useful device for enabling you to know that it is.
He instinctively knew that it was Fenny and that he wanted to
find her; but he could not. By straining too much for it, he
could feel he was losing this strange new faculty, so he relaxed
the search and let his mind wander more easily once more.
And again, he felt the fracture.
Again he couldn't find it. This time, whatever his instinct was
busy telling him it was all right to believe, he wasn't certain
that it was Fenny - or perhaps it was a different fracture this
time. It had the same disjointed quality but it seemed a more
general feeling of fracture, deeper, not a single mind, maybe not
a mind at all. It was different.
He let his mind sink slowly and widely into the Earth, rippling,
seeping, sinking.
He was following the Earth through its days, drifting with the
rhythms of its myriad pulses, seeping through the webs of its
life, swelling with its tides, turning with its weight. Always
the fracture kept returning, a dull disjointed distant ache.
And now he was flying through a land of light; the light was
time, the tides of it were days receding. The fracture he had
sensed, the second fracture, lay in the distance before him
across the land, the thickness of a single hair across the
dreaming landscape of the days of Earth.
And suddenly he was upon it.
He danced dizzily over the edge as the dreamland dropped sheer
away beneath him, a stupefying precipice into nothing, him wildly
twisting, clawing at nothing, flailing in horrifying space,
spinning, falling.
Across the jagged chasm had been another land, another time, an
older world, not fractured from, but hardly joined: two Earths.
He woke.
A cold breeze brushed the feverish sweat standing on his
forehead. The nightmare was spent and so, he felt, was he. His
shoulders dropped, he gently rubbed his eyes with the tips of his
fingers. At last he was sleepy as well as very tired. As to what
it meant, if it meant anything at all, he would think about it in
the morning; for now he would go to bed and sleep. His own bed,
his own sleep.
He could see his house in the distance and wondered why this was.
It was silhouetted against the moonlight and he recognized its
rather dull blockish shape. He looked about him and noticed that
he was about eighteen inches above the rose bushes of one of his
neighbours, John Ainsworth. His rose bushes were carefully
tended, pruned back for the winter, strapped to canes and
labelled, and Arthur wondered what he was doing above them. He
wondered what was holding him there, and when he discovered that
nothing was holding him there he crashed awkwardly to the ground.
He picked himself up, brushed himself down and hobbled back to
his house on a sprained ankle. He undressed and toppled into bed.
While he was asleep the phone rang again. It rang for fully
fifteen minutes and caused him to turn over twice. It never,
however, stood a chance of waking him up.
=================================================================
Chapter 8
Arthur awoke feeling wonderful, absolutely fabulous, refreshed,
overjoyed to be home, bouncing with energy, hardly disappointed
at all to discover it was the middle of February.
He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy
things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for
two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time
he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a
virulent space disease he's picked up without knowing it in the
Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would
have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere,
blinded the other half and driven everyone else psychotic and
sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.
He felt strong, he felt healthy. He vigorously cleared away the
junk mail with a spade and then buried the cat.
Just as he was finishing that, the phone went, but he let it ring
while he maintained a moment's respectful silence. Whoever it was
would ring back if it was important.
He kicked the mud off his shoes and went back inside.
There had been a small number of significant letters in the piles
of junk - some documents from the council, dated three years
earlier, relating to the proposed demolition of his house, and
some other letters about the setting up of a public inquiry into
the whole bypass scheme in the area; there was also an old letter
from Greenpeace, the ecological pressure group to which he
occasionally made contributions, asking for help with their
scheme to release dolphins and orcas from captivity, and some
postcards from friends, vaguely complaining that he never got in
touch these days.
He collected these together and put them in a cardboard file
which he marked "Things To Do". Since he was feeling so vigorous
and dynamic that morning, he even added the word "Urgent!"
He unpacked his towel and another few odd bits and pieces from
the plastic bag he had acquired at the Port Brasta Mega-Market.
The slogan on the side was a clever and elaborate pun in Lingua
Centauri which was completely incomprehensible in any other
language and therefore entirely pointless for a Duty Free Shop at
a spaceport. The bag also had a hole in it so he threw it away.
He realized with a sudden twinge that something else must have
dropped out in the small spacecraft that had brought him to
Earth, kindly going out of its way to drop him right beside the
A303. He had lost his battered and spaceworn copy of the thing
which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable wastes
of space he had traversed. He had lost the Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy.
Well, he told himself, this time I really won't be needing it
again.
He had some calls to make.
He had decided how to deal with the mass of contradictions his
return journey precipitated, which was that he would simply
brazen it out.
He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department
head.
"Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven't been in for
six months but I've gone mad."
"Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that.
Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?"
"When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?"
"Sometime in spring I think."
"I'll be in shortly after that."
"Rightyho."
He flipped through the Yellow Pages and made a short list of
numbers to try.
"Oh hello, is that the Old Elms Hospital? Yes, I was just phoning
to see if I could have a word with Fenella, er ... Fenella - Good
Lord, silly me, I'll forget my own name next, er, Fenella - isn't
this ridiculous? Patient of yours, dark haired girl, came in last
night ..."
"I'm afraid we don't have any patients called Fenella."
"Oh, don't you? I mean Fiona of course, we just call her Fen ..."
"I'm sorry, goodbye."
Click.
Six conversations along these lines began to take their toll on
his mood of vigorous, dynamic optimism, and he decided that
before it deserted him entirely he would take it down to the pub
and parade it a little.
He had had the perfect idea for explaining away every
inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled
to himself as he pushed open the door which had so daunted him
last night.
"Arthur!!!!"
He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes that stared at him
from all corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful
time he'd had in Southern California.
=================================================================
Chapter 9
He accepted another pint and took a pull at it.
"Of course, I had my own personal alchemist too."
"You what?"
He was getting silly and he knew it. Exuberance and Hall and
Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the
first effects it had is to stop you being wary of things, and the
point at which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more
was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.
"Oh yes," he insisted with a happy glazed smile. "It's why I've
lost so much weight."
"What?" said his audience.
"Oh yes," he said again. "The Californians have rediscovered
alchemy. Oh yes."
He smiled again.
"Only," he said, "it's in a much more useful form than that which
in ..." He paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble
in his head. "In which the ancients used to practise it. Or at
least," he added, "failed to practise it. They couldn't get it to
work you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn't cut it."
"Nostradamus?" said one of his audience.
"I didn't think he was an alchemist," said another.
"I thought," said a third, "he was a seer."
"He became a seer," said Arthur to his audience, the component
parts of which were beginning to bob and blur a little, "because
he was such a lousy alchemist. You should know that."
He took another pull at his beer. It was something he had not
tasted for eight years. He tasted it and tasted it.
"What has alchemy got to do," asked a bit of the audience, "with
losing weight?"
"I'm glad you asked that," said Arthur. "Very glad. And I will
now tell you what the connection is between ..." He paused.
"Between those two things. The things you mentioned. I'll tell
you."
He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like watching oil
tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.
"They've discovered how to turn excess body fat into gold," he
said, in a sudden blur of coherence.
"You're kidding."
"Oh yes," he said, "no," he corrected himself, "they have."
He rounded on the doubting part of his audience, which was all of
it, and so it took a little while to round on it completely.
"Have you been to California?" he demanded. "Do you know the sort
of stuff they do there?"
Three members of his audience said they had and that he was
talking nonsense.
"You haven't seen anything," insisted Arthur. "Oh yes," he added,
because someone was offering to buy another round.
"The evidence," he said, pointing at himself, and not missing by
more than a couple of inches, "is before your eyes. Fourteen
hours in a trance," he said, "in a tank. In a trance. I was in a
tank. I think," he added after a thoughtful pause, "I already
said that."
He waited patiently while the next round was duly distributed. He
composed the next bit of his story in his mind, which was going
to be something about the tank needing to be orientated along a
line dropped perpendicularly from the Pole Star to a baseline
drawn between Mars and Venus, and was about to start trying to
say it when he decided to give it a miss.
"Long time," he said instead, "in a tank. In a trance." He looked
round severely at his audience, to make sure it was all following
attentively.
He resumed.
"Where was I?" he said.
"In a trance," said one.
"In a tank," said another.
"Oh yes," said Arthur. "Thank you. And slowly," he said pressing
onwards, "slowly, slowly slowly, all your excess body fat ...
turns ... to ..." he paused for effect, "subcoo ... subyoo ...
subtoocay ..." - he paused for breath - "subcutaneous gold, which
you can have surgically removed. Getting out of the tank is hell.
What did you say?"
"I was just clearing my throat."
"I think you doubt me."
"I was clearing my throat."
"She was clearing her throat," confirmed a significant part of
the audience in a low rumble.
"Oh yes," said Arthur, "all right. And you then split the
proceeds ..." he paused again for a maths break, "fifty-fifty
with the alchemist. Make a lot of money!"
He looked swayingly around at his audience, and could not help
but be aware of an air of scepticism about their jumbled faces.
He felt very affronted by this.
"How else," he demanded, "could I afford to have my face
dropped?"
Friendly arms began to help him home. "Listen," he protested, as
the cold February breeze brushed his face, "looking lived-in is
all the rage in California at the moment. You've got to look as
if you've seen the Galaxy. Life, I mean. You've got to look as if
you've seen life. That's what I got. A face drop. Give me eight
years, I said. I hope being thirty doesn't come back into fashion
or I've wasted a lot of money."
He lapsed into silence for a while as the friendly arms continued
to help him along the lane to his house.
"Got in yesterday," he mumbled. "I'm very happy to be home. Or
somewhere very like it ..."
"Jet lag," muttered one of his friends. "Long trip from
California. Really mucks you up for a couple of days."
"I don't think he's been there at all," muttered another. "I
wonder where he has been. And what's happened to him."
After a little sleep Arthur got up and pottered round the house a
bit. He felt woozy and a little low, still disoriented by the
journey. He wondered how he was going to find Fenny.
He sat and looked at the fish bowl. He tapped it again, and
