In fact, thought Arthur as he looked about, the upper room was at least reasonably wonderful anyway. It was simply decorated, furnished with things made out of cushions and also a stereo set with speakers which would have impressed the guys who put up Stonehenge.
There were flowers which were pale and pictures which were interesting.
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.”
“Yes.”
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.
For Arthur, who could usually contrive to feel self-conscious if left alone for long enough with a Swiss Cheese plant, the moment was one of sustained revelation. He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who awakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savannah stretching grey and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.
He wondered what the new sounds were as he gazed at her openly wondering face and her eyes that smiled with a shared surprise.
He hadn’t realized that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “Yes”.
Fenchurch dropped her eyes away at last, with a tiny shake of her head.
“I know,” she said. “I shall have to remember,” she added, “that you are the sort of person who cannot hold on to a simple piece of paper for two minutes without winning a raffle with it.”
She turned away.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said quickly. “Hyde Park. I’ll change into something less suitable.”
She was dressed in a rather severe dark dress, not a particularly shapely one, and it didn’t really suit her.
“I wear it specially for my ’cello teacher,” she said. “He’s a nice boy, but I sometimes think all that bowing gets him a bit excited. I’ll be down in a moment.”
She ran lightly up the steps to the gallery above, and called down, “Put the bottle in the fridge for later.”
He noticed as he slipped the champagne bottle into the door that it had an identical twin to sit next to.
He walked over to the window and looked out. He turned and started to look at her records. From above he heard the rustle of her dress fall to the ground. He talked to himself about the sort of person he was. He told himself very firmly that for this moment at least he would keep his eyes very firmly and steadfastly locked on to the spines of her records, read the titles, nod appreciatively, count the blasted things if he had to. He would keep his head down.
This he completely, utterly and abjectly failed to do.
She was staring down at him with such intensity that she seemed hardly to notice that he was looking up at her. Then suddenly she shook her head, dropped the light sundress over herself and disappeared quickly into the bathroom.
She emerged a moment later, all smiles and with a sunhat and came tripping down the steps with extraordinary lightness. It was a strange kind of dancing motion she had. She saw that he noticed it and put her head slightly on one side.
“Like it?” she said.
“You look gorgeous,” he said simply, because she did.
“Hmmmm,” she said, as if he hadn’t really answered her question.
She closed the upstairs front door which had stood open all this time, and looked around the little room to see that it was all in a fit state to be left on its own for a while. Arthur’s eyes followed hers around, and while he was looking in the other direction she slipped something out of a drawer and into the canvas bag she was carrying.
Arthur looked back at her.
“Ready?”
“Did you know,” she said with a slightly puzzled smile, “that there’s something wrong with me?”
Her directness caught Arthur unprepared.
“Well,” he said, “I’d heard some vague sort of…”
“I wonder how much you do know about me,” she said. “If you heard from where I think you heard then that’s not it. Russell just sort of makes stuff up, because he can’t deal with what it really is.”
A pang of worry went through Arthur.
“Then what is it?” he said. “Can you tell me?”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s nothing bad at all. Just unusual. Very very unusual.”
She touched his hand, and then leant forward and kissed him briefly.
“I shall be very interested to know,” she said, “if you manage to work out what it is this evening.”
Arthur felt that if someone tapped him at that point he would have chimed, like the deep sustained rolling chime his grey fishbowl made when he flicked it with his thumbnail.
Chapter 19
Ford Prefect was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.
He slid himself out of the maintenance hatchway which he had fashioned into a bunk for himself by disabling some of the noisier machinery in his vicinity and padding it with towels. He slung himself down the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily.
They were claustrophobic and ill-lit, and what light there was continually flickering and dimming as power surged this way and that through the ship, causing heavy vibrations and rasping humming noises.
That wasn’t it, though.
He paused and leaned back against the wall as something that looked like a small silver power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a nasty searing screech.
That wasn’t it either.
He clambered listlessly through a bulkhead door and found himself in a larger corridor, though still ill-lit.
The ship lurched. It had been doing this a fair bit, but this was heavier. A small platoon of robots went by making a terrible clattering.
Still not it, though.
Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end of the corridor, so he walked along it in the other direction.
He passed a series of observation monitors let into the walls behind plates of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.
One of them showed some horrible green scaly reptilian figure ranting and raving about the Single Transferable Vote system. It was hard to tell whether he was for or against it, but he clearly felt very strongly about it. Ford turned the sound down.
That wasn’t it, though.
He passed another monitor. It was showing a commercial for some brand of toothpaste that would apparently make you feel free if you used it. There was nasty blaring music with it too, but that wasn’t it.
He came upon another, much larger three-dimensional screen that was monitoring the outside of the vast silver Xaxisian ship.
As he watched, a thousand horribly beweaponed Zirzla robot starcruisers came searing round the dark shadow of a moon, silhouetted against the blinding disc of the star Xaxis, and the ship simultaneously unleashed a vicious blaze of hideously incomprehensible forces from all its orifices against them.
That was it.
Ford shook his head irritably and rubbed his eyes. He slumped on the wrecked body of a dull silver robot which clearly had been burning earlier on, but had now cooled down enough to sit on.
He yawned and dug his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy out of his satchel. He activated the screen, and flicked idly through some level three entries and some level four entries. He was looking for some good insomnia cures. He found REST, which was what he reckoned he needed. He found REST AND RECUPERATION and was about to pass on when he suddenly had a better idea. He looked up at the monitor screen. The battle was raging more fiercely every second and the noise was appalling. The ship juddered, screamed, and lurched as each new bolt of stunning energy was delivered or received.