By Douglas Adams
Sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective enterprise. A passenger check-in table at London's Heathrow Airport is going up in a ball of flame and Dirk lightly turns into very inquisitive.
Read or Download Dirk Gentry 02 Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul PDF
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Extra resources for Dirk Gentry 02 Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Sample text
It was a large Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn’tlook as if it had been installed there: it wasn’t plugged in and ithad a small neat sticker on it explaining that it was temporarilyout of order. It looked as if it had simply been left thereinadvenently by someone who was probably even now walkingaround wondering which room he had left it in. Its large red andwhite wavy panel stared glassily into the room and did notexplain itself. The only thing the machine communicated to theoutside world was that there was a slot into which coins of avariety of denominations might be inserted, and an aperture towhich a variety of different cans would be delivered if themachine was working, which it was not.
This was largelybecause of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply tofind any car that looked as if it knew where it was going andfollow it. The results were more often surprising than successful,but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions whenit was both. Furthermore he was not at all certain that his car was working. It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special time in thecompany’s history when they were making cars which had tostop for repairs more often than they needed to stop for petrol,and frequently needed to rest for months between outings.
She left. A week later, in much thesame mood, she married an airline cabin steward called Smith. Dirk had kicked her desk over, and then had to pick it uphimself later when she didn’t come back. Nobody, it seemed, wished to have anything detected. He hadrecently, to make ends meet, taken up doing palmistry in drag onThursday evenings, but he wasn’t comfortable with it. He couldhave withstood it - the hateful, abject humiliation of it all wassomething to which he had, in different ways, now becomeaccustomed, and he was quite anonymous in his little tent in theback garden of the pub - he could have withstood it all if hehadn’t been so horribly, excruciatingly good at it.
