So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, Page 3

  He twisted round in his seat.

  "Are you sure she's all right?" he said again.

  Beyond the fact that she was, to him, heartthumpingly beautiful, he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was, the exact shading of her hair. And nor could he ask her anything about herself because, sadly, she was completely unconscious.

  "She's just drugged," said her brother, shrugging, not moving his eyes from the road ahead.

  "And that's all right, is it?" said Arthur, in alarm.

  "Suits me," he said.

  "Ah," said Arthur. "Er," he added after a moment's thought.

  The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.

  After an initial flurry of opening hellos, he and Russell - the wonderful girl's brother's name was Russell, a name which, to Arthur's mind, always suggested burly men with blond moustaches and blow-dried hair, who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirtfronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on snooker matches - had quickly discovered they didn't like each other at all.

  Russell was a burly man. He had a blond moustache. His hair was fine and blow dried. To be fair to him - though Arthur didn't see any necessity for this beyond the sheer mental exercise of it - he, Arthur, was looking pretty grim himself. A man can't cross a hundred thousand light years, mostly in other people's baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

  "She's not a junkie," said Russell suddenly, as if he clearly thought that someone else in the car might be. "She's under sedation."

  "But that's terrible," said Arthur, twisting round to look at her again. She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across her face, obscuring it.

  "What's the matter with her, is she ill?"

  "No," said Russell, "merely barking mad."

  "What?" said Arthur, horrified.

  "Loopy, completely bananas. I'm taking her back to the hospital and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog."

  "A hedgehog?"

  Russell hooted his horn fiercely at the car that came round the corner towards them half-way on to their side of the road, making them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.

  "Well, maybe not a hedgehog," he said after he'd settled down again. "Though it would probably be simpler to deal with if she did. If somebody thinks they're a hedgehog, presumably you just give 'em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel better. At least medical science could deal with it, that's the point. Seems that's no good enough for Fenny, though."

  "Fenny...?"

  "You know what I got her for Christmas?"

  "Well, no."

  "Black's Medical Dictionary."

  "Nice present."

  "I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical order."

  "You say her name is Fenny?"

  "Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like that at school, you know."

  "Was she?"

  "She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of."

  "I can see how that would be irritating," said Arthur doubtfully. He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn't sustain the name Fenella properly.

  "Not that I wasn't sympathetic," continued Russell, "but it did get a bit irritating. She was limping for months."

  He slowed down.

  "This is your turning isn't it?"

  "Ah, no," said Arthur, "five miles further on. If that's all right."

  "OK," said Russell after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn't, and speeded up again.

  It was in fact Arthur's turning, but he couldn't leave without finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could take either of the next two turnings.

  They led back to the village that had been his home, though what he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise to the shudders that only very normal things can create, when seen where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar light.

  By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.

  Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it no more than a parking offence.

  "Delusions," said Russell.

  "What?" said Arthur, started out of his train of thought.

  "She says she suffers from strange delusions that she's living in the real world. It's no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that's why the delusions are so strange. Don't know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off for a beer is my answer. I mean you can only muck about so much can't you?"

  Arthur frowned, not for the first time.

  "Well..."

  "And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going on about strange jumps in her brainwave patterns."

  "Jumps?"

  "This," said Fenny.

  Arthur whirled round in his seat and stared into her suddenly open but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn't in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked once, and then she was sleeping peacefully.

  "What did she say?" he asked anxiously.

  "She said 'this'."

  "This what?"

  "This what? How the heck should I know? This hedgehog, that chimney pot, the other pair of Don Alfonso's tweezers. She's barking mad, I thought I'd mentioned that."

  "You don't seem to care very much." Arthur tried to say it as matter-of-factly as possible but it didn't seem to work.

  "Look, buster..."

  "OK, I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I didn't mean it to sound like that," said Arthur. "I know you care a lot, obviously," he added, lying. "I know that you have to deal with it somehow. You'll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula."

  He stared furiously out of the window.

  He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in his head on this night as he returned to the home that he had thought had vanished into oblivion for ever, the one that was compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he knew nothing other than that she had said "this" to him, and that he wouldn't wish her brother on a Vogon.

  "So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned?" he went on to say as quickly as he could.

  "Look, this is my sister, I don't even know why I'm talking to you about..."

  "OK, I'm sorry. Perhaps you'd better let me out. This is..."

  At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them through a sieve.

  Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as the sky blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating to pass a lorry marked "McKeena's All-Weather Haulage". The tension eased as the rain subsided.

  "It started with all that business of the CIA agent they found in the reservoir, when everybody had all the hallucinations and everything, you remember?"


  Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitch-hiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

  "No," he said.

  "That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a cafe somewhere. Rickmansworth. Don't know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich."

  Arthur winced. "I'm very sorry to hear that," he said a little stiffly.

  Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

  "So what," said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together, "was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?"

  "Bobbing up and down of course. He was dead."

  "But what..."

  "Come on, you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations. Everyone said it was a cock up, the CIA trying experiments into drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they'd been invaded."

  "What hallucinations were those exactly...?" said Arthur in a rather quiet voice.

  "What do you mean, what hallucinations? I'm talking about all that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we're going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the effect wore off. The CIA denied it which meant it must be true."

  Arthur's head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something to steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little opening and closing movements as if it was on his mind to say something, but nothing emerged.

  "Anyway," continued Russell, "whatever drug it was it didn't seem to wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana, so..." He shrugged.

  "The Vogon..." squeaked Arthur. "The yellow ships... vanished?"

  "Well, of course they did, they were hallucinations," said Russell, and looked at Arthur oddly. "You trying to say you don't remember any of this? Where have you been for heaven's sake?"

  This was, to Arthur, such an astonishingly good question that he half-leapt out of his seat with shock.

  "Christ!!!" yelled Russell, fighting to control the car which was suddenly trying to skid. He pulled it out of the path of an oncoming lorry and swerved up on to a grass bank. As the car lurched to a halt, the girl in the back was thrown against Russell's seat and collapsed awkwardly.

  Arthur twisted round in horror.

  "Is she all right?" he blurted out.

  Russell swept his hands angrily back through his blow-dried hair. He tugged at his blond moustache. He turned to Arthur.

  "Would you please," he said, "let go of the handbrake?"

  Chapter 6

  From here it was a four-mile walk to his village: a further mile to the turning, to which the abominable Russell had now fiercely declined to take him, and from there a further three miles of winding country lane.

  The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.

  He shook his head sharply in the hope that it might dislodge some salient fact which would fall into place and make sense of an otherwise utterly bewildering Universe, but since the salient fact, if there was one, entirely failed to do this, he set off up the road again, hoping that a good vigorous walk, and maybe even some good painful blisters, would help to reassure him of his own existence at least, if not his sanity.

  It was 10.30 when he arrived, a fact he discovered from the steamed and greasy window of the Horse and Groom pub, in which there had hung for many years a battered old Guiness clock which featured a picture of an emu with a pint glass jammed rather amusingly down its throat.

  This was the pub at which he had passed the fateful lunchtime during which first his house and then the entire planet Earth had been demolished, or rather had seemed to be demolished. No, damn it, had been demolished, because if it hadn't then where the bloody heck had he been for the last eight years, and how he had got there if not in one of the big yellow Vogon ships which the appalling Russell had just been telling him were merely drug-induced hallucinations, and yet if it had been demolished, what was he currently standing on...?

  He jammed the brake on this line of thought because it wasn't going to get him any further than it had the last twenty times he'd been over it.

  He started again.

  This was the pub at which he had passed the fateful lunchtime during which whatever it was had happened that he was going to sort out later had happened, and...

  It still didn't make sense.

  He started again.

  This was the pub in which...

  This was a pub.

  Pubs served drinks and he couldn't half do with one.

  Satisfied that his jumbled thought processes had at last arrived at a conclusion, and a conclusion he was happy with, even if it wasn't the one he had set out to achieve, he strode towards the door.

  And stopped.

  A small black wire-haired terrier ran out from behind a low wall and then, catching sight of Arthur, began to snarl.

  Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to an advertising friend of his, and was called Know-Nothing-Bozo because the way its hair stood up on its head it reminded people of the President of the United States, and the dog knew Arthur, or at least should do. It was a stupid dog, could not even read an autocue, which way why some people had protested about its name, but it should at least have been able to recognize Arthur instead of standing there, hackles raised, as if Arthur was the most fearful apparition ever to intrude upon its feeble-witted life.

  This prompted Arthur to go and peer at the window again, this time with an eye not for the asphyxiating emu but for himself.

  Seeing himself for the first time suddenly in a familiar context, he had to admit that the dog had a point.

  He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare birds with, and there was no doubt but that to go into the pub in his present condition would excite comments of a raucous kind, and worse still, there would doubtless be several people in there at the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be bound to bombard him with questions which, at the moment, he felt ill-equipped to deal with.

  Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from one of Will's own commercials for being incapable of knowing which dog food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that 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 to do 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.