Mostly Harmless [36]
The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realise that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and armagnac he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it. There was not a lot of demand for his services.
Arthur's heart sank. This surprised him, because he thought it was already about as low as it could possibly be. He closed his eyes for a moment. He so much wanted to be home. He so much wanted his own home world, the actual Earth he had grown up on, not to have been demolished. He so much wanted none of this to have happened. He so much wanted that when he opened his eyes again he would be standing on the doorstep of his little cottage in the west country of England, that the sun would be shining over the green hills, the post van would be going up the lane, the daffodils would be blooming in his garden, and in the distance the pub would be opening for lunch. He so much wanted to take the newspaper down to the pub and read it over a pint of bitter. He so much wanted to do the crossword. He so much wanted to be able to get completely stuck on 17 across.
He opened his eyes.
The strange thing was pulsating irritably at him, tapping some kind of pseudopodia on the desk.
Arthur shook his head and looked at the next sheet of paper.
Grim, he thought. And the next.
Very grim. And the next.
Oh... Now that looked better.
It was a world called Bartledan. It had oxygen. It had green hills. It even, it seemed, had a renowned literary culture. But the thing that most aroused his interest was a photograph of a small bunch of Bartledanian people, standing around in a village square, smiling pleasantly at the camera.
"Ah," he said, and held the picture up to the strange thing behind the desk.
Its eyes squirmed out on stalks and roiled up and down the piece of paper, leaving a glistening trail of slime all over it.
"Yes," it said with distaste. "They do look exactly like you.'
Arthur moved to Bartledan and, using some money he had made by selling some toenail clippings and spit to a DNA bank, he bought himself a room in the village featured in the picture. It was pleasant there. The air was balmy. The people looked like him and seemed not to mind him being there. They didn't attack him with anything. He bought some clothes and a cupboard to put them in.
He had got himself a life. Now he had to find a purpose in it.
At first he tried to sit and read. But the literature of Bartledan, famed though it was throughout this sector of the Galaxy for its subtlety and grace, didn't seem to be able to sustain his interest. The problem was that it wasn't actually about human beings after all. It wasn't about what human beings wanted. The people of Bartledan were remarkably like human beings to look at, but when you said "Good evening" to one, he would tend to look around with a slight sense of surprise, sniff the air and say that, yes, he supposed that it probably was a goodish evening now that Arthur came to mention it.
"No, what I meant was to wish you a good evening," Arthur would say, or rather, used to say. He soon learned to avoid these conversations. "I mean that I hope you have a good evening," he would add.
More puzzlement.
"Wish?" the Bartledanian would say at last, in polite bafflement.
"Er, yes," Arthur would then have said. "I'm just expressing the hope that...'
"Hope?"
"Yes."
"What is hope?"
Good question, thought Arthur to himself, and retreated back to his room to think about things.
On the one hand he could only recognise and respect what he learnt about the Bartledanian view of the universe, which was that the universe was what the universe was, take