FORTY-TWO

Remember the answer to everything according to the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy?

FORTY-TWO

Henry McFadish was thinking deeply about the mysteries of time and how sometimes a week seems to be a century and another time a day seems to be a mere moment when it was all answered for him in the blink of an eye, giving him barely enough time to understand it before his awareness switched off for ever.

And that answer was so complex that it might take an age to recount it. But it started with Oh, I’ve got it at last and ended with silence.

What he got at last was a detailed plan of everything, the universe, his place in it, Martha Ogilvy who he’d loved for ever and the 3.30 from Paddington to home. It was all there, and then it wasn’t.

Martha Ogilvy was stark naked, and then she wasn’t. The Universe was billions of stars, and then it wasn’t. And the 3.30 from Paddington crashed, and then it didn’t.

He was alive, and then he wasn’t.

But in the less than a flash of comprehensive understanding he unravelled the equation that explained who and what everything including himself was. He even rocketed through square roots and other even more complex things that he barely understood and he arrived at the answer he’d read in a book somewhere. Forty-two. And he’d had no giant computer to help him, just his brain overdoing things at the precise moment when its blood supply was unexpectedly cut off.

And it was quite clear to him that time was something he’d never understand because he wouldn’t have long enough. Unless, that is, he could stretch things out a bit, empty an overfilled pint pot into a champagne flute without spilling a drop, play a concerto on a violin before learning to play the instrument and make a lovely omelette before the egg was actually laid.

He saw the girl before she saw him, and it wasn’t Martha Ogilvy, which was good because he didn’t want Martha to be dead even though he knew she was, and the girl most certainly was breathing her last, a microsecond, it seemed, before she was born. Things on the world seemed to be going c**k-eyed. Yet in that microsecond he saw her being born, growing up, meeting a lad, having a baby, being a mother, growing old and then, finally dying, and all in less than a heartbeat. But then, his heart had stopped beating, hadn’t it?

And the girl was a pile of dust waiting for the west wind from nowhere to blow it to somewhere.

He might have loved that girl: she was his sort. He knew as much as her youth flashed past his eyes. He might have been the father of her child, but he wasn’t and he might have grown old along with her, but he hadn’t. Possibilities rocked his mind.

Once, and this wasn’t a flickering reality but a glorious memory, he had seen Martha Ogilvy and known in the same instant that he loved her. Of course he did! It was written in the stars and etched onto his life-line. And she had loved him. She had told him so when she was quivering underneath him on his bed at midnight after that party at the Jones house.

Then she had told him the same thing when the babies were born, all three of them, one at a time over the years. And when she had died, bless her, she had told him too. In the old lady voice that was very different from the girlish giggle of yore.

I love you, Henry…

The babies grew up, too. A boy and two girls, the boy, they said, his spitting image and the girls always reminded him of Martha, and they started growing old. They became middle aged a moment ago, and then he knew the meaning of everything.

The book had said forty-two, but the book had got it wrong! Nothing in the everything of universes was worthy of such a large number as forty-two.

How could it? When everyone has their everythings and everyone has their stories. That’s too many forty-twos to be possible when the whole lot are added together, not in a finite universe like this one.

His mind became scrambled by such considerations.

Let me see.

There he was, Henry Mcfadish, driving down the lane past the duck pond that had no ducks on it, round Reuter’s bend, that dangerous bend that everyone took too fast because of the thrill of speed, and smack into the number 42 bus coming the other way much more sedately.

There is was, that number again, there impressed on his retina and then gone, along with his retina, both eyes and even most of his head.

And in that blinding of his eyes lay the micro-instant that he found time to worry about time, and he was gone as was the girl, the pile of dust, every west wind that ever blew to somewhere, and then the howling in his bloodless brain that told him I’ve got it at last…

Silence

© Peter Rogerson 17.09.23

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Reviews

[Arundass TP]

Read story on great puzzle of 42. Creative and inteligent writing. Good work 👍

[Peter Rogerson]

The book referred to is Richard Adams Hitch=hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was both a radio play and a television drama way back.