"Douglas Adams - So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

"So long, and thanks for all the fish"

by Douglas Adams

So long, and thanks for all the fish

for Jane with thanks

to Rick and Heidi for the loan of their stable event

to Mogens and Andy and all at Huntsham  Court  for  a  number  of

unstable events

and especially to  Sonny  Metha  for  being  stable  through  all events.

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.

Chapter 1

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."

Chapter 2

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.

Chapter 3

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.

Chapter 4

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."

Chapter 5

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:

     a) they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the normal way;

     b) their lives would be otherwise in danger;

     c) 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?"

Chapter 6

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.

Chapter 7

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.

Chapter 8

Arthur awoke feeling wonderful, absolutely  fabulous,  refreshed, overjoyed  to  be home, bouncing with energy, hardly disappointed at all to discover it was the middle of February.

     He almost danced to the  fridge,  found  the  three  least  hairy things  in  it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that  time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he's picked up without knowing it  in  the Flargathon  Gas  Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of  the  Western  Hemisphere, blinded  the  other  half  and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.

     He felt strong, he felt healthy. He vigorously cleared  away  the junk mail with a spade and then buried the cat.

     Just as he was finishing that, the phone went, but he let it ring while he maintained a moment's respectful silence. Whoever it was would ring back if it was important.

     He kicked the mud off his shoes and went back inside.

     There had been a small number of significant letters in the piles of  junk  -  some  documents  from the council, dated three years earlier, relating to the proposed demolition of  his  house,  and some  other letters about the setting up of a public inquiry into the whole bypass scheme in the area; there was also an old letter from  Greenpeace,  the  ecological  pressure  group  to  which he occasionally made  contributions,  asking  for  help  with  their scheme  to  release  dolphins  and orcas from captivity, and some postcards from friends, vaguely complaining that he never got  in touch these days.

     He collected these together and put  them  in  a  cardboard  file which  he marked "Things To Do". Since he was feeling so vigorous and dynamic that morning, he even added the word "Urgent!"

     He unpacked his towel and another few odd bits  and  pieces  from the  plastic  bag he had acquired at the Port Brasta Mega-Market.  The slogan on the side was a clever and elaborate pun  in  Lingua Centauri  which  was  completely  incomprehensible  in  any other language and therefore entirely pointless for a Duty Free Shop at a spaceport. The bag also had a hole in it so he threw it away.

     He realized with a sudden twinge that something  else  must  have dropped  out  in  the  small  spacecraft  that had brought him to Earth, kindly going out of its way to drop him right  beside  the A303.  He  had  lost his battered and spaceworn copy of the thing which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable  wastes of space he had traversed. He had lost the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

     Well, he told himself, this time I really  won't  be  needing  it again.

     He had some calls to make.

     He had decided how to deal with the mass  of  contradictions  his return  journey  precipitated,  which  was  that  he would simply brazen it out.

     He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to  his  department head.

     "Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven't been  in  for six months but I've gone mad."

     "Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something  like  that.

     Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?"

     "When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?"

     "Sometime in spring I think."

     "I'll be in shortly after that."

     "Rightyho."

     He flipped through the Yellow Pages and  made  a  short  list  of numbers to try.

     "Oh hello, is that the Old Elms Hospital? Yes, I was just phoning to see if I could have a word with Fenella, er ... Fenella - Good Lord, silly me, I'll forget my own name next, er, Fenella - isn't this ridiculous? Patient of yours, dark haired girl, came in last night ..."

     "I'm afraid we don't have any patients called Fenella."

     "Oh, don't you? I mean Fiona of course, we just call her Fen ..."

     "I'm sorry, goodbye."

     Click.

     Six conversations along these lines began to take their  toll  on his  mood  of  vigorous,  dynamic  optimism,  and he decided that before it deserted him entirely he would take it down to the  pub and parade it a little.

     He  had  had  the  perfect  idea  for   explaining   away   every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled to himself as he pushed open the door which had  so  daunted  him last night.

     "Arthur!!!!"

     He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes  that  stared  at  him from  all  corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he'd had in Southern California.

Chapter 9

He accepted another pint and took a pull at it.

     "Of course, I had my own personal alchemist too."

     "You what?"

     He was getting silly and he knew  it.  Exuberance  and  Hall  and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it had is to stop you being wary of things, and the point  at  which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.

     "Oh yes," he insisted with a happy glazed smile. "It's  why  I've lost so much weight."

     "What?" said his audience.

     "Oh yes," he said  again.  "The  Californians  have  rediscovered alchemy. Oh yes."

     He smiled again.

     "Only," he said, "it's in a much more useful form than that which in  ..."  He paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble in his head. "In which the ancients used to practise  it.  Or  at least," he added, "failed to practise it. They couldn't get it to work you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn't cut it."

     "Nostradamus?" said one of his audience.

     "I didn't think he was an alchemist," said another.

     "I thought," said a third, "he was a seer."

     "He became a seer," said Arthur to his  audience,  the  component parts  of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, "because he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that."

     He took another pull at his beer. It was  something  he  had  not tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.

     "What has alchemy got to do," asked a bit of the audience,  "with losing weight?"

     "I'm glad you asked that," said Arthur. "Very glad.  And  I  will now  tell  you  what  the  connection  is between ..." He paused.  "Between those two things. The things you  mentioned.  I'll  tell you."

     He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like  watching  oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.

     "They've discovered how to turn excess body fat  into  gold,"  he said, in a sudden blur of coherence.

     "You're kidding."

     "Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."

     He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.

     "Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort of stuff they do there?"

     Three members of his audience said  they  had  and  that  he  was talking nonsense.

     "You haven't seen anything," insisted Arthur. "Oh yes," he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.

     "The evidence," he said, pointing at himself, and not missing  by more  than  a  couple  of  inches, "is before your eyes. Fourteen hours in a trance," he said, "in a tank. In a trance. I was in  a tank.  I  think,"  he  added after a thoughtful pause, "I already said that."

     He waited patiently while the next round was duly distributed. He composed  the  next bit of his story in his mind, which was going to be something about the tank needing to be orientated  along  a line  dropped  perpendicularly  from  the Pole Star to a baseline drawn between Mars and Venus, and was about to  start  trying  to say it when he decided to give it a miss.

     "Long time," he said instead, "in a tank. In a trance." He looked round severely at his audience, to make sure it was all following attentively.

     He resumed.

     "Where was I?" he said.

     "In a trance," said one.

     "In a tank," said another.

     "Oh yes," said Arthur. "Thank you. And slowly," he said  pressing onwards,  "slowly,  slowly  slowly,  all your excess body fat ...  turns ... to ..." he paused for effect, "subcoo  ...  subyoo  ...  subtoocay ..." - he paused for breath - "subcutaneous gold, which you can have surgically removed. Getting out of the tank is hell.  What did you say?"

     "I was just clearing my throat."

     "I think you doubt me."

     "I was clearing my throat."

     "She was clearing her throat," confirmed a  significant  part  of the audience in a low rumble.

     "Oh yes," said  Arthur,  "all  right.  And  you  then  split  the proceeds  ..."  he  paused  again for a maths break, "fifty-fifty with the alchemist. Make a lot of money!"

     He looked swayingly around at his audience, and  could  not  help but be aware of an air of scepticism about their jumbled faces.

     He felt very affronted by this.

     "How else,"  he  demanded,  "could  I  afford  to  have  my  face dropped?"

     Friendly arms began to help him home. "Listen," he protested,  as the  cold  February breeze brushed his face, "looking lived-in is all the rage in California at the moment. You've got to  look  as if you've seen the Galaxy. Life, I mean. You've got to look as if you've seen life. That's what I got. A face drop. Give  me  eight years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn't come back into fashion or I've wasted a lot of money."

     He lapsed into silence for a while as the friendly arms continued to help him along the lane to his house.

     "Got in yesterday," he mumbled. "I'm very happy to  be  home.  Or somewhere very like it ..."

     "Jet  lag,"  muttered  one  of  his  friends.  "Long  trip   from California. Really mucks you up for a couple of days."

     "I don't think he's been there  at  all,"  muttered  another.  "I wonder where he has been. And what's happened to him."

     After a little sleep Arthur got up and pottered round the house a bit.  He  felt  woozy  and a little low, still disoriented by the journey. He wondered how he was going to find Fenny.

     He sat and looked at the fish  bowl.  He  tapped  it  again,  and despite  being  full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its deep and resonant chime as clearly and mesmerically as before.

     Someone is trying to thank me, he thought to himself. He wondered who, and for what.

Chapter 10

"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and twenty seconds.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

     Ford Prefect suppressed a little  giggle  of  evil  satisfaction, realized  that  he  had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

     He switched the incoming signal through from the Sub-Etha Net  to the  ship's  hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted, sing-song voice spoke out with remarkable clarity round the cabin.

     "At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and thirty seconds.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

     He tweaked the volume up just a little while  keeping  a  careful eye on a rapidly changing table of figures on the ship's computer display. For the length of time he had in mind, the  question  of power  consumption became significant. He didn't want a murder on his conscience.

     "At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and  forty seconds.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

     He checked around the  small  ship.  He  walked  down  the  short corridor. "At the third stroke ..."

     He stuck his head into  the  small,  functional,  gleaming  steel bathroom.

     "it will be ..."

     It sounded fine in there.

     He looked into the tiny sleeping quarters.

     "... one ... thirty-two ..."

     It sounded a bit muffled. There was a towel hanging over  one  of the speakers. He took down the towel.

     "... and fifty seconds."

     Fine.

     He checked out the packed cargo hold, and wasn't at all satisfied with  the sound. There was altogether too much crated junk in the way. He stepped back out and waited for  the  door  to  seal.  He broke open a closed control panel and pushed the jettison button.  He didn't know why he hadn't thought of that before. A  whooshing rumbling  noise  died  away quickly into silence. After a pause a slight hiss could be heard again.

     It stopped.

     He waited for the green light to show and then  opened  the  door again on the now empty cargo hold.

     "... one ... thirty-three ... and fifty seconds."

     Very nice.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

     He then went and had a last thorough examination of the emergency suspended  animation  chamber,  which  was  where he particularly wanted it to be heard.

     "At the third stroke it will be  one  ...  thirty  ...  four  ...  precisely."

     He shivered  as  he  peered  down  through  the  heavily  frosted covering  at  the  dim bulk of the form within. One day, who knew when, it would wake, and when it did, it would know what time  it was. Not exactly local time, true, but what the heck.

     He double-checked the computer display  above  the  freezer  bed, dimmed the lights and checked it again.

     "At the third stroke it will be ..."

     He tiptoed out and returned to the control cabin.

     "... one ... thirty-four and twenty seconds."

     The voice sounded as clear as if he was hearing it over  a  phone in London, which he wasn't, not by a long way.

     He gazed out into  the  inky  night.  The  star  the  size  of  a brilliant  biscuit  crumb  he  could  see  in  the  distance  was Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather stilted, sing-song voice was being received, Pleiades Zeta.

     The bright orange curve that filled over half  the  visible  area was  the  giant  gas  planet  Sesefras  Magna, where the Xaxisian battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a  small cool blue moon, Epun.

     "At the third stroke it will be ..."

     For twenty minutes he sat and watched as the gap between the ship and  Epun  closed,  as the ship's computer teased and kneaded the numbers that would bring it into a loop around the  little  moon, close   the  loop  and  keep  it  there,  orbiting  in  perpetual obscurity.

     "One ... fifty-nine ..."

     His original plan had been to close down all external  signalling and  radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as possible unless you were actually looking at it,  but  then  he'd had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous beam, pencil-thin, broadcasting the incoming time signal  to  the planet  of the signal's origin, which it would not reach for four hundred years, travelling at light  speed,  but  where  it  would probably cause something of a stir when it did.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

     He sniggered.

     He didn't like to think of himself as  the  sort  of  person  who giggled  or  sniggered,  but  he  had  to  admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

     "At the third stroke ..."

     The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit round a little known and never visited moon. Almost perfect.

     One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation  of the  launching  of  the  ship's  little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing actions,  reactions,  tangential  forces,  all  the  mathematical poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.

     Before he left, he turned out the lights.

     As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft  zipped  out  on the  beginning  of  its  three-day  journey to the orbiting space station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a  long  pencil-thin  beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey still.

     "At the third stroke, it will be two ... thirteen ...  and  fifty seconds."

     He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud  but  he didn't have the room.

     "Beep ... beep ... beep."

Chapter 11

"April showers I hate especially."

     However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed  determined to  talk  to  him.  He  wondered  if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn't seem to be one free in the  whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.

     "Bloody April showers. Hate hate hate."

     Arthur stared, frowning, out of the window. A light, sunny  spray of  rain  hung  over the motorway. Two months he'd been back now.  Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably  easy.

     People  had  such  extraordinarily short memories, including him.  Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now  seemed  to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped from the tv and now kept  in  the  back  of  a  cupboard  without bothering to watch.

     One effect that still lingered though, was his joy at being back.  Now  that  the  Earth's  atmosphere  had closed over his head for good,  he  thought,  wrongly,  everything  within  it  gave   him extraordinary  pleasure.  Looking  at  the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.

     "Well, I like them," he said suddenly, "and for all  the  obvious reasons.  They're light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good."

     The man snorted derisively.

     "That's what they all say," he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.

     He was a lorry driver. Arthur  knew  this  because  his  opening, unprovoked  remark  had been, "I'm a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic isn't it? Bloody ironic."

     If there was a sequitur hidden in this  remark,  Arthur  had  not been  able  to  divine  it  and  had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.

     But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now.  "They  all  say  that  about  bloody April showers," he said. "So bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather."

     He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something about the government.

     "What I want to know is this," he said, "if it's going to be nice weather,  why,"  he almost spat, "can't it be nice without bloody raining?"

     Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

     "Well, there you go," he said and instead got up himself. "Bye."

     He stopped off at the service  station  shop,  then  walked  back through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain on his face. There was even, he  noticed,  a  faint  rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.

     He climbed into his battered  but  adored  old  black  Golf  GTi, squealed  the  tyres,  and  headed out past the islands of petrol pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.

     He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere  of  the  Earth  had closed finally and for ever above his head.

     He was wrong to think that it  would  ever  be  possible  to  put behind  him  the  tangled  web  of  irresolutions  into which his galactic travels had dragged him.

     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."

Chapter 12

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.

Chapter 13

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.

Chapter 14

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?"

Chapter 15

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.

Chapter 16

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.