Douglas Adams - The long dark tea-time of the soul

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Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow

Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange

flame the usual peaple tried to claim responsibility. First the

IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels

rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was

completely under control, that it was a one in a million

chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all,

and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location

for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having

to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at

all.

No rational cause could be found for the explosion - it

was simply designated an act of god. But, thinks Dirk Gently,

which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal

Two of Heathrow Airport trying to chatch the 15.37 to Oslo.

Funnier than Psycho... more chilling than Jeeves

Takes Charge... shorter than War and Peace... the

new Dirk Gently novel, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

Douglas Adams is the best-selling author of the Hitch

Hiker books: The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the

Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life,

the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All

the Fish, and Mostly Harmless.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has appeared in more

forms than one might reasonably expect, most of which flatly

contradict each other. It has appeared as a BBC radio series

(its original form), a BBC TV series, all sorts of different

records, cassettes, and CD's, a computer game, and also,

apotheotically, a bath towel. A series of graphic novels is

currently in preparation, and the motion-picture version is

confidently expected any decade now.

He is also the author of the Dirk Gently books, Dirk

Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long

Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He is currently working

on another book in this series.

He has also written The Deeper Meaning of Liff with

John Lloyd and, most recently, the travel and wildlife book

Last Chance to See, with Mark Carwardine. He is

making more TV programmes these days and also frequently

lectures on computers and semi-extinct parrots.

He lives partly in Islington, London, partly in Provence,

France, but mostly in airport bookstalls. Also by Douglas Adams

in Pan Books

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Life, the Universe and Everything

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Mostly Harmless

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The Deeper Meaning of Liff (With John Lloyd)

Last Chance to See (With Mark Carwardine)

Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

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Pan Books in association with William HeinemannFor Jane

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II and

an Apple LaserWriter II NTX. The word processing software was

FullWrite Professional from Ashton Tate. The fnal proofing and

photosetting was done by The Last Word, London SW6.

I would like to say an enormous thank you to my amazing

and wonderful editor, Sue Freestone.

Her help, support, criticism, encouragement. enthusiasm

and sandwiches have been beyond measure. I also owe thanks and

apologies to Sophie, James and Vivian who saw so little of her

during the final weeks of work.

Chapter 1

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth

has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a

degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special

effort. This ugliness arises because airports ane full of

people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that

their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the

only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and

architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their

designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness

motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make

effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever

from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller

with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie

racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky,

and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds

that it is functional, and conceal the location of the

departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of

hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.

All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered

from doubt. She was not a superstitious person, or even a

religious person. she was simply someone who was not at all

sure she should be flying to Norway. But she was finding it

increasingly easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and

if it was remotely possible that any godlike being who could

order the disposition of particles at the creation of the

Universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the

M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble

with the tickets, finding a next-door neighbour to look after

the cat, then finding the cat so it could be looked after by

the next-door neighbour, the sudden leak in the roof, the

missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death of the

next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat - it all had the

semblance of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had

begun to assume godlike proportions.

Even the taxi-driver - when she had eventually found a

taxi- had said, "Norway? What you want to go there for?" And

when she hadn't instantly said, "'The aurora borealis!" or

"Fjords!" but had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her

lip, he had said, "I know, I bet it's some bloke dragging you

out there. Tell you what, tell him to stuff it. Go to

Tenerife."

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There was an idea.

Tenerife.

Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.

She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry

tangles of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable

the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like

in Norway.

Or, indeed, at home. Home would bc about as icebound as

Norway right now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of

steam bursting out of the grnund, catching in the frigid air

and dissipating bctween the glacial cliff faces of Sixth

Avenue.

A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the

course of her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt

to be a New Yorker. For though she had lived in the city very

little, most of her life had been spent at a constant distance

from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of

distracted wandering around South America five years ago

following the loss of her newly mamed husband, Luke, in a New

York taxihailing accident.

She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that

she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was

pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they

brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to.

That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and

sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real

pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.

London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of

course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why

would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it

was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it amved at

your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it

out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front

of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid,

stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this

simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one

frustration she could never learn simply to live with and

accept, and about once a month or so she would get very

depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most

lavish pizza she could describe - pizza with an extra pizza on

it, essentially - and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.

"To what?"

"Deliver. Let me give you the address - "

"I don't understand. Aren't you going to come and pick it

up?"

"No. Aren't you going to deliver? My address - "

"Er, we don't do that, miss."

"Don't do what?"

"Er, deliver. . ."

"You don't deliver? Am I hearing you

correctly... ?"

The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly

slanging match which would leave her feeling drained and shaky,

but much, much better the following morning. In all other

respects she was one of the most sweet-natured people you could

hope to meet.

But today was testing her to the limit.

There had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and

when the distant flash of blue lights made it clear that the

cause was an accident somewhere ahead of them Kate had become

more tense and had stared fixedly out of the other window as

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eventually they had crawled past it.

The taxi-driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had

dropped her off because she didn't have the right money, and

there was a lot of disgruntled hunting through tight trouser

pockets before he was eventually able to find change for her.

The atmosphere was heavy and thundery and now, standing in the

middle of the main check-in concourse at Terminal Two, Heathrow

Airport, she could not find the check-in desk for her flight to

Oslo.

She stood very still for a moment, breathing calmly and

deeply and trying not to think of Jean-Philippe.

Jean-Philippe was, as the taxi-driver had correctly

guessed, the reason why she was going to Norway, but was also

the reason why she was convinced that Norway was not at all a

good place for her to go. Thinking of him therefore made her

head oscillate and it seemed best not to think about him at all

but simply to go to Norway as if that was where she happened to

be going anyway. She would then be terribly surprised to bump

into him at whatever hotel it was he had written on the card

that was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag.

In fact she would be surprised to find him there anyway.

What she would be much more likely to find was a message from

him saying that he had been unexpectedly called away to

Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and that he would call her from

there. Jean-Philippe was the most continually absent person she

had ever met. In this he was the culmination of a series. Since

she had lost Luke to the great yellow Chevrolet she had been

oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions that a succession

of self-absorbed men had inspired in her.

She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut

her eyes for a second. She wished that when she opened them

again there would be a sign in front of her saying "This way

for Norway" which she could simply follow without needing to

think about it or anything else ever again. This, she

reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought,

was presumably how religions got started, and must be the

reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for

converts. They know that people there are at their most

vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of

guidance.

Kate opened her eyes again and was, of course,

disappointed. But then a second or two later there was a

momentary parting in a long surging wave of cross Germans in

inexplicable yellow polo shirts and through it she had a brief

glimpse of the check-in desk for Oslo. Lugging her garment bag

on to her shoulder, she made her way towards it.

There was just one other person before her in the line at

the desk and he, it turned out, was having trouble or perhaps

making it.

He was a large man, impressively large and well-built -

even expertly built - but he was also definitely odd-looking in

a way that Kate couldn't quite deal with. She couldn't even say

what it was that was odd about him, only that she was

immediately inclined not to include him on her list of things

to think about at the moment. She remembered reading an article

which had explained that the central processing unit of the

human brain only had seven memory registers, which meant that

if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and then

thought of something else, orte of the other seven would

instantly drop out.

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In quick succession she thought about whether or not she

was likely to catch the plane, about whether it was just her

imagination that the day was a particularly bloody one, about

airline staff who smile charmingly and are breathtakingly rude,

about Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower

prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't, about

whether or not she felt a magazine article about airports

coming on which might help pay for the trip, about whether her

garment bag would hurt less on her other shoulder and finally,

in spite of all her intentions to the contrary, about

Jean-Philippe, who was another set of at lest seven subtopics

all to himself.

The man standing arguing in front of her popped right out

of her mind.

It was only the announcement on the airport Tannoy of the

last call for her flight to Oslo which forced her attention

back to the situation in front of her.

The large man was making trouble about the fact that he

hadn't been given a first class seat reservation. It had just

transpired that the reason for this was that he didn't in fact

have a first class ticket.

Kate's spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and

began to prowl around there making a low growling noise.

It now transpired that the man in front of her didn't

actually have a ticket at all, and the argument then began to

range freely and angrily over such topics as the physical

appearance of the airline :heck-in girl, her qualities as a

person, theories about her ancestors, speculations as to what

surprises the future might have in store for her and the

airline for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on the

happy subject of the man's credit card.

He didn't have one.

Further discussions ensued, and had to do with cheques,

and why the airline did not accept them.

Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch.

"Excuse me," she said, interrupting the transactions. "Is

this going to take long? I have to catch the Oslo flight."

"I'm just dealing with this gentleman," said the girl,

"I'll be with you in just one second."

Kate nodded, and politely allowed just one second to go

by.

"It's just that the flight's about to leave," she said

then. "I have one bag, I have my ticket, I have a reservation.

It'll take about thirty seconds. I hate to interrupt, but I'd

hate even more to miss my flight for the sake of thirty

seconds. That's thirty actual seconds, not thirty `just one'

seconds, which could keep us here all night."

The check-in girl turned the full glare on her lipgloss on

to Kate, but before she could speak the large blond man looked

round, and the effect of his face was a little disconcerting.

"I, too," he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, "wish to

fly to Oslo."

Kate stared at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in

an airport, or rather, the airport looked thoroughly out of

place around him.

"Well," she said, "the way we're stacked up at the moment

it looks like neither of us is going to make it. Can we just

sort this one out? What's the hold-up?"

The check-in girl smiled her charming, dead smile and

said, "The airline does not accept cheques, as a matter of

company policy."

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"Well I do," said Kate, slapping down her own credit card.

"Charge the gentleman's ticket to this, and I'll take a cheque

from him.

"OK?" she added to the big man, who was looking at her

with slow surprise. His eyes were large and blue and conveyed

the impression that they had looked at a lot of glaciers in

their time. They were extraordinarily arrogant and also

muddled.

"OK?" she repeated briskly. "My name is Kate Schechter.

Two `c's, two `h's, two `e's and also a `t', an `r' and an `s'.

Provided they're all there the bank won't be fussy about the

order they come in. They never seem to know themselves."

The man very slowly inclined his head a little towards her

in a rough bow of acknowledgement. He thanked her for her

kindness, courtesy and some Norwegian word that was lost on

her, said that it was a long while since he had encountered

anything of the kind, that she was a woman of spirit and some

other Norwegian word, and that he was indebted to her. He also

added, as an afterthought, that he had no cheque-book.

"Right!" said Kate, determined not to be deflected from

her course. She fished in her handbag for a piece of paper,

took a pen from the check-in counter, scribbled on the paper

and thrust it at him.

"That's my address," she said, "send me the money. Hock

your fur coat if you have to. Just send it me. OK? I'm taking a

flyer on trusting you."

The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on

it with immense slowness, then folded it with elaborate care

and put it into the pocket of his coat. Again he bowed to her

very slightly.

Kate suddenly realised that the check-in girl was silently

waiting for her pen back to fill in the credit card form. She

pushed it back at her in annoyance, handed over her own ticket

and imposed on herself an icy calm.

The airport Tannoy announced the departure of their

flight.

"May I see your passports, please?" said the girl

unhunriedly.

Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn't have one.

"You what?" exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply

stopped moving at all and stared quietly at a random point on

her desk waiting for someone else to make a move. It wasn't her

problem.

The man repeated angrily that he didn't have a passport.

He shouted it and banged his fist on the counter so hard that

it was slightly dented by the force of the blow.

Kate picked up her ticket, her passport and her credit

card and hoisted her garment bag back up on to her shoulder.

"This is when I get off," she said, and simply walked

away. She felt that she had made every effort a human being

could possibly be expected to make to catch her plane, but that

it was not to be. She would send a message to Jean-Philippe

saying that she could not be there, and it would probably sit

in a slot next to his message to her saying why he could not be

there either. For once they would be equally absent.

For the time being she would go and cool off. She set off

in search of first a newspaper and then some coffee, and by

dint of following the appropriate signs was unable to locate

either. She was then unable to find a working phone from which

to send a message, and decided to give up on the airport

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altogether. Just get out, she told herself, find a taxi, and go

back home.

She threaded her way back across the check-in concourse,

and had almost made it to the exit when she happened to glance

back at the check-in desk that had defeated her, and was just

in time to see it shoot up through the roof engulfed in a ball

of orange flame.

As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness,

and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she

was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn't

merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she

passed out.

Chapter 2

The usual people tried to claim responsibility.

First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even

British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that

the situation was completely under control, that it was a one

in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive

leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a

nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before

finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do

with them at all.

No cause could be found for the explosion.

It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own

free will. Explanations were advanced, but most of these were

simply phrases which restated the problem in different words,

along the same principles which had given the world "metal

fatigue". In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to

account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and

concrete into an explosive condition, which was "non-linear

catastrophic sWctural exasperation", or to put it another way -

as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following

night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career -

the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being

where it was".

As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the

casualties varied wildly. They started at forty-seven dead,

eighty-nine seriously injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a

hundred and thirty injured, and rose as high as one hundred and

seventeen dead before the figures started to be revised

downwards once more. The final figures revealed that once all

the people who could be accounted for had been accounted for,

in fact no one had been killed at all. A small number of people

were in hospital suffering from cuts and bruises and varying

degrees of traumatised shock, but that, unless anyone had any

information about anybody actually being missing, was that.

This was yet another inexplicable aspect to the whole

affair. The force of the explosion had been enough to reduce a

large part of the front of Terminal Two to rubble, and yet

everyone inside the building had somehow either fallen very

luckily, or been shielded from one piece of falling masonry by

another, or had the shock of the explosion absorbed by their

luggage. All in all, very little luggage had survived at all.

There were questions asked in Parliament about this, but not

very interesting ones.

It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware

of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the

outside world.

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She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which

she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin

trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great

curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a

tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful

or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other

nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar

as she recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised

that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had

heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a

tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the

other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard

it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

Gradually the trunks, the memories and the penguins began

to grow indistinct, to become all white and swimmy, then to

become like walls that were all white and swimmy, and finally

to become walls that were merely white, or rather a yellowish,

greenish kind of off-white, and to enclose her in a small room.

The room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but

turned down low, and the light from a street lamp found its way

between the grey curtains and threw sodium patterns on the

opposite wall. She became dimly aware of the shadowed shape of

her own body lying under the white, turned-down sheet and the

pale, neat blankets. She stared at it for a nervous while,

checking that it looked right before she tried, tentatively, to

move any part of it. She tried her right hand, and that seemed

to be fine. A little stiff and aching, but the fingers all

responded, and all seemed to be of the right length and

thickness, and to bend in the right places and in the right

directions.

She panicked briefly when she couldn't immediately locate

her left hand, but then she found it lying across her stomach

and nagging at her in some odd way. It took her a second or two

of concentration to put together a number of rather disturbing

feelings and realise that there was a needle bandaged into her

arm. This shook her quite badly. From the needle there snaked a

long thin transparent pipe that glistened yellowly in the light

from the street lamp and hung in a gentle curl from a thick

plastic bag suspended from a tall metal stand. An array of

horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus, but

she peered dimly at the bag and saw the words "Dextro-Saline".

She made herself calm down again and lay quietly for a few

moments before continuing her exploration.

Her ribcage seemed undamaged. Bruised and tender, but

there was no shaiper pain anywhere to suggest that anything was

broken. Her hips and thighs ached and were stiff, but revealed

no serious hurt. She flexed

the muscles down her right leg and then her left. She

rather fancied that her left ankle was sprained.

In other words, she told herself, she was perfectly all

right. So what was she doing here in what she could tell from

the septic colour of the paint was clearly a hospital?

She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the

penguins for an entertaining few minutes.

The next time she came round she treated herself with a

little more care, and lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous.

She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It

was dark and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like

the North Sea. Lumpy things jumbled themselves out of it and

slowly arranged themselves into a heaving airport. The airport

was sour and ached in her head, and in the middle of it,

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pulsing like a migraine, was the memory of a moment's whirling

splurge of light.

It became suddenly very clear to her that the check-in

concourse of Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport had been hit by a

meteorite. Silhouetted in the flare was the fur-coated figure

of a big man who must have caught the full force of it and been

reduced instantly to a cloud of atoms that were free to go as

they pleased. The thought caused a deep and horrid shudder to

go through her. He had been infuriating and arrogant, but she

had liked him in an odd way. There had been something oddly

noble in his perverse bloody-mindedness. Or maybe, she

realised, she liked to think that such perverse

bloody-mindedness was noble because it reminded her of herself

trying to order pizza to be delivered in an alien, hostile and

non-pizza-delivering world. Nobleness was one word for making a

fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were

others.

She felt a sudden surge of fear and loneliness, but it

quickly ebbed away and left her feeling much more composed,

relaxed, and wanting to go to the lavatory.

According to her watch it was shortly after three o'clock,

and according to everything else it was night-time. She should

probably call a nurse and let the world know she had come

round. There was a window in the side wall of the room through

which she could see a dim corridor in which stood a stretcher

trolley and a tall black oxygen bottle, but which was otherwise

empty. Things were very quiet out there.

Peering around her in the small room she saw a

white-painted plywood cupboard, a couple of tubular steel and

vinyl chairs lurking quietly in the shadows, and a

white-painted plywood bedside cabinet which supported a small

bowl with a single banana in it. On the other side of the bed

stood her drip stand. Set into the wall on that side of the bed

was a metal plate with a couple of black knobs and a set of old

bakelite headphones hanging from it, and wound around the

tubular side pillar of the bedhead was a cable with a bell push

attached to it, which she fingered, and then decided not to

push.

She was fine. She could find her own way about.

Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her

elbows, and slid her legs out from under the sheets and on to

the floor, which was cold to her feet. She could tell almost

immediately that she shouldn't be doing this because every part

of her feet was sending back streams of messages telling her

exactly what every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched

felt like, as if it was a strange and worrying thing the like

of which they had never encountered before. Nevertheless she

sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor

as something they were just going to have to get used to.

Ttte hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped

thing. It wasn't merely baggy, she decided on examining it more

closely, it actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue and white

striped cotton. It opened up the back and let in chilly night

draughts. Perfunctory sleeves flopped half-way down her arms.

She moved her arms around in the light, examining the skin,

rubbing it and pinching it, especially around the bandage which

held her drip needle in place. Normally her arms were lithe and

the skin was firm and supple. Tonight, however, they looked

like bits of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with

her other hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.

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file:///F|/rah/New%20Folder/Long%20Dark%20Tea%20Time%20of%20the%20Soul,%20The.txt

She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it

wobbled slightly less than she did, she was able to use it to

pull herself slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall slim

figure trembling, and after a few seconds she held the drip

stand away at a bent arm's length, like a shepherd holding a

crook.

She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least

standing up.

The drip stand rolled on four small and independently

perverse wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a

supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the

door ahead of her. Walking increased her sense of wooziness,

but also increased her resolve not to give in to it. She

reached the door, opened it, and pushing the drip stand out

ahead of her, looked out into the corridor.

To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing-doors

with circular porthole windows, which seemed to lead into a

larger area, an open ward perhaps. To her right a number of

smaller doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a

short distance before turning a sharp corner. One of those

doors would probably be the lavatory. The others? Well, she

would find out as she looked for the lavatory.

The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly

bigger and had a chair in it and therefor probably counted as a

room since most people don't like to sit in cupboards, even

nurses, who have to do a lot of things that most people

wouldn't like to. It also had a stack of styro beakers, a lot

of semi-congealed coffee creamer and an elderly coffee maker,

all sitting on top of a small table together and seeping grimly

over a copy of the Evening Standard.

Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to

reconstruct some of her missing days from it. However, what

with her own wobbly condition making it difficult to read, and

the droopily stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was

able to glean little more than the fact that no one could

really say for certain what had happened. It seemed that no one

had been seriously hurt, but that an employee of one of the

airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had now been

officially classified as an "Act of God".

"Nice one, God," thought Kate. She put down the remains of

the paper and closed the door behind her.

The next door she tried was another small side ward like

her own. There was a bedside table and a single banana in the

fruit bowl.

The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door to

quickly, but she did not pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately

something odd had caught her attention, but although she had

noticed it, she coutd not immediately say what it was. She

stood there with the door half closed, staring at the door,

knowing that she should not look again, and knowing that she

would.

Carefully she eased the door back open again.

The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness

did not give her a good feeling about the occupant of the bed.

She listened. The silence didn't sound too good either. It

wasn't the silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence of

nothing but a little distant traffic noise.

She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the

doorway, looking and listening. She wondered about the sheer

bulk of the occupant of the bed and how cold he was with just a

thin blanket pulled over him. Next to the bed was a small

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Douglas Adams - The long dark tea-time of the soul

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