Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

Hey, this was good. The empty air was kind of a shock, but a good shock, like a swimming pool in the morning. And the air wasn’t empty. It was like falling into enormous invisible pillows, with fingers that came out and tugged and pulled at you, ruffling your hair, rattling your T-shirt. As his brain got to grips with the huge openness around him, he felt like a little toy hanging from the end of an immense mobile slowly turn over Dave World. He was turning in a big, easy arc, a little bit to the right and then, in response to a small shift in his weight, a little bit to the left, but still, it seemed, moving as an arc within an arc, a wheel within a wheel. The world, his world turned slowly around beneath him, green, rich, lush and vivid.

It was about 1.2 million years since the human race had suddenly gone extinct, and the world had really perked up a lot in that time. In geological terms it was but a fleeting moment, of course, but the forces of evolution had suddenly had tons of space to play in, huge gaps to fill, and everything had started to thrive like crazy. Everybody used to talk about saving the world—well, Dave had done it. Now it was great.

The whole place was really neat now. DaveWorld. Yay. He was riding the air pretty well now, not fighting it, but flowing along it. He was beginning to get a sense, though, that just dropping himself in his own swimming pool might be a little tougher than he had expected. But that was how he liked things to be—a little tougher than he expected.

Maybe it was even going to be a lot tougher, he began to realise. It was one thing to be staying comfortably aloft, following the currents, riding gradually down, it was quite another thing to steer in any meaningful kind of way. When he tried to turn too sharply, the delicate structure around him would start to rattle and bang in quite an alarming way.

“I DON’T DO CATS,” said Dirk Gently.

His tone was sharp. He felt he had come up in the world. He had no evidence to support this view, he just felt it was about time. He also had indigestion, but that had nothing whatever to do with it.

“Your advertisement says ...”

“The advertisement is out of date,” snapped Dirk. “I don’t do cats.” He waved her away and pretended to be busy with some paperwork. “Then what do you do?” she persisted.

Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women.

They upset him, with their grace, their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to out to dinner with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the room, that she wouldn’t out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemtive action. If she was not going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to dinner with him on his terms.

“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.

She raised her other eyebrow as well.

“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?” “Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow.

What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing.

Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.

He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.

He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I ...” “Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”

“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.

“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually survive a good fling at the wall.”

“What?” said Dirk.

“I mean that however respectable your business may be, it was actually respected you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”

“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am not going to look for your lost cat

“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly ...”

“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”

Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an “I don’t care what I wear, just any old thing that’s lying around”

kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around. She was obviously pretty bright, probably had a pretty good job, like running some sort of major textile or telecommunications company despite being clearly only thirty-two. In other words, she was exactly the sort of person who didn’t mislay cats, and certainly didn’t go running off to poky little private detective agencies if she did.

He felt ill at ease.

“Talk sense, please,” he said sharply. “My time is valuable.”

“Oh yes? How valuable?”

She looked scornfully around his office. He had to admit to himself that it was grim, but he was damned if he was just going to sit there and take it. Just because he needed the work, needed the money, had nothing better to do with his time, there was no reason for anybody to think that he was at the beck and call of every good-looking woman who walked into his office offering to pay for his services. He felt humiliated.

“I’m not talking about my scale of fees, though it is, I promise you, awesome. I was merely thinking of time passing. Time that won’t pass this way again.” He leaned forward in a pointed manner.

“Time is a finite entity, you know. Only about four billion years to go till the sun explodes. I know it seems like a lot now, but it will soon go if we just squander it on frivolous nonsense and small talk.”

“Small talk! This is half of my cat we’re talking about!”

“Madam, I don’t know who this ‘we’ is that you are referring to, but ...” “Listen. You may choose, when you’ve heard the details of this case, not to accept it because it is, I admit, a little odd. But I made an appointment to see you on the basis of what it said in your advertisement, to whit, that you find lost cats, and if you turn me down solely on the basis that you do not find lost cats, then I must remind you that there is such a thing as the Trades Descriptions Act. I can’t remember exactly what it says, but I bet you five pounds it says you can’t do that.”