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, 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 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 upwards, 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 an eye, but merely to glance at, as it were, in passing.
Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found that if she judged herself just 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 various complicated reasons revolutionized the life of a family on Hounslow, over whose washing line it was discovered draped in the morning.
In a mute embrace, they drifted up till they were swimming amongst the misty wraiths of moisture that you can see feathering around the wings of an aeroplane but never feel because you are sitting warm inside the stuffy aeroplane and looking through the little scratchy perspex 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 by only 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 tidepool, they found that above the clouds is where the night get 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 cumulo-nimbus, and now began lazily to drift down its contours, as Fenchurch eased Arthur in turn from his clothes, prised 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 a heart-sickening fall or loss of nerve, a re-grouping moments later and a wonderful new idea enthusiastically signalled 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 shutter and looked out over the wing.
At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.
By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.
She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.
The following morning Arthur and Fenchurch slept very late in the alley despite the continual wail of furniture being restored.
The following night they did it all over again, only this time with Sony Walkmen.
Chapter 27
“This is all very wonderful,” said Fenchurch a few days later. “But I do need to know what has happened to me. You see, there’s this difference between us. That you lost something and found it again, and I found something and lost it. I need to find it again.”
She had to go out for the day, so Arthur settled down for a day of telephoning.
Murray Bost Henson was a journalist on one of the papers with small pages and big print. It would be pleasant to be able to say that he was none the worse for it, but sadly, this was not the case. He happened to be the only journalist that Arthur knew, so Arthur phoned him anyway.
“Arthur my old soup spoon, my old silver turreen, how particularly stunning to hear from you. Someone told me you’d gone off into space or something.”
Murray had his own special kind of conversation language which he had invented for his own use, and which no one else was able to speak or even to follow. Hardly any of it meant anything at all. The bits which did mean anything were often so wonderfully buried that no one could ever spot them slipping past in the avalance of nonsense. The time when you did find out, later, which bits he did mean, was often a bad time for all concerned.
“What?” said Arthur.
“Just a rumour my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumour. Probably means nothing at all, but I may need a quote from you.”
“Nothing to say, just pub talk.”
“We thrive on it, my old prosthetic limb, we thrive on it. Plus it would fit like a whatsit in one of those other things with the other stories of the
week, so it could be just to have you denying it. Excuse me, something has just fallen out of my ear.”
There was a slight pause, at the end of which Murray Bost Henson came back on the line sounding genuinely shaken.
“Just remembered,” he said, “what an odd evening I had last night. Anyway my old, I won’t say what, how do you feel about having ridden on Halley’s Comet?”
“I haven’t,” said Arthur with a suppressed sigh, “ridden on Halley’s Comet.”
“OK, How do you feel about not having ridden on Halley’s Comet?”
“Pretty relaxed, Murray.”
There was a pause while Murray wrote this down.
“Good enough for me, Arthur, good enough for Ethel and me and the chickens. Fits in with the general weirdness of the week. Week of the Weirdos, we’re thinking of calling it. Good, eh?”
“Very good.”
“Got a ring to it. First we have this man it always rains on.”
“What?”
“It’s the absolute stocking top truth. All documented in his little black book, it all checks out at every single funloving level. The Met Office is going ice cold thick banana whips, and funny little men in white coats are flying in from all over the world with their little rulers and boxes and drip feeds. This man is the bee’s knees, Arthur, he is the wasp’s nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world. We’re calling him the Rain God. Nice, eh?”
“I think I’ve met him.”
“Good ring to it. What did you say?”
“I may have met him. Complains all the time, yes?”
“Incredible! You met the Rain God?”
“If it’s the same guy. I told him to stop complaining and show someone his book.”
There was an impressed pause from Murray Bost Henson’s end of the phone.
“Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by you. Listen, do you know how much a tour operator is paying that guy not to go to Malaga this year? I mean forget irrigating the Sahara and boring stuff like that, this guy has a whole new career ahead of him, just avoiding places for money. The man’s turning into a monster, Arthur, we might even have to make him win the bingo.
“Listen, we may want to do a feature on you, Arthur, the Man Who Made the Rain God Rain. Got a ring to it, eh?”
“A nice one, but…”
“We may need to photograph you under a garden shower, but that’ll be OK. Where are you?”
“Er, I’m in Islington. Listen, Murray…”
“Islington!”
“Yes…”
“Well, what about the real weirdness of the week, the real seriously loopy stuff. You know anything about these flying people?”
“No.”
“You must have. This is the real seethingly crazy one. This is the real meatballs in the batter. Locals are phoning in all the time to say there’s this couple who go flying nights. We’ve got guys down in our photo labs working through the night to put together a genuine photograph. You must have heard.”
“No.”
“Arthur, where have you been? Oh, space, right, I got your quote. But that was months ago. Listen, it’s night after night this week, my old cheesegrater, right on your patch. This couple just fly around the sky and start doing all kinds of stuff. And I don’t mean looking through walls or pretending to be box girder bridges. You don’t know anything?”
“No.”
“Arthur, it’s been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with you, chumbum, but I have to go. I’ll send the guy with the camera and the hose. Give me the address, I’m ready and writing.”
“Listen, Murray, I called to ask you something.”
“I have a lot to do.”
“I just wanted to find out something about the dolphins.”
“No story. Last year’s news. Forget ’em. They’re gone.”
“It’s important.”
“Listen, no one will touch it. You can’t sustain a story, you know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever the story’s about. Not our territory anyway, try the Sundays. Maybe they’ll run a little ‘Whatever Happened to “Whatever Happened to the Dolphins”’ story in a couple of years, around August. But what’s anybody going to do now? ‘Dolphins still gone’? ‘Continuing Dolphin Absence’? ‘Dolphins – Further Days Without Them’? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its little feet in the air and presently goes to the great golden spike in the sky, my old fruitbat.”
“Murray, I’m not interested in whether it’s a story. I just want to find out how I can get in touch with that guy in California who claims to know something about it. I thought you might know.”
Chapter 28
“People are beginning to talk,” said Fenchurch that evening, after they had hauled her ’cello in.
“Not only talk,” said Arthur, “but print, in big bold letters under the bingo prizes. Which is why I thought I’d better get these.”
He showed her the long narrow booklets of airline tickets.
“Arthur!” she said, hugging him. “Does that mean you managed to talk to him?”
“I have had a day,” said Arthur, “of extreme telephonic exhaustion. I have spoken to virtually every department of virtually every paper in Fleet street, and I finally tracked his number down.”
“You’ve obviously been working hard, you’re drenched with sweat poor darling.”
“Not with sweat,” said Arthur wearily. “A photographer’s just been. I tried to argue, but – never mind, the point is, yes.”
“You spoke to him.”
“I spoke to his wife. She said he was too weird to come to the phone right now and could I call back.”
He sat down heavily, realized he was missing something and went to the fridge to find it.
“Want a drink?”
“Would commit murder to get one. I always know I’m in for a tough time when my ’cello teacher looks me up and down and says, ‘Ah yes, my dear, I think a little Tchaikovsky today.’.”
“I called again,” said Arthur, “and she said that he was 3.2 light years from the phone and I should call back.”
“Ah.”
“I called again. She said the situation had improved. He was now a mere 2.6 light years from the phone but it was still a long way to shout.”
“You don’t suppose,” said Fenchurch, doubtfully, “that there’s anyone else we can talk to?”
“It gets worse,” said Arthur, “I spoke to someone on a science magazine who actually knows him, and he said that John Watson will not only believe, but will actually have absolute proof, often dictated to him by angels with golden beards and green wings and Doctor Scholl footwear, that the month’s most fashionable silly theory is true. For people who question the validity of these visions he will triumphantly produce the clogs in question, and that’s as far as you get.”
“I didn’t realize it was that bad,” said Fenchurch quietly. She fiddled listlessly with the tickets.
“I phoned Mrs. Watson again,” said Arthur. “Her name, by the way, and you may wish to know this, is Arcane Jill.”
“I see.”
“I’m glad you see. I thought you mightn’t believe any of this, so when I called her this time I used the telephone answering machine to record the call.”
He went across to the telephone machine and fiddled and fumed with all its buttons for a while, because it was the one which was particularly recommended by Which? magazine and is almost impossible to use without going mad.
“Here it is,” he said at last, wiping the sweat from his brow.
The voice was thin and crackly with its journey to a geostationary satellite and back, but it was also hauntingly calm.
“Perhaps I should explain,” Arcane Jill Watson’s voice said, “that the phone is in fact in a room that he never comes into. It’s in the Asylum you see. Wonko the Sane does not like to enter the Asylum and so he does not.
I feel you should know this because it may save you phoning. If you would like to meet him, this is very easily arranged. All you have to do is walk in. He will only meet people outside the Asylum.”
Arthur’s voice, at its most mystified: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Where is the asylum?”
“Where is the Asylum?” Arcane Jill Watson again. “Have you ever read the instructions on a packet of toothpicks?”
On the tape, Arthur’s voice had to admit that he had not.
“You may want to do that. You may find that it clarifies things for you a little. You may find that it indicates to you where the Asylum is. Thank you.”
The sound of the phone line went dead. Arthur turned the machine off.
“Well, I suppose we can regard that as an invitation,” he said with a shrug. “I actually managed to get the address from the guy on the science magazine.”
Fenchurch looked up at him again with a thoughtful frown, and looked at the tickets again.
“Do you think it’s worth it?” she said.
“Well,” said Arthur, “the one thing that everyone I spoke to agrees on, apart from the fact that they all thought he was barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living about dolphins.”
Chapter 29
“This is an important announcement. This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark.”
Chapter 30
They rented a car in Los Angeles from one of the places that rents out cars that other people have thrown away.
“Getting it to go round corners is a bit of a problem,” said the guy behind the sunglasses as he handed them the keys, “sometimes it’s simpler just to get out and find a car that’s going in that direction.”
They stayed for one night in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard which someone had told them they would enjoy being puzzled by.
“Everyone there is either English or odd or both. They’ve got a swimming pool where you can go and watch English rock stars reading Language, Truth and Logic for the photographers.”
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish tuhgttg-4 Page 11
