Volume 4 - So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Read online

  24

  Luckily there was a strong updraft in the alley because Arthur hadn’t done this sort of thing for a while, at least not deliberately, and deliberately is exactly the way you are not meant to do it.

  He swung down sharply, nearly catching himself a nasty crack on the jaw with the doorstep, and tumbled through the air, so suddenly stunned with what a profoundly stupid thing he had just done that he completely forgot the bit about hitting the ground and didn’t.

  A nice trick, he thought to himself, if you can do it.

  The ground was hanging menacingly above his head.

  He tried not to think about the ground, what an extraordinarily big thing it was and how much it would hurt him if it decided to stop hanging there and suddenly fell on him. He tried to think nice thoughts about lemurs instead, which was exactly the right thing to do because he couldn’t at that moment remember precisely what a lemur was, if it was one of those things that sweep in great majestic herds across the plains of wherever it was or if that was wildebeests, so it was a tricky kind of thing to think nice thoughts about without simply resorting to an icky sort of general well-disposedness toward things, and all this kept his mind well occupied while his body tried to adjust to the fact that it wasn’t touching anything.

  A Mars bar wrapper fluttered down the alleyway.

  After a seeming moment of doubt and indecision it eventually allowed the wind to ease it, fluttering, between him and the ground.

  “Arthur…”

  The ground was still hanging menacingly above his head, and he thought it was probably time to do something about that, such as fall away from it, which is what he did. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

  As he fell, slowly, very, very slowly, he closed his eyes—carefully, so as not to jolt anything.

  The feel of his eyes closing ran down his whole body. Once it had reached his feet, and the whole of his body was alerted to the fact that his eyes were now closed and was not panicked by it, he slowly, very, very slowly revolved his body one way and his mind the other.

  That should sort the ground out.

  He could feel the air clear about him now, breezing around him quite cheerfully, untroubled by his being there, and slowly, very, very slowly, as from a deep and distant sleep, he opened his eyes.

  He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until all the bird talk had driven him scatty, but this was different.

  Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a slight trembling which could have been attributable to a number of things, being in the air.

  Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.

  Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was supposed to see it through the night was on an ingenious time switch which meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as the evening was beginning to draw in. He was therefore safely shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.

  He slowly, very, very slowly lifted his head to Fenchurch, who was standing in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her upstairs doorway.

  Her face was inches from his.

  “I was about to ask you,” she said in a low, trembly voice, “what you were doing. But then I realized that I could see what you were doing. You were flying. So it seemed,” she went on after a slight wondering pause, “like a bit of a silly question. And I couldn’t immediately think of any others.”

  Arthur said, “Can you do it?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to try?”

  She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to say no, but just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.

  “It’s quite easy,” urged Arthur, “if you don’t know how. That’s the important bit. Be not at all sure how you’re doing it.”

  Just to demonstrate how easy it was he floated away down the alley, fell dramatically upward and bobbed back down toward her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

  “Ask me how I did that.”

  “How … did you do that?”

  “No idea. Not a clue.”

  She shrugged in bewilderment. “So how can I …?”

  Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.

  “I want you to try,” he said, “to step onto my hand, just one foot.”

  “What?”

  “Try it.”

  Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if she was trying to step onto the hand of someone who was floating in front of her in midair, she stepped onto his hand.

  “Now the other.”

  “What?”

  “Take the weight off your back foot.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try it.”

  “Like this?”

  “Like that.”

  Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if—she stopped telling herself what what she was doing was like because she had a feeling she didn’t altogether want to know.

  She fixed her eyes very, very firmly on the gutter of the roof of the decrepit warehouse opposite which had been annoying her for weeks because it was clearly going to fall off and she wondered if anyone was going to do anything about it or whether she ought to say something to somebody and didn’t think for a moment about the fact that she was standing on the hands of someone who wasn’t standing on anything at all.

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

  She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company that had their offices around the corner and took her weight off her left foot, so she should probably go and see them about the gutter.

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

  “I can’t.”

  “Try.”

  She 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.

  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.

  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 turned 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.