The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (80 page)

“What?” said Arthur.

“Just a rumor, my old elephant tusk, my little green baize card table, just a rumor. 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 good 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.”

“Okay. 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 books, it all checks out at every single fun-loving 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 okay. 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 cheese grater, 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 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 it is 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.”

P
eople 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 here. 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 Dr. 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 with.”

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 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 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 agreed on, apart from the fact they all thought he was barking mad, is that he does know more than any man living about dolphins.”

T
his is an important announcement. This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be a perfect time to disembark.”

T
hey 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 around 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.”

It was true. There was one and that was exactly what he was doing.

The garage attendant didn’t think much of their car, but that was fine because they didn’t either.

Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills along Mulholland Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later stopped to look across the dazzling sea of floating light that is the San Fernando Valley. They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped immediately at the back of their eyes and didn’t touch any other part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through what this particularly dramatic sea of light was illuminating they didn’t think much of it.

They slept late and restlessly and awoke at lunchtime when it was unbearably hot.

They drove out along the freeway to Santa Monica for their first look at the Pacific Ocean, the ocean which Wonko the Sane spent all his days and a good deal of his nights looking at.

“Someone told me,” said Fenchurch, “that they once overheard two ladies on this beach, doing what we’re doing, looking at the Pacific Ocean for the first time in their lives. And apparently, after a long pause, one of them said to the other, ‘You know, it’s not as big as I expected.’ ”

Their mood gradually lifted as they walked along the beach in Malibu and watched all the millionaires in their chic shanty huts carefully keeping an eye on one another to check how rich they were each getting.

Their mood lifted further as the sun began to move down the western half of the sky, and by the time they were back in their rattling car and driving toward a sunset that no one of any sensibility would dream of building a city like Los Angeles in front of they were suddenly feeling astonishingly and irrationally happy and didn’t even mind that the terrible old car radio would only play two stations, and those simultaneously. So what, they were both playing good rock and roll.

“I know that he will be able to help us,” said Fenchurch determinedly, “I know he will. What’s his name again, the one he likes to be called?”

“Wonko the Sane.”

“I know that he will be able to help us.”

Arthur wondered if he would and hoped that he would, and hoped that what Fenchurch had lost could be found here, on this Earth, whatever this Earth might prove to be.

He hoped, as he had hoped continually and fervently since the time they had talked together on the banks of the Serpentine, that he would not be called upon to try to remember something that he had very firmly and deliberately buried in the furthest recesses of his memory, where he hoped it would cease to nag at him.

In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed to be a converted warehouse.

Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious.

Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her.

“Why’s this fish so bloody good?” he demanded, angrily.

“Please excuse my friend,” said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. “I think he’s having a nice day at last.”

I
f you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

He was tall and he gangled.

When he sat in his deck chair gazing at the Pacific, not so much with any kind of wild surmise any longer as with a peaceful deep dejection, it was a little difficult to tell exactly where the deck chair ended and he began, and you would hesitate to put your hand on, say, his forearm in case the whole structure suddenly collapsed with a snap and took your thumb off. But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face made you suddenly feel “Oh. Well, that’s all right then.”