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 onward toward 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 unfathomable 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.

Chapter 21

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 colors that protruded dimly through the atmosphere of heady smoke, the carpets thick with ground glass, ash and guacamole 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 at each other things that nobody could hear 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 bristling. What little light there was in the place mustered its forces briefly to glint menacingly off the horns on 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 comforter 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 you 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, patted him on the arm, lifted up her skirts like a Hovercraft and moved off into the heaving crowd.

“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.”

“Good, good,” said Slartibartfast, “good.” He plunged into the crowd himself, and was told to relax by everybody he passed.

“Have you seen a bail anywhere?” said Arthur to a little man who seemed to be standing eagerly waiting to listen to somebody. “It’s made of silver, vitally important for the future safety of the Universe, and about this long.”

“No,” said the enthusiastically wizened little man, “but do have a drink and tell me all about it.”

Ford Prefect writhed past, dancing a wild, frenetic and not entirely unobscene dance with someone who looked as if she were wearing Sydney Opera House on her head. He was yelling a futile conversation at her above the din “I like the hat!” he bawled.

“What?”

“I said, I like the hat.”

“I’m not wearing a hat.”

“Well, I like the head, then.”

“What?”

“I said, I like the head. Interesting bone structure.”

“What?”

Ford worked a shrug into the complex routine of other movements he was performing.

“I said you dance great,” he shouted, “just don’t nod so much.”

“What?”

“It’s just that every time you nod,” said Ford, “ … ow!” he added as his partner nodded forward to say “What?” and once again pecked him sharply on the forehead with the sharp end of her swept-forward skull.

“My planet was blown up one morning,” said Arthur, who had found himself quite unexpectedly telling the little man his life story, or at least, edited highlights of it, “that’s why I’m dressed like this, in my dressing gown. My planet was blown up with all my clothes in it, you see. I didn’t realize I’d be coming to a party.”

The little man nodded enthusiastically.

“Later, I was thrown off a spaceship. Still in my dressing gown. Rather than the spacesuit one would normally expect. Shortly after that I discovered that my planet had originally been built for a bunch of mice. You can imagine how I felt about that. I was then shot at for a while and blown up. In fact I have been blown up ridiculously often, shot at, insulted, regularly disintegrated, deprived of tea and recently I crashed into a swamp and had to spend five years in a damp cave.”

“Ah,” effervesced the little man, “and did you have a wonderful time?”

Arthur started to choke violently on his drink.

“What a wonderfully exciting cough,” said the little man, quite startled by it, “do you mind if I join you?”

And with that he launched into the most extraordinary and spectacular fit of coughing that caught Arthur so much by surprise that he started to choke violently, discovered he was already doing it and got thoroughly confused. Together they performed a lung-busting duet that went on for fully two minutes before Arthur managed to cough and splutter to a halt.

“So invigorating,” said the little man, panting and wiping tears from his eyes, “what an exciting life you must lead. Thank you very much.”

He shook Arthur warmly by the hand and walked off into the crowd. Arthur shook his head in astonishment.

A youngish-looking man came up to him, an aggressive-looking type with a hook mouth, a lantern nose and small beady little cheekbones. He was wearing black trousers, a black silk shirt open to what was presumably his navel, though Arthur had learned never to make assumptions about the anatomies of the sort of people he tended to meet these days, and had all sorts of nasty dangly gold things hanging round his neck. He carried something in a black bag, and clearly wanted people to notice that he didn’t want them to notice it.