So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [20]
“Beep … beep … beep …”
He sniggered.
He didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of person who giggled or sniggered, but he had to admit that he had been giggling and sniggering almost continuously for well over half an hour now.
“At the third stroke …”
The ship was now locked almost perfectly into its perpetual orbit round a little-known and never-visited moon. Almost perfect.
One thing only remained. He ran again the computer simulation of the launching of the ship’s little Escape-O-Buggy, balancing actions, reactions, tangential forces, all the mathematical poetry of motion, and saw that it was good.
Before he left, he turned out the lights.
As his tiny little cigar tube of an escape craft zipped out on the beginning of its three-day journey to the orbiting space station Port Sesefron, it rode for a few seconds a long pencil-thin beam of radiation that was starting out on a longer journey still.
“At the third stroke, it will be two … thirteen … and fifty seconds.”
He giggled and sniggered. He would have laughed out loud but he didn’t have room.
“Beep … beep … beep.”
Chapter 11
pril showers I hate especially.”
However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn’t seem to be one free in the whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.
“Bloody April showers. Hate, hate, hate.”
Arthur stared, frowning, out the window. A light, sunny spray of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he’d been back now. Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped off television and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.
One effect that still lingered, though, was his joy at being back. Now that the Earth’s atmosphere had closed over his head for good, he thought wrongly, everything within it gave him extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.
“Well, I like them,” he said suddenly, “and for all the obvious reasons. They’re light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good.”
The man snorted derisively.
“That’s what they all say,” he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.
He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening, unprovoked remark had been, “I’m a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic, isn’t it? Bloody ironic.”
If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.
But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now. “They all say that about bloody April showers,” he said, “so bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather.”
He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something extraordinary about the government.
“What I want to know is this,” he said, “if it’s going to be nice weather, why,” he almost spat, “can’t it be nice without bloody raining?”
Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.
“Well, there you go,” he said, and instead got up himself. “’Bye.”
He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back through the parking lot, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain in his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that, too.
He climbed into his battered but adored old black VW Rabbit, squealed the tires, and headed out past the islands of gas pumps and along the slip road to the motorway.
He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and forever above