She shrugged. “What do you think he meant,” she said, “by the message?”

“I don’t know,” said Arthur, though the memory of a man called Prak who laughed at him continuously kept nagging at him.

When Wonko returned he was carrying something that stunned Arthur. Not the sandals; they were perfectly ordinary wooden-bottomed sandals.

“I just thought you’d like to see,” he said, “what angels wear on their feet. Just out of curiosity. I’m not trying to prove anything, by the way. I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I’ll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see this.”

This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him carrying, for it was a wonderfully silver-gray glass fishbowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur’s bedroom.

Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without success, to say “Where did you get that?” sharply, and with a gasp in his voice.

Finally his time had come but he missed it by a millisecond.

“Where did you get that?” said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice.

Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice said, “What? Have you seen one of these before?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’ve got one. Or at least did have. Russell stole it to put his golf balls in. I don’t know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell for stealing it. Why, have you got one?”

“Yes, it was …”

They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply backward and forward between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways. “You have one of these, too?” he said to both of them.

“Yes.” They both said it.

He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the California sun.

The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.”

“Do you know,” asked Wonko quietly, “what it is?”

They shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the gray glass.

“It is a farewell gift from the dolphins,” said Wonko in a low quiet voice, “the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.”

He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.

“Have you …” he said to Arthur, “what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?”

“Er, I keep a fish in it,” said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. “I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl.” He tailed off.

“You’ve done nothing else? No,” he said, “if you had, you would know.” He shook his head again.

“My wife kept wheat germ in ours,” resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, “until last night.…”

“What,” said Arthur slowly and hushedly, “happened last night?”

“We ran out of wheat germ,” said Wonko, evenly. “My wife,” he added, “has gone to get some more.” He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.

“And what happened then?” said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone.

“I washed it,” said Wonko. “I washed it very carefully, very, very carefully, removing every last speck of wheat germ, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you … have you held one to your ear?”

They both shook their heads, again slowly, again dumbly.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you should.”

Chapter 32

The deep roar of the ocean.

The break of waves on farther shores than thought can find.

The silent thunders of the deep.

And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.

Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.

A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.

Waves of joy on — where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.

A fugue of voices now, clamoring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.

And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the fight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.

Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear.

“This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell.”

And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly gray bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.

Chapter 33

That night they stayed Outside the Asylum and watched TV from inside it.

“This is what I wanted you to see,” said Wonko the Sane when the news came around again, “an old colleague of mine. He’s over in your country running an investigation. Just watch.”

It was a press conference.

“I’m afraid I can’t comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon.”

“Can you tell us what that means?”

“I’m not altogether sure. Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that.

“No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is.

“And if it turns out that you’re right, you’ll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a … er, ‘Supernormal’—not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a ‘Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer.’ We’ll probably want to shove a ‘Quasi’ in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn’t catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that’ll be all for now, other than to say ‘Hi!’ to Wonko if he’s watching.”

Chapter 34

On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.

They talked quietly to themselves.

“I still have to know,” said Fenchurch, “and I strongly feel that you know something that you’re not telling me.”

Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.

“Do you have a pencil?” he said.