The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  And again, he felt the fracture.

  Again he couldn’t find it. This time, whatever his instincts were 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 drooped, 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 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 rosebushes of one of his neighbors, John Ainsworth. His rosebushes were carefully tended, pruned back for the winter, strapped to canes and labeled, 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’d 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 rang, 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 space-worn copy of the thing which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable wastes of space he had traversed. He had lost The Hitchhiker’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 start hibernating?”

  “Sometime in spring, I think.”

  “I’ll be in shortly after that.”

  “Righty-ho.”

  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 meant 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 the perfect idea for explaining away every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled 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 has 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 practice it. Or at least,” he added, “failed to practice 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 maneuvered 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 blurt 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 oriented along a line dropped perpendicularly from the Pole Star to a base line 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 onward, “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 math 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 skepticism 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 very 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 fishbowl. 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 superb hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted singsong 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 onto the new 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 were hearing it over a p
hone in London, which he wasn’t, not by a long way.

  He gazed out into the inky night. The star he could see in the distance the size of a brilliant biscuit crumb was Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather stilted, singsong 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 merely 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 signaling 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, traveling 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.