Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [77]
She didn’t want to make any false moves. She didn’t want to alarm him. But there were things she had to know.
“How did you … where did you get … this?” she asked, gesturing around the room nervously.
“The decor?” asked the Leader. “Do you like it? It is very sophisticated. We are a sophisticated people, we Grebulons. We buy sophisticated consumer durables … by mail order.”
Tricia had nodded tremendously slowly at this point. “Mail order …”she had said.
The Leader chuckled. It was one of those dark chocolate, reassuring, silky chuckles.
“I think you think they ship it here. No! Ha-ha! We have arranged a special box number in New Hampshire. We make regular pick-up visits. Ha-ha!” He lounged back in a relaxed fashion on his beanbag, reached for a reheated French fry and nibbled the end of it, an amused smile playing across his lips.
Tricia could feel her brain beginning to bubble very slightly. She kept the video camera going.
“How do you, well, er, how do you pay for these wonderful … things?”
The Leader chuckled again.
“American Express,” he said with a nonchalant shrug.
Tricia nodded slowly again. She knew that they gave cards exclusively to just about anybody.
“And these?” she said, holding up the hamburger he had presented her with.
“It is very easy,” said the Leader. “We stand in line.”
Again, Tricia realized with a cold, trickling feeling going down her spine, that explained an awful lot.
* * *
She hit the fast-forward button again. There was nothing of any use here at all. It was all nightmarish madness. She could have faked something that would have looked more convincing.
Another sick feeling began to creep over her as she watched this hopeless, awful tape, and she began, with slow horror, to realize that it must be the answer.
She must be …
She shook her head and tried to get a grip.
An overnight flight going east … The sleeping pills she had taken to get her through it. The vodka she’d had to set the sleeping pills going.
What else? Well. There was seventeen years of obsession that a glamorous man with two heads, one of which was disguised as a parrot in a cage, had tried to pick her up at a party but had then impatiently flown off to another planet in a flying saucer. There suddenly seemed to be all sorts of bothersome aspects to that idea that had never really occurred to her. Never occurred to her. In seventeen years.
She stuffed her fist into her mouth.
She must get help.
Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that … New York had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.
She must have had a nervous breakdown.
That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got home. She had dreamed the whole story. An alien race of people dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature’s way of telling her to check into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.
She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large coffees she’d got through as well, and realized how heavily she was breathing and how fast.
Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realizing that you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down, to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.
After a while, now that she was breathing normally again, she opened them again.
So where had she got this tape from, then?
It was still running.
All right. It was a fake.
She had faked it herself,