Chapter 22

Arthur lay floundering in pain on a piece of ripped and dismembered reinforced concrete, flicked at by wisps of passing cloud and confused by the sounds of flabby merrymaking somewhere indistinctly behind him.

There was a sound he couldn’t immediately identify, partly because he didn’t know the tune “I Left my Leg in Jaglan Beta” and partly because the band playing it were very tired, and some members of it were playing it in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed r2, each according to the amount of sleep he’d managed to grab recently.

He lay, panting heavily in the wet air, and tried feeling bits of himself to see where he might be hurt. Wherever he touched himself, he encountered a pain. After a short while he worked out that this was because it was his hand that was hurting. He seemed to have sprained his wrist. His back, too, was hurting, but he soon satisfied himself that he was not badly hurt, but just bruised and a little shaken, as who wouldn’t be? He couldn’t understand what a building would be doing flying through the clouds.

On the other hand, he would have been a little hard-pressed to come up with any convincing explanation of his own presence, so he decided that he and the building were just going to have to accept each other. He looked up from where he was lying. A wall of pale but stained stone slabs rose up behind him, the building proper. He seemed to be stretched out on some sort of ledge or lip which extended outwards for about three or four feet all the way around. It was a hunk of the ground in which the party building had had its foundations, and which it had taken along with itself to keep itself bound together at the bottom end.

Nervously, he stood up and, suddenly, looking out over the edge, he felt nauseous with vertigo. He pressed himself back against the wall, wet with mist and sweat. His head was swimming freestyle, but someone in his stomach was doing the butterfly.

Even though he had got up here under his own power, he could now not even bear to contemplate the hideous drop in front of him. He was not about to try his luck jumping. He was not about to move an inch closer to the edge.

Clutching his hold-all he edged along the wall, hoping to find a doorway in. The solid weight of the can of olive oil was a great reassurance to him.

He was edging in the direction of the nearest corner, in the hope that the wall around the corner might offer more in the way of entrances than this one, which offered none.

The unsteadiness of the building’s flight made him feel sick with fear, and after a short while he took the towel from out of his hold-all and did something with it which once again justified its supreme position in the list of useful things to take with you when you hitch-hike round the Galaxy. He put it over his head so he wouldn’t have to see what he was doing.

His feet edged along the ground. His outstretched hand edged along the wall.

Finally he came to the corner, and as his hand rounded the corner it encountered something which gave him such a shock that he nearly fell straight off. It was another hand.

The two hands gripped each other.

He desperately wanted to use his other hand to pull the towel back from his eyes, but it was holding the hold-all with the olive oil, the retsina and the postcards from Santorini, and he very much didn’t want to put it down.

He experienced one of those “self” moments, one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think “Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?” He whimpered very slightly.

He tried to free his hand, but he couldn’t. The other hand was holding his tightly. He had no recourse but to edge onwards towards the corner. He leaned around it and shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the towel. This seemed to provoke a sharp cry of some unfashionable emotion from the owner of the other hand.

The towel was whipped from his head and he found his eyes peering into those of Ford Prefect. Beyond him stood Slartibartfast, and beyond them he could clearly see a porchway and a large closed door.

They were both pressed back against the wall, eyes wild with terror as they stared out into the thick blind cloud around them, and tried to resist the lurching and swaying of the building.

– Where the zarking photon have you been? - hissed Ford, panic stricken.

– Er, well, - stuttered Arthur, not really knowing how to sum it all up that briefly. - Here and there. What are you doing here?

Ford turned his wild eyes on Arthur again.

– They won’t let us in without a bottle, - he hissed.

The first thing Arthur noticed as they entered into the thick of the party, apart from the noise, the suffocating heat, the wild profusion of colours that protruded dimly through the atmosphere of heavy smoke, the carpets thick with ground glass, ash and avocado droppings, and the small group of pterodactyl-like creatures in lurex who descended on his cherished bottle of retsina, squawking, “A new pleasure, a new pleasure”, was Trillian being chatted up by a Thunder God.

– Didn’t I see you at Milliways? - he was saying.

– Were you the one with the hammer?

– Yes. I much prefer it here. So much less reputable, so much more fraught.

Squeals of some hideous pleasure rang around the room, the outer dimensions of which were invisible through the heaving throng of happy, noisy creatures, cheerfully yelling things that nobody could hear at each other and occasionally having crises.

– Seems fun, - said Trillian. - What did you say, Arthur?

– I said, how the hell did you get here?

– I was a row of dots flowing randomly through the Universe. Have you met Thor? He makes thunder.

– Hello, - said Arthur. - I expect that must be very interesting.

– Hi, - said Thor. - It is. Have you got a drink?

– Er, no actually…

– Then why don’t you go and get one?

– See you later, Arthur, - said Trillian.

Something jogged Arthur’s mind, and he looked around huntedly.

– Zaphod isn’t here, is he? - he said.

– See you, - said Trillian firmly, - later.

Thor glared at him with hard coal-black eyes, his beard bristled, what little light was there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns of his helmet.

He took Trillian’s elbow in his extremely large hand and the muscles in his upper arm moved around each other like a couple of Volkswagens parking.

He led her away.

– One of the interesting things about being immortal, - he said, - is…

– One of the interesting things about space, - Arthur heard Slartibartfast saying to a large and voluminous creature who looked like someone losing a fight with a pink duvet and was gazing raptly at the old man’s deep eyes and silver beard, - is how dull it is.

– Dull? - said the creature, and blinked her rather wrinkled and bloodshot eyes.

– Yes, - said Slartibartfast, - staggeringly dull. Bewilderingly so. You see, there’s so much of it and so little in it. Would you like me to quote some statistics?

– Er, well…

– Please, I would like to. They, too, are quite sensationally dull.

– I’ll come back and hear them in a moment, - she said, patting him on the arm, lifted up her skirts like a hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crown.

– I thought she’d never go, - growled the old man. - Come, Earthman…

– Arthur.

– We must find the Silver Bail, it is here somewhere.

– Can’t we just relax a little? - Arthur said. - I’ve had a tough day. Trillian’s here, incidentally, she didn’t say how, it probably doesn’t matter.

– Think of the danger to the Universe…

– The Universe, - said Arthur, - is big enough and old enough to look after itself for half an hour. All right, - he added, in response to Slartibartfast’s increasing agitation, - I’ll wander round and see if anybody’s seen it.