the meat in all the other bowls had had engine oil poured over
it.
Will would definitely be in there. Here was his dog, here was his
car, a grey Porsche 928S with a sign in the back window which
read, "My other car is also a Porsche." Damn him.
He stared at it and realized that he had just learned something
he hadn't known before.
Will Smithers, like most of the overpaid and under-scrupulous
bastards Arthur knew in advertising made a point of changing his
car every August so that he could tell people his accountant made
him do it, though the truth was that his accountant was trying
like hell to stop him, what with all the alimony he had to pay,
and so on - and this was the same car Arthur remembered him
having before. The number plate proclaimed its year.
Given that it was now winter, and that the event which had caused
Arthur so much trouble eight of his personal years ago had
occurred at the beginning of September, less than six or seven
months could have passed here.
He stood terribly still for a moment and let Know-Nothing-Bozo
jump up and down yapping at him. He was suddenly stunned by a
realization he could no longer avoid, which was this: he was now
an alien on his own world. Try as he might, no one was even to be
able to believe his story. Not only did it sound perfectly potty,
but it was flatly contradicted by the simplest observable facts.
Was this really the Earth? Was there the slightest possibility
that he had made some extraordinary mistake?
The pub in front of him was unbearably familiar to him in every
detail - every brick, every piece of peeling paint; and inside he
could sense its familiar stuffy, noisy warmth, its exposed beams,
its unauthentic cast-iron light fittings, its bar sticky with
beer that people he knew had put their elbows in, overlooked by
cardboard cutouts of girls with packets of peanuts stapled all
over their breasts. It was all the stuff of his home, his world.
He even knew this blasted dog.
"Hey, Know-Nothing!"
The sound of Will Smithers' voice meant he had to decide what do
to quickly. If he stood his ground he would be discovered and the
whole circus would begin. To hide would only postpone the moment,
and it was bitterly cold now.
The fact that it was Will made the choice easier. It wasn't that
Arthur disliked him as such - Will was quite fun. It was just
that he was fun in such an exhausting way because, being in
advertising, he always wanted you to know how much fun he was
having and where he had got his jacket from.
Mindful of this, Arthur hid behind a van.
"Hey, Know-Nothing, what's up?"
The door opened and Will came out, wearing a leather flying
jacket that he'd got a mate of his at the Road Research
Laboratory to crash a car into specially, in order to get that
battered look. Know-Nothing yelped with delight and, having got
the attention it wanted, was happy to forget Arthur.
Will was with some friends, and they had a game they played with
the dog.
"Commies!" they all shouted at the dog in chorus. "Commies,
commies, commies!!!"
The dog went berserk with barking, prancing up and down, yapping
its little heart out, beside itself in transports of ecstatic
rage. They all laughed and cheered it on, then gradually
dispersed to their various cars and disappeared into the night.
Well that clears one thing up, thought Arthur from behind the
van, this is quite definitely the planet I remember.
=================================================================
Chapter 7
His house was still there.
How or why, he had no idea. He had decided to go and have a look
while he was waiting for the pub to empty, so that he could go
and ask the landlord for a bed for the night when everyone else
had gone. And there it was.
He hurriedly let himself in with the key he kept under a stone
frog in the garden, because, astoundingly, the phone was ringing.
He had heard it faintly all the way up the lane and had started
to run as soon as he realized where the sound was coming from.
The door had to be forced open because of the astonishing
accumulation of junk mail on the doormat. It jammed itself stuck
on what he would later discover were fourteen identical,
personally addressed invitations to apply for a credit card he
already had, seventeen identical threatening letters for non-
payment of bills on a credit card he didn't have, thirty-three
identical letters saying that he personally had been specially
selected as a man of taste and discrimination who knew what he
wanted and where he was going in today's sophisticated jet-
setting world and would he therefore like to buy some grotty
wallet, and also a dead tabby kitten.
He rammed himself through the relatively narrow opening afforded
by all this, stumbled through a pile of wine offers that no
discriminating connoisseur would want to miss, slithered over a
heap of beach villa holidays, blundered up the dark stairs to his
bedroom and got to the phone just as it stopped ringing.
He collapsed, panting, on to his cold, musty-smelling bed and for
a few minutes stopped trying to prevent the world from spinning
round his head in the way it obviously wanted to.
When it had enjoyed its little spin and had calmed down a bit,
Arthur reached out for the bedside light, not expecting it to
come on. To his surprise it did. This appealed to Arthur's sense
of logic. Since the Electricity Board cut him off without fail
every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they
should leave him connected when he didn't. Sending them money
obviously only drew attention to yourself.
The room was much as he had left it, i.e. festeringly untidy,
though the effect was muted a little by a thick layer of dust.
Half-read books and magazines nestled amongst piles of half-used
towels. Half pairs of socks reclined in half-drunk cups of
coffee. What was once a half-eaten sandwich had now half-turned
into something that Arthur entirely didn't want to know about.
Bung a fork of lightning through this lot, he thought to himself,
and you'd start the evolution of life all over again.
There was only one thing in the room that was different.
For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was
different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting
dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.
It was next to a battered old television on which it was only
possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it
tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.
It was a box.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.
It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a
cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a
single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.
He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it
was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was
waiting for him to open it.
Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He
brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of
the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box.
He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe,
nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It
wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as
Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It
was a bowl. A fish bowl.
It was made of the most wonderful glass perfectly transparent,
yet with an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and
slate had gone into its making.
Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of
the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely
perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the
tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there
was nothing.
He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was
exquisite. But it was a fish bowl.
He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and
glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed
possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to
drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream.
Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and this time the
light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different
angle and glittered on some fine abrasions on the fish bowl's
surface. He held it up, adjusting the angle to the light, and
suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed
on the glass.
"So Long," they said, "and Thanks ..."
And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing.
For fully five more minutes he turned the object round and
around, held it to the light at different angles, tapped it for
its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the shadowy
letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl
with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to the
television. He shook the little Babel fish from his ear and
dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be needing it
any more, except for watching foreign movies.
He returned to lie on his bed, and turned out the light.
He lay still and quiet. He absorbed the enveloping darkness,
slowly relaxed his limbs from end to end, eased and regulated his
breathing, gradually cleared his mind of all thought, closed his
eyes and was completely incapable of getting to sleep.
The night was uneasy with rain. The rain clouds themselves had
now moved on and were currently concentrating their attention on
a small transport cafe just outside Bournemouth, but the sky
through which they had passed had been disturbed by them and now
wore a damply ruffled air, as if it didn't know what else it
might not do it further provoked.
The moon was out in a watery way. It looked like a ball of paper
from the back pocket of jeans that have just come out of the
washing machine, and which only time and ironing would tell if it
was an old shopping list or a five pound note.
The wind flicked about a little, like the tail of a horse that's
trying to decide what sort of mood it's in tonight, and a bell
somewhere chimed midnight.
A skylight creaked open.
It was stiff and had to be jiggled and persuaded a little because
the frame was slightly rotten and the hinges had at some time in
its life been rather sensibly painted over, but eventually it was
open.
A strut was found to prop it and a figure struggled out into the
narrow gully between the opposing pitches of the roof.
It stood and watched the sky in silence.
The figure was completely unrecognizable as the wild-looking
creature who had burst crazily into the cottage a little over an
hour ago. Gone was the ragged threadbare dressing gown, smeared
with the mud of a hundred worlds, stained with junk food
condiment from a hundred grimy spaceports, gone was the tangled
mane of hair, gone the long and knotted beard, flourishing
ecosystem and all.
Instead, there was Arthur Dent the smooth and casual, in
corduroys and a chunky sweater. His hair was cropped and washed,
his chin clean shaven. Only the eyes still said that whatever it
was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like
it please to stop.
They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at
this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images
the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no
surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.
The night seemed like an alive thing to him at this moment, the
dark earth around him a being in which he was rooted.
He could feel like a tingle on distant nerve ends the flood of a
far river, the roll of invisible hills, the knot of heavy
rainclouds parked somewhere away to the south.
He could sense, too, the thrill of being a tree, which was
something he hadn't expected. He knew that it felt good to curl
your toes in the earth, but he'd never realized it could feel
quite as good as that. He could sense an almost unseemly wave of
pleasure reaching out to him all the way from the New Forest. He
must try this summer, he thought, and see what having leaves felt
like.
From another direction he felt the sensation of being a sheep
startled by a flying saucer, but it was virtually
indistinguishable from the feeling of being a sheep startled by
anything else it ever encountered, for they were creatures who
learned very little on their journey through life, and would be
startled to see the sun rising in the morning, and astonished by
all the green stuff in the fields.
He was surprised to find he could feel the sheep being startled
by the sun that morning, and the morning before, and being
startled by a clump of trees the day before that. He could go
further and further back, but it got dull because all it
consisted of was sheep being startled by things they'd been
startled by the day before.
He left the sheep and let his mind drift outwards sleepily in
developing ripples. It felt the presence of other minds, hundreds
of them, thousands in a web, some sleepy, some sleeping, some
terribly excited, one fractured.
One fractured.
He passed it fleetingly and tried to feel for it again, but it
eluded him like the other card with an apple on it in Pelmanism.
He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who
it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once
you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very
