CHAPTER 1
Fenchurch woke up slowly. Her eyes didn't want to open for some time, but she eventually asserted her authority and forced them to open a small crack. At which point she was rather startled to discover that she was in her bed back home on Earth. Her eyes then popped open all the way! How long had she been there? She had been lost traveling among the stars, last she remembered. She couldn't have found the entire planet Earth, gone home and to bed... and then simply forgotten! She was sure she would have remembered!
Then she noticed the sleeping figure under the covers next to her. Who was that! Had she been drinking? She didn't feel hung-over, but that would explain the situation. She must've finally hitchhiked back home to Earth, been so pleased about it that she went to a pub, picked up a total stranger and brought him home with her. The sleeping figure stirred gently. She reached out a tentative hand and cautiously pulled the top of the blankets back to see who it was. "Arthur?"
Arthur opened his eyes. "Oh, hello. Did you sleep well?"
She blinked at him a few times to make sure he stayed there after each blink. He did stay. It was time to question him. "How did you get here?" she asked, smiling.
Arthur frowned, "I don't know. I suppose I must have fallen asleep here last night."
"But just a minute! Arthur, I need to know how we got! We're back home! On Earth! But I don't remember coming home! Do you?" She looked around again to make sure that she was indeed in her old bedroom back in London. Everything was where it should be. Everything was ordinary. She hadn't actually seen anything ordinary for several years now. And oddly enough she found the ordinariness of the room to be completely surreal. She only ever saw an ordinary bed in dreams of a home she thought she had left behind long ago. She only ever saw an ordinary chest of drawers in her dreams. She had become used to that. These things no longer existed in the real, physical world. And yet here they were!
"Now you come to mention it, I don't remember coming here either," said Arthur. "Tell me something," he said with a puzzled frown on his face.
"Yes?"
"Has that alligator always been there?"
"Which alligator?" Fenchurch said, looking around nervously, her eyes boggling.
"The one over there by the bedroom door. Next to the rhinoceros," he added helpfully.
Fenchurch looked to where Arthur was pointing, and saw that there were two people standing in the doorway to her bedroom, and that they were both wearing very obvious animal costumes. The sort one wears at a Halloween party. The rhino then reached over to the alligator and pulled off the mask... revealing it to be another rhino. Or rather, another rhino costume. The alligator then pulled off the rhino's mask, revealing it to be another alligator costume.
"That's odd," commented Arthur.
"You know something," said Fenchurch thoughtfully. "It's not so much the rhino and the alligator... it's the flying pigs that's really spoiling our home-coming."
Arthur noticed that there were indeed several pigs flying about in Fenchurch's bedroom... up near the clouds. And then he realized that it wasn't so much Fenchurch's bedroom, as it was a field of multi-coloured tie-dyed grass... and the pigs were flying maneuvers in the air above them as though they were fighter jets performing at an air show.
Vapour trails then shot out from the pigs' rear ends. And then the vapour trails merged together and acted like a giant zipper unzipping the sky. And as the sky unzipped, Arthur and Fenchurch found themselves falling up through the sky and into a gigantic toilet.
But fortunately they ended up on a small island in the middle of the bowl. And as they lay there panting for breath, Arthur noticed something very odd. "Fenchurch," he said. "You're turning into a dodo bird. Stop it."
Fenchurch didn't quite understand why Arthur had said this to her. And her ability to think clearly was slipping away, like a guilty dog extricating himself from a room with a smelly brown heap in the middle of the floor. "Me no dodo," she said in her defense. The accusation struck her as especially strange because clearly it was Arthur himself who was turning into a dodo. She pointed her wing at him and declared, "You the dodo."
Arthur wasn't quite sure what she was saying. But he was certain that she was wrong. And he too seemed to be losing his ability to construct a decent argument, so all he could say in response was, "Me no dodo." He then pointed to Fenchurch, who was most definitely a dodo, and he said, "You the dodo."
Fenchurch could only retort with, "Me no dodo. You the dodo."
Arthur thought about this for several seconds before finally responding with, "Me no dodo. You the dodo."
Fenchurch had trouble accepting this, and so shook her beak and pointed her wing at Arthur, "Me no dodo. You the dodo."
Arthur shook his own enormous beak, "Me no dodo. You the dodo."
"No. Me no dodo. You the dodo."
"Me no dodo. You the dodo."
"No. Me no dodo. You the dodo."
Amazingly, this argument went on for several minutes... until they both turned into chocolate pudding.
#
After the Infinite Improbability Drive prototype ship the Heart of Gold successfully took former president Zaphod Beeblebrox around the galaxy during his fugitive years, the drive eventually went into mass production. These days most ships in the galaxy were powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive. The Imperial Galactic Government experimented briefly with other forms of travel, such as the Bistromathic Drive, the Bad Luck Drive, and the sickeningly complex Quantum Inversion Disintegration and Rematerialization Drive. But in the end, they realized that the Infinite Improbability Drive was the least reliable... but the one whose industry presidents provided the largest campaign donations. So the Infinite Improbability Drive was now the standard in galactic travel.
#
Things settled down in the drive room of the spaceship on which Fenchurch had stowed away. The flying pigs were gone, and unfortunately so was Arthur. In fact he had never been there at all. She hadn't actually seen him since shortly after visiting God's last message to His creation. They had been sitting in the passenger section of a space transport when the ship had made a perfectly ordinary jump through hyperspace. And then Arthur was gone! One moment he was sitting next to her, they were planning their future together in a big, wide, exciting galaxy, and the next moment, he was gone, and Fenchurch was alone in a big, wide, lonely galaxy. The ship's crew had explained patiently and sympathetically that the accident had happened because she and Arthur had originated in a plural zone. And there was simply nothing to be done.
She'd been looking for him ever since.
She was currently hiding out in the drive room of a ship carrying supplies to another space craft. The voice of the captain came over the speakers and announced that they had just finished their improbability jump, and were about to dock with another ship and transfer their cargo.
This was where Fenchurch got off. As the crew members entered the room and began the cargo transfer, she emerged from behind the crates, picked up one of the smaller containers, and helped carry it across to the other ship. Then once again she snuck down behind the crates and waited...
#
Several days earlier, Fenchurch had been on the planet Hargphardtle. Now resigned to being thoroughly lost in the galaxy, she started trying to make some sort of living for herself by crafting and selling musical instruments vaguely resembling the cello, which she used to play back on Earth. It was the fifth planet she had been to since finding herself separated from Arthur in the hyperspace accident. She had come across a collection of large wooden objects which the locals called "lawyers' case breakers." Though exactly what that meant, she didn't want to know. But she found that she could fairly easily convert these into musical instruments very much like an Earth cello.
She also found for herself a little corner of unused sidewalk. Actually it wasn't like the sidewalks on Earth. This one was 42 stories up (coincidence), and just to the side of where a clear walk-way tube from across the way came out into an outdoor balcony café. One reason she preferred this site was that although she felt ashamed every time she did it, she would keep an eye on the tables, and when people would leave a significant portion of food on their plates, she would wander by and quickly grab some of the good bits for herself before the robotic waiters could clear away the plates. For a few weeks she shared the corner space with another homeless life form. He was small and blue and covered in a kind of downy fur. He was loud and opinionated, he only owned one shirt (a thoroughly soiled "Disaster Area" T-shirt), and made a small amount of money for himself by providing passers-by with psychiatric interpretive ballet. But he soon left and she never met up with him again.
It startled her when one day a few weeks after he had left that she noticed a television screen (or at least it's intergalactic equivalent) in a shop window. And on the screen she saw that he now had his own television show where he did psychiatric interpretive ballet for couples who were in danger of breaking up, and also for people suffering from "fart bubble" addiction.
It was while selling her cello-like things next to the balcony café that she heard the news on a nearby radio of the historic launch of the Starship GSS Suicidal Insanity, which was about to go back in time to begin construction of the Big Bang Burger Bar. The radio announcer explained that the origin of the restaurant was some sort of galactic mystery, and the crew of this starship was hoping to solve it by simply becoming a part of it. There was a brief interview with the head of the project, Alaric Badgerbull. He explained that as far as anybody could tell, the restaurant had simply always been there, and nobody had ever come forward to claim to be the mind behind it. "And if nobody else is going to be responsible, then it might as well be me!" he said. He explained that he had personally visited the restaurant and made notes of all the materials used in its construction. He then commissioned the GSS Suicidal Insanity and her crew to help him carry out the task. Their historic launch would take place in a few days.
As she sat in her corner between the pedestrian tube and the balcony café with her cello-like instruments on display around her and the aliens walking, flying, crawling, oozing, bouncing, or in some cases speelbonking (Speelbonking was a very complex form of perambulation that consisted in equal parts of walking, defecating, and astral projecting.) by her, Fenchurch pulled a clam out of her pocket. "Did you hear that, Sparky? That sounds interesting."
"It sure does, Boss," Sparky replied in a high-pitched voice that always reminded Fenchurch of Mickey Mouse. She had never been able to figure out why the clam should call her Boss though. But she quickly got used to it, and eventually she even came to like it. Which was at least fair, as the clam didn't know why the human should call him Sparky.
#
Sparky was from the planet Pontookie Epsilon. The clams there lived for thousands of years, and were not only sentient, they were actually among the most supremely intelligent life forms in the entire galaxy. Simply by sitting and thinking about things, these clams were able to deduce the existence of the rest of the universe to a very high degree of accuracy, without ever having to see it. Except for one blind spot. For some reason, the clams had never been able to deduce that there would be such a thing as war. The clams were also highly philosophical, and could frequently convince people that nothing truly existed, even if it was staring them in the face. Some could even take existing circumstances and project what would happen next to an accuracy of nearly 99%.
Unfortunately the clams of Pontookie Epsilon, like clams on most worlds, their physical bodies were merely slimy little blobs stuck between two shells. And thus they had no means of escape from the local fisher-folk, who would catch them and then sell them to tourists as a sort of (usually unwilling) "guru in the pocket."
#
"If you're still looking for that other Earthling," Sparky offered, "you might want to get yourself onboard that ship, Boss."
"Why?"
"Almost everybody goes to the Big Bang Burger Bar eventually."
Fenchurch had long ago learned to stop asking Sparky if he were sure about the things he told her. So she accepted what he said, and proceeded to hitchhike to a nearby planet where she found another ship which was going to rendezvous with the Suicidal Insanity, and then promptly snuck onboard.
#
With the cargo transfer now complete, and Fenchurch safely hiding amongst that cargo in the hold of the Suicidal Insanity, she heard the captain make an announcement over the speakers, explaining that they had just picked up the last of the equipment, and would now begin traveling back in time. Fenchurch braced herself for this. She had never traveled backwards in time before. She had only ever traveled forward in time. And then at more or less the same rate as most other people and things.
Then she felt it. And oddly enough the sensation was rather like taking a hot shower, while her insides froze.