The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (72 page)

H
e accepted another pint and took a pull at it.

“Of course, I had my own personal alchemist, too,”

“You what?”

He was getting silly and he knew it. Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it has is to stop you being wary of things, and the point at which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.

“Oh yes,” he insisted with a happy glazed smile, “it’s why I’ve lost so much weight.”

“What?” said his audience.

“Oh yes,” he said again, “the Californians have rediscovered alchemy, oh yes.”

He smiled again.

“Only,” he said, “it’s in a much more useful form than that which in”—he paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble in his head—“in which the ancients used to practice it. Or at least,” he added, “failed to practice it. They couldn’t get it to work, you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn’t cut it.”

“Nostradamus?” said one of his audience.

“I didn’t think he was an alchemist,” said another.

“I thought,” said a third, “he was a seer.”

“He became a seer,” said Arthur to his audience, the component parts of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, “because he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that.”

He took another pull at his beer. It was something he had not tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.

“What has alchemy got to do,” asked a bit of the audience, “with losing weight?”

“I’m glad you asked that,” said Arthur, “very glad. And I will now tell you what the connection is between”—he paused—“between those two things. The things you mentioned. I’ll tell you.”

He paused and maneuvered his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.

“They’ve discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold,” he said, in a sudden blurt of coherence.

“You’re kidding.”

“Oh yes,” he said, “no,” he corrected himself, “they have.”

He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.

“Have you
been
to California?” he demanded. “Do you
know
the sort of stuff they do there?”

Three members of his audience said they had and that he was talking nonsense.

“You haven’t seen anything,” insisted Arthur. “Oh yes,” he added, because someone was offering to buy another round.

“The evidence,” he said, pointing at himself, and not missing by more than a couple of inches, “is before your eyes. Fourteen hours in a trance,” he said, “in a tank. In a trance. I was in a tank. I think,” he added after a thoughtful pause, “I already said that.”

He waited patiently while the next round was duly distributed. He composed the next bit of his story in his mind, which was going to be something about the tank needing to be oriented along a line dropped perpendicularly from the Pole Star to a base line drawn between Mars and Venus, and was about to start trying to say it when he decided to give it a miss.

“Long time,” he said instead, “in a tank. In a trance.” He looked round severely at his audience, to make sure it was all following attentively.

He resumed.

“Where was I?” he said.

“In a trance,” said one.

“In a tank,” said another.

“Oh yes,” said Arthur, “thank you. And slowly,” he said, pressing onward, “slowly, slowly slowly, all your excess body fat … turns … to”—he paused for effect—“subcoo … subyoo … subtoocay”—he paused for breath—“subcutaneous gold, which you can have surgically removed. Getting out of the tank is hell. What did you say?”

“I was just clearing my throat.”

“I think you doubt me.”

“I was clearing my throat.”

“She was clearing her throat,” confirmed a significant part of the audience in a low rumble.

“Oh yes,” said Arthur, “all right. And you then split the proceeds”—he paused again for a math break—“fifty-fifty with the alchemist. Make a lot of money!”

He looked swayingly around at his audience, and could not help but be aware of an air of skepticism about their jumbled faces.

He felt very affronted by this.

“How else,” he demanded, “could I afford to have my face dropped?”

Friendly arms began to help him home. “Listen,” he protested, as the cold February breeze brushed his face, “looking lived-in is all the rage in California at the moment. You’ve got to look as if you’ve seen the Galaxy. Life, I mean. You’ve got to look as if you’ve seen life. That’s what I got. A face drop. Give me eight years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn’t come back into fashion or I’ve wasted a lot of money.”

He lapsed into silence for a while as the friendly arms continued to help him along the lane to his house.

“Got in yesterday,” he mumbled. “I’m very very very happy to be home. Or somewhere very like it … “

“Jet lag,” muttered one of his friends, “long trip from California. Really mucks you up for a couple of days.”

“I don’t think he’s been there at all,” muttered another. “I wonder where he has been. And what’s happened to him.”

After a little sleep Arthur got up and pottered round the house a bit. He felt woozy and a little low, still disoriented by the journey. He wondered how he was going to find Fenny.

He sat and looked at the fishbowl. He tapped it again, and despite being full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its deep and resonant chime as clearly and mesmerically as before.

Someone is trying to thank me, he thought to himself. He wondered who, and for what.

A
t the third stroke it will be one … thirty-two … and twenty seconds.”

“Beep … beep … beep.”

Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.

He switched the incoming signal through from the Sub-Etha Net to the ship’s superb hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted singsong voice spoke out with remarkable clarity round the cabin.

“At the third stroke it will be one … thirty-two … and thirty seconds.”

“Beep … beep … beep.”

He tweaked the volume up just a little, while keeping a careful eye on a rapidly changing table of figures on the ship’s computer display. For the length of time he had in mind, the question of power consumption became significant. He didn’t want a murder on his conscience.

“At the third stroke it will be one … thirty-two … and forty seconds.”

“Beep … beep … beep.”

He checked around the small ship. He walked down the short corridor.

“At the third stroke …”

He stuck his head into the small, functional, gleaming steel bathroom.

“ … it will be … “

It sounded fine in there.

He looked into the tiny sleeping quarters.

“ … one … thirty-two …”

It sounded a bit muffled. There was a towel hanging over one of the speakers. He took down the towel.

“ … and fifty seconds.”

Fine.

He checked out the packed cargo hold, and wasn’t at all satisfied with the sound. There was altogether too much crated junk in the way. He stepped back out and waited for the door to seal. He broke open a closed control panel and pushed the jettison button. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of that before. A whooshing, rumbling noise died away
quickly into silence. After a pause a slight hiss could be heard again.

It stopped.

He waited for the green light to show and then opened the door again onto the new empty cargo hold.

“ … one … thirty-three … and fifty seconds.”

Very nice.

“Beep … beep … beep.”

He then went and had a last thorough examination of the emergency suspended animation chamber, which was where he particularly wanted it to be heard.

“At the third stroke it will be one … thirty-four … precisely.”

He shivered as he peered down through the heavily frosted covering at the dim bulk of the form within. One day, who knew when, it would wake, and when it did, it would know what time it was. Not exactly local time, true, but what the heck.

He double-checked the computer display above the freezer bed, dimmed the lights, and checked it again.

“At the third stroke it will be … “

He tiptoed out and returned to the control cabin.

“ … one … thirty-four and twenty seconds.”

The voice sounded as clear as if he were hearing it over a phone in London, which he wasn’t, not by a long way.

He gazed out into the inky night. The star he could see in the distance the size of a brilliant biscuit crumb was Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather stilted, singsong voice was being received, Pleiades Zeta.

The bright orange curve that filled over half the visible area was the giant gas planet Sesefras Magna, where the Xaxisian battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a small cool blue moon, Epun.

“At the third stroke it will be … “

For twenty minutes he sat and merely watched as the gap between the ship and Epun closed, as the ship’s computer teased and kneaded the numbers that would bring it into a loop around the little moon, close the loop and keep it there, orbiting in perpetual obscurity.

“One … fifty-nine …”

His original plan had been to close down all external signaling and radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as possible unless you were actually looking at it, but then he’d had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous beam, pencil thin, broadcasting the
incoming time signal to the planet of the signal’s origin, which it would not reach for four hundred years, traveling at light-speed, but where it would probably cause something of a stir when it did.

“Beep … beep … beep …”

He sniggered.

He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.

“At the third stroke …”

The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit round a little-known and never-visited moon. Almost perfect.

One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation of the launching of the ship’s little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing actions, reactions, tangential forces, all the mathematical poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.

Before he left, he turned out the lights.

As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft zipped out on the beginning of its three-day journey to the orbiting space station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a long pencil-thin beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey still.

“At the third stroke, it will be two … thirteen … and fifty seconds.”

He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he didn’t have room.

“Beep … beep … beep.”

A
pril showers I hate especially.”

However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn’t seem to be one free in the whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.

“Bloody April showers. Hate, hate, hate.”

Arthur stared, frowning, out the window. A light, sunny spray of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he’d been back now. Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped off television and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.

One effect that still lingered, though, was his joy at being back. Now that the Earth’s atmosphere had closed over his head for good, he thought wrongly, everything within it gave him extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.

“Well, I like them,” he said suddenly, “and for all the obvious reasons. They’re light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good.”

The man snorted derisively.

“That’s what they all say,” he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.

He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening, unprovoked remark had been, “I’m a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic, isn’t it? Bloody ironic.”

If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.

But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now. “They all say that about bloody April showers,” he said, “so bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather.”

He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something extraordinary about the government.

“What I want to know is this,” he said, “if it’s going to be nice weather,
why,”
he almost spat, “can’t it be nice without bloody raining?”

Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

“Well, there you go,” he said, and instead got up himself. “’Bye.”

He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back through the parking lot, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain in his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that, too.

He climbed into his battered but adored old black VW Rabbit, squealed the tires, and headed out past the islands of gas pumps and along the slip road to the motorway.

He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and forever above his head.

He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him.

He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.