into her eyes she reflected
that if there was one thing life had taught her it was that there
are times when you do not go back for your bag and other times
when you do. It had yet to teach her to distinguish between the
two types of occasion.


                          % 3

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly
call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel
universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible
to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is
now well-established that all known gods came into existence
a good three millionths of a second after the Universe began
rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they
already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is, and are
therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics
at this time.
  
One encouraging thing the Guide does have to say on the
subject of parallel universes is that you don't stand the remotest
chance of understanding it. You can therefore say `What?' and
`Eh?' and even go cross-eyed and start to blither if you like
without any fear of making a fool of yourself.
  
The first thing to realise about parallel universes, the Guide
says, is that they are not parallel.
  
It is also important to realise that they are not, strictly speaking,
universes either, but it is easiest if you try and realise that a little
later, after you've realised that everything you've realised up to
that moment is not true.
  
The reason they are not universes is that any given universe
is not actually a thing as such, but is just a way of looking at
what is technically known as the WSOGMM, or Whole Sort of
General Mish Mash. The Whole Sort of General Mish Mash
doesn't actually exist either, but is just the sum total of all the
different ways there would be of looking at it if it did.
  
The reason they are not parallel is the same reason that the
sea is not parallel. It doesn't mean anything. You can slice the
Whole Sort of General Mish Mash any way you like and you will
generally come up with something that someone will call home.
  
Please feel free to blither now.
 The Earth with which we are here concerned, because of its
particular orientation in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash,
was hit by a neutrino that other Earths were not.
  
A neutrino is not a big thing to be hit by.
  
In fact it's hard to think of anything much smaller by which
one could reasonably hope to be hit. And it's not as if being
hit by neutrinos was in itself a particularly unusual event for
something the size of the Earth. Far from it. It would be an
unusual nanosecond in which the Earth was not hit by several
billion passing neutrinos.
  
It all depends on what you mean by `hit', of course, seeing as
matter consists almost entirely of nothing at all. The chances of
a neutrino actually hitting something as it travels through all this
howling emptiness are roughly comparable to that of dropping a
ball bearing at random from a cruising 747 and hitting, say, an
egg sandwich.
  
Anyway, this neutrino hit something. Nothing terribly impor-
tant in the scale of things, you might say. But the problem with
saying something like that is that you would be talking cross-
eyed badger spit. Once something actually happens somewhere
in something as wildly complicated as the Universe, Kevin knows
where it will all end up - where `Kevin' is any random entity that
doesn't know nothin' about nothin'.
  
This neutrino struck an atom.
  
The atom was part of a molecule. The molecule was part
of a nucleic acid. The nucleic acid was part of a gene. The
gene was part of a genetic recipe for growing... and so on.
The upshot was that a plant ended up growing an extra leaf. In
Essex. Or what would, after a lot of palaver and local difficulties
of a geological nature, become Essex.
  
The plant was a clover. It threw its weight, or rather its seed,
around extremely effectively and rapidly became the world's
dominant type of clover. The precise causal connection between
this tiny biological happenstance, and a few other minor vari-
ations that exist in that slice of the Whole Sort of General
Mish Mash - such as Tricia McMillan failing to leave with
Zaphod Beeblebrox, abnormally low sales of pecan-flavoured
ice-cream and the fact that the Earth On which all this occurred
did not get demolished by the Vogons to make way for a new
hyperspace bypass - is currently sitting at number 4,763,984,132
on the research project priority list at what was once the History
Department of the University of MaxiMegalon, and no one cur-
rently at the prayer meeting by the poolside appears to feel any
sense of urgency about the problem.


                          % 4

Tricia began to feel that the world was conspiring against her.
She knew that this was a perfectly normal way to feel after an
overnight flight going east, when you suddenly have a whole
other mysteriously threatening day to deal with for which you
are not the least bit prepared. But still.
  
There were marks on her lawn.
  
She didn't really care about marks on her lawn very much.
Marks on her lawn could go and take a running jump as far as
she was concerned. It was Saturday morning. She had just got
home from New York feeling tired, crabby and paranoid, and
all she wanted to do was go to bed with the radio on quietly and
gradually fall asleep to the sound of Ned Sherrin being terribly
clever about something.
  
But Eric Bartlett was not going to let her get away with not
making a thorough inspection of the marks. Eric was the old
gardener who came in from the village on Saturday mornings
to poke around at her garden with a stick. He didn't believe
in people coming in from New York first thing in the morning.
Didn't hold with it. Went against nature. He believed in virtually
everything else, though.
  
`Probably them space aliens,' he said, bending over and prod-
ding at the edges of the small indentations with his stick. `Hear
a lot about space aliens these days. I expect it's them.'
  
`Do you?' said Tricia, looking furtively at her watch. Ten
minutes, she reckoned. Ten minutes she'd be able to stay
standing up. Then she would simply keel over, whether she
was in her bedroom or still out here in the garden. That was
if she just had to stand. If she also had to nod intelligently and
say `Do you?' from time to time, it might cut it down to five.
  
`Oh yes,' said Eric. `They come down here, land on your lawn,
and then buzz off again, sometimes with your cat. Mrs Williams
at the Post Office, her cat - you know the ginger. one? - it got
abducted by space aliens. Course, they brought it back the next
day but it were in a very odd mood. Kept prowling around all
morning, and then falling asleep in the afternoon. Used to be
the other way round, is the point. Sleep in the morning, prowl in
the afternoon. Jet lag, you see, from being in an interplanetary
craft.'
  
`I see,' said Tricia.
  
`They dyed it tabby, too, she says. These marks are exactly
the sort of marks that their landing pods would probably make.'
  
`You don't think it's the lawn mower?' asked Tricia.
  
`If the marks were more round, I'd say, but these are just
off-round, you see. Altogether more alien in shape.'
  
`It's just that you mentioned the lawn mower was playing
up and needed fixing or it might start gouging holes in the
lawn.'
  
`I did say that, Miss Tricia, and I stand by what I said.
I'm not saying it's not the lawn mower for definite, I'm just
saying what seems to me more likely given the shapes of the
holes. They come in over these trees, you see, in their landing
pods...'
  
`Eric...,' said Tricia, patiently.

`Tell you what, though, Miss Tricia,' said Eric, `I will take a
look at the mower, like I meant to last week, and leave you to
get on with whatever you' re wanting to.'
  
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia. `I'm going to bed now, in
fact. Help yourself to anything you want in the kitchen.'
  
`Thank you, Miss Tricia, and good luck to you,' said Eric.
He bent over and picked something from the lawn.
  
`There,' he said. `Three-leaf clover. Good luck you see.'
  
He peered at it closely to check that it was a real three-leaf
clover and not just a regular four-leaf one that one of the leaves
had fallen off. `If I were you, though, I'd watch for signs of alien
activity in the area.' He scanned the horizon keenly. `Particularly
from over there in the Henley direction.'
  
`Thank you, Eric,' said Tricia again. `I will.'
  
She went to bed and dreamt fitfully of parrots and other birds.
In the afternoon she got up and prowled around restlessly, not
certain what to do with the rest of the day, or indeed the rest of
her life. She spent at least an hour dithering, trying to make up
her mind whether to head up into town and go to Stavro's for the
evening. This was the currently fashionable spot for high-flying
media people, and seeing a few friends there might help her ease
herself back into the swing of things. She decided at last she would
go. It was good. It was fun there. She was very fond of Stavro
himself, who was a Greek with a German father - a fairly odd
combination. Tricia had been to the Alpha a couple of nights
earlier, which was Stavro's original club in New York, now run
by his brother Karl, who thought of himself as a German with a
Greek mother. Stavro would be very happy to be told that Karl
was making a bit of a pig's ear of running the New York club,
so Tricia would go and make him happy. There was little love
lost between Stavro and Karl Mueller.
  
OK. That's what she would do.
  
She then spent another hour dithering about what to wear.
At last she settled on a smart little black dress she'd got in New
York. She phoned a friend to see who was likely to be at the
club that evening, and was told that it was closed this evening
for a private wedding party.
  
She thought that trying to live life according to any plan you
actually work out is like trying to buy ingredients for a recipe from
the supermarket. You get one of those trolleys which simply will
not go in the direction you push it and end up just having to buy
completely different stuff. What do you do with it? What do you
do with the recipe? She didn't know.
  
Anyway, that night an alien spacecraft landed on her lawn.


                          % 5

She watched it coming in from over the Henley direction with
mild curiosity at first, wondering what those lights were. Living,
as she did, not a million miles from Heathrow, she was used to
seeing lights in the sky. Not usually so late in the evening, or so
low, though, which was why she was mildly curious.
  
When whatever it was began to come closer and closer her
curiosity began to turn to bemusement.
  
`Hmmm,' she thought, which was about as far as she could get
with thinking. She was still feeling dopey and jet-lagged and the
messages that one part of her brain was busy sending to another
were not necessarily arriving on time or the right way up. She left
the kitchen where she'd been fixing herself a coffee and went to
open the back door which led out to the garden. She took a deep
breath of cool evening air, stepped outside and looked up.
  
There was something roughly the size of a large camper
van parked about a hundred feet above her lawn.
  
It was really there. Hanging there. Almost silent.
  
Something moved deep inside her.
  
Her arms dropped slowly down to her side. She didn't notice
the scalding coffee slopping over her foot. She was hardly
breathing as slowly, inch by inch, foot by foot, the craft came
downwards. Its lights were playing softly over the ground as if
probing and feeling it. They played over her.
  
It seemed beyond all hope that she should be given her
chance again. Had he found her? Had he come back?
The craft dropped down and down until at last it had settled
quietly on her lawn. It didn't look exactly like the one she had
seen departing all those years ago, she thought, but flashing lights
in the night sky are hard to resolve into clear shapes.
  
Silence.
  
Then a click and a hum.
  
Then another click and another hum. Click hum, click hum.
  
A doorway slid open, spilling light towards her across the
lawn.
  
She waited, tingling.
  
A figure stood silhouetted in the light, then another, and
another.
  
Wide eyes blinked slowly at her. Hands were slowly raised
in greeting.
  
`McMillan?' a voice said at last, a strange, thin voice that
managed the syllables with difficulty. `Tricia McMillan. Ms Tricia
McMillan?'
  
`Yes,' said Tricia, almost soundlessly.
  
`We have been monitoring you.'
  
`M... monitoring? Me?'
  
`Yes.'
  
They looked at her for a while, their large eyes moving
up and down her very slowly.
  
`You look smaller in real life,' one said at last.
  
`What?' said Tricia.
  
`Yes.'
  
`I... I don't understand,' said Tricia. She hadn't expected any
of this, of course, but even for something she hadn't expected to
begin with it wasn't going the way she expected. At last she said,
  
`Are you... are you from... Zaphod?'
  
This question seemed to cause a little consternation among the
three figures. They conferred with each other in some skittering
language of their own and then turned back to her.
  
`We don't think so. Not as far as we know,' said one.
  
`Where is Zaphod?' said another, looking up into the night sky.
  
`I... I don't know, said Tricia, helplessly.
  
`Is it far from here? Which direction? We don't know.'
  
Tricia realised with a sinking heart that they had no idea
who she was talking about. Or even what she was talking about.
And she had no idea what they were talking about. She put her
hopes tightly away again and snapped her brain back into gear.
There was no point in being disappointed. She had to wake up
to the fact that she had here the journalistic scoop of the cen-
tury. What should she do? Go back into the house for a video
camera? Wouldn't they just be gone when she got back? She
was thoroughly confused as to strategy. Keep'em talking, she
thought. Figure it out later.
  
`You've been monitoring... me?'
  
`All of you. Everything on your planet. TV. Radio. Tele-
communications. Computers. Video circuitry. Warehouses.'
  
`What?'
  
`Car parks. Everything. We monitor everything.'
  
Tricia stared at them.
  
`That must be very boring, isn't it?' she blurted out.
  
`Yes.'
  
`So why...'
  
`Except...'
  
`Yes? Except what?'
  
`Game shows. We quite like game shows.'
  
There was a terribly long silence as Tricia looked at the
aliens and the aliens looked at her.
  
`There's something I would just like to get from indoors,'
said Tricia very deliberately. `Tell you what. Would you, or
one of you, like to come inside with me and have a look?'
  
`Very much,' they all said, enthusiastically.
 All three of them stood, slightly awkwardly in her sitting room,
as she hurried around picking up a video camera, a 35mm camera,
a tape recorder, every recording medium she could grab hold of.
They were all thin and, under domestic lighting conditions, a sort
of dim purplish green.
  
`I really won't be a second, guys,' Tricia said, as she rummaged
through some drawers for spare tapes and films.
  
The aliens were looking at the shelves that held her CDs
and her old records. One of them nudged one of the others
very slightly.
  
`Look,' he said. `Elvis.'
  
Tricia stopped, and stared at them all over again.
  
`You like Elvis?' she said.
  
`Yes,' they said.
  
`Elvis Presley?'
  
`Yes.'
  
She shook her head in bewilderment as she tried to stuff
a new tape into her video camera.
  
`Some of your people,' said one of her visitors, hesitantly,
`think that Elvis has been kidnapped by space aliens.'
  
`What?' said Tricia. `Has he?'
  
`It is possible.'
  
`Are you telling me that you have kidnapped Elvis?' gasped
Tricia. She was trying to keep cool enough not to foul up her
equipment, but this was all almost too much for her.
  
`No. Not us,' said her guests. `Aliens. It is a very interesting
possibility. We talk of it often.'
  
`I must get this down,' Tricia muttered to herself. She checked
her video was properly loaded and working now. She pointed the
camera at them. She didn't put it up to her eye because she didn't
want to freak them out. But she was sufficiently experienced to
be able to shoot accurately from the hip.
  
`OK,' she said. `Now tell me slowly and carefully who you
are. You first,' she said to the one on the left. `What's your
name?'
  
`I don't know.'
  
`You don't know.'
  
`No.'
  
`I see,' said Tricia. `And what about you other two?'
  
`We don't know.'
  
`Good. OK. Perhaps you can tell me where you are from?'
  
They shook their heads.
  
`You don't know where you're from?'
  
They shook their heads again.
  
`So,' said Tricia. `What are you... er...'
  
She was floundering but, being a professional, kept the camera
steady while she did it.
  
`We are on a mission,' said one of the aliens.
  
`A mission? A mission to do what?'
  
`We do not know.'
  
Still she kept the camera steady.
  
`So what are you doing here on Earth, then?'
  
`We have come to fetch you.'
  
Rock steady, rock steady. Could have been on a tripod. She
wondered if she should be using a tripod, in fact. She wondered
that because it gave her a moment or two to digest what they had
just said. No, she thought, hand-held gave her more flexibility.
She also thought, help, what am I going to do?
  
`Why,' she asked, calmly, `have you come to fetch me?'
  
`Because we have lost our minds.'
  
`Excuse me,' said Tricia, `I'm going to have to get a tripod.'
  
They seemed happy enough to stand there doing nothing
while Tricia quickly found a tripod and mounted the camera on
it. Her face was completely immobile, but she did not have the
faintest idea what was going on or what to think about it.
  
`OK,' she said, when she was ready. `Why...'
  
`We liked your interview with the astrologer.'
  
`You saw it?'
  
`We see everything. We are very interested in astrology.
We like it. It is very interesting. Not everything is interesting.
Astrology is interesting. What the stars tell us. What the stars
foretell. We could do with some information like that.'
  
`But...'
  
Tricia didn't know where to start.
  
Own up, she thought. There's no point in trying to second
guess any of this stuff.
  
So she said, `But I don't know anything about astrology.'
  
`We do.'
  
`You do?'
  
`Yes. We follow our horoscopes. We are very avid. We see
all your newspapers and your magazines and are very avid with
them. But our leader says we have a problem.'
  
`You have a leader?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`What's his name?'
  
`We do not know.'
  
`What does he say his name is, for Christ's sake? Sorry
I'll need to edit that. What does he say his name is?'
  
`He does not know.'
  
`So how do you all know he's the leader?'
  
`He seized control. He said someone has to do something
round here.'
  
`Ah! , said Tricia, seizing on a clue. `Where is ``here''?'
  
`Rupert.'
  
`What?'
  
`Your people call it Rupert. The tenth planet from your
sun. We have settled there for many years. It is highly cold
and uninteresting there. But good for monitoring.'
  
`Why are you monitoring us?'
  
`It is all we know to do.'
  
`OK,' said Tricia. `Right. What is the problem that your
leader says you have?'
  
`Triangulation.'
  
`I beg your pardon?'
  
`Astrology is a very precise science. We know this.'
  
`Well...' said Tricia, then left it at that.
  
`But it is precise for you here on Earth.'
  
`Ye... e... s...' She had a horrible feeling she was
getting a vague glimmering of something.
  
`So when Venus is rising in Capricorn, for instance, that
is from Earth. How does that work if we are out on Rupert?
What if the Earth is rising in Capricorn? It is hard for us to
know. Amongst the things we have forgotten, which we think
are many and profound, is trigonometry.'
  
`Let me get this straight,' said Tricia. `You want me to
come with you to... Rupert...'
  
`Yes.'
  
`To recalculate your horoscopes for you to take account of
the relative positions of Earth and Rupert?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`Do I get an exclusive?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`I'm your girl,' said Tricia, thinking that at the very least
she could sell it to the National Enquirer.
 As she boarded the craft that would take her off to the furthest
limits of the Solar System, the first thing that met her eyes was
a bank of video monitors across which thousands of images were
sweeping. A fourth alien was sitting watching them, but was
focused on one particular screen that held a steady image. It
was a replay of the impromptu interview which Tricia had just
conducted with his three colleagues. He looked up when he saw
her apprehensively climbing in.
  
`Good evening, Ms McMillan,' he said. `Nice camera work.'


                          % 6

Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three
inches further from the ventilation shaft than he remembered it
so he misjudged the point at which he would hit the ground,
started running too soon, stumbled awkwardly and twisted his
ankle. Damn! He ran off down the corridor anyway, hobbling
slightly.
  
All over the building, alarms were erupting into their usual
frenzy of excitement. He dived for cover behind the usual storage
cabinets, glanced around to check that he was unseen, and started
rapidly to fish around inside his satchel for the usual things he
needed.
  
His ankle, unusually, was hurting like hell.
  
The ground was not only three inches further from the ven-
tilation shaft than he remembered, it was also on a different
planet than he remembered, but it was the three inches that
had caught him by surprise. The offices of the Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy were quite often shifted at very short
notice to another planet, for reasons of local climate, local
hostility, power bills or tax, but they were always reconstructed
exactly the same way, almost to the very molecule. For many of
the company's employees, the layout of their offices represented
the only constant they knew in a severely distorted personal uni-
verse.
  
Something, though, was odd.
  
This was not in itself surprising, thought Ford as he pulled
out his lightweight throwing towel. Virtually everything in his
life was, to a greater or lesser extent, odd. It was just that this
was odd in a slightly different way than he was used to things
being odd, which was, well, strange. He couldn't quite get it into
focus immediately.
  
He got out his No.3 gauge prising tool.
The alarms were going in the same old way that he knew
well. There was a kind of music to them that he could almost
hum along to. That was all very familiar. The world outside had
been a new one on Ford. He had not been to Saquo-Pilia Hensha
before, and he had liked it. It had a kind of carnival atmosphere
to it.
  
He took from his satchel a toy bow and arrow which he
had bought in a street market.
  
He had discovered that the reason for the carnival atmosphere
on Saquo-Pilia Hensha was that the local people were celebrating
the annual feast of the Assumption of St Antwelm. St Antwelm
had been, during his lifetime, a great and popular king who had
made a great and popular assumption. What King Antwelm had
assumed was that what everybody wanted, all other things being
equal, was to be happy and enjoy themselves and have the best
possible time together. On his death he had willed his entire per-
sonal fortune to financing an annual festival to remind everyone
of this, with lots of good food and dancing and very silly games
like Hunt the Wocket. His Assumption had been such a brilliantly
good one that he was made into a saint for it. Not only that, but all
the people who had previously been made saints for doing things
like being stoned to death in a thoroughly miserable way or living
upside down in barrels of dung were instantly demoted and were
now thought to be rather embarrassing.
  
The familiar H-shaped building of the Hitch Hiker's Guide
offices rose above the outskirts of the city, and Ford Prefect
had broken into it in the familiar way. He always entered via the
ventilation system rather than the main lobby because the main
lobby was patrolled by robots whose job it was to quiz incoming
employees about their expense accounts. Ford Prefect's expense
accounts were notoriously complex and difficult affairs and he had
found, on the whole, that the lobby robots were ill-equipped to
understand the arguments he wished to put forward in relation to
them. He preferred, therefore, to make his entrance by another
route.
  
This meant setting off nearly every alarm in the building, but
not the one in the accounts department, which was the way that
Ford preferred it.
  
He hunkered down behind the storage cabinet, he licked
the rubber suction cup of the toy arrow, and then fitted it
to the string of the bow.
  
Within about thirty seconds a security robot the size of a
small melon came flying down the corridor at about waist height,
scanning left and right for anything unusual as it did so.
  
With impeccable timing Ford shot the toy arrow across its
path. The arrow flew across the corridor and stuck, wobbling,
on the opposite wall. As it flew, the robot's sensors locked on
to it instantly and the robot twisted through ninety degrees to
follow it, see what the hell it was and where it was going.
  
This bought Ford one precious second, during which the
robot was looking in the opposite direction from him. He
hurled the towel over the flying robot and caught it.
  
Because of the various sensory protuberances with which the
robot was festooned, it couldn't manoeuvre inside the towel, and
it just twitched back and forth without being able to turn and face
its captor.
  
Ford hauled it quickly towards him and pinned it down to
the ground. It was beginning to whine pitifully. With one swift
and practised movement, Ford reached under the towel with his
No.3 gauge prising tool and flipped off the small plastic panel on
top of the robot which gave access to its logic circuits.
  
Now logic is a wonderful thing but it has, as the processes
of evolution discovered, certain drawbacks.
  
Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something
else which thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest
way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it the same
stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a
loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sand-
wich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (The
MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the
Surprisingly Obvious).
  
A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring
sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the
whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to
believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was
placed in front of it. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!
A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.'
  
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich
in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again.
Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that
the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip
straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor
in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, `Ah!
A herring sandwich..., etc., and repeated the same action over
and over and over again. The only thing that prevented the her-
ring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business
and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was
that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between
a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was
going on than was the robot.
  
The scientists at the Institute thus discovered the driving
force behind all change, development and innovation in life,
which was this: herring sandwiches. They published a paper
to this effect, which was widely criticised as being extremely
stupid. They checked their figures and realised that what they
had actually discovered was `boredom', or rather, the practical
function of boredom. In a fever of excitement they then went
on to discover other emotions, Like `irritability', `depression',
`reluctance', `ickiness' and so on. The next big breakthrough came
when they stopped using herring sandwiches, whereupon a whole
welter of new emotions became suddenly available to them for
study, such as `relief', `joy', `friskiness', `appetite', `satisfaction',
and most important of all, the desire for `happiness'.
  
This was the biggest breakthrough of all.
  
Vast wodges of complex computer code governing robot behav-
iour in all possible contingencies could be replaced very simply.
All that robots needed was the capacity to be either bored or
happy, and a few conditions that needed to be satisfied in order
to bring those states about. They would then work the rest out
for themselves.
  
The robot which Ford had got trapped under his towel was
not, at the moment a happy robot. It was happy when it could
move about. It was happy when it could see other things. It was
particularly happy when it could see other things moving about,
particularly if the other things were moving about doing things
they shouldn't do because it could then, with considerable delight,
report them.
  
Ford would soon fix that.
  
He squatted over the robot and held it between his knees. The
towel was still covering all of its sensory mechanisms, but Ford
had now got its logic circuits exposed. The robot was whirring
grungily and pettishly, but it could only fidget, it couldn't actually
move. Using the prising tool, Ford eased a small chip out from its
socket. As soon as it came out, the robot went quiet and just sat
there in a coma.
  
The chip Ford had taken out was the one which contained
the instructions for all the conditions that had to be fulfilled in
order for the robot to feel happy. The robot would be happy
when a tiny electrical charge from a point just to the left of the
chip reached another point just to the right of the chip. The chip
determined whether the charge got there or not.
  
Ford pulled out a small length of wire that had been threaded
into the towel. He dug one end of it into the top left hole of the
chip socket and the other into the bottom right hole.
  
That was all it took. Now the robot would be happy whatever
happened.
  
Ford quickly stood up and whisked the towel away. The
robot rose ecstatically into the air, pursuing a kind of wriggly
path.
  
It turned and saw Ford.
  
`Mr Prefect, sir! I'm so happy to see you!'
  
`Good to see you, little fella,' said Ford.
  
The robot rapidly reported back to its central control that
everything was now for the best in this best of all possible
worlds, the alarms rapidly quelled themselves, and life returned
to normal.
  
At least, almost to normal.
  
There was something odd about the place.
  
The little robot was gurgling with electric delight. Ford hurried
on down the corridor, letting the thing bob along in his wake
telling him how delicious everything was, and how happy it was
to be able to tell him that.
  
Ford, however , was not happy.
  
He passed faces of people he didn't know. They didn't look
like his sort of people. They were too well groomed. Their
eyes were too dead. Every time he thought he saw someone
he recognised in the distance, and hurried along to say hello,
it would turn out to be someone else, with an altogether neater
hairstyle and a much more thrusting, purposeful look than, well,
than anybody Ford knew.
  
A staircase had been moved a few inches to the left. A
ceiling had been lowered slightly. A Lobby had been remodelled.
All these things were not worrying in themselves, though they
were a little disorienting. The thing that was worrying was the
decor. It used to be brash and glitzy. Expensive - because the
Guide sold so well through the civilised and post-civilised Galaxy
- but expensive and fun. Wild games machines lined the corridors.
Insanely painted grand pianos hung from ceilings, vicious sea
creatures from the planet Viv reared up out of pools in tree-filled
atria, robot butlers in stupid shirts roamed the corridors seeking
whose hands they might press frothing drinks into. People used
to have pet vastdragons on leads and pterospondes on perches in
their offices. People knew how to have a good time, and if they
didn't there were courses they could sign up for which would put
that right.
  
There was none of that now.
  
Somebody had been through the place doing some iniquitous
kind of taste job on it.
  
Ford turned sharply into a small alcove, cupped his hand
and yanked the flying robot in with him. He squatted down
and peered at the burbling cybernaut.
  
`What's been happening here?' he demanded.
  
`Oh just the nicest things, sir, just the nicest possible things.
Can I sit on your lap, please?'
  
`No,' said Ford, brushing the thing away. It was overjoyed
to be spurned in this way and started to bob and burble and
swoon. Ford grabbed it again and stuck it firmly in the air a
foot in front of his face. It tried to stay where it was put but
couldn't help quivering slightly.
  
`Something's changed, hasn't it?' Ford hissed.
  
`Oh yes,' squealed the little robot, `in the most fabulous
and wonderful way. I feel so good about it.'
  
`Well what was it like before, then?'
  
`Scrumptious.'
  
`But you like the way it's changed?' demanded Ford.
  
`I like everything,' moaned the robot. `Especially when you
shout at me like that. Do it again, please.'
  
`Just tell me what's happened!'
  
`Oh thank you, thank you!'
  
Ford sighed.
  
`OK, OK,' panted the robot. `The Guide has been taken over.
There's a new management. It's all so gorgeous I could just melt.
The old management was also fabulous of course, though I'm not
sure if I thought so at the time.'
  
`That was before you had a bit of wire stuck in your head.'
  
`How true. How wonderfully true. How wonderfully, bub-
blingly, frothingly, burstingly true. What a truly ecstasy-induc-
ingly correct observation.'
  
`What's happened?' insisted Ford. `Who is this new man-
agement? When did they take over? I... oh, never mind,' he
added, as the little robot started to gibbet with uncontrollable
joy and rub itself against his knee. `I'll go and find out for myself.'
 Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,
tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and
gave way, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the drinks
trolley laden with some of the Galaxy's most potent and expen-
sive beverages habitually stood, seized hold of the trolley and,
using it to give himself cover, trundled it and himself across the
main exposed part of the office floor to where the valuable and
extremely rude statue of Leda and the Octopus stood, and took
shelter behind it. Meanwhile the little security robot, entering at
chest height, was suicidally delighted to draw gunfire away from
Ford.
  
That, at least, was the plan, and a necessary one. The current
editor-in-chief, Stagyar-zil-Doggo, was a dangerously unbalanced
man who took a homicidal view of contributing staff turning up in
his office without pages of fresh, proofed copy, and had a battery
of laser guided guns linked to special scanning devices in the door
frame to deter anybody who was merely bringing extremely good
reasons why they hadn't written any. Thus was a high level of
output maintained.
  
Unfortunately the drinks trolley wasn't there.
  
Ford hurled himself desperately sideways and somersaulted
towards the statue of Leda and the Octopus, which also wasn't
there. He rolled and hurtled around the room in a kind of random
panic, tripped, span, hit the window, which fortunately was built
to withstand rocket attacks, rebounded, and fell in a bruised and
winded heap behind a smart grey crushed leather sofa, which
hadn't been there before.
  
After a few seconds he slowly peeked up above the top of the
sofa. As well as there being no drinks trolley and no Leda and
the Octopus, there had also been a startling absence of gunfire.
He frowned. This was all utterly wrong.
  
`Mr Prefect, I assume,' said a voice.
  
The voice came from a smooth-faced individual behind a
large ceramo-teak-bonded desk. Stagyar-zil-Doggo may well have
been a hell of an individual, but no one, for a whole variety of
reasons, would ever have called him smooth-faced. This was not
Stagyar-zil-Doggo.
  
`I assume from the manner of your entrance that you do not
have new material for the, er, Guide, at the moment,' said the
smooth-faced individual. He was sitting with his elbows resting
on the table and holding his fingertips together in a manner
which, inexplicably, has never been made a capital offence.
  
`I've been busy,' said Ford, rather weakly. He staggered
to his feet, brushing himself down. Then he thought, what the
hell was he saying things weakly for? He had to get on top of
this situation. He had to find out who the hell this person was,
and he suddenly thought of a way of doing it.
  
`Who the hell are you?, he demanded.
  
`I am your new editor-in-chief. That is, if we decide to
retain your services. My name is Vann Harl.' He didn't put his
hand out. He just added, `What have you done to that security
robot?'
  
The little robot was rolling very, very slowly round the ceiling
and moaning quietly to itself.
  
`I've made it very happy,' snapped Ford. `It's a kind of
mission I have. Where's Stagyar? More to the point, where's
his drinks trolley?'
  
`Mr zil-Doggo is no longer with this organisation. His drinks
trolley is, I imagine, helping to console him for this fact.'
  
`Organisation?' yelled Ford. `Organisation? What a bloody
stupid word for a set-up like this!'
  
`Precisely our sentiments. Under-structured, over-resourced,
under-managed, over-inebriated. And that,' said Harl, `was just
the editor.'
  
`I'll do the jokes,' snarled Ford.
  
`No,' said Harl. `You will do the restaurant column.'
  
He tossed a piece of plastic on to the desk in front of
him. Ford did not move to pick it up.
  
`You what?' said Ford.
  
`No. Me Harl. You Prefect. You do restaurant column. Me
editor. Me sit here tell you you do restaurant column. You get?'
  
`Restaurant column?' said Ford, too bewildered to be really
angry yet.
  
`Siddown, Prefect,' said Harl. He swung round in his swivel
chair, got to his feet, and stood staring out at the tiny specks
enjoying the carnival twenty-three stories below.
  
`Time to get this business on its feet, Prefect,' he snapped.
  
`We at InfiniDim Enterprises are...'
  
`You at what?'
  
`InfiniDim Enterprises. We have bought out the Guide.'
  
`InfiniDim?'
  
`We spent millions on that name, Prefect. Start liking it
or start packing.'
  
Ford shrugged. He had nothing to pack.
  
`The Galaxy is changing,' said Harl. `We've got to change
with it. Go with the market. The market is moving up. New
aspirations. New technology. The future is...'
  
`Don't tell me about the future,' said Ford. `I've been all over
the future. Spend half my time there. It' s the same as anywhere
else. Anywhen else. Whatever. Just the same old stuff in faster
cars and smellier air.'
  
`That's one future,' said Harl. `That's your future, if you
accept it. you've got to learn to think multi-dimensionally.
There are limitless futures stretching out in every direction from
this moment - and from this moment and from this. Billions of
them, bifurcating every instant! Every possible position of every
possible electron balloons out into billions of probabilities! Bil-
lions and billions of shining, gleaming futures! you know what
that means?'
  
`You're dribbling down your chin.'
  
`Billions and billions of markets!'
  
`I see,' said Ford. `So you sell billions and billions of Guides.'
  
`No,' said Harl, reaching for his handkerchief and not finding
one. `Excuse me,' he said, `but this gets me so excited.' Ford
handed him his towel.
  
`The reason we don't sell billions and billions of Guides,'
continued Harl, after wiping his mouth, `is the expense. What we
do is we sell one Guide billions and billions of times. We exploit
the multidimensional nature of the Universe to cut down on
manufacturing costs. And we don't sell to penniless hitch hikers.
What a stupid notion that was! Find the one section of the market
that, more or less by definition, doesn't have any money, and try
and sell to it. No. We sell to the affluent business traveller and
his vacationing wife in a billion, billion different futures . This is
the most radical, dynamic and thrusting business venture in the
entire multidimensional infinity of space/time/probability ever.'
  
`And you want me to be its restaurant critic,' said Ford.
  
`We would value your input.'
  
`Kill!' shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.
  
The towel leapt up out of Harl's hands.
  
This was not because it had any motive force of its own,
but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might.
The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect
hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just
lunging for the credit card, but you don't get to occupy the sort
of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in
which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid
view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself
backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof
glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal
dreams.
  
Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly every-
thing had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he
now held in his hand - it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with
his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years
from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford
had ever seen in his life - then he clambered over the desk to
see to Harl.
  
He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he
might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet
bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl's breast
pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens.
Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of
someone's wife and family - presumably Harl's, but it was hard
to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn't have time
for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for
weekends.
  
Ha!
  
He couldn't believe what he'd just found.
  
He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely
exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of
receipts.
  
It wasn't insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in
fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and
semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see
a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried
pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface .
  
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly
thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was
perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in
which you were required to provide absolute proof of your iden-
tity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome
just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential
problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an
epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash
point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around
waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits
of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant
(or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious
reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions
about members of their family they didn't even remember they
had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours.
And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If
you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty
or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
  
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of
information about you, your body and your life into one all-
purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around
in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest
triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
  
Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred
to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.
  
`Hey!' he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering
with euphoria up on the ceiling. `You want to stay happy?'
  
The robot gurgled that it did.
  
`Then stick with me and do everything I tell you without fail.'
  
The robot said that it was quite happy where it was up
on the ceiling thank you very much. It had never realised
before how much sheer titillation there was to be got from a
good ceiling and it wanted to explore its feelings about ceilings
in greater depth.
  
`You stay there,' said Ford, `and you'll soon be recaptured
and have your conditional chip replaced. You want to stay
happy, come now.'
  
The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse
and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.
  
`Listen,' said Ford, `can you keep the rest of the security
system happy for a few minutes?'
  
`One of the joys of true happiness,' trilled the robot, `is
sharing. I brim, I froth, I overflow with...'
  
`OK,' said Ford. `Just spread a little happiness around the
security network. Don't give it any information. Just make it
feel good so it doesn't feel the need to ask for any.'
  
He picked up his towel and ran cheerfully for the door.
Life had been a little dull of late. It showed every sign now
of becoming extremely froody.


                          % 7

Arthur Dent had been in some hell-holes in his life, but he had
never before seen a spaceport which had a sign saying, `Even
travelling despondently is better than arriving here.' To welcome
visitors the arrivals hall featured a picture of the President of
NowWhat, smiling. It was the only picture anybody could find
of him, and it had been taken shortly after he had shot himself
so although the photo had been retouched as well as could be
managed the smile it wore was rather a ghastly one. The side
of his head had been drawn back in in crayon. No replacement
had been found for the photograph because no replacement had
been found for the President. There was only one ambition which
anyone on the planet ever had, and that was to leave.
  
Arthur checked himself into a small motel on the outskirts of
town, and sat glumly on the bed, which was damp, and flipped
through the little information brochure, which was also damp. It
said that the planet of NowWhat had been named after the open-
ing words of the first settlers to arrive there after struggling across
light years of space to reach the furthest unexplored outreaches of
the Galaxy. The main town was called OhWell. There weren't any
other towns to speak of. Settlement on NowWhat had not been
a success and the sort of people who actually wanted to live on
NowWhat were not the sort of people you would want to spend
time with.
  
Trading was mentioned in the brochure. The main trade that
was carried out was in the skins of the NowWhattian boghog but
it wasn't a very successful one because no one in their right minds
would want to buy a NowWhattian boghog skin. The trade only
hung on by its fingernails because there was always a significant
number of people in the Galaxy who were not in their right minds.
Arthur had felt very uncomfortable looking around at some of
the other occupants of the small passenger compartment of the
ship.
  
The brochure described some of the history of the planet.
Whoever had written it had obviously started out trying to drum
up a little enthusiasm for the place by stressing that it wasn't
actually cold and wet all the time, but could find little positive
to add to this so the tone of the piece quickly degenerated into
savage irony.
  
It talked about the early years of settlement. It said that the
major activities pursued on NowWhat were those of catching,
skinning and eating NowWhattian boghogs, which were the only
extant form of animal life on NowWhat, all other having long
ago died of despair. The boghogs were tiny, vicious creatures,
and the small margin by which they fell short of being completely
inedible was the margin by which life on the planet subsisted.
So what were the rewards, however small, that made life on
NowWhat worth living? Well, there weren't any. Not a one.
Even making yourself some protective clothing out of boghog
skins was an exercise in disappointment and futility, since the
skins were unaccountably thin and leaky. This caused a lot of
puzzled conjecture amongst the settlers. What was the boghog's
secret of keeping warm? If anyone had ever learnt the language
the boghogs spoke to each other they would have discovered
that there was no trick. The boghogs were as cold and wet as
anyone else on the planet. No one had had the slightest desire
to learn the language of the boghogs for the simple reason that
these creatures communicated by biting each other very hard on
the thigh. Life on NowWhat being what it was, most of what a
boghog might have to say about it could easily be signified by
these means.
  
Arthur flipped through the brochure till he found what he
was looking for. At the back there were a few maps of the
planet. They were fairly rough and ready because they weren't
likely to be of much interest to anyone, but they told him what
he wanted to know.
  
He didn't recognise it at first because the maps were the
other way up from the way he would have expected and looked,
therefore thoroughly unfamiliar. Of course, up and down, north
and south, are absolutely arbitrary designations, but we are used
to seeing things the way we are used to seeing them, and
Arthur had to turn the maps upside-down to make sense of
them.
  
There was one huge landmass off on the upper left-hand
side of the page which tapered down to a tiny waist and then
ballooned out again like a large comma. On the right-hand side
was a collection of large shapes jumbled familiarly together. The
outlines were not exactly the same, and Arthur didn't know if this
was because the map was so rough, or because the sea-level was
higher or because, well, things were just different here. But the
evidence was inarguable.
  
This was definitely the Earth.
  
Or rather, it most definitely was not.
  
It merely looked a lot like the Earth and occupied the same
co-ordinates in space/time. What co-ordinates it occupied in
Probability was anybody's guess.
  
He sighed.
  
This, he realised, was about as close to home as he was
likely to get. Which meant that he was about as far from home
as he could possibly be. Glumly he slapped the brochure shut
and wondered what on earth he was going to do next.
  
He allowed himself a hollow laugh at what he had just
thought. He looked at his old watch, and shook it a bit to wind it.
It had taken him, according to his own time-scale, a year of hard
travelling to get here. A year since the accident in hyperspace in
which Fenchurch had completely vanished. One minute she had
been sitting there next to him in the SlumpJet; the next minute
the ship had done a perfectly normal hyperspace hop and when
he had next looked she was not there. The seat wasn't even
warm. Her name wasn't even on the passenger list.
  
The spaceline had been wary of him when he had complained.
A lot of awkward things happen in space travel, and a lot of them
make a lot of money for lawyers. But when they had asked him
what Galactic Sector he and Fenchurch had been from and he
had said ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha they had relaxed completely in a
way that Arthur wasn't at all sure he liked. They even laughed
a little, though sympathetically, of course. They pointed to the
clause in the ticket contract which said that the entities whose
lifespans had originated in any of the Plural zones were advised
not to travel in hyperspace and did so at their own risk. Every-
body, they said, knew that. They tittered slightly and shook their
heads.
  
As Arthur had left their offices he found he was trembling
slightly. Not only had he lost Fenchurch in the most complete
and utter way possible, but he felt that the more time he spent
away out in the Galaxy the more it seemed that the number of
things he didn't know anything about actually increased.
  
Just as he was lost for a moment in these numb memories a
knock came on the door of his motel room, which then opened
immediately. A fat and dishevelled man came in carrying Arthur's
one small case.
  
He got as far as, `Where shall I put -' when there was
a sudden violent flurry and he collapsed heavily against the
door, trying to beat off a small and mangy creature that had
leapt snarling out of the wet night and buried its teeth in his
thigh, even through the thick layers of leather padding he wore
there. There was a brief, ugly confusion of jabbering and thrash-
ing. The man shouted frantically and pointed. Arthur grabbed a
hefty stick that stood next to the door expressly for this purpose
and beat at the boghog with it.
  
The boghog suddenly disengaged and limped backwards, dazed
and forlorn. It turned anxiously in the corner of the room, its tail
tucked up right under its back legs, and stood looking nervously
up at Arthur, jerking its head awkwardly and repeatedly to one
side. Its jaw seemed to be dislocated. It cried a little and scraped
its damp tail across the floor. By the door, the fat man with
Arthur's suitcase was sitting and cursing, trying to staunch the
flow of blood from his thigh. His clothes were already wet from
the rain.
  
Arthur stared at the boghog, not knowing what to do. The
boghog looked at him questioningly. It tried to approach him,
waking mournful little whimpering noises. It moved its jaw pain-
fully. It made a sudden leap for Arthur's thigh, but its dislocated
jaw was too weak to get a grip and it sank, whining sadly, down
to the floor. The fat man jumped to his feet, grabbed the stick,
beat the boghog's brains into a sticky, pulpy mess on the thin
carpet, and then stood there breathing heavily as if daring the
animal to move again, just once.
  
A single boghog eyeball sat looking reproachfully at Arthur
from out of the mashed ruins of its head.
  
`What do you think it was trying to say?' asked Arthur
in a small voice.
  
`Ah, nothing much,' said the man `Just its way of trying
to be friendly. This is just our way of being friendly back,'
he added, gripping the stick.
  
`When's the next flight out?' asked Arthur.
  
`Thought you'd only just arrived,' said the man.
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `It was only going to be a brief visit.
I just wanted to see if this was the right place or not. Sorry.'
  
`You mean you're on the wrong planet?' said the man lugu-
briously. `Funny how many people say that. Specially the people
who live here.' He eyed the remains of the boghog with a deep,
ancestral resentment.
  
`Oh no,' said Arthur, 'it's the right planet all right.' He
picked up the damp brochure lying on the bed and put it in
his pocket. `It's OK, thanks, I'll take that,' he said, taking his
case from the man. He went to the door and looked out into
the cold, wet night.
  
`Yes, it's the right planet, all right,' he said again. `Right
planet, wrong universe.'
  
A single bird wheeled in the sky above him as he set off
back for the spaceport.


                          % 8

Ford had his own code of ethics. It wasn't much of one, but it
was his and he stuck by it, more or less. One rule he made was
never to buy his own drinks. He wasn't sure if that counted as an
ethic, but you have to go with what you've got. He was also firmly
and utterly opposed to all and any forms of cruelty to any animals
whatsoever except geese. And furthermore he would never steal
from his employers.
  
Well, not exactly steal.
  
If his accounts supervisor didn't start to hyperventilate and
put out a seal-all-exits security alert when Ford handed in his
expenses claim then Ford felt he wasn't doing his job properly.
But actually stealing was another thing. That was biting the hand
that feeds you. Sucking very hard on it, even nibbling it in an
affectionate kind of a way was OK, but you didn't actually bite
it. Not when that hand was the Guide. The Guide was something
sacred and special.
  
But that, thought Ford as he ducked and weaved his way
down through the building, was about to change. And they
had only themselves to blame. Look at all this stuff. Lines of
neat grey office cubicles and executive workstation pods. The
whole place was dreary with the hum of memos and minutes of
meetings flitting through its electronic networks. Out in the street
they were playing Hunt the Wocket for Zark's sake, but here in
the very heart of the Guide offices no one was even recklessly
kicking a ball around the corridors or wearing inappropriately
coloured beachware.
  
`InfiniDim Enterprises,' Ford snarled to himself as he stalked
rapidly down one corridor after another. Door after door magi-
cally opened to him without question. Elevators took him happily
to places they should not. Ford was trying to pursue the most
tangled and complicated route he could, heading generally down-
wards through the building. His happy little robot took care of
everything, spreading waves of acquiescent joy through all the
security circuits it encountered.
  
Ford thought it needed a name and decided to call it Emily
Saunders, after a girl he had very fond memories of. Then he
thought that Emily Saunders was an absurd name for a security
robot, and decided to call it Colin instead, after Emily's dog.
  
He was moving deep into the bowels of the building now,
into areas he had never entered before, areas of higher and
higher security. He was beginning to encounter puzzled looks
from the operatives he passed. At this level of security you
didn't even call them people anymore. And they were probably
doing stuff that only operatives would do. When they went home
to their families in the evening they became people again, and
when their little children looked up to them with their sweet
shining eyes and said `Daddy, what did you do all day today?'
they just said, `I performed my duties as an operative,' and left
it at that.
  
The truth of the matter was that all sorts of highly dodgy
stuff went on behind the cheery, happy-go-lucky front that the
Guide liked to put up - or used to like to put up before this new
InfiniDim Enterprises bunch marched in and started to make the
whole thing highly dodgy. There were all kinds of tax scams and
rackets and graft and shady deals supporting the shining edifice,
and down in the secure research and data-processing levels of
the building was where it all went on.
  
Every few years the Guide would set up its business, and
indeed its building on a new world, and all would be sunshine
and laughter for a while as the Guide would put down its roots
in the local culture and economy, provide employment, a sense
of glamour and adventure and, in the end, not quite as much
actual revenue as the locals had expected.
  
When the Guide moved on, taking its building with it, it
left a little like a thief in the night. Exactly like a thief in
the night in fact. It usually left in the very early hours of
the morning, and the following day there always turned out
to be a very great deal of stuff missing. Whole cultures and
economies would collapse in its wake, often within a week,
leaving once thriving planets desolate and shell-shocked but
still somehow feeling they had been part of some great adven-
ture.
  
The `operatives' who shot puzzled glances at Ford as he
marched on into the depths of the building's most sensitive
areas were reassured by the presence of Colin, who was flying
along with him in a buzz of emotional fulfilment and easing his
path for him at every stage.
  
Alarms were starting to go off in other parts of the building.
Perhaps that meant that Vann Harl had already been discovered,
which might be a problem. Ford had been hoping he would be
able to slip the Ident-i-Eeze back into his pocket before he came
round. Well, that was a problem for later, and he didn't for the
moment have the faintest idea how he was going to solve it. For
the moment he wasn't going to worry. Wherever he went with
little Colin, he was surrounded by a cocoon of sweetness and
light and, most importantly, willing and acquiescent elevators
and positively obsequious doors.
  
Ford even began to whistle, which was probably his mistake.
Nobody likes a whistler, particularly not the divinity that shapes
our ends.
  
The next door wouldn't open.
  
And that was a pity, because it was the very one that Ford
had been making for. It stood there before him, grey and
resolutely closed with a sign on it saying:
 
\begin{center} 
                       NO ADMITTANCE.                NOT EVEN TO AUTHORISED PERSONNEL.                 YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME HERE.                            GO AWAY.\end{center}
Colin reported that the doors had been getting generally a
lot grimmer down in these lower reaches of the building.
  
They were about ten stories below ground level now. The
air was refrigerated and the tasteful grey hessian wall-weave
had given way to brutal grey bolted steel walls. Colin's rampant
euphoria had subsided into a kind of determined cheeriness. He
said that he was beginning to tire a little. It was taking all his
energy to pump the slightest bonhomie whatsoever into the doors
down here.
  
Ford kicked at the door. It opened.
  
`Mixture of pleasure and pain,' he muttered. `Always does
the trick.'
 
 He walked in and Colin flew in after him. Even with a
wire stuck straight into his pleasure electrode his happiness
was a nervous kind of happiness. He bobbed around a little.
  
The room was small, grey and humming.
  
This was the nerve centre of the entire Guide.
  
The computer terminals that lined the grey walls were win-
dows on to every aspect of the Guide's operations. Here, on the
left-hand side of the room, reports were gathered over the Sub-
Etha-Net from field researchers in every corner of the Galaxy,
fed straight up into the network of sub-editor's offices where they
had all the good bits cut out by secretaries because the sub-editors
were out having lunch. The remaining copy would then be shot
across to the other half of the building - the other leg of the `H'
- which was the legal department. The legal department would
cut out anything that was still even remotely good from what
remained and fire it back to the offices of the executive editors,
who were also out at lunch. So the editors' secretaries would read
it and say it was stupid and cut most of what was left.
  
When any of the editors finally staggered in from lunch they
would exclaim `What is this feeble crap that X' - where X was
the name of the field researcher in question - `has sent us from
half-way across the bloody Galaxy? What's the point of having
somebody spending three whole orbital periods out in the bloody
Gagrakacka Mind Zones, with all that stuff going on out there,
if this load of anaemic squitter is the best he can be bothered to
send us. Disallow his expenses!'
  
`What shall we do with the copy?' the secretary would ask.
  
`Ah, put it out over the network. Got to have something
going out there. I've got a headache, I'm going home.'
  
So the edited copy would go for one last slash and burn
through the legal department, and then be sent back down
here where it would be broadcast out over the Sub-Etha-Net
for instantaneous retrieval anywhere in the Galaxy. That was
handled by equipment which was monitored and controlled by
the terminals on the right-hand side of the room.
  
Meanwhile the order to disallow the researcher's expenses
was relayed down to the computer terminal stuck off in the
right-hand corner, and it was to this terminal that Ford Prefect
now swiftly made his way.
  
(If you are reading this on planet Earth then:
\begin{description}
	\item{}  
a) Good luck to you. There is an awful lot of stuff you
don't know anything about, but you are not alone in this. It's
just that in your case the consequences of not knowing any of
this stuff are particularly terrible, but then, hey, that's just the
way the cookie gets completely stomped on and obliterated.
	\item{}  
b) Don't imagine you know what a computer terminal is.
\end{description}
A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with
a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and
body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.)
  
Ford hurried over to the terminal, sat in front of it and
quickly dipped himself into its universe.
  
It wasn't the normal universe he knew. It was a universe of
densely enfolded worlds, of wild topographies, towering moun-
tain peaks, heart stopping ravines, of moons shattering off into
sea horses, hurtful blurting crevices, silently heaving oceans and
bottomless hurtling hooping funts.
  
He held still to get his bearings. He controlled his breathing,
closed his eyes and looked again.
  
So this was where accountants spent their time. There was
clearly more to them than met the eye. He looked around
carefully, trying not to let it all swell and swim and overwhelm
him.
  
He didn't know his way around this universe. He didn't
even know the physical laws that determined its dimensional
extents or behaviours, but his instinct told him to look for the
most outstanding feature he could detect and make towards it.
  
Way off in some indistinguishable distance - was it a mile
or a million or a mote in his eye? - was a stunning peak that
overarched the sky, climbed and climbed and spread out in
flowering aigrettes 1, agglomerates 2, and arch imandrites 3.
  
He weltered towards it, hooling and thurling, and at last
reached it in a meaninglessly long umthingth of time.
  
He clung to it, arms outspread, gripping tightly on to its
roughly gnarled and pitted surface. Once he was certain that
he was secure he made the hideous mistake of looking down.
  
While he had been weltering, hooling and thurling, the distance
beneath him had not bothered him unduly, but now that he was
\begin{enumerate}
	\item An ornamental tuft of plumes.
	\item A jumbled mass.
	\item A cleric ranking below a bishop.
\end{enumerate}
gripping, the distance made his heart wilt and his brain bend.
His fingers were white with pain and tension. His teeth were
grinding and twisting against each other beyond his control. His
eyes turned inwards with waves from the willowing extremities
of nausea.
  
With an immense effort of will and faith he simply let go
and pushed.
  
He felt himself float. Away. And then, counter-intuitively,
upwards. And upwards.
  
He threw his shoulders back, let his arms drop, gazed upwards
and let himself be drawn loosely, higher and higher.
  
Before long, insofar as such terms had any meaning in this
virtual universe, a ledge loomed up ahead of him on which he
could grip and on to which he could clamber.
  
He rose, he gripped, he clambered.
  
He panted a little. This was all a little stressful.
  
He held tightly on to the ledge as he sat. He wasn't certain if
this was to prevent himself from falling down off it or rising up
from it, but he needed something to grip on to as he surveyed
the world in which he found himself.
  
The whirling, turning height span him and twisted his brain
in upon itself till he found himself, eyes closed, whimpering and
hugging the hideous wall of towering rock.
  
He slowly brought his breathing back under control again.
He told himself repeatedly that he was just in a graphic rep-
resentation of a world. A virtual universe. A simulated reality.
He could snap back out of it at any moment.
  
He snapped back out of it.
  
He was sitting in a blue leatherette foam filled swivel-seated
office chair in front of a computer terminal.
  
He relaxed.
  
He was clinging to the face of an impossibly high peak perched
on a narrow ledge above a drop of brain-swivelling dimensions.
  
It wasn't just the landscape being so far beneath him -
he wished it would stop undulating and waving.
  
He had to get a grip. Not on the rock wall - that was an
illusion. He had to get a grip on the situation, be able to look
at the physical world he was in while drawing himself out of it
emotionally.
  
He clenched inwardly and then, just as he had let go of the
rock face itself, he let go of the idea of the rock face and let
himself just sit there clearly and freely. He looked out at the
world. He was breathing well. He was cool. He was in charge
again.
  
He was in a four-dimensional topological model of the Guide's
financial systems, and somebody or something would very shortly
want to know why.
  
And here they came.
  
Swooping through virtual space towards him came a small
flock of mean and steely-eyed creatures with pointy little heads,
pencil moustaches and querulous demands as to who he was,
what he was doing there, what his authorisation was, what the
authorisation of his authorising agent was, what his inside leg
measurement was and so on. Laser light flickered all over him
as if he was a packet of biscuits at a supermarket check-out. The
heavier duty laser guns were held, for the moment, in reserve.
The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no
difference. Being virtually killed by a virtual laser in virtual space
is just as effective as the real thing, because you are as dead as
you think you are.
  
The laser readers were becoming very agitated as they flickered
over his fingerprints, his retina and the follicle pattern where his
hair line was receding. They didn't like what they were finding at
all. The chattering and screeching of highly personal and insolent
questions was rising in pitch. A little surgical steel scraper was
reaching out towards the skin at the nape of his neck when
Ford, holding his breath and praying very slightly, pulled Vann
Harl's Ident-i-Eeze out of his pocket and waved it in front of
them.
  
Instantly every laser was diverted to the little card and Swept
backwards and forwards over it and in it, examining and reading
every molecule.
  
Then, just as suddenly, they stopped.
  
The entire flock of little virtual inspectors snapped to attention.
  
`Nice to see you, Mr Harl,' they said in smarmy unison.
`Is there anything we can do for you?'
  
Ford smiled a slow and vicious smile.
  `
Do you know,' he said, `I rather think there is?'
 Five minutes later he was out of there.
  
About thirty seconds to do the job, and three minutes thirty
to cover his tracks. He could have done anything he liked in
the virtual structure, more or less. He could have transferred
ownership of the entire organisation into his own name, but he
doubted if that would have gone unnoticed. He didn't want it
anyway. It would have meant responsibility, working late nights
at the office, not to mention massive and time-consuming fraud
investigations and a fair amount of time in jail. He wanted
something that nobody other than the computer would notice:
that was the bit that took thirty seconds.
  
The thing that took three minutes thirty was programming
the computer not to notice that it had noticed anything.
  
It had to want not to know about what Ford was up to, and
then he could safely leave the computer to rationalise its own
defences against the information ever emerging. It was a pro-
gramming technique that had been reverse-engineered from the
sort of psychotic mental blocks that otherwise perfectly normal
people had been observed invariably to develop when elected to
high political office.
  
The other minute was spent discovering that the computer
system already had a mental block. A big one.
  
He would never have discovered it if he hadn't been busy
engineering a mental block himself. He came across a whole
slew of smooth and plausible denial procedures and diversionary
subroutines exactly where he had been planning to install his
own. The computer denied all knowledge of them, of course,
then blankly refused to accept that there was anything even to
deny knowledge of, and was generally so convincing that even
Ford almost found himself thinking he must have made a mistake.
  
He was impressed.
  
He was so impressed, in fact, that he didn't bother to install
his own mental block procedures, he just set up calls to the ones
that were already there, which then called themselves when ques-
tioned, and so on.
  
He quickly set about debugging the little bits of code he had
installed himself, only to discover they weren't there. Cursing,
he searched all over for them, but could find no trace of them
at all.
  
He was just about to start installing them all over again when
he realised that the reason he couldn't find them was that they
were working already.
  
He grinned with satisfaction.
  
He tried to discover what the computer's other mental block
was all about, but it seemed, not unnaturally, to have a mental
block about it. He could no longer find any trace of it at all, in
fact; it was that good. He wondered if he had been imagining
it. He wondered if he had been imagining that it was something
to do with something in the building, and something to do with
the number 13. He ran a few tests. Yes, he had obviously been
imagining it.
 No time for fancy routes now, there was obviously a major
security alert in progress. Ford took the elevator up to the ground
floor to change to the express elevators. He had somehow to get
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's pocket before it was missed.
How, he didn't know.
  
The doors of the elevator slid open to reveal a large posse of
security guards and robots poised waiting for it and brandishing
filthy looking weapons.
  
They ordered him out.
  
With a shrug he stepped forward. They all pushed rudely
past him into the elevator which took them down to continue
their search for him on the lower levels.
  
This was fun, thought Ford, giving Colin a friendly pat.
Colin was about the first genuinely useful robot Ford had ever
encountered. Colin bobbed along in the air in front of him in a
lather of cheerful ecstasy. Ford was glad he'd named him after
a dog.
  
He was highly tempted just to leave at that point and hope
for the best, but he knew that the best had a far greater chance
of actually occurring if Harl did not discover that his Ident-i-Eeze
was missing. He had somehow, surreptitiously, to return it.
  
They went to the express elevators.
  
`Hi,' said the elevator they got into.
  
`Hi,' said Ford.
  
`Where can I take you folks today?' said the elevator.
  
`Floor 23,' said Ford.
  
`Seems to be a popular floor today,' said the elevator.
  
`Hmm,' thought Ford, not liking the sound of that at all.
The elevator lit up the twenty-third floor on its floor display
and started to zoom upwards. Something about the floor display
tweaked at Ford's mind but he couldn't catch what it was and
forgot about it. He was more worried about the idea of the floor
he was going to being a popular one. He hadn't really thought
through how he was going to deal with whatever it was that was
happening up there because he had no idea what he was going
to find. He would just have to busk it.
  
They were there.
  
The doors slid open.
  
Ominous quiet.
  
Empty corridor.
  
There was the door to Harl's office, with a slight layer of
dust around it. Ford knew that this dust consisted of billions of
tiny molecular robots that had crawled out of the woodwork,
built each other, rebuilt the door , disassembled each other and
then crept back into the woodwork again and just waited for
damage. Ford wondered what kind of life that was, but not for
long because he was a lot more concerned about what his own
life was like at that moment.
  
He took a deep breath and started his run.


                          % 9

Arthur felt at a bit of a loss. There was a whole Galaxy of stuff
out there for him, and he wondered if it was churlish of him to
complain to himself that it lacked just two things: the world he
was born on and the woman he loved.
  
Damn it and blast it, he thought, and felt the need of some
guidance and advice. He consulted the Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy. He looked up `guidance' and it said `See under
ADVICE'. He looked up `advice' and it said `see under GUIDANCE'.
It had been doing a lot of that kind of stuff recently and
he wondered if it was all it was cracked up to be.
  
He headed to the outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy where, it
was said, wisdom and truth were to be found, most particularly
on the planet Hawalius, which was a planet of oracles and seers
and soothsayers and also take-away pizza shops, because most
mystics were completely incapable of cooking for themselves.
  
However it appeared that some sort of calamity had befallen
this planet. As Arthur wandered the streets of the village where
the major prophets lived, it had something of a crestfallen air.
He came across one prophet who was clearly shutting up shop
in a despondent kind of way and asked him what was happening.
  
`No call for us any more,' he said gruffly as he started to
bang a nail into the plank he was holding across the window of
his hovel.
  
`Oh? Why's that?'
  
`Hold on to the other end of this and I'll show you.'
  
Arthur held up the unnailed end of the plank and the old
prophet scuttled into the recesses of his hovel, returning a
moment or two later with a small Sub-Etha radio. He turned it
on, fiddled with the dial for a moment and put the thing on the
small wooden bench that he usually sat and prophesied on. He
then took hold of the plank again and resumed hammering.
  
Arthur sat and listened to the radio.
  
`...be confirmed,' said the radio.
  
`Tomorrow,' it continued, `the Vice-President of Poffla Vigus,
Roopy Ga Stip, will announce that he intends to run for Presi-
dent. In a speech he will give tomorrow at...'
  
`Find another channel,' said the prophet. Arthur pushed the
preset button.
  
`...refused to Comment,' said the radio. `Next week's jobless
totals in the Zabush sector, it continued, `will be the worst since
records began. A report published next month says...'
  
`Find another,' barked the prophet, crossly. Arthur pushed
the button again.
  
`...denied it categorically,' said the radio. `Next month's
Royal Wedding between Prince Gid of the Soofling Dynasty
and Princess Hooli of Raui Alpha will be the most spectacular
ceremony the Bjanjy Territories has ever witnessed. Our reporter
Trillian Astra is there and sends us this report.'
  
Arthur blinked.
  
The sound of cheering crowds and a hubbub of brass bands
erupted from the radio. A very familiar voice said, `Well Krart,
the scene here in the middle of next month is absolutely incred-
ible. Princess Hooli is looking radiant in a...'
  
The prophet swiped the radio off the bench and on to the
dusty ground, where it squawked like a badly tuned chicken.
  
`See what we have to contend with?' grumbled the prophet.
`Here, hold this. Not that, this. No, not like that. This way up.
Other way round, you fool.'
  `I was listening to that,' complained Arthur, grappling help-
lessly with the prophet's hammer.
  
`So does everybody. That's why this place is like a ghost
town.' He spat into the dust.
  
`No, I mean, that sounded like someone I knew.'
  
`Princess Hooli? If I had to stand around saying hello to
everybody who's known Princess Hooli I'd need a new set of
lungs.'
  
`Not the Princess,' said Arthur. `The reporter. Her name's
Trillian. I don't know where she got the Astra from. She's from
the same planet as me. I wondered where she'd got to.'
  
`Oh, she's all over the continuum these days. We can't get
the tri-d TV stations out here of course, thank the Great Green
Arkleseizure, but you hear her on the radio, gallivanting here
and there through space/time. She wants to settle down and find
herself a steady era that young lady does. It'll all end in tears.
Probably already has.' He swung with his hammer and hit his
thumb rather hard. He started to speak in tongues.
 The village of oracles wasn't much better.
  
He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it
was best to find the oracle that other oracles went to, but he
was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying, `I just don't
know any more. Try next door, but that's just a suggestion, not
formal oracular advice.'
  
`Next door' was a cave a few hundred yards away and Arthur
walked towards it. Smoke and steam were rising from, respec-
tively, a small fire and a battered tin pot that was hanging over
it. There was also a very nasty smell coming from the pot. At
least Arthur thought it was coming from the pot. The distended
bladders of some of the local goat-like things were hanging from
a propped-up line drying in the sun, and the smell could have been
coming from them. There was also, a worryingly small distance
away, a pile of discarded bodies of the local goat-like things and
the smell could have been coming from them.
  
But the smell could just as easily have been coming from
the old lady who was busy beating flies away from the pile
of bodies. It was a hopeless task because each of the flies was
about the size of a winged bottle top and all she had was a table
tennis bat. Also she seemed half blind. Every now and then, by
chance, her wild thrashing would connect with one of the flies
with a richly satisfying thunk, and the fly would hurtle through
the air and smack itself open against the rock face a few yards
from the entrance to her cave.
  
She gave every impression, by her demeanour, that these
were the moments she lived for.
  
Arthur watched this exotic performance for a while from
a polite distance, and then at last tried giving a gentle cough
to attract her attention. The gentle cough, courteously meant,
unfortunately involved first inhaling rather more of the local
atmosphere than he had so far been doing and as a result, he
erupted into a fit of raucous expectoration, and collapsed against
the rock face, choking and streaming with tears. He struggled for
breath, but each new breath made things worse. He vomited,
half-choked again, rolled over his vomit, kept rolling for a few
yards, and eventually made it up on to his hands and knees and
crawled, panting, into slightly fresher air.
  
`Excuse me,' he said. He got some breath back. `I really
am most dreadfully sorry. I feel a complete idiot and...' He
gestured helplessly towards the small pile of his own vomit lying
spread around the entrance to her cave.
  
`What can I say?' he said. `What can I possibly say?'
  
This at least had gained her attention. She looked round
at him suspiciously, but, being half blind, had difficulty finding
him in the blurred and rocky landscape.
  
He waved, helpfully. `Hello!' he called.
  
At last she spotted him, grunted to herself and turned back
to whacking flies.
  
It was horribly apparent from the way that currents of air
moved when she did, that the major source of the smell was
in fact her. The drying bladders, the festering bodies and the
noxious potage may all have been making violent contributions
to the atmosphere, but the major olfactory presence was the
woman herself.
  
She got another good thwack at a fly. It smacked against
the rock and dribbled its insides down it in what she clearly
regarded, if she could see that far, as a satisfactory manner.
  
Unsteadily, Arthur got to his feet and brushed himself down
with a fistful of dried grass. He didn't know what else to do by
way of announcing himself. He had half a mind just to wander
off again, but felt awkward about leaving a pile of his vomit
in front of the entrance to the woman's home. He wondered
what to do about it. He started to pluck up more handsful
of the scrubby dried grass that was to be found here and
there. He was worried, though, that if he ventured nearer
to the vomit he might simply add to it rather than clear it
up.
  
Just as he was debating with himself as to what the right
course of action was he began to realise that she was at last
saying something to him.
  
`I beg your pardon?' he called out.
  
`I said, can I help you?' she said, in a thin, scratchy voice.
that he could only just hear.
  
`Er, I came to ask your advice,' he called back, feeling
a bit ridiculous.
  
She turned to peer at him, myopically, then turned back,
swiped at a fly and missed.
  
`What about?' she said.
  
`I beg your pardon?' he said.
  
`I said, what about?' she almost screeched.
  
`Well,' said Arthur. `Just sort of general advice, really. It
said in the brochure -'
  
`Ha! Brochure!' spat the old woman. She seemed to be
waving her bat more or less at random now.
  
Arthur fished the crumpled-up brochure from his pocket.
He wasn't quite certain why. He had already read it and she,
he expected, wouldn't want to. He unfolded it anyway in order
to have something to frown thoughtfully at for a moment or
two. The copy in the brochure wittered on about the ancient
mystical arts of the seers and sages of Hawalius, and wild-
ly over-represented the level of accommodation available in
Hawalion. Arthur still carried a copy of The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy with him but found, when he consulted
it, that the entries were becoming more abstruse and paranoid
and had lots of x's and j's and {'s in them. Something was wrong
somewhere. Whether it was in his own personal unit, or whether
it was something or someone going terribly amiss, or perhaps just
hallucinating, at the heart of the Guide organisation itself, he
didn't know. But one way or another he was even less inclined
to trust it than usual, which meant that he trusted it not one
bit, and mostly used it for eating his sandwiches off when he
was sitting on a rock staring at something.
  
The woman had turned and was walking slowly towards him
now. Arthur tried, without making it too obvious, to judge the
wind direction, and bobbed about a bit as she approached.
  
`Advice,' she said. `Advice, eh?'
  
`Er, yes,' said Arthur. `Yes, that is -'
  
He frowned again at the brochure, as if to be certain that
he hadn't misread it and stupidly turned up on the wrong planet
or something. The brochure said `The friendly local inhabitants
will be glad to share with you the knowledge and wisdom of
the ancients. Peer with them into the swirling mysteries of past
and future time!' There were some coupons as well, but Arthur
had been far too embarrassed actually to cut them out or try to
present them to anybody.
  
`Advice, eh,' said the old woman again. `Just sort of general
advice, you say. On what? What to do with your life, that sort
of thing?'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `That sort of thing. Bit of a problem I
sometimes find if I'm being perfectly honest.' He was trying
desperately, with tiny darting movements, to stay upwind of
her. She surprised him by suddenly turning sharply away from
him and heading off towards her cave.
  
`You'll have to help me with the photocopier, then,' she said.
  
`What?' said Arthur.
 
`The photocopier,' she repeated, patiently. `You'll have to
help me drag it out. It's solar-powered. I have to keep it in
the cave, though, so the birds don't shit on it.'
  
`I see,' said Arthur.
  
`I'd take a few deep breaths if I were you,' muttered the
old woman, as she stomped into the gloom of the cave mouth.
  
Arthur did as she advised. He almost hyperventilated in fact.
When he felt he was ready, he held his breath and followed her
in.
  
The photocopier was a big old thing on a rickety trolley.
It stood just inside the dim shadows of the cave. The wheels
were stuck obstinately in different directions and the ground
was rough and stony.
  
`Go ahead and take a breath outside,' said the old woman.
Arthur was going red in the face trying to help her move the
thing.
  
He nodded in relief. If she wasn't going to be embarrassed
about it then neither, he was determined, would he. He stepped
outside and took a few breaths, then came back in to do more
heaving and pushing. He had to do this quite a few times till at
last the machine was outside.
  
The sun beat down on it. The old woman disappeared back
into her cave again and brought with her some mottled metal
panels, which she connected to the machine to collect the sun's
energy.
  
She squinted up into the sky. The sun was quite bright,
but the day was hazy and vague.
  
`It'll take a while,' she said.
  
Arthur said he was happy to wait.
  
The old woman shrugged and stomped across to the fire.
Above it, the contents of the tin can were bubbling away. She
poked about at them with a stick.
  
`You won't be wanting any lunch?' she enquired of Arthur.
  
`I've eaten, thanks,' said Arthur. `No, really. I've eaten.'
  
`I'm sure you have,' said the old lady. She stirred with
the stick. After a few minutes she fished a lump of some-
thing out, blew on it to cool it a little, and then put it in
her mouth.
  
She chewed on it thoughtfully for a bit.
  
Then she hobbled slowly across to the pile of dead goat-like
things. She spat the lump out on to the pile. She hobbled slowly
back to the can. She tried to unhook it from the sort of tripod-like
thing that it was hanging from.
  
`Can I help you?' said Arthur, jumping up politely. He hurried
over.
  
Together they disengaged the tin from the tripod and carried
it awkwardly down the slight slope that led downwards from her
cave and towards a line of scrubby and gnarled trees, which
marked the edge of a steep but quite shallow gully, from, which
a whole new range of offensive smells was emanating.
  
`Ready?' said the old Lady.
  
`Yes...' said Arthur, though he didn't know for what.
  
`One,' said the old lady.
  
`Two,' she said.
  
`Three,' she added.
  
Arthur realised just in time what she intended. Together
they tossed the contents of the tin into the gully.
  
After an hour or two of uncommunicative silence, the old
woman decided that the solar panels had absorbed enough
sunlight to run the photocopier now and she disappeared to
rummage inside her cave. She emerged at last with a few sheaves
of paper and fed them through the machine.
  
She handed the copies to Arthur.
  
`This is, er, this your advice then, is it?' said Arthur, leafing
through them uncertainly.
  
`No,' said the old lady. `It's the story of my life. You see,
the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged
against the quality of life they actually lead. Now, as you look
through this document you'll see that I've underlined all the major
decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They're all indexed
and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take
decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that
I've taken, then maybe you won't finish up at the end of your
life...' she paused, and filled her lungs for a good shout, `...
in a smelly old cave like this!'
  
She grabbed up her table tennis bat, rolled up her sleeve,
stomped off to her pile of dead goat-like things, and started
to set about the flies with vim and vigour.
 The last village Arthur visited consisted entirely of extremely
high poles. They were so high that it wasn't possible to tell,
from the ground, what was on top of them, and Arthur had to
climb three before he found one that had anything on top of it
at all other than a platform covered with bird droppings.
  
Not an easy task. You went up the poles by climbing on
the short wooden pegs that had been hammered into them in
slowly ascending spirals. Anybody who was a less diligent tourist
than Arthur would have taken a couple of snapshots and sloped
right off to the nearest Bar \& Grill, where you also could buy a
range of particularly sweet and gooey chocolate cakes to eat in
front of the ascetics. But, largely as a result of this, most of the
ascetics had gone now. In fact they had mostly gone and set up
lucrative therapy centres on some of the more affluent worlds
in the North West ripple of the Galaxy, where the living was
easier by a factor of about seventeen million, and the chocolate
was just fabulous. Most of the ascetics, it turned out, had not
known about chocolate before they took up asceticism. Most of
the clients who came to their therapy centres knew about it all
too well.
  
At the top of the third pole Arthur stopped for a breather. He
was very hot and out of breath, since each pole was about fifty or
sixty feet high. The world seemed to swing vertiginously around
him, but it didn't worry Arthur too much. He knew that, logically.
he could not die until he had been to Stavromula Beta 4, and had
therefore managed to cultivate a merry attitude towards extreme
personal danger. He felt a little giddy perched fifty feet up in the
air on top of a pole, but he dealt with it by eating a sandwich. He
was just about to embark on reading the photocopied life history
of the oracle, when he was rather startled to hear a slight cough
behind him.
  
He turned so abruptly that he dropped his sandwich, which
turned downwards through the air and was rather small by the
time it was stopped by the ground.
  
About thirty feet behind Arthur was another pole, and, alone
amongst the sparse forest of about three dozen poles, the top of
it was occupied. It was occupied by an old man who, in turn,
seemed to be occupied by profound thoughts that were making
him scowl.
  
`Excuse me,' said Arthur. The man ignored him. Perhaps he
couldn't hear him. The breeze was moving about a bit. It was
only by chance that Arthur had heard the slight cough.
  
`Hello?' called Arthur. `Hello!'
  
The man at last glanced round at him. He seemed surprised
to see him. Arthur couldn't tell if he was surprised and pleased
to see him or just surprsised.
  
`Are you open?' called Arthur.
  
The man frowned in incomprehension. Arthur couldn't tell
if he couldn't understand or couldn't hear.
 4 See Life, the Universe and Everything, {\bf Chapter 18}.
 `I'll pop over,' called Arthur. `Don't go away.'
  
He clambered off the small platform and climbed quickly
down the spiralling pegs, arriving at the bottom quite dizzy.
  
He started to make his way over to the pole on which
the old man was sitting, and then suddenly realised that he
had disoriented himself on the way down and didn't know for
certain which one it was.
  
He looked around for landmarks and worked out which was
the right one.
  
He climbed it. It wasn't.
  
`Damn,' he said. `Excuse me!' he called out to the old man
again, who was now straight in front of him and forty feet away.
`Got lost. Be with you in a minute.' Down he went again, getting
very hot and bothered.
  
When he arrived, panting and sweating, at the top of the
pole that he knew for certain was the right one he realised that
the man was, somehow or other, mucking him about.
  
`What do you want?' shouted the old man crossly at him. He
was now sitting on top of the pole that Arthur recognised was
the one that he had been on himself when eating his sandwich.
  
`How did you get over there?' called Arthur in bewilder-
ment.
  
`You think I'm going to tell you just like that what it took
me forty springs, summers and autumns of sitting on top of a
pole to work out?'
  
`What about winter?'
  
`What about winter?'
  
`Don't you sit on the pole in the winter?'
  
`Just because I sit up a pole for most of my life,' said the
man, `doesn't mean I'm an idiot. I go south in the winter. Got
a beach house. Sit on the chimney stack.'
  
`Do you have any advice for a traveller?'
  
`Yes. Get a beach house.'
  
`I see.'
  
The man stared out over the hot, dry scrubby landscape.
>From here Arthur could just see the old woman, a tiny speck
in the distance, dancing up and down swatting flies.
  
`You see her?' called the old man, suddenly.
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. `I consulted her in fact.'
  
`Fat lot she knows. I got the beach house because she turned
it down. What advice did she give you?'
  
`Do exactly the opposite of everything she's done.'
  
`In other words, get a beach house.'
  
`I suppose so,' said Arthur. `Well, maybe I'll get one.'
  
`Hmmm.'
  
The horizon was swimming in a fetid heat haze.
  
`Any other advice?' asked Arthur. `Other than to do with
real estate?'
  
`A beach house isn't just real estate. It's a state of mind,'
said the man. He turned and looked at Arthur.
  
Oddly, the man's face was now only a couple of feet away.
He seemed in one way to be a perfectly normal shape, but his
body was sitting cross-legged on a pole forty feet away while his
face was only two feet from Arthur's. Without moving his head,
and without seeming to do anything odd at all, he stood up and
stepped on to the top of another pole. Either it was just the heat,
thought Arthur, or space was a different shape for him.
  
`A beach house,' he said, `doesn't even have to be on the
beach. Though the best ones are. We all like to congregate,'
he went on, `at boundary conditions.'
  
`Really?' said Arthur.
  
`Where land meets water. Where earth meets air. Where
body meets mind. Where space meets time. We like to be
on one side, and look at the other.'
  
Arthur got terribly excited. This was exactly the sort of
thing he'd been promised in the brochure. Here was a man who
seemed to be moving through some kind of Escher space saying
really profound things about all sorts of stuff.
  
It was unnerving though. The man was now stepping from
pole to ground, from ground to pole, from pole to pole, from
pole to horizon and back: he was making complete nonsense of
Arthur's spatial universe. `Please stop!' Arthur said, suddenly.
  
`Can't take it, huh?' said the man. Without the slightest
movement he was now back, sitting cross-legged, on top of the
pole forty feet in front of Arthur. `You come to me for advice,
but you can't cope with anything you don't recognise. Hmmm.
So we'll have to tell you something you already know but make
it sound like news, eh? Well, business as usual I suppose.' He
sighed and squinted mournfully into the distance.
  
`Where you from, boy?' he then asked.
Arthur decided to be clever. He was fed up with being
mistaken for a complete idiot by everyone he ever met. `Tell
you what,' he said. `You're a seer. Why don't you tell me?'
  
The old man sighed again. `I was just,' he said, passing his
hand round behind his head, `making conversation.' When he
brought his hand round to the front again, he had a globe of the
Earth spinning on his up-pointed forefinger. It was unmistakable.
He put it away again. Arthur was stunned.
  
`How did you -'
  
`I can't tell you.'
  
`Why not? I've come all this way.'
`You cannot see what I see because you see what you see.
You cannot know what I know because you know what you
know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what
you see and what you know because they are not of the same
kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know,
because that would be to replace you yourself.'
  
`Hang on, can I write this down?' said Arthur, excitedly
fumbling in his pocket for a pencil.
  
`You can pick up a copy at the spaceport,' said the old
man . `They've got racks of the stuff.'
  
`Oh,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Well, isn't there anything
that's perhaps a bit more specific to me?'
  
`Everything you see or hear or experience in any way at
all is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it,
so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you.'
  
Arthur looked at him doubtfully. `Can I get that at the
spaceport, too?' he said.
  
`Check it out,' said the old man.
  
`It says in the brochure,' said Arthur, pulling it out of his
pocket and looking at it again, `that I can have a special prayer,
individually tailored to me and my special needs.'
  
`Oh, all right,' said the old man. `Here's a prayer for you.
Got a pencil?'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur.
  
`It goes like this. Let's see now: ``Protect me from knowing what
I don't need to know. Protect me from even knowing that there
are things to know that I don't know. Protect me from knowing
that I decided not to know about the things that I decided not to
know about. Amen.'' That's it. It's what you pray silently inside
yourself anyway, so you may as well have it out in the open.'
  
`Hmmm,' said Arthur. `Well, thank you -'
  
`There's another prayer that goes with it that's very impor-
tant,' continued the old man, `so you'd better jot this down,
too.'
  
`OK.'
  
`It goes, ``Lord, lord, lord...'' It's best to put that bit
in, just in case. You can never be too sure ``Lord, lord, lord.
Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer. Amen...''
And that's it. Most of the trouble people get into in life comes
from missing out that last part.'
  
`Ever heard of a place called Stavromula Beta?' asked Arthur.
  
`No.'
  
`Well, thank you for your help,' said Arthur.
  
`Don't mention it,' said the man on the pole, and vanished.


                          % 10

Ford hurled himself at the door of the editor-in-chief's office,
tucked himself into a tight ball as the frame splintered and gave
way once again, rolled rapidly across the floor to where the smart
grey crushed leather sofa was and set up his strategic operational
base behind it.
  
That, at least, was the plan.
  
Unfortunately the smart grey crushed leather sofa wasn't there.
  
Why, thought Ford, as he twisted himself round in mid-air,
lurched, dived and scuttled for cover behind Harl's desk, did
people have this stupid obsession with rearranging their office
furniture every five minutes?
  
Why, for instance, replace a perfectly serviceable if rather
muted grey crushed leather sofa with what appeared to be a
small tank?
  
And who was the big guy with the mobile rocket launcher
on his shoulder? Someone from head office? Couldn't be. This
was head office. At least it was the head office of the Guide.
Where these InfiniDim Enterprises guys came from Zarquon
knew. Nowhere very sunny, judging from the slug-like colour
and texture of their skins. This was all wrong, thought Ford.
People connected with the Guide should come from sunny
places.
  
There were several of them, in fact, and all of them seemed
to be more heavily armed and armoured than you normally
expected corporate executives to be, even in today's rough and
tumble business world.
  
He was making a lot of assumptions here, of course. He
was assuming that the big, bull-necked, slug-like guys were
in some way connected with InfiniDim Enterprises, but it was
a reasonable assumption and he felt happy about it because
they had logos on their armour-plating which said `InfiniDim
Enterprises' on them. He had a nagging suspicion that this was
not a business meeting, though. He also had a nagging feeling
that these slug-like creatures were familiar to him in some way.
Familiar, but in an unfamiliar guise.
  
Well, he had been in the room for a good two and a half
seconds now, and thought that it was probably about time to
start doing something constructive. He could take a hostage.
That would be good.
  
Vann Harl was in his swivel chair, looking alarmed, pale
and shaken. Had probably had some bad news as well as a
nasty bang to the back of his head. Ford leapt to his feet and
made a running grab for him.
  Under the pretext of getting him into a good solid double
underpinned elbow-lock, Ford managed surreptitiously to slip
the Ident-i-Eeze back into Harl's inner pocket.
  
Bingo!
  
He'd done what he came to do. Now he just had to talk
his way out of here.
  
`OK,' he said. `I...' He paused.
  
The big guy with the rocket launcher was turning towards
Ford Prefect and pointing it at him, which Ford couldn't help
feeling was wildly irresponsible behaviour.
  
`I...' he started again, and then on a sudden impulse
decided to duck.
  
There was a deafening roar as flames leapt from the back
of the rocket launcher and a rocket leapt from its front.
  
The rocket hurtled past Ford and hit the large plate-glass
window, which billowed outwards in a shower of a million
shards under the force of the explosion. Huge shock waves of
noise and air pressure reverberated around the room, sweeping
a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet and Colin the security robot
out of the window.
  
Ah! So they're not totally rocket-proof after all, thought Ford
Prefect to himself. Someone should have a word with somebody
about that. He disentangled himself from Harl and tried to work
out which way to run.
  
He was surrounded.
  
The big guy with the rocket launcher was moving it up
into position for another shot.
Ford was completely at a loss for what to do next.
  
`Look,' he said in a stern voice. But he wasn't certain how far
saying things like `Look' in a stern voice was necessarily going to
get him, and time was not on his side. What the hell, he thought,
you're only young once, and threw himself out of the window.
That would at least keep the element of surprise on his side.


                          % 11

The first thing Arthur Dent had to do, he realised resignedly,
was to get himself a life. This meant he had to find a planet
he could have one on. It had to be a planet he could breathe
on, where he could stand up and sit down without experiencing
gravitational discomfort. It had to be somewhere where the acid
levels were low and the plants didn't actually attack you.
  
`I hate to be anthropic about this,' he said to the strange
thing behind the desk at the Resettlement Advice Centre on
Pintleton Alpha, `but I'd quite like to live somewhere where
the people look vaguely like me as well. You know. Sort of
human.'
  
The strange thing behind the desk waved some of its stranger
bits around and seemed rather taken aback by this. It oozed and
glopped off its seat, thrashed its way slowly across the floor,
ingested the old metal filing cabinet and then, with a great
belch, excreted the appropriate drawer. It popped out a couple
of glistening tentacles from its ear, removed some files from the
drawer, sucked the drawer back in and vomited up the cabinet
again. It thrashed its way back across the floor, slimed its way
back up on to the seat and slapped the files on the table.
  
`See anything you fancy?' it asked.
  
Arthur looked nervously through some grubby and damp
pieces of paper. He was definitely in some backwater part of
the Galaxy here, and somewhere off to the left as far as the
universe he knew and recognised was concerned. In the space
where his own home should have been there was a rotten hick
planet, drowned with rain and inhabited by thugs and boghogs.
Even The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy seemed to work
only fitfully here, which was why he was reduced to making these
sorts of enquiries in these sorts of places. One place he always
asked after was Stavromula Beta, but no one had ever heard of
such a planet.
  
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little
to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had
been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally
came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and
armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He
couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster.
He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was
not a lot of demand for his services.
  
Arthur's heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought
it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed
his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He
so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had
grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted
none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he
opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his
little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would
be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up
the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in
the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much
wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over
a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so
much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.
  
He opened his eyes.
  
The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping
some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.
  
Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.
  
Grim, he thought. And the next.
  
Very grim. And the next.
  
Oh... Now that looked better.
  
It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green
hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But
the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a
small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village
square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.
  
`Ah,' he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing
behind the desk.
  
Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down
the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over
it.
  
`Yes,' it said with distaste. `They do look exactly like you.'
 Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had
made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA
bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the
picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people
looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They
didn't attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a
cupboard to put them in.
  
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
  
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan,
famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its
subtlety and grace, didn't seem to be able to sustain his interest.
The problem was that it wasn't actually about human beings after
all. It wasn't about what human beings wanted. The people of
Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but
when you said `Good evening' to one, he would tend to look
around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that,
yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that
Arthur came to mention it.
  
`No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening,' Arthur
would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these
conversations. `I mean that I hope you have a good evening,' he
would add.
  
More puzzlement.
  
`Wish?' the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
  
`Er, yes,' Arthur would then have said. `I'm just expressing
the hope that...'
  
`Hope?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`What is hope?'
  
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated
back to his room to think about things.
  
On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he
learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was
that the universe was what the universe was, take it or leave it.
On the other hand he could not help but feel that not to desire
anything, not ever to. wish or to hope, was just not natural.
  
Natural. There was a tricky word.
  
He had long ago realised that a lot of things that he had
thought of as natural, like buying people presents at Christmas,
stopping at red lights or falling at a rate of 32 feet/second/second,
were just the habits of his own world and didn't necessarily work
the same way anywhere else; but not to wish - that really couldn't
be natural, could it? That would be like not breathing.
  
Breathing was another thing that the Bartledanians didn't
do, despite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. They just stood
there. Occasionally they ran around and played netball and stuff
(without ever wishing to win though, of course - they would just
play, and whoever won, won), but they never actually breathed.
It was, for some reason, unnecessary. Arthur quickly learned
that playing netball with them was just too spooky. Though they
looked like humans, and even moved and sounded like humans,
they didn't breathe and they didn't wish for things.
  
Breathing and wishing for things, on the other hand, was
just about all that Arthur seemed to do all day. Sometimes
he would wish for things so much that his breathing would get
quite agitated, and he would have to go and lie down for a bit.
On his own. In his small room. So far from the world which had
given birth to him that his brain could not even process the sort
of numbers involved without just going limp.
  
He preferred not to think about it. He preferred just to sit
and read - or at least he would prefer it if there was anything
worth reading. But nobody in Bartledanian stories ever wanted
anything. Not even a glass of water. Certainly, they would fetch
one if they were thirsty, but if there wasn't one available, they
would think no more about it. He had just read an entire book
in which the main character had, over the course of a week, done
some work in his garden, played a great deal of netball, helped
mend a road, fathered a child on his wife and then unexpectedly
died of thirst just before the last chapter. In exasperation Arthur
had combed his way back through the book and in the end had
found a passing reference to some problem with the plumbing in
Chapter 2. And that was it. So the guy dies. It just happens.
  
It wasn't even the climax of the book, because there wasn't
one. The character died about a third of the way through the
penultimate chapter of the book, and the rest of it was just more
stuff about road-mending. The book just finished dead at the one
hundred thousandth word, because that was how long books were
on Bartledan.
  
Arthur threw the book across the room, sold the room and
left. He started to travel with wild abandon, trading in more
and more spit, toenails, fingernails, blood, hair, anything that
anybody wanted, for tickets. For semen, he discovered, he could
travel first class. He settled nowhere, but only existed in the
hermetic, twilight world of the cabins of hyperspatial starships,
eating, drinking, sleeping, watching movies, only stopping at
spaceports to donate more DNA and catch the next long-haul
ship out. He waited and waited for another accident to happen.
  
The trouble with trying to make the right accident happen
is that it won't. That is not what `accident' means. The acci-
dent that eventually occurred was not what he had planned
at all. The ship he was on blipped in hyperspace, flickered
horribly between ninety-seven different points in the Galaxy
simultaneously, caught the unexpected gravitational pull of an
uncharted planet in one of them, became ensnared in its outer
atmosphere and began to fall, screaming and tearing, into it.
  
The ship's systems protested all the way down that everything
was perfectly normal and under control, but when it went into a
final hectic spin, ripped wildly through half a mile of trees and
finally exploded into a seething ball of flame it became clear that
this was not the case.
  
Fire engulfed the forest, boiled into the night, then neatly
put itself out, as all unscheduled fires over a certain size are
now required to do by law. For a short while afterwards, other
small fires flared up here and there as odd pieces of scattered
debris exploded quietly in their own time. Then they too died
away.
  
Arthur Dent, because of the sheer boredom of endless inter-
stellar flight, was the only one on board who had actually
familiarised himself with the ship's safety procedures in case
of an unscheduled landing, and was therefore the sole survivor.
He lay dazed, broken and bleeding in a sort of fluffy pink plastic
cocoon with `Have a nice day' printed in over three thousand
different languages all over it.
  
Black, roaring silences swam sickeningly through his shattered
mind. He knew with a kind of resigned certainty that he would
survive, because he had not yet been to Stavromula Beta.
  
After what seemed an eternity of pain and darkness, he
became aware of quiet shapes moving around him.


                          % 12

Ford tumbled through the open air in a cloud of glass splinters
and chair parts. Again, he hadn't really thought things through,
really, and was just playing it by ear, buying time. At times of
major crisis he found it was often quite helpful to have his life
flash before his eyes. It gave him a chance to reflect on things,
see things in some sort of perspective, and it sometimes furnished
him with a vital clue as to what to do next.
  
There was the ground rushing up to meet him at 30 feet
per second per second, but he would, he thought, deal with
that problem when he got to it. First things first.
  
Ah, here it came. His childhood. Hum drum stuff, he'd
been through it all before. Images flashed by. Boring times on
Betelgeuse Five. Zaphod Beeblebrox as a kid. Yes he knew all
that. He wished he had some kind of fast forward in his brain.
His seventh birthday party, being given his first towel. Come on,
come on.
  
He was twisting and turning downwards, the outside air at
this height a cold shock to his lungs. Trying not to inhale glass.
 
Early voyages to other planets. Oh for Zark's sake, this
was like some sort of bloody travelogue documentary before
the main feature. First beginning to work for the Guide.
  
Ah!
  
Those were the days. They worked out of a hut on the
Bwenelli Atoll on Fanalla before the Riktanarqals and the
Danqueds vertled it. Half a dozen guys, some towels, a handful
of highly sophisticated digital devices, and most importantly a
lot of dreams. No. Most importantly a lot of Fanallan rum. To
be completely accurate, that Ol' Janx Spirit was the absolute
most important thing, then the Fanallan rum, and also some of
the beaches on the Atoll where the local girls would hang out,
but the dreams were important as well. Whatever happened to
those?
  
He couldn't quite remember what the dreams were in fact,
but they had seemed immensely important at the time. They
had certainly not involved this huge towering office block he was
now falling down the side of. All of that had come when some of
the original team had started to settle down and get greedy, while
he and others had stayed out in the field, researching and hitch
hiking, and gradually becoming more and more isolated from the
corporate nightmare the Guide had inexorably turned into, and
the architectural monstrosity it had come to occupy. Where were
the dreams in that? He thought of all the corporate lawyers who
occupied half of the building, all the `operatives' who occupied the
lower levels, and all the sub-editors and their secretaries and their
secretaries' lawyers and their secretaries' lawyers' secretaries, and
worst of all the accountants and the marketing department.
  
He had half a mind just to keep on falling. Two fingers
to the lot of them.
  
He was just passing the seventeenth floor now, where the
marketing department hung out. Load of tosspots all arguing
about what colour the Guide should be and exercising their
infinitely infallible skills of being wise after the event. If any of
them had chosen to look out of the window at that moment they
would have been startled by the sight of Ford Prefect dropping
past them to his certain death and flicking V-signs at them.
  
Sixteenth floor. Sub-editors. Bastards. What about all that
copy of his they'd cut? Fifteen years of research he'd filed
from one planet alone and they'd cut it to two words. `Mostly
Harmless.' V-signs to them as well.
  
Fifteenth floor. Logistical Administration, whatever that was
about. They all had big cars. That, he thought, was what that
was about.
  
Fourteenth floor. Personnel. He had a very shrewd suspicion
that it was they who had engineered his fifteen-year exile while
the Guide metamorphosed into the corporate monolith (or
rather, duolith - mustn't forget the lawyers) it had become.
  
Thirteenth floor. Research and development.
  
Hang about.
  
Thirteenth floor.
  
He was having to think rather fast at the moment because
the situation was becoming a little urgent.
  
He suddenly remembered the floor display panel in the eleva-
tor. It hadn't had a thirteenth floor. He'd thought no more about
it because, having spent fifteen years on the rather backward
planet Earth where they were superstitious about the number
thirteen, he was used to being in buildings that numbered their
floors without it. No reason for that here, though.
  
The windows of the thirteenth floor, he could not help noticing
as he flashed swiftly by them, were darkened.
  
What was going on in there? He started to remember all
the stuff that Harl had been talking about. One, new, multi-
dimensional Guide spread across an infinite number of universes.
It had sounded, the way Harl had put it, like wild meaninglessness
dreamed up by the marketing department with the backing of the
accountants. If it was any more real than that then it was a very
weird and dangerous idea. Was it real? What was going on behind
the darkened windows of the sealed-off thirteenth floor?
  
Ford felt a rising sense of curiosity, and then a rising sense
of panic. That was the complete list of rising feelings he had. In
every other respect he was falling very rapidly. He really ought
to turn his mind to wondering how he was going to get out of
this situation alive.
  
He glanced down. A hundred feet or so below him people
were milling around, some of them beginning to look up expect-
antly. Clearing a space for him. Even temporarily calling off the
wonderful and completely fatuous hunt for wockets.
  He would hate to disappoint them, but about two feet below
him, he hadn't realised before, was Colin. Colin had obviously
been happily dancing attendance and waiting for him to decide
what he wanted to do.
  
`Colin!' Ford bawled.
  
Colin didn't respond. Ford went cold. Then he suddenly
realised that he hadn't told Colin his name was Colin.
  
`Come up here!' Ford bawled.
  
Colin bobbed up beside him. Colin was enjoying the ride
down immensely and hoped that Ford was, too.
  
Colin's world went unexpectedly dark as Ford's towel suddenly
enveloped him. Colin immediately felt himself get much, much
heavier. He was thrilled and delighted by the challenge that Ford
had presented him with. Just not sure if he could handle it, that
was all.
  
The towel was slung over Colin. Ford was hanging from the
towel, gripping to its seams. Other hitch hikers had seen fit to
modify their towels in exotic ways, weaving all kinds of esoteric
tools and utilities and even computer equipment into their fabric.
Ford was a purist. He liked to keep things simple. He carried
a regular towel from a regular domestic soft furnishings shop.
It even had a kind of blue and pink floral pattern despite his
repeated attempts to bleach and stone wash it. It had a couple
of pieces of wire threaded into it, a bit of flexible writing stick,
and also some nutrients soaked into one of the corners of the
fabric so he could suck it in an emergency, but otherwise it was
a simple towel you could dry your face on.
  
The only actual modification he had been persuaded by a
friend to make to it was to reinforce the seams.
  
Ford gripped the seams like a maniac.
  
They were still descending, but the rate had slowed.
  
`Up, Colin!' he shouted.
  
Nothing.
  
`Your name,' shouted Ford, `is Colin. So when I shout ``Up,
Colin!'' I want you, Colin, to go up. OK? Up, Colin!'
  
Nothing. Or rather a sort of muffled groaning sound from
Colin. Ford was very anxious. They were descending very slow-
ly now, but Ford was very anxious about the sort of people he
could see assembling on the ground beneath him. Friendly,
local, wocket-hunting types were dispersing, and thick, heavy,
bull-necked, slug-like creatures with rocket launchers were, it
seemed, sliding out of what was usually called thin air. Thin
air, as all experienced Galactic travellers well know, is, in fact,
extremely thick with multi-dimensional complexities.
  
`Up,' bellowed Ford again. `Up! Colin, go up!'
  
Colin was straining and groaning. They were now more or
less stationary in the air. Ford felt as if his fingers were breaking.
  
`Up!'
 
They stayed put.
  
`Up, up, up!'
  
A slug was preparing to launch a rocket at him. Ford couldn't
believe it. He was hanging from a towel in mid-air and a slug
was preparing to fire rockets at him. He was running out of
anything he could think of doing and was beginning to get
seriously alarmed.
  
This was the sort of predicament that he usually relied on
having the Guide available for to give advice, however infuriating
or glib, but this was not a moment for reaching into his pocket.
And the Guide seemed to be no longer a friend and ally but was
now itself a source of danger. These were the Guide offices he
was hanging outside, for Zark's sake, in danger of his life from
the people who now appeared to own the thing. What had become
of all the dreams he vaguely remembered having on the Bwenelli
Atoll? They should have let it all be. They should have stayed
there. Stayed on the beach. Loved good women. Lived on fish.
He should have known it was all wrong the moment they started
hanging grand pianos over the sea-monster pool in the atrium.
He began to feel thoroughly wasted and miserable. His fingers
were on fire with clenched pain. And his ankle was still hurting.
  
Oh thank you, ankle, he thought to himself bitterly. Thank
you for bringing up your problems at this time. I expect you'd
like a nice warm footbath to make you feel better, wouldn't you?
Or at least you'd like me to...
  
He had an idea.
  
The armoured slug had hoisted the rocket launcher up on to
its shoulder. The rocket was presumably designed to hit anything
in its path that moved.
  
Ford tried not to sweat because he could feel his grip on
the seams of his towel slipping.
  
With the toe of his good foot he nudged and prised at
the heel of the shoe on his hurting foot.
  
`Go up, damn you!' Ford muttered hopelessly to Colin, who
was cheerily straining away but unable to rise. Ford worked away
at the heel of his shoe.
  
He was trying to judge the timing, but there was no point.
Just go for it. He only had one shot and that was it. He had
now eased the back of his shoe down off his heel. His twisted
ankle felt a little better. Well that was good, wasn't it?
  
With his other foot he kicked at the heel of the shoe. It slipped
off his foot and fell through the air. About half a second later a
rocket erupted up from the muzzle of its launcher, encountered
the shoe falling through its path, went straight for it, hit it, and
exploded with a great sense of satisfaction and achievement.
  
This happened about fifteen feet from the ground.
  
The main force of the explosion was directed downwards.
Where, a second earlier, there had been a squad of InfiniDim
Enterprises executives with a rocket launcher standing on an
elegant terraced plaza paved with large slabs of lustrous stone
cut from the ancient alabastrum quarries of Zentalquabula there
was now, instead, a bit of a pit with nasty bits in it.
  
A great wump of hot air welled up from the explosion throwing
Ford and Colin violently up into the sky. Ford fought desperately
and blindly to hold on and failed. He turned helplessly upwards
through the sky, reached the peak of a parabola, paused and
then started to fall again. He fell and fell and fell and suddenly
winded himself badly on Colin, who was still rising.
  
He clasped himself desperately on to the small spherical
robot. Colin slewed wildly through the air towards the tower of
the Guide offices, trying delightedly to control himself and slow
down.
  
The world span sickeningly round Ford's head as they span
and twisted round each other and then, equally sickeningly,
everything suddenly stopped.
  
Ford found himself deposited dizzily on a window ledge.
  
His towel fell past and he grabbed at it and caught it.
  
Colin bobbed in the air inches away from him.
  
Ford looked around himself in a bruised, bleeding and breath-
less daze. The ledge was only about a foot wide and he was
perched precariously on it, thirteen stories up.
  
Thirteen.
  
He knew they were thirteen stories up because the windows
were dark. He was bitterly upset. He had bought those shoes
for some absurd price in a store on the Lower East Side in New
York. He had, as a result, written an entire essay on the joys of
great footwear, all of which had been jettisoned in the `Mostly
harmless' debacle. Damn everything.
  
And now one of the shoes was gone. He threw his head
back and stared at the sky.
  
It wouldn't be such a grim tragedy if the planet in question
hadn't been demolished, which meant that he wouldn't even be
able to get another pair.
  
Yes, given the infinite sideways extension of probability there
was, of course, an almost infinite multiplicity of planets Earth,
but, when you came down to it, a major pair of shoes wasn't
something you could just replace by mucking about in multi-
dimensional space/time.
  
He sighed.
  
Oh well, he'd better make the best of it. At least it had
saved his life. For the time being.
  
He was perched on a foot-wide ledge thirteen stories up the
side of a building and he wasn't at all sure that that was worth
a good shoe.
  
He stared in woozily through the darkened glass.
  
It was as dark and silent as the tomb.
  
No. That was a ridiculous thing to think. He'd been to
some great parties in tombs.
  
Could he detect some movement? He wasn't quite sure. It
seemed that he could see some kind of weird, flapping shad-
ow. Perhaps it was just blood dribbling over his eyelashes . He
wiped it away. Boy, he'd love to have a farm somewhere, keep
some sheep. He peered into the window again, trying to make
out what the shape was, but he had the feeling, so common in
today's universe, that he was looking into some kind of optical
illusion and that his eyes were just playing silly buggers with him.
  
Was there a bird of some kind in there? Was that what
they had hidden away up here on a concealed floor behind
darkened, rocket-proof glass? Someone's aviary? There was
certainly something flapping about in there, but it seemed like
not so much a bird, more a kind of bird-shaped hole in space.
  
He closed his eyes, which he'd been wanting to do for a bit
anyway. He wondered what the hell to do next. Jump? Climb?
He didn't think there was going to be any way of breaking in. OK,
the supposedly rocket-proof glass hadn't stood up, when it came
to it, to an actual rocket, but then that had been a rocket that
had been fired at very short range from inside, which probably
wasn't what the engineers who designed it had had in mind. It
didn't mean he was going to be able to break the window here
by wrapping his fist in his towel and punching. What the hell, he
tried it anyway and hurt his fist. It was just as well he couldn't
get a good swing from where he was sitting or he might have
hurt it quite badly. The building had been sturdily reinforced
when it was completely rebuilt after the Frogstar attack, and
was probably the most heavily armoured publishing company in
the business, but there was always, he thought, some weakness
in any system designed by a corporate committee. He had already
found one of them. The engineers who designed the windows had
not expected them to be hit by a rocket from short range from
the inside, so the window had failed.
  
So, what would the engineers not be expecting someone
sitting on the ledge outside the window to do?
  
He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it.
  
The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be
there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting
where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake
that people make when trying to design something completely
foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
  
He pulled his newly acquired credit card from his pocket,
slid it into a crack where the window met its surrounding frame,
and did something a rocket would not have been able to do. He
wiggled it around a bit. He felt a catch slip. He slid the window
open and almost fell backwards off the ledge laughing, giving
thanks as he did so for the Great Ventilation and Telephone
Riots of SrDt 3454.
 The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had
started off as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the
problem that ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it
had solved the problem reasonably well up to the point when
someone invented air-conditioning, which solved the problem
far more throbbingly.
  
And that was all well and good provided you could stand
the noise and the dribbling until someone else came up with
something even sexier and smarter than air-conditioning which
was called in-building climate control.
  
Now this was quite something.
 
The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were
that it was thrillingly more expensive, involved a huge amount of
sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far
better at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people
wanted to breathe than mere people did.
  
It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn't muck
up the sophisticated calculations which the system was making
on their behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed
shut. This is true.
  
While the systems were being installed, a number of people
who were going to work in the buildings found themselves having
conversations with Breathe-o-Smart systems fitters which went
something like this:
  
`But what if we want to have the windows open?'
  
`You won't want to have the windows open with new Breathe-
o-Smart.'
  
`Yes but supposing we just wanted to have them open for
a little bit?'
  
`You won't want to have them open even for a little bit.
The new Breathe-o-Smart system will see to that.'
  
`Hmmm.'
  
`Enjoy Breathe-o-Smart!'
  
`OK, so what if the Breathe-o-Smart breaks down or goes
wrong or something?'
  
`Ah! One of the smartest features of the Breathe-o-Smart is
that it cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score.
Enjoy your breathing now, and have a nice day.'
  
(It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and
Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454, that all mechanical or electri-
cal or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam
or piston-driven devices, are now requited to have a certain
legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn't matter how
small the object is, the designers of the object have got to find
a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their
attention which is being drawn to it rather than necessarily that
of the user's.
  
The legend is this:
  
`The major difference between a thing that might go wrong
and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing
that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to
be impossible to get at or repair.')
  
Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical
precision, with major failures of the Breathe-o-Smart systems.
To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only
a few deaths from asphyxiation.
  
The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened
simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc.
issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved
by using their systems in temperate climates.
  
The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart
system on a particularly hot and humid day with the resulting
evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where
they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-
distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having
to say, all day and every day, `Thank you for using BS\&S' to
every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally
taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.
  
In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city,
rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries
of `Get off the line, asshole! I don't care what number you want,
what extension you're calling from. Go and stick a firework up
your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!'
and a variety of other animal noises that they didn't get a chance
to practise in the normal line of their work.
  
As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a
constitutional right to say `Use BS\&S and die!' at least once
an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were
required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.
  
Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the
suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had
been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-o-Smart tyr-
anny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves, could now
just clamber out on to their own window ledges and leap off at
their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the
moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts
they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was
a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also
a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.
  
Another completely unlooked for result was that Ford Prefect,
stranded thirteen stories up a heavily armoured building armed
with nothing but a towel and a credit card was nevertheless able
to clamber through a supposedly rocket-proof window to safety.
  
He closed the window neatly after him, having first allowed
Colin to follow him through, and then started to look around
for this bird thing.
  
The thing he realised about the windows was this: because
they had been converted into openable windows after they had
first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much
less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows
in the first place.
  
Hey ho, it's a funny old life, he was just thinking to himself,
when he suddenly realised that the room he had gone to all this
trouble to break into was not a very interesting one.
  
He stopped in surprise.
  
Where was the strange flapping shape? Where was anything
that was worth all this palaver - the extraordinary veil of secrecy
that seemed to lie over this room and the equally extraordinary
sequence of events that had seemed to conspire to get him into
it?
  
The room, like every other room in this building now, was
done out in some appallingly tasteful grey. There were a few
charts and drawings on the wall. Most of them were meaningless
to Ford, but then he came across something that was obviously
a mock-up for a poster of some kind.
  
There was a kind of bird-like logo on it, and a slogan which said
`The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk II: the single most
astounding thing of any kind ever. Coming soon to a dimension
near you.' No more information than that.
  
Ford looked around again. Then his attention was gradually
drawn to Colin, the absurdly over-happy security robot, who was
cowering in a corner of the room gibbering with what seemed
strangely like fear.
  
Odd, thought Ford. He looked around to see what it was that
Colin might have been reacting to. Then he saw something that
he hadn't noticed before, lying quietly on top of a work bench.
  
It was circular and black and about the size of a small side
plate. Its top and its bottom were smoothly convex so that it
resembled a small lightweight throwing discus.
  
Its surfaces seemed to be completely smooth, unbroken and
featureless.
  
It was doing nothing.

Then Ford noticed that there was something written on it.
Strange. There hadn't been anything written on it a moment
ago and now suddenly there was. There just didn't seem to have
been any observable transition between the two states.
  
All it said, in small, alarming letters was a single word:

\begin{center}
                             PANIC

\end{center}
A moment ago there hadn't been any marks or cracks in
its surface. Now there were. They were growing.
  
Panic, the Guide Mk II said. Ford begin to do as he was
told. He had just remembered why the slug-like creatures looked
familiar. Their colour scheme was a kind of corporate grey, but
in all other respects they looked exactly like Vogons.


                          % 13

The ship dropped quietly to land on the edge of the wide
clearing, a hundred yards or so from the village.
  
It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly but with a minimum of
fuss. One moment it was a perfectly ordinary late afternoon in
the early autumn - the leaves were just beginning to turn red and
gold, the river was beginning to swell again with the rains from the
mountains in the north, the plumage of the pikka birds was begin-
ning to thicken in anticipation of the coming winter frosts, any day
now the Perfectly Normal Beasts would start their thunderous
migration across the plains, and Old Thrashbarg was beginning
to mutter to himself as he hobbled his way around the village,
a muttering which meant that he was rehearsing and elaborating
the stories that he would tell of the past year once the evenings
had drawn in and people had no choice but to gather round the
fire and listen to him and grumble and say that that wasn't how
they remembered it - and the next moment there was a spaceship
sitting there, gleaming in the warm autumn sun.
  
It hummed for a bit and then stopped.
  
It wasn't a big spaceship. If the villagers had been experts
on spaceships they would have known at once that it was a
pretty nifty one, a small sleek Hrundi four-berth runabout
with just about every optional extra in the brochure except
Advanced Vectoid Stabilisis, which only wimps went for. You
can't get a good tight, sharp curve round a tri-lateral time axis
with Advanced Vectoid Stabilisis. All right, it's a bit safer, but
it makes the handling go all soggy.
  
The villagers didn't know all that, of course. Most of them here
on the remote planet of Lamuella had never seen a spaceship,
certainly not one that was all in one piece, and as it shone warmly
in the evening light it was just the most extraordinary thing they
had come across since the day Kirp caught a fish with a head at
both ends.
  
Everybody had fallen silent.
  
Whereas a moment before two or three dozen people had
been wandering about, chattering, chopping wood, carrying
water, teasing the pikka birds, or just amiably trying to stay
out of Old Thrashbarg's way, suddenly all activity died away
and everybody turned to look at the strange object in amazement.
  
Or, not quite everybody. The pikka birds tended to be amazed
by completely different things. A perfectly ordinary leaf lying
unexpectedly on a stone would cause them to skitter off in par-
oxysms of confusion; sunrise took them completely by surprise
every morning, but the arrival of an alien craft from another
world simply failed to engage any part of their attention. They
continued to kar and rit and huk as they pecked for seeds on the
ground; the river continued with its quiet, spacious burbling.
  
Also, the noise of loud and tuneless singing from the last
hut on the left continued unabated.
  
Suddenly, with a slight click and a hum, a door folded itself
outwards and downwards from the spaceship. Then, for a minute
or two, nothing further seemed to happen, other than the loud
singing from the last hut on the left, and the thing just sat there.
  
Some of the villagers, particularly the boys, began to edge
forward a little bit to have a closer look. Old Thrashbarg tried
to shoo them back. This was exactly the sort of thing that Old
Thrashbarg didn't like to have happening. He hadn't foretold it,
not even slightly, and even though he would be able to wrestle
the whole thing into his continuing story somehow or other, it
really was all getting a bit much to deal with.
  
He strode forward, pushed the boys back, and raised his arms
and his ancient knobbly staff into the air. The long warm light
of the evening sun caught him nicely. He prepared to welcome
whatever gods these were as if he had been expecting them all
along.
  
Still nothing happened.
  
Gradually it became clear that there was some kind of argument
going on inside the craft. Time went by and Old Thrashbarg's
arms were beginning to ache.
  
Suddenly the ramp folded itself back up again.
That made it easy for Thrashbarg. They were demons and
he had repulsed them. The reason he hadn't foretold it was that
prudence and modesty forbade.
  
Almost immediately a different ramp folded itself out on the
other side of the craft from where Thrashbarg was standing, and
two figures at last emerged on it, still arguing with each other
and ignoring everybody, even Thrashbarg, whom they wouldn't
even have noticed from where they were standing.
  
Old Thrashbarg chewed angrily on his beard.
  
To continue to stand there with his arms upraised? To kneel
with his head bowed forward and his staff held out pointing at
them? To fall backwards as if overcome in some titanic inner
struggle? Perhaps just to go off to the woods and live in a tree
for a year without speaking to anyone?
  
He opted just to drop his arms smartly as if he had done
what he meant to do. They were really hurting so he didn't
have much choice. He made a small, secret sign he had just
invented towards the ramp which had closed and then made
three and a half steps backwards, so he could at least get a
good look at whoever these people were and then decide what
to do next.
  
The taller one was a very good looking woman wearing
soft and crumply clothes. Old Thrashbarg didn't know this, but
they were made of Rymplon TM, a new synthetic fabric which was
terrific for space travel because it looked its absolute best when
it was all creased and sweaty.
  
The shorter one was a girl. She was awkward and sullen
looking, and was wearing clothes which looked their absolute
worst when they were all creased and sweaty, and what was
more she almost certainly knew it.
  
All eyes watched them, except for the pikka birds, which
had their own things to watch.
  
The woman stood and looked around her. She had a purposeful
air about her. There was obviously something in particular she
wanted, but she didn't know exactly where to find it. She glanced
from face to face among the villagers assembled curiously around
her without apparently seeing what she was looking for.
  
Thrashbarg had no idea how to play this at all, and decided
to resort to chanting. He threw back his head and began to
wail, but was instantly interrupted by a fresh outbreak of song
from the hut of the Sandwich Maker: the last one on the left.
The woman looked round sharply, and gradually a smile came
over her face. Without so much as a glance at Old Thrashbarg
she started to walk towards the hut.
 There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which
it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth.
It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are
many and profound: choosing the right bread for instance. The
Sandwich Maker had spent many months in daily consultation
and experiment with Grarp the baker and eventually they had
between them created a loaf of exactly the consistency that was
dense enough to slice thinly and neatly, while still being light,
moist and having that fine nutty flavour which best enhanced
the savour of roast Perfectly Normal Beast flesh.
  
There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the
precise relationships between the width and height of the slice
and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk
and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was
a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise
of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense
sandwich experience.
  
The proper tools, of course, were crucial, and many were
the days that the Sandwich Maker, when not engaged with the
Baker at his oven, would spend with Strinder the Tool Maker,
weighing and balancing knives, taking them to the forge and
back again. Suppleness, strength, keenness of edge, length and
balance were all enthusiastically debated, theories put forward,
tested, refined, and many was the evening when the Sandwich
Maker and the Tool Maker could be seen silhouetted against
the light of the setting sun and the Tool Maker's forge making
slow sweeping movements through the air trying one knife after
another, comparing the weight of this one with the balance of
another, the suppleness of a third and the handle binding of a
fourth.
  
Three knives altogether were required. First there was the
knife for the slicing of the bread: a firm, authoritative blade
which imposed a clear and defining will on a loaf. Then there
was the butter-spreading knife, which was a whippy little number
but still with a firm backbone to it. Early versions had been a little
too whippy, but now the combination of flexibility with a core of
strength was exactly right to achieve the maximum smoothness
and grace of spread.
  
The chief amongst the knives, of course, was the carving
knife. This was the knife that would not merely impose its will
on the medium through which it moved, as did the bread knife;
it must work with it, be guided by the grain of the meat, to
achieve slices of the most exquisite consistency and translucency,
that would slide away in filmy folds from the main hunk of meat.
The Sandwich Maker would then flip each sheet with a smooth
flick of the wrist on to the beautifully proportioned lower bread
slice, trim it with four deft strokes and then at last perform the
magic that the children of the village so longed to gather round
and watch with rapt attention and wonder. With just four more
dexterous flips of the knife he would assemble the trimmings
into a perfectly fitting jigsaw of pieces on top of the primary
slice. For every sandwich the size and shape of the trimmings
were different, but the Sandwich Maker would always effortlessly
and without hesitation assemble them into a pattern which fitted
perfectly. A second layer of meat and a second layer of trimmings,
and the main act of creation would be accomplished.
  
The Sandwich Maker would pass what he had made to his
assistant who would then add a few slices of newcumber and
fladish and a touch of splagberry sauce, and then apply the
topmost layer of bread and cut the sandwich with a fourth
and altogether plainer knife. It was not that these were not also
skilful operations, but they were lesser skills to be performed by
a dedicated apprentice who would one day, when the Sandwich
Maker finally laid down his tools, take over from him. It was
an exalted position and that apprentice, Drimple, was the envy
of his fellows. There were those in the village who were happy
chopping wood, those who were content carrying water, but to
be the Sandwich Maker was very heaven.
  
And so the Sandwich Maker sang as he worked.
  
He was using the last of the year's salted meat. It was a little
past its best now, but still the rich savour of Perfectly Normal
Beast meat was something unsurpassed in any of the Sandwich
Maker's previous experience. Next week it was anticipated that
the Perfectly Normal Beasts would appear again for their regu-
lar migration, whereupon the whole village would once again be
plunged into frenetic action: hunting the Beasts, killing perhaps
six, maybe even seven dozen of the thousands that thundered
past. Then the Beasts must be rapidly butchered and cleaned,
with most of the meat salted to keep it through the winter months
until the return migration in the spring, which would replenish
their supplies.
  
The very best of the meat would be roasted straight away
for the feast that marked the Autumn Passage. The celebrations
would last for three days of sheer exuberance, dancing and stories
that Old Thrashbarg would tell of how the hunt had gone, stories
that he would have been busy sitting making up in his hut while
the rest of the village was out doing the actual hunting.
  
And then the very, very best of the meat would be saved
from the feast and delivered cold to the Sandwich Maker. And
the Sandwich Maker would exercise on it the skills that he
had brought to them from the gods, and make the exquisite
Sandwiches of the Third Season, of which the whole village would
partake before beginning, the next day, to prepare themselves for
the rigours of the coming winter.
  
Today he was just making ordinary sandwiches, if such deli-
cacies, so lovingly crafted, could ever be called ordinary. Today
his assistant was away so the Sandwich Maker was applying his
own garnish, which he was happy to do. He was happy with just
about everything in fact.
  
He sliced, he sang. He flipped each slice of meat neatly on to
a slice of bread, trimmed it and assembled all the trimmings into
their jigsaw. A little salad, a little sauce, another slice of bread,
another sandwich, another verse of Yellow Submarine.
  
`Hello , Arthur.'
  
The Sandwich Maker almost sliced his thumb off.
 The villagers had watched in consternation as the woman had
marched boldly to the hut of the Sandwich Maker. The Sandwich
Maker had been sent to them by Almighty Bob in a burning fiery
chariot. This, at least, was what Thrashbarg said, and Thrashbarg
was the authority on these things. So, at least, Thrashbarg
claimed, and Thrashbarg was... and so on and so on. It
was hardly worth arguing about.
  
A few villagers wondered why Almighty Bob would send
his onlie begotten Sandwich Maker in a burning fiery chariot
rather than perhaps in one that might have landed quietly
without destroying half the forest, filling it with ghosts and also
injuring the Sandwich Maker quite badly. Old Thrashbarg said
that it was the ineffable will of Bob, and when they asked him
what ineffable meant he said look it up.
  
This was a problem because Old Thrashbarg had the only
dictionary and he wouldn't let them borrow it. They asked him
why not and he said that it was not for them to know the will
of Almighty Bob, and when they asked him why not again he
said because he said so. Anyway, somebody sneaked into Old
Thrashbarg's hut one day while he was out having a swim and
looked up `ineffable'. `Ineffable' apparently meant `unknowable,
indescribable, unutterable, not to be known or spoken about'. So
that cleared that up.
  
At least they had got the sandwiches.
  
One day Old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had decreed
that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches.
The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and
Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't
looking. `Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, `or burn!'
They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed
easiest.
 And now this woman had just arrived out of nowhere, and gone
straight for the Sandwich Maker's hut. His fame had obviously
spread, though it was hard to know where to since, according to
Old Thrashbarg, there wasn't anywhere else. Anyway, wherever
it was she had come from, presumably somewhere ineffable, she
was here now and was in the Sandwich Maker's hut. Who was
she? And who was the strange girl who was hanging around
outside the hut moodily and kicking at stones and showing every
sign of not wanting to be there? It seemed odd that someone
should come all the way from somewhere ineffable in a chariot
that was obviously a vast improvement on the burning fiery one
which had brought them the Sandwich Maker, if she didn't even
want to be here?
  
They all looked to Thrashbarg, but he was on his knees
mumbling and looking very firmly up into the sky and not
catching anybody else's eye until he'd thought of something.
 `Trillian!' said the Sandwich Maker, sucking his bleeding thumb.
`What...? Who...? When...? Where...?'
  
`Exactly the questions I was going to ask you,' said Trillian,
looking around Arthur's hut. It was neatly laid out with his
kitchen utensils. There were some fairly basic cupboards and
shelves, and a basic bed in the corner. A door at the back of
the room led to something Trillian couldn't see because the door
was closed. `Nice,' she said, but in an enquiring tone of voice. She
couldn't quite make out what the set-up was.
  
`Very nice,' said Arthur. `Wonderfully nice. I don't know
when I've ever been anywhere nicer. I'm happy here. They
like me, I make sandwiches for them, and... er, well that's
it really. They like me and I make sandwiches for them.'
  
`Sounds, er...'
  
`Idyllic,' said Arthur, firmly. `It is. It really is. I don't expect
you'd like it very much, but for me it's, well, it's perfect. Look, sit
down, please, make yourself comfortable. Can I get you anything,
er, a sandwich?'
  
Trillian picked up a sandwich and looked at it. She sniffed
it carefully.
  
`Try it,' said Arthur, `it's good.'
  
Trillian took a nibble, then a bite and munched on it thought-
fully.
  
`It is good,' she said, looking at it.
  
`My life's work,' said Arthur, trying to sound proud and
hoping he didn't sound like a complete idiot. He was used
to being revered a bit, and was having to go through some
unexpected mental gear changes.
  
`What's the meat in it?' asked Trillian.
  
`Ah yes, that's, um, that's Perfectly Normal Beast.'
  
`It's what?'
  
`Perfectly Normal Beast. It's a bit like a cow, or rather
a bull. Kind of like a buffalo in fact. Large, charging sort
of animal.'
  
`So what's odd about it?'
  
`Nothing, it's Perfectly Normal.'
  
`I see.'
  
`It's just a bit odd where it comes from.'
  
Tricia frowned, and stopped chewing.
  
`Where does it come from?' she asked with her mouth full.
She wasn't going to swallow until she knew.
  
`Well it's not just a matter of where it comes from, it's also
where it goes to. It's all right, it's perfectly safe to swallow. I've
eaten tons of it. It's great. Very succulent. Very tender. Slightly
sweet flavour with a long dark finish.'
  
Trillian still hadn't swallowed.
  
`Where,' she said, `does it come from, and where does it go to?'
  
`They come from a point just slightly to the east of the
Hondo Mountains. They're the big ones behind us here, you
must have seen them as you came in, and then they sweep in
their thousands across the great Anhondo plains and, er, well
that's it really. That's where they come from. That's where they
go.'
  
Trillian frowned. There was something she wasn't quite getting
about this.
  
`I probably haven't made it quite clear,' said Arthur. `When
I say they come from a point to the east of the Hondo Moun-
tains, I mean that that's where they suddenly appear. Then they
sweep across the Anhondo plains and, well, vanish really. We
have about six days to catch as many of them as we can before
they disappear. In the spring they do it again only the other way
round, you see.'
  
Reluctantly, Trillian swallowed. It was either that or spit
it out, and it did in fact taste pretty good.
  
`I see,' she said, once she had reassured herself that she
didn't seem to be suffering any ill effects. `And why are they
called Perfectly Normal Beasts?'
  
`Well, I think because otherwise people might think it was
a bit odd. I think Old Thrashbarg called them that. He says
that they come from where they come from and they go to
where they go to and that it's Bob's will and that's all there is
to it.'
  
`Who...'
  
`Just don't even ask.'
  
`Well, you look well on it.'
  
`I feel well. You look well.'
  
`I'm well. I'm very well.'
  
`Well, that's good.'
  
`Yes.'
  
`Good.'
  
`Good.'
  
`Nice of you to drop in.'
  
`Thanks.'
  
`Well,' said Arthur, casting around himself. Astounding how
hard it was to think of anything to say to someone after all this
time.
 
`I expect you're wondering how I found you,' said Trillian.
  
`Yes!' said Arthur. `I was wondering exactly that. How did
you find me?'
  
`Well, as you may or may not know, I now work for one
of the big Sub-Etha broadcasting networks that -'
  
`I did know that,' said Arthur, suddenly remembering. `Yes,
you've done very well. That's terrific. Very exciting. Well done.
Must be a lot of fun.'
  
`Exhausting.'
  
`All that rushing around. I expect it must be, yes.'
 
`We have access to virtually every kind of information. I
found your name on the passenger list of the ship that crashed.'
  
Arthur was astonished.
  
`You mean they knew about the crash?'
 
`Well, of course they knew. You don't have a whole spaceliner
disappear without someone knowing about it.'
  
`But you mean, they knew where it had happened? They
knew I'd survived?'
 
`Yes.'
  
`But nobody's ever been to look or search or rescue. There's
been absolutely nothing.'
  
`Well there wouldn't be. It's a whole complicated insurance
thing. They just bury the whole thing. Pretend it never happened.
The insurance business is completely screwy now. You know
they've reintroduced the death penalty for insurance company
directors?'
  
`Really?' said Arthur. `No I didn't. For what offence?'
  
Trillian frowned.
  
`What do you mean, offence?'
  
`I see.'
  
Trillian gave Arthur a long look, and then, in a new tone
of voice, said, `It's time for you to take responsibility, Arthur.'
  
Arthur tried to understand this remark. He found it often
took a moment or so before he saw exactly what it was that
people were driving at, so he let a moment or two pass at a
leisurely rate. Life was so pleasant and relaxed these days, there
was time to let things sink in. He let it sink in.
  
He still didn't quite understand what she meant, though,
so in the end he had to say so.
  
Trillian gave him a cool smile and then turned back to
the door of the hut.
  
`Random?' she called. `Come in. Come and meet your father.'


                          % 14

As the Guide folded itself back into a smooth, dark disk, Ford
realised some pretty hectic stuff. Or at least he tried to realise
it, but it was too hectic to take in all in one go. His head was
hammering, his ankle was hurting, and though he didn't like to
be a wimp about his ankle, he always found that intense multi-
dimensional logic was something he understood best in the bath.
He needed time to think about this. Time, a tall drink, and some
kind of rich, foamy oil.
  
He had to get out of here. He had to get the Guide out
of here. He didn't think they'd make it together.
  
He glanced wildly round the room.
  
Think, think, think. It had to be something simple and obvious.
If he was right in his nasty lurking suspicion that he was dealing
with nasty, lurking Vogons, then the more simple and obvious
the better.
  
Suddenly he saw what he needed.
  
He wouldn't try to beat the system, he would just use it. The
frightening thing about the Vogons was their absolute mindless
determination to do whatever mindless thing it was they were
determined to do. There was never any point in trying to appeal
to their reason because they didn't have any. However, if you
kept your nerve you could sometimes exploit their blinkered,
bludgeoning insistence on being bludgeoning and blinkered. It
wasn't merely that their left hand didn't always know what their
right hand was doing, so to speak; quite often their right hand
had a pretty hazy notion as well.
  
Did he dare just post the thing to himself?
  
Did he dare just put it in the system and let the Vogons
work out how to get the thing to him while at the same time
they were busy, as they probably would be, tearing the building
apart to find out where he'd hidden it?
  
Yes.
  
Feverishly, he packed it. He wrapped it. He labelled it.
With a moment's pause to wonder if he was really doing the
right thing, he committed the package to the building's internal
mail chute.
  
`Colin,' he said, turning to the little, hovering ball. `I am
going to abandon you to your fate.'
  
`I'm so happy,' said Colin.
  
`Make the most of it,' said Ford. `Because what I want you
to do is to nursemaid that package out of the building. They'll
probably incinerate you when they find you, and I won't be here
to help. It will be very, very nasty for you, and that's just too
bad. Got it?'
  
`I gurgle with pleasure,' said Colin.
  
`Go!' said Ford.
  
Colin obediently dived down the mail chute in pursuit of his
charge. Now Ford had only himself to worry about, but that was
still quite a substantial worry. There were noises of heavy running
footsteps outside the door, which he had taken the precaution of
locking and shifting a large filing cabinet in front of.
  
He was worried that everything had gone so smoothly. Every-
thing had fitted terribly well. He had hurtled through the day
with reckless abandon and yet everything had worked out with
uncanny neatness. Except for his shoe. He was bitter about his
shoe. That was an account that was going to have to be settled.
  
With a deafening roar the door exploded inwards. In the
turmoil of smoke and dust he could see large, slug-like creatures
hurrying through.
  
So everything was going well was it? Everything was working
out as if the most extraordinary luck was on his side? Well, he'd
see about that.
  
In a spirit of scientific enquiry he hurled himself out of
the window again.


                          % 15

The first month, getting to know each other, was a little difficult.
  
The second month, trying to come to terms with what they'd
got to know about each other in the first month, was much easier.
  
The third month, when the box arrived, was very tricky indeed.
 
At the beginning, it was a problem even trying to explain
what a month was. This had been a pleasantly simple matter
for Arthur, here on Lamuella. The days were just a little over
twenty-five hours long, which basically meant an extra hour in
bed every single day and, of course, having regularly to reset his
watch, which Arthur rather enjoyed doing.
  
He also felt at home with the number of suns and moons
which Lamuella had - one of each - as opposed to some of
the planets he'd fetched up on from time to time which had
had ridiculous numbers of them.
  
The planet orbited its single sun every three hundred days,
which was a good number because it meant the year didn't drag
by. The moon orbited Lamuella just over nine times a year,
which meant that a month was a little over thirty days, which
was absolutely perfect because it gave you a little more time to
get things done in. It was not merely reassuringly like Earth, it
was actually rather an improvement.
  
Random, on the other hand, thought she was trapped in a
recurring nightmare. She would have crying fits and think the
moon was out to get her. Every night it was there, and then,
when it went, the sun came out and followed her. Over and over
again.
  
Trillian had warned Arthur that Random might have some
difficulty in adjusting to a more regular lifestyle than she had
been used to up till now, but Arthur hadn't been ready for
actual howling at the moon.
  
He hadn't been ready for any of this of course.
  
His daughter?
  
His daughter? He and Trillian had never even - had they?
He was absolutely convinced he would have remembered. What
about Zaphod?
  
`Not the same species, Arthur,' Trillian had answered. `When
I decided I wanted a child they ran all sorts of genetic tests on
me and could find only one match anywhere. It was only later
that it dawned on me. I double checked and I was right. They
don't usually like to tell you, but I insisted.'
  
`You mean you went to a DNA bank?' Arthur had asked,
pop-eyed.
  
`Yes. But she wasn't quite as random as her name suggests,
because, of course, you were the only homo sapiens donor. I
must say, though, it seems you were quite a frequent flyer.'
  
Arthur had stared wide-eyed at the unhappy looking girl who
was slouching awkwardly in the door-frame looking at him.
  
`But when... how long...?'
  
`You mean, what age is she?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`The wrong one.'
  
`What do you mean?'
  
`I mean that I haven't any idea.'
 
`What?'
  
`Well, in my time line I think it's about ten years since I had
her, but she's obviously quite a lot older than that. I spend my
life going backwards and forwards in time, you see. The job. I
used to take her with me when I could, but it just wasn't always
possible. Then I used to put her into day care time zones, but
you just can't get reliable time tracking now. You leave them
there in the morning, you've simply no idea how old they'll be
in the evening. You complain till you're blue in the face but it
doesn't get you anywhere. I left her at one of the places for a
few hours once, and when I came back she'd passed puberty.
I've done all I can, Arthur, it's over to you. I've got a war to
cover.'
The ten seconds that passed after Trillian left were about the
longest of Arthur Dent's life. Time, we know, is relative. You
can travel light years through the stars and back, and if you do it
at the speed of light then, when you return, you may have aged
mere seconds while your twin brother or sister will have aged
twenty, thirty, forty or however many years it is, depending on
how far you travelled.
  
This will come to you as a profound personal shock, particularly
if you didn't know you had a twin brother or sister. The seconds
that you have been absent for will not have been sufficient time to
prepare you for the shock of new and strangely distended family
relationships when you return.
  
Ten seconds' silence was not enough time for Arthur to
reassemble his whole view of himself and his life in a way that
suddenly included an entire new daughter of whose merest exist-
ence he had had not the slightest inkling of a suspicion when he
had woken that morning. Deep, emotional family ties cannot be
constructed in ten seconds, however far and fast you travel away
from them, and Arthur could only feel helpless, bewildered and
numb as he looked at the girl standing in his doorway, staring at
his floor.
  
He supposed that there was no point in pretending not to
be hopeless.
  
He walked over and he hugged her.
  
`I don't love you,' he said. `I'm sorry. I don't even know
you yet. But give me a few minutes.'
{\it 
  We live in strange times.
    We also live in strange places: each in a universe of our
  own. The people with whom we populate our universes are
  the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our
  own. Being able to glance out into this bewildering complexity
  of infinite recursion and say things like, `Oh, hi Ed! Nice tan.
  How's Carol?' involves a great deal of filtering skill for which
  all conscious entities have eventually to develop a capacity in
  order to protect themselves from the contemplation of the
  chaos through which they seethe and tumble. So give your
  kid a break, OK? \begin{flushright}
                Extract from Practical Parenting in a Fractally\end{flushright} \begin{flushright}
                                              Demented Universe\end{flushright} }

`What's this?'
  
Arthur had almost given up. That is to say, he was not
going to give up. He was absolutely not going to give up.
Not now. Not ever. But if he had been the sort of person who
was going to give up, this was probably the time he would have
done it.
  
Not content with being surly, bad-tempered, wanting to go
and play in the paleozoic era, not seeing why they had to have
the gravity on the whole time and shouting at the sun to stop
following her, Random had also used his carving knife to dig up
stones to throw at the pikka birds for looking at her like that.
  
Arthur didn't even know if Lamuella had had a paleozoic
era. According to Old Thrashbarg the planet had been found
fully-formed in the navel of a giant earwig at four-thirty one
Vroonday afternoon, and although Arthur, as a seasoned galactic
traveller with good `O' level passes in Physics and Geography,
had fairly serious doubts about this, it was rather a waste of time
trying to argue with Old Thrashbarg and there had never been
much point before.
  
He sighed as he sat nursing the chipped and bent knife. He
was going to love her if it killed him, or her, or both. It wasn't
easy being a father. He knew that no one had ever said it was
going to be easy, but that wasn't the point because he'd never
asked about being one in the first place.
  
He was doing his best. Every moment that he could wrest
away from making sandwiches he was spending with her, talking
to her, walking with her, sitting on the hill with her watching the
sun go down over he valley in which the village nestled, trying
to find out about her life, trying to explain to her about his. It
was a tricky business. The common ground between them, apart
from the fact that they had almost identical genes, was about the
size of a pebble. Or rather, it was about the size of Trillian and
of her they had slightly differing views.
  
`What's this?'
  
He suddenly realised she had been talking to him and he
hadn't noticed. Or rather he had not recognized her voice.
  
Instead of the usual tone of voice in which she spoke to him,
which was bitter and truculent, she was just asking him a simple
question.
  
He looked round in surprise.
  
She was sitting there on a stool in the corner of the hut in
that rather hunched way she had, knees together, feet splayed
out, with her dark hair hanging down over her face as she looked
at something she had cradled in her hands.
  
Arthur went over to her, a little nervously.
  
Her mood swings were very unpredictable but so far they'd
all been between different types of bad ones. Outbreaks of bitter
recrimination would give way without warning to abject self-pity
and then long bouts of sullen despair which were punctuated with
sudden acts of mindless violence against inanimate objects and
demands to go to electric clubs.
  
Not only were there no electric clubs on Lamuella, there
were no clubs at all and, in fact, no electricity. There was a
forge and a bakery, a few carts and a well, but those were the
high water mark of Lamuellan technology, and a fair number of
Random's unquenchable rages were directed against the sheer
incomprehensible backwardness of the place.
  
She could pick up Sub-Etha TV on a small Flex-O-Panel
which had been surgically implanted in her wrist, but that didn't
cheer her up at all because it was full of news of insanely exciting
things happening in every other part of the Galaxy than here.
It would also give her frequent news of her mother, who had
dumped her to go off and cover some war which now seemed
not to have happened, or at least to have gone all wrong in some
way because of the absence of any proper intelligence gathering.
It also gave her access to lots of great adventure shows featuring
all sorts of fantastically expensive spaceships crashing into each
other.
  
The villagers were absolutely hypnotised by all these wonderful
magic images flashing over her wrist. They had only ever seen
one spaceship crash, and it had been so frightening, violent and
shocking and had caused so much horrible devastation, fire and
death that, stupidly, they had never realised it was entertainment.
  
Old Thrashbarg had been so astonished by it that he had
instantly seen Random as an emissary from Bob, but had fairly
soon afterwards decided that in fact she had been sent as a test
of his faith, if not of his patience. He was also alarmed at the
number of spaceship crashes he had to start incorporating into
his holy stories if he was to hold the attention of the villagers,
and not have them rushing off to peer at Random's wrist all the
time.
  
At the moment she was not peering at her wrist. Her wrist
was turned off. Arthur squatted down quietly beside her to see
what she was looking at.
  
It was his watch. He had taken it off when he'd gone to
shower under the local waterfall, and Random had found it
and was trying to work it out.
  
`It's just a watch,' he said. `It's to tell the time.'
  
`I know that,' she said. `But you keep on fiddling with it,
and it still doesn't tell the right time. Or even anything like
it.'
  
She brought up the display on her wrist panel, which auto-
matically produced a readout of local time. Her wrist panel had
quietly got on with the business of measuring the local gravity
and orbital momentum, and had noticed where the sun was and
tracked its movement in the sky, all within the first few minutes
of Random's arrival. It had then quickly picked up clues from its
environment as to what the local unit conventions were and reset
itself appropriately. It did this sort of thing continually, which was
particularly valuable if you did a lot of travelling in time as well
as space.
  
Random frowned at her father's watch, which didn't do any
of this.
  
Arthur was very fond of it. It was a better one than he
would ever have afforded himself. He had been given it on
his twenty-second birthday by a rich and guilt-ridden godfather
who had forgotten every single birthday he had had up till then,
and also his name. It had the day, the date, the phases of the
moon; it had `To Albert on his twenty-first birthday' and the
wrong date engraved on the battered and scratched surface of
its back in letters that were still just about visible.
  
The watch had been through a considerahle amount of stuff
in the last few years, most of which would fall well outside the
warranty. He didn't suppose, of course, that the warranty had
especially mentioned that the watch was guaranteed to be accu-
rate only within the very particular gravitational and magnetic
fields of the Earth, and so long as the day was twenty-four hours
long and the planet didn't explode and so on. These were such
basic assumptions that even the lawyers would have missed them.
  
Luckily his watch was a wind-up one, or at least, a self-winder.
Nowhere else in the Galaxy would he have found batteries of pre-
cisely the dimensions and power specifications that were perfectly
standard on Earth.
  
`So what are all these numbers?' asked Random.
  
Arthur took it from her.
  
`These numbers round the edge mark the hours. In the little
window on the right it says THU, which means Thursday, and
the number is 14, which means it's the fourteenth day of the
month of MAY which is what it says in this window over here.
  
`And this sort of crescent-shaped window at the top tells you
about the phases of the moon. In other words it tells you how
much of the moon is lit up at night by the sun, which depends
on the relative positions of the Sun and the Moon and, well...
the Earth.'
  
`The Earth,' said Random.
  
`Yes.'
  
`And that's where you came from, and where Mum came from.'
  
`Yes.'
  
Random took the watch back from him and looked at it
again, clearly baffled by something. Then she held it up to
her ear and listened in puzzlement.
  
`What's that noise?'
  
`It's ticking. That's the mechanism that drives the watch. It's
called clockwork. It's all kind of interlocking cogs and springs
that work to turn the hands round at exactly the right speed to
mark the hours and minutes and days and so on.'
  
Random carried on peering at it.
  
`There's something puzzling you,' said Arthur. `What is it?'
  
`Yes,' said Random, at last. `Why's it all in hardware?'
Arthur suggested they went for a walk. He felt there were
things they should discuss, and for once Random seemed, if
not precisely amenable and willing, then at least not growling.
  
>From Random's point of view this was also all very weird. It
wasn't that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that
she didn't know how or what else to be.
  
Who was this guy? What was this life she was supposed to
lead? What was this world she was supposed to lead it in? And
what was this universe that kept coming at her through her eyes
and ears? What was it for? What did it want?
  
She'd been born in a spaceship that had been going from
somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to some-
where else, somewhere else had only turned out to be another
somewhere that you had to get to somewhere else again from,
and so on.
  
It was her normal expectation that she was supposed to be
somewhere else. It was normal for her to feel that she was in
the wrong place.
  
Then, constant time travel had only compounded this problem,
and had led to the feeling that she was not only always in the
wrong place, but she was also almost always there at the wrong
time.
  
She didn't notice that she felt this, because it was the only
way she ever felt, just as it never seemed odd to her that
nearly everywhere she went she needed either to wear weights
or anti-gravity suits and usually special apparatus for breathing
as well. The only places you could ever feel right were worlds you
designed for yourself to inhabit - virtual realities in the electric
clubs. It had never occurred to her that the real Universe was
something you could actually fit into.
  
And that included this Lamuella place her mother had dumped
her in. And it also included this person who had bestowed on her
this precious and magical gift of life in return for a seat upgrade.
It was just as well he had turned out to be rather kind and friendly
or there would have been trouble. Really. She'd got a specially
sharpened stone in her pocket she could cause a lot of trouble
with.
  
It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else's
point of view without the proper training.
They sat on the spot that Arthur particularly liked, on the side
of a hill overlooking the valley. The sun was going down over
the village.
  
The only thing that Arthur wasn't quite so fond of was being
able to see a little way into the next valley, where a deep dark
mangled furrow in the forest marked the spot where his ship
had crashed. But maybe that was what kept bringing him back
here. There were plenty of spots from which you could survey
the lush rolling countryside of Lamuella, but this was the one
he was drawn to, with its nagging dark spot of fear and pain
nestling just on the edge of his vision.
  
He had never been there again since he had been pulled
out of the wreckage.
  
Wouldn't.
  
Couldn't bear it.
  
In fact he had gone some of the way back to it the very next
day, while he was still numb and spinning with shock. He had
a broken leg, a couple of broken ribs, some bad burns and was
not really thinking coherently but had insisted that the villagers
take him, which, uneasily, they had. He had not managed to
get right to the actual spot where the ground had bubbled and
melted, however, and had at last hobbled away from the horror
for ever.
  
Soon, word had got around that the whole area was haunted
and no one had ventured back there ever since. The land was full
of beautiful, verdant and delightful valleys - no point in going to
a highly worrying one. Let the past hold on to itself and let the
present move forward into the future.
Random cradled the watch in her hands, slowly turning it
to let the long light of the evening sun shine warmly in the
scratches and scuffs of the thick glass. It fascinated her watching
the spidery little second hand ticking its way round. Every time
it completed a full circle, the longer of the two main hands had
moved on exactly to the next of the sixty small divisions round
the dial. And when the long hand had made its own full circle.
the smaller hand had moved on to the next of the main digits.
  
`You've been watching it for over an hour.' said Arthur,
quietly.
  
`I know, she said. `An hour is when the big hand has gone
all the way round, yes?'
  
`That's right.'
  
`Then I've been watching it for an hour and seventeen...
minutes.'
  
She smiled with a deep and mysterious pleasure and moved
very slightly so that she was resting just a little. against his arm.
Arthur felt a small sigh escape from him that had been pent up
inside his chest for weeks. He wanted to put his arm around his
daughter's shoulders, but felt it was too early yet and that she
would shy away from him. But something was working. Some-
thing was easing inside her. The watch meant something to her
that nothing in her life had so far managed to do. Arthur was
not sure that he had really understood what it was yet, but he
was profoundly pleased and relieved that something had reached
her.
  
`Explain to me again,' said Random.
  
`There's nothing really to it,' said Arthur. `Clockwork was
something that developed over hundreds of years...'
  
`Earth years.'
  
`Yes. It became finer and finer and more and more intricate.
It was highly skilled and delicate work. It had to be made very
small, and it had to carry on working accurately however much
you waved it around or dropped it.'
  
`But only on one planet?'
  
`Well, that was where it was made, you see. It was never
expected to go anywhere else and deal with different suns and
moons and magnetic fields and things. I mean the thing still
goes perfectly well, but it doesn't really mean much this far
from Switzerland.'
  
`From where?'
  
`Switzerland. That's where these were made. Small hilly coun-
try. Tiresomely neat. The people who made them didn't really
know there were other worlds.'
  
`Quite a big thing not to know.'
  
`Well, yes.'
  
`So where did they come from?'
  
`They, that is we... we just sort of grew there. We evolv-
ed on the Earth. From, I don't know, some kind of sludge or
something.'
  
`Like this watch.'
  
`Um. I don't think the watch grew out of sludge.'
  
`You don't understand!'
  
Random suddenly leaped to her feet, shouting.
  
`You don't understand! You don't understand me, you don't
understand anything! I hate you for being so stupid!'
  
She started to run hectically down the hill, still clutching
the watch and shouting that she hated him.
  
Arthur jumped up, startled and at a loss. He started to run
after her through the stringy and clumpy grass. It was hard and
painful for him. When he had broken his leg in the crash, it had
not been a clean break, and it had not healed cleanly. He was
stumbling and wincing as he ran.
  
Suddenly she turned and faced him, her face dark with anger.
  
She brandished the watch at him. `You don't understand
that there's somewhere this belongs? Somewhere it works?
Somewhere that it fits?'
  
She turned and ran again. She was fit and fleet-footed and
Arthur could not remotely keep up with her.
 
It wasn't that he had not expected being a father to be
this difficult, it was that he hadn't expected to be a father
at all, particularly not suddenly and unexpectedly on an alien
planet.
  
Random turned to shout at him again. For some reason
he stopped each time she did.
  
`Who do you think I am?' she demanded angrily. `Your
upgrade? Who do you think Mum thought I was? Some sort
of ticket to the life she didn't have?'
  
`I don't know what you mean by that,' said Arthur, panting
and hurting.
  
`You don't know what anybody means by anything!'
  
`What do you mean?'
  
`Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!'
  
`Tell me! Please tell me! What does she mean by saying
the life she didn't have?'
  
`She wished she'd stayed on Earth! She wished she hadn't
gone off with that stupid brain-dead fruit gum, Zaphod! She
thinks she would have had a different life!'
  
`But,' said Arthur, `she would have been killed! She would
have been killed when the world was destroyed!'
  
`That's a different life isn't it?'
  
`That's...'
  
`She wouldn't have had to have me! She hates me!'
  
`You can't mean that! How could anyone possibly, er, I
mean...'
  
`She had me because I was meant to make things fit for her.
That was my job. But I fitted even worse than she did! So she
just shut me off and carried on with her stupid life.'
  
`What's stupid about her life? She's fantastically successful,
isn't she? She's all over time and space, all over the Sub-Etha
TV networks...'
  
`Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!'
  
Random turned and ran off again. Arthur couldn't keep up
with her and at last he had to sit down for a bit and let the pain
in his leg subside. The turmoil in his head he didn't know what
to do with at all.
He hobbled into the village an hour later. It was getting dark. The
villagers he passed said hello, but there was a sense of nervousness
and of not quite knowing what was going on or what to do about
it in the air. Old Thrashbarg had been seen pulling on his beard
a fair bit and looking at the moon, and that was not a good sign
either.
  
Arthur went into his hut.
  
Random was sitting hunched quietly over the table.
  
`I'm sorry,' she said. `I'm so sorry.'
  
`That's all right,' said Arthur as gently as he knew how. `It's
good to, well, to have a little chat. There's so much we have to
learn and understand about each other, and life isn't, well it isn't
all just tea and sandwiches...'
  
`I'm so sorry,' she said again, sobbing.
  
Arthur went up to her and put his arm round her shoulder.
She didn't resist or pull away. Then Arthur saw what it was she
was so sorry about.
  
In the pool of light thrown by a Lamuellan lantern lay
Arthur's watch. Random had forced the back off it with the
back edge of the butter spreading knife, and all of the minute
cogs and springs and levers were lying in a tiny cock-eyed mess
where she'd been fiddling with them.
  
`I just wanted to see how it worked,' said Random, `how it
all fitted together. I'm so sorry! I can't get it back together. I'm
sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't know what to do. I'll get it
repaired! Really! I'll get it repaired!'
The following day Thrashbarg came round and said all sorts
of Bob stuff. He tried to exert a calming influence by inviting
Random to let her mind dwell on the ineffable mystery of the
giant earwig, and Random said there was no giant earwig and
Thrashbarg went very cold and silent and said she would be cast
into outer darkness. Random said good, she'd been born there,
and the next day the parcel arrived.
This was all getting a bit eventful.
  
In fact, when the parcel arrived, delivered by a kind of robot
drone that dropped out of the sky making droning robot noises,
it brought with it a sense which gradually began to permeate
through the whole village, that it was almost one event too many.
  
It wasn't the robot drone's fault. All it required was Arthur
Dent's signature or thumb print, or just a few scrapings of skin
cells from the nape of his neck and it would be on its way again.
It hung around waiting, not quite sure what all this resentment
was about. Meanwhile, Kirp had caught another fish with a head
at both ends, but on closer inspection it turned out that it was in
fact two fish cut in half and sewn together rather badly, so not
only had Kirp failed to rekindle any great interest in two-headed
fish but he had seriously cast doubt on the authenticity of the
first one. Only the pikka birds seemed to feel that everything
was exactly normal.
  
The robot drone got Arthur's signature and made its escape.
Arthur bore the parcel back to his hut and sat and looked at
it.
  
`Let's open it!' said Random, who was feeling much more
cheerful this morning now that everything around her had got
thoroughly weird, but Arthur said no.
  
`Why not?'
  
`It's not addressed to me.'
  
`Yes, it is.'
  
`No, it isn't. It's addressed to... well, it's addressed to
Ford Prefect, in care of me.'
  
`Ford Prefect? Is he the one who...'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur tartly.
  
`I've heard about him.'
  
`I expect you have.'
  
`Let' s open it anyway. What else are we going to do?'
  
`I don't know,' said Arthur, who really wasn't sure.
He had taken his damaged knives over to the forge bright
and early that morning and Strinder had had a look at them
and said that he would see what he could do.
  
They had tried the usual business of waving the knives through
the air, feeling for the point of balance and the point of flex and
so on, but the joy was gone from it, and Arthur had a sad feeling
that his sandwich making days were probably numbered.
  
He hung his head.
  
The next appearance of the Perfectly Normal Beasts was
imminent, but Arthur felt that the usual festivities of hunting
and feasting were going to be rather muted and uncertain.
Something had happened here on Lamuella, and Arthur had
a horrible feeling that it was him.
  
`What do you think it is?' urged Random, turning the parcel
over in her hands.
  
`I don't know, said Arthur. `Something bad and worrying,
though.'
  
`How do you know?' Random protested.
  
`Because anything to do with Ford Prefect is bound to be
worse and more worrying than something that isn't,' said Arthur.
`Believe me.'
  
`You're upset about something, aren't you?' said Random.
  
Arthur sighed.
  
`I'm just feeling a little jumpy and unsettled, I think,' said
Arthur.
  
`I'm sorry,' said Random, and put the package down again.
She could see that it really would upset him if she opened it.
She would just have to do it when he wasn't looking.


                          % 16

Arthur wasn't quite certain which he noticed as being missing
first. When he noticed that the one wasn't there his mind instantly
leapt to the other and he knew immediately that they were both
gone and that something insanely bad and difficult to deal with
would happen as a result.
  
Random was not there. And neither was the parcel.
  
He had left it up on a shelf all day, in plain view. It was
an exercise in trust.
  
He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a
parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust
and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them.
He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to
do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to
be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you
live.
  
You also panic.
  
Arthur ran out of the hut. It was the middle of the evening.
The light was getting dim and a storm was brewing. He could
not see her anywhere, nor any sign of her. He asked. No one
had seen her. He asked again. No one else had seen her. They
were going home for the night . A little wind was whipping round
the edge of the village, picking things up and tossing them around
in a dangerously casual manner.
  
He found Old Thrashbarg and asked him. Thrashbarg looked
at him stonily, and then pointed in the one direction that Arthur
had dreaded, and had therefore instinctively known was the way
she would have gone.
  
So now he knew the worst.
  
She had gone where she thought he would not follow her.
  
He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid,
and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse wouldn't feel like a bunch of complete idiots
riding out of.
  
With a heavy sense of the utmost foreboding he set off
on the track that led to the forest in the next valley. The first
heavy blobs of rain began to hit the ground as Arthur tried to
drag himself to some sort of run.
Random reached the crest of the hill and looked down into the
next valley. It had been a longer and harder climb than she had
anticipated. She was a little worried that doing the trip at night
was not that great an idea, but her father had been mooching
around near the hut all day trying to pretend to either her or
himself that he wasn't guarding the parcel. At last he'd had to
go over to the forge to talk with Strinder about the knives, and
Random had seized her opportunity and done a runner with the
parcel.
  
It was perfectly clear that she couldn't just open the thing
there, in the hut, or even in the village. He might have come
across her at any moment. Which meant that she had to go
where she wouldn't be followed.
  
She could stop where she was now. She had gone this way
in the hope that he wouldn't follow her. and even if he did he
would never find her up in the wooded parts of the hill with
night drawing in and the rain starting.
  
All the way up, the parcel had been jiggling under her arm.
It was a satisfyingly hunky sort of thing: a box with a square top
about the length of her forearm on each side, and about the length
of her hand deep, wrapped up in brown plasper with an ingenious
new form of self-knotting string. It didn't rattle as she shook it,
but she sensed that its weight was concentrated excitingly at the
centre.
  
Having come so far, though, there was a certain satisfaction
in not stopping here, but carrying on down into what seemed to
be almost a forbidden area - where her father's ship had come
down. She wasn't exactly certain what the word `haunted' meant,
but it might be fun to find out. She would keep going and save
the parcel up for when she got there.
  
It was getting darker, though. She hadn't used her tiny electric
torch yet, because she didn't want to be visible from a distance.
She would have to use it now, but it probably didn't matter since
she would be on the other side of the hill which divided the valleys
from each other.
  
She turned her torch on. Almost at the same moment a fork
of lightning ripped across the valley into which she was heading
and startled her considerably. As the darkness shuddered back
around her and a clap of thunder rolled out across the land she
felt suddenly rather small and lost with just a feeble pencil of
light bobbing in her hand. Perhaps she should stop after all
and open the parcel here. Or maybe she should go back and
come out again tomorrow. It was only a momentary hesitation,
though. She knew there was no going back tonight, and sensed
that there was no going back ever.
  
She headed on down the side of the hill. The rain was
beginning to pick up now. Where a short while ago it had
been a few heavy blobs it was settling in for a good pour now,
hissing in the trees, and the ground was getting slippery under
her feet.
  
At least, she thought it was the rain hissing in the trees.
Shadows were leaping and leering at her as her light bobbed
through the trees. Onwards and downwards.
  
She hurried on for another ten or fifteen minutes, soaked to the
skin now and shivering, and gradually became aware that there
seemed to be some other light somewhere ahead of her. It was
very faint and she wasn't certain if she was imagining it or not.
She turned off her torch to see. There did seem to be some sort
of dim glow ahead. She couldn't tell what it was. She turned her
torch back on and continued down the hill, towards whatever it
was.
  
There was something wrong with the woods though.
  
She couldn't immediately say what it was, but they didn't
seem like sprightly healthy woods looking forward to a good
spring. The trees were lolling at sickly angles and had a sort of
pallid, blighted look about them. Random more than once had
the worrying sensation that they were trying to reach towards
her as she passed them, but it was just a trick of the way that
her light caused their shadows to flicker and lurch.
  
Suddenly, something fell out of a tree in front of her. She
leapt backwards with alarm, dropping both the torch and the
box as she did so. She went down into a crouch, pulling the
specially sharpened rock out of her pocket.
  
The thing that had fallen out of the tree was moving. The
torch was lying on the ground and pointing towards it, and a
vast, grotesque shadow was slowly lurching through the light
towards her. She could hear faint rustling and screeching noises
over the steady hiss of the rain. She scrabbled on the ground for
the torch, found it, and shone it directly at the creature.
 
At the same moment another dropped from a tree just a few
feet away. She swung the torch wildly from one to another. She
held her rock up, ready to throw.
  
They were quite small in fact. It was the angle of the light that
had made them loom so large. Not only small. but small, furry
and cuddly. And there was another, dropping from the trees. It
fell through the beam of light, so she saw it quite clearly.
  
It fell neatly and precisely, turned, and then, like the other
two, started slowly and purposefully to advance on Random.
  
She stayed rooted to the spot. She still had her rock. poised
and ready to throw, but was increasingly conscious of the fact
that the things she had it poised and ready to throw at were
squirrels. Or at least, squirrel-like things. Soft, warm, cuddly
squirrel-like things advancing on her in a way she wasn't at all
certain she liked.
  
She shone her torch directly on the first of them. It was
making aggressive, hectoring, screeching noises, and carrying
in one of its little fists a small tattered piece of wet, pink rag.
Random hefted her rock menacingly in her hand, but it made
no impression at all on the squirrel advancing on her with its
wet piece of rag.
  
She backed away. She didn't know at all how to deal with this.
If they had been vicious snarling slavering beasts with glistening
fangs she would have pitched into them with a will, but squirrels
behaving like this she couldn't quite handle.
  
She backed away again. The second squirrel was starting
to make a flanking manoeuvre round to her right. Carrying a
cup. Some kind of acorn thing. The third was right behind it
and making its own advance. What was it carrying? Some little
scrap of soggy paper, Random thought.
  
She stepped back again, caught her ankle against the root
of a tree and fell over backwards.
  
Instantly the first squirrel darted forward and was on top of
her, advancing along her stomach with cold purpose. in its eyes,
and a piece of wet rag in its fist.
  
Random tried to jump up, but only managed to jump about
an inch. The startled movement of the squirrel on her stomach
startled her in return. The squirrel froze, gripping her skin
through her soaking shirt with its tiny claws. Then slowly, inch
by inch, it made its way up her, stopped, and proffered her the
rag.
  
She felt almost hypnotised by the strangeness of the thing and
its tiny glinting eyes. It proffered her the rag again. It pushed it
at her repeatedly, screeching insistently, till at last, nervously,
hesitantly, she took the thing from it. It continued to watch her
intently, its eyes darting all over her face . She had no idea what
to do. Rain and mud were streaming down her face and she had
a squirrel sitting on her. She wiped some mud out of her eyes
with the rag.
  
The squirrel shrieked triumphantly, grabbed the rag hack,
leapt off her, ran scampering into the dark, enclosing night,
darted up into a tree, dived into a hole in the trunk, settled
back and lit a cigarette.
 
Meanwhile Random was trying to fend off the squirrel with
the acorn cup full of rain and the one with the paper. She
shuffled backwards on her bottom.
  
`No!' she shouted. `Go away!'
  
They darted back, in fright, and then darted right forward
again with their gifts. She brandished her rock at them. `Go!'
she yelled.
  
The squirrels scampered round in consternation. Then one
darted straight at her, dropped the acorn cup in her lap, turned
and ran off into the night. The other stood quivering for a
moment, then put its scrap of paper neatly down in front of
her and disappeared as well.
  
She was alone again, but trembling with confusion. She got
unsteadily to her feet, picked up her rock and her parcel, then
paused and picked up the scrap of paper as well. It was so soggy
and dilapidated it was hard to make out what it was. It seemed
just to be a fragment of an in-flight magazine.
  
Just as Random was trying to understand exactly what it was
that this all meant, a man walked out into the clearing in which
she was standing, raised a vicious-looking gun and shot her.
Arthur was thrashing around hopelessly two or three miles
behind her, on the upward side of the hill.
  
Within minutes of setting out he had gone back again and
equipped himself with a lamp. Not an electric one. The only
electric light in the place was the one that Random had brought
with her. This was a kind of dim hurricane lamp: a perforated
metal canister from Strinder's forge, which contained a reservoir
of inflammable fish oil, a wick of knotted dried grass and was
wrapped in a translucent film made from dried membranes from
the gut of a Perfectly Normal Beast.
  
It had now gone out.
  
Arthur jiggled around with it in a thoroughly pointless kind
of a way for a few seconds. There was clearly no way he was
going to get the thing suddenly to burst into flame again in the
middle of a rainstorm, but it's impossible not to make a token
effort. Reluctantly he threw the thing aside.
  
What to do? This was hopeless. He was absolutely sodden,
his clothes heavy and billowing with the rain, and now he was
lost in the dark as well.
 
For a brief second he was lost in the blinding light, and
then he was lost in the dark again.
  
The sheet of lightning had at least shown him that he was
very close to the brow of the hill. Once he had breasted that
he would... well, he wasn't certain what he would do. He'd
have to work that out when he got there.
  
He limped forward and upwards.
  
A few minutes later he knew that he was standing panting at
the top. There was some kind of dim glow in the distance below
him. He had no idea what it was, and indeed he hardly liked to
think. It was the only thing he had to make towards, though,
so he started to make his way, stumbling, lost and frightened
towards it.
The flash of lethal light passed straight through Random and,
about two seconds later, so did the man who had shot it. Other
than that he paid her no attention whatsoever. He had shot
someone standing behind her, and when she turned to look,
he was kneeling over the body and going through its pockets.
  
The tableau froze and vanished. It was replaced a second
later by a giant pair of teeth framed by immense and perfectly
glossed red lips. A huge blue brush appeared out of nowhere
and started foamily to scrub at the teeth, which continued to
hang there gleaming in the shimmering curtain of rain.
  
Random blinked at it twice before she got it.
  
It was a commercial. The guy who had shot her was part
of a holographic in-flight movie. She must now be very close to
where the ship had crashed. Obviously some of its systems were
more indestructible than others.
  
The next half-mile of the journey was particularly trouble-
some. Not only did she have the cold and the rain and the night
to contend with, but also the fractured and thrashing remains of
the ship's on-board entertainment system. Spaceships and jetcars
and helipods crashed and exploded continuously around her,
illuminating the night, villainous people in strange hats smug-
gled dangerous drugs through her, and the combined orchestra
and chorus of the Hallapolis State Opera performed the closing
March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard from Act IV of Rizgar's
Blamwellamum of Woont in a little glade somewhere off to her
left.
  
And then she was standing on the lip of a very nasty looking and
bubbly-edged crater. There was still a faint warm glow coming
from what would otherwise have looked like an enormous piece
of caramelised chewing gum in the centre of the pit: the melted
remains of a great spaceship.
  
She stood looking at it for a longish while, and then at
last started to walk along and around the edge of the crater.
She was no longer certain what she was looking for, but kept
moving anyway, keeping the horror of the pit to her left.
  
The rain was beginning to ease off a little, but it was still
extremely wet, and since she didn't know what it was that was
in the box, whether it was perhaps something delicate or dam-
ageable, she thought she ought to find somewhere reasonably dry
to open it. She hoped she hadn't already damaged it by dropping
it.
  
She played her torch around the surrounding trees, which were
thin on the ground here, and mostly charred and broken. In the
middle distance she thought she could see a jumbled outcrop of
rock which might provide some shelter, and she started to pick
her way towards it. All around she found the detritus that had
been ejected from the ship as it broke up, before the final fireball.
  
After she had moved two or three hundred yards from the
edge of the crater she came across the tattered fragments of some
fluffy pink material, sodden, muddied and drooping amongst the
broken trees. She guessed, correctly, that this must be the remains
of the escape cocoon that had saved her father's life. She went and
looked at it more closely, and then noticed something close to it
on the ground, half covered in mud.
  
She picked it up and wiped the mud off it. It was some kind of
electronic device the size of a small book. Feebly glowing on its
cover, in response to her touch, were some large friendly letters.
They said DON'T PANIC. She knew what this was. It was her
father's copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
  
She felt instantly reassured by it, turned her head up to the
thundery sky and let some. rain wash over her face and into her
mouth.
  
She shook her head and hurried on towards the rocks. Clamber-
ing up and over them she almost immediately found the perfect
thing. The mouth of a cave. She played her torch into its inte-
rior. It seemed to be dry and safe. Picking her way carefully,
she walked in. It was quite spacious, but didn't go that deep.
Exhausted and relieved she sat on a convenient rock, put the
box down in front of her and started immediately to open it.


                          % 17

For a long period of time there was much speculation and
controversy about where the so-called `missing matter' of the
Universe had got to. All over the Galaxy the science depart-
ments of all the major universities were acquiring more and
more elaborate equipment to probe and search the hearts of
distant galaxies, and then the very centre and the very edges of
the whole Universe, but when eventually it was tracked down it
turned out in fact to he all the stuff which the equipment had
been packed in.
  
There was quite a large quantity of missing matter in the
box, little soft round white pellets of missing matter, which
Random discarded for future generations of physicists to track
down and discover all over again once the findings of the
current generation of physicists had been lost and forgotten
about.
  
Out of the pellets of missing matter she lifted the featureless
black disk. She put it down on a rock beside her and sifted
amongst all the missing matter to see if there was anything
else, a manual or some attachments or something, but there
was nothing else at all. Just the black disk.
  
She shone the torch on it.
  
As she did so, cracks began to appear along its apparently
featureless surface. Random backed away nervously, but then
saw that the thing, whatever it was, was merely unfolding itself.
  
The process was wonderfully beautiful. It was extraordinarily
elaborate but also simple and elegant. It was like a piece of
self-opening origami, or a rosebud blooming into a rose in just
a few seconds.
  
Where just a few moments earlier there had been a smoothly
curved black disk there was now a bird. A bird, hovering there.
  
Random continued to back away from it, carefully and watch-
fully.
  
It was a little like a pikka bird, only rather smaller. That is
to say, in fact it was larger, or to be more exact, precisely the
same size or, at least, not less than twice the size. It was also
both a lot bluer and a lot pinker than pikka birds, while at the
same time being perfectly black.
  
There was also something very odd about it, which Random
couldn't immediately make out.
  
It certainly shared with pikka birds the impression it gave
that it was watching something that you couldn't see.
  
Suddenly it vanished.
  
Then, just as suddenly everything went black. Random drop-
ped into a tense crouch, feeling for the specially sharpened rock
in her pocket again. Then the blackness receded and rolled itself
up into a ball and then the blackness was the bird again. It hung
in the air in front of her, beating its wings slowly and staring at
her.
  
`Excuse me,' it said suddenly, `I just have to calibrate myself.
Can you hear me when I say this?'
  
`When you say what?' demanded Random.
  
`Good,' said the bird. `And can you hear me when I say
this?' It spoke this time at a much higher pitch.
  
`Yes, of course I can!' said Random.
  
`And can you hear me when I say this?' it said, this time
in a sepulchrally deep voice.
  
`Yes!'
 
There was then a pause.
  
`No obviously not,' said the bird after a few seconds. `Good,
well your hearing range is obviously between 20 and 16 KHz. So.
Is this comfortable for you?' it said in a pleasant light tenor. `No
uncomfortable harmonics screeching away in the upper register?
Obviously not. Good. I can use those as data channels. Now.
How many of me can you see?'
  
Suddenly the air was full of nothing but interlocking birds.
Random was well used to spending time in virtual realities, but
this was something far weirder than anything she had previously
encountered. It was as if the whole geometry of space was
redefined in seamless bird shapes.
  
Random gasped and flung her arms round her face, her
arms moving through bird-shaped space.
  
`Hmmm, obviously way too many,' said the bird. `How about
now?'
  
It concertina-ed into a tunnel of birds, as if it was a bird
caught between parallel mirrors, reflecting infinitely into the
distance.
  
`What are you?' shouted Random.
  
`We'll come to that in a minute,' said the bird. `Just how
many, please?'
  
`Well, you're sort of...' Random gestured helplessly off
into the distance.
  
`I see, still infinite in extent, but at least we're homing in
on the right dimensional matrix. Good. No, the answer is an
orange and two lemons.'
  
`Lemons?'
  
`If I have three lemons and three oranges and I lose two
oranges and a lemon what do I have left?'
  
`Huh?'
  
`OK, so you think that time flows that way, do you? Interesting.
Am I still infinite?' it asked, ballooning this way and that in space.
`Am I infinite now? How yellow am I?'
  
Moment by moment the bird was going through mind-mangling
transformations of shape and extent.
  
`I can't...' said Random bewildered.
  
`You don't have to answer, I can tell from watching you
now. So. Am I your mother? Am I a rock? Do I seem huge,
squishy and sinuously intertwined? No? How about now? Am
I going backwards?'
  
For once the bird was perfectly still and steady.
  
`No,' Said Random.
  
`Well I was in fact, I was moving backwards in time. Hmmm.
Well I think we've sorted all that out now. If you'd like to know,
I can tell you that in your universe you move freely in three
dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in
a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a
fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it
gets a hit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in
dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn't want to know about.
All you really need to know for the moment is that the universe
is a lot more complicated than you might think, even if you start
from a position of thinking it's pretty damn complicated in the
first place. I can easily not say words like ``damn'' if it offends
you.'
  
`Say what you damn well like.'
  
`I will.'
  
`What the hell are you?' demanded Random.
  
`I am The Guide. In your universe I am your Guide. In fact I
inhabit what is technically known as the Whole Sort of General
Mish Mash which means... well, let me show you.'
  
It turned in mid-air and swooped out of the cave, and then
perched on a rock, just beneath an overhang, out of the rain,
which was getting heavier again.
  
`Come on,' it said, `watch this.'
  
Random didn't like being bossed around by a bird, but she
followed it to the mouth of the cave anyway, still fingering the
rock in her pocket.
  
`Rain,' said the bird. `You see? Just rain.'
  
`I know what rain is.'
  
Sheets of the stuff were sweeping through the night, moonlight
sifting through it.
  
`So what is it?'
  
`What do you mean, what is it? Look, who are you? What
were you doing in that box? Why have I spent a night running
through the forest fending off demented squirrels to find that
all I've got at the end of it is a bird asking me what rain
is. It's just water falling through the bloody air, that's what
it is. Anything else you want to know or can we go home
now?'
  
There was a long pause before the bird answered, `You
want to go home?'
  
`I haven't got a home!' Random almost shocked herself,
she screamed the words so loudly.
  
`Look into the rain...' said the bird Guide.
  
`I'm looking into the rain! What else is there to look at?'
  
`What do you see?'
  
`What do you mean, you stupid bird? I just see a load
of rain. It's just water, falling.'
  
`What shapes do you see in the water?'
  
`Shapes? There aren't any shapes. It's just, just...'
  
`Just a mish mash,' said the bird Guide.
  
`Yes...'
  
`Now what do you see?'
  
Just on the very edge of visibility a thin faint beam fanned out
of the bird's eyes. In the dry air beneath the overhang there was
nothing to see. Where the beam hit the drops of rain as they fell
through it, there was a flat sheet of light, so bright and vivid it
seemed solid.
  
`Oh great. A laser show,' said Random fractiously. `Never
seen one of those before, of course, except at about five million
rock concerts.'
  
`Tell me what you see!'
  
`Just a flat sheet! Stupid bird.'
  
`There's nothing there that wasn't there before. I'm just using
light to draw your attention to certain drops at certain moments.
Now what do you see?'
  
The light shut off.
  
`Nothing.'
  
`I'm doing exactly the same thing, but with ultra-violet light.
You can't see it.'
  
`So what's the point of showing me something I can't see?'
  
`So that you understand that just because you see something,
it doesn't mean to say it's there. And if you don't see something
it doesn't mean to say it's not there, it's only what your senses
bring to your attention.'
  
`I'm bored with this,' said Random, and then gasped.
  
Hanging in the rain was a giant and very vivid three-dimen-
sional image of her father looking startled about something.
About two miles away behind Random, her father, struggling
his way through the woods suddenly stopped. He was startled to
see an image of himself looking startled about something hanging
brightly in the rain-filled air about two miles away. About two
miles away some distance to the right of the direction in which
he was heading.
  
He was almost completely lost, convinced he was going to die
of cold and wet and exhaustion and beginning to wish he could
just get on with it. He had just been brought an entire golfing
magazine by a squirrel, as well, and his brain. was beginning to
howl and gibber.
  
Seeing a huge bright image of himself light up in the sky told
him that, on balance, he was probably right to howl and gibber
but probably wrong as far as the direction he was heading was
concerned.
  
Taking a deep breath, he turned and headed off towards
the inexplicable light show.
`OK, so what's that supposed to prove?' demanded Random. It
was the fact that the image was her father that had startled her
rather than the appearance of the image itself. She had seen her
first hologram when she was two months old and had been put in
it to play. She had seen her most recent one about half an hour
ago playing the March of the AnjaQantine Star Guard.
  
`Only that it's no more there or not there than the sheet
was,' said the bird. `It's just the interaction of water from the
sky moving in one direction, with light at frequencies your senses
can detect moving in another. It makes an apparently solid image
in your mind. But it's all just images in the Mish Mash. Here's
another one for you.'
  
`My mother!' said Random.
  
`No,' said the bird.
  
`I know my mother when I see her!'
  
The image was of a woman emerging from a spacecraft
inside a large, grey hangar-like building. She was being escorted
by a group of tall, thin purplish-green creatures. It was definite-
ly Random's mother. Well, almost definitely. Trillian wouldn't
have been walking quite so uncertainly in low gravity, or looking
around her at a boring old life-support environment with quite
such a disbelieving look on her face, or carrying such a quaint
old camera.
  
`So who is it?' demanded Random.
  
`She is part of the extent of your mother on the probability
axis,' said the bird Guide.
  
`I haven't the faintest idea what you mean.'
  
`Space, time and probability all have axes along which it
is possible to move.'
  
`Still dunno. Though I think... No. Explain.'
  
`I thought you wanted to go home.'
  
`Explain!'
  
`Would you like to see your home?'
  
`See it? It was destroyed!'
  
`It is discontinuous along the probability axis. Look!'
 
Something very strange and wonderful now swam into view
in the rain. It was a huge, bluish-greenish globe, misty and
cloud-covered, turning with. majestic slowness against a black,
starry background.
  
`Now you see it,' said the bird. `Now you don't.'
A little less than two miles away, now, Arthur Dent stood still
in his tracks. He could not believe what he could see, hanging
there, shrouded in rain, but brilliant and vividly real against the
night sky - the Earth. He gasped at the sight of it. Then, at the
moment he gasped, it disappeared again. Then it appeared again.
Then, and this was the bit that made him give up and stick straws
in his hair, it turned into a sausage.
Random was also startled by the sight of this huge, blue and
green and watery and misty sausage hanging above her. And
now it was a string of sausages, or rather it was a string of
sausages in which many of the sausages were missing. The whole
brilliant string turned and span in a bewildering dance in the
air and then gradually slowed, grew insubstantial and faded into
the glistening darkness of the night.
  
`What was that?' asked Random, in a small voice.
  
`A glimpse along the probability axis of a discontinuously
probable object.'
  
`I see.'
  
`Most objects mutate and change along their axis of prob-
ability, but the world of your origin does something slightly
different. It lies on what you might call a fault line in the
landscape of probability which means that at many probability
co-ordinates, the whole of it simply ceases to exist. It has an
inherent instability, which is typical of anything that lies within
what are usually designated the Plural sectors. Make sense?'
  
`No.'
  
`Want to go and see for yourself?'
  
`To... Earth?'
  
`Yes.'
  
`Is that possible?'
  
The bird Guide did not answer at once. It spread its wings
and, with an easy grace, ascended into the air and flew out into
the rain which, once again, was beginning to lighten.
 
It soared ecstatically up into the night sky, lights flashed
around it, dimensions dithered in its wake. It swooped and
turned and looped and turned again and came at last to rest
two feet in front of Random's face, its wings beating slowly and
silently.
  
It spoke to her again.
  
`Your universe is vast to you. Vast in time, vast in space.
That's because of the filters through which you perceive it. But
I was built with no filters at all, which means I perceive the mish
mash which contains all possible universes but which has, itself,
no size at all. For me, anything is possible. I am omniscient
and omnipotent, extremely vain, and, what is more, I come in
a handy self-carrying package. You have to work out how much
of the above is true.'
  
A slow smile spread over Random's face.
  
`You bloody little thing. You've been winding me up!'
  
`As I said, anything is possible.'
  
Random laughed. `OK,' she said. `Let's try and go to Earth.
Let's go to Earth at some point on its, er...'
  
`Probability axis?'
  
`Yes. Where it hasn't been blown up. OK. So you're the
Guide. How do we get a lift?'
  
`Reverse engineering.'
  
`What?'
  
`Reverse engineering. To me the flow of time is irrelevant.
You decide what you want. I then merely make sure that it has
already happened.'
  
`You're joking.'
  
`Anything is possible.'
  
Random frowned. `You are joking aren't you?'
  
`Let me put it another way,' said the bird. `Reverse engineering
enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of the
horribly few spaceships that passes through your galactic sector
every year or so to make up its mind about whether or not it
feels like giving you a lift. You want a lift a ship arrives and
gives you one. The pilot may think he has any one of a million
reasons why he has decided to stop and pick you up. The real
reason is that I have determined that he will.'
  
`This is you being extremely vain isn't it, little bird?'
  
The bird was silent.
  
`OK,' said Random. `I want a ship to take me to Earth.'
  
`Will this one do?'
  
It was so silent that Random had not noticed the descending
spaceship until it was nearly on top of her.
Arthur had noticed it. He was a mile away now and closing. Just
after the illuminated sausage display had drawn to its conclusion
he had noticed the faint glimmerings of further lights coming
down out of the clouds and had, to begin with, assumed it to
be another piece of flashy son et lumiere.
  
It took a moment or so for it to dawn on him that it was
an actual spaceship, and a moment or two longer for him to
realise that it was dropping directly down to where he assumed
his daughter to be. That was when, rain or no rain, leg injury
or no leg injury, darkness or no darkness, he suddenly started
really to run.
  
He fell almost immediately, slid and hurt his knee quite badly
on a rock. He slithered back up to his feet and tried again. He
had a horrible cold feeling that he was about to lose Random
for ever. Limping and cursing, he ran. He didn't know what it
was that had been in the box, but the name on it had been Ford
Prefect, and that was the name he cursed as he ran.
The ship was one of the sexiest and most beautiful ones that
Random had ever seen.
  
It was astounding. Silver, sleek, ineffable.
  
If she didn't know better she would have said it was an RW6.
As it settled silently beside her she realised that it actually was
an RW6 and she could scarcely breathe for excitement. An RW6
was the sort of thing you only saw in the sort of magazines that
were designed to provoke civil unrest.
  
She was also extremely nervous. The manner and timing of
its arrival was deeply unsettling. Either it was the most bizarre
coincidence or something very peculiar and worrying was going
on. She waited a little tensely for the ship's hatch to open. Her
Guide - she thought of it as hers now - was hovering lightly over
her right shoulder, its wings barely fluttering.
  
The hatch opened. Just a little dim light escaped. A moment
or two passed and a figure emerged. He stood still for a moment
or so, obviously trying to accustom his eyes to the darkness.
Then he caught sight of Random standing there, and seemed a
little surprised. He started to walk towards her. Then suddenly
he shouted in surprise and started to run at her.
  
Random was not a good person to take a run at on a
dark night when she was feeling a little strung out. She had
unconsciously been fingering the rock in her pocket from the
moment she saw the craft coming down.
Still running, slithering, hurtling, bumping into trees, Arthur
saw at last that he was too late. The ship had only been on the
ground for about three minutes, and now, silently, gracefully it
was rising up above the trees again, turning smoothly in the fine
speckle of rain to which the storm had now abated, climbing,
climbing, tipping up its nose and, suddenly, effortlessly, hurtling
up through the clouds.
  
Gone. Random was in it. It was impossible for Arthur to
know this, but he just went ahead and knew it anyway. She was
gone. He had had his stint at being a parent and could scarcely
believe how badly he had done at it. He tried to continue run-
ning, but his feet were dragging, his knee was hurting like fury
and he knew that he was too late.
  
He could not conceive that he could feel more wretched
and awful than this, but he was wrong.
  
He limped his way at last to the cave where Random had
sheltered and opened the box. The ground bore the indentations
of the spacecraft that had landed there only minutes before, but
of Random there was no sign. He wandered disconsolately into
the cave, found the empty box and piles of missing matter pellets
strewn around the place. He felt a little cross about that. He'd
tried to teach her about cleaning up after herself. Feeling a bit
cross with her about something like that helped him feel less
desolate about her leaving. He knew he had no means of finding
her.
  
His foot knocked against something unexpected. He bent
down to pick it up, and was thoroughly surprised to discover
what it was. It was his old Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
How did that come to be in the cave? He had never returned
to collect it from the scene of the crash. He had not wanted to
revisit the crash and he had not wanted the Guide again. He had
reckoned he was here on Lamuella, making sandwiches for good.
How did it come to be in the cave? It was active. The words on
the cover flashed DON'T PANIC at him.
  
He went out of the cave again into the dim and damp
moonlight. He sat on a rock to have a look through the old
Guide, and then discovered it wasn't a rock, it was a person.


                          % 18

Arthur leapt to his feet with a start of fear. It would be
hard to say which he was more frightened of: that he. might
have hurt the person he had inadvertently sat on or that the
person he had inadvertently sat on would hurt him back.
  
There seemed, on inspection, to be little immediate cause for
alarm on the second count. Whoever it was he had sat on was
unconscious. That would probably go a great deal of the way
towards explaining what he was doing lying there. He seemed to
be breathing OK, though. Arthur felt his pulse. That was OK as
well.
  
He was lying on his side, half curled up. It was so long ago
and far away when Arthur had last done First Aid that he really
couldn't remember what it was he was supposed to do. The first
thing he was supposed to do, he remembered, was to have a First
Aid kit about his person. Damn.
  
Should he roll him on to his back or not? Suppose he had
any broken bones? Suppose he swallowed his tongue? Suppose
he sued him? Who, apart from anything else, was he?
  
At that moment the unconscious man groaned loudly and
rolled himself over.
 
Arthur wondered if he should -
  
He looked at him.
  
He looked at him again.
  
He looked at him again, just to make absolutely sure.
  
Despite the fact that he had been thinking he was feeling
about as low as he possibly could, he experienced a terrible
sinking feeling.
  
The figure groaned again and slowly opened his eyes. It
took him a while to focus, then he blinked and stiffened.
  
`You!' said Ford Prefect.
  
`You!' said Arthur Dent.
  
Ford groaned again.
  
`What do you need to have explained this time?' he said,
and closed his eyes in some kind of despair. Five minutes later he was sitting up and rubbing the side
of his head, where he had quite a large swelling.
  
`Who the hell was that woman?' he said. `Why are we sur-
rounded by squirrels, and what do they want?'
  
`I've been pestered by squirrels all night,' said Arthur. `They
keep on trying to give me magazines and stuff.'
  
Ford frowned. `Really?' he said.
  
`And bits of rag.'
  
Ford thought.
  
`Oh,' he said. `Is this near where your ship crashed?'
  
`Yes,' said Arthur. He said it a little tightly.
  
`That's probably it. Can happen. Ship's cabin robots get
destroyed. The cyberminds that control them survive and start
infesting the local wildlife. Can turn a whole ecosystem into some
kind of helpless thrashing service industry, handing out hot towels
and drinks to passers-by. Should be a law against it. Probably is.
Probably also a law against there being a law against it so every-
body can get nice and worked up. Hey ho. What did you say?'
  
`I said, and the woman is my daughter.'
  
Ford stopped rubbing his head.
  
`Say that one more time.'
  
`I said,' said Arthur huffily, `the woman is my daughter.'
  
`I didn't know,' said Ford, `that you had a daughter.'
  
`Well, there's probably a lot you don't know about me,'
said Arthur. `Come to mention it, there's probably a lot I
don't know about me either.'
  
`Well, well, well. When did this happen then?'
  
`I'm not quite sure.'
  
`That sounds like more familiar territory,' said Ford. `Is there
a mother involved?'
  
`Trillian.'
  
`Trillian? I didn't think that...'
  
`No. Look, it's a bit embarrassing.'
  
`I remember she told me once she had a kid but only, sort
of, in passing. I'm in touch with her from time to time. Never
seen her with the kid.'
  
Arthur said nothing.
  
Ford started to feel the side of his head again in some
bemusement.
  
`Are you sure this was your daughter?' he said.
  
`Tell me what happened.'
  
`Phroo. Long story. I was coming to pick up this parcel
I'd sent to myself here care of you...'
  
`Well, what was that all about?'
  
`I think it may be something unimaginably dangerous.'
  
`And you sent it to me?' protested Arthur.
  
`Safest place I could think of. I thought I could rely on you
to be absolutely boring and not open it. Anyway, coming in at
night I couldn't find this village place. I was going by pretty basic
information. I couldn't find any signal of any kind. I guess you
don't have signals and stuff here.'
  
`That's what I like about it.'
  
`Then I did pick up a faint signal from your old copy of the
Guide, so I homed in on that, thinking that would take me to
you. I found I'd landed in some kind of wood. Couldn't figure
out what was going on. I get out, and then see this woman
standing there. I go up to say hello, then suddenly I see that
she's got this thing!'
  
`What thing?'
  
`The thing I sent you! The new Guide! The bird thing! You
were meant to keep it safe, you idiot, but this woman had the
thing right there by her shoulder. I ran forward and she hit me
with a rock.'
  
`I see,' said Arthur. `What did you do?'
  
`Well, I fell over of course. I was very badly hurt. She and
the bird started to make off towards my ship. And when I say
my ship, I mean an RW6.'
  
`A what?'
  
`An RW6 for Zark's sake. I've got this great relationship
going now between my credit card and the Guide's central
computer. You would not believe that ship, Arthur, it's...'
  
`So an RW6 is a spaceship, then?'
  
`Yes! It's - oh never mind. Look, just get some kind of
grip will you, Arthur? Or at least get some kind of catalogue.
At this point I was very worried. And, I think, semi-concussed.
I was down on my knees and bleeding profusely, so I did the
only thing I could think of, which was to beg. I said, please for
Zark's sake don't take my ship. And don't leave me stranded in
the middle of some primitive zarking forest with no medical help
and a head injury. I could be in serious trouble and so could she.'
  
`What did she say?'
  
`She hit me on the head with the rock again.'
  
`I think I can confirm that that was my daughter.'
  
`Sweet kid.'
  
`You have to get to know her,' said Arthur.
  
`She eases up does she?'
  
`No,' said Arthur, `but you get a better sense of when to duck.'
  
Ford held his head and tried to see straight.
  
The sky was beginning to lighten in the west, which was
where the sun rose. Arthur didn't particularly want to see
it. The last thing he wanted after a hellish night like this
one was some blasted day coming along and barging about the
place.
  
`What are you doing in a place like this, Arthur?' demanded
Ford.
  
`Well,' said Arthur, `making sandwiches mostly.'
  
`What?'
  
`I am, probably was, the sandwich maker for a small tribe. It
was a bit embarrassing really. When I first arrived, that is, when
they rescued me from the wreckage of this super high-technology
spacecraft which had crashed on their planet, they were very nice
to me and I thought I should help them out a bit. You know, I'm
an educated chap from a high-technology culture, I could show
them a thing or two. And of course I couldn't. I haven't got the
faintest idea, when it comes down to it, of how anything actually
works. I don't mean like video-recorders, nobody knows how to
work those. I mean just something like a pen or an artesian well
or something. Not the foggiest. I couldn't help at all. One day
I got glum and made myself a sandwich. That suddenly got
them all excited. They'd never seen one before. It was just
an idea that had never occurred to them, and I happen to
quite like making sandwiches, so it all sort of developed from
there.'
  
`And you enjoyed that?'
  
`Well, yes, I think I sort of did, really. Getting a good
set of knives, that sort of thing.'
  
`You didn't, for instance, find it mind-witheringly, explosively,
astoundingly, blisteringly dull?'
  
`Well, er, no. Not as such. Not actually blisteringly.'
  
`Odd. I would.'
  
`Well, I suppose we have a different outlook.'
  
`Yes.'
  
`Like the pikka birds.'
  
Ford had no idea what he was talking about and couldn't
be bothered to ask. Instead he said, `So how the hell do we
get out of this place?'
  
`Well I think the simplest way from here is just to follow the
way down the valley to the plains, probably take an hour, and
then walk round from there. I don't think I could face going
back up and over the way I came.'
  
`Walk round where from there?'
  
`Well, back to the village. I suppose.' Arthur sighed a little
forlornly.
  
`I don't want to go to any blasted village!' snapped Ford.
  
`We've got to get out of here!'
  
`Where? How?'
  
`I don't know, you tell me. You live here! There must be
some way off this zarking planet.'
  
`I don't know. What do you usually do? Sit around and
wait for a passing spacecraft, I suppose.'
  
`Oh yes? And how many spacecraft have visited this zark-
forsaken little fleapit recently?'
  
`Well, a few years ago there was mine that crashed here by
mistake. Then there was, er, Trillian, then the parcel delivery,
and now you, and...'
  
`Yes, but apart from the usual suspects?'
  
`Well, er, I think pretty much none, so far as I know. Pretty
quiet round here.'
  
As if deliberately to prove him wrong, there was a long,
low distant roll of thunder.
  
Ford leapt to his feet fretfully and started pacing backwards
and forwards in the feeble, painful light of the early dawn which
lay streaked against the sky as if someone had dragged a piece
of liver across it.
  
`You don't understand how important this is,' he said.
  
`What? You mean my daughter out there all alone in the
Galaxy? You think I don't...'
  
`Can we feel sorry for the Galaxy later?' said Ford. `This is
very, very serious indeed. The Guide has been taken over. It's
been bought out.'
  
Arthur leapt up. `Oh very serious,' he shouted. `Please fill
me in straight away on some corporate publishing politics! I
can't tell you how much it's been on my mind of late!'
  
`You don't understand! There's a whole new Guide!'
  
`Oh!' shouted Arthur again. `Oh! Oh! Oh! I'm incoherent
with excitement! I can hardly wait for it to come out to find
out which are the most exciting spaceports to get bored hanging
about in in some globular cluster I've never heard of. Please,
can we rush to a store that's got it right this very instant?'
  
Ford narrowed his eyes.
  
`This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn't it?'
  
`Do you know,' bellowed Arthur, `I think it is? I really think
it might just be a crazy little thing called sarcasm seeping in at
the edges of my manner of speech! Ford, I have had a fucking
bad night! Will you please try and take that into account while you
consider what fascinating bits of badger-sputumly inconsequential
trivia to assail me with next?'
  
`Try to rest,' said Ford. `I need to think.'
  
`Why do you need to think? Can't we just sit and go budum-
budumbudum with our lips for a bit? Couldn't we just dribble
gently and loll a little bit to the left for a few minutes? I can't
stand it, Ford! I can't stand all this thinking and trying to work
things out any more. You may think that I am just standing here
barking...'
  
`Hadn't occurred to me in fact.'
  
`...but I mean it! What is the point? We assume that
every time we do anything we know what the consequences
will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This
is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly
cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!'
  
`Which is exactly my point.'
  
`Thank you,' said Arthur, sitting down again. `What?'
  
`Temporal reverse engineering.'
  
Arthur put his head in his hands and shook it gently from
side to side.
  
`Is there any humane way,' he moaned, `in which I can prevent
you from telling me what temporary reverse bloody-whatsiting is?'
  
`No,' said Ford, `because your daughter is caught up in the
middle of it and it is deadly, deadly serious.'
  
Thunder rolled in the pause.
  
`All right,' said Arthur. `Tell me.'
  
`I leaped out of a high-rise office window.'
  
This cheered Arthur up.
  
`Oh!' he said. `Why don't you do it again?'
  
`I did.'
  
`Hmmm,' said Arthur, disappointed. `Obviously no good came
of it.'
  
`The first time I managed to save myself by the most astonish-
ing and - I say this in all modesty - fabulous piece of ingenious
quick-thinking, agility, fancy footwork and self-sacrifice.'
  
`What was the self-sacrifice?'
  
`I jettisoned half of a much loved and I think irreplaceable
pair of shoes.'
  
`Why was that self-sacrifice?'
  
`Because they were mine!' said Ford crossly.
  
`I think we have different value systems.'
  
`Well mine's better.'
  
`That's according to your... oh never mind. So having saved
yourself very cleverly once you very sensibly went and jumped
again. Please don't tell me why. Just tell me what happened if
you must.'
  
`I fell straight into the open cockpit of a passing jet towncar
whose pilot had just accidentally pushed the eject button when he
meant only to change tracks on the stereo. Now, even I couldn't
think that that was particularly clever of me.'
  
`Oh, I don't know,' said Arthur wearily. `I expect you probably
sneaked into his jetcar the previous night and set the pilot's least
favourite track to play or something.'
  
`No, I didn't,' said Ford.
  
`Just checking.'
  
`Though oddly enough, somebody else did. And this is the
nub. You could trace the chain and branches of crucial events
and coincidences back and back. Turned out the new Guide had
done it. That bird.'
  
`What bird?'
  
`You haven't seen it?'
  
`No.'
  
`Oh. It's a lethal little thing. Looks pretty, talks big, collapses
waveforms selectively at will.'
  
`What does that mean?'
  
`Temporal reverse engineering.'
  
`Oh,' said Arthur. `Oh yes.'
  
`The question is, who is it really doing it for?'
  
`I've actually got a sandwich in my pocket,' said Arthur,
delving. `Would you like a bit?'
  
`Yeah, OK.'
  
`It's a bit squished and sodden, I'm afraid.'
  
`Never mind.'
  
They munched for a bit.
  
`It's quite good in fact,' said Ford. `What's the meat in it?'
  
`Perfectly Normal Beast.'
  
`Not come across that one. So, the question is,' Ford con-
tinued, `who is the bird really doing it for? What's the real game
here?'
  
`Mmm,' ate Arthur.
  
`When I found the bird,' continued Ford, `which I did by a
series of coincidences that are interesting in themselves, it put
on the most fantastic multi-dimensional display of pyrotechnics
I've ever seen. It then said that it would put its services at my
disposal in my universe. I said, thanks but no thanks. It said that
it would anyway, whether I liked it or not. I said just try it, and
it said it would and, indeed, already had done. I said we'd see
about that and it said that we would. That's when I decided to
pack the thing up and get it out of there. So I sent it to you for
safety.'
  
`Oh yes? Whose?'
  
`Never you mind. Then, what with one thing and another,
I thought it prudent to jump out of the window again, being
fresh out of other options at the time. Luckily for me the jetcar
was there otherwise I would have had to fall back on ingenious
quick-thinking, agility, maybe another shoe or, failing all else,
the ground. But it meant that, whether I liked it or not, the
Guide was, well, working for me, and that was deeply worrying.'
  
`Why?'
  
`Because if you've got the Guide you think that you are the
one it's working for. Everything went swimmingly smoothly for
me from then on, up to the very moment that I come up against
the totty with the rock, then, bang, I'm history. I'm out of the
loop.'
  
`Are you referring to my daughter?'
  
`As politely as I can. She's the next one in the chain who will
think that everything is going fabulously for her. She can beat
whoever she likes around the head with bits of the landscape,
everything will just swim for her until she's done whatever she's
supposed to do and then it will be all up for her too. It's reverse
temporal engineering, and clearly nobody understood what was
being unleashed!'
  
`Like me for instance.'
  
`What? Oh, wake up, Arthur. Look, let me try it again.
The new Guide came out of the research labs. It made use
of this new technology of Unfiltered Perception. Do you know
what that means?'
  
`Look, I've been making sandwiches for Bob's sake!'
  
`Who's Bob?'
  
`Never mind. Just carry on.'
  
`Unfiltered Perception means it perceives everything. Got
that? I don't perceive everything. You don't perceive everything.
We have filters. The new Guide doesn't have any sense filters. It
perceives everything. It wasn't a complicated technological idea.
It was just a question of leaving a bit out. Got it?'
  
`Why don't I just say that I've got it, and then you can
carry on regardless.'
  
`Right. Now because the bird can perceive every possible
Universe. it is present in every possible universe. Yes?'
  
`Y... e... e... s. Ish.'
  
`So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and account-
ing departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn't that mean
we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite
number of times? Don't squint at me like that, Arthur, this is
how accountants think!'
  
`That's quite clever, isn't it?'
  
`No! It is fantastically stupid. Look. The machine's only a
little Guide. It's got some quite clever cybertechnology in it,
but because it has Unfiltered Perception, any smallest move it
makes has the power of a virus. It can propagate throughout
space, time and a million other dimensions. Anything can be
focused anywhere in any of the universes that you and I move in.
Its power is recursive. Think of a computer program. Somewhere,
there is one key instruction, and everything else is just functions
calling themselves, or brackets billowing out endlessly through an
infinite address space. What happens when the brackets collapse?
Where's the final ``end if''? Is any of this making sense? Arthur?'
  
`Sorry, I was nodding off for a moment. Something about
the Universe, yes?'
  
`Something about the Universe, yes,' said Ford, wearily. He
sat down again.
  
`All right,' he said. `Think about this. You know who I think
I saw at the Guide offices? Vogons. Ah. I see I've said a word
you understand at last.'
  
Arthur leapt to his feet.
  
`That noise,' he said.
  
`What noise?'
  
`The thunder.'
  
`what about it?'
  
`It isn't thunder. It's the spring migration of the Perfectly
Normal Beasts. It's started.'
  
`What are these animals you keep on about?'
  
`I don't keep on about them. I just put bits of them in
sandwiches.'
  
`Why are they called Perfectly Normal Beasts?'
  
Arthur told him.
  
It wasn't often that Arthur had the pleasure of seeing Ford's
eyes open wide with astonishment.


                          % 19

It was a sight that Arthur never quite got used to, or tired of.
He and Ford had tracked their way swiftly along the side of the
small river that flowed down along the bed of the valley, and
when at last they reached the margin of the plains they pulled
themselves up into the branches of a large tree to get a better
view of one of the stranger and more wonderful visions that the
Galaxy has to offer.
  
The great thunderous herd of thousand upon thousand of
Perfectly Normal Beasts was sweeping in magnificent array across
the Anhondo Plain. In the early pale light of the morning, as the
great animals charged through the fine steam of the sweat of
their bodies mingled with the muddy mist churned up by their
pounding hooves, their appearance seemed a little unreal and
ghostly anyway, but what was heart-stopping about them was
where they came from and where they went to, which appeared
to be, simply, nowhere.
  
They formed a solid, charging phalanx roughly a hundred yards
wide and half a mile long. The phalanx never moved, except that
it exhibited a slight gradual drift sideways and backwards for the
eight or nine days that it regularly appeared for. But though the
phalanx stayed more or less constant, the great beasts of which
it was composed charged steadily at upwards of twenty miles an
hour, appearing suddenly from thin air at one end of the plain,
and disappearing equally abruptly at the other end.
  
No one knew where they came from, no one knew where they
went. They were so important to the lives of the Lamuellans, it
was almost as if nobody liked to ask. Old Thrashbarg had said
on one occasion that some times if you received an answer, the
question might be taken away. Some of the villagers had privately
said that this was the only properly wise thing they'd ever heard
Thrashbarg say, and after a short debate on the matter, had put
it down to chance.
  
The noise of the pounding of the hooves was so intense
that it was hard to hear anything else above it.
  
`What did you say?' shouted Arthur.
  
`I said,' shouted Ford, `this looks like it might be some
kind of evidence of dimensional drift.'
  
`Which is what?' shouted Arthur back.
  
`Well, a lot of people are beginning to worry that space/time
is showing signs of cracking up with everything that's happening
to it. There are quite a lot of worlds where you can see how the
landmasses have cracked up and moved around just from the
weirdly long or meandering routes that migrating animals take.
This might be something like that. We live in twisted times. Still,
in the absence of a decent spaceport...'
  
Arthur looked at him in a kind of frozen way.
  
`What do you mean?' he said.
  
`What do you mean, what do I mean?' shouted Ford. `You
know perfectly well what I mean. We're going to ride our way
out of here.'
  
`Are you seriously suggesting we try to ride a Perfectly Normal
Beast?'
  
`Yeah. See where it goes to.'
  
`We'll be killed! No,' said Arthur, suddenly. `We won't be
killed. At least I won't. Ford, have you ever heard of a planet
called Stavromula Beta?'
  
Ford frowned. `Don't think so,' he said. He pulled out his
own battered old copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and accessed it. `Any funny spelling?' he said.
  
`Don't know. I've only ever heard it said, and that was
by someone who had a mouthful of other people's teeth. You
remember I told you about Agrajag?'
  
Ford thought for a moment. `You mean the guy who was
convinced you were getting him killed over and over again?'
  
`Yes. One of the places he claimed I'd got him killed was
Stavromula Beta. Someone tries to shoot me, it seems. I duck
and Agrajag, or at least, one of his many reincarnations, gets hit.
It seems that this has definitely happened at some point in time
so, I suppose, I can't get killed at least until after I've ducked
on Stavromula Beta. Only no one's ever heard of it.'
  
`Hmm.' Ford tried a few other searches of the Hitch Hiker's
Guide, but drew a blank.
  
`Nothing,' he said.
  
`I was just... no, I've never heard of it,' said Ford finally.
He wondered why it was ringing a very, very faint bell, though.
  
`OK,' said Arthur. `I've seen the way the Lamuellan hunters
trap Perfectly Normal Beasts. If you spear one in the herd it just
gets trampled, so they have to lure them out one at a time for
the kill. It's very like the way a matador works, you know, with
a brightly coloured cape. You get one to charge at you and then
step aside and execute a rather elegant swing through with the
cape. Have you got anything like a brightly coloured cape about
you?'
  
`This do?' said Ford, handing him his towel.


                          % 20

Leaping on to the back of a one-and-a-half-ton Perfectly Normal
Beast migrating through your world at a thundering thirty miles
an hour is not as easy as it might at first seem. Certainly it is
not as easy as the Lamuellan hunters made it seem, and Arthur
Dent was prepared to discover that this might turn out to be the
difficult bit.
  
What he hadn't been prepared to discover, however, was
how difficult it was even getting to the difficult bit. It was the
bit that was supposed to be the easy bit which turned out to be
practically impossible.
  
They couldn't even catch the attention of a single animal.
The Perfectly Normal Beasts were so intent on working up a
good thunder with their hooves, heads down shoulders forward,
back legs pounding the ground into porridge that it would have
taken something not merely startling but actually geological to
disturb them.
  
The sheer amount of thundering and pending was, in the
end, more than Arthur and Ford could deal with. After they had
spent nearly two hours prancing about doing increasingly foolish
things with a medium-sized floral patterned bath towel, they had
not managed to get even one of the great beasts thundering and
pounding past them to do so much as glance casually in their
direction.
  
They were within three feet of the horizontal avalanche of
sweating bodies. To have been much nearer would have been
to risk instant death, chrono-logic or no chrono-logic. Arthur
had seen what remained of any Perfectly Normal Beast which,
as the result of a clumsy mis-throw by a young and inexperienced
Lamuellan hunter, got speared while still thundering and pound-
ing with the herd.
  
One stumble was all it took. No prior appointment with death
on Stavromula Beta, wherever the hell Stavromula Beta was,
would save you or anybody else from the thunderous, mangling
pounding of those hooves.
  
At last, Arthur and Ford staggered back. They sat down,
exhausted and defeated, and started to criticise each other's
technique with the towel.
  
`You've got to flick it more,' complained Ford. `You need
more follow-through from the elbow if you're going to get those
blasted creatures to notice anything at all.'
  
`Follow-through?' protested Arthur. `You need more supple-
ness in the wrist.'
  
`You need more after-flourish,' countered Ford.
  
`You need a bigger towel.'
  
`You need,' said another voice, `a pikka bird.'
  
`You what?'
  
The voice had come from behind them. They turned, and
there, standing behind them in the early morning sun, was Old
Thrashbarg.
  
`To attract the attention of a Perfectly Normal Beast,' he
said, as he walked forward towards them, `you need a pikka
bird. Like this.'
  
>From under the rough, cassocky robe-like thing he wore he
drew a small pikka bird. It sat restlessly on Old Thrashbarg's
hand and peered intently at Bob knows what darting around
about three feet six inches in front of it.
  
Ford instantly went into the sort of alert crouch he liked to
do when he wasn't quite sure what was going on or what he
ought to do about it. He waved his arms around very slowly
in what he hoped was an ominous manner.
  
`Who is this?' he hissed.
  
`It's just Old Thrashbarg,' said Arthur quietly. `And I wouldn't
bother with all the fancy movements. He's just as experienced a
bluffer as you are. You could end up dancing around each other
all day.'
  
`The bird,' hissed Ford again. `What's the bird?'
  
`It's just a bird!' said Arthur impatiently. `It's like any other
bird. It lays eggs and goes ark at things you can't see. Or kar
or rit or something.'
  
`Have you seen one lay eggs?' said Ford, suspiciously.
  
`For heaven's sake of course I have,' said Arthur. `And
I've eaten hundreds of them. Make rather a good omelette.
The secret is little cubes of cold butter and then whipping it
lightly with...'
  
`I don't want a zarking recipe,' said Ford. `I just want to
be sure it's a real bird and not some kind of multi-dimensional
cybernightmare.'
  
He slowly stood up from his crouched position and started
to brush himself down. He was still watching the bird, though.
  
`So,' said Old Thrashbarg to Arthur. `Is it written that Bob
shall once more take back unto himself the benediction of his
once-given sandwich maker?'
  
Ford almost went back into his crouch.
  
`It's all right,' muttered Arthur, `he always talks like that.'
Aloud, he said, `Ah, venerable Thrashbarg. Um, yes. I'm afraid
I think I'm going to have to be popping off now. But young
Drimple, my apprentice, will be a fine sandwich maker in my
stead. He has the aptitude, a deep love of sandwiches, and the
skills he has acquired so far, though rudimentary as yet, will, in
time mature and, er, well, I think he'll work out OK is what I'm
trying to say.'
  
Old Thrashbarg regarded him gravely. His old grey eyes
moved sadly. He held his arms aloft, one still carrying a bobbing
pikka bird, the other his staff.
  
`O Sandwich Maker from Bob!' he pronounced. He paused,
furrowed his brow, and sighed as he closed his eyes in pious
contemplation. `Life,' he said, `will be a very great deal less
weird without you!'
  
Arthur was stunned.
  
`Do you know,' he said, `I think that's the nicest thing any-
body's ever said to me?'
  
`Can we get on, please?' said Ford.
  
Something was already happening. The presence of the pikka
bird at the end of Thrashbarg's outstretched arm was sending
tremors of interest through the thundering herd. The odd head
flicked momentarily in their direction. Arthur began to remem-
ber some of the Perfectly Normal Beast hunts he had witnessed.
He recalled that as well as the hunter-matadors brandishing their
capes there were always others standing behind them holding
pikka birds. He had always assumed that, like him, they had
just come along to watch.
  
Old Thrashbarg moved forward, a little closer to the rolling
herd. Some of the Beasts were now tossing their heads back
with interest at the sight of the pikka bird.
  
Old Thrashbarg's outstretched arms were trembling.
  
Only the pikka bird itself seemed to show no interest in
what was going on. A few anonymous molecules of air nowhere
in particular engaged all of its perky attention.
  
`Now!' exclaimed Old Thrashbarg at last. `Now you may
work them with the towel!'
  
Arthur advanced with Ford's towel, moving the way the
hunter-matadors did, with a kind of elegant strut that did not
come at all naturally to him. But now he knew what to do and
that it was right. He brandished and flicked the towel a few
times, to be ready for the moment, and then he watched.
  
Some distance away he spotted the Beast he wanted. Head
down, it was galloping towards him, right on the very edge of
the herd. Old Thrashbarg switched the bird, the Beast looked
up, tossed its head, and then, just as its head was coming down
again, Arthur flourished the towel in the Beast's line of sight. It
tossed its head again in bemusement, and its eyes followed the
movement of the towel.
  
He had got the Beast's attention.
  
>From that moment on, it seemed the most natural thing
to coax and draw the animal towards him. Its head was up,
cocked slightly to one side. It was slowing to a canter and
then a trot. A few seconds later the huge thing was standing
there amongst them, snorting, panting, sweating, and sniffing
excitedly at the pikka bird, which appeared not to have noticed
its arrival at all. With strange sort of sweeping movements of his
arms Old Thrashbarg kept the pikka bird in front of the Beast,
but always out of its reach and always downwards. With strange
sort of sweeping movements of the towel, Arthur kept drawing
the Beast's attention this way and that - always downwards.
  
`I don't think I've ever seen anything quite so stupid in
my life,' muttered Ford to himself.
  
At last, the Beast dropped, bemused but docile, to its knees.
  
`Go!' whispered Old Thrashbarg urgently, to Ford. `Go! Go
now!'
  
Ford leapt up on to the great creature's back, scrabbling
amongst its thick knotty fur for purchase, grasping great handfuls
of the stuff to hold him steady once he was in position.
  
`Now, Sandwich Maker! Go!' He performed some elaborate
sign and ritual handshake which Arthur couldn't quite get the
hang of because Old Thrashbarg had obviously made it up
on the spur of the moment, then he pushed Arthur forward.
Taking a deep breath, he clambered up behind Ford on to
the great, hot, heaving back of the beast and held on tight.
Huge muscles the size of sea lions rippled and flexed beneath
him.
  
Old Thrashbarg held the bird suddenly aloft. The Beast's
head swivelled up to follow it. Thrashbarg pushed upwards
and upwards repeatedly with his arms and with the pikka bird;
and slowly, heavily the Perfectly Normal Beast lurched up off
its knees and stood, at last, swaying slightly. Its two riders held
on fiercely and nervously.
  
Arthur gazed out over the sea of hurtling animals, straining
in an attempt to see where it was they were going, but there
was nothing but heat haze.
  
`Can you see anything?' he said to Ford.
  
`No.' Ford twisted round to glance back, trying to see if
there was any clue as to where they had come from. Still,
nothing.
  
Arthur shouted down at Thrashbarg.
  
`Do you know where they come from?' he called. `Or where
they're going?'
  
`The domain of the King!' shouted Old Thrashbarg back.
  
`King?' shouted Arthur in surprise. `What King?' The Per-
fectly Normal Beast was swaying and rocking restlessly under
him.
  
`What do you mean, what King?' shouted Old Thrashbarg.
`The King.'
  
`It's just that you never mentioned a King,' shouted Arthur
back, in some consternation.
  
`What?' shouted Old Thrashbarg. The thrumming of a thou-
sand hooves was very hard to hear over, and the old man was
concentrating on what he was doing.
  
Still holding the bird aloft, he led the Beast slowly round till
it was once more parallel with the motion of its great herd. He
moved forward. The Beast followed. He moved forward again.
The Beast followed again. At last, the Beast was lumbering for-
ward with a little momentum.
  
`I said you never mentioned a King!' shouted Arthur again.
  
`I didn't say a King,' shouted Old Thrashbarg, `I said the King.'
  
He drew back his arm and then hurled it forward with all his
strength, casting the pikka bird up into the air above the herd.
This seemed to catch the pikka bird completely by surprise as it
had obviously not been paying any attention at all to what was
going on. It took it a moment or two to work out what was
happening, then it unfurled its little wings, spread them out,
and flew.
  
`Go!' shouted Thrashbarg. `Go and meet your destiny, Sand-
wich Maker!'
  
Arthur wasn't so sure about wanting to meet his destiny
as such. He just wanted to get to wherever it was they were
going so he could get back off this creature again. He didn't
feel at all safe up there. The Beast was gathering speed as it
followed in the wake of the pikka bird. And then it was in at
the fringes of the great tide of animals, and in a moment or two,
with its head down, the pikka bird forgotten, it was running with
the herd again and rapidly approaching the point at which the
herd was vanishing into thin air. Arthur and Ford held on to the
great monster for dear life, surrounded on all sides by hurtling
mountains of bodies.
  
`Go! Ride that Beast!' shouted Thrashbarg. His distant voice
reverberated faintly in their ears. `Ride that Perfectly Normal
Beast! Ride it, ride it!'
  
Ford shouted in Arthur's ear, `Where did he say we were
going?'
  
`He said something about a King,' shouted Arthur in return,
holding on desperately.
  
`What King?'
  
`That's what I said. He just said the King.'
  
`I didn't know there was a the King,' shouted Ford.
  
`Nor did I,' shouted Arthur back.
  
`Except of course for the King,' shouted Ford. `And I don't
suppose he meant him.'
  
`What King?' shouted Arthur.
  
The point of exit was almost upon them. Just ahead of
them, Perfectly Normal Beasts were galloping into nothingness
and vanishing.
  
`What do you mean, what King?' shouted Ford. `I don't
know what King. I'm only saying that he couldn't possibly
mean the King, so I don't know what he means.'
  
`Ford, I don't know what you're talking about.'
  
`So?' said Ford. Then with a sudden rush, the stars came
on, turned and twisted around their heads, and then, just as
suddenly, turned off again.


                          % 21

Misty grey buildings loomed and flickered. They bounced up
and down in a highly embarrassing way.
  
What sort of buildings were they?
  
What were they for? What did they remind her of?
  
It's so difficult to know what things are supposed to be when
you suddenly turn up unexpectedly on a different world which has
a different culture, a different set of the most basic assumptions
about life, and also incredibly dull and meaningless architecture.
  
The sky above the buildings was a cold and hostile black.
The stars, which should have been blindingly brilliant points
of light this far from the sun were blurred and dulled by the
thickness of the huge shielding bubble. Perspex or something
like it. Something dull and heavy anyway.
  
Tricia wound the tape back again to the beginning.
  
She knew there was something slightly odd about it.
  
Well, in fact, there were about a million things that were
slightly odd about it, but there was one that was nagging at
her and she hadn't quite got it.
  
She sighed and yawned.
  
As she waited for the tape to rewind she cleared away some
of the dirty polystyrene coffee cups that had accumulated on the
editing desk and tipped them into the bin.
  
She was sitting in a small editing suite at a video production
company in Soho. She had `Do not disturb' notices plastered all
over the door, and a block on all incoming calls at the switch-
board. This was originally to protect her astonishing scoop, but
now it was to protect her from embarrassment.
  
She would watch the tape all the way through again from
the beginning. If she could bear to. She might do some fast
forwarding here and there.
  
It was about four o'clock on Monday afternoon, and she
had a kind of sick feeling. She was trying to work out what the
cause of this slightly sick feeling was, and there was no shortage
of candidates.
  
First of all, it had all come on top of the overnight flight
from New York. The red eye. Always a killer, that.
  
Then, being accosted by aliens on her lawn and flown to
the planet Rupert. She was not sufficiently experienced in that
sort of thing to be able to say for sure that that was always a
killer, but she would be prepared to bet that those who went
through it regularly cursed it. There were always stress charts
being published in magazines. Fifty stress points for losing your
job. Seventy-five points for a divorce or changing your hairstyle
and so on. None of them ever mentioned being accosted on your
lawn by aliens and then being flown to the planet Rupert, but she
was sure it was worth a few dozen points.
  
It wasn't that the journey had been particularly stressful. It
had been extremely dull in fact. Certainly it had been no more
stressful than the trip she had just taken across the Atlantic and
it had taken roughly the same time, about seven hours.
  
Well that was pretty astounding wasn't it? Flying to the outer
limits of the solar system in the same time that it took to fly to
New York meant they must have some fantastic unheard-of form
of propulsion in the ship. She quizzed her hosts about it and they
agreed that it was pretty good.
  
`But how does it work?' she had demanded excitedly. She
was still quite excited at the beginning of the trip.
  
She found that part of the tape and played it through to
herself. The Grebulons, which is what they called themselves,
were politely showing her which buttons they pressed to make
the ship go.
  
`Yes, but what principle does it work on?' she heard herself
demand, from behind the camera.
  
`Oh, you mean is it something like a warp drive or something
like that?' they said.
  
`Yes,' persisted Tricia. `What is it?'
  
`It probably is something of the kind,' they said.
  
`Like what?'
  
`Warp drive, photon drive, something like that. You'd have
to ask the Flight Engineer.'
  
`Which one is he?'
  
`We don't know. We have all lost our minds, you see.'
  
`Oh yes,' said Tricia, a little faintly. `So you said. Um,
how did you lose your minds, exactly , then?.'
  
`We don't know,' they said, patiently.
  
`Because you've lost your minds,' echoed Tricia, glumly.
  
`Would you like to watch television? It is a long flight.
We watch television. It is something we enjoy.'
  
All of this riveting stuff was on the tape, and fine. viewing
it made. First of all the picture quality was extremely poor.
Tricia didn't know why this was, exactly. She had a feeling
that the Grebulons responded to a slightly different range of
light frequencies, and that there had been a lot of ultra-violet
around which was mucking up the video camera. There were
a lot of interference patterns and video snow as well. Probably
something to do with the warp drive that none of them knew
the first thing about.
  
So what she had on tape, essentially, was a bunch of slightly
thin and discoloured people sitting around watching televisions
that were showing network broadcasts. She had also pointed the
camera out of the very tiny viewport near her seat and got a nice,
slightly streaky effect of stars. She knew it was real, but it would
have taken a good three or four minutes to fake.
  
In the end she had decided to save her precious videotape
for Rupert itself and had simply sat back and watched television
with them. She had even dozed off for a while.
  
So part of her sick feeling came from the sense that she
had had all that time in an alien spacecraft of astounding
technological design, and had spent most of it dozing in front of
reruns of M*A*S*H and Cagney and Lacey. But what else was
there to do? She had taken some photos as well, of course, all
of which had subsequently turned out to be badly fogged when
she got them back from the chemist.
  
Another part of her sick feeling probably came from the landing
on Rupert. This at least had been dramatic and hair-raising. The
ship had come sweeping in over a dark and sombre landscape, a
terrain so desperately far removed from the heat and light of its
parent sun that it seemed like a map of the psychological scars
on the mind of an abandoned child.
  
Lights blazed through the frozen darkness and guided the
ship into the mouth of some kind of cave that seemed to bend
itself open to accept the small craft.
  
Unfortunately, because of the angle of their approach, and
the depth at which the small thick viewport was set into the
craft's skin, it hadn't been possible to get the. video camera to
point directly at any of it. She ran through that bit of the tape.
  
The camera was pointing directly at the sun.
  
This is normally very bad for a video camera. But when
the sun is roughly a third of a billion miles away it doesn't
do any harm. In fact it hardly makes any impression at all.
You just get a small point of light right in the middle of the
frame, which could be just about anything. It was just one star
in a multitude.
  
Tricia fast-forwarded.
  
Ah. Now, the next bit had been quite promising. They had
emerged out of the ship into a vast, grey, hangar-like structure.
This was clearly alien technology on a dramatic scale. Huge grey
buildings under the dark canopy of the Perspex bubble. These
were the same buildings that she had been looking at at the end
of the tape. She had taken more footage of them while leaving
Rupert a few hours later, just as she was about to reboard the
spacecraft for the journey home. What did they remind her of?
  
Well, as much as anything else they reminded her of a
film set from just about any low-budget science-fiction movie of
the last twenty years. A lot larger, of course, but it all looked
thoroughly tawdry and unconvincing on the video screen. Apart
from the dreadful picture quality she had been struggling with the
unexpected effects of gravity that was appreciably lower than that
on Earth, and she had found it very hard to keep the camera from
bouncing around in an embarrassingly unprofessional way. It was
therefore impossible to make out any detail.
  
And now here was the Leader coming forward to greet
her, smiling and sticking his hand out.
  
That was all he was called. The Leader.
  
None of the Grebulons had names, largely because they
couldn't think of any. Tricia discovered that some of them had
thought of calling themselves after characters from television
programmes they had picked up from Earth, but hard as they
had tried to call each other Wayne and Bobby and Chuck, some
remnant of something lurking deep in the cultural subconscious
they had brought with them from the distant stars which were
their homes must have told them that this really wasn't right and
wouldn't do.
  
The Leader had looked pretty much like all the others.
Possibly a bit less thin. He said how much he enjoyed her shows
on TV, that he was her greatest fan, how glad he was that she
had been able to come along and visit them on Rupert and how
much everybody had been looking forward to her coming, how
he hoped the flight had been comfortable and so on. There was
no particular sense she could detect of being any kind of emissary
from the stars or anything.
  
Certainly, watching it now on videotape, he just looked like
some guy in costume and make-up, standing in front of a set
that wouldn't hold up too well if you leant against it.
  
She sat staring at the screen with her face cradled in her
hands, and shaking her head in slow bewilderment.
  
This was awful.
  
Not only was this bit awful but she knew what was coming
next. It was the bit where the Leader asked if she was hungry
after the flight, and would she perhaps like to come and have
something to eat? They could discuss things over a little dinner.
  
She could remember what she was thinking at this point.
  
Alien food.
  
How was she going to deal with it?
  
Would she actually have to eat it? Would she have access to
some sort of paper napkin she could spit stuff out into? Wouldn't
there be all sorts of differential immunity problems?
  
It turned out to be hamburgers.
  
Not only did it turn out to be hamburgers, but the hamburgers
it turned out to be were very clearly and obviously McDonald's
hamburgers which had been reheated in a microwave. It wasn't
just the look of them. It wasn't just the smell. It was the poly-
styrene clamshell packages they came in which had `McDonald's'
printed all over them.
  
`Eat! Enjoy!' said the Leader. `Nothing is too good for our
honoured guest!'
  
This was in his private apartment. Tricia had looked around it
in bewilderment that had bordered on fear but had nevertheless
got it all on videotape.
  
The apartment had a waterbed in it. And a Midi hi-fi. And
one of those tall electrically illuminated glass things which sit on
table tops and appear to have large globules of sperm floating
about in them. The walls were covered in velvet.
  
The leader lounged against a brown corduroy bean bag and
squirted breath-freshener into his mouth.
 
Tricia began to feel very scared, suddenly. She was further from
Earth than any human being, to her knowledge, had ever been,
and she was with an alien creature, who was lounging against a
brown corduroy bean bag and squirting breath-freshener into his
mouth.
  
She didn't want to make any false moves. She didn't want
to alarm him. But there were things she had to know.
  
`How did you... where did you get... this?' she asked,
gesturing around the room, nervously.
  
`The decor?' asked the Leader. `Do you like it? It is very
sophisticated. We are a sophisticated people, we Grebulons.
We buy sophisticated consumer durables... by mail order.'
  
Tricia had nodded tremendously slowly at this point.
  
`Mail order...' she had said.
  
The Leader chuckled. It was one of those dark chocolate
reassuring silky chuckles.
  
`I think you think they ship it here. No! Ha Ha! We have
arranged a special box number in New Hampshire. We make
regular pick-up visits. Ha Ha!' He lounged back in a relaxed
fashion on his bean bag, reached for a reheated french fry
and nibbled the end of it, an amused smile playing across. his
lips.
  
Tricia could feel her brain beginning to bubble very slightly.
She kept the video camera going.
  
`How do you, well, er, how do you pay for these wonderful
...things?'
  
The Leader chuckled again.
  
`American Express,' he said with a nonchalant shrug.
 
Tricia nodded slowly again. She knew that they gave cards
exclusively to just about anybody.
  
`And these?' she said, holding up the hamburger he had
presented her with.
 
`It is very easy,' said the Leader. `We stand in line.'
  
Again, Tricia realised with a cold, trickling feeling going
down her spine, that explained an awful lot.She hit the fast forward button again. There was nothing of any
use here at all. It was all nightmarish madness. She could have
faked something that would have looked more convincing.
  
Another sick feeling began to creep over her as she watched
this hopeless awful tape, and she began, with slow horror, to
realise that it must be the answer.
  
She must be...
  
She shook her head and tried to get a grip.
  
An overnight flight going East... The sleeping pills she
had taken to get her through it. The vodka she'd had to set
the sleeping pills going.
  
What else? Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that
a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as
a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had
then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer.
There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to
that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred
to her. In seventeen years.
  
She stuffed her fist into her mouth.
  
She must get help.
  
Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien
spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that... New York
had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the
bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.
  
She must have had a nervous breakdown.
  
That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous
breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got
home. She had dreamt the whole story. An alien race of people
dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote
outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with
our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature's way of telling her to check
into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.
  
She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large
coffees she'd got through as well, and realised how heavily
she was breathing and how fast.
  
Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realising that
you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She
had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was
on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had
been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down,
to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.
  
After a while, now that she was breathing normally again,
she opened them again.
  
So where had she got this tape from then?
  
It was still running.
  
All right. It was a fake.
  
She had faked it herself, that was it.
  
It must have been her who had faked it because her voice
was all over the soundtrack, asking questions. Every now and
then the camera would swing down at the end of a shot and she
would see her own feet in her own shoes. She had faked it and
she had no recollection of faking it or any idea of why she had
done it.
  
Her breathing was getting hectic again as she watched the
snowy, flickering screen.
  
She must still be hallucinating.
  
She shook her head, trying to make it go away. She had no
memory of faking any of this very obviously fake stuff. On the
other hand she did seem to have memories that were very like
the faked stuff. She continued to watch in a bewildered trance.
  
The person she imagined to be called the Leader was ques-
tioning her about astrology and she was answering smoothly and
calmly. Only she could detect the well-disguised rising panic in
her own voice.
  
The Leader pushed a button, and a maroon velvet wall
slid aside, revealing a large bank of flat TV monitors.
  
Each of the monitors was showing a kaleidoscope of different
images: a few seconds from a game show, a few seconds from a
cop show, a few seconds from a supermarket warehouse security
system, a few seconds from somebody's holiday movies, a few
seconds of sex, a few seconds of news, a few seconds of comedy.
It was clear that the Leader was very proud of all this stuff and
he was waving his hands like a conductor while continuing at the
same time to talk complete gibberish.
  
Another wave of his hands, and all the screens cleared to
form one giant computer screen showing in diagrammatic form
all the planets of the solar system and mapped out against a
background of the stars in their constellations. The display was
completely static.
  
`We have great skills,' the Leader was saying. `Great skills in
computation, in cosmological trigonometry, in three-dimensional
navigational calculus. Great skills. Great, great skills. Only we
have lost them. It is too bad. We like to have skills only they
have gone. They are in space somewhere, hurtling. With our
names and the details of our homes and loved ones. Please,' he
said, gesturing her forward to sit at the computer's console, `be
skilful for us.'
  
Obviously what happened next was that Tricia quickly set
the video camera up on its tripod to capture the whole scene.
She then walked into shot herself and sat down calmly in front
of the giant computer display, spent a few moments familiarising
herself with the interface and then started smoothly and com-
petently to pretend that she had the faintest idea what she was
doing.
 
It hadn't been that difficult, in fact.
  
She was, after all, a mathematician and astrophysicist by
training and a television presenter by experience, and what
science she had forgotten over the years she was more than
capable of making up by bluffing.
  
The computer she was working on was clear evidence that
the Grebulons came from a far more advanced and sophisticated
culture than their current vacuous state suggested, and with its
aid she was able, within about half an hour, to cobble together
a rough working model of the solar system.
  
It wasn't particularly accurate or anything, but it looked
good. The planets were whizzing around in reasonably good
simulations of their orbits, and you could watch the movement
of the whole piece of virtual cosmological clockwork from any
point within the system - very roughly. You could watch from
Earth, you could watch from Mars, etc. You could watch from
the surface of the planet Rupert. Tricia had been quite impressed
with herself, but also very impressed with the computer system
she was working on. Using a computer workstation on Earth the
task would probably have taken a year or so of programming.
  
When she was finished, the Leader came up behind her and
watched. He was very pleased and delighted with what she had
achieved.
  
`Good,' he said. `And now, please, I would like you to
demonstrate how to use the system you have just designed
to translate the information in this book for me.'
  
Quietly he put a book down in front of her.
  
It was You and Your Planets by Gail Andrews.Tricia stopped the tape again.
  
She was definitely feeling very wobbly indeed. The feeling
that she was hallucinating had now receded, but had not left
anything any easier or clearer in her head.
  
She pushed her seat back from the editing desk and wondered
what to do. Years ago she had left the field of astronomical
research because she knew, without any doubt whatsoever,
that she had met a being from another planet. At a par-
ty. And she had also known, without any doubt whatsoever,
that she would have made herself a laughing stock if she had
ever said so. But how could she study cosmology and not
say anything about the single most important thing she knew
about it? She had done the only thing she could do. She had
left.
  
Now she worked in television and the same thing had happened
again.
  
She had videotape, actual videotape of the most astounding
story in the history of, well anything: a forgotten outpost of an
alien civilisation marooned on the outermost planet of our own
solar system.
  
She had the story.
  
She had been there.
  
She had seen it.
  
She had the videotape for God's sake.
  
And if she ever showed it to anybody, she would be a
laughing stock.How could she prove any of this? It wasn't even worth thinking
about. The whole thing was a nightmare from virtually any angle
she cared to look at it from. Her head was beginning to throb.
  
She had some aspirin in her bag. She went out of the little
editing suite to the water dispenser down the corridor. She took
the aspirin and drank several cups of water.
  
The place seemed to be very quiet. Usually there were more
people bustling about the place, or at least some people bustling
around the place. She popped her head round the door of the
editing suite next to hers but there was no one there.
  
She had gone rather overboard keeping people out of her
own suite. `DO NOT DISTURB,' the notice read. `DO NOT
EVEN THINK OF ENTERING. I DON'T CARE WHAT IT
IS. GO AWAY. I'M BUSY!'
  
When she went back in she noticed that the message light
on her phone extension was winking, and wondered how long
it had been on.
  
`Hello?' she said to the receptionist.
  
`Oh, Miss McMillan, I'm so glad you called. Everybody's
been trying to reach you. Your TV company. They're desperate
to reach you. Can you call them?'
  
`Why didn't you put them through?' said Tricia.
  
`You said I wasn't to put anybody through for anything. You
said I was to deny that you were even here. I didn't know what
to do. I came up to give you a message, but...'
  
`OK,' said Tricia, cursing herself. She phoned her office.
  
`Tricia! Where the haemorrhaging fuck are you?'
  
`At the editing...'
  
`They said...'
  
`I know. What's up?'
  
`What's up? Only a bloody alien spaceship!'
  
`What? Where?'
  
`Regent's Park. Big silver job. Some girl with a bird. She
speaks English and throws rocks at people and wants someone
to repair her watch. Just get there.'Tricia stared at it.
  
It wasn't a Grebulon ship. Not that she was suddenly an
expert on extraterrestrial craft, but this was a sleek and beautiful
silver and white thing about the size of a large ocean-going yacht,
which is what it most resembled. Next to this, the structures of the
huge half-dismantled Grebulon ship looked like gun turrets on a
battleship. Gun turrets. That's what those blank grey buildings
had looked like. And what was odd about them was that by the
time she passed them again on her way to reboarding the small
Grebulon craft, they had moved. These things flitted briefly
through her head as she ran from the taxi to meet her camera
crew.
  
`Where's the girl?' she shouted above the noise of helicopters
and police sirens.
  
`There!' shouted the producer while the sound engineer hurried
to clip a radio mike to her. `She says her mother and father came
from here in some parallel dimension or something like that, and
she's got her father's watch, and... I don't know. What can I
tell you? Busk it. Ask her what it feels like to be from outer
space.'
  
`Thanks a lot, Ted,' muttered Tricia, checked that her mike
was securely clipped, gave the engineer some level, took a deep
breath, tossed her hair back and switched into her role of pro-
fessional reporter, on home ground, ready for anything.
  
At least, nearly anything.
  
She turned to look for the girl. That must be her, with
the wild hair and wild eyes. The girl turned towards her. And
stared.
  
`Mother!' she screamed, and started to hurl rocks at Tricia.


                          % 22

Daylight exploded around them. Hot, heavy sun. A desert plain
stretched out ahead in a haze of heat. They thundered out into
it.
  
`Jump!' shouted Ford Prefect.
  
`What?' shouted Arthur Dent, holding on for dear life.
  
There was no reply.
  
`What did you say?' shouted Arthur again, and then realised
that Ford Prefect was no longer there. He looked around in panic
and started to slip. Realising he couldn't hold on any longer he
pushed himself sideways as hard as he could and rolled into a
ball as he hit the ground, rolling, rolling away from the pounding
hooves.
  
What a day, he thought, as he started furiously coughing
dust up out of his lungs. He hadn't had a day as bad as this
since the Earth had been blown up. He staggered up to his
knees , and then up to his feet and started to run away. He
didn't know what from or what to, but running away seemed a
prudent move.
  
He ran straight into Ford Prefect who was standing there
surveying the scene.
  
`Look,' said Ford. `That is precisely what we need.'
  
Arthur coughed up some more dust, and wiped some other
dust out of his hair and eyes. He turned, panting, to look at
what Ford was looking at.
  
It didn't look much like the domain of a King, or the King,
or any kind of King. It looked quite inviting though.
  
First, the context. This was a desert world. The dusty earth
was packed hard and had neatly bruised every last bit of Arthur
that hadn't already been bruised by the festivities of the previous
night. Some way ahead of them were great cliffs that looked like
sandstone, eroded by the wind and what little rain presumably
fell in those parts into wild and fantastic shapes, which matched
the fantastic shapes of the giant cacti that sprouted here and there
from the arid, orange landscape.
  
For a moment Arthur dared to hope they had unexpectedly
arrived in Arizona or New Mexico or maybe South Dakota, but
there was plenty of evidence that this was not the case.
  
The Perfectly Normal Beasts, for a start, still thundering,
still pounding. They swept up in their tens of thousands from
the far horizon, disappeared completely for about half a mile,
then swept off, thundering and pounding to the distant horizon
opposite.
  
Then there were the spaceships parked in front of the Bar
\& Grill. Ah. The Domain of the King Bar \& Grill. Bit of an
anti-climax, thought Arthur to himself.
  
In fact only one of the spaceships was parked in front of
the Domain of the King Bar \& Grill. The other three were in
a parking lot by the side of the Bar and Grill. It was the one in
front that caught the eye, though. Wonderful looking thing. Wild
fins all over it, far, far too much chrome all over the fins and most
of the actual  bodywork painted in a shocking pink. It crouched
there like an immense brooding insect and looked as if it was at
any moment about to jump on something about a mile away.
  
The Domain of the King Bar \& Grill was slap bang in
the middle of where the Perfectly Normal Beasts would be
charging if they didn't take a minor transdimensional diversion
on the way. It stood on its own, undisturbed. An ordinary Bar
\& Grill. A truckstop diner. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
Quiet. The Domain of the King.
  
`Gonna buy that spaceship,' said Ford quietly.
  
`Buy it?' said Arthur. `That's not like you. I thought you
usually pinched them.'
  
`Sometimes you have to show a little respect,' said Ford.
  
`Probably have to show a little cash as well,' said Arthur.
`How the hell much is that thing worth?'
  
With a tiny movement, Ford brought his Dine-O-Charge
credit card up out of his pocket. Arthur noticed that the hand
holding it was trembling very slightly.
  
`I'll teach them to make me the restaurant critic...' breathed
Ford.
  
`What do you mean?' asked Arthur.
  
`I'll show you,' said Ford with a nasty glint in his eye.
  
`Let's go and run up a few expenses shall we?'`Couple beers,' said Ford, `and, I dunno, a couple bacon rolls,
whatever you got, oh and that pink thing outside.'
  
He flipped his card on the top of the bar and looked around
casually.
  
There was a kind of silence.
 
There hadn't been a lot of noise before, but there was defi-
nitely a kind of silence now. Even the distant thunder of the
Perfectly Normal Beasts carefully avoiding the Domain of the
King seemed suddenly a little muted.
  
`Just rode into town,' said Ford as if nothing was odd about
that or about anything else. He was leaning against the bar at
an extravagantly relaxed angle.
  
There were about three other customers in the place, sitting
at tables, nursing beers. About three. Some people would say
there were exactly three, but it wasn't that kind of a place, not
the kind of a place that you felt like being that specific in. There
was some big guy setting up some stuff on the little stage as well.
Old drum kit. Couple guitars. Country and Western kind of stuff.
  
The barman was not moving very swiftly to get in Ford's
order. In fact he wasn't moving at all.
  
`Not sure that the pink thing's for sale,' he said at last
in the kind of accent that went on for quite a long time.
  
`Sure it is,' said Ford. `How much you want?'
  
`Well...'
  
`Think of a number, I'll double it.'
  
`T'ain't mine to sell,' said the barman.
  
`So, whose?'
  
The barman nodded at the big guy setting up on the stage.
Big fat guy, moving slow, balding.
  
Ford nodded. He grinned.
  
`OK,' he said. `Get the beers, get the rolls. Keep the tab open.'Arthur sat at the bar and rested. He was used to not knowing
what was going on. He felt comfortable with it. The beer was
pretty good and made him a little sleepy which he didn't mind
at all. The bacon rolls were not bacon rolls. They were Perfectly
Normal Beast rolls. He exchanged a few professional roll-making
remarks with the barman and just let Ford get on with whatever
Ford wanted to do.
  
`OK,' said Ford, returning to his stool. `It's cool. We got
the pink thing.'
  
The barman was very surprised. `He's selling it to you?'
  
`He's giving it to us for free,' said Ford, taking a gnaw at his
roll. `Hey, no, keep the tab open though. We have some items
to add to it. Good roll.'
  
He took a deep pull of beer.
  
`Good beer,' he added. `Good ship too,' he said, eying
the big pink and chrome insect-like thing, bits of which could
be seen through the windows of the bar. `Good everything,
pretty much. You know, he said, sitting back, reflectively, `it's
at times like this that you kind of wonder if it's worth worrying
about the fabric of space/time and the causal integrity of the
multi-dimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse
of all wave forms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and
all that sort of stuff that's been bugging me. Maybe I feel that
what the big guy says is right. Just let it all go. What does it
matter? Let it go.'
  
`Which big guy?' said Arthur.
  
Ford just nodded towards the stage. The big guy was saying
`one two' into the mike a couple of times. Couple other guys
were on the stage now. Drums. Guitar.
  
The barman, who had been silent for a moment or two,
said, `You say he's letting you have his ship?'
  
`Yeah,' said Ford. `Let it all go is what he said. Take the
ship. Take it with my blessing. Be good to her. I will he good
to her.'
  
He took a pull at his beer again.
  
`Like I was saying,' he went on. `It's at times like this that
you kind of think, let it all go. But then you think of guys like
InfiniDim Enterprises and you think, they are not going to get
away with it. They are going to suffer. It is my sacred and holy
duty to see those guys suffer. Here, let me put something on the
tab for the singer. I asked for a special request and we agreed.
It's to go on the tab. OK?'
  
`OK,' said the barman, cautiously. Then he shrugged. `OK,
however you want to do it. How much?'
  
Ford named a figure. The barman fell over amongst the
bottles and glasses. Ford vaulted quickly over the bar to check
that he was all right and help him back up to his feet. He'd cut
his finger and his elbow a bit and was feeling a little woozy but
was otherwise fine. The big guy started to sing. The barman
hobbled off with Ford's credit card to get authorisation.
  
`Is there stuff going on here that I don't know about?' said
Arthur to Ford.
  
`Isn't there usually?' said Ford.
  
`No need to be like that,' said Arthur. He began to wake up.
`Shouldn't we be going?' he said suddenly. `Will that ship get us
to Earth?'
  
`Sure will,' said Ford.
  
`That's where Random will be going!' said Arthur with a
start. `We can follow her! But... er...'
  
Ford let Arthur get on with thinking things out for himself
while he got out his old edition of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
  
`But where are we on the probability axis thing?' said Arthur.
`Will the Earth be there or not there? I spent so much time look-
ing for it. All I found was planets that were a bit like it or not
at all like it, though it was clearly the right place because of the
continents. The worst version was called NowWhat where I got
bitten by some wretched little animal. That's how they commu-
nicated, you know, by biting each other. Bloody painful. Then
half the time, of course, the Earth isn't even there because it's
been blown up by the bloody Vogons. How much sense am I
making?'
  
Ford didn't comment. He was listening to something. He
passed the Guide over to Arthur and pointed at the screen.
The active entry read `Earth. Mostly harmless.'
  
`You mean it's there!' said Arthur excitedly. `The Earth
is there! That's where Random will be going! The bird was
showing her the Earth in the rainstorm!'
  
Ford motioned Arthur to shout a little less loudly. He was
listening.
  
Arthur was growing impatient. He'd heard bar singers sing
`Love Me Tender' before. He was a bit surprised to hear it
here, right in the middle of wherever the hell this was, certainly
not Earth, but then things tended not to surprise him these days
as much as formerly. The singer was quite good, as bar singers
went, if you liked that sort of thing, but Arthur was getting fretful.
  
He glanced at his watch. This only served to remind. him that
he didn't have his watch any more. Random had it, or at least
the remains of it.
  
`Don't you think we should be going?' he said, insistently.
  
`Shhh!' said Ford. `I paid to hear this song.' He seemed
to have tears in his eyes, which Arthur found a bit disturbing.
He'd never seen Ford moved by anything other than very, very
strong drink. Probably the dust. He waited, tapping his fingers
irritably, out of time with the music.
  
The song ended. The singer went on to do `Heartbreak Hotel'.
  
`Anyway,' Ford whispered, `I've got to review the restaurant.'
  
`What?'
  
`I have to write a review.'
  
`Write a review? Of this place?'
  
`Filing the review validates the expenses claim. I've fixed it so
that it happens completely automatically and untraceably. This
bill is going to need some validation,' he added quietly, staring
into his beer with a nasty smirk.
  
`For a couple of beers and a roll?'
  
`And a tip for the singer.'
  
`Why, how much did you tip him?'
  
Ford named a figure again.
  
`I don't know how much that is,' said Arthur. `What's it
worth in pounds sterling? What would it buy you?'
  
`It would probably buy you, roughly... er...' Ford screwed
his eyes up as he did some calculations in his head. `Switzerland,'
he said at last. He picked up his Hitch Hiker's Guide and started
to type.
  
Arthur nodded intelligently. There were times when he wished
he understood what on earth Ford was talking about, and other
times, like now, when he felt it was probably safer not even to
try. He looked over Ford's shoulder. `This isn't going to take
long, is it?' he said.
  
`Nah,' said Ford. `Piece of piss. Just mention that the rolls
were quite good, the beer good and cold, local wildlife nicely
eccentric, the bar singer the best in the known universe, and
that's about it. Doesn't need much. Just a validation.'
  
He touched an area on the screen marked ENTER and
the message vanished into the Sub-Etha.
  
`You thought the singer was pretty good then?'
  
`Yeah,' said Ford. The barman was returning with a piece
of paper, which seemed to be trembling in his hand.
  
He pushed it over to Ford with a kind of nervous, reverential
twitch.
  
`Funny thing,' said the barman. `The system rejected it first
couple times. Can't say it surprised me.' Beads of sweat were
standing on his brow. `Then suddenly it's, oh yeah, that's OK,
and the system... er, validates it. Just like that. You wanna
...sign it?'
  
Ford scanned the form quickly. He sucked his teeth. `This
is going to hurt InfiniDim a lot,' he said, with an appearance
of concern. `Oh well,' he added softly, `screw 'em.'
  
He signed with a flourish and handed it back to the barman.
  
`More money,' he said, `than the Colonel made for him
in an entire career of doing crap movies and casino gigs. Just
for doing what he does best. Standing up and singing in a bar.
And he negotiated it himself. I think this is a good moment for
him. Tell him I said thanks and buy him a drink.' He tossed a
few coins on the bar. The barman pushed them away.
  
`I don't think that's necessary,' he said, slightly hoarsely.
  
`Tis to me,' said Ford. `OK, we are outa here.'They stood out in the heat and the dust and looked at the big
pink and chrome thing with amazement and admiration. Or at
least, Ford looked at it with amazement and admiration.
  
Arthur just looked at it. `You don't think it's a bit overdone,
do you?'
  
He said it again when they climbed inside it. The seats
and quite a lot of the controls were covered in fine fur skin
or suede. There was a big gold monogram on the main control
panel which just read `EP'.
  
`You know,' said Ford as he fired up the ship's engines, `I
asked him if it was true that he had been abducted by aliens,
and you know what he said?'
  
`Who?' said Arthur.
  
`The King.'
  
`Which King? Oh, we've had this conversation, haven't we?'
  
`Never mind,' said Ford. `For what it's worth, he said, no.
He went of his own accord.'
  
`I'm still not sure who we're talking about,' said Arthur.
Ford shook his head. `Look,' he said, `there are some tapes
over in the compartment to your left. Why don't you choose
some music and put it on?'
  
`OK,' said Arthur, and flipped through the cartons. `Do
you like Elvis Presley?' he said.
  
`Yeah I do as a matter of fact,' said Ford. `Now. I hope this
machine can leap like it looks Like it can.' He engaged the main
drive.
  
`Yeeehaah!' shouted Ford as they shot upwards at face-tearing
speed.
  
It could.


                          % 23

The news networks don't like this kind of thing. They regard it
as a waste. An incontrovertible spaceship arrives out of nowhere
in the middle of London and it is sensational news of the highest
magnitude. Another completely different one arrives three and
a half hours later and somehow it isn't.
  
`ANOTHER SPACECRAFT!' said the headlines and news
stand billboards. `THIS ONE'S PINK.' A couple of months later
they could have made a lot more of it. The third spacecraft, half
an hour after that, the little four berth Hrundi runabout, only
made it on to the local news.
  
Ford and Arthur had come screaming down out of the strato-
sphere and parked neatly on Portland Place. It was just after
six-thirty in the evening and there were spaces free. They min-
gled briefly with the crowd that gathered round to ogle, then said
loudly that if no one else was going to call the police they would,
and made good their escape.
  
`Home...' said Arthur, a husky tone creeping into his
voice as he gazed, misty-eyed around him.
  
`Oh don't get all maudlin on me,' snapped Ford. `We have
to find your daughter and we have to find that bird thing.'
  
`How?' said Arthur. `This is a planet of five and a half
billion people, and...'
  
`Yes,' said Ford. `But only one of them has just arrived
from outer space in a large silver spaceship accompanied by a
mechanical bird. I suggest we just find a television and some-
thing to drink while we watch it. We need some serious room
service.'They checked into a large two-bedroomed suite at the Langham.
Mysteriously, Ford's Dine-O-Charge card, issued on a planet over
five thousand light years away, seemed to present the hotel's
computer with no problems.
  
Ford hit the phones straight away while Arthur attempted
to locate the television.
  
`OK,' said Ford. `I want to order up some margaritas please.
Couple of pitchers. Couple of Chef's Salads. And as much foie
gras as you've got. And also London Zoo.'
  
`She's on the news!' shouted Arthur from the next room.
  
`That's what I said,' said Ford into the phone. `London
Zoo. Just charge it to the room.'
  
`She's... Good God!' shouted Arthur. `Do you know who
she's being interviewed by?'
  
`Are you having difficulty understanding the English lan-
guage?' continued Ford. `It's the zoo just up the road from
here. I don't care if it's closed this evening. I don't want
to buy a ticket, I just want to buy the zoo. I don't care
if you're busy. This is room service, I'm in a room and I
want some service. Got a piece of paper? OK. Here's what
I want you to do. All the animals that can be safely returned
to the wild, return them. Set up some good teams of people
to monitor their progress in the wild, see that they're doing
OK.'
  
`It's Trillian!' shouted Arthur. `Or is it... er... God, I can't
stand all this parallel universe stuff. It's so bloody confusing. It
seems to be a different Trillian. It's Tricia McMillan which is
what Trillian used to be called before... er... Why don't
you come and watch, see if you can figure it out?'
  
`Just a second,' Ford shouted, and returned to his negotia-
tions with room service. `Then we'll need some natural reserves
for the animals that can't hack it in the wild,' he said. `Set up a
team to work out the best places to do that. We might need to
buy somewhere like Zaire and maybe some islands. Madagascar.
Baffin. Sumatra. Those kind of places. We'll need a wide variety
of habitats. Look, l don't see why you're seeing this as a problem.
Learn to delegate. Hire whoever you want. Get on to it. I think
you'll find my credit is good. And blue cheese dressing on the
salad. Thank you.'
  
He put the phone down and went through to Arthur, who
was sitting on the edge of his bed watching television.
  
`I ordered us some foie gras,' said Ford.
  
`What?' said Arthur, whose attention was entirely focused
on the television.
  
`I said I ordered us some foie gras.'
  
`Oh,' said Arthur, vaguely. `Um, I always feel a hit bad
about foie gras. Bit cruel to the geese, isn't it?'
  
`Fuck 'em,' said Ford, slumping on the bed. `You can't care
about every damn thing.'
  
`Well, that's all very well for you to say, but...'
  
`Drop it!' said Ford. `If you don't like it I'll have yours.
What's happening?'
  
`Chaos!' said Arthur. `Complete chaos! Random keeps on
screaming at Trillian, or Tricia or whoever it is, that she aban-
doned her and then demanding to go to a good night club. Tricia's
broken down in tears and says she's never even met Random
let alone given birth to her. Then she suddenly started howling
about someone called Rupert and said that he had lost his mind
or something. I didn't quite follow that bit, to be honest. Then
Random started throwing stuff and they've cut to a commercial
break while they try and sort it all out. Oh! They've just cut back
to the studio! Shut up and watch.'
  
A rather shaken anchorman appeared on the screen and
apologised to viewers for the disruption of the previous item.
He said he didn't have any very clear news to report, only that
the mysterious girl, who called herself Random Frequent Flyer
Dent had left the studio to, er, rest. Tricia McMillan would be,
he hoped, back tomorrow. Meanwhile, fresh reports of UFO
activity were coming in...
  
Ford leaped up off the bed, grabbed the nearest phone and
jabbed at a number.
  
`Concierge? You want to own the hotel? It's yours if you
can find out for me in five minutes which clubs Tricia McMillan
belongs to. Just charge the whole thing to this room.'


                          % 24

Away in the inky depths of space invisible movements were
being made.
  
Invisible to any of the inhabitants of the strange and tem-
peramental Plural zone at the focus of which lay the infinitely
multitudinous possibilities of the planet called Earth, but not
inconsequential to them.
  
At the very edge of the solar system, hunkered down on a
green leatherette sofa, staring fretfully at a range of TV and
computer screens sat a very worried Grebulon leader. He was
fiddling with stuff. Fiddling with his book on astrology. Fiddling
with the console of his computer. Fiddling with the displays
being fed through to him constantly from all of the Grebulons'
monitoring devices, all of them focused on the planet Earth.
  
He was distressed. Their mission was to monitor. But to
monitor secretly. He was a bit fed up with his mission, to be
honest. He was fairly certain that his mission must have been
to do more than sit around watching TV for years on end. They
certainly had a lot of other equipment with them that must have
had some purpose if only they hadn't accidentally lost all trace
of their purpose. He needed a sense of purpose in life, which
was why he had turned to astrology to fill the yawning gulf that
existed in the middle of his mind and soul. That would tell him
something, surely.
  
Well, it was telling him something.
  
It was telling him, as far as he could make out, that he
was about to have a very bad month, that things were going to
go from bad to worse if he didn't get a grip on things and start
making some positive moves and thinking things out for himself.
  
It was true. It was very clear from his star chart which
he had worked out using his astrology book and the computer
program which that nice Tricia McMillan had designed for him to
re-triangulate all the appropriate astronomical data. Earth-based
astrology had to be entirely recalculated to yield results that were
meaningful to the Grebulons here on the tenth planet out on the
frozen edges of the solar system.
  
The recalculations showed absolutely clearly and unamhigu-
ously that he was going to have a very bad month indeed,
starting with today. Because today Earth was starting to rise
into Capricorn, and that, for the Grebulon leader, who showed
all the character signs of being a classic Taurus, was very bad
indeed.
  
Now was the time, his horoscope said, for taking positive
actions, making tough decisions, seeing what needed to be done
and doing it. This was all very difficult for him, but he knew that
nobody ever said that doing tough stuff wasn't tough. The com-
puter was already tracking and predicting the second-by-second
location of the planet Earth. He ordered the great grey turrets
to swivel.Because all of the Grebulon surveillance equipment was focused
on the planet Earth, it failed to spot that there was now another
source of data in the solar system.
  
Its chances of spotting this other source of data - a massive
yellow constructor ship - accidentally were practically nil. It was
as far from the sun as Rupert was, but almost diametrically
opposite, almost hidden by the sun.
  
Almost.
  
The massive yellow constructor ship wanted to be able to
monitor events on Planet Ten without being spotted itself. It
had managed this very successfully.
  
There were all sorts of other ways in which this ship was
diametrically opposite to the Grebulons.
  
Its leader, its Captain, had a very clear idea of what his
purpose was. It was a very simple and plain one and he had been
pursuing it in his simple, plain way for a considerable period of
time now.
  
Anyone who knew of his purpose might have said that it was
a pointless and ugly one, that it wasn't the sort of purpose that
enhanced a life, put a spring in a person's step, made birds sing
and flowers bloom. Rather the reverse in fact. Absolutely the
reverse.
  
It wasn't his job to worry about that, though. It was his job
to do his job, which was to do his job. If that led to a certain
narrowness of vision and circularity of thought then it wasn't his
job to worry about such things. Any such things that came his
way were referred to others who had, in turn, other people to
refer such things to.
  
Many, many light years from here, indeed from anywhere,
lies the grim and long abandoned planet, Vogsphere. Some-
where on a fetid, fog-bound mud bank on this planet there
stands, surrounded by the dirty, broken and empty carapaces
of the last few jeweled scuttling crabs, a small stone monument
which marks the place, where it is thought, the species Vogon
Vogonblurtus first arose. On the monument there is carved an
arrow which points away into the fog, under which are inscribed
in plain, simple letters the words `The buck stops there.'
  
Deep in the bowels of his unsightly yellow ship, the Vogon
Captain grunted as he reached for a slightly faded and dog-eared
piece of paper that lay in front of him. A demolition order.
  
If you were to unravel exactly where the Captain's job, which
was to do his job which was to do his job, actually began, then it
all came down at last to this piece of paper that had been issued
to him by his immediate superior long ago. The piece of paper
had an instruction on it, and his purpose was to carry out that
instruction and put a little tick mark in the adjacent box when
he had carried it out.
  
He had carried out the instruction once before, but a number
of troublesome circumstances had prevented him from being able
to put the tick in the little box.
  
One of the troublesome circumstances was the Plural nature of
this Galactic sector, where the possible continually interfered with
the probable. Simple demolition didn't get you any further than
pushing down a bubble under a badly hung strip of wallpaper.
Anything you demolished kept on popping up again. That would
soon be taken care of.
  
Another was a small bunch of people who continually refused
to be where they were supposed to be when they were supposed
to be there. That, also, would soon be taken care of.
  
The third was an irritating and anarchic little device called
the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. That was now well and
truly taken care of and, in fact, through the phenomenal power
of temporal reverse engineering, it was now itself the agency
through which everything else would be taken care of. The
Captain had merely come to watch the final act of this drama.
He himself did not have to lift a finger.
  
`Show me,' he said.
  
The shadowy shape of a bird spread its wings and rose
into the air near him. Darkness engulfed the bridge. Dim
lights danced briefly in the black eyes of the bird as, deep in
its instructional address space, bracket after bracket was final-
ly closing, if clauses were finally ending, repeat loops halting,
recursive functions calling themselves for the last few times.
  
A brilliant vision lit up in the darkness, a watery blue and
green vision, a tube flowing through the air, shaped like a
chopped up string of sausages.
  
With a flatulent noise of satisfaction, the Vogon Captain
sat back to watch.


                          % 25

`Just there, number forty-two,' shouted Ford Prefect to the
taxi-driver. `Right here!'
  
The taxi lurched to a halt, and Ford and Arthur jumped out.
They had stopped at quite a number of cash-dispensers on the
way, and Ford chucked a fistful of money through the window
at the driver.
  
The entrance to the club was dark, smart and severe. Only
the smallest little plaque bore its name. Members knew where
it was, and if you weren't a member then knowing where it was
wasn't any help to you.
  
Ford Prefect was not a member of Stavro's though he had
once been to Stavro's other club in New York. He had a very
simple method of dealing with establishments of which he was not
a member. He simply swept in as soon as the door was opened,
pointed back at Arthur and said, `It's OK, he's with me.'
  He bounded down the dark glossy stairs, feeling very froody
in his new shoes. They were suede and they were blue, and he
was very pleased that in spite of everything else going on he had
been sharp-eyed enough to spot them in a shop window from the
back of a speeding taxi.
  
`I thought I told you not to come here.'
  
`What?' said Ford.
  
A thin, ill-looking man wearing something baggy and Italian
was walking up the stairs past them, lighting a cigarette, and had
stopped, suddenly.
  
`Not you,' he said. `Him.'
  
He looked straight at Arthur, then seemed to become a
little confused.
  
`Excuse me,' he said. `I think I must have mistaken you
for someone else.' He started on up the stairs again , but almost
immediately turned round once more, even more puzzled. He
stared at Arthur.
  
`Now what?' said Ford.
  
`What did you say?'
  
`I said, now what?' repeated Ford irritably.
  
`Yes, I think so,' said the man and swayed slightly and
dropped the book of matches he'd been carrying. His mouth
moved weakly. Then he put his hand to his forehead.
  
`Excuse me,' he said, `I'm trying desperately to remember
which drug I've just taken, but it must be one of those ones
which mean you can't remember.'
  
He shook his head and turned away again, and went up
towards the men's room.
  
`Come on,' said Ford. He hurried on downstairs, with Arthur
following nervously in his wake. The encounter had shaken him
badly and he didn't know why.
  
He didn't like places like this. For all of the dreams of Earth
and home he had had for years, he now badly missed his hut on
Lamuella with his knives and his sandwiches. He even missed
Old Thrashbarg.
  
`Arthur!'
  
It was the most astounding effect. His name was being shouted
in stereo.
  
He twisted to look one way. Up the stairs behind him he saw
Trillian hurrying down towards him in her wonderfully rumpled
Rymplon TM. She was looking suddenly aghast.
  
He twisted the other way to see what she was looking suddenly
aghast at.
  
At the bottom of the stairs was Trillian, wearing... No
- this was Tricia. Tricia that he had just seen, hysterical with
confusion, on television. And behind her was Random, looking
more wild-eyed than ever. Behind her in the recesses of the
smart, dimly lit club, the other clientele of the evening formed a
frozen tableau, staring anxiously up at the confrontation on the
stairs.
  
For a few seconds everyone stood stock still. Only the music
from behind the bar didn't know to stop throbbing.
  
`The gun she is holding,' said Ford quietly, nodding slightly
towards Random, `is a Wabanatta 3. It was in the ship she stole
from me. It's quite dangerous in fact. Just don't move for a
moment. Let's just everybody stay calm and find out what's
upsetting her.'
  
`Where do I fit?' screamed Random suddenly. The hand
holding the gun was trembling fiercely. Her other hand delved
into her pocket and pulled out the remains of Arthur's watch.
She shook it at them.
  
`I thought I would fit here,' she cried, `on the world that
made me! But it turns out that even my mother doesn't know
who I am!' She flung the watch violently aside, and it smashed
into the glasses behind the bar, scattering its innards.
  
Everyone was very quiet for a moment or two longer.
  
`Random,' said Trillian quietly from up on the stairs.
  
`Shut up!' shouted Random. `You abandoned me!'
  
`Random, it is very important that you listen to me and
understand,' persisted Trillian quietly. `There isn't very much
time. We must leave. We must all leave.'
  
`What are you talking about? We're always leaving!' She had
both hands on the gun now, and both were shaking. There was
no one in particular she was pointing it at. She was just pointing
it at the world in general.
  
`Listen,' said Trillian again. `I left you because I went to cover
a war for the network. It was extremely dangerous . At least, I
thought it was going to be. I arrived and the war had suddenly
ceased to happen. There was a time anomaly and... listen!
Please listen! A reconnaissance battleship had failed to turn up,
the rest of the fleet was scattered in some farcical disarray. It's
happening all the time now.'
  
`I don't care! I don't want to hear about your bloody job!'
shouted Random. `I want a home! I want to fit somewhere!'
  
`This is not your home,' said Trillian, still keeping her voice
calm. `You don't have one. We none of us have one. Hardly
anybody has one any more. The missing ship I was just talking
about. The people of that ship don't have a home. They don't
know where they are from. They don't even have any memory
of who they are or what they are for. They are very lost and
very confused and very frightened. They are here in this solar
system, and they are about to do something very... misguided
because they are so lost and confused. We... must... leave
... now. I can't tell you where there is to go to. Perhaps there
isn't anywhere. But here is not the place to be. Please. One more
time. Can we go?'
  
Random was wavering in panic and confusion.
  
`It's all right,' said Arthur gently. `If I'm here, we're safe.
Don't ask me to explain just now, but I am safe, so you are
safe. OK?'
  
`What are you saying?' said Trillian.
  
`Let's all just relax,' said Arthur. He was feeling very tranquil.
His life was charmed and none of this seemed real.
  
Slowly, gradually, Random began to relax, and to let the
gun down, inch by inch.
  
Two things happened simultaneously.
  
The door to the men's room at the top of the stairs opened,
and the man who had accosted Arthur came out, sniffing.
  
Startled at the sudden movement, Random lifted the gun
again just as a man standing behind her made a grab for it.
  
Arthur threw himself forward. There was a deafening explo-
sion. He fell awkwardly as Trillian threw herself down over him.
The noise died away. Arthur looked up to see the man at the top
of the stairs gazing down at him with a look of utter stupefaction.
  
`You...' he said. Then slowly, horribly, he fell apart.
  
Random threw the gun down and fell to her knees, sobbing.
I'm sorry!' she said. `I'm so sorry! I'm so, so sorry...'
  
Tricia went to her. Trillian went to her.
  
Arthur sat on the stairs with his head between his hands and
had not the faintest idea what to do. Ford was sitting on the stair
beneath him. He picked something up, looked at it with interest,
and passed it up to Arthur.
  
`This mean anything to you? he said.
  
Arthur took it. It was the book of matches which the dead
man had dropped. It had the name of the club on it. It had the
name of the proprietor of the club on it. It looked like this:

He stared at it for some time as things began slowly to reassemble
themselves in his mind. He wondered what he should do, but
he only wondered it idly. Around him people were beginning
to rush and shout a lot, but it was suddenly very clear to him
that there was nothing to be done, not now or ever. Through
the new strangeness of noise and light he could just make out
the shape of Ford Prefect sitting back and laughing wildly.
  
A tremendous feeling of peace came over him. He knew
that at last, for once and for ever, it was now all, finally, over.

In the darkness of the bridge at the heart of the Vogon ship,
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz sat alone. Lights flared briefly across the
external vision screens that lined one wall. In the air above him
the discontinuities in the blue and green watery sausage shape
resolved themselves. Options collapsed, possibilities folded into
each other, and the whole at last resolved itself out of existence.
  
A very deep darkness descended. The Vogon captain sat
immersed in it for a few seconds.
  
`Light' he said.
  
There was no response. The bird, too, had crumpled out
of all possibility.
  
The Vogon turned on the light himself. He picked up the
piece of paper again and placed a little tick in the little box.
Well, that was done. His ship slunk off into the inky void.In spite of having taken what he regarded as an extremely
positive piece of action, the Grebulon Leader ended up having
a very bad month after all. It was pretty much the same as all
the previous months except that there was now nothing on the
television any more. He put on a little light music instead.