despite being full of water and a small yellow Babel fish which
was gulping its way around rather dejectedly, it still chimed its
deep and resonant chime as clearly and mesmerically as before.
Someone is trying to thank me, he thought to himself. He wondered
who, and for what.
=================================================================
Chapter 10
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and twenty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction,
realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out
loud, a wicked laugh.
He switched the incoming signal through from the Sub-Etha Net to
the ship's hi-fi system, and the odd, rather stilted, sing-song
voice spoke out with remarkable clarity round the cabin.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and thirty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He tweaked the volume up just a little while keeping a careful
eye on a rapidly changing table of figures on the ship's computer
display. For the length of time he had in mind, the question of
power consumption became significant. He didn't want a murder on
his conscience.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty-two ... and forty
seconds.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He checked around the small ship. He walked down the short
corridor. "At the third stroke ..."
He stuck his head into the small, functional, gleaming steel
bathroom.
"it will be ..."
It sounded fine in there.
He looked into the tiny sleeping quarters.
"... one ... thirty-two ..."
It sounded a bit muffled. There was a towel hanging over one of
the speakers. He took down the towel.
"... and fifty seconds."
Fine.
He checked out the packed cargo hold, and wasn't at all satisfied
with the sound. There was altogether too much crated junk in the
way. He stepped back out and waited for the door to seal. He
broke open a closed control panel and pushed the jettison button.
He didn't know why he hadn't thought of that before. A whooshing
rumbling noise died away quickly into silence. After a pause a
slight hiss could be heard again.
It stopped.
He waited for the green light to show and then opened the door
again on the now empty cargo hold.
"... one ... thirty-three ... and fifty seconds."
Very nice.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He then went and had a last thorough examination of the emergency
suspended animation chamber, which was where he particularly
wanted it to be heard.
"At the third stroke it will be one ... thirty ... four ...
precisely."
He shivered as he peered down through the heavily frosted
covering at the dim bulk of the form within. One day, who knew
when, it would wake, and when it did, it would know what time it
was. Not exactly local time, true, but what the heck.
He double-checked the computer display above the freezer bed,
dimmed the lights and checked it again.
"At the third stroke it will be ..."
He tiptoed out and returned to the control cabin.
"... one ... thirty-four and twenty seconds."
The voice sounded as clear as if he was hearing it over a phone
in London, which he wasn't, not by a long way.
He gazed out into the inky night. The star the size of a
brilliant biscuit crumb he could see in the distance was
Zondostina, or as it was known on the world from which the rather
stilted, sing-song voice was being received, Pleiades Zeta.
The bright orange curve that filled over half the visible area
was the giant gas planet Sesefras Magna, where the Xaxisian
battleships docked, and just rising over its horizon was a small
cool blue moon, Epun.
"At the third stroke it will be ..."
For twenty minutes he sat and watched as the gap between the ship
and Epun closed, as the ship's computer teased and kneaded the
numbers that would bring it into a loop around the little moon,
close the loop and keep it there, orbiting in perpetual
obscurity.
"One ... fifty-nine ..."
His original plan had been to close down all external signalling
and radiation from the ship, to render it as nearly invisible as
possible unless you were actually looking at it, but then he'd
had an idea he preferred. It would now emit one single continuous
beam, pencil-thin, broadcasting the incoming time signal to the
planet of the signal's origin, which it would not reach for four
hundred years, travelling at light speed, but where it would
probably cause something of a stir when it did.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
He sniggered.
He didn't like to think of himself as the sort of person who
giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been
giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an
hour now.
"At the third stroke ..."
The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit
round a little known and never visited moon. Almost perfect.
One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation of
the launching of the ship's little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing
actions, reactions, tangential forces, all the mathematical
poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.
Before he left, he turned out the lights.
As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft zipped out on
the beginning of its three-day journey to the orbiting space
station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a long pencil-
thin beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey
still.
"At the third stroke, it will be two ... thirteen ... and fifty
seconds."
He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he
didn't have the room.
"Beep ... beep ... beep."
=================================================================
Chapter 11
"April showers I hate especially."
However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined
to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to
another table, but there didn't seem to be one free in the whole
cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.
"Bloody April showers. Hate hate hate."
Arthur stared, frowning, out of the window. A light, sunny spray
of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he'd been back now.
Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy.
People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him.
Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to
him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped
from the tv and now kept in the back of a cupboard without
bothering to watch.
One effect that still lingered though, was his joy at being back.
Now that the Earth's atmosphere had closed over his head for
good, he thought, wrongly, everything within it gave him
extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the
raindrops he felt he had to protest.
"Well, I like them," he said suddenly, "and for all the obvious
reasons. They're light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you
feel good."
The man snorted derisively.
"That's what they all say," he said, and glowered darkly from his
corner seat.
He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening,
unprovoked remark had been, "I'm a lorry driver. I hate driving
in the rain. Ironic isn't it? Bloody ironic."
If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not
been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt,
affable but not encouraging.
But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now.
"They all say that about bloody April showers," he said. "So
bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather."
He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say
something about the government.
"What I want to know is this," he said, "if it's going to be nice
weather, why," he almost spat, "can't it be nice without bloody
raining?"
Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot
to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.
"Well, there you go," he said and instead got up himself. "Bye."
He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back
through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of
rain on his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow
glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.
He climbed into his battered but adored old black Golf GTi,
squealed the tyres, and headed out past the islands of petrol
pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.
He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had
closed finally and for ever above his head.
He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put
behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his
galactic travels had dragged him.
He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard,
oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a
microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable
infinity of the Universe.
He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.
The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a
small umbrella.
His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and
skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.
"Fenny!" he shouted.
Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit
her instead with the car door as he leant across and flung it
open at her.
It caught her hand and knocked away her umbrella, which then
bowled wildly away across the road.
"Shit!" yelled Arthur as helpfully as he cold, leapt out of his
own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKeena's All-
Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny's
umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.
The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy-long-legs,
expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a
little.
He picked it up.
"Er," he said. There didn't seem to be a lot of point in offering
the thing back to her.
"How did you know my name?" she said.
"Er, well," he said. "Look, I'll get you another one ..."
He looked at her and tailed off.
She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale
and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost
sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a
formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than
what she looked as if she was looking at.
But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as if she suddenly
arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face,
and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was
very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.
She grinned, tossed her bag into the back and swivelled herself
into the front seat.
"Don't worry about the umbrella," she said to him as she climbed
in. "It was my brother's and he can't have liked it or he
wouldn't have given it to me." She laughed and pulled on her
seatbelt. "You're not a friend of my brother's are you?"
"No."
Her voice was the only part of her which didn't say "Good".
Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite
extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly
away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that
neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were
in trouble.
So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother's car,
the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his
nightmare years in the stars had not been the unbalance of the
moment, or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced
now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-
balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.
"So ..." he said, hoping to kick the conversation off to an
exciting start.
"He was meant to pick me up - my brother - but phoned to say he
couldn't make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look
at the calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided to hitch.
So."
"So."
"So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know my
name."
"Perhaps we ought to first sort out," said Arthur, looking back
over his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic,
"where I'm taking you."
Very close, he hoped, or long away. Close would mean she lived
near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.
"I'd like to go to Taunton," she said, "please. If that's all
right. It's not far. You can drop me at ..."
"You live in Taunton?" he said, hoping that he'd managed to sound
merely curious rather than ecstatic. Taunton was wonderfully
close to him. He could ...
"No, London," she said. "There's a train in just under an hour."
It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away up
the motorway. He wondered what to do, and while he was wondering
with horror heard himself saying, "Oh, I can take you to London.
Let me take you to London ..."
Bungling idiot. Why on Earth had he said "let" in that stupid
way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.
