“I just thought you’d like to see,” he said, “what angels wear on their feet. Just out of curiousity. I’m not trying to prove anything, by the way. I’m a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that. I’ll show you something to demonstrate that later. So, the other reason I call myself Wonko the Sane is so that people will think I am a fool. That allows me to say what I see when I see it. You can’t possibly be a scientist if you mind people thinking that you’re a fool. Anyway, I also thought you might like to see this.”
This was the thing that Arthur had been stunned to see him carrying, for it was a wonderful silver-grey glass fish bowl, seemingly identical to the one in Arthur’s bedroom.
Arthur had been trying for some thirty seconds now, without success, to say, “Where did you get that?” sharply, and with a gasp in his voice.
Finally his time had come, but he missed it by a millisecond.
“Where did you get that?” said Fenchurch, sharply and with a gasp in her voice.
Arthur glanced at Fenchurch sharply and with a gasp in his voice said, “What? Have you seen one of these before?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve got one. Or at least I did have. Russell nicked it to put his golfballs in. I don’t know where it came from, just that I was angry with Russell for nicking it. Why, have you got one?”
“Yes, it was …”
They both became aware that Wonko the Sane was glancing sharply backwards and forwards between them, and trying to get a gasp in edgeways.
“You have one of those too?” he said to both of them.
“Yes.” They both said it.
He looked long and calmly at each of them, then he held up the bowl to catch the light of the Californian sun.
The bowl seemed almost to sing with the sun, to chime with the intensity of its light, and cast darkly brilliant rainbows around the sand and upon them. He turned it, and turned it. They could see quite clearly in the fine tracery of its etchwork the words “So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish.”
“Do you know,” asked Wonko quietly, “what it is?”
They each shook their heads slowly, and with wonder, almost hypnotized by the flashing of the lightning shadows in the grey glass.
“It is a farewell gift from the dolphins,” said Wonko in a low quiet voice, “the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.”
He shook his head with a slow, slow smile, and then looked again at Fenchurch, and then at Arthur.
“Have you …” he said to Arthur, “what have you done with yours? May I ask you that?”
“Er, I keep a fish in it,” said Arthur, slightly embarrassed. “I happened to have this fish I was wondering what to do with, and, er, there was this bowl.” He tailed off.
“You’ve done nothing else? No,” he said, “if you had, you would know.” He shook his head again.
“My wife kept wheatgerm in ours,” resumed Wonko, with some new tone in his voice, “until last night …”
“What,” said Arthur slowly and hushedly, “happened last night?”
“We ran out of wheatgerm,” said Wonko, evenly. “My wife,” he added, “has gone to get some more.” He seemed lost with his own thoughts for a moment.
“And what happened then?” said Fenchurch, in the same breathless tone.
“I washed it,” said Wonko. “I washed it very carefully, very very carefully, removing every last speck of wheatgerm, then I dried it slowly with a lint-free cloth, slowly, carefully, turning it over and over. Then I held it to my ear. Have you … have you held one to your ear?”