So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4)

by Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and told nobody anything they didn’t already know—except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena. Since this was clearly not true the whole thing eventually had to be scrapped.

Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.

It was just the rain that got him down, always the rain. It was raining now, just for a change. It was a particular type of rain that he particularly disliked, particularly when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was rain type 17.

and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.

Rob McKenna had two hundred and thirty-one different types of rain entered in his little book, and he didn’t like any of them.

For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.

Whether it was because he was drunk, ill, or suicidally insane would not have been apparent to a casual observer, and indeed there were no casual observers in the Old Pink Dog Bar on the lower south side of Han Dold City because it wasn’t the sort of place you could afford to do things casually in if you wanted to stay alive.

One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a missile crisis sort of hush.

“this is the American Express card. It is the finest way of settling bills known to man. Haven’t you read their junk mail?”

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 somber passages of a war requiem.

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

He sat on a step, took from his satchel a bottle of that Ol’ Janx Spirit and a towel. He opened the bottle and wiped the top of it with the towel, which had the opposite effect to the one intended, in that the Ol’ Janx Spirit instantly killed off millions of the germs which had been slowly building up quite a complex and enlightened civilization on the smellier patches of his towel.

There was a helicopter above them now which seemed to be involved in a side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from the building. The sound engineer was hanging out the window by his fingertips, and a maddened guitarist was beating on his fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing at all of them.

Tips for aliens in New York: Land anywhere, Central Park, anywhere. No one will care or indeed even notice.

A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light-years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

“Loopy, completely bananas. I’m taking her back to the hospital and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog.”

“She says she suffers from strange delusions that she’s living in the real world. It’s no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that’s why the delusions are so strange. Don’t know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting.

Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitchhiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana,

The Saab seethed off into the night. Arthur watched it go, 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.

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

Will Smithers, for instance, the owner of Know-Nothing-Bozo the Non-Wonder Dog, an animal so stupid that it had been sacked from one of Will’s own commercials for being incapable of knowing which dog food it was supposed to prefer, despite the fact that the meat in all the other bowls had engine oil poured all over it.

The door opened and Will came out, wearing a leather flying jacket that he’d got a mate of his at the Road Research Laboratory to crash a car into specially, in order to get that battered look.

He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he’d picked up without knowing it in the Flaigathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half, and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.

He paused and maneuvered his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.

He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening, unprovoked remark had been, “I’m a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic, isn’t it? Bloody ironic.”

Her voice was the only part of her which didn’t say “Good.” 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 was vital to his driving or they were in trouble.

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.”

The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as “junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what’s that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo,” and in another, written only hours later as “being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow.”

San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a “good place to go. It’s very easy to believe that everyone you meet there also is a space traveler. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying ‘hi.’ Until you’ve settled in and got the hang of the place it is best to say ‘no’ to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of.”

His house was called The Outside of the Asylum. His name was simply John Watson, though he preferred to be called—and some of his friends had now reluctantly agreed to do this—Wonko the Sane.

Arthur wandered in a blissed-out haze and looked at all the shops, which in Islington are quite a useful bunch, as anyone who regularly needs old woodworking tools, Boer War helmets, drag, office furniture, or fish will readily confirm.

There was a sort of gallery structure in the roof space which held a bed and also a bathroom which, Fenchurch explained, you could actually swing a cat in, “But,” she added, “only if it was a reasonably patient cat and didn’t mind a few nasty cracks about the head. So. Here you are.”

Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer’s evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled up over his face.

I searched my soul, and discovered that there was nothing anywhere in my upbringing, experience, or even primal instincts to tell me how to react to someone who has quite simply, calmly, sitting right there in front of me, stolen one of my biscuits.”

When I eat a biscuit,” said Arthur, “it stays eaten.”

Right and proper

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 meaning of the words “scrupulous,” “conscientious,” and “diligent,” and tends to get his nightmares through a straw.

Not that Fire Dragons weren’t an essentially peace-loving species, because they were. They adored it to bits, and this wholesale adoring of things to bits was often in itself the problem: one so often hurts the one one loves, especially if one is a Fuolornis Fire Dragon with breath like a rocket booster and teeth like a park fence.

“Life,” he said, “is like a grapefruit.” “Er, how so?” “Well, it’s sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects. And the reasons for this are obvious: editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

“At four he got up and went to the bathroom again. He opened the door to the bathroom …” and so on. It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. You don’t, in short, want to know.

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.

“Arthur, my old soup spoon, my old silver tureen, how particularly stunning to hear from you! Someone told me you’d gone off into space or something.”

This man is the bee’s knees, Arthur, he is the wasp’s nipples.

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 a perfect time to disembark.”

“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

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.

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—