Chapter 26

Arthur Dent allowed himself for an unworthy moment to think, as they drifted up, that he very much hoped that his friends who had always found him pleasant but dull, or more latterly, odd but dull, were having a good time in the pub, but that was the last time, for a while, that he thought of them.

They drifted up, spiralling slowly around each other, like sycamore seeds falling from sycamore trees in the autumn, except going the other way. And as they drifted up their minds sang with the ecstatic knowledge that either what they were doing was completely and utterly and totally impossible or that physics had a lot of catching up to do. Physics shook its head and, looking the other way, concentrated on keeping the cars going along the Euston Road and out towards the Westway flyover, on keeping the streetlights lit and on making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground. Dwindling headily beneath them, the beaded strings of light of London

– London, Arthur had to keep reminding himself, not the strangely coloured fields of Krikkit on the remote fringes of the galaxy, lighted freckles of which faintly spanned the opening sky above them, but London – swayed, swaying and turning, turned.

“Try a swoop,” he called to Fenchurch.

“What?”

Her voice seemed strangely clear but distant in all the vast empty air. It was breathy and faint with disbelief – all those things, clear, faint, distant, breathy, all at the same time.

“We’re flying. . . ” she said.

“A trifle,” called Arthur, “think nothing of it. Try a swoop.”

“A sw-”

Her hand caught his, and in a second her weight caught it too, and stunningly, she was gone, tumbling beneath him, clawing wildly at nothing. Physics glanced at Arthur, and clotted with horror he was gone too, sick with giddy dropping, every part of him screaming but his voice. They plummeted because this was London and you really couldn’t do this sort of thing here.

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