The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2)

by Douglas Adams

The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching television at him.

How would an immortal being have a passport? Quite simply, how? Dirk tried to imagine what might happen if—to pick a name quite at random—the God Thor, he of the Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at the passport office and try to explain who he was and how come he had no birth certificate. There would be no shock, no horror, no loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic impossibility. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether anybody believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing a valid birth certificate. He could stand there wreaking miracles all day if he liked but at close of business, if he didn’t have a valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked to leave.

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But imagine for a moment such a person attempting to leave the country, armed with no passport, no credit cards, merely the power to throw thunderbolts and who knew what else. You would probably have to imagine a scene very similar to the one that did in fact occur at Terminal Two, Heathrow. But why, if you were a Norse god, would you be needing to leave the country by means of a scheduled airline? Surely there were other means? Dirk rather thought that one of the perks of being an immortal divine might be the ability to fly under your own power. From what he remembered of his reading of the Norse legends many years ago, the gods were continually flying all over the place, and there was never any mention of them hanging around in departure lounges eating crummy buns. Admittedly, the world was not, in those days, bristling with air-traffic controllers, radar, missile-warning systems and such like. Still, a quick hop across the North Sea shouldn’t be that much of a problem for a god, particularly if the weather was in your favor, which, if you were the God of Thunder, you would pretty much expect it to be, or want to know the reason why.

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“We will go to Asgard . . . now,” he said. At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement. The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back again as a suddenly different world. This world was a much darker one and colder still.

chapter 24, 2 min to end