So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [42]
Or to take a more specific example, what about the night after the committee meeting party on prehistoric Earth when Arthur found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon rise over the softly burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of staring every morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in the art department of an advertising agency on the planet Golgafrincham? What then? What happened next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.
The next one didn’t resume the story till five years later, and you can, claim some, take discretion too far. “This Arthur Dent,” comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the Galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep-space probe thought to originate from another alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, “what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
Chapter 26
rthur Dent very much hoped, for an unworthy moment, as they drifted up, that his friends who had always found him pleasant but dull or, more latterly, odd but dull, were having a good time in the pub, but that was the last time, for a while, that he thought of them.
They drifted up, spiraling slowly around each other, like sycamore seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except going the other way.
And as they drifted up, their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do.
Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cars going along the Euston Road and out toward the Westway flyover, on keeping the street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody in Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.
Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings of lights of London—London, Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the strangely colored fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the Galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky above them, but London—swayed, swaying and turning, turned.
“Try a swoop,” he called to Fenchurch.
“What?”
Her voice seemed strangely clear but distant in all the vast empty air. It was breathy and faint with disbelief—all those things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.
“We’re flying …” she said.
“A trifle,” called Arthur, “think nothing of it. Try a swoop.”
“A sw—”
Her hand caught his, and in a sudden second her weight caught it, too, and stunningly, she was gone, tumbling beneath him, clawing wildly at nothing.
Physics glanced at Arthur and, clotted with horror, he was gone, too, sick with giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but his voice.
They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn’t do this sort of thing here.
He couldn’t catch her because this was London, and not a million miles from here—seven hundred and fifty-six, to be exact, in Pisa, where Galileo had clearly demonstrated that two falling bodies fell at exactly the same rate of acceleration irrespective of their relative weights.
They fell.
Arthur realized as he fell, giddily and sickeningly, that if he was going to hang around in the sky believing everything that the Italians had to say about physics when they couldn’t even keep a simple tower straight, that they were in dead trouble, and he damn well did fall faster than Fenchurch.
He grappled her from above, and fumbled for a tight grip on her shoulders. He got it.
Fine. They were now falling together, which was all very sweet and romantic, but didn’t solve the basic problem, which was that they were falling, and the ground wasn’t waiting