Prequel: Mostly Harmless
Rob McKenna was a miserable bastard and he knew it because he’d had a lot of people point it out to him over the years and he saw no reason to disagree with them except the obvious one which was that he liked disagreeing with people, particularly people he disliked, which included, at the last count, everybody.
For a moment he felt good about this. A moment or two later he felt bad about feeling good about it. Then he felt good about feeling bad about feeling good about it and, satisfied, drove on into the night.
The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing …’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.
The particular way in which he was choosing to dice recklessly with death today was by trying to pay for a drinks bill the size of a small defence budget with an American Express card, which was not acceptable anywhere in the known Universe
He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them. Between them they killed a virulent space disease he’d picked up without knowing it in the Flargathon Gas Swamps a few days earlier, which otherwise would have killed off half the population of the Western Hemisphere, blinded the other half and driven everyone else psychotic and sterile, so the Earth was lucky there.
He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel
Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh.
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 street lights lit and on making sure that when somebody on Baker Street dropped a cheeseburger it went splat upon the ground.
‘I’m afraid I can’t comment on the name Rain God at this present time, and we are calling him an example of a Spontaneous Para-Causal Meteorological Phenomenon.’ ‘Can you tell us what that means?’ ‘I’m not altogether sure. Let’s be straight here. If we find something we can’t understand, we like to call it something you can’t understand, or indeed pronounce. I mean if we just let you go around calling him a Rain God, then that suggests that you know something we don’t, and I’m afraid we couldn’t have that. ‘No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is. ‘And if it turns out that you’re right, you’ll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a … er, “Supernormal …” – not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a “Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer”. We’ll probably want to shove a “Quasi” in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn’t catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that’ll be all for now, other than to say “Hi!” to Wonko if he’s watching.’