So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

by Douglas Adams

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has, beneath the elegant veneer, the simplest, easiest, most traditional of plots: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, makes love to her in the clouds and sets off with her to find God’s Final Message To His Creation.

That evening it was dark early, which was normal for the time of year. It was cold and windy, which was normal. It started to rain, which was particularly normal. A spacecraft landed, which was not.

wetter than an otter in a washing machine,

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing . . .’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.

As it chanced, the following day the driver of the Cortina went into hospital to have his appendix out, only due to a rather amusing mix-up the surgeon removed his leg in error, and before the appendectomy could be rescheduled, the appendicitis complicated into an entertainingly serious case of peritonitis and justice, in its way, was served.

The particular way in which he was choosing to dice recklessly with death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defence budget with an American Express card, which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe.

The cheery quality of Ford’s voice was beginning to grate on the barman’s ears. It sounded like someone relentlessly playing the kazoo during one of the more sombre passages of a War Requiem.

He had kept it ever since because he found it useful to carry a form of currency that no one would accept.

‘You gonna die, boy,’ the barman murmured quietly at Ford Prefect, and the evidence was on his side.

He stepped out along the street, walking briskly. The air was stifling, but he liked it because it was stifling city air, full of excitingly unpleasant smells, dangerous music and the distant sound of warring police tribes.

He knew he was going through that part of the city where people’s plans often changed quite abruptly.

‘Goosnargh,’ said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn’t know what it should be.

Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked ‘Mode Execute Ready’ instead of the now old-fashioned ‘Access Standby’ which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-age ‘Off’.

Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him.

‘Ah,’ said Arthur. ‘Er,’ he added after a moment’s thought. The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.

Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of.’

He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.

The CIA denied it which meant it must be true.’

as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.

He jammed the brake on this line of thought because it wasn’t going to get him any further than it had the last twenty times he’d been over it. He started again.

Now Arthur knew this dog, and he knew it well. It belonged to an advertising friend of his, and was called Know-Nothing Bozo because the way its hair stood up on its head reminded people of the President of the United States of America,

Since the Electricity Board cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they should leave him connected when he didn’t. Sending them money obviously only drew attention to yourself.

He lay still and quiet. He absorbed the enveloping darkness, slowly relaxed his limbs from end to end, eased and regulated his breathing, gradually cleared his mind of all thought, closed his eyes and was completely incapable of getting to sleep.

They were not the same eyes with which he had last looked out at this particular scene, and the brain which interpreted the images the eyes resolved was not the same brain. There had been no surgery involved, just the continual wrenching of experience.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

He had lost his battered and spaceworn copy of the thing which had helped him find his way across the unbelievable wastes of space he had traversed. He had lost The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it has is to stop you being wary of things,

‘I’m glad you asked that,’ said Arthur. ‘Very glad. And I will now tell you what the connection is between . . .’ He paused. ‘Between those two things. The things you mentioned. I’ll tell you.’

Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.

She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at. But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as if she suddenly arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.

Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were in trouble.

‘Oh, I can take you to London. Let me take you to London . . .’ Bungling idiot. Why on earth had he said ‘let’ in that stupid way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old. ‘Are you going to London?’ she asked. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said, ‘but . . .’ Bungling idiot.

Maybe he should even leave it till tomorrow. That would be the cool thing to do. Or next week sometime.

He wanted her and didn’t care who knew it. He definitely and absolutely wanted her, adored her, longed for her, wanted to do more things than there were names for with her.

He had lost everything he cared for, and was now simply waiting for the end of the world – little realizing that it had already been and gone.

On prehistoric Earth he had lived in a cave, not a nice cave, a lousy cave, but . . . There was no but. It had been a totally lousy cave and he had hated it. But he had lived in it for five years, which made it a home of some kind, and a person likes to keep track of his homes. Arthur Dent was such a person and so he went to Exeter to buy a computer.

‘Have you much experience of computers?’ Arthur wondered whether to mention Eddie the shipboard computer on the Heart of Gold, who could have done the job in a second, or Deep Thought, or – but decided he wouldn’t.

They looked at each other for a moment. The moment became a longer moment, and suddenly it was a very long moment, so long one could hardly tell where all the time was coming from.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing bad at all. Just unusual. Very very unusual.’

‘The purpose of having the sun go low in the evenings, in the summer, especially in parks,’ said the voice earnestly, ‘is to make girls’ breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case.’

They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of couples actually lying on top of each other and sat and watched the stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the water which ran beneath the stunning ducks.

‘What on earth did you do?’ ‘Well, in the circumstances I did what any red-blooded Englishman would do. I was compelled,’ said Arthur, ‘to ignore it.’

She looked down. Arthur could feel that it was one of those sorts of moments. The air seemed to stand still around them, waiting. Arthur wished that the air would go away and mind its own business.

‘It was very odd,’ she said, much as one of the pursuing Egyptians might have said that the behaviour of the Red Sea when Moses waved his rod at it was a little on the strange side.

‘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.

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 around to see if he had any more clever tricks up his sleeve, but was coming up to meet them like an express train.

This man is the bee’s knees, Arthur, he is the wasp’s nipples. He is, I would go so far as to say, the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world.

You can’t sustain a story, you know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever it is the story’s about.

extreme telephonic exhaustion.

‘This is an important announcement. This is flight 121 to Los Angeles. If your travel plans today do not include Los Angeles, now would be the perfect time to disembark.’