The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (78 page)

T
he night in Islington was sweet and fragrant.

There were, of course, no Fuolornis Fire Dragons about in the alley, but if any had chanced by they might just as well have sloped off across the road for a pizza, for they were not going to be needed.

Had an emergency cropped up while they were still in the middle of their pizza with extra anchovies they could always have sent across a message to put Dire Straits on the stereo, which is now known to have much the same effect.

“No,” said Fenchurch, “not yet.”

Arthur put Dire Straits on the stereo. Fenchurch pushed ajar the upstairs front door to let in a little more of the sweet fragrant night air. They both sat on some of the furniture made out of cushions very close to the open bottle of champagne.

“No,” said Fenchurch, “not till you’ve found out what’s wrong with me, which bit. But I suppose,” she added, very, very, very quietly, “that we may as well start with where your hand is now.”

Arthur said, “So which way do I go?”

“Down,” said Fenchurch, “on this occasion.”

He moved his hand.

“Down,” she said, “is in fact the other way.”

“Oh yes.”

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff drink—which is not strictly relevant at this point since the record hadn’t yet got to that bit, but there will be too much else going on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch, so it seems best to mention it now while things are still moving slowly.

“And so we come,” said Arthur, “to your knee. There is something terribly and tragically wrong with your left knee.”

“My left knee,” said Fenchurch, “is absolutely fine.”

“So it is.”

“Did you know that …”

“What?”

“Ah, it’s all right, I can tell you do. No, keep going.”

“So it has to be something to do with your feet.…”

She smiled in the dim light, and wriggled her shoulders noncommittally against the cushions. Since there are cushions in the Universe, on Sqornshellous Beta to be exact, two worlds in from the swampland of the mattresses, that actively enjoy being wriggled against, particularly if it’s noncommittally because of the syncopated way in which the shoulders move, it’s a pity they weren’t there. They weren’t, but such is life.

Arthur held her left foot in his lap and looked it over carefully. All kinds of stuff about the way her dress fell away from her legs was making it difficult for him to think particularly clearly at this point.

“I have to admit,” he said, “that I really don’t know what I’m looking for.”

“You’ll know when you find it,” she said, “really you will.” There was a slight catch in her voice. “It’s not that one.”

Feeling increasingly puzzled, Arthur let her left foot down on the floor and moved himself around so that he could take her right foot. She moved forward, put her arms round him and kissed him, because the record had got to that bit which, if you knew the record, you would know made it impossible not to do this.

Then she gave him her right foot.

He stroked it, ran his fingers around her ankle, under her toes, along her instep, could find nothing wrong with it.

She watched him with great amusement, laughed and shook her head.

“No, don’t stop,” she said, “but it’s not that one now.”

Arthur stopped, and frowned at her left foot on the floor.

“Don’t stop.”

He stroked her right foot, ran his fingers around her ankle, under her toes, along her instep, and said, “You mean it’s something to do with which leg I’m holding …?”

She did another of the shrugs which would have brought such joy into the life of a simple cushion from Sqornshellous Beta.

He frowned.

“Pick me up,” she said quietly.

He let her right foot down on the floor and stood up. So did she. He picked her up in his arms and they kissed again. This went on for a while, then she said, “Now put me down again.”

Still puzzled, he did so.

“Well?”

She looked at him almost challengingly.

“So what’s wrong with my feet?” she said.

Arthur still did not understand. He sat on the floor, then got down on his hands and knees to look at her feet, in situ, as it were, in their normal habitat. And as he looked closely, something odd struck him. He put his head right down to the ground and peered. There was a long pause. He sat back heavily.

“Yes,” he said, “I see what’s wrong with your feet. They don’t touch the ground.”

“So … so what do you think …?”

Arthur looked up at her quickly and saw the deep apprehension making her eyes suddenly dark. She bit her lip and was trembling.

“What do … ” she stammered, “ … are you …?” She shook the hair forward over her eyes that were filling with dark fearful tears.

He stood up quickly, put his arms around her and gave her a single kiss.

“Perhaps you can do what I can do,” he said, and walked straight out of her upstairs front door.

The record got to the good bit.

T
he battle raged on about the star of Xaxis. Hundreds of the fierce and horribly beweaponed Zirzla ships had now been smashed and wrenched to atoms by the withering forces the huge silver Xaxisian ship was able to deploy. Part of the moon had gone, too, blasted away by those same blazing force guns that ripped the very fabric of space as they passed through it.

The Zirzla ships that remained, horribly beweaponed though they were, were now hopelessly outclassed by the devastating power of the Xaxisian ship, and were fleeing for cover behind the rapidly disintegrating moon, when the Xaxisian ship, in hurtling pursuit behind them, suddenly announced that it needed a holiday and left the field of battle.

All was redoubled fear and consternation for a moment, but the ship was gone.

With the stupendous powers at its command it flitted across vast tracts of irrationally shaped space, quickly, effortlessly, and above all, quietly.

Deep in his greasy, smelly bunk, fashioned out of a maintenance hatchway, Ford Prefect slept among his towels, dreaming of old haunts. He dreamed at one point in his slumbers of New York. In his dreams he was walking late at night along the East Side, beside the river which had become so extravagantly polluted that new life forms were now emerging from it spontaneously, demanding welfare and voting rights.

One of these floated past, waving. Ford waved back.

The thing thrashed to the shore and struggled up the bank.

“Hi,” it said, “I’ve just been created. I’m completely new to the Universe in all respects. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“Phew,” said Ford, a little nonplussed, “I can tell you where some bars are, I guess.”

“What about love and happiness? I sense deep needs for things like that,” it said, waving its tentacles. “Got any leads there?”

“You can get some of that,” said Ford, “on Seventh Avenue.”

“I instinctively feel,” said the creature, urgently, “that I need to be beautiful. Am I?”

“You’re pretty direct, aren’t you?”

“No point in mucking about. Am I?”

The thing was oozing all over the place now, squelching and blubbering. A nearby wino was getting interested.

“To me?” said Ford. “No. But listen,” he added after a moment, “most people make out, you know. Are there any more like you down there?”

“Search me, buster,” said the creature. “As I said, I’m new here. Life is entirely strange to me. What’s it like?”

Here was something that Ford felt he could speak about with authority.

“Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.”

“Er, how so?”

“Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”

“Is there anyone else out there I can talk to?”

“I expect so,” said Ford; “ask a policeman.”

Deep in his bunk, Ford Prefect wriggled and turned onto his other side. It wasn’t his favorite type of dream because it didn’t have Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six) in it, whom many of his dreams did feature. But at least it was a dream. At least he was asleep.

L
uckily there was a strong updraft in the alley because Arthur hadn’t done this sort of thing for a while, at least not deliberately, and deliberately is exactly the way you are not meant to do it.

He swung down sharply, nearly catching himself a nasty crack on the jaw with the doorstep, and tumbled through the air, so suddenly stunned with what a profoundly stupid thing he had just done that he completely forgot the bit about hitting the ground and didn’t.

A nice trick, he thought to himself, if you can do it.

The ground was hanging menacingly above his head.

He tried not to think about the ground, what an extraordinarily big thing it was and how much it would hurt him if it decided to stop hanging there and suddenly fell on him. He tried to think nice thoughts about lemurs instead, which was exactly the right thing to do because he couldn’t at that moment remember precisely what a lemur was, if it was one of those things that sweep in great majestic herds across the plains of wherever it was or if that was wildebeests, so it was a tricky kind of thing to think nice thoughts about without simply resorting to an icky sort of general well-disposedness toward things, and all this kept his mind well occupied while his body tried to adjust to the fact that it wasn’t touching anything.

A Mars bar wrapper fluttered down the alleyway.

After a seeming moment of doubt and indecision it eventually 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 bird talk 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 time switch 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. And I couldn’t immediately think of any others.”

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 dramatically upward and bobbed back down toward 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 onto my hand, just one foot.”

“What?”

“Try it.”

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if she was trying to step onto the hand of someone who was floating in front of her in midair, she stepped onto 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 gutter 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 that had their offices around the corner and took her 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 had never seen the gutter from this angle before, and it looked to her now as if there might be a bird’s nest as well as all the mud and gunge up there. If she leaned forward just a little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably see it more clearly.