The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “Now,” said Arthur, “take the weight off your right foot.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  She had never seen the gutter from this angle before, and it looked to her now as if there might be a bird’s nest as well as all the mud and gunge up there. If she leaned forward just a little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably see it more clearly.

  Arthur was alarmed to see that someone down in the alley was trying to steal her bicycle. He particularly didn’t want to get involved in an argument at the moment and hoped that the guy would do it quietly and not look up.

  He had the quiet shifty look of someone who habitually stole bicycles in alleys and habitually didn’t expect to find their owners hovering several feet above him. He was relaxed by both these habits, and went about his job with purpose and concentration, and when he found that the bike was unarguably bound to an iron bar embedded in concrete by hoops of tungsten carbide, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.

  Arthur let out a long-held breath.

  “See what a piece of eggshell I have found you,” said Fenchurch in his ear.

  Chapter 25

  Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects.

  And the reasons for this are obvious: editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

  Like this, for instance: “Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up the stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room, took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes one by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor. He put on his pajamas, the blue ones with the stripes. He washed his face and hands, brushed his teeth, went to the bathroom, realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong order, had to wash his hands again, and went to bed. He read for fifteen minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that trying to work out where in the book he had got to the previous night, then he turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.

  “It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.

  “After that he moved restlessly in his sleep for a moment and then turned over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after this his eyes flickered briefly and he slightly scratched his nose, though there was still a good twenty minutes to go before he turned back onto his left side. And so he whiled the night away, sleeping.

  “At four he got up and went to the bathroom again. He opened the door to the bathroom …” and so on.

  It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. You don’t, in short, want to know.

  But there are other omissions as well, besides the toothbrushing-and-trying-to-find-fresh-socks variety, and in some of these people have often seemed inordinately interested.

  What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?

  To which the answer was, of course, mind your own business.

  And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on the planet Krikkit? Just because the planet didn’t have Fuolornis Fire Dragons or Dire Straits doesn’t mean that the whole planet just sat up every night reading.

  Or to take a more specific example, what about the night after the committee meeting party on prehistoric Earth when Arthur found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon rise over the softly burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of staring every morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in the art department of an advertising agency on the planet Golgafrincham? What then? What happened next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.

  The next one didn’t resume the story till five years later, and you can, claim some, take discretion too far. “This Arthur Dent,” comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the Galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep-space probe thought to originate from another alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, “what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”

  Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

  Chapter 26

  Arthur Dent very much hoped, for an unworthy moment, as they drifted up, that his friends who had always found him pleasant but dull or, more latterly, odd but dull, were having a good time in the pub, but that was the last time, for a while, that he thought of them.

  They drifted up, spiraling slowly around each other, like sycamore seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except going the other way.

  And as they drifted up, their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.

  Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cars going along the Euston Road and out toward the Westway flyover, on keeping the street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody in Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.

  Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings of lights of London—London, Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the strangely colored fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the Galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky above them, but London—swayed, swaying and turning, turned.

  “Try a swoop,” he called to Fenchurch.

  “What?”

  Her voice seemed strangely clear but distant in all the vast empty air. It was breathy and faint with disbelief—all those things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.

  “We’re flying …” she said.

  “A trifle,” called Arthur, “think nothing of it. Try a swoop.”

  “A sw—”

  Her hand caught his, and in a sudden second her weight caught it, too, and stunningly, she was gone, tumbling beneath him, clawing wildly at nothing.

  Physics glanced at Arthur and, clotted with horror, he was gone, too, sick with giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but his voice.

  They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn’t do this sort of thing here.

  He couldn’t catch her because this was London, and not a million miles from here—seven hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in Pisa, where Galileo had clearly demonstrated that two falling bodies fell at exactly the same rate of acceleration irrespective of their relative weights.

  They fell.

  Arthur realized as he fell, giddily and sickeningly, that if he was going to hang around in the sky believing everything that the Italians had to say about physics when they couldn’t even keep a simple tower straight, that they were in dead trouble, and he damn well did fall faster than Fenchurch.

  He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip on her shoulders. He got it.

  Fine. They were now falling together, which was all very sweet and romantic, but didn’t solve the basic problem, which was that they were falling, and the ground wasn’t waiting around to see if he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to meet them like an express train.

  He couldn’t support her weight, he hadn’t anything he could support it with or against. The only thing he could think was that they were obviously going to die, and if he wanted anything other than the obvious to happen he was going to have to do something other than the obvious. Here he felt he was on familiar territory.

  He let go of her, pushed her away, and when she tu
rned her face to him in a gasp of stunned horror, caught her little finger with his little finger and swung her back upward, tumbling clumsily up after her.

  “Shit,” she said, as she sat panting and breathless on absolutely nothing at all, and when she had recovered herself they fled on up into the night.

  Just below cloud level they paused and scanned where they had impossibly come. The ground was something not to regard with any too firm or steady eye, but merely to glance at, as it were, in passing.

  Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found that if she judged herself right against a body of wind she could pull off some really quite dazzling ones with a little pirouette at the end, followed by a little drop which made her dress billow around her, and this is where readers who are keen to know what Marvin and Ford Prefect have been up to all this while should look ahead to later chapters, because Arthur now could wait no longer and helped her take it off.

  It drifted down and away whipped by the wind until it was a speck which finally vanished, and for obvious complicated reasons revolutionized the life of a family in Hounslow, over whose washing line it was discovered draped in the morning.

  In a mute embrace, they drifted up till they were swimming among the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering around the wings of an airplane but never feel because you are sitting warm inside the stuffy airplane and looking through the little scratchy Plexiglas window while somebody else’s son tries patiently to pour warm milk into your shirt.

  Arthur and Fenchurch could feel them, wispy cold and thin, wreathing round their bodies, very cold, very thin. They felt, even Fenchurch, now protected from the elements only by a couple of fragments from Marks and Spencer, that if they were not going to let the force of gravity bother them, then mere cold or paucity of atmosphere could go and whistle.

  The two fragments from Marks and Spencer which, as Fenchurch rose now into the misty body of the clouds, Arthur removed very, very slowly, which is the only way it’s possible to do it when you’re flying and also not using your hands, went on to create considerable havoc in the morning in, respectively, counting from top to bottom, Isleworth and Richmond.

  They were in the cloud for a long time, because it was stacked very high, and when finally they emerged wetly above it, Fenchurch slowly spinning like a starfish lapped by a rising tide pool, they found that above the clouds is where the night gets seriously moonlit.

  The light is darkly brilliant. There are different mountains up there, but they are mountains with their own white Arctic snows.

  They had emerged at the top of the high-stacked cumulonimbus, and now began lazily to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch eased Arthur in turn from his clothes, pried him free of them till all were gone, winding their surprised way down into the enveloping whiteness.

  She kissed him, kissed his neck, his chest, and soon they were drifting on, turning slowly, in a kind of speechless T-shape, which might have caused even a Fuolornis Fire Dragon, had one flown past, replete with pizza, to flap its wings and cough a little.

  There were, however, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons in the clouds nor could there be for, like the dinosaurs, the dodos, and the Greater Drubbered Wintwock of Stegbartle Major in the Constellation Fraz, and unlike the Boeing 747 which is in plentiful supply, they are, sadly, extinct, and the Universe shall never know their like again.

  The reason that a Boeing 747 crops up rather unexpectedly in the above list is not unconnected with the fact that something very similar happened in the lives of Arthur and Fenchurch a moment or two later.

  They are big things, terrifyingly big. You know when one is in the air with you. There is a thunderous attack of air, a moving wall of screaming wind, and you get tossed aside, if you are foolish enough to be doing anything remotely like what Arthur and Fenchurch were doing in its close vicinity, like butterflies in the Blitz.

  This time, however, there was no heart-sickening fall or loss of nerve, just a regrouping moments later and a wonderful new idea enthusiastically signaled through the buffeting noise.

  Mrs. E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts, was an elderly lady; indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.

  With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shade and looked over the wing.

  At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought, no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.

  By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.

  She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

  The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.

  The following night they did it all over again, only this time with Sony Walkmen.

  Chapter 27

  This is all very wonderful,” said Fenchurch a few days later, “but I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there’s this difference between us. That you lost something and found it again, and I found something and lost it. I need to find it again.”

  She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for a day of telephoning.

  Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one of the papers with small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say that he was none the worse for this but, sadly, this was not the case. He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so Arthur phoned him anyway.

  “Arthur, my old soup spoon, my old silver tureen, how particularly stunning to hear from you! Someone told me you’d gone off into space or something.”

  Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he had invented for his own use, and which no one else was able to speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at all. The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalanche of nonsense. The time when you did find out, later, which bits he did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.

  “What?” said Arthur.

  “Just a rumor, my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumor. Probably means nothing at all, but I may need a quote from you.”

  “Nothing to say, just pub talk.”

  “We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on it. Plus it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the other stories of the week, so it could be good just to have you denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear.”

  There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost Henson came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.

  “Just remembered,” he said, “what an odd evening I had last night. Anyway my old, I won’t say what, how do you feel about having ridden on Halley’s comet?”

  “I haven’t,” said Arthur with a suppressed sigh, “ridden on Halley’s comet.”

  “Okay. How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley’s comet?”

  “Pretty relaxed, Murray.”

  There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.

  “Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of the Weirdos, we’re thinking of calling it. Good, eh?”

  “Very good.”

  “Got a ring to it. First, we have this man it always rains on.” “What?”

  “It’s the absolute stocking top truth. All documented in his little black books, it all checks out at every single fun-loving level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana whips, and funny little men in white coats are flying in from all over the world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man is the bee’s knees, Arthur, he is the wasp’s nipples.
He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world. We’re calling him the Rain God. Nice, eh?”

  “I think I’ve met him.”

  “Good ring to it. What did you say?”

  “I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?”

  “Incredible! You met the Rain God?”

  “If it’s the same guy. I told him to stop complaining and show someone his book.”

  There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson’s end of the phone.

  “Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by you. Listen, do you know how much a tour operator is paying that guy not to go to Malaga this year? I mean, forget irrigating the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding places for money. The man’s turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to make him win the bingo.

  “Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man Who Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?”

  “A nice one, but—”

  “We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that’ll be okay. Where are you?”

  “Er, I’m in Islington. Listen, Murray—”

  “Islington!”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, what about the real weirdness of the week, the real seriously loopy stuff. You know anything about these flying people?”

  “No.”

  “You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy one. This is the real meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the time to say there’s this couple who go flying nights. We’ve got guys down in our photo labs working through the night to put together a genuine photograph. You must have heard.”

  “No.”

  “Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote. But that was months ago. Listen, it’s night after night this week, my old cheese grater, right on your patch. This couple just fly around the sky and start doing all kinds of stuff. And I don’t mean looking through walls or pretending to be box-girder bridges. You don’t know anything?”