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

Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like the inside of a vacuum cleaner.

He accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin steward. He supposed that most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died. The strange stresses that cabin stewards continually thumped them with were like electric shocks applied to heart-attack victims in an attempt to revive them. Well.

What a strange and complicated hour and a half that had been. Dirk was still by no means sure that something somewhere had not gone terribly wrong, and he was tempted, now that the seatbelt sign had been turned off by the captain, to go and take a bit of a casual stroll through the aircraft to have a look for his quarry. But no one was going to be getting on or off the aircraft for a little while now, so he would probably be wiser to restrain himself for an hour. Or even longer. It was, after all, an eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles. He had not been expecting to go to Chicago today, and the sight of his quarry making a beeline for the check-in desk for the 1330 flight to Chicago had made him lurch. However, a resolution was a resolution, so after a brief pause to make sure that his quarry hadn’t merely gone up to the check-in desk to ask directions to the tie shop, Dirk had made his way light-headedly to the ticket sales desk and slammed plastic.

Overwhelmed with his sudden solvency, he had even booked himself business class. His anonymous employer was obviously someone of means who was not going to quibble over a few minor expenses.

Suppose his quarry was travelling business class? Dirk would not be able to keep tabs on him from a seat stuck in the back of the plane. There was almost an argument there for travelling first class, but not, Dirk reluctantly admitted to himself, a sane one.

First class? He just didn’t look it. The fare would be quite a few months rent on his flat. But who knows? Maybe he had caught the eye of a Hollywood casting director who was whisking him over for a screen test. It wouldn’t be difficult to slip into the first-class cabin and have a quick look around, but it would be difficult to do it without attracting attention.

Not on the plane? Dirk had seen him heading in towards passport control, but there had been a moment when he had suddenly looked round and Dirk had ducked quickly into the bookshop.

A few seconds later, when Dirk next glanced up, his quarry had gone—into, Dirk had assumed, passport control. Dirk had lingered for a decent interval, bought some newspapers and books, and then made his way through passport control and into the departure area himself.

It had not especially surprised him that he had not spotted his quarry anywhere in the departure area: it was a shining maze of pointless shops, cafes, and lounges, and Dirk felt that there was nothing to be gained by rushing around hunting for him. They were being funnelled inexorably in the same direction anway. They’d be on the same plane.

Not on the plane? Dirk sat stock still. Thinking back, he had to admit that the last time he had actually physically seen his quarry was before he had even gone through passport control, and that everything else was based on the assumption that his quarry was going to do what he, Dirk, had decided he was going to do. This, he now realised, was actually quite a large assumption. Cold air trickled down his neck from the nozzle above him.

Yesterday he had inexpertly boarded a bus while tailing this man. Today, it seemed, he had inadvertently boarded a plane to Chicago. He put his hand to his brow and asked himself, honestly, how good a private detective he really was. He summoned a cabin steward and ordered a glass of whisky, and nursed it as if it were very ill indeed. After a while he reached into his plastic bag of books and newspapers. He might as well just pass the time. He sighed. He drew out of the bag something he had no recollection of putting there. It was a courier delivery packet, which had already been opened. With a slow frown developing on his forehead, he pulled out its contents. There was a book inside. He turned it over, wonderingly. It was called Advanced Surveillance Techniques. He recognised it. He’d had a flyer for it yesterday in the post. He’d screwed it up and thrown it to the floor. Folded between a couple of pages of the book was the exact same flyer, flattened and smoothed out. With a deep sense of foreboding, Dirk slowly unfolded it. Scrawled across it in felt tip, in handwriting that was oddly familiar, were the words “Bon Voyage!” The cabin steward leaned across him. “Can I freshen your drink, sir?” he said.

THE SUN STOOD high above the distant Pacific. The day was bright, the sky blue and cloudless, the air, if you liked the smell of burnt carpets, perfect. Los Angeles. A city I have never visited.

A car, a blue convertible, sleek and desirable, came sweeping west out of Beverly Hills along the, as I understand it, gracious curves of Sunset Boulevard. Anybody seeing such a car would have wanted it.

Obviously. It was designed to make you want it. If people had turned out not to want it very much, the makers would have redesigned it and redesigned it until they did. The world is now full of things like this, which is, of course, why everybody is in such a permanent state of want.

The sleek, desirable blue convertible swept on. There is a set of traffic lights, I understand, on the borders of Bel Air and Brentwood, and as the car approached them, they turned red. The car drew to a halt. The woman shook her hair and adjusted her sunglasses in the mirror. As she did so, she caught sight of a brief flicker of movement in the mirror as a small, dark-haired figure emerged quietly from the shade of the roadside and snuck round the back of the car. A moment later he was leaning right over her, pointing a small handgun into her face. I know even less about handguns than I do about clothes. I’d be completely hopeless in Los Angeles. I’d be laughed at not only for my lack of dress sense but also my pitiful inability to tell a Magnum .38 from a Walther PPK or even, for heaven’s sake, a derringer. I do know, however, that the gun was also blue, or at least blue-black, and that the woman was startled out of her wits to have it pointed into her left eye from a range of just under one inch. Her assailant gave her to understand that now would be an excellent moment for her to vacate her seat and, no, not to take the key out of the car or even to attempt to pick up her bag, which was lying on the seat next to her, but just to be very cool, move very easily, very gently, and just get the fuck out of the car.

The woman tried to be very cool, to move very easily and very gently, but was hampered by the fact that she was shaking with uncontrollable fear as the gun bobbed about just an inch or so from her face like a mayfly in the summer. She did, however, get the fuck out of the car. She stood trembling in the middle of the road as the thief jumped into the car in her place, gunned the engine in a quick roar of triumph, and careered sharply off along Sunset Boulevard, around the bend, and away. She twisted around on the spot in an agony of shocked helplessness. Her world had turned abruptly upside down and tipped her out of it, and she was now, suddenly and unexpectedly, that most helpless of all people in Los Angeles, a pedestrian.

She tried to wave down one or two of the other cars on the road, but they manoeuvred politely past her.

One of them was an open-topped Mustang with the radio playing loudly. I’d love to be able to say that it was tuned to an oldies station and that the words “How does it feeeeel? How does it feeeeeel?” snarled out at this moment, but there are limits even to fiction. It was an oldies station, but the old song it was playing was “Sunday Girl” by Blondie, and so wasn’t even remotely appropriate, seeing as this was a Thursday. What could she do?