The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (24 page)

Run! Hurtle! Charge! Crash! Bang! There seemed to be more bits of fencing round his neck again, and suddenly his progress was rather less free than it had been, and he was all encumbered with stuff. He ploughed on heavily. Suddenly he found himself in a sea of scattering creatures squealing as his huge bulk careered through them. The air was full of the sound of cries and bellows and little tinkly crashes.

Bewildering odours danced around him—a surge of burning meat, heady wafts of some kind of woozy-making stuff, big stabs of viciously sweet musk. He was confused and tried to fix on things by sight. He didn’t trust vision very much, it didn’t tell him very much. He could just about tell when things were blinking or lurking or running around. He tried to get a fix on the hollering, scurrying shapes, and then saw a big hazy rectangle of light. That was something. He heaved himself round and charged at it.

And also some nasty, rainy, itchy sensations all over his flank. He didn’t like that. He stumbled as he barged into a large room and was immediately assaulted with a suffocating splurge of smell, screamy noises, and splashy lights. He charged into a huddle of screaming creatures, which roared and screeched and then went all cracked and squidgy. One of them got stuck on him and Desmond had to shake his head to dislodge it. Before him now was another large glinting rectangle, and a little way beyond it the ground shimmered with a pale blue light. Desmond lunged forward again. There was another crash, and another shower of sharp and worrying pain. He hurtled onwards and out into the open air once more.

The light in the ground was a strange pool of water, with screaming things in it. He had never seen water glow like that. And then there were some more blinking lights in front of him. He didn’t pay any attention to the little lights. He didn’t even pay any attention to the banging noises that went with each blink. Bang bang, so what? But what did catch his attention was the sudden acrid smell and the flowers of pain that started to bloom in his body. A flower was planted in his shoulder, and another. His leg began to move oddly. A flower was planted in his flank, which felt very odd and worrying. Another flower was planted in his head, and gradually the whole world started to become more distant and less important. It began to roar. He felt himself tipping forward with enormous slowness, and gradually found himself enveloped in great waves of warm, glowing blueness.

As the world ebbed from him he heard a gabbling, hysterical voice making sounds that made no sense to him, but they sounded like this:

“Get the paramedics! Get the police! Not just Malibu, get the LAPD. Now! Tell them to get a helicopter up here! We’ve got dead and wounded! And tell them ... I don’t know how they’re gonna deal with this, but tell them we’ve got a dead rhinoceros in the swimming pool.”

THOUGH IT WAS now embarrassingly clear to Dirk that only he and not his actual quarry was aboard the flight, that he had been thrown four thousand miles and a couple of thousand crucial pounds off course by a childishly simple ruse, he nevertheless determined to make one final check. He stationed himself right by the exit as everyone started to disembark at O’Hare Airport. He was watching so intently that he nearly missed hearing his own name being called over the aircraft’s PA, directing him to go to the airline’s information desk. “Mr. Gently?” said the woman at the desk, brightly.

“Yes ...” said Dirk warily.

“May I see your passport, sir?”

He passed it over. He stayed poised on the balls of his feet, expecting trouble.

“Your ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”

“Ticket through to Albuquerque, sir.”

“My ticket to—?”

“Albuquerque, sir.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Albuquerque, New Mexico, sir.”

Dirk looked at the proffered ticket folder as if it were a piece of trick rhubarb. “Where did this come from?” he demanded. He took it and peered at the flight details.

The woman gave him a huge airline smile and a huge airline shrug. “Out of this machine, I guess. Just prints those tickets out.”

“What does it say on your computer?”

“Just says prepaid ticket for Mr. Dirk Gently to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to be collected. Were you not expecting to go to Albuquerque today, sir?” “I was expecting to end up somewhere I didn’t expect, I just wasn’t expecting it to be Albuquerque, that’s all.”

“Sounds like it’s an excellent destination for you, Mr. Gently. Enjoy your flight.”

He did. He sat and ruminated quietly to himself over the events of the last couple of days, arranging them in his mind not in such a way that they made any kind of sense yet, but in suggestive little arrays. A

meteor here, half a cat there, the electronic threads of invisible dollars and unexpected airline tickets that connected them. Before touching down in Chicago, his self-confidence had been in tatters, but now he felt a thrilling tingle of excitement. There was something or someone out there that he had engaged with, something that he uniquely had found and that he was being drawn towards. The fact that he still had no idea who or what it was no longer troubled him. It was there, he had found it, and it had found him. He had felt its pulse. Its face and its name would emerge in their proper times.

At Albuquerque airport he stood silently for a while under the high painted beams, surrounded by the dark, staring eyes of the drunk-driving lawyers peering from their billboards. He breathed deeply. He felt calm, he felt good, he felt able to meet with the wild, thrashing improbabilities that lie an atom’s depth beneath the dull surface of the narrated world, and to speak their language. He walked unhurriedly to the long escalators, and sailed slowly downwards like an invisible king.

His man was waiting for him.

He could tell him immediately—another still point in the scurrying airport. He was a large, fat, sweaty man with an ill-fitting black suit and a face like a badly laid table. He stood a few feet back from the foot of the escalator, gazing up it with an inert but complicated expression. It was as well that Dirk had been ready to spot him because the sign he held, which read D. JENTTRY, was one he might otherwise easily have missed.

Dirk introduced himself. The man said his name was Joe and that he would go and get the car. And that, rather anticlimactically, Dirk felt, was that. The car drew up at the curbside, a slightly elderly, black stretch Cadillac, gleaming dully in the airport lighting. Dirk regarded it with satisfaction, climbed into it, and settled into the backseat with a small grunt of pleasure. “The client said you’d like it,” said Joe distantly from his driving coop as he quietly rolled the thing forward and out on to the airport exit road.

Dirk looked around him at the scuffed and threadbare velveteen blue upholstery and the tinted plastic film peeling from the windows. The TV, when Dirk tried it, was tuned to nothing but noise, and the asthmatic air conditioning wheezed out a musty wind that was in no way preferable to the warm evening desert air through which they were moving.

“The client,” said Dirk, as the great rattling thing cruised out onto the dimly lit freeway through the city.

“Who exactly is the client?” “An Australian gentleman, he sounded like,” said Joe. His voice was rather high and whiny.

“Australian?” said Dirk, in surprise.

“Yes sir, Australian. Like you.”

Dirk frowned. “I’m from England,” he said.

“But Australian, right?”

“Why Australian, exactly?”

“Australian accent.”

“Well, not really.”

“Well, where’s that place?”

“What place?” asked Dirk.

“New Zealand,” said Joe. “Australia’s in New Zealand, right?” “Well, not precisely, but I can see what you’re ... well, I was going to say I can see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure I can.”

“What part of New Zealand you from, then?”

“Well, more sort of England, in fact.”

“Is that in New Zealand?”

“Only up to a point,” said Dirk.

The car headed north on the freeway in the direction of Santa Fe. Moonlight lay magically on the high desert. The evening air was crisp.

“You been to Santa Fe before?” Joe nasaled.

“No,” said Dirk. He had abandoned trying to engage him in any kind of intelligible conversation and began to wonder if he had been deliberately chosen for his shortcomings in this area. Dirk was trying hard to stay sunk in thought, but Joe kept yanking him back to the surface.

“No,” said Dirk. He had abandoned trying to engage him in any kind of intelligible conversation and began to wonder if he had been deliberately chosen for his shortcomings in this area. Dirk was trying hard to stay sunk in thought, but Joe kept yanking him back to the surface.

.

Californication they call it. Hur-hur. You know what they call it?”

“Californication?” hazarded Dirk. “Fanta Se,” said Joe. “All the Hollywood types moving in from California.

Ruining it. Especially since the earthquake. You heard about the earthquake?” “Well, I did, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk. “It was on the news. Rather a lot.” “Yeah, it was a big earthquake. And now all the Californians are moving out here instead. To Santa Fe.

Ruining it. Californians. You know what they call it?” Dirk could feel the whole conversation wheeling round and coming at him again.

He tried to deflect it.

“Have you always lived in Santa Fe, then?” he said feebly.

“Oh yeah,” said Joe. “Well, nearly always. Over a year now. Feels like always.”

“So where did you live before?”

“California,” said Joe. “Moved out after my sister was hit in a drive-by shooting. You have drive-by shootings in New Zealand?” “No,” said Dirk. “Not in New Zealand so far as I know. Nor even yet in London, which is where I live. Look, I’m sorry about your sister.” “Yeah. Standing on a streetcorner down on Melrose, couple of guys drive by in a Mercedes, one of those new ones, you know, with the double glazing, and pow, they blew her away—500 SEL, I think it was. Midnight blue. Real smart. They musta jacked it. You have carjacking back in old England?” “Carjacking?”

“People walk up to you, steal your car.”

“No, but thanks for asking. We have people who clean your windscreen against your will, but, er ...”

Joe barked with contempt.

“The thing is,” explained Dirk, “in London you could certainly walk up to someone and steal their car, but you wouldn’t be able to drive it away.” “Some kinda fancy device?”

“No, just traffic,” said Dirk. “But, er ... your sister,” he asked nervously.

“Was she okay?”

“Okay?” shouted Joe. “You shoot someone with a Kalashnikov and they’re okay, you’re gonna want your money back. Hur-hur.”

Dirk tried to make sympathetic noises, but they wouldn’t form properly in his throat. The car was slowing down, so he lowered the peeling window to look at the desert night.

A passing road sign flared briefly in the car’s headlights.

“Stop the car!” shouted Dirk suddenly.

He leant out of the car window, straining to look back as the car gradually wallowed to a halt. In the distance the dim shape of a road sign was silhouetted in the moonlight.

“Can you reverse back down the road?” said Dirk urgently.

“It’s a freeway,” protested Joe.

“Yes, yes,” said Dirk. “There’s no one behind us. The road’s empty. Only a few hundred yards.”

Grumbling to himself, Joe put the big barge into reverse, and slowly they weaved their way back down the freeway.

“This is what they do in New Zealand, isn’t it?” he whined.

“What?”

“Drive backwards.”

“No,” said Dirk. “But I know what you’re thinking of. Just like us British, they do drive on the other side of the road.” “Suppose it’s safer that way,” said Joe, “if everyone’s driving backwards.” “Yes,” said Dirk. “Much safer.” He leaped out of the car as soon as it drew to a halt.

Highlighted in the pool of the car’s lights, five thousand miles from Dirk’s ramshackle office in Clerkenwell, was a square yellow road sign that said, in large letters, GUSTY WINDS, and, in smaller letters underneath it, MAY EXIST. The moon hung high in the sky above it.

“Joe!” shouted Dirk to the driver. “Who put this here?”

“What?” said Joe.

“This sign!” said Dirk.

“You mean this sign?” said Joe.

“Yes!” shouted Dirk. “ ‘Gusty Winds May Exist.’ ” “Well, I suppose,” said Joe, “the State Highway Authority.” “What?” said Dirk, bewildered again. “The State Highway Authority,” said Joe, a bit flummoxed. “You see ’em all over.”

“ ‘Gusty Winds May Exist’?” said Dirk. “You mean this is just a regular road sign?”

“Well, yeah,” said Joe. “Just means it’s a bit windy here. You know, wind comes across the desert. Can blow you around a bit. Especially in one of these.” Dirk blinked. He suddenly felt rather foolish. He had been imagining, a little wildly, that someone had specially painted the name of a bisected cat on a signpost on a New Mexican road especially for his benefit. This was absurd. The cat in question had obviously been named after a perfectly commonplace American road sign. Paranoia, he reminded himself, was one of the normal by-products of jet lag and whisky.

Joe’s window and peered in.

“Joe,” he said. “You slowed the car down just as we were approaching the sign. Was that deliberately so that I would see it?” He hoped it wasn’t just the whisky and the jet lag talking.

“Oh no,” said Joe. “I was slowing down for the rhinoceros.”

“PROBABLY THE JET LAG,” Dirk said. “I thought for a moment you said a rhinoceros.”

“Yeah,” said Joe, disgustedly. “Got held up by it earlier. As it was leaving the airport.”

Dirk tried to think this through before he said anything that might expose him to ridicule. Presumably there must be a local football team or rock band called the Rhinoceroses. Must be. Coming from the airport? Driving to Santa Fe? He was going to have to ask.

“What exact type of rhinoceros are we discussing here?” he said.

“Dunno. I’m not as good at breeds of rhinoceros,” said Joe, “as I am at accents. If it was an accent, I could tell you what exact type it was, but since it’s a rhinoceros I can only tell you that it’s one of the big grey type, you know, with the horn. From Irkutsk or one of those kinda places. You know, Portugal or somewhere.”

“You mean Africa?”

“Could be Africa.”

“And you say it’s up there on the road ahead of us?”

“Yup.”

“Then let’s get after it,” said Dirk. “Quickly.”

He climbed back into the car, and Joe eased it out onto the highway once more. Dirk hunched himself up at the front of the passenger compartment and peered over Joe’s shoulder as they sped on through the desert. In a few minutes the shape of a large truck loomed up ahead in the Cadillac’s headlights. It was a green low-loader with a large, slatted crate roped down on to it. “So. You’re pretty interested in rhinoceroses, then,” said Joe conversationally. “Not especially,” said Dirk. “Not till I read my horoscope this morning.”

“That right? Don’t believe in them myself. You know what mine said this morning? It said that I should think long and hard about my personal and financial prospects. Pretty much what it said yesterday.

‘Course, that’s pretty much what I do every day, just driving around. So I suppose that means something, then. What did yours say?”

“That I would meet a three-ton rhinoceros called Desmond.”

“I guess you can see a different bunch of stars from New Zealand,” said Joe.

“It’s a replacement. That’s what I heard,” volunteered Joe.

“A replacement?”

“Yup.”

“A replacement for what?”

“Previous rhinoceros.”

“Well, I suppose it would hardly be a replacement for a lightbulb?” said Dirk.

“Tell me—what happened to the, er, previous rhinoceros?”

“Died.”

“What a tragedy. Where? At the zoo?”

“At a party.”

“A party?”

“Yup.”

Dirk sucked his lip thoughtfully. There was a principle he liked to adhere to when he remembered, which was never to ask a question unless he was fairly certain he would like the answer. He sucked his other lip. “I think I’ll go and take a look myself,” he said, and climbed out of the car. The large, dark green truck was pulled onto the side of the road. The sides of the truck were about four feet high, and a heavy tarpaulin was roped down over an enormous crate. The driver was leaning against the door of the cab, smoking a cigarette. He clearly thought that being in charge of a three-ton rhinoceros meant that no one would argue with him about this, but he was wrong. The most astonishing amount of abuse was being hurled at him by the drivers negotiating their way one by one past his truck.

“Bastards!” muttered the driver to himself as Dirk wandered up to him in a nonchalant kind of way and lit a companionable cigarette himself. He was trying to give it up, but usually kept a pack in his pocket for tactical purposes. “You know what I hate?” said Dirk to the truckdriver, “Those signs in cabs that say

‘Thank You for Not Smoking.’ I don’t mind if they say ‘Please Don’t Smoke,’ or even just a straightforward ‘No Smoking.’ But I hate those prim ‘Thank You for Not Smoking’ signs. Make you want to light up immediately and say, ‘No need to thank me, I wasn’t going to not smoke.’ ” The driver laughed.

“Taking this old bugger far?” asked Dirk, with the air of one seasoned rhinoceros delivery driver comparing notes with another. He gave the truck an appraising glance.

“Just out to Malibu,” said the driver. “Way up Topanga Canyon.” Dirk gave a knowing cluck as if to say, “Don’t talk to me about Topanga Canyon, I once had to take a whole herd of wildebeest to Cardiff in a minibus. You want trouble? That was trouble.” He sucked deeply on his cigarette. “Must have been some party,” he remarked.

“I’ve always found that a rhinoceros makes a pretty poor kind of party guest,” said Dirk. “Try it if you must, but brace yourself.” It was Dirk’s view that asking direct questions made people wary. It was more effective to talk complete nonsense and let people correct him.

“What do you mean, ‘party’?” said the driver.

“The party the other rhinoceros was attending,” said Dirk, tapping the side of his nose, “when it died.”

“Attending?” said the driver with a frown. “I wouldn’t say that it was actually attending the party.”

Dirk raised an encouraging eyebrow.

“It charged down out of the hills, smashed through the perimeter fence, crashed through the plate-glass windows into the house, took a couple of turns around the main room injuring about seventeen people, hurtled back out into the garden where somebody shot it, whereupon it toppled slowly into a swimming pool full of mostly naked screenwriters, taking half a hundredweight of avocado dip and some kind of Polynesian fruit melange with it.”

Dirk took a moment or two to digest this information. Then, “Whose house was this?” he said.

“Just some movie people. Apparently they’d had Bruce Willis round only the previous week. Now this.”

“Seems a bit rough on the old rhino as well,” said Dirk. “And now here’s another one.”

Excerpts from an Interview with the Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000 How does Douglas Adams arrive for coffee? If he were like the Montecitans stopping by Pierre Lafond’s, he would show up in an SUV, a luxury car, or a luxury SUV. The basic cup of coffee at Pierre Lafond’s costs $1.25 and is called

“organic French roast.” It tastes exactly like McDonald’s coffee or organic crankcase fluid, not that the drivers of SUVs seem to care. I expected more from Adams than an SUV: I wanted to see him skip out of a spaceship, materialize, or even just walk. This is a guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and has managed to make life, the universe and everything much more entertaining. So, I wondered, how would he arrive? Black Mercedes.

Adams is six feet five inches tall, with intensely round eyes. He hadn’t had a good day. His daughter was sick, and the croissant he was eating at 5:00 P.M. was lunch. Life hasn’t been bad for the forty-nine-year-old Adams, though. He travels the world, his nine books have sold over 15 million copies, and the oft-delayed Hitchhiker’s movie is now being produced by Disney and has the director of Austin Powers signed on.

“The perennial movie, which has been about to be made for about twenty years and is even more about to be made now,” Adams said. “But we shall see. I wish I had never thought of doing it as a movie. I’d have about ten years of my life back. For the first time in over a decade, Adams is working on a book.

“There was a point where I just got massively fed up with it. My books tend to use up ideas at a ferocious rate,” he said. “I never intended to be a novelist to begin with. So I decided to go and do a whole bunch of other things... . The consequence of that is I have a huge backlog of story ideas, and now the sort of panic is, ‘Can I do them all in the rest of my career, given the speed at which they’re arriving at the moment?’ The other panic, of course, is the perennial writer’s problem of application. I think I have more fear of writing than most writers.”

“Since then, I’ve now got lots and lots of different story lines waiting for me to turn them into books.

One of them I shall apply the title Salmon of Doubt to, but I don’t know which one yet.”

In 1990, Adams, with zoologist Mark Carwardine, wrote Last Chance to See. It’s one of his hardest books to find, and his favorite. When Adams—who has lived in Santa Barbara for the last two years—speaks today at UCSB, it’s the book he’ll talk about.

“I do talks around most of the rest of the country,” Adams said. “So I was very keen to do one here, just to sort of say, ‘Hi, here I am.’ ” Adams gives a lot of speeches, usually about high technology to large companies. “I actually much prefer doing this particular one, which I only ever usually get to do at colleges because it’s funny, but big corporations don’t particularly like to hear about protecting endangered wildlife,” he said. “You lose a lot of money to endangered wildlife.”

Last Chance to See started as a magazine article for the World Wildlife Fund. The group sent Adams to Madagascar, where he met Carwardine. Adams wrote about the aye-aye, an endangered species of nocturnal lemur that looks like a cross between a bat, a monkey, and a very surprised infant.

“At the time, it was thought that there were only about fifteen. They’ve found a few more so it’s not quite so endangered, just very, very, very endangered,” Adams said. “The whole thing was completely magical.” So magical that Adams and Carwardine spent the next year traveling the world and seeing endangered animals, like flightless kakapo parrots in New Zealand and baiji river dolphins in China. The last twenty dolphins will become extinct when the Chinese government completes the Three Gorges Dam and destroys the dolphins’ habitat.

“It’s a desperate thing, not only because another species is lost and the tragedy of that, but because I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something... . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.” In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, intergalactic bulldozers destroyed the Earth and humanity. A very different sort of bulldozer destroyed the most successful species the planet had ever known. Sixty-five million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula, created a one-hundred-mile crater, and sent a cloud of searing vapor and dust into the air. That was pretty much it for the dinosaurs.

“I’m rather obsessed with the idea of that comet coming down and it being the single event to which we owe our very existence,” Adams said. “It is arguably the single most dramatic thing to have ever occurred in the world and certainly the one that was the most dramatic event in our lives, in that it paved the way for our existence, and no one was there to see it.”

Dinosaur-killing rocks are classic physics. The newer physics is a little too outlandish for Adams, a man who wrote that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is 42. A computer came up with that answer, and Adams said computers will change everything.

“Now that we’ve built computers, first we made them room-size, then desk-size and in briefcases and in pockets, soon they’ll be as plentiful as dust—you can sprinkle computers all over the place. Gradually, the whole environment will become something far more responsive and smart, and we’ll be living in a way that’s very hard for people living on the planet just now to understand,” Adams said. “I guess my six-year-old daughter will get a much better handle on it.” Adams has done a bit of everything, from radio to television to designing computer games. Not all of them worked out.

“At the end of all this being-determined-to-be-a-jack-of-all-trades, I think I’m better off just sitting down and putting a hundred thousand words in a cunning order.”

Adams writes “slowly and painfully.”

“People assume you sit in a room, looking pensive and writing great thoughts,” he said. “But you mostly sit in a room looking panic-stricken and hoping they haven’t put a guard on the door yet.”

Adams will probably be writing for the next few years, before his daughter grows up.

“I think what I’ll do, because there has been talk about me doing a big TV documentary series, is that I’ll wait until her hormones kick in, and then I shall go off like a shot,” he said. “I think when she’s about thirteen I’ll go off and do a big documentary series and come back when she’s become civilized.” The interview ended when Adams’s cell phone rang from inside his pocket. In the other pocket there was a little bit of padded cotton, red jtrimmed with a giraffe on it. It looked like it belonged to his daughter. His wife and daughter were supposed to have flown to London that night, but his daughter came down with an ear infection. “A serious one, actually.”

It was time for Adams to climb into his black Mercedes to go home and see her.

And so he did.

Interview conducted by Brendan Buhler, Artsweek