The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  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 leaped 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 onto 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 mustache. 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 mile farther to the exit, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a farther 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 to the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk and maybe even some good painful blisters would help to reassure him of at least his own existence, if not his sanity.

  It was ten-thirty 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 Guinness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.

  This was the pub in which he had passed the fatal lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished, no, damn it, had been demolished because if they hadn’t been then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how had he 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 in which he had passed the fatal 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 could certainly 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 toward the door.

  And stopped.

  A small black wirehaired terrior ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur clearly, 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 the Non-Wonder Dog because the way its hair stood up on its head reminded people of the President of the United States of America, and the dog knew Arthur, or at least should. It was a stupid dog, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur were 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 comment 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 engine oil poured all over it.

  Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, there was his car, a gray 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 underscrupulous 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 they might, no one was even going 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’s voice meant he had to decide what to do 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 gradual
ly dispersed to their various cars and disappeared into the night.

  Well, that clears one thing up, thought Arthur from behind his van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.

  Chapter 7

  His house was still there.

  How or why, he had no idea, but 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 let himself in with a key he kept under a stone frog in the garden, hurriedly 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 nonpayment 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, onto 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 had cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they should leave him connected when he hadn’t. Sending them money obviously only drew attention to himself.

  The room was much as he had left it, festeringly untidy, though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust. Half-read books and magazines nestled among piles of half-used towels. Half-pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of coffee. What once had been a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned into something that Arthur didn’t entirely want to know about. Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself, and you’d start the evolution of life off 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 was too 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 gray box, with a kind of dull luster to it. It was a cubical gray box, just over a foot on one side. It was tied with a single gray ribbon, knotted into a neat how 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 gray 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 fishbowl.

  It was made of the most wonderful glass, perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-gray 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 fishbowl.

  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 fishbowl’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 around 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 anymore, 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 café 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 if 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, 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 hinge 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.

  The figure 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 ecostructure and all.

  Instead, there was Arthur Dent, smooth and casual in corduroys and a bulky 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 wa
s 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 rain clouds 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 at him all the way from the New Forest. He must try this summer, he thought, to 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 go 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 outward 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 a memory course. 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 easily once more.