Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

him in the morning.  He knew with a sense of creeping dread that of all the things he had left behind in the land of the living it was the telephone that he was going to miss the most, and then he turned his mind determinedly back to where it didn’t want to go.
    The figure.
    It seemed to him that the figure had been almost like a figure of Death itself; or was that his imagination playing tricks with him?  Was he dreaming that it was a cowled figure?  What would any figure, whether cowled or just casually dressed, be doing in the boot of his car?
    At that moment a car zipped past him on the road and disappeared off into the night, taking its oasis of light with it.  He thought with longing of the warm, leather-upholstered, climate-controlled comfort of his own car abandoned on the road behind him, and then a sudden extraordinary thought struck him.
    Was there any way he could hitch a lift?  Could anyone actually see him?  How would anyone react if they could?  Well, there was only one way to find out.
    He heard another car coming up in the distance behind him and turned to face it.  The twin pools of hazy lights approached through the mist and Gordon gritted his phantom teeth and stuck his thumb out at them.
    The car swept by regardless.
    Nothing.
    Angrily he made an indistinct V sign at the receding red rear lights, and realised, looking straight through his own upraised arm, that he wasn’t at his most visible at the moment.  Was there perhaps some effort of will he could make to render himself more visible when he wanted to?  He screwed up his eyes in concentration, then realised that he would need to have his eyes open in order to judge the results.  He tried again, forcing his mind as hard as he could, but the results were unsatisfactory.
    Though it did seem to make some kind of rudimentary, glowing difference, he couldn’t sustain it, and it faded almost immediately, however much he piled on the mental pressure.  He would have to judge the timing very carefully if he was going to make his presence felt, or at least seen.
    Another car approached from behind, travelling fast.  He turned again, stuck his thumb out, waited till the moment was right and willed himself visible.
    The car swerved slightly, and then carried on its way, only a little more slowly.  Well, that was something.  What else could he do?  He would go and stand under a lamppost for a start, and he would practise.  The next car he would get for sure.

CHAPTER 12
           
    ‘...so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.  Maybe.’
    Beep.
    ‘Shit.  Damn.  Hold on a minute.  Blast.  Look... er...’
    Click.
    Richard pushed the phone back into its cradle and slammed his car into reverse for twenty yards to have another look at the sign-post by the road junction he’d just sped past in the mist.  He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction, which he was now trying to identify and correct for.
    Arriving back at the junction he tried to correlate the information on the signpost with the information on the map.  But it couldn’t be done.  The road junction was quite deliberately sitting on a page divide on the map, and the signpost was revolving maliciously in the wind.  Instinct told him that he was heading in the wrong direction, but he didn’t want to go back the way he’d come for fear of getting sucked back into the gravitational whirlpool of Cambridge’s traffic system.
    He turned left, therefore, in the hope of finding better fortune in that direction, but after a while lost his nerve and turned a speculative right, and then chanced another exploratory left and after a few more such manoeuvres was thoroughly lost.
    He swore to himself and turned up the heating in the car.  If he had