Free The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams Page A

discreetly stored at the dive centre where nobody could see it or guess at its purpose.
    “We have your Sub Bug,” said a voice.
    “Ah yes,” I said. “Yes, the, er, Sub Bug. Thank you very much. Yes, is that all right?”
    “No worries,” said the voice, “at all.”
    “Ah. Good.”
    “So if you like, why don’t you come down to the dive centre in the morning. We can check it out, see how it works, see what you need, take it out for a spin, whatever you want. We’ll just do whatever we can to help you.” “Oh. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
    “No worries at all.”
    The voice was very friendly and reassuring. My jet-lagged paranoia began to subside a little. We went and had dinner.
    The resort had four restaurants, and we chose the Oriental Seafood Restaurant. Seafood in Australia mostly seems to consist of barramundi, Morton Bay bugs, and everything else.
    “Morton Bay bugs,” said our smiling Chinese waitress, “are like lobsters, only this big.” She held her two forefingers about three inches apart. “We smash their head in. Is very nice. You will like.”
    We didn’t like that much, in fact. The restaurant was very smartly decorated in Japanese-style black and white, but the food looked better than it tasted and they played Muzak at us. For a moment I felt the ghost of the old, naff Hayman Island stalking through its glamorously tasteful new home. The other restaurants available were Polynesian, Italian, and the one to which they gave top billing, La Fontaine, a French restaurant that we decided to keep for the last of our four nights, though we had nagging doubts. I tend to like local cooking unless I’m in Wales, and the thought of French haute cuisine transported here did not fill me with confidence. I wanted to keep an open mind, though, because as it happens one of the best meals I ever had was steamed crab and chateaubriand of zebu cooked by a French-trained chef in the south of Madagascar. But then the French had infested Madagascar for seventy-five years and bequeathed it a rich legacy of culinary skills and hideous bureaucracy. We decided at least to look at La Fontaine that night. As we prowled our way toward it, we traversed acres of beautifully laid carpet, passed grand pianos, chandeliers, and reproduction Louis XVI furniture. I found myself racking my brains for any memory I might have of perhaps some schismatic eighteenth-century French court that might have been set up, however briefly, on the Great Barrier Reef. I asked Jane, who is an historian, and she assured me that I was being extremely silly, and so we went to bed.
    It is, as I have said, shaped like the front half of a dolphin. The body of it is blue, and toward the front there are two small yellow fins, one on each side, that can rotate through a few degrees and direct the Sub Bug upward or downward. At the back are two large handles that you hold on to as the Sub Bug pulls you through the water. Within reach of your thumbs are buttons that make the thing go, and control its ascent and descent. Inside the Bug is a cylinder of compressed air—a normal scuba cylinder—and this provides power to spin the two propellers that push the Bug forward, and also supplies air down a flexible tube to a free-floating regulator. A regulator is the thing you stick in your mouth that gives you your air when you’re diving. The point of this arrangement is that you only need your mask and flippers; you don’t need to carry a scuba tank on your own back, because you’re getting your air direct from the Sub Bug. The Bug is designed in such a way that you can set a maximum depth beyond which it will not go. The very maximum anyway is thirty feet.
    Ian had received a flurry of faxes from Martin Pemberton about setting up the machine, and was pretty confident about it “No worries at all,” he said, and asked me what I planned. I said it might be an idea to take it for a shallow local try out before taking it out into deep water.
    “No