So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [10]
“Ah no,” said Arthur, “five miles farther on. If that’s all right.”
“Okay,” said Russell, after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.
It was in fact Arthur’s exit, 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 exits.
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 in him to the shudders that only very 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 just a parking offense.
“Delusions,” said Russell.
“What?” said Arthur, startled 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 brain-wave 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…”
“Okay, 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 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 thought had vanished into oblivion forever, 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—”
“Okay, 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 “McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage.” The tension eased as the rain subsided.
“It started out with all that business of the CIA agent they found in