Volume 4 - So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Page 3

  “That,” said the barman in a barely audible whisper, from between dry lips, “will do nicely, sir.”

  5

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a powerful organ. Indeed, its influence is so prodigious that strict rules had to be drawn up by its editorial staff to prevent its misuse. So none of its field researchers is allowed to accept any kind of services, discounts, or preferential treatment of any kind in return for editorial favors 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; or

  c. they really want to.

  Since invoking the third rule involved giving the editor a cut, Ford always preferred to muck 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 distant 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 careened 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 Italian 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 giri. “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 okay 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 his 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 clamor 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 helicopters 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 forever.”

  “It’s getting impossible to talk, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  She shrugged and pointed upward.

  There was a helicopter 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 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 theater group who 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-gray 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 swath 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 theater group was reemerging from the Italian 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 farther on the steel-gray limousine was parked silently by the curb.

  She hurried toward 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 descr
iptions of surf on Australian beaches, yogurt 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 backward and forward 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 a cabdriver immediately. A cabdriver’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 than 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 center.…”

  Ford flipped the switch which he saw was marked “Mode Execute Ready” instead of the now old-fashioned “Access Standby” that 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, he felt 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.

  Walking north again he passed a steel-gray limousine parked by the curb, and from a nearby doorway he heard a soft voice saying, “It’s okay, honey, it’s really okay, 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 that 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 that 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 careening down among the gantries and landing lights at Han Dold City 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 he 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 reinstated entry on the planet Earth. He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now be able to attend to, and he 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 back seat was a girl who had made him crack his head on the door as he had 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 hitchhiked 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, heart-thumpingly beautiful, he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was, the exact shading of her hair. And he couldn’t 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 helios, 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 mustaches and blow-dried hair who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirt fronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on billiards matches—had quickly discovered they didn’t like each other at all.

  Russell was a burly man. He had a blond mustache. 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 himself looking pretty grim. 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 a car that came round the corner toward them halfway across 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, com
e down again when they feel better. At least medical science could deal with it, that’s the point. Seems that’s not 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 exit, isn’t it?”

  “Ah no,” said Arthur, “five miles farther on. If that’s all right.”

  “Okay,” said Russell, after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.

  It was in fact Arthur’s exit, 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 exits.

  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 in him 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.