“How are the feet today?” said Arthur quietly.
“Okay. It doesn’t feel so odd in the sand. Or in the water. The water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn’t our world.”
She shrugged. “What do you think he meant,” she said, “by the message?”
“I don’t know,” said Arthur, though the memory of a man called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.
When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned Arthur. Not the sandals; they were perfectly ordinary wooden-bottomed sandals.
“I just thought you’d like to see,” he said, “what angels wear on their feet. Just out of curiosity. I’m not trying to prove anything, by the way. I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I’ll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see this.”
This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him carrying, for it was a wonderfully silver-gray glass fishbowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur’s bedroom.
Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without success, to say “Where did you get that?” sharply, and with a gasp in his voice.
Finally his time had come but he missed it by a millisecond.
“Where did you get that?” said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice.
Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice said, “What? Have you seen one of these before?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve got one. Or at least did have. Russell stole it to put his golf balls in. I don’t know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell for stealing it. Why, have you got one?”
“Yes, it was …”
They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply backward and forward between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways. “You have one of these, too?” he said to both of them.
“Yes.” They both said it.
He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the California sun.
The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.”
“Do you know,” asked Wonko quietly, “what it is?”
They shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the gray glass.
“It is a farewell gift from the dolphins,” said Wonko in a low quiet voice, “the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.”
He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.
“Have you …” he said to Arthur, “what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?”
“Er, I keep a fish in it,” said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. “I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl.” He tailed off.
“You’ve done nothing else? No,” he said, “if you had, you would know.” He shook his head again.
“My wife kept wheat germ in ours,” resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, “until last night.…”
“What,” said Arthur slowly and hushedly, “happened last night?”
“We ran out of wheat germ,” said Wonko, evenly. “My wife,” he added, “has gone to get some more.” He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.
“And what happened then?” said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone.
“I washed it,” said Wonko. “I washed it very carefully, very, very carefully, removing every last speck of wheat germ, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you … have you held one to your ear?”
They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you should.”
Chapter 32
The deep roar of the ocean.
The break of waves on farther shores than thought can find.
The silent thunders of the deep.
And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.
Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.
A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.
Waves of joy on—where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.
A fugue of voices now, clamoring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.
And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the fight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.
Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.
“This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell.”
And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly gray bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.
Chapter 33
That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from inside it.
“This is what I wanted you to see,” said Wonko the Sane when the news came around again, “an old colleague of mine. He’s over in your country running an investigation. Just watch.”
It was a press conference.
“I’m afraid I can’t comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon.”
“Can you tell us what that means?”
“I’m not altogether sure. Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that.
“No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is.
“And if it turns out that you’re right, you’ll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a … er, ‘Supernormal’—not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a ‘Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer.’ We’ll probably want to shove a ‘Quasi’ in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn’t catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that’ll be all for now, other than to say ‘Hi!’ to Wonko if he’s watching.”
Chapter 34
On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.
They talked quietly to themselves.
“I still have to know,” said Fenchurch, “and I strongly feel that you know something that you’re not telling me.”
Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.
“Do you have a pencil?” he said.
She dug around and found one.
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” she said, after he had spent twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil again, and grunting irritably to himself.
“Trying to remember an address someone once gave me.”
“Your life would be an awful lot simpler,” she said, “if you bought yourself an address book.”
Finally he passed the paper to her.
“You look after it,” he said.
She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out were the words “Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry. Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma.”
“And what’s there?”
“Apparently,” said Arthur, “it’s God’s Final Message to His Creation.”
“That sounds a bit more like it,” said Fenchurch. “How do we get there?”
“You really …?”
“Yes,” said Fenchurch firmly, “I really want to know.”
Arthur looked out of the little scratchy Plexiglas window at the open sky outside.
“Excuse me,” said the woman who had been looking at them rather oddly, suddenly, “I hope you don’t think I’m rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it’s nice to talk to somebody. My name’s Enid Kapelsen, I’m from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?”
Chapter 35
They went to Arthur’s house in the West Country, shoved a couple of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every galactic hitchhiker ends up spending most of his time doing.
They waited for a flying saucer to come by.
“Friend of mine did this for fifteen years,” said Arthur one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.
“Who was that?”
“Called Ford Prefect.”
He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again.
He wondered where Ford Prefect was.
By an extraordinary coincidence the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incident with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs.
Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hungover and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.
In fact he looked extremely ill, not merely as if he’d been pulled through a hedge backward, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backward through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur’s sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort of waving caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur eventually had to drag him to the sofa.
“Thank you,” said Ford, “thank you very much. Have you …” he said, and fell asleep for three hours.
“ … the faintest idea,” he continued suddenly, when he revived, “how hard it is to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven’t, so I’ll tell you,” he said, “over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me.”
He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.
“Stupid operators keep asking you where you’re calling from and you try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn’t be if you’re coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?”
“Making you some black coffee.”
“Oh.” Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about the place forlornly.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Rice Krispies.”
“And this?”
“Paprika.”
“I see,” said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, on top of the other, but that didn’t seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and that seemed to work.
“A little space-lagged,” he said. “What was I saying?”
“About not phoning from Letchworth.”
“I wasn’t. I explained this to the lady. ‘Bugger Letchworth,’ I said, ‘if that’s your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed leg of a journey between the stars known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.’ I said ‘dear lady,’ ” explained Ford Prefect, “because I didn’t want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin—”
“Tactful,” said Arthur Dent.
“Exactly,” said Ford, “tactful.”
He frowned.
“Space-lag,” he said, “is very bad for sub-clauses. You’ll have to assist me again,” he continued, “by reminding me what I was talking about.”
“ ‘Between the stars,’ ” said Arthur, “ ‘known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as—’ ”
“Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,” concluded Ford triumphantly. “This conversation lark is quite a gas, isn’t it?”
“Have some coffee.”
“Thank you, no. ‘And the reason,’ I said, ‘why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialing direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny-pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast starship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?’ ”
“And could she?”
“I don’t know. She had hung up,” said Ford, “by this time. So! What do you suppose,” he asked fiercely, “I did next?”
“I’ve no idea, Ford,” said Arthur.
“Pity,” said Ford, “I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate those guys, you know. They really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing round the celestial infinite with their junky little machines that never work properly or, when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and,” he added savagely, “go beep to tell you when they’ve done it!”
This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right-thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right-thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that “it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
“In other words—and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. “
“And this guy,” ranted Ford, “was on a drive to sell more of them! His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators, and wine bars! Or if they didn’t have restaurants, elevators, and wine bars yet, to artificially accelerate their civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where’s that coffee!”
“I threw it away.”
“Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next. I saved civilization as we know. I knew it was something like that.”
He stumbled determinedly back into the sitting room, where he seemed to carry on talking to himself, tripping over the furniture and making beep-beep noises.
A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid face, Arthur followed him.
Ford looked stunned.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“Making some coffee,” said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford’s company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times.
“You missed the best bit!” raged Ford. “You missed the bit where I jumped the guy! Now,” he said, “I shall have to jump him all over again!”
; He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.
“It was better,” he said sullenly, “last time,” and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table.
“I see,” said Arthur, casting a placid eye over the trussed-up wreckage, “and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?”
“What?” screamed Ford. “What? You missed that bit, too? That’s the suspended animation facility! I put the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well, I had to, didn’t I?”
“So it would seem,” said Arthur, in his placid voice.
“Don’t touch that!!!” yelled Ford.
Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which was for some mysterious reason lying on the table, off the hook, paused, placidly.
“Okay,” said Ford, calming down, “listen to it.”
Arthur put the phone to his ear.
“It’s the speaking clock,” he said.
“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “beep, beep, beep.”
“I see,” said Arthur, with every ounce of placidness he could muster.
“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “is exactly what is being heard all over that guy’s ship, while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little known moon of Sesefras Magna. The London speaking clock!”
“I see,” said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time to ask the big one.
“Why?” he said, acidly.
“With a bit of luck,” said Ford, “the phone bill will bankrupt the buggers.”
He threw himself, sweating, onto the sofa.
“Anyway,” he said, “dramatic arrival, don’t you think?”
Chapter 36
The flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world.
Finally there was no doubt, no possibility of mistake, no hallucinations, no mysterious CIA agents found floating in reservoirs.
This time it was real, it was definite. It was quite definitely definite.
It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything beneath it and crushed a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods.
The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Page 65
