He had flown before, of course, flown many times on Krikkit until all the bird talk had driven him scatty, but this was different.

Here he was on his own world, quietly, and without fuss, beyond a slight trembling which could have been attributable to a number of things, being in the air.

Ten or fifteen feet below him was the hard tarmac and a few yards off to the right the yellow street lights of Upper Street.

Luckily the alleyway was dark since the light which was supposed to see it through the night was on an ingenious time switch which meant it came on just before lunchtime and went off again as the evening was beginning to draw in. He was therefore safely shrouded in a blanket of dark obscurity.

He slowly, very, very slowly lifted his head to Fenchurch, who was standing in silent breathless amazement, silhouetted in her upstairs doorway.

Her face was inches from his.

“I was about to ask you,” she said in a low, trembly voice, “what you were doing. But then I realized that I could see what you were doing. You were flying. So it seemed,” she went on after a slight wondering pause, “like a bit of a silly question. And I couldn’t immediately think of any others.”

Arthur said, “Can you do it?”

“No.”

“Would you like to try?”

She bit her lip and shook her head, not so much to say no, but just in sheer bewilderment. She was shaking like a leaf.

“It’s quite easy,” urged Arthur, “if you don’t know how. That’s the important bit. Be not at all sure how you’re doing it.”

Just to demonstrate how easy it was he floated away down the alley, fell dramatically upward and bobbed back down toward her like a banknote on a breath of wind.

“Ask me how I did that.”

“How … did you do that?”

“No idea. Not a clue.”

She shrugged in bewilderment. “So how can I …?”

Arthur bobbed down a little lower and held out his hand.

“I want you to try,” he said, “to step onto my hand, just one foot.”

“What?”

“Try it.”

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if she was trying to step onto the hand of someone who was floating in front of her in midair, she stepped onto his hand.

“Now the other.”

“What?”

“Take the weight off your back foot.”

“I can’t.”

“Try it.”

“Like this?”

“Like that.”

Nervously, hesitantly, almost, she told herself, as if — she stopped telling herself what what she was doing was like because she had a feeling she didn’t altogether want to know.

She fixed her eyes very, very firmly on the gutter of the roof of the decrepit warehouse opposite which had been annoying her for weeks because it was clearly going to fall off and she wondered if anyone was going to do anything about it or whether she ought to say something to somebody and didn’t think for a moment about the fact that she was standing on the hands of someone who wasn’t standing on anything at all.

“Now,” said Arthur, “take your weight off your left foot.”

She thought that the warehouse belonged to the carpet company that had their offices around the corner and took her weight off her left foot, so she should probably go and see them about the gutter.

“Now,” said Arthur, “take the weight off your right foot.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

She had never seen the gutter from this angle before, and it looked to her now as if there might be a bird’s nest as well as all the mud and gunge up there. If she leaned forward just a little and took her weight off her right foot, she could probably see it more clearly.

Arthur was alarmed to see that someone down in the alley was trying to steal her bicycle. He particularly didn’t want to get involved in an argument at the moment and hoped that the guy would do it quietly and not look up.

He had the quiet shifty look of someone who habitually stole bicycles in alleys and habitually didn’t expect to find their owners hovering several feet above him. He was relaxed by both these habits, and went about his job with purpose and concentration, and when he found that the bike was unarguably bound to an iron bar embedded in concrete by hoops of tungsten carbide, he peacefully bent both its wheels and went on his way.

Arthur let out a long-held breath.

“See what a piece of eggshell I have found you,” said Fenchurch in his ear.

Chapter 25

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have received an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, falls somewhat short, in its composition, of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects.

And the reasons for this are obvious: editing, selection, the need to balance that which is interesting with that which is relevant and cut out all the tedious happenstance.

Like this, for instance: “Arthur Dent went to bed. He went up the stairs, all fifteen of them, opened the door, went into his room, took off his shoes and socks and then all the rest of his clothes one by one and left them in a neatly crumpled heap on the floor. He put on his pajamas, the blue ones with the stripes. He washed his face and hands, brushed his teeth, went to the bathroom, realized that he had once again got this all in the wrong order, had to wash his hands again, and went to bed. He read for fifteen minutes, spending the first ten minutes of that trying to work out where in the book he had got to the previous night, then he turned out the light and within a minute or so more was asleep.

“It was dark. He lay on his left side for a good hour.

“After that he moved restlessly in his sleep for a moment and then turned over to sleep on his right side. Another hour after this his eyes flickered briefly and he slightly scratched his nose, though there was still a good twenty minutes to go before he turned back onto his left side. And so he whiled the night away, sleeping.

“At four he got up and went to the bathroom again. He opened the door to the bathroom …” and so on.

It’s guff. It doesn’t advance the action. It makes for nice fat books such as the American market thrives on, but it doesn’t actually get you anywhere. You don’t, in short, want to know.

But there are other omissions as well, besides the toothbrushing-and-trying-to-find-fresh-socks variety, and in some of these people have often seemed inordinately interested.

What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?

To which the answer was, of course, mind your own business.

And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on the planet Krikkit? Just because the planet didn’t have Fuolornis Fire Dragons or Dire Straits doesn’t mean that the whole planet just sat up every night reading.

Or to take a more specific example, what about the night after the committee meeting party on prehistoric Earth when Arthur found himself sitting on a hillside watching the moon rise over the softly burning trees in company with a beautiful young girl called Mella, recently escaped from a lifetime of staring every morning at a hundred nearly identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste in the art department of an advertising agency on the planet Golgafrincham? What then? What happened next? And the answer is, of course, that the book ended.

The next one didn’t resume the story till five years later, and you can, claim some, take discretion too far. “This Arthur Dent,” comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the Galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a mysterious deep-space probe thought to originate from another alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, “what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”