THE
LONG DARK
TEA-TIME OF
THE SOUL

DOUGLAS
ADAMS

When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame the usual people tried to claim responsibility.  First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn’t actually anything to do with them at all.
No rational cause could be found for the explosion – it was simply designated an act of God.  But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God?  And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 to Oslo?

Douglas Adams
1952 – 2001
The Guardian Obituary

Douglas Adams.com

By the author of
THE HITCH HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
and
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY

Chapter 1

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression “as pretty as an airport”.
     Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly.  Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort.  This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk, and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
     They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

There were three of them, three police cars left askew across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal, good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just fuck off.

“Don’t stand there looking like a startled whatsisname,”