Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams [46]
He could now do something about that. Blinking with the noneffort of it he wafted higher into the air, and now the boulders were hurtling through the air beneath him.
He looked downward with intense curiosity. Between him and the shivering ground was now some thirty feet of empty air, empty, that is, if you discounted the boulders that didn’t stay in it for long, but bounded on downward in the iron grip of the law of gravity: the same law that seemed, all of a sudden, to have given Arthur a sabbatical.
It occurred to him almost instantly, with the instinctive correctness that self-preservation instills in the mind, that he mustn’t try to think about it, that if he did, the law of gravity would suddenly glance sharply in his direction and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing up there, and all would suddenly be lost.
So he thought about tulips. It was difficult, but he did. He thought about the pleasing firm roundness of the bottom of tulips, he thought about the interesting variety of colors they came in, and wondered what proportion of the total number of tulips that grew, or had grown, on the Earth would be found within a radius of one mile from a windmill. After a while he got dangerously bored with this train of thought, felt the air slipping away beneath him, felt that he was drifting down into the paths of the bouncing boulders that he was trying so hard not to think about, so he thought about the Athens airport for a bit and that kept him usefully annoyed for about five minutes—at the end of which he was startled to discover that he was now floating about six hundred feet above the ground.
He wondered for a moment how he was going to get back down to it, but instantly shied away from that area of speculation again, and tried to look at the situation steadily.
He was flying. What was he going to do about it? He looked back down at the ground. He didn’t look at it hard, but did his best just to give it an idle glance, as it were, in passing. There were a couple of things he couldn’t help noticing. One was that the eruption of the mountain seemed now to have spent itself—there was a crater just a little way beneath the peak, presumably where the rock had caved in on top of the huge cavernous cathedral, the statue of himself and the sadly abused figure of Agrajag.
The other was his tote bag, the one he had lost at the Athens airport. It was sitting pertly on a piece of clear ground, surrounded by exhausted boulders but apparently hit by none of them. Why this should be he could not speculate, but since this mystery was completely overshadowed by the monstrous impossibility of the bag’s being there in the first place, it was not a speculation he really felt strong enough for anyway. The thing is, it was there.
He was faced with the fact that he was going to have to pick the thing up. Here he was, flying along six hundred feet above the surface of an alien planet, the name of which he couldn’t even remember. He could not ignore the plaintive posture of this tiny piece of what used to be his life, here, so many light-years from the pulverized remains of his home.
Furthermore, he realized, the bag, if it was still in the state in which he lost it, would contain a can that would have in it the only Greek olive oil still surviving in the Universe.
Slowly, carefully, inch by inch, he began to bob downward, swinging gently from side to side like a nervous sheet of paper feeling its way toward the ground.
It went well; he was feeling good. The air supported him, but let him through. Two minutes later he was hovering a mere two feet above the bag and was faced with some difficult decisions. He bobbed there lightly. He frowned, but again, as lightly as he could.
If he picked the bag up, could he carry it? Wouldn’t the extra weight pull him straight to the ground?
Wouldn’t the mere act of touching something on the ground suddenly discharge whatever mysterious force it was that was holding him in the air?
Wouldn’t he be better off just being sensible at this point and