Free So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams Page A

of "yoo-hooing". The appallingly permed woman was waving to them across the room like some stupid bird with a broken wing. Everyone in the pub turned to them and seemed to be expecting some sort of response.

They hadn't listened to the bit about how pleased and happy Anjie was going to be about the 4.30p everyone had helped to raise towards the cost of her kidney machine, had been vaguely aware that someone from the next table had won a box of cherry brandy liqueurs, and took a moment or two to cotton on to the fact that the yoo-hooing lady was trying to ask them if they had ticket number 37.

Arthur discovered that he had. He glanced angrily at his watch.

Fenchurch gave him a push.

"Go on," she said, "go and get it. Don't be bad tempered. Give them a nice speech about how pleased you are and you can give me a call and tell me how it went. I'll want to hear the record. Go on."

She flicked his arm and left.

The regulars thought his acceptance speech a little over- effusive. It was, after all, merely an album of bagpipe music.

Arthur thought about it, and listened to the music, and kept on breaking into laughter.

Chapter 14

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

Ring ring.

"Hello, yes? Yes, that's right. Yes. You'll 'ave to speak up, there's an awful lot of noise in 'ere. What?

"No, I only do the bar in the evenings. It's Yvonne who does lunch, and Jim, he's the landlord. No, I wasn't on. What?

"You'll have to speak up.

"What? No, don't know anything about no raffle. What?

"No, don't know nothing about it. 'Old on, I'll call Jim."

The barmaid put her hand over the receiver and called over the noisy bar.

"'Ere, Jim, bloke on the phone says something about he's won a raffle. He keeps on saying it's ticket 37 and he's won."

"No, there was a guy in the pub here won," shouted back the barman.

"He says 'ave we got the tick et."

"Well how can he think he's won if he hasn't even got a ticket?"

"Jim says 'ow can you think you've won if you "aven't even got the ticket. What?"

She put her hand over the receiver again.

"Jim, 'e keeps effing and blinding at me. Says there's a number on the ticket."

"Course there was a number on the ticket, it was a bloody raffle ticket wasn't it?"

"'E says 'e means its a telephone number on the ticket."

"Put the phone down and serve the bloody customers, will you?"

Chapter 15

Eight hours West sat a man alone on a beach mourning an inexplicable loss. He could only think of his loss in little packets of grief at a time, because the whole thing was too great to be borne.

He watched the long slow Pacific waves come in along the sand, and waited and waited for the nothing that he knew was about to happen. As the time came for it not to happen, it duly didn't happen and so the afternoon wore itself away and the sun dropped beneath the long line of sea, and the day was gone.

The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house was there, but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that first runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo", and in another, written only hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth. Plus the air is, for some reason, yellow."

The coastline runs west, and then turns north up to the misty bay of San Francisco, which the Guide describes as a "good place to go. It's very easy to believe that everyone you meet there is also a space traveller. Starting a new religion for you is just their way of saying `hi'. Until you've settled in and got the hang of the place it is best to say `no' to three questions out of any given four that anyone may ask you, because there are some very strange things going on there, some of which an unsuspecting alien could die of." The hundreds of