So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [36]
“Arthur, where have you been, for heaven’s sake? The dolphins all disappeared on the same day I…”
She stared him intently in his startled eyes.
“What…?”
“No dolphins. All gone. Vanished.”
She searched his face.
“Did you really not know that?”
It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.
“Where did they go?” he asked.
“No one knows. That’s what vanished means.” She paused. “Well, there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he lives in California,” she said, “and is mad. I was thinking of going to see him because it seems the only lead I’ve got on what happened to me.”
She shrugged, and then looked at him long and quietly. She laid her hand on the side of his face.
“I really would like to know where you’ve been,” she said. “I think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that’s why we recognized each other.”
She glanced around the park, which was now being gathered into the clutches of dusk.
“Well,” she said, “now you’ve got someone you can tell.”
Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.
“It is,” he said, “a very long story.”
Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.
“Is it anything to do with this?” she said. The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travel-worn as if it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapored oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words “Don’t Panic.”
“Where did you get this?” said Arthur, startled, taking it from her.
“Ah,” she said, “I thought it was yours. In Russell’s car that night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?”
Arthur drew The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from its cover. It was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.
“A few,” he said.
“Can we go?”
“What? No,” said Arthur abruptly, then relented, but relented warily. “Do you want to?” he said, hoping for the answer no. It was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, “You don’t want to, do you?” which expects it.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to know what the message was that I lost, and where it came from. Because I don’t think,” she added, standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of the park, “that it came from here.”
“I’m not even sure,” she further added, slipping her arm around Arthur’s waist, “that I know where here is.”
Chapter 21
he Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing. It is, essentially, as the title implies, a guidebook. The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizable number of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
Read it through again and you’ll get it.
The Galaxy is a rapidly changing place. There is, frankly, so much of it, every bit of which is continually on the move, continually changing. A bit of a nightmare, you might think, for a scrupulous and conscientious editor diligently striving to keep this massively detailed and complex electronic tome abreast of all the changing circumstances and conditions that the Galaxy throws up every minute of every hour of every day, and you would be wrong. Where you would be wrong would be in failing to realize that the editor, like all the editors the Guide has ever had, has no real grasp of the meaning of the words “scrupulous,” “conscientious,