So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

by Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a powerful organ. Indeed, its influence is so prodigious that strict rules have had to be drawn up by its editorial staff to prevent its misuse. So none of its field researchers are allowed to accept any kind of services, discounts or preferential treatment of any kind in return for editorial favours unless: a) they have made a bona fide attempt to pay for a service in the normal way; b) their lives would be otherwise in danger; c) they really want to.

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.

So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother’s car, the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his nightmare years in the stars, had not been the unbalance of the moment, or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction to centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do. ‘Make ’em dry,’ is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, ‘make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.’ It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins they are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone, among his cats on a back stair in Stepney. The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand, and waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn’t happen and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of the sea, and the day was gone.

His house was called The Outside of the Asylum.

‘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.

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 meanings of the words ‘scrupulous’, ‘conscientious’ or ‘diligent’, and tends to get his nightmares through a straw. Entries tend to get updated or not across the Sub-Etha Net according to if they read good. Take for example, the case of Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars, famed in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-D mini-serieses as home of the magnificent and magical Fuolornis Fire Dragon. In Ancient days, before the Advent of the Sorth of Bragadox, when Fragilis sang and Saxaquine of the Quenelux held sway, when the air was sweet and the nights fragrant, but everyone somehow managed to be, or so they claimed, though how on earth they could have thought that anyone was even remotely likely to believe such a preposterous claim what with all the sweet air and fragrant nights and whatnot is anyone’s guess, virgins, it was not possible to heave a brick on Brequinda in the Foth of Avalars ...

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 damn well did fall faster than Fenchurch.

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.

‘Well, you did a bundle. An absolute bundle has absolutely been done by you.

‘Arthur, it’s been almost inexpressibly delicious conversing with you, chumbum, but I have to go.

‘Listen, no one will touch it. You can’t sustain a story, you know, when the only news is the continuing absence of whatever it is the story’s about. Not our territory anyway, try the Sundays. Maybe they’ll run a little “Whatever Happened to ‘Whatever Happened to the Dolphins’” story in a couple of years, around August. But what’s anybody going to do now? “Dolphins Still Gone”? “Continuing Dolphin Absence”? “Dolphins – Further Days Without Them”? The story dies, Arthur. It lies down and kicks its little feet in the air and presently goes to the great golden spike in the sky, my old fruitbat.’

Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand, we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that. ‘No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is. ‘And if it turns out that you’re right, you’ll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a . . . er, “Super-normal . . .” – not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a “Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer”. We’ll probably want to shove a “Quasi” in there somewhere to protect ourselves.

‘Space-lag,’ he said, ‘is very bad for sub clauses.

Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny-pinching son of a star-beast piloting this son of a starbeast starship insists that I call collect.

‘But that’s terrible,’ said Arthur. ‘Listen, bud,’ said Ford, ‘if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say “That’s terrible” I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin. But I haven’t and I am. Anyway, what are you looking so placid and moon-eyed for? Are you in love?’ Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly. ‘With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?’

Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft, which wasn’t very. The immediate perimeter was fenced off and patrolled by the tiny flying service robots. Staked out around that was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going to breach them. They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from the army or the army from the public, or to guarantee the giant ship’s diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting parking tickets was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.

‘Hold it!’ he shouted again, and this time brandished a short squat black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to the signals from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the galaxy are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming, while the other half are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downwards again.

‘Clear a path, please,’ shouted Ford again. ‘Everything’s under proper scientific control.’

Beyond what used to be known as the Limitless Lightfields of Flanux until the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine were discovered lying behind them, lie the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine.