So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (14 page)

"Ah yes," he said, "that's to so with the day I finally realized that the world had gone totally mad and built the Asylum to put it in, poor thing, and hoped it would get better."
This was the point at which Arthur began to feel a little nervous again.
"Here," said Wonko the Sane, "we are outside the Asylum." He pointed again at the rough brickwork, the pointing and the guttering. "Go through that door," he pointed at the first door through which they had originally entered, "and you go into the Asylum. I've tried to decorate it nicely to keep the inmates happy, but there's very little one can do. I never go in there now myself. If ever I am tempted, which these days I rarely am, I simply look at the sign written over the door and shy away."
"That one?" said Fenchurch, pointing, rather puzzled, at a blue plaque with some instructions written on it.
"Yes. They are the words that finally turned me into the hermit I have now become. It was quite sudden. I saw them, and I knew what I had to do."
The sign said:
Hold stick near centre of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.
"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 packet of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane."
He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers.
"And in case it crossed your mind to wonder, as I can see how it possibly might, I am completely sane. Which is why I call myself Wonko the Sane, just to reassure people on this point. Wonko is what my mother called me when I was a kid and clumsy and knocked things over, and sane is what I am, and how," he added, with one of his smiles that made you feel, "Oh. Well that's all right then." "I intend to remain. Shall we go on to the beach and see what we have to talk about?"
They went out on to the beach, which was where he started talking about angels with golden beards and green wings and Dr Scholl sandals.
"About the dolphins ..." said Fenchurch gently, hopefully.
"I can show you the sandals," said Wonko the Sane.
"I wonder, do you know ..."
"Would you like me to show you," said Wonko the Sane, "the sandals ? I have them. I'll get them. They are made by the Dr Scholl company, and the angels say that they particularly suit the terrain they have to work in. They say they run a concession stand by the message. When I say I don't know what that means they say no, you don't, and laugh. Well, I'll get them anyway."
As he walked back towards the inside, or the outside depending on how you looked at it, Arthur and Fenchurch looked at each other in a wondering and slightly desperate sort of way, then each shrugged and idly drew figures in the sand.
"How are the feet today?" said Arthur quietly.
"OK. It doesn't feel so odd in the sand. Or in the water. The water touches them perfectly. I just think this isn't our world."
She shrugged.
"What do you think he meant," she said, "by the message?"
"I don't know," said Arthur, though the memory of a man called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.
When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned Arthur. Not the sandals, they were perfectly ordinary wooden- bottomed sandals.
"I just thought you'd like to see," he said, "what angels wear on their feet. Just out of curiousity. I'm not trying to prove anything, by the way. I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I'll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can't possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you're a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see this."
This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him carrying, for it was a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur's bedroom.
Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without success, to say, "Where did you get that?" sharply, and with a gasp in his voice.
Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond.
"Where did you get that?" said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice.
Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice said, "What? Have you seen one of these before?"
"Yes," she said, "I've got one. Or at least I did have. Russell nicked it to put his golfballs in. I don't know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell for nicking it. Why, have you got one?"
"Yes, it was ..."
They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply backwards and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways.
"You have one of those too?" he said to both of them.
"Yes." They both said it.
He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.
The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish."
"Do you know," asked Wonko quietly, "what it is?"
They each shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey glass.
"It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to."
He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.
"Have you ..." he said to Arthur, "what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?"
"Er, I keep a fish in it," said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. "I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl." He tailed off.
"You've done nothing else? No," he said, "if you had, you would know." He shook his head again.
"My wife kept wheatgerm in ours," resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, "until last night ..."
"What," said Arthur slowly and hushedly, "happened last night?"
"We ran out of wheatgerm," said Wonko, evenly. "My wife," he added, "has gone to get some more." He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.
"And what happened then?" said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone.
"I washed it," said Wonko. "I washed it very carefully, very very carefully, removing every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you ... have you held one to your ear?"
They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.
"Perhaps," he said, "you should."
Chapter 32
The deep roar of the ocean.
The break of waves on further shores than thought can find.
The silent thunders of the deep.
And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, the half-articulated songs of thought.
Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.
A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.
Waves of joy on - where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.
A fugue of voices now, clamouring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.
And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the flight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.
Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.
"This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."
And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly grey bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.
Chapter 33
That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from inside it.
"This is what I wanted you to see," said Wonko the Sane when the news came around again, "an old colleague of mine. He's over in your country running an investigation. Just watch."
It was a press conference.
"I'm afraid I can't comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para- Causal Meteorological Phenomenon."
"Can you tell us what that means?"
"I'm not altogether sure. 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 `Supernormal ...' - 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. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn't catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that'll be all for now, other than to say `Hi!' to Wonko if he's watching."
Chapter 34
On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.
They talked quietly to themselves.
"I still have to know," said Fenchurch, "and I strongly feel that you know something that you're not telling me."
Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.
"Do you have a pencil?" he said. She dug around and found one.
"What are you doing, sweetheart?" she said, after he had spent twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil again and grunting irritably to himself.
"Trying to remember an address someone once gave me."
"Your life would be an awful lot simpler," she said, "if you bought yourself an address book."
Finally he passed the paper to her.
"You look after it," he said.
She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out were the words "Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry. Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma."
"And what's there?"
"Apparently," said Arthur, "it's God's Final Message to His Creation."
"That sounds a bit more like it," said Fenchurch. "How do we get there?"
"You really ...?"
"Yes," said Fenchurch firmly, "I really want to know."
Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex window at the open sky outside.
"Excuse me," said the woman who had been looking at them rather oddly, suddenly, "I hope you don't think I'm rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it's nice to talk to somebody. My name's Enid Kapelsen, I'm from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?"
Chapter 35
They 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 hitch hiker 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 incidents 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 backwards, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur's sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually 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 Crispies."
"And this?"
"Paprika."
"I see," said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, one 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 on 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 ..."