So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [52]
Chapter 35
hey went to Arthur’s house in the West Country, shoved a couple of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every galactic hitchhiker ends up spending most of his time doing.
They waited for a flying saucer to come by.
“Friend of mine did this for fifteen years,” said Arthur one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.
“Who was that?”
“Called Ford Prefect.”
He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again.
He wondered where Ford Prefect was.
By an extraordinary coincidence the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incident with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs.
Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung-over and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.
In fact he looked extremely ill, not merely as if he’d been pulled through a hedge backward, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backward through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur’s sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort of waving caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur eventually had to drag him to the sofa.
“Thank you,” said Ford, “thank you very much. Have you …” he said, and fell asleep for three hours.
“… the faintest idea,” he continued suddenly, when he revived, “how hard it is to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven’t, so I’ll tell you,” he said, “over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me.”
He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.
“Stupid operators keep asking you where you’re calling from and you try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn’t be if you’re coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?”
“Making you some black coffee.”
“Oh.” Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about the place forlornly.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Rice Krispies.”
“And this?”
“Paprika.”
“I see,” said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, on top of the other, but that didn’t seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and that seemed to work.
“A little space-lagged,” he said. “What was I saying?”
“About not phoning from Letchworth.”
“I wasn’t. I explained this to the lady. ‘Bugger Letchworth,’ I said, ‘if that’s your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed leg of a journey between the stars known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.’ I said ‘dear lady,’” explained Ford Prefect, “because I didn’t want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin—”
“Tactful,” said Arthur Dent.
“Exactly,” said Ford, “tactful.”
He frowned.
“Space-lag,” he said, “is very bad for sub-clauses. You’ll have to assist me again,” he continued, “by reminding me what I was talking about.”
“‘Between the stars,’ “said Arthur,” ‘known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as—’”
“Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,” concluded Ford triumphantly. “This conversation lark is quite a gas, isn’t it?”
“Have some coffee.”
“Thank you, no. ‘And the reason,’ I said, ‘why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialing direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny-pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast starship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?”
“And could she?”
“I don’t know. She had hung up,” said Ford, “by this time. So! What do you suppose,” he asked fiercely, “I did next?”
“I’ve no idea, Ford,” said Arthur.
“Pity,” said Ford, “I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate those guys, you know. They really are the creeps