allowed the wind to ease it, fluttering, between him and the
ground.
"Arthur ..."
The ground was still hanging menacingly above his head, and he
thought it was probably time to do something about that, such as
fall away from it, which is what he did. Slowly. Very, very
slowly.
As he fell slowly, very, very slowly, he closed his eyes -
carefully, so as not to jolt anything.
The feel of his eyes closing ran down his whole body. Once it had
reached his feet, and the whole of his body was alerted to the
fact that his eyes were now closed and was not panicked by it, he
slowly, very, very slowly, revolved his body one way and his mind
the other.
That should sort the ground out.
He could feel the air clear about him now, breezing around him
quite cheerfully, untroubled by his being there, and slowly,
very, very slowly, as from a deep and distant sleep, he opened
his eyes.
He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until
all the birdtalk had driven him scatty, but this was different.
Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a
slight trembling which could have been attributable to a number
of things, being in the air.
Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards
off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.
Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was supposed
to see it through the night was on an ingenious timeswitch which
meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as the
evening was beginning to draw in. He was, therefore, safely
shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.
He slowly, very, very slowly, lifted his head to Fenchurch, who
was standing in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her
upstairs doorway.
Her face was inches from his.
"I was about to ask you," she said in a low trembly voice, "what
you were doing. But then I realized that I could see what you
were doing. You were flying. So it seemed," she went on after a
slight wondering pause, "like a bit of a silly question."
Arthur said, "Can you do it?"
"No."
"Would you like to try?"
She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to say no, but
just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.
"It's quite easy," urged Arthur, "if you don't know how. That's
the important bit. Be not at all sure how you're doing it."
Just to demonstrate how easy it was he floated away down the
alley, fell upwards quite dramatically and bobbed back down to
her like a banknote on a breath of wind.
"Ask me how I did that."
"How ... did you do that?"
"No idea. Not a clue."
She shrugged in bewilderment. "So how can I ...?"
Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.
"I want you to try," he said, "to step on my hand. Just one
foot."
"What?"
"Try it."
Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if she was
trying to step on the hand of someone who was floating in front
of her in midair, she stepped on to his hand.
"Now the other."
"What?"
"Take the weight off your back foot."
"I can't."
"Try it."
"Like this?"
"Like that."
Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if - She
stopped telling herself what what she was doing was like because
she had a feeling she didn't altogether want to know.
She fixed her eyes very very firmly on the guttering of the roof
of the decrepit warehouse opposite which had been annoying her
for weeks because it was clearly going to fall off and she
wondered if anyone was going to do anything about it or whether
she ought to say something to somebody, and didn't think for a
moment about the fact that she was standing on the hands of
someone who wasn't standing on anything at all.
"Now," said Arthur, "take your weight off your left foot."
She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company who
had their offices round the corner, and took the weight off her
left foot, so she should probably go and see them about the
gutter.
"Now," said Arthur, "take the weight off your right foot."
"I can't."
"Try."
She hadn't seen the guttering from quite this angle before, and
it looked to her now as if as well as the mud and gunge up there
there might also be a bird's nest. If she leaned forward just a
little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably
see it more clearly.
Arthur was alarmed to see that someone down in the alley was
trying to steal her bicycle. He particularly didn't want to get
involved in an argument at the moment and hoped that the guy
would do it quietly and not look up.
He had the quiet shifty look of someone who habitually stole
bicycles in alleys and habitually didn't expect to find their
owners hovering several feet above them. He was relaxed by both
these habits, and went about his job with purpose and
concentration, and when he found that the bike was unarguably
bound by hoops of tungsten carbide to an iron bar embedded in
concrete, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.
Arthur let out a long-held breath.
"See what a piece of eggshell I have found you," said Fenchurch
in his ear.
=================================================================
Chapter 25
Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may
have received an impression of his character and habits which,
while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the
truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole
truth in all its glorious aspects.
And the reasons for this are obvious. Editing, selection, the
need to balance that which is interesting with that which is
relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.
Like this for instance. "Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up the
stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room,
took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes
one by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor.
He put on his pyjamas, the blue ones with the stripe. He washed
his face and hands, cleaned his teeth, went to the lavatory,
realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong order,
had to wash his hands again and went to bed. He read for fifteen
minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that trying to work
out where in the book he had got to the previous night, then he
turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.
"It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.
"After that he moved restlessly in his sleep for a moment and
then turned over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after
this his eyes flickered briefly and he slightly scratched his
nose, though there was still a good twenty minutes to go before
he turned back on to his left side. And so he whiled the night
away, sleeping.
"At four he got up and went to the lavatory again. He opened the
door to the lavatory ..." and so on.
It's guff. It doesn't advance the action. It makes for nice fat
books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn't
actually get you anywhere. You don't, in short, want to know.
But there are other omissions as well, beside the teethcleaning
and trying to find fresh socks variety, and in some of these
people have often seemed inordinately interested.
What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings
with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?
To which the answer is, of course, mind your own business.
And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on the planet
Krikkit? Just because the planet didn't have Fuolornis Fire
Dragons or Dire Straits doesn't mean that everyone just sat up
every night reading.
Or to take a more specific example, what about the night after
the committee meeting party on Prehistoric Earth, when Arthur
found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon rise over
the softly burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl
called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of staring every
morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit
tubes of toothpaste in the art department of an advertising
agency on the planet Golgafrincham. What then? What happened
next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.
The next one didn't resume the story till five years later, and
you can, claim some, take discretion too far. "This Arthur Dent,"
comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the galaxy, and has
even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep space probe
thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too
hideous to contemplate, "what is he, man or mouse? Is he
interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life?
Has he no spirit? has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a
nutshell, fuck?"
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on
to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
=================================================================
Chapter 26
Arthur Dent allowed himself for an unworthy moment to think, as
they drifted up, that he very much hoped that his friends who had
always found him pleasant but dull, or more latterly, odd but
dull, were having a good time in the pub, but that was the last
time, for a while, that he thought of them.
They drifted up, spiralling slowly around each other, like
sycamore seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except
going the other way.
And as they drifted up their minds sang with the ecstatic
knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and
utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of
catching up to do.
Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated
on keeping the cars going along the Euston Road and out towards
the Westway flyover, on keeping the streetlights lit and on
making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a
cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.
Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings of light of
London - London, Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the
strangely coloured fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the
galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky
above them, but London - swayed, swaying and turning, turned.
"Try a swoop," he called to Fenchurch.
"What?"
Her voice seemed strangely clear but distant in all the vast
empty air. It was breathy and faint with disbelief - all those
things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.
"We're flying ..." she said.
"A trifle," called Arthur, "think nothing of it. Try a swoop."
"A sw-"
Her hand caught his, and in a second her weight caught it too,
and stunningly, she was gone, tumbling beneath him, clawing
wildly at nothing.
Physics glanced at Arthur, and clotted with horror he was gone
too, sick with giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but
his voice.
They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn't do
this sort of thing here.
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
