“Not bad,” he said, then found his body fulfilling an urgent desire to be horizontal.
“It’ll take a while,” said Ford, helping Arthur up. “Perhaps we should get you a Phodcaran Hurenge.”
CHAPTER 49
“Excuse me?” Asked Arthur. The two dolphins stopped chattering and turned to face him. “This will probably sound very silly and you will almost certainly have no idea what I’m talking about, but I’m from a planet called Earth and..”
“You’re not!” Exclaimed one of the dolphins.
“You’re pulling my flipper, surely!” Squealed the other.
“No I really am,” said Arthur. “I was wondering if you could explain to me exactly what happened on Earth. You know, why it reappeared and you disappeared.”
“Well you are talking to the right people, my name is Etats and this is Dilos,” said Etats, offering his flipper, which Arthur shook. He fought the urge to throw Etats a fish and blow a whistle.
“We were behind the Campaign to Save the Humans,” said Dilos.
“I got a bowl from you then,” said Arthur.
“It can’t be!” They sang in unison.
“Let me guess, ‘ said Arthur, but they didn’t give him the chance.
“You must be the Arthur Dent.”
“That’s right.”
“Out of vision, man. Is this one meeting to remember!” Said Etats.
“Let me get you a drink,” said Dilos. He passed a container to Arthur. It was see-through with a straw poking through the lid. Arthur sipped the straw and was pleasantly surprised to taste gin and tonic. When he released the straw, he quickly put his finger over it to prevent any water getting in, being 10 metres under and sitting around a submerged table.
“Don’t worry,” said Etats. “Each cup has an artificial atmosphere in it to allow liquid out but not in.”
“How clever,” remarked Arthur, removing his finger.
“Now where shall we start?” Said Dilos. “We originally came from a planet called Dolph. It was a grotty planet really. It was in the same dimension as those bastards who wanted the ultimate answer to life, the Universe and everything.”
“I know all about that,” said Arthur.
“Terrible neighbours,” said Etats. “We used to tap their information channels just to remind ourselves how lucky we were. Anyway, Deep Thought decided that Dolphins were to be part of the network. They approached us with this proposition to spend time on Earth and we accepted.”
“Not because we wanted to help,” interrupted Dilos.
“Oh no, we couldn’t give a Jrevi Wooc about them,” said Etats. “No, it just seemed like a good holiday spot. So we decided that we would work to get our planet in decent living order and holiday on Earth until the work was done. We worked shifts, half the workforce on Dolph, half on holiday. We arrived just before the Golgafrinchians. The hyper intelligent, pan dimensional beings hadn’t arrived so we knew then it wasn’t going to work. Still, we weren’t going to tell them because the Earth was far superior to Dolph and we were having too much fun
“We loved the humans,” continued Dilos. “Once all the cavemen died, the inbreeding of the Golgafrinchians reduced them to babbling idiots.”
“How could you tell the difference?” Asked Arthur.
“Good point, because the hyper intelligent pan dimensional beings couldn’t,” laughed Etats. “That’s why they didn’t abort the whole thing. So modern man evolved from that time on. The mice moulded them through the years unaware they were wasting their time.”
“No wonder you lot always seemed to be happy,” said Arthur.
“We were,” said Dilos. “But we felt sorry for the humans, because they treated us so well most of the time. So when we found out about the Vogon Constructor Fleet, we tried to warn you, but you didn’t have Babel fish. So we started the Campaign to Save the Humans. No-one was particularly interested and the psychiatrists gave us a lot of trouble. They didn’t believe us about the Golgafrinchians. They put it down to a childhood neurosis. Apart from saving the Humans, we didn’t really fancy going back to Dolph, which was still in a pretty bad way.”
“Then we had a stroke of luck,” said Etats. “One of our great hobbies in the sea when we weren’t on the surface was what you called ‘hacking’ on computers. That how we found out about the Vogons.”