She patted the grass lightly, as if for reassurance, and then seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say.

“And I woke up in hospital. I suppose I’ve been in and out ever since. And that’s why I have an instinctive nervousness,” she said, “of sudden startling revelations that’s everything’s going to be all right.” She looked up at him.

Arthur had simply ceased to worry himself about the strange anomalies surrounding his return to his home world, or rather had consigned them to that part of his mind marked “Things to think about – Urgent.” “Here is the world,” he had told himself. “Here, for whatever reason, is the world, and here it stays. With me on it.” But now it seemed to go swimmy around him, as it had that night in the car when Fenchurch’s brother had told him the silly stories about the CIA agent in the reservoir. The trees went swimmy. The lake went swimmy, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be alarmed by because a grey goose had just landed on it. The geese were having a great relaxed time and had no major answers they wished to know the questions to.

“Anyway,” said Fenchurch, suddenly and brightly and with a wide-eyed smile, “there is something wrong with part of me, and you’ve got to find out what it is. We’ll go home.”

Arthur shook his head.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

Arthur had shaken his head, not to disagree with her suggestion which he thought was a truly excellent one, one of the world’s great suggestions, but because he was just for a moment trying to free himself of the recurring impression he had that just when he was least expecting it the Universe would suddenly leap out from behind a door and go boo at him.

“I’m just trying to get this entirely clear in my mind,” said Arthur, “you say you felt as if the Earth actually… exploded …”

“Yes. More than felt.”

“Which is what everybody else says,” he said hesitantly, “is hallucinations?”

“Yes, but Arthur that’s ridiculous. People think that if you just say ‘hallucinations’ it explains anything you want it to explain and eventually whatever it is you can’t understand will just go away. It’s just a word, it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t explain why the dolphins disappeared.”

“No,” said Arthur. “No,” he added thoughtfully. “No,” he added again, even more thoughtfully. “What?” he said at last.

“Doesn’t explain the dolphins disappearing.”

“No,” said Arthur, “I see that. Which dolphins do you mean?”

“What do you mean which dolphins? I’m talking about when all the dolphins disappeared.”

She put her hand on his knee, which made him realize that the tingling going up and down his spine was not her gently stroking his back, and must instead be one of the nasty creepy feelings he so often got when people were trying to explain things to him.

“The dolphins?”

“Yes.”

“All the dolphins,” said Arthur, “disappeared?”

“Yes.”

“The dolphins? You’re saying the dolphins all disappeared? Is this,” said Arthur, trying to be absolutely clear on this point, “what you’re saying?”

“Arthur where have you been for heaven’s sake? The dolphins all disappeared on the same day I…”

She stared him intently in his startled eyes.

“What…?”

“No dolphins. All gone. Vanished.”

She searched his face.

“Did you really not know that?”

It was clear from his startled expression that he did not.

“Where did they go?” he asked.

“No one knows. That’s what vanished means.” She paused. “Well, there is one man who says he knows about it, but everyone says he lives in California,” she said, “and is mad. I was thinking of going to see him because it seems the only lead I’ve got on what happened to me.”

She shrugged, and then looked at him long and quietly. She lay her hand on the side of his face.

“I really would like to know where you’ve been,” she said. “I think something terrible happened to you then as well. And that’s why we recognized each other.”

She glanced around the park, which was now being gathered into the clutches of dusk.

“Well,” she said, “now you’ve got someone you can tell.”

Arthur slowly let out a long year of a sigh.

“It is,” he said, “a very long story.”

Fenchurch leaned across him and drew over her canvas bag.

“Is it anything to do with this?” she said. The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travelworn as it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half-buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapoured oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words “Don’t Panic”.

“Where did you get this?” said Arthur, startled, taking it from her.

“Ah,” she said, “I thought it was yours. In Russell’s car that night. You dropped it. Have you been to many of these places?”

Arthur drew The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from its cover. It was like a small, thin, flexible lap computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.

“A few,” he said.

“Can we go to them?”

“What? No,” said Arthur abruptly, then relented, but relented warily. “Do you want to?” he said, hoping for the answer no. It was an act of great generosity on his part not to say, “You don’t want to, do you?” which expects it.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to know what the message was that I lost, and where it came from. Because I don’t think,” she added, standing up and looking round the increasing gloom of the park, “that it came from here.”

“I’m not even sure,” she further added, slipping her arm around Arthur’s waist, “that I know where here is.”

Chapter 21

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, as has been remarked before often and accurately, a pretty startling kind of a thing. It is, essentially, as the title implies, a guide book. The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable portion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.

The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.

This is:

Change.

Read it through again and you’ll get it.

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 of 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 on the Foth of Avalars, famed in myth, legend and stultifyingly dull tri-D mini-series as home of the magnificent and magical Fuolornis Fire Dragon.

In Ancient days, 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 without hitting at least half a dozen Fuolornis Fire Dragons.