So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [17]
He collected these together and put them in a cardboard file which he marked “Things To Do.” Since he was feeling so vigorous and dynamic that morning, he even added the word “Urgent!”
He unpacked his towel and another few odd bits and pieces from the plastic bag he had acquired at the Port Brasta Mega-Market. The slogan on the side was a clever and elaborate pun in Lingua Centauri which was completely incomprehensible in any other language and therefore entirely pointless for a duty-free shop at a spaceport. The bag also had a hole in it so he threw it away.
He realized with a sudden twinge that something else must have dropped out in the small spacecraft that had brought him to Earth, kindly going out of its way to drop him right beside the A303. He had lost his battered and space-worn copy of the thing which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable wastes of space he had traversed. He had lost The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Well, he told himself, this time I really won’t be needing it again.
He had some calls to make.
He had decided how to deal with the mass of contradictions his return journey precipitated, which was that he would simply brazen it out.
He phoned the BBC and asked to be put through to his department head.
“Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in for six months but I’ve gone mad.”
“Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?”
“When do hedgehogs start hibernating?”
“Sometime in spring, I think.”
“I’ll be in shortly after that.”
“Righty-ho.”
He flipped through the Yellow Pages and made a short list of numbers to try.
“Oh, hello, is that the Old Elms Hospital? Yes, I was just phoning to see if I could have a word with Fenella, er…Fenella … good Lord, silly me, I’ll forget my own name next, er, Fenella—isn’t this ridiculous? Patient of yours, dark-haired girl, came in last night…”
“I’m afraid we don’t have any patients called Fenella.”
“Oh, don’t you? I meant Fiona, of course, we just call her Fen—”
“I’m sorry, goodbye.”
Click.
Six conversations along these lines began to take their toll on his mood of vigorous, dynamic optimism, and he decided that before it deserted him entirely he would take it down to the pub and parade it a little.
He had the perfect idea for explaining away every inexplicable weirdness about himself at a stroke, and he whistled as he pushed open the door which had so daunted him last night.
“Arthur!!!!”
He grinned cheerfully at the boggling eyes that stared at him from all corners of the pub, and told them all what a wonderful time he’d had in Southern California.
Chapter 9
e accepted another pint and took a pull at it. “Of course, I had my own personal alchemist, too.”
“You what?”
He was getting silly and he knew it. Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it has is to stop you being wary of things, and the point at which Arthur should have stopped and explained no more was the point at which he started instead to get inventive.
“Oh yes,” he insisted with a happy glazed smile, “it’s why I’ve lost so much weight.”
“What?” said his audience.
“Oh yes,” he said again, “the Californians have rediscovered alchemy, oh yes.”
He smiled again.
“Only,” he said, “it’s in a much more useful form than that which in”—he paused thoughtfully to let a little grammar assemble in his head—“in which the ancients used to practice it. Or at least,” he added, “failed to practice it. They couldn’t get it to work, you know. Nostradamus and that lot. Couldn’t cut it.”
“Nostradamus?” said one of his audience.
“I didn’t think he was an alchemist,” said another.
“I thought,” said a third, “he was a seer.”
“He became a seer,” said Arthur to his audience, the