“Hold on!” the figure called, waving at the ship.
The steps, which had started to fold themselves back through the hatchway, stopped, re-unfolded, and allowed him back in.
He emerged again a few seconds later carrying a battered and threadbare towel which he shoved into the bag.
He waved again, hoisted the bag under his arm, and started to run for the shelter of some trees as, behind him, the spacecraft had already begun its ascent.
Lightning flitted through the sky and made the figure pause for a moment, and then hurry onward, revising his path to give the trees a wide berth. He moved swiftly across the ground, slipping here and there, hunching himself against the rain which was falling now with ever-increasing concentration, as if being pulled from the sky.
His feet sloshed through the mud. Thunder grumbled over the hills. He pointlessly wiped the rain off his face and stumbled on.
More lights.
Not lightning this time, but more diffused and dimmer lights which played slowly over the horizon and faded.
The figure paused again on seeing them, and then redoubled his steps, making directly toward the point on the horizon at which they had appeared.
And now the ground was becoming steeper, sloping upward, and after another two or three hundred yards it led at last to an obstacle. The figure paused to examine the barrier and then dropped the bag over it before climbing over it himself.
Hardly had the figure touched the ground on the other side than there came a machine sweeping out of the rain toward him with lights streaming through the wall of water. The figure pressed back as the machine streaked toward him. It was a low, bulbous shape, like a small whale surfing—sleek, gray, and rounded and moving at terrifying speed.
The figure instinctively threw up his hands to protect himself, but was hit only by a sluice of water as the machine swept past and off into the night.
It was illuminated briefly by another flicker of lightning crossing the sky, which allowed the soaked figure by the roadside a split second to read a small sign at the back of the machine before it disappeared.
To the figure’s apparent incredulous astonishment the sign read “My other car is also a Porsche.”
2
Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.
He heaved a sigh and shoved down a gear.
The hill was beginning to steepen and his lorry was heavy with Danish thermostatic radiator controls.
It wasn’t that he was naturally predisposed to be so surly, at least he hoped not. It was just the rain that got him down, always the rain.
It was raining now, just for a change.
It was a particular type of rain that he particularly disliked, particularly when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was rain type 17.
He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.
Rob McKenna had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn’t like any of them.
He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It grumbled in a comfortable sort of way about all the Danish thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.
Since he had left Denmark the previous afternoon, he had been through types 33 (light pricking drizzle which made the roads slippery), 39 (heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle freshening), 87 and 88 (two finely distinguished varieties of vertical torrential downpour), 100 (postdownpour squalling, cold), all the sea-storm types between 192 and 213 at once, 123, 124, 126, 127 (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least favorite of all, 17.
Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windshield so hard that it didn’t make much odds whether he had his wipers on or off.
He tested this theory by turning them off briefly, but as it turned out the visibility did get quite a lot worse. It just failed to get better again when he turned them back on.
In fact one of the wiper blades began to flap off.
Swish swish swish flop swish swish flop swish swish flop swish flop swish flop flop flap scrape.
He pounded his steering wheel, kicked the floor, thumped his cassette player until it suddenly started playing Barry Manilow, thumped it until it stopped again, and swore and swore and swore and swore and swore.
It was at the very moment that his fury was peaking that there loomed swimmingly in his headlights, hardly visible through the blatter, a figure by the roadside.
A poor bedraggled figure, strangely attired, wetter than an otter in a washing machine, and hitching.
“Poor miserable sod,” thought Rob McKenna to himself, realizing that here was somebody with a better right to feel hard done by than himself, “must be chilled to the bone. Stupid to be out hitching on a filthy night like this. All you get is cold, wet, and lorries driving through puddles at you.”
He shook his head grimly, heaved another sigh, gave the wheel a turn, and hit a large sheet of water square on.
“See what I mean?” he thought to himself as he plowed swiftly through it; “you get some right bastards on the road.”
Splattered in his rearview mirror a couple of seconds later was the reflection of the hitchhiker, drenched by the roadside.
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.
At least it made up for finally having been overtaken by that Porsche he had been diligently blocking for the last twenty miles.
And as he drove on, the rain clouds dragged down the sky after him for, though he did not know it, Rob McKenna was a Rain God. All he knew was that his working days were miserable and he had a succession of lousy holidays. All the clouds knew was that they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him and to water him.
3
The next two lorries were not driven by Rain Gods, but they did exactly the same thing.
The figure trudged, or rather sloshed, onward till the hill resumed and the treacherous sheet of water was left behind.
After a while the rain began to ease and the moon put in a brief appearance from behind the clouds.
A Renault drove by, and its driver made frantic and complex signals to the trudging figure to indicate that normally he would have been delighted to give the figure a lift, only he couldn’t this time because he wasn’t going in the direction that the figure wanted to go, whatever direction that might be, and he was sure the figure would understand. He concluded the signaling with a cheery thumbs-up sign as if to say that he hoped the figure felt really fine about being cold and almost terminally wet, and he would catch him next time around.
The figure trudged on. A Fiat passed and did exactly the same as the Renault.
A Maxi passed on the other side of the road and flashed its lights at the slowly plodding figure, though whether this was meant to convey a “Hello” or a “Sorry, we’re going the other way” or
a “Hey look, there’s someone in the rain, what a jerk” was entirely unclear. A green strip across the top of the windshield indicated that whatever the message was, it came from Steve and Carola.
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying “And another thing …” twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.
The air was clearer now, the night cold. Sound traveled rather well. The lost figure, shivering desperately, presently reached a junction, where a side road turned off to the left. Opposite the turning stood a signpost and this the figure suddenly hurried to and studied with feverish curiosity, only twisting away from it as another car passed suddenly.
And another.
The first whisked by with complete disregard, the second flashed meaninglessly. A Ford Cortina passed and put on its brakes.
Lurching with surprise, the figure bundled his bag to his chest and hurried forward toward it, but at the last moment the Cortina spun its wheels in the wet and careened off up the road rather amusingly.
The figure slowed to a stop and stood there, lost and dejected.
As it chanced, the following day the driver of the Cortina went into the hospital to have his appendix out, only due to a rather amusing mix-up the surgeon removed his leg in error and before the appendectomy could be rescheduled, the appendicitis complicated into an entertainingly serious case of peritonitis, and justice, in its way, was served.
The figure trudged on.
A Saab drew to a halt beside him.
Its window wound down and a friendly voice said, “Have you come far?”
The figure turned toward it. He stopped and grasped the handle of the door.
The figure, the car, and its door handle were all on a planet called the Earth, a world whose entire entry in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was comprised of two words “Mostly harmless.”
The man who wrote this entry was called Ford Prefect, and he was at this precise moment on a far from harmless world, sitting in a far from harmless bar, recklessly causing trouble.
4
Whether it was because he was drunk, ill, or suicidally insane would not have been apparent to a casual observer, and indeed there were no casual observers in the Old Pink Dog Bar on the lower south side of Han Dold City because it wasn’t the sort of place you could afford to do things casually in if you wanted to stay alive. Any observers in the place would have been mean, hawklike observers, heavily armed, with painful throbbings in their heads which caused them to do crazy things when they observed things they didn’t like.
One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a missile crisis sort of hush.
Even the evil-looking bird perched on a rod in the bar had stopped screeching out the names and addresses of local contract killers, which was a service it provided for free.
All eyes were on Ford Prefect. Some of them were on stalks.
The particular way in which he was choosing to dice recklessly with death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defense budget with an American Express card, which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.
“What are you worried about,” he asked in a cheery kind of voice, “the expiration date? Haven’t you guys ever heard of Neo-Relativity out here? There’re whole new areas of physics which can take care of this sort of thing. Time dilation effects, temporal relastatics—”
“We are not worried about the expiration date,” said the man to whom he addressed these remarks, who was a dangerous barman in a dangerous city. His voice was a low soft purr, like the low soft purr made by the opening of an ICBM silo. A hand like a side of meat tapped lightly on the bar top, lightly denting it.
“Well, that’s good then,” said Ford, packing his satchel and preparing to leave.
The tapping finger reached out and rested lightly on the shoulder of Ford Prefect. It prevented him from leaving.
Although the finger was attached to a slablike hand, and the hand was attached to a clublike forearm, the forearm wasn’t attached to anything at all, except in the metaphorical sense that it was attached by a fierce doglike loyalty to the bar which was its home. It had previously been more conventionally attached to the original owner of the bar, who on his deathbed had unexpectedly bequeathed it to medical science. Medical science had decided they didn’t like the look of it and had bequeathed it right back to the Old Pink Dog Bar.
The new barman didn’t believe in the supernatural or poltergeists or anything kooky like that, he just knew a useful ally when he saw one. The hand sat on the bar. It took orders, it served drinks, it dealt murderously with people who behaved as if they wanted to be murdered. Ford Prefect sat still.
“We are not worried about the expiration date,” repeated the barman, satisfied that he now had Ford Prefect’s full attention; “we are worried about the entire piece of plastic.”
“What?” said Ford. He seemed a little taken aback.
“This,” said the barman, holding out the card as if it were a small fish whose soul had three weeks earlier winged its way to the Land Where Fish Are Eternally Blessed. “We don’t accept it.”
Ford wondered briefly whether to raise the fact that he didn’t have any other means of payment on him, but decided for the moment to soldier on. The disembodied hand was now grasping his shoulder lightly but firmly between its finger and thumb.
“But you don’t understand,” said Ford, his expression slowly ripening from a little taken abackness into rank incredulity, “this is the American Express card. It is the finest way of settling bills known to man. Haven’t you read their junk mail?”
The cheery quality of Ford’s voice was beginning to grate on the barman’s ears. It sounded like someone relentlessly playing the kazoo during one of the more somber passages of a war requiem.
One of the bones in Ford’s shoulder began to grate against another one of the bones in his shoulder in a way that suggested the hand had learned the principles of pain from a highly skilled chiropractor. He hoped he could get this business settled before the hand started to grate one of the bones in his shoulder against any of the bones in different parts of his body. Luckily, the shoulder it was holding was not the one he had his satchel slung over.
The barman slid the card back across the bar at Ford.
“We have never,” he said with muted savagery, “heard of this thing.”
This was hardly surprising.
Ford had only acquired it through a serious computer error toward the end of the fifteen-year sojourn he had spent on the planet Earth. Exactly how serious, the American Express Company had gotten to know very rapidly, and the increasingly strident and panic-stricken demands of its debt collection department were only silenced by the unexpected demolition of the entire planet by the Vogons, to make way for a new hyperspace bypass.
He had kept it ever since because he found it useful to carry a form of currency that no one would accept.
“Credit?” he said. “Aaaargggh …”
These two words were usually coupled in the Old Pink Dog Bar.
“I thought,” gasped Ford, “that this was meant to be a class establishment.…”
He glanced around at the motley collection of thugs, pimps, and record company executives that skulked on the edges of the dim pools of light with which the dark shadows of the bar’s inner recesses were pitted. They were all very deliberately looking in any direction but his, carefully picking up the threads of their former conversations about murders, drug rings, and music publishing deals. They knew what would happen now and didn’t want to watch in case it put them off their drinks.
“You gonna die, boy,” murmured the barman quietly at Ford Prefect, and the evidence was on his side. The bar used to have hanging up one of those signs that read “Please don’t ask for credit as a punch in the mouth often offends,” but in the interest of strict accuracy this was altered to “Please don’t ask for credit because having your throat
torn out by a savage bird while a disembodied hand smashes your head against the bar often offends.” However, this made an unreadable mess of the notice and anyway didn’t have the same ring to it, so it was taken down again. It was felt that the story would get about of its own accord, and it had.
“Lemme look at the bill again,” said Ford. He picked it up and studied it thoughtfully under the malevolent gaze of the barman, and the equally malevolent gaze of the bird, which was currently gouging great furrows in the bar top with its talons.
It was a rather lengthy piece of paper.
At the bottom of it was a number that looked like one of those serial numbers you find on the underside of stereo sets which always take so long to copy on to the registration form. He had, after all, been in the bar all day, he had been drinking a lot of stuff with bubbles in it, and he had bought an awful lot of rounds for all the pimps, thugs, and record executives who suddenly couldn’t remember who he was.
He cleared his throat rather quietly and patted his pockets. There was, as he knew, nothing in them.
He rested his left hand lightly but firmly on the half-opened flap of his satchel. The disembodied hand renewed its pressure on his right shoulder.
“You see,” said the barman, and his face seemed to wobble evilly in front of Ford’s, “I have a reputation to think of. You see that, don’t you?”
This is it, thought Ford. There was nothing else for it. He had obeyed the rules, he had made a bona fide attempt to pay his bill, it had been rejected. He was now in danger of his life.
“Well,” he said quietly, “if it’s your reputation …”
With a sudden flash of speed he opened his satchel and slapped down on the bar top his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the official card which said that he was a field researcher for the Guide and absolutely not allowed to do what he was now doing.
“Want a write-up?”
The barman’s face stopped in midwobble. The bird’s talons stopped in midfurrow. The hand slowly released its grip.
Volume 4 - So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish Page 2
