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
