From here to Dave’s Place was about a mile horizontally and a couple of hundred feet vertically. He could just see, glinting in the sun, his large blue swimming pool, neatly secluded within the Japanese garden on the top of Dave’s Hill. The distance and the direction of the sun made details a little difficult, but he was confident that Sam would be waiting for him there beside the pool. He reckoned he could drop himself pretty neatly into that. He glanced at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock, and he’d scheduled the meeting for eight. Sam would be there.
Sam’s view was that a lot of Dave’s plans and schemes were reckless, crazy, irresponsible, occasionally bordering on the just plain dumb. Dropping into the pool would be something better than dumb guys could do. How tough could it be to do it if you were Dave?
He checked the wind direction, stepped into a lightweight harness belt, tightened it, clipped the belt to the glider, passed his hands through two loops, gripped the main struts, and he was ready.
All he had to do now was throw himself off into space.
Wow. Okay. Go.
No fuss, no dumb stuff. With a light heart he threw himself out forward, and sailed into empty space. The air supported him immediately, with a little rough buffeting. He braced himself against the frame, then tried to relax a little, then relaxed a little more, trying to find a good balance that was easy but responsive. He got it. He was out there. He was flying. He was just some kind of a bird.
Hey, this was good. The empty air was kind of a shock, but a good shock, like a swimming pool in the morning. And the air wasn’t empty. It was like falling into enormous invisible pillows, with fingers that came out and tugged and pulled at you, ruffling your hair, rattling your T-shirt. As his brain got to grips with the huge openness around him, he felt like a little toy hanging from the end of an immense mobile slowly turning over Dave World. He was turning in a big, easy arc, a little bit to the right and then, in response to a small shift in his weight, a little bit to the left, but still, it seemed, moving as an arc within an arc, a wheel within a wheel. The world, his world turned slowly around beneath him, green, rich, lush and vivid.
It was about 1.2 million years since the human race had suddenly gone extinct, and the world had really perked up a lot in that time. In geological terms it was but a fleeting moment, of course, but the forces of evolution had suddenly had tons of space to play in, huge gaps to fill, and everything had started to thrive like crazy. Everybody used to talk about saving the world—well, Dave had done it. Now it was great. The whole place was really neat now. DaveWorld. Yay.
He was riding the air pretty well now, not fighting it, but flowing along it. He was beginning to get a sense, though, that just dropping himself in his own swimming pool might be a little tougher than he had expected. But that was how he liked things to be—a little tougher than he expected.
Maybe it was even going to be a lot tougher, he began to realise. It was one thing to be staying comfortably aloft, following the currents, riding gradually down, it was quite another thing to steer in any meaningful kind of way. When he tried to turn too sharply, the delicate structure around him would start to rattle and bang in quite an alarming way.
Chapter 2
“I don’t do cats,” said Dirk Gently.
His tone was sharp. He felt he had come up in the world. He had no evidence to support this view, he just felt it was about time. He also had indigestion, but that had nothing whatever to do with it.
The woman—what was her name? Melinda something, he had it written on a piece of paper somewhere but had lost it, possibly under the pile of unopened bank statements on the far corner of his desk—was standing in front of his desk with her left eyebrow raised indignantly.
“Your advertisement says ...”
“The advertisement is out of date,” snapped Dirk. “I don’t do cats.” He waved her away and pretended to be busy with some paperwork.
“Then what do you do?” she persisted.
Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women. They upset him, with their grace, their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to out to dinner with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the room, that she wouldn’t out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemtive action. If she was not going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to dinner with him on his terms.
“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.
She raised her other eyebrow as well.
“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?”
“Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow. What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing. Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.
He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.
He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I ...”
“Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”
“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.
“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually survive a good fling at the wall.”
“What?” said Dirk.
“I mean that however respectable your business may be, if it was actually respected you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”
Dirk had no idea what had happened to the other chair in his office, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit it.
“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am not going to look for your lost cat.”
“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly ...”
“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”
Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an “I don’t care what I wear, just any old thing that’s lying around” kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around. She was obviously pretty bright, probably had a pretty good job, like running some sort of major textile or telecommunications company despite being clearly only thirty-two. In other words, she was exactly the sort of person who didn’t mislay cats, and certainly didn’t go running off to poky little private detective agencies if she did. He felt ill at ease.