Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [79]
Tricia stopped the tape again.
She was definitely feeling very wobbly indeed. The feeling that she was hallucinating had now receded, but had not left anything any easier or clearer in her head.
She pushed her seat back from the editing desk and wondered what to do. Years ago she had left the field of astronomical research because she knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that she had met a being from another planet. At a party. And she had also known, without any doubt whatsoever, that she would have made herself a laughingstock if she had ever said so. But how could she study cosmology and not say anything about the single most important thing she knew about it? She had done the only thing she could do. She had left.
Now she worked in television and the same thing had happened again.
She had videotape, actual videotape of the most astounding story in the history of, well, anything: a forgotten outpost of an alien civilization marooned on the outermost planet of our own solar system.
She had the story.
She had been there.
She had seen it.
She had the videotape, for God’s sake.
And if she ever showed it to anybody, she would be a laughingstock.
How could she prove any of this? It wasn’t even worth thinking about. The whole thing was a nightmare from virtually any angle she cared to look at it from. Her head was beginning to throb.
She had some aspirin in her bag. She went out of the little editing suite to the water dispenser down the corridor. She took the aspirin and drank several cups of water.
The place seemed to be very quiet. Usually there were more people bustling about the place, or at least some people bustling around the place. She popped her head around the door of the editing suite next to hers but there was no one there.
She had gone rather overboard keeping people out of her own suite, DO NOT DISTURB, the notice read, DO NOT EVEN THINK OF ENTERING. I DON’T CARE WHAT IT IS. GO AWAY, I’M BUSY!
When she went back in she noticed that the message light on her phone extension was winking and wondered how long it had been on.
“Hello?” she said to the receptionist.
“Oh, Miss McMillan, I’m so glad you called. Everybody’s been trying to reach you. Your TV company. They’re desperate to reach you. Can you call them?”
“Why didn’t you put them through?” said Tricia.
“You said I wasn’t to put anybody through for anything.
You said I was to deny that you were even here. I didn’t know what to do. I came up to give you a message, but …”
“Okay,” said Tricia, cursing herself. She phoned her office.
“Tricia!” Where the hemorrhaging fuck are you?”
“At the editing …”
“They said …”
“I know. What’s up?”
“What’s up? Only a bloody alien spaceship!”
“What? Where?”
“Regent’s Park. Big silver job. Some girl with a bird. She speaks English and throws rocks at people and wants someone to repair her watch. Just get there.”
Tricia stared at it.
It wasn’t a Grebulon ship. Not that she was suddenly an expert on extraterrestrial craft, but this was a sleek and beautiful silver and white thing about the size of a large oceangoing yacht, which is what it most resembled. Next to this, the structures of the huge half-dismantled Grebulon ship looked like gun turrets on a battleship. Gun turrets. That’s what those blank gray buildings had looked like. And what was odd about them was that by the time she passed them again on her way to reboarding the small Grebulon craft, they had moved. These things flitted briefly through her head as she ran from the taxi to meet her camera crew.
“Where’s the girl?” she shouted above the noise of helicopters and police sirens.
“There!” shouted the producer while the sound engineer hurried to clip a radio mike to her. “She says her mother and father came from here in some parallel dimension or something like that, and she’s got her father’s watch, and … I don’t know. What can I tell you? Busk it. Ask her what it feels like to be from outer space.”
“Thanks a lot, Ted,” muttered Tricia. She checked that her mike was securely clipped, gave the engineer