"I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats."
"Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were assorted
rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer."
"On the raft."
"On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft."
"Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer."
"Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety."
"Ugh."
"The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter swimming
in front of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying
about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched
animals on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had
such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must hurt pulling
it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the
time.
"Then one day - and remember I'd been looking at this picture
every night for years - I suddenly noticed that the raft had a
sail. Never seen it before. The otter was fine, he was just
swimming along."
She shrugged.
"Good story?" she said.
"Ends weakly," said Arthur, "leaves the audience crying `Yes, but
what of it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before
the credits."
Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs.
"It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost unnoticed
worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like
black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being
watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your
worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact
very easy.' You probably thing I'm saying that because I'm going
to say that I felt like that this afternoon or something, don't
you?"
"Well, I ..." said Arthur, his composure suddenly shattered.
"Well, it's all right," she said, "I did. That's exactly what I
felt. But you see, I've felt that before, even stronger.
Incredibly strongly. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a one," she said
gazing off into the distance, "for sudden startling revelations."
Arthur was at sea, could hardly speak, and felt it wiser,
therefore, for the moment not to try.
"It was very odd," she said, much as one of the pursuing
Egyptians might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when
Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side.
"Very odd," she repeated, "for days before, the strangest feeling
had been building in me, as if I was going to give birth. No, it
wasn't like that in fact, it was more as if I was being connected
into something, bit by bit. No, not even that; it was as if the
whole of the Earth, through me, was going to ..."
"Does the number," said Arthur gently, "forty-two mean anything
to you at all?"
"What? No, what are you talking about?" exclaimed Fenchurch.
"Just a thought," murmured Arthur.
"Arthur, I mean this, this is very real to me, this is serious."
"I was being perfectly serious," said Arthur. "It's just the
Universe I'm never quite sure about."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Tell me the rest of it," he said. "Don't worry if it sounds odd.
Believe me, you are talking to someone who has seen a lot of
stuff," he added, "that is odd. And I don't mean biscuits."
She nodded, and seemed to believe him. Suddenly, she gripped his
arm.
"It was so simple," she said, "so wonderfully and extraordinarily
simple, when it came."
"What was it?" said Arthur quietly.
"Arthur, you see," she said, "that's what I no longer know. And
the loss is unbearable. If I try to think back to it, it all goes
flickery and jumpy, and if I try too hard, I get as far as the
teacup and I just black out."
"What?"
"Well, like your story," she said, "the best bit happened in a
cafe. I was sitting there, having a cup of tea. This was after
days of this build up, the feeling of becoming connected up. I
think I was buzzing gently. And there was some work going on at a
building site opposite the cafe, and I was watching it through
the window, over the rim of my teacup, which I always find is the
nicest way of watching other people working. And suddenly, there
it was in my mind, this message from somewhere. And it was so
simple. It made such sense of everything. I just sat up and
thought, `Oh! Oh, well that's all right then.' I was so startled
I almost dropped my teacup, in fact I think I did drop it. Yes,"
she added thoughtfully, "I'm sure I did. How much sense am I
making?"
"It was fine up to the bit about the teacup."
She shook her head, and shook it again, as if trying to clear it,
which is what she was trying to do.
"Well that's it," she said. "Fine up to the bit about the teacup.
That was the point at which it seemed to me quite literally as if
the world exploded."
"What ...?"
"I know it sounds crazy, and everybody says it was
hallucinations, but if that was hallucinations then I have
hallucinations in big screen 3D with 16-track Dolby Stereo and
should probably hire myself out to people who are bored with
shark movies. It was as if the ground was literally ripped from
under my feet, and ... and ..."
She patted the grass lightly, as if for reassurance, and then
seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say.
"And I woke up in hospital. I suppose I've been in and out ever
since. And that's why I have an instinctive nervousness," she
said, "of sudden startling revelations that's everything's going
to be all right." She looked up at him.
Arthur had simply ceased to worry himself about the strange
anomalies surrounding his return to his home world, or rather had
consigned them to that part of his mind marked "Things to think
about - Urgent." "Here is the world," he had told himself. "Here,
for whatever reason, is the world, and here it stays. With me on
it." But now it seemed to go swimmy around him, as it had that
night in the car when Fenchurch's brother had told him the silly
stories about the CIA agent in the reservoir. The trees went
swimmy. The lake went swimmy, but this was perfectly natural and
nothing to be alarmed by because a grey goose had just landed on
it. The geese were having a great relaxed time and had no major
answers they wished to know the questions to.
"Anyway," said Fenchurch, suddenly and brightly and with a wide-
eyed smile, "there is something wrong with part of me, and you've
got to find out what it is. We'll go home."
Arthur shook his head.
"What's the matter?" she said.
Arthur had shaken his head, not to disagree with her suggestion
which he thought was a truly excellent one, one of the world's
great suggestions, but because he was just for a moment trying to
free himself of the recurring impression he had that just when he
was least expecting it the Universe would suddenly leap out from
behind a door and go boo at him.
"I'm just trying to get this entirely clear in my mind," said
Arthur, "you say you felt as if the Earth actually ... exploded
..."
"Yes. More than felt."
"Which is what everybody else says," he said hesitantly, "is
hallucinations?"
"Yes, but Arthur that's ridiculous. People think that if you just
say `hallucinations' it explains anything you want it to explain
and eventually whatever it is you can't understand will just go
away. It's just a word, it doesn't explain anything. It doesn't
explain why the dolphins disappeared."
"No," said Arthur. "No," he added thoughtfully. "No," he added
again, even more thoughtfully. "What?" he said at last.
"Doesn't explain the dolphins disappearing."
"No," said Arthur, "I see that. Which dolphins do you mean?"
"What do you mean which dolphins? I'm talking about when all the
dolphins disappeared."
She put her hand on his knee, which made him realize that the
tingling going up and down his spine was not her gently stroking
his back, and must instead be one of the nasty creepy feelings he
so often got when people were trying to explain things to him.
"The dolphins?"
"Yes."
"All the dolphins," said Arthur, "disappeared?"
"Yes."
"The dolphins? You're saying the dolphins all disappeared? Is
this," said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point,
"what you're saying?"
"Arthur where have you been for heaven's sake? The dolphins all
disappeared on the same day I ..."
She stared him intently in his startled eyes.
"What ...?"
"No dolphins. All gone. Vanished."
She searched his face.
"Did you really not know that?"
It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.
"Where did they go?" he asked.
"No one knows. That's what vanished means." She paused. "Well,
there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he
lives in California," she said, "and is mad. I was thinking of
going to see him because it seems the only lead I've got on what
happened to me."
She shrugged, and then looked at him long and quietly. She lay
her hand on the side of his face.
"I really would like to know where you've been," she said. "I
think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that's
why we recognized each other."
She glanced around the park, which was now being gathered into
the clutches of dusk.
"Well," she said, "now you've got someone you can tell."
Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.
"It is," he said, "a very long story."
Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.
"Is it anything to do with this?" she said. The thing she took
out of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled
into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly
on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands
that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on
the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around
spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers
had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that
might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy
plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the
words "Don't Panic".
"Where did you get this?" said Arthur, startled, taking it from
her.
"Ah," she said, "I thought it was yours. In Russell's car that
night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?"
Arthur drew the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy from its cover.
It was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some
buttons till the screen flared with text.
"A few," he said.
"Can we go to them?"
"What? No," said Arthur abruptly, then relented, but relented
warily. "Do you want to?" he said, hoping for the answer no. It
was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, "You don't
want to, do you?" which expects it.
"Yes," she said. "I want to know what the message was that I
lost, and where it came from. Because I don't think," she added,
standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of the park,
"that it came from here."
"I'm not even sure," she further added, slipping her arm around
Arthur's waist, "that I know where here is."
=================================================================
Chapter 21
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked
before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing.
It is, essentially, as the title implies, a guide book. The
problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a
sizeable portion of which are continually clogging up the civil,
commercial and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and
especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you'll get it.
The Galaxy is a rapidly changing place. There is, frankly, so
much of it, every bit of which is continually on the move,
continually changing. A bit of a nightmare, you might think, for
a scrupulous and conscientious editor diligently striving to keep
this massively detailed and complex electronic tome abreast of
all the changing circumstances and conditions that the Galaxy
throws up every minute of every hour of every day, and you would
be wrong. Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize
that the editor, like all the editors of the Guide has ever had,
has no real grasp of the meanings of the words "scrupulous",
"conscientious" or "diligent", and tends to get his nightmares
through a straw.
Entries tend to get updated or not across the Sub-Etha Net
according to if they read good.
Take for example, the case of Brequinda on the Foth of Avalars,
famed in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-d mini-serieses
