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The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
for Jonny Brock and Clare Gorst
and all other Arlingtoniansfor tea, sympathy, and a sofa
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded
yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles
is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-
descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still
think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these
were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces
of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small
green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big
mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And
some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no
one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man
had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be
nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a
small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the
world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was
right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to
anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone-
about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea
was lost forever.
This is not her story.
But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some
of its consequences.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on
Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or
heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out
of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no
Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly
successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care
Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero
Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of
philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of
God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern
Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted
the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of
all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and
contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate,
it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important
respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words
Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its
extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these
consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable
book begins very simply.
It begins with a house.
The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.
It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of West
Country farmland. Not a remarkable house by any means - it was
about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and
had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which
more or less exactly failed to please the eye.
The only person for whom the house was in any way special was
Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one
he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since
he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and
irritable. He was about thirty as well, dark haired and never-
quite at ease with himself. The thing that used to worry him most
was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was
looking so worried about. He worked in local radio which he
always used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting than
they probably thought. It was, too - most of his friends worked
in advertising.
It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wanted
to knock down his house and build an bypass instead.
At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very
good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his
room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and
stomped off to the bathroom to wash.
Toothpaste on the brush - so. Scrub.
Shaving mirror - pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a
moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom
window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles.
He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen
to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.
Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.
The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in
search of something to connect with.
The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.
He stared at it.
"Yellow," he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get
dressed.
Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water,
and another. He began to suspect that he was hung over. Why was
he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed
that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror.
"Yellow," he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.
He stood and thought. The pub, he thought. Oh dear, the pub. He
vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed
important. He'd been telling people about it, telling people
about it at great length, he rather suspected: his clearest
visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces.
Something about a new bypass he had just found out about. It had
been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known
about it. Ridiculous. He took a swig of water. It would sort
itself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council
didn't have a leg to stand on. It would sort itself out.
God what a terrible hangover it had earned him though. He looked
at himself in the wardrobe mirror. He stuck out his tongue.
"Yellow," he thought. The word yellow wandered through his mind
in search of something to connect with.
Fifteen seconds later he was out of the house and lying in front
of a big yellow bulldozer that was advancing up his garden path.
Mr L Prosser was, as they say, only human. In other words he was
a carbon-based life form descended from an ape. More specifically
he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council.
Curiously enough, though he didn't know it, he was also a direct
male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening
generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he
had no discernible Mongoloid characteristics, and the only
vestiges left in Mr L Prosser of his mighty ancestry were a
pronounced stoutness about the tum and a predilection for little
fur hats.
He was by no means a great warrior: in fact he was a nervous
worried man. Today he was particularly nervous and worried
because something had gone seriously wrong with his job - which
was to see that Arthur Dent's house got cleared out of the way
before the day was out.
"Come off it, Mr Dent,", he said, "you can't win you know. You
can't lie in front of the bulldozer indefinitely." He tried to
make his eyes blaze fiercely but they just wouldn't do it.
Arthur lay in the mud and squelched at him.
"I'm game," he said, "we'll see who rusts first."
"I'm afraid you're going to have to accept it," said Mr Prosser
gripping his fur hat and rolling it round the top of his head,
"this bypass has got to be built and it's going to be built!"
"First I've heard of it," said Arthur, "why's it going to be
built?"
Mr Prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped and
put it away again.
"What do you mean, why's it got to be built?" he said. "It's a
bypass. You've got to build bypasses."
Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from point
A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to
point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point
directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great
about point A that so many people of point B are so keen to get
there, and what's so great about point B that so many people of
point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people
would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted
to be.
Mr Prosser wanted to be at point D. Point D wasn't anywhere in
particular, it was just any convenient point a very long way from
points A, B and C. He would have a nice little cottage at point
D, with axes over the door, and spend a pleasant amount of time
at point E, which would be the nearest pub to point D. His wife
of course wanted climbing roses, but he wanted axes. He didn't
know why - he just liked axes. He flushed hotly under the
derisive grins of the bulldozer drivers.
He shifted his weight from foot to foot, but it was equally
uncomfortable on each. Obviously somebody had been appallingly
incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him.
Mr Prosser said: "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions
or protests at the appropriate time you know."
"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate time? The first I
knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I
asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no he'd
come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of
course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me
a fiver. Then he told me."
"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning
office for the last nine month."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see
them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your
way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually
telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find
them."
"That's the display department."
"With a torch."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom
of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a
sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard."
A cloud passed overhead. It cast a shadow over Arthur Dent as he
lay propped up on his elbow in the cold mud. It cast a shadow
over Arthur Dent's house. Mr Prosser frowned at it.
"It's not as if it's a particularly nice house," he said.
"I'm sorry, but I happen to like it."
"You'll like the bypass."
"Oh shut up," said Arthur Dent. "Shut up and go away, and take
your bloody bypass with you. You haven't got a leg to stand on
and you know it."
Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his
mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly
attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with
fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin
with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr
Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made
him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled
himself together.
"Mr Dent," he said.
"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.
"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much
damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight
over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr Prosser, and stormed nervously off
wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen
all shouting at him.
By a curious coincidence, None at all is exactly how much
suspicion the ape-descendant Arthur Dent had that one of his
closest friends was not descended from an ape, but was in fact
from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from
Guildford as he usually claimed.
Arthur Dent had never, ever suspected this.
This friend of his had first arrived on the planet some fifteen
Earth years previously, and he had worked hard to blend himself
into Earth society - with, it must be said, some success. For
instance he had spent those fifteen years pretending to be an out
of work actor, which was plausible enough.
He had made one careless blunder though, because he had skimped a
bit on his preparatory research. The information he had gathered
had led him to choose the name "Ford Prefect" as being nicely
inconspicuous.
He was not conspicuously tall, his features were striking but not
conspicuously handsome. His hair was wiry and gingerish and
brushed backwards from the temples. His skin seemed to be pulled
backwards from the nose. There was something very slightly odd
about him, but it was difficult to say what it was. Perhaps it
was that his eyes didn't blink often enough and when you talked
to him for any length of time your eyes began involuntarily to
water on his behalf. Perhaps it was that he smiled slightly too
broadly and gave people the unnerving impression that he was
about to go for their neck.
He struck most of the friends he had made on Earth as an
eccentric, but a harmless one -- an unruly boozer with some
oddish habits. For instance he would often gatecrash university
parties, get badly drunk and start making fun of any
astrophysicist he could find till he got thrown out.
Sometimes he would get seized with oddly distracted moods and
stare into the sky as if hypnotized until someone asked him what
he was doing. Then he would start guiltily for a moment, relax
and grin.
"Oh, just looking for flying saucers," he would joke and everyone
would laugh and ask him what sort of flying saucers he was
looking for.
"Green ones!" he would reply with a wicked grin, laugh wildly for
a moment and then suddenly lunge for the nearest bar and buy an
enormous round of drinks.
Evenings like this usually ended badly. Ford would get out of his
skull on whisky, huddle into a corner with some girl and explain
to her in slurred phrases that honestly the colour of the flying
saucers didn't matter that much really.
Thereafter, staggering semi-paralytic down the night streets he
would often ask passing policemen if they knew the way to
Betelgeuse. The policemen would usually say something like,
"Don't you think it's about time you went off home sir?"
"I'm trying to baby, I'm trying to," is what Ford invariably
replied on these occasions.
In fact what he was really looking out for when he stared
distractedly into the night sky was any kind of flying saucer at
all. The reason he said green was that green was the traditional
space livery of the Betelgeuse trading scouts.
Ford Prefect was desperate that any flying saucer at all would
arrive soon because fifteen years was a long time to get stranded
anywhere, particularly somewhere as mindboggingly dull as the
Earth.
Ford wished that a flying saucer would arrive soon because he
knew how to flag flying saucers down and get lifts from them. He
knew how to see the Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty
Altairan dollars a day.
In fact, Ford Prefect was a roving researcher for that wholly
remarkable book The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Human beings are great adaptors, and by lunchtime life in the
environs of Arthur's house had settled into a steady routine. It
was Arthur's accepted role to lie squelching in the mud making
occasional demands to see his lawyer, his mother or a good book;
it was Mr Prosser's accepted role to tackle Arthur with the
occasional new ploy such as the For the Public Good talk, the
March of Progress talk, the They Knocked My House Down Once You
Know, Never Looked Back talk and various other cajoleries and
threats; and it was the bulldozer drivers' accepted role to sit
around drinking coffee and experimenting with union regulations
to see how they could turn the situation to their financial
advantage.
The Earth moved slowly in its diurnal course.
The sun was beginning to dry out the mud Arthur lay in.
A shadow moved across him again.
"Hello Arthur," said the shadow.
Arthur looked up and squinting into the sun was startled to see
Ford Prefect standing above him.
"Ford! Hello, how are you?"
"Fine," said Ford, "look, are you busy?"
"Am I busy?" exclaimed Arthur. "Well, I've just got all these
bulldozers and things to lie in front of because they'll knock my
house down if I don't, but other than that ... well, no not
especially, why?"
They don't have sarcasm on Betelgeuse, and Ford Prefect often
failed to notice it unless he was concentrating. He said, "Good,
is there anywhere we can talk?"
"What?" said Arthur Dent.
For a few seconds Ford seemed to ignore him, and stared fixedly
into the sky like a rabbit trying to get run over by a car. Then
suddenly he squatted down beside Arthur.
"We've got to talk," he said urgently.
"Fine," said Arthur, "talk."
"And drink," said Ford. "It's vitally important that we talk and
drink. Now. We'll go to the pub in the village."
He looked into the sky again, nervous, expectant.
"Look, don't you understand?" shouted Arthur. He pointed at
Prosser. "That man wants to knock my house down!"
Ford glanced at him, puzzled.
"Well he can do it while you're away can't he?" he asked.
"But I don't want him to!"
"Ah."
"Look, what's the matter with you Ford?" said Arthur.
"Nothing. Nothing's the matter. Listen to me - I've got to tell
you the most important thing you've ever heard. I've got to tell
you now, and I've got to tell you in the saloon bar of the Horse
and Groom."
"But why?"
"Because you are going to need a very stiff drink."
Ford stared at Arthur, and Arthur was astonished to find that his
will was beginning to weaken. He didn't realize that this was
because of an old drinking game that Ford learned to play in the
hyperspace ports that served the madranite mining belts in the
star system of Orion Beta.
The game was not unlike the Earth game called Indian Wrestling,
and was played like this:
Two contestants would sit either side of a table, with a glass in
front of each of them.
Between them would be placed a bottle of Janx Spirit (as
immortalized in that ancient Orion mining song "Oh don't give me
none more of that Old Janx Spirit/ No, don't you give me none
more of that Old Janx Spirit/ For my head will fly, my tongue
will lie, my eyes will fry and I may die/ Won't you pour me one
more of that sinful Old Janx Spirit").
Each of the two contestants would then concentrate their will on
the bottle and attempt to tip it and pour spirit into the glass
of his opponent - who would then have to drink it.
The bottle would then be refilled. The game would be played
again. And again.
Once you started to lose you would probably keep losing, because
one of the effects of Janx spirit is to depress telepsychic
power.
As soon as a predetermined quantity had been consumed, the final
loser would have to perform a forfeit, which was usually
obscenely biological.
Ford Prefect usually played to lose.
Ford stared at Arthur, who began to think that perhaps he did
want to go to the Horse and Groom after all.
"But what about my house ...?" he asked plaintively.
Ford looked across to Mr Prosser, and suddenly a wicked thought
struck him.
"He wants to knock your house down?"
"Yes, he wants to build ..."
"And he can't because you're lying in front of the bulldozers?"
"Yes, and ..."
"I'm sure we can come to some arrangement," said Ford. "Excuse
me!" he shouted.
Mr Prosser (who was arguing with a spokesman for the bulldozer
drivers about whether or not Arthur Dent constituted a mental
health hazard, and how much they should get paid if he did)
looked around. He was surprised and slightly alarmed to find that
Arthur had company.
"Yes? Hello?" he called. "Has Mr Dent come to his senses yet?"
"Can we for the moment," called Ford, "assume that he hasn't?"
"Well?" sighed Mr Prosser.
"And can we also assume," said Ford, "that he's going to be
staying here all day?"
"So?"
"So all your men are going to be standing around all day doing
nothing?"
"Could be, could be ..."
"Well, if you're resigned to doing that anyway, you don't
actually need him to lie here all the time do you?"
"What?"
"You don't," said Ford patiently, "actually need him here."
Mr Prosser thought about this.
"Well no, not as such...", he said, "not exactly need ..."
Prosser was worried. He thought that one of them wasn't making a
lot of sense.
Ford said, "So if you would just like to take it as read that
he's actually here, then he and I could slip off down to the pub
for half an hour. How does that sound?"
Mr Prosser thought it sounded perfectly potty.
"That sounds perfectly reasonable," he said in a reassuring tone
of voice, wondering who he was trying to reassure.
"And if you want to pop off for a quick one yourself later on,"
said Ford, "we can always cover up for you in return."
"Thank you very much," said Mr Prosser who no longer knew how to
play this at all, "thank you very much, yes, that's very kind
..." He frowned, then smiled, then tried to do both at once,
failed, grasped hold of his fur hat and rolled it fitfully round
the top of his head. He could only assume that he had just won.
"So," continued Ford Prefect, "if you would just like to come
over here and lie down ..."
"What?" said Mr Prosser.
"Ah, I'm sorry," said Ford, "perhaps I hadn't made myself fully
clear. Somebody's got to lie in front of the bulldozers haven't
they? Or there won't be anything to stop them driving into Mr
Dent's house will there?"
"What?" said Mr Prosser again.
"It's very simple," said Ford, "my client, Mr Dent, says that he
will stop lying here in the mud on the sole condition that you
come and take over from him."
"What are you talking about?" said Arthur, but Ford nudged him
with his shoe to be quiet.
"You want me," said Mr Prosser, spelling out this new thought to
himself, "to come and lie there ..."
"Yes."
"In front of the bulldozer?"
"Yes."
"Instead of Mr Dent."
"Yes."
"In the mud."
"In, as you say it, the mud."
As soon as Mr Prosser realized that he was substantially the
loser after all, it was as if a weight lifted itself off his
shoulders: this was more like the world as he knew it. He sighed.
"In return for which you will take Mr Dent with you down to the
pub?"
"That's it," said Ford. "That's it exactly."
Mr Prosser took a few nervous steps forward and stopped.
"Promise?"
"Promise," said Ford. He turned to Arthur.
"Come on," he said to him, "get up and let the man lie down."
Arthur stood up, feeling as if he was in a dream.
Ford beckoned to Prosser who sadly, awkwardly, sat down in the
mud. He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he
sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying
it. The mud folded itself round his bottom and his arms and oozed
into his shoes.
Ford looked at him severely.
"And no sneaky knocking down Mr Dent's house whilst he's away,
alright?" he said.
"The mere thought," growled Mr Prosser, "hadn't even begun to
speculate," he continued, settling himself back, "about the
merest possibility of crossing my mind."
He saw the bulldozer driver's union representative approaching
and let his head sink back and closed his eyes. He was trying to
marshal his arguments for proving that he did not now constitute
a mental health hazard himself. He was far from certain about
this - his mind seemed to be full of noise, horses, smoke, and
the stench of blood. This always happened when he felt miserable
and put upon, and he had never been able to explain it to
himself. In a high dimension of which we know nothing the mighty
Khan bellowed with rage, but Mr Prosser only trembled slightly
and whimpered. He began to fell little pricks of water behind the
eyelids. Bureaucratic cock-ups, angry men lying in the mud,
indecipherable strangers handing out inexplicable humiliations
and an unidentified army of horsemen laughing at him in his head
- what a day.
What a day. Ford Prefect knew that it didn't matter a pair of
dingo's kidneys whether Arthur's house got knocked down or not
now.
Arthur remained very worried.
"But can we trust him?" he said.
"Myself I'd trust him to the end of the Earth," said Ford.
"Oh yes," said Arthur, "and how far's that?"
"About twelve minutes away," said Ford, "come on, I need a
drink."
Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol.
It says that alcohol is a colourless volatile liquid formed by
the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect
on certain carbon-based life forms.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It
says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle
Blaster.
It says that the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like
having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round
a large gold brick.
The Guide also tells you on which planets the best Pan Galactic
Gargle Blasters are mixed, how much you can expect to pay for one
and what voluntary organizations exist to help you rehabilitate
afterwards.
The Guide even tells you how you can mix one yourself.
Take the juice from one bottle of that Ol' Janx Spirit, it says.
Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V
- Oh that Santraginean sea water, it says. Oh those Santraginean
fish!!!
Allow three cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin to melt into the mixture
(it must be properly iced or the benzine is lost).
Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in
memory of all those happy Hikers who have died of pleasure in the
Marshes of Fallia.
Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin
Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark
Qualactin Zones, subtle sweet and mystic.
Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve,
spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of
the drink.
Sprinkle Zamphuor.
Add an olive.
Drink ... but ... very carefully ...
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy sells rather better than
the Encyclopedia Galactica.
"Six pints of bitter," said Ford Prefect to the barman of the
Horse and Groom. "And quickly please, the world's about to end."
The barman of the Horse and Groom didn't deserve this sort of
treatment, he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up
his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared
out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur who
shrugged helplessly and said nothing.
So the barman said, "Oh yes sir? Nice weather for it," and
started pulling pints.
He tried again.
"Going to watch the match this afternoon then?"
Ford glanced round at him.
"No, no point," he said, and looked back out of the window.
"What's that, foregone conclusion then you reckon sir?" said the
barman. "Arsenal without a chance?"
"No, no," said Ford, "it's just that the world's about to end."
"Oh yes sir, so you said," said the barman, looking over his
glasses this time at Arthur. "Lucky escape for Arsenal if it
did."
Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.
"No, not really," he said. He frowned.
The barman breathed in heavily. "There you are sir, six pints,"
he said.
Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and
smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had
heard what was going on.
None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was
smiling at them for.
A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men,
looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic,
arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin
at them.
"Get off," said Ford, "They're ours," giving him a look that
would have an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.
Ford slapped a five-pound note on the bar. He said, "Keep the
change."
"What, from a fiver? Thank you sir."
"You've got ten minutes left to spend it."
The barman simply decided to walk away for a bit.
"Ford," said Arthur, "would you please tell me what the hell is
going on?"
"Drink up," said Ford, "you've got three pints to get through."
"Three pints?" said Arthur. "At lunchtime?"
The man next to ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored
him. He said, "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
"Very deep," said Arthur, "you should send that in to the
Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you."
"Drink up."
"Why three pints all of a sudden?"
"Muscle relaxant, you'll need it."
"Muscle relaxant?"
"Muscle relaxant."
Arthur stared into his beer.
"Did I do anything wrong today," he said, "or has the world
always been like this and I've been too wrapped up in myself to
notice?"
"Alright," said Ford, "I'll try to explain. How long have we
known each other?"
"How long?" Arthur thought. "Er, about five years, maybe six," he
said. "Most of it seemed to make some sense at the time."
"Alright," said Ford. "How would you react if I said that I'm not
from Guildford after all, but from a small planet somewhere in
the vicinity of Betelgeuse?"
Arthur shrugged in a so-so sort of way.
"I don't know," he said, taking a pull of beer. "Why - do you
think it's the sort of thing you're likely to say?"
Ford gave up. It really wasn't worth bothering at the moment,
what with the world being about to end. He just said:
"Drink up."
He added, perfectly factually:
"The world's about to end."
Arthur gave the rest of the pub another wan smile. The rest of
the pub frowned at him. A man waved at him to stop smiling at
them and mind his own business.
"This must be Thursday," said Arthur musing to himself, sinking
low over his beer, "I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through
the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet;
several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky
slablike somethings, huge as office buildings, silent as birds.
They soared with ease, basking in electromagnetic rays from the
star Sol, biding their time, grouping, preparing.
The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their
presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. The
huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed
over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank
looked straight through them - which was a pity because it was
exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these
years.
The only place they registered at all was on a small black device
called a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic which winked away quietly to
itself. It nestled in the darkness inside a leather satchel which
Ford Prefect wore habitually round his neck. The contents of Ford
Prefect's satchel were quite interesting in fact and would have
made any Earth physicist's eyes pop out of his head, which is why
he always concealed them by keeping a couple of dog-eared scripts
for plays he pretended he was auditioning for stuffed in the top.
Besides the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic and the scripts he had an
Electronic Thumb - a short squat black rod, smooth and matt with
a couple of flat switches and dials at one end; he also had a
device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator.
This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen
about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages"
could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked insanely
complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic
cover it fitted into had the words Don't Panic printed on it in
large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was
in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the
great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form
of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were
printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would
require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around
in.
Beneath that in Ford Prefect's satchel were a few biros, a
notepad, and a largish bath towel from Marks and Spencer.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on
the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an
interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across
the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant
marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea
vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so
redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini
raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-
hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or
to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a
mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it,
it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can
wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of
course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean
enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For
some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a
hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume
that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel,
soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat
spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the
strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a
dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have
"lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch
the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle
against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his
towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in
"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who
really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet,
have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really
amazingly together guy.)
Nestling quietly on top of the towel in Ford Prefect's satchel,
the Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic began to wink more quickly. Miles above
the surface of the planet the huge yellow somethings began to fan
out. At Jodrell Bank, someone decided it was time for a nice
relaxing cup of tea.
"You got a towel with you?" said Ford Prefect suddenly to Arthur.
Arthur, struggling through his third pint, looked round at him.
"Why? What, no ... should I have?" He had given up being
surprised, there didn't seem to be any point any longer.
Ford clicked his tongue in irritation.
"Drink up," he urged.
At that moment the dull sound of a rumbling crash from outside
filtered through the low murmur of the pub, through the sound of
the jukebox, through the sound of the man next to Ford hiccupping
over the whisky Ford had eventually bought him.
Arthur choked on his beer, leapt to his feet.
"What's that?" he yelped.
"Don't worry," said Ford, "they haven't started yet."
"Thank God for that," said Arthur and relaxed.
"It's probably just your house being knocked down," said Ford,
drowning his last pint.
"What?" shouted Arthur. Suddenly Ford's spell was broken. Arthur
looked wildly around him and ran to the window.
"My God they are! They're knocking my house down. What the hell
am I doing in the pub, Ford?"
"It hardly makes any difference at this stage," said Ford, "let
them have their fun."
"Fun?" yelped Arthur. "Fun!" He quickly checked out of the window
again that they were talking about the same thing.
"Damn their fun!" he hooted and ran out of the pub furiously
waving a nearly empty beer glass. He made no friends at all in
the pub that lunchtime.
"Stop, you vandals! You home wreckers!" bawled Arthur. "You half
crazed Visigoths, stop will you!"
Ford would have to go after him. Turning quickly to the barman he
asked for four packets of peanuts.
"There you are sir," said the barman, slapping the packets on the
bar, "twenty-eight pence if you'd be so kind."
Ford was very kind - he gave the barman another five-pound note
and told him to keep the change. The barman looked at it and then
looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary
sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had
ever experienced it before. In moments of great stress, every
life form that exists gives out a tiny sublimal signal. This
signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of
how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is
never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from
your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are
too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under
great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near
vicinity of Betelgeuse.
The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking,
incomprehensible sense of distance. He didn't know what it meant,
but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost
awe.
"Are you serious, sir?" he said in a small whisper which had the
effect of silencing the pub. "You think the world's going to
end?"
"Yes," said Ford.
"But, this afternoon?"
Ford had recovered himself. He was at his flippest.
"Yes," he said gaily, "in less than two minutes I would
estimate."
The barman couldn't believe the conversation he was having, but
he couldn't believe the sensation he had just had either.
"Isn't there anything we can do about it then?" he said.
"No, nothing," said Ford, stuffing the peanuts into his pockets.
Someone in the hushed bar suddenly laughed raucously at how
stupid everyone had become.
The man sitting next to Ford was a bit sozzled by now. His eyes
waved their way up to Ford.
"I thought," he said, "that if the world was going to end we were
meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something."
"If you like, yes," said Ford.
"That's what they told us in the army," said the man, and his
eyes began the long trek back down to his whisky.
"Will that help?" asked the barman.
"No," said Ford and gave him a friendly smile. "Excuse me," he
said, "I've got to go." With a wave, he left.
The pub was silent for a moment longer, and then, embarrassingly
enough, the man with the raucous laugh did it again. The girl he
had dragged along to the pub with him had grown to loathe him
dearly over the last hour or so, and it would probably have been
a great satisfaction to her to know that in a minute and a half
or so he would suddenly evaporate into a whiff of hydrogen, ozone
and carbon monoxide. However, when the moment came she would be
too busy evaporating herself to notice it.
The barman cleared his throat. He heard himself say:
"Last orders, please."
The huge yellow machines began to sink downward and to move
faster.
Ford knew they were there. This wasn't the way he had wanted it.
Running up the lane, Arthur had nearly reached his house. He
didn't notice how cold it had suddenly become, he didn't notice
the wind, he didn't notice the sudden irrational squall of rain.
He didn't notice anything but the caterpillar bulldozers crawling
over the rubble that had been his home.
"You barbarians!" he yelled. "I'll sue the council for every
penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered! And
whipped! And boiled ... until ... until ... until you've had
enough."
Ford was running after him very fast. Very very fast.
"And then I'll do it again!" yelled Arthur. "And when I've
finished I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on
them!"
Arthur didn't notice that the men were running from the
bulldozers; he didn't notice that Mr Prosser was staring
hectically into the sky. What Mr Prosser had noticed was that
huge yellow somethings were screaming through the clouds.
Impossibly huge yellow somethings.
"And I will carry on jumping on them," yelled Arthur, still
running, "until I get blisters, or I can think of anything even
more unpleasant to do, and then ..."
Arthur tripped, and fell headlong, rolled and landed flat on his
back. At last he noticed that something was going on. His finger
shot upwards.
"What the hell's that?" he shrieked.
Whatever it was raced across the sky in monstrous yellowness,
tore the sky apart with mind-buggering noise and leapt off into
the distance leaving the gaping air to shut behind it with a bang
that drove your ears six feet into your skull.
Another one followed and did the same thing only louder.
It's difficult to say exactly what the people on the surface of
the planet were doing now, because they didn't really know what
they were doing themselves. None of it made a lot of sense -
running into houses, running out of houses, howling noiselessly
at the noise. All around the world city streets exploded with
people, cars slewed into each other as the noise fell on them and
then rolled off like a tidal wave over hills and valleys, deserts
and oceans, seeming to flatten everything it hit.
Only one man stood and watched the sky, stood with terrible
sadness in his eyes and rubber bungs in his ears. He knew exactly
what was happening and had known ever since his Sub-Etha Sens-O-
Matic had started winking in the dead of night beside his pillar
and woken him with a start. It was what he had waited for all
these years, but when he had deciphered the signal pattern
sitting alone in his small dark room a coldness had gripped him
and squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the Galaxy who
could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought,
didn't it just have to be the Vogons.
Still he knew what he had to do. As the Vogon craft screamed
through the air high above him he opened his satchel. He threw
away a copy of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he
threw away a copy of Godspell: He wouldn't need them where he was
going. Everything was ready, everything was prepared.
He knew where his towel was.
A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it was worse than the
noise. For a while nothing happened.
The great ships hung motionless in the air, over every nation on
Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a
blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as
their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The
ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
And still nothing happened.
Then there was a slight whisper, a sudden spacious whisper of
open ambient sound. Every hi fi set in the world, every radio,
every television, every cassette recorder, every woofer, every
tweeter, every mid-range driver in the world quietly turned
itself on.
Every tin can, every dust bin, every window, every car, every
wine glass, every sheet of rusty metal became activated as an
acoustically perfect sounding board.
Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the
very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address
system ever built. But there was no concert, no music, no
fanfare, just a simple message.
"People of Earth, your attention please," a voice said, and it
was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadrophonic sound with
distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.
"This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace
Planning Council," the voice continued. "As you will no doubt be
aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the
Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route
through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of
those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly
less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you."
The PA died away.
Uncomprehending terror settled on the watching people of Earth.
The terror moved slowly through the gathered crowds as if they
were iron fillings on a sheet of board and a magnet was moving
beneath them. Panic sprouted again, desperate fleeing panic, but
there was nowhere to flee to.
Observing this, the Vogons turned on their PA again. It said:
"There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the
planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in
your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of
your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any
formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss
about it now."
The PA fell silent again and its echo drifted off across the
land. The huge ships turned slowly in the sky with easy power. On
the underside of each a hatchway opened, an empty black space.
By this time somebody somewhere must have manned a radio
transmitter, located a wavelength and broadcasted a message back
to the Vogon ships, to plead on behalf of the planet. Nobody ever
heard what they said, they only heard the reply. The PA slammed
back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said:
"What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For
heaven's sake mankind, it's only four light years away you know.
I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in
local affairs that's your own lookout.
"Energize the demolition beams."
Light poured out into the hatchways.
"I don't know," said the voice on the PA, "apathetic bloody
planet, I've no sympathy at all." It cut off.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.
There was a terrible ghastly noise.
There was a terrible ghastly silence.
The Vogon Constructor fleet coasted away into the inky starry
void.
Far away on the opposite spiral arm of the Galaxy, five hundred
thousand light years from the star Sol, Zaphod Beeblebrox,
President of the Imperial Galactic Government, sped across the
seas of Damogran, his ion drive delta boat winking and flashing
in the Damogran sun.
Damogran the hot; Damogran the remote; Damogran the almost
totally unheard of.
Damogran, secret home of the Heart of Gold.
The boat sped on across the water. It would be some time before
it reached its destination because Damogran is such an
inconveniently arranged planet. It consists of nothing but
middling to large desert islands separated by very pretty but
annoyingly wide stretches of ocean.
The boat sped on.
Because of this topological awkwardness Damogran has always
remained a deserted planet. This is why the Imperial Galactic
Government chose Damogran for the Heart of Gold project, because
it was so deserted and the Heart of Gold was so secret.
The boat zipped and skipped across the sea, the sea that lay
between the main islands of the only archipelago of any useful
size on the whole planet. Zaphod Beeblebrox was on his way from
the tiny spaceport on Easter Island (the name was an entirely
meaningless coincidence - in Galacticspeke, easter means small
flat and light brown) to the Heart of Gold island, which by
another meaningless coincidence was called France.
One of the side effects of work on the Heart of Gold was a whole
string of pretty meaningless coincidences.
But it was not in any way a coincidence that today, the day of
culmination of the project, the great day of unveiling, the day
that the Heart of Gold was finally to be introduced to a
marvelling Galaxy, was also a great day of culmination for Zaphod
Beeblebrox. It was for the sake of this day that he had first
decided to run for the Presidency, a decision which had sent
waves of astonishment throughout the Imperial Galaxy - Zaphod
Beeblebrox? President? Not the Zaphod Beeblebrox? Not the
President? Many had seen it as a clinching proof that the whole
of known creation had finally gone bananas.
Zaphod grinned and gave the boat an extra kick of speed.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippy, good timer, (crook?
quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal
relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.
President?
No one had gone bananas, not in that way at least.
Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on
which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod
Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was
more or less a fait accompli: he was the ideal Presidency
fodder*.
What they completely failed to understand was why Zaphod was
doing it.
He banked sharply, shooting a wild wall of water at the sun.
Today was the day; today was the day when they would realize what
Zaphod had been up to. Today was what Zaphod Beeblebrox's
Presidency was all about. Today was also his two hundredth
birthday, but that was just another meaningless coincidence.
As he skipped his boat across the seas of Damogran he smiled
quietly to himself about what a wonderful exciting day it was
going to be. He relaxed and spread his two arms lazily across the
seat back. He steered with an extra arm he'd recently fitted just
beneath his right one to help improve his ski-boxing.
"Hey," he cooed to himself, "you're a real cool boy you." But his
nerves sang a song shriller than a dog whistle.
The island of France was about twenty miles long, five miles
across the middle, sandy and crescent shaped. In fact it seemed
to exist not so much as an island in its own right as simply a
means of defining the sweep and curve of a huge bay. This
impression was heightened by the fact that the inner coastline of
the crescent consisted almost entirely of steep cliffs. From the
top of the cliff the land sloped slowly down five miles to the
opposite shore.
On top of the cliffs stood a reception committee.
It consisted in large part of the engineers and researchers who
had built the Heart of Gold - mostly humanoid, but here and there
were a few reptiloid atomineers, two or three green slyph-like
maximegalacticans, an octopoid physucturalist or two and a
Hooloovoo (a Hooloovoo is a super-intelligent shade of the color
blue). All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multi-
colored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily
refracted into a free standing prism for the occasion.
There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of
them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the
furthest limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental
fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of
possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement
of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his
neck. (An orange sash was what the President of the Galaxy
traditionally wore.) It might not even have made much difference
to them if they'd known exactly how much power the President of
the Galaxy actually wielded: none at all. Only six people in the
Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to
wield power but to attract attention away from it.
Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job.
The crowd gasped, dazzled by sun and seemanship, as the
Presidential speedboat zipped round the headland into the bay. It
flashed and shone as it came skating over the sea in wide
skidding turns.
In fact it didn't need to touch the water at all, because it was
supported on a hazy cushion of ionized atoms - but just for
effect it was fitted with thin finblades which could be lowered
into the water. They slashed sheets of water hissing into the
air, carved deep gashes into the sea which swayed crazily and
sank back foaming into the boat's wake as it careered across the
bay.
Zaphod loved effect: it was what he was best at.
He twisted the wheel sharply, the boat slewed round in a wild
scything skid beneath the cliff face and dropped to rest lightly
on the rocking waves.
Within seconds he ran out onto the deck and waved and grinned at
over three billion people. The three billion people weren't
actually there, but they watched his every gesture through the
eyes of a small robot tri-D camera which hovered obsequiously in
the air nearby. The antics of the President always made amazingly
popular tri-D; that's what they were for.
He grinned again. Three billion and six people didn't know it,
but today would be a bigger antic than anyone had bargained for.
The robot camera homed in for a close up on the more popular of
his two heads and he waved again. He was roughly humanoid in
appearance except for the extra head and third arm. His fair
tousled hair stuck out in random directions, his blue eyes
glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins
were almost always unshaven.
A twenty-foot-high transparent globe floated next to his boat,
rolling and bobbing, glistening in the brilliant sun. Inside it
floated a wide semi-circular sofa upholstered in glorious red
leather: the more the globe bobbed and rolled, the more the sofa
stayed perfectly still, steady as an upholstered rock. Again, all
done for effect as much as anything.
Zaphod stepped through the wall of the globe and relaxed on the
sofa. He spread his two arms lazily along the back and with the
third brushed some dust off his knee. His heads looked about,
smiling; he put his feet up. At any moment, he thought, he might
scream.
Water boiled up beneath the bubble, it seethed and spouted. The
bubble surged into the air, bobbing and rolling on the water
spout. Up, up it climbed, throwing stilts of light at the cliff.
Up it surged on the jet, the water falling from beneath it,
crashing back into the sea hundreds of feet below.
Zaphod smiled, picturing himself.
A thoroughly ridiculous form of transport, but a thoroughly
beautiful one.
At the top of the cliff the globe wavered for a moment, tipped on
to a railed ramp, rolled down it to a small concave platform and
riddled to a halt.
To tremendous applause Zaphod Beeblebrox stepped out of the
bubble, his orange sash blazing in the light.
The President of the Galaxy had arrived.
He waited for the applause to die down, then raised his hands in
greeting.
"Hi," he said.
A government spider sidled up to him and attempted to press a
copy of his prepared speech into his hands. Pages three to seven
of the original version were at the moment floating soggily on
the Damogran sea some five miles out from the bay. Pages one and
two had been salvaged by a Damogran Frond Crested Eagle and had
already become incorporated into an extraordinary new form of
nest which the eagle had invented. It was constructed largely of
papier m@ch@ and it was virtually impossible for a newly hatched
baby eagle to break out of it. The Damogran Frond Crested Eagle
had heard of the notion of survival of the species but wanted no
truck with it.
Zaphod Beeblebrox would not be needing his set speech and he
gently deflected the one being offered him by the spider.
"Hi," he said again.
Everyone beamed at him, or, at least, nearly everyone. He singled
out Trillian from the crowd. Trillian was a gird that Zaphod had
picked up recently whilst visiting a planet, just for fun,
incognito. She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of
black hair, a full mouth, an odd little nob of a nose and
ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head scarf knotted in that
particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress she looked
vaguely Arabic. Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab
of course. The Arabs had very recently ceased to exist, and even
when they had existed they were five hundred thousand light years
from Damogran. Trillian wasn't anybody in particular, or so
Zaphod claimed. She just went around with him rather a lot and
told him what she thought of him.
"Hi honey," he said to her.
She flashed him a quick tight smile and looked away. Then she
looked back for a moment and smiled more warmly - but by this
time he was looking at something else.
"Hi," he said to a small knot of creatures from the press who
were standing nearby wishing that he would stop saying Hi and get
on with the quotes. He grinned at them particularly because he
knew that in a few moments he would be giving them one hell of a
quote.
The next thing he said though was not a lot of use to them. One
of the officials of the party had irritably decided that the
President was clearly not in a mood to read the deliciously
turned speech that had been written for him, and had flipped the
switch on the remote control device in his pocket. Away in front
of them a huge white dome that bulged against the sky cracked
down in the middle, split, and slowly folded itself down into the
ground. Everyone gasped although they had known perfectly well it
was going to do that because they had built it that way.
Beneath it lay uncovered a huge starship, one hundred and fifty
metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white
and mindboggingly beautiful. At the heart of it, unseen, lay a
small gold box which carried within it the most brain-wretching
device ever conceived, a device which made this starship unique
in the history of the galaxy, a device after which the ship had
been named - The Heart of Gold.
"Wow", said Zaphod Beeblebrox to the Heart of Gold. There wasn't
much else he could say.
He said it again because he knew it would annoy the press.
"Wow."
The crowd turned their faces back towards him expectantly. He
winked at Trillian who raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes
at him. She knew what he was about to say and thought him a
terrible showoff.
"That is really amazing," he said. "That really is truly amazing.
That is so amazingly amazing I think I'd like to steal it."
A marvellous Presidential quote, absolutely true to form. The
crowd laughed appreciatively, the newsmen gleefully punched
buttons on their Sub-Etha News-Matics and the President grinned.
As he grinned his heart screamed unbearably and he fingered the
small Paralyso-Matic bomb that nestled quietly in his pocket.
Finally he could bear it no more. He lifted his heads up to the
sky, let out a wild whoop in major thirds, threw the bomb to the
ground and ran forward through the sea of suddenly frozen smiles.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was not a pleasant sight, even for other
Vogons. His highly domed nose rose high above a small piggy
forehead. His dark green rubbery skin was thick enough for him to
play the game of Vogon Civil Service politics, and play it well,
and waterproof enough for him to survive indefinitely at sea
depths of up to a thousand feet with no ill effects.
Not that he ever went swimming of course. His busy schedule would
not allow it. He was the way he was because billions of years ago
when the Vogons had first crawled out of the sluggish primeval
seas of Vogsphere, and had lain panting and heaving on the
planet's virgin shores... when the first rays of the bright young
Vogsol sun had shone across them that morning, it was as if the
forces of evolution ad simply given up on them there and then,
had turned aside in disgust and written them off as an ugly and
unfortunate mistake. They never evolved again; they should never
have survived.
The fact that they did is some kind of tribute to the thick-
willed slug-brained stubbornness of these creatures. Evolution?
they said to themselves, Who needs it?, and what nature refused
to do for them they simply did without until such time as they
were able to rectify the grosser anatomical inconveniences with
surgery.
Meanwhile, the natural forces on the planet Vogsphere had been
working overtime to make up for their earlier blunder. They
brought forth scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs, which the
Vogons ate, smashing their shells with iron mallets; tall
aspiring trees with breathtaking slenderness and colour which the
Vogons cut down and burned the crab meat with; elegant gazelle-
like creatures with silken coats and dewy eyes which the Vogons
would catch and sit on. They were no use as transport because
their backs would snap instantly, but the Vogons sat on them
anyway.
Thus the planet Vogsphere whiled away the unhappy millennia until
the Vogons suddenly discovered the principles of interstellar
travel. Within a few short Vog years every last Vogon had
migrated to the Megabrantis cluster, the political hub of the
Galaxy and now formed the immensely powerful backbone of the
Galactic Civil Service. They have attempted to acquire learning,
they have attempted to acquire style and social grace, but in
most respects the modern Vogon is little different from his
primitive forebears. Every year they import twenty-seven thousand
scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs from their native planet
and while away a happy drunken night smashing them to bits with
iron mallets.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was a fairly typical Vogon in that he was
thoroughly vile. Also, he did not like hitch hikers.
Somewhere in a small dark cabin buried deep in the intestines of
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's flagship, a small match flared
nervously. The owner of the match was not a Vogon, but he knew
all about them and was right to be nervous. His name was Ford
Prefect*.
He looked about the cabin but could see very little; strange
monstrous shadows loomed and leaped with the tiny flickering
flame, but all was quiet. He breathed a silent thank you to the
Dentrassis. The Dentrassis are an unruly tribe of gourmands, a
wild but pleasant bunch whom the Vogons had recently taken to
employing as catering staff on their long haul fleets, on the
strict understanding that they keep themselves very much to
themselves.
This suited the Dentrassis fine, because they loved Vogon money,
which is one of the hardest currencies in space, but loathed the
Vogons themselves. The only sort of Vogon a Dentrassi liked to
see was an annoyed Vogon.
It was because of this tiny piece of information that Ford
Prefect was not now a whiff of hydrogen, ozone and carbon
monoxide.
He heard a slight groan. By the light of the match he saw a heavy
shape moving slightly on the floor. Quickly he shook the match
out, reached in his pocket, found what he was looking for and
took it out. He crouched on the floor. The shape moved again.
Ford Prefect said: "I bought some peanuts."
Arthur Dent moved, and groaned again, muttering incoherently.
"Here, have some," urged Ford, shaking the packet again, "if
you've never been through a matter transference beam before
you've probably lost some salt and protein. The beer you had
should have cushioned your system a bit."
"Whhhrrrr..." said Arthur Dent. He opened his eyes.
"It's dark," he said.
"Yes," said Ford Prefect, "it's dark."
"No light," said Arthur Dent. "Dark, no light."
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to
understand about human beings was their habit of continually
stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or
You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a
thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a
theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings
don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths
probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and
observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If
they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their
brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well
as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human
beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried
about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.
"Yes," he agreed with Arthur, "no light." He helped Arthur to
some peanuts. "How do you feel?" he asked.
"Like a military academy," said Arthur, "bits of me keep on
passing out."
Ford stared at him blankly in the darkness.
"If I asked you where the hell we were," said Arthur weakly,
"would I regret it?"
Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said.
"Oh good," said Arthur.
"We're in a small galley cabin," said Ford, "in one of the
spaceships of the Vogon Constructor Fleet."
"Ah," said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of the
word safe that I wasn't previously aware of."
Ford struck another match to help him search for a light switch.
Monstrous shadows leaped and loomed again. Arthur struggled to
his feet and hugged himself apprehensively. Hideous alien shapes
seemed to throng about him, the air was thick with musty smells
which sidled into his lungs without identifying themselves, and a
low irritating hum kept his brain from focusing.
"How did we get here?" he asked, shivering slightly.
"We hitched a lift," said Ford.
"Excuse me?" said Arthur. "Are you trying to tell me that we just
stuck out our thumbs and some green bug-eyed monster stuck his
head out and said, Hi fellas, hop right in. I can take you as far
as the Basingstoke roundabout?"
"Well," said Ford, "the Thumb's an electronic sub-etha signalling
device, the roundabout's at Barnard's Star six light years away,
but otherwise, that's more or less right."
"And the bug-eyed monster?"
"Is green, yes."
"Fine," said Arthur, "when can I get home?"
"You can't," said Ford Prefect, and found the light switch.
"Shade your eyes ..." he said, and turned it on.
Even Ford was surprised.
"Good grief," said Arthur, "is this really the interior of a
flying saucer?"
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz heaved his unpleasant green body round the
control bridge. He always felt vaguely irritable after
demolishing populated planets. He wished that someone would come
and tell him that it was all wrong so that he could shout at them
and feel better. He flopped as heavily as he could on to his
control seat in the hope that it would break and give him
something to be genuinely angry about, but it only gave a
complaining sort of creak.
"Go away!" he shouted at a young Vogon guard who entered the
bridge at that moment. The guard vanished immediately, feeling
rather relieved. He was glad it wouldn't now be him who delivered
the report they'd just received. The report was an official
release which said that a wonderful new form of spaceship drive
was at this moment being unveiled at a government research base
on Damogran which would henceforth make all hyperspatial express
routes unnecessary.
Another door slid open, but this time the Vogon captain didn't
shout because it was the door from the galley quarters where the
Dentrassis prepared his meals. A meal would be most welcome.
A huge furry creature bounded through the door with his lunch
tray. It was grinning like a maniac.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was delighted. He knew that when a
Dentrassi looked that pleased with itself there was something
going on somewhere on the ship that he could get very angry
indeed about.
Ford and Arthur stared about them.
"Well, what do you think?" said Ford.
"It's a bit squalid, isn't it?"
Ford frowned at the grubby mattress, unwashed cups and
unidentifiable bits of smelly alien underwear that lay around the
cramped cabin.
"Well, this is a working ship, you see," said Ford. "These are
the Dentrassi sleeping quarters."
"I thought you said they were called Vogons or something."
"Yes," said Ford, "the Vogons run the ship, the Dentrassis are
the cooks, they let us on board."
"I'm confused," said Arthur.
"Here, have a look at this," said Ford. He sat down on one of the
mattresses and rummaged about in his satchel. Arthur prodded the
mattress nervously and then sat on it himself: in fact he had
very little to be nervous about, because all mattresses grown in
the swamps of Squornshellous Zeta are very thoroughly killed and
dried before being put to service. Very few have ever come to
life again.
Ford handed the book to Arthur.
"What is it?" asked Arthur.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's a sort of electronic
book. It tells you everything you need to know about anything.
That's its job."
Arthur turned it over nervously in his hands.
"I like the cover," he said. "Don't Panic. It's the first helpful
or intelligible thing anybody's said to me all day."
"I'll show you how it works," said Ford. He snatched it from
Arthur who was still holding it as if it was a two-week-dead lark
and pulled it out of its cover.
"You press this button here you see and the screen lights up
giving you the index."
A screen, about three inches by four, lit up and characters began
to flicker across the surface.
"You want to know about Vogons, so I enter that name so." His
fingers tapped some more keys. "And there we are."
The words Vogon Constructor Fleets flared in green across the
screen.
Ford pressed a large red button at the bottom of the screen and
words began to undulate across it. At the same time, the book
began to speak the entry as well in a still quiet measured voice.
This is what the book said.
"Vogon Constructor Fleets. Here is what to do if you want to get
a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most
unpleasant races in the Galaxy -- not actually evil, but bad
tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even
lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous
Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate,
sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public
inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled
as firelighters.
"The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your
finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to
feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
"On no account allow a Vogon to read poetry at you."
Arthur blinked at it.
"What a strange book. How did we get a lift then?"
"That's the point, it's out of date now," said Ford, sliding the
book back into its cover. "I'm doing the field research for the
New Revised Edition, and one of the things I'll have to include
is a bit about how the Vogons now employ Dentrassi cooks which
gives us a rather useful little loophole."
A pained expression crossed Arthur's face. "But who are the
Dentrassi?" he said.
"Great guys," said Ford. "They're the best cooks and the best
drink mixers and they don't give a wet slap about anything else.
And they'll always help hitch hikers aboard, partly because they
like the company, but mostly because it annoys the Vogons. Which
is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you're an
impoverished hitch hiker trying to see the marvels of the
Universe for less than thirty Altairan Dollars a day. And that's
my job. Fun, isn't it?"
Arthur looked lost.
"It's amazing," he said and frowned at one of the other
mattresses.
"Unfortunately I got stuck on the Earth for rather longer than I
intended," said Ford. "I came for a week and got stuck for
fifteen years."
"But how did you get there in the first place then?"
"Easy, I got a lift with a teaser."
"A teaser?"
"Yeah."
"Er, what is ..."
"A teaser? Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They
cruise around looking for planets which haven't made interstellar
contact yet and buzz them."
"Buzz them?" Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making
life difficult for him.
"Yeah", said Ford, "they buzz them. They find some isolated spot
with very few people around, then land right by some poor soul
whom no one's ever going to believe and then strut up and down in
front of him wearing silly antennae on their heads and making
beep beep noises. Rather childish really." Ford leant back on the
mattress with his hands behind his head and looked infuriatingly
pleased with himself.
"Ford," insisted Arthur, "I don't know if this sounds like a
silly question, but what am I doing here?"
"Well you know that," said Ford. "I rescued you from the Earth."
"And what's happened to the Earth?"
"Ah. It's been demolished."
"Has it," said Arthur levelly.
"Yes. It just boiled away into space."
"Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that."
Ford frowned to himself and seemed to roll the thought around his
mind.
"Yes, I can understand that," he said at last.
"Understand that!" shouted Arthur. "Understand that!"
Ford sprang up.
"Keep looking at the book!" he hissed urgently.
"What?"
"Don't Panic."
"I'm not panicking!"
"Yes you are."
"Alright so I'm panicking, what else is there to do?"
"You just come along with me and have a good time. The Galaxy's a
fun place. You'll need to have this fish in your ear."
"I beg your pardon?" asked Arthur, rather politely he thought.
Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a
small yellow fish wriggling around in it. Arthur blinked at him.
He wished there was something simple and recognizable he could
grasp hold of. He would have felt safe if alongside the Dentrassi
underwear, the piles of Squornshellous mattresses and the man
from Betelgeuse holding up a small yellow fish and offering to
put it in his ear he had been able to see just a small packet of
corn flakes. He couldn't, and he didn't feel safe.
Suddenly a violent noise leapt at them from no source that he
could identify. He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man
trying to gargle whilst fighting off a pack of wolves.
"Shush!" said Ford. "Listen, it might be important."
"Im ... important?"
"It's the Vogon captain making an announcement on the T'annoy."
"You mean that's how the Vogons talk?"
"Listen!"
"But I can't speak Vogon!"
"You don't need to. Just put that fish in your ear."
Ford, with a lightning movement, clapped his hand to Arthur's
ear, and he had the sudden sickening sensation of the fish
slithering deep into his aural tract. Gasping with horror he
scrabbled at his ear for a second or so, but then slowly turned
goggle-eyed with wonder. He was experiencing the aural equivalent
of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and
suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick. Or of
looking at a lot of coloured dots on a piece of paper which
suddenly resolve themselves into the figure six and mean that
your optician is going to charge you a lot of money for a new
pair of glasses.
He was still listening to the howling gargles, he knew that, only
now it had taken on the semblance of perfectly straightforward
English.
This is what he heard ...
"Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle
howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp
uuuurgh should have a good time. Message repeats. This is your
captain speaking, so stop whatever you're doing and pay
attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a
couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello wherever you are. I just want
to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I
worked hard to get where I am today, and I didn't become captain
of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi
service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a
search party, and as soon that they find you I will put you off
the ship. If you're very lucky I might read you some of my poetry
first.
"Secondly, we are about to jump into hyperspace for the journey
to Barnard's Star. On arrival we will stay in dock for a
seventy-two hour refit, and no one's to leave the ship during
that time. I repeat, all planet leave is cancelled. I've just had
an unhappy love affair, so I don't see why anybody else should
have a good time. Message ends."
The noise stopped.
Arthur discovered to his embarrassment that he was lying curled
up in a small ball on the floor with his arms wrapped round his
head. He smiled weakly.
"Charming man," he said. "I wish I had a daughter so I could
forbid her to marry one ..."
"You wouldn't need to," said Ford. "They've got as much sex
appeal as a road accident. No, don't move," he added as Arthur
began to uncurl himself, "you'd better be prepared for the jump
into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."
Arthur thought about this.
"Ford," he said.
"Yeah?"
"What's this fish doing in my ear?"
"It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the
book if you like."
He tossed over The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and then
curled himself up into a foetal ball to prepare himself for the
jump.
At that moment the bottom fell out of Arthur's mind.
His eyes turned inside out. His feet began to leak out of the top
of his head.
The room folded flat about him, spun around, shifted out of
existence and left him sliding into his own navel.
They were passing through hyperspace.
"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the
oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not
from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all
unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to
nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its
carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious
thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech
centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical
upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear
you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of
language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the
brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel
fish.
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything
so mind\-bog\-gin\-gly useful could have evolved purely by chance that
some thin\-kers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching
proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I
exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am
nothing.'
"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it?
It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so
therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly
vanished in a puff of logic.
"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to
prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next
zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of
dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a
small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-
selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all
barriers to communication between different races and cultures,
has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the
history of creation."
Arthur let out a low groan. He was horrified to discover that the
kick through hyperspace hadn't killed him. He was now six light
years from the place that the Earth would have been if it still
existed.
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There
was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole
Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by
thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction.
He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction.
Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing
behind in the queue at the supermarket before and felt a sudden
stab - the supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone.
Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there
would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an
outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind.
England only existed in his mind - his mind, stuck here in this
dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia
closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that - somehow he'd got it.
He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp
it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No
reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The
dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every
Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave
him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any
such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was
sobbing for his mother.
He jerked himself violently to his feet.
"Ford!"
Ford looked up from where he was sitting in a corner humming to
himself. He always found the actual travelling-through-space part
of space travel rather trying.
"Yeah?" he said.
"If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth,
you must have been gathering material on it."
"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
"Let me see what it says in this edition then, I've got to see
it."
"Yeah OK." He passed it over again.
Arthur grabbed hold of it and tried to stop his hands shaking. He
pressed the entry for the relevant page. The screen flashed and
swirled and resolved into a page of print. Arthur stared at it.
"It doesn't have an entry!" he burst out.
Ford looked over his shoulder.
"Yes it does," he said, "down there, see at the bottom of the
screen, just under Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted
whore of Eroticon 6."
Arthur followed Ford's finger, and saw where it was pointing. For
a moment it still didn't register, then his mind nearly blew up.
"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One
word!"
Ford shrugged.
"Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only
a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he
said, "and no one knew much about the Earth of course."
"Well for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the
editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed
cough.
"Mostly harmless!" shouted Arthur.
"What was that noise?" hissed Ford.
"It was me shouting," shouted Arthur.
"No! Shut up!" said Ford. I think we're in trouble."
"You think we're in trouble!"
Outside the door were the sounds of marching feet.
"The Dentrassi?" whispered Arthur.
"No, those are steel tipped boots," said Ford.
There was a sharp ringing rap on the door.
"Then who is it?" said Arthur.
"Well," said Ford, "if we're lucky it's just the Vogons come to
throw us in to space."
"And if we're unlucky?"
"If we're unlucky," said Ford grimly, "the captain might be
serious in his threat that he's going to read us some of his
poetry first ..."
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe.
The second worst is that of the Azagoths of Kria. During a
recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his
poem "Ode To A Small Lump of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One
Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal
haemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts
Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's
reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-
book epic entitled My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles when his own
major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and
civilization, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled
his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in
the destruction of the planet Earth.
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz smiled very slowly. This was done not so
much for effect as because he was trying to remember the sequence
of muscle movements. He had had a terribly therapeutic yell at
his prisoners and was now feeling quite relaxed and ready for a
little callousness.
The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation Chairs --strapped in.
Vogons suffered no illusions as to the regard their works were
generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been
part of bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a
properly evolved and cultured race, but now the only thing that
kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness.
The sweat stood out cold on Ford Prefect's brow, and slid round
the electrodes strapped to his temples. These were attached to a
battery of electronic equipment - imagery intensifiers, rhythmic
modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers - all
designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure
that not a single nuance of the poet's thought was lost.
Arthur Dent sat and quivered. He had no idea what he was in for,
but he knew that he hadn't liked anything that had happened so
far and didn't think things were likely to change.
The Vogon began to read - a fetid little passage of his own
devising.
"Oh frettled gruntbuggly ..." he began. Spasms wracked Ford's
body - this was worse than ever he'd been prepared for.
"... thy micturations are to me | As plurdled gabbleblotchits on
a lurgid bee."
"Aaaaaaarggggghhhhhh!" went Ford Prefect, wrenching his head back
as lumps of pain thumped through it. He could dimly see beside
him Arthur lolling and rolling in his seat. He clenched his
teeth.
"Groop I implore thee," continued the merciless Vogon, "my
foonting turlingdromes."
His voice was rising to a horrible pitch of impassioned
stridency. "And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly
bindlewurdles,| Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my
blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"
"Nnnnnnnnnnyyyyyyyuuuuuuurrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!" cried Ford Prefect
and threw one final spasm as the electronic enhancement of the
last line caught him full blast across the temples. He went limp.
Arthur lolled.
"Now Earthlings ..." whirred the Vogon (he didn't know that Ford
Prefect was in fact from a small planet in the vicinity of
Betelgeuse, and wouldn't have cared if he had) "I present you
with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space, or ..."
he paused for melodramatic effect, "tell me how good you thought
my poem was!"
He threw himself backwards into a huge leathery bat-shaped seat
and watched them. He did the smile again.
Ford was rasping for breath. He rolled his dusty tongue round his
parched mouth and moaned.
Arthur said brightly: "Actually I quite liked it."
Ford turned and gaped. Here was an approach that had quite simply
not occurred to him.
The Vogon raised a surprised eyebrow that effectively obscured
his nose and was therefore no bad thing.
"Oh good ..." he whirred, in considerable astonishment.
"Oh yes," said Arthur, "I thought that some of the metaphysical
imagery was really particularly effective."
Ford continued to stare at him, slowly organizing his thoughts
around this totally new concept. Were they really going to be
able to bareface their way out of this?
"Yes, do continue ..." invited the Vogon.
"Oh ... and er ... interesting rhythmic devices too," continued
Arthur, "which seemed to counterpoint the ... er ... er ..." He
floundered.
Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding "counterpoint the surrealism
of the underlying metaphor of the ... er ..." He floundered too,
but Arthur was ready again.
"... humanity of the ..."
"Vogonity," Ford hissed at him.
"Ah yes, Vogonity (sorry) of the poet's compassionate soul,"
Arthur felt he was on a home stretch now, "which contrives
through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this,
transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental
dichotomies of the other," (he was reaching a triumphant
crescendo ...) "and one is left with a profound and vivid insight
into ... into ... er ..." (... which suddenly gave out on him.)
Ford leaped in with the coup de gr@ce:
"Into whatever it was the poem was about!" he yelled. Out of the
corner of his mouth: "Well done, Arthur, that was very good."
The Vogon perused them. For a moment his embittered racial soul
had been touched, but he thought no - too little too late. His
voice took on the quality of a cat snagging brushed nylon.
"So what you're saying is that I write poetry because underneath
my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be
loved," he said. He paused. "Is that right?"
Ford laughed a nervous laugh. "Well I mean yes," he said, "don't
we all, deep down, you know ... er ..."
The Vogon stood up.
"No, well you're completely wrong," he said, "I just write poetry
to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief.
I'm going to throw you off the ship anyway. Guard! Take the
prisoners to number three airlock and throw them out!"
"What?" shouted Ford.
A huge young Vogon guard stepped forward and yanked them out of
their straps with his huge blubbery arms.
"You can't throw us into space," yelled Ford, "we're trying to
write a book."
"Resistance is useless!" shouted the Vogon guard back at him. It
was the first phrase he'd learnt when he joined the Vogon Guard
Corps.
The captain watched with detached amusement and then turned away.
Arthur stared round him wildly.
"I don't want to die now!" he yelled. "I've still got a headache!
I don't want to go to heaven with a headache, I'd be all cross
and wouldn't enjoy it!"
The guard grasped them both firmly round the neck, and bowing
deferentially towards his captain's back, hoiked them both
protesting out of the bridge. A steel door closed and the captain
was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself,
lightly fingering his notebook of verses.
"Hmmmm," he said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying
metaphor ..." He considered this for a moment, and then closed
the book with a grim smile.
"Death's too good for them," he said.
The long steel-lined corridor echoed to the feeble struggles of
the two humanoids clamped firmly under rubbery Vogon armpits.
"This is great," spluttered Arthur, "this is really terrific. Let
go of me you brute!"
The Vogon guard dragged them on.
"Don't you worry," said Ford, "I'll think of something." He
didn't sound hopeful.
"Resistance is useless!" bellowed the guard.
"Just don't say things like that," stammered Ford. "How can
anyone maintain a positive mental attitude if you're saying
things like that?"
"My God," complained Arthur, "you're talking about a positive
mental attitude and you haven't even had your planet demolished
today. I woke up this morning and thought I'd have a nice relaxed
day, do a bit of reading, brush the dog ... It's now just after
four in the afternoon and I'm already thrown out of an alien
spaceship six light years from the smoking remains of the Earth!"
He spluttered and gurgled as the Vogon tightened his grip.
"Alright," said Ford, "just stop panicking."
"Who said anything about panicking?" snapped Arthur. "This is
still just the culture shock. You wait till I've settled down
into the situation and found my bearings. Then I'll start
panicking."
"Arthur you're getting hysterical. Shut up!" Ford tried
desperately to think, but was interrupted by the guard shouting
again.
"Resistance is useless!"
"And you can shut up as well!" snapped Ford.
"Resistance is useless!"
"Oh give it a rest," said Ford. He twisted his head till he was
looking straight up into his captor's face. A thought struck him.
"Do you really enjoy this sort of thing?" he asked suddenly.
The Vogon stopped dead and a look of immense stupidity seeped
slowly over his face.
"Enjoy?" he boomed. "What do you mean?"
"What I mean," said Ford, "is does it give you a full satisfying
life? Stomping around, shouting, pushing people out of spaceships
..."
The Vogon stared up at the low steel ceiling and his eyebrows
almost rolled over each other. His mouth slacked. Finally he
said, "Well the hours are good ..."
"They'd have to be," agreed Ford.
Arthur twisted his head to look at Ford.
"Ford, what are you doing?" he asked in an amazed whisper.
"Oh, just trying to take an interest in the world around me, OK?"
he said. "So the hours are pretty good then?" he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around
in the murky depths.
"Yeah," he said, "but now you come to mention it, most of the
actual minutes are pretty lousy. Except ..." he thought again,
which required looking at the ceiling - "except some of the
shouting I quite like." He filled his lungs and bellowed,
"Resistance is ..."
"Sure, yes," interrupted Ford hurriedly, "you're good at that, I
can tell. But if it's mostly lousy," he said, slowly giving the
words time to reach their mark, "then why do you do it? What is
it? The girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find
that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents
an interesting challenge?"
"Er ..." said the guard, "er ... er ... I dunno. I think I just
sort of ... do it really. My aunt said that spaceship guard was a
good career for a young Vogon - you know, the uniform, the low-
slung stun ray holster, the mindless tedium ..."
"There you are Arthur," said Ford with the air of someone
reaching the conclusion of his argument, "you think you've got
problems."
Arthur rather thought he had. Apart from the unpleasant business
with his home planet the Vogon guard had half-throttled him
already and he didn't like the sound of being thrown into space
very much.
"Try and understand his problem," insisted Ford. "Here he is poor
lad, his entire life's work is stamping around, throwing people
off spaceships ..."
"And shouting," added the guard.
"And shouting, sure," said Ford patting the blubbery arm clamped
round his neck in friendly condescension, "... and he doesn't
even know why he's doing it!"
Arthur agreed this was very sad. He did this with a small feeble
gesture, because he was too asphyxicated to speak.
Deep rumblings of bemusement came from the guard.
"Well. Now you put it like that I suppose ..."
"Good lad!" encouraged Ford.
"But alright," went on the rumblings, "so what's the
alternative?"
"Well," said Ford, brightly but slowly, "stop doing it of course!
Tell them," he went on, "you're not going to do it anymore." He
felt he had to add something to that, but for the moment the
guard seemed to have his mind occupied pondering that much.
"Eerrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ..." said the guard,
"erm, well that doesn't sound that great to me."
Ford suddenly felt the moment slipping away.
"Now wait a minute," he said, "that's just the start you see,
there's more to it than that you see ..."
But at that moment the guard renewed his grip and continued his
original purpose of lugging his prisoners to the airlock. He was
obviously quite touched.
"No, I think if it's all the same to you," he said, "I'd better
get you both shoved into this airlock and then go and get on with
some other bits of shouting I've got to do."
It wasn't all the same to Ford Prefect after all.
"Come on now ... but look!" he said, less slowly, less brightly.
"Huhhhhgggggggnnnnnnn ..." said Arthur without any clear
inflection.
"But hang on," pursued Ford, "there's music and art and things to
tell you about yet! Arrrggghhh!"
"Resistance is useless," bellowed the guard, and then added, "You
see if I keep it up I can eventually get promoted to Senior
Shouting Officer, and there aren't usually many vacancies for
non-shouting and non-pushing-people-about officers, so I think
I'd better stick to what I know."
They had now reached the airlock - a large circular steel
hatchway of massive strength and weight let into the inner skin
of the craft. The guard operated a control and the hatchway swung
smoothly open.
"But thanks for taking an interest," said the Vogon guard. "Bye
now." He flung Ford and Arthur through the hatchway into the
small chamber within. Arthur lay panting for breath. Ford
scrambled round and flung his shoulder uselessly against the
reclosing hatchway.
"But listen," he shouted to the guard, "there's a whole world you
don't know anything about ... here how about this?" Desperately
he grabbed for the only bit of culture he knew offhand - he
hummed the first bar of Beethoven's Fifth.
"Da da da dum! Doesn't that stir anything in you?"
"No," said the guard, "not really. But I'll mention it to my
aunt."
If he said anything further after that it was lost. The hatchway
sealed itself tight, and all sound was lost but the faint distant
hum of the ship's engines.
They were in a brightly polished cylindrical chamber about six
feet in diameter and ten feet long.
"Potentially bright lad I thought," he said and slumped against
the curved wall.
Arthur was still lying in the curve of the floor where he had
fallen. He didn't look up. He just lay panting.
"We're trapped now aren't we?"
"Yes," said Ford, "we're trapped."
"Well didn't you think of anything? I thought you said you were
going to think of something. Perhaps you thought of something and
didn't notice."
"Oh yes, I thought of something," panted Ford. Arthur looked up
expectantly.
"But unfortunately," continued Ford, "it rather involved being on
the other side of this airtight hatchway." He kicked the hatch
they'd just been through.
"But it was a good idea was it?"
"Oh yes, very neat."
"What was it?"
"Well I hadn't worked out the details yet. Not much point now is
there?"
"So ... er, what happens next?"
"Oh, er, well the hatchway in front of us will open automatically
in a few moments and we will shoot out into deep space I expect
and asphyxicate. If you take a lungful of air with you you can
last for up to thirty seconds of course ..." said Ford. He stuck
his hands behind his back, raised his eyebrows and started to hum
an old Betelgeusian battle hymn. To Arthur's eyes he suddenly
looked very alien.
"So this is it," said Arthur, "we're going to die."
"Yes," said Ford, "except ... no! Wait a minute!" he suddenly
lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of
vision. "What's this switch?" he cried.
"What? Where?" cried Arthur twisting round.
"No, I was only fooling," said Ford, "we are going to die after
all."
He slumped against the wall again and carried on the tune from
where he left off.
"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm
trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about
to die of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd
listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."
"Oh." Ford carried on humming.
"This is terrific," Arthur thought to himself, "Nelson's Column
has gone, McDonald's have gone, all that's left is me and the
words Mostly Harmless. Any second now all that will be left is
Mostly Harmless. And yesterday the planet seemed to be going so
well."
A motor whirred.
A slight hiss built into a deafening roar of rushing air as the
outer hatchway opened on to an empty blackness studded with tiny
impossibly bright points of light. Ford and Arthur popped into
outer space like corks from a toy gun.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable
book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times over many
years and under many different editorships. It contains
contributions from countless numbers of travellers and
researchers.
The introduction begins like this:
"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how
vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. I mean you may think it's
a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts
to space. Listen ..." and so on.
(After a while the style settles down a bit and it begins to tell
you things you really need to know, like the fact that the
fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin is now so worried about
the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year
that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount
you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your
bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory
it is vitally important to get a receipt.)
To be fair though, when confronted by the sheer enormity of
distances between the stars, better minds than the one
responsible for the Guide's introduction have faltered. Some
invite you to consider for a moment a peanut in reading and a
small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into
the human imagination.
Even light, which travels so fast that it takes most races
thousands of years to realize that it travels at all, takes time
to journey between the stars. It takes eight minutes from the
star Sol to the place where the Earth used to be, and four years
more to arrive at Sol's nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Proxima.
For light to reach the other side of the Galaxy, for it to reach
Damogran for instance, takes rather longer: five hundred thousand
years.
The record for hitch hiking this distance is just under five
years, but you don't get to see much on the way.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy says that if you hold a
lungful of air you can survive in the total vacuum of space for
about thirty seconds. However it goes on to say that what with
space being the mind boggling size it is the chances of getting
picked up by another ship within those thirty seconds are two to
the power of two hundred and sixty-seven thousand seven hundred
and nine to one against.
By a totally staggering coincidence that is also the telephone
number of an Islington flat where Arthur once went to a very good
party and met a very nice girl whom he totally failed to get off
with - she went off with a gatecrasher.
Though the planet Earth, the Islington flat and the telephone
have all now been demolished, it is comforting to reflect that
they are all in some small way commemorated by the fact that
twenty-nine seconds later Ford and Arthur were rescued.
A computer chatted to itself in alarm as it noticed an airlock
open and close itself for no apparent reason.
This was because Reason was in fact out to lunch.
A hole had just appeared in the Galaxy. It was exactly a
nothingth of a second long, a nothingth of an inch wide, and
quite a lot of million light years from end to end.
As it closed up lots of paper hats and party balloons fell out of
it and drifted off through the universe. A team of seven three-
foot-high market analysts fell out of it and died, partly of
asphyxication, partly of surprise.
Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand lightly fried eggs fell out
of it too, materializing in a large woobly heap on the famine-
struck land of Poghril in the Pansel system.
The whole Poghril tribe had died out from famine except for one
last man who died of cholesterol poisoning some weeks later.
The nothingth of a second for which the hole existed reverberated
backwards and forwards through time in a most improbable fashion.
Somewhere in the deeply remote past it seriously traumatized a
small random group of atoms drifting through the empty sterility
of space and made them cling together in the most extraordinarily
unlikely patterns. These patterns quickly learnt to copy
themselves (this was part of what was so extraordinary of the
patterns) and went on to cause massive trouble on every planet
they drifted on to. That was how life began in the Universe.
Five wild Event Maelstroms swirled in vicious storms of unreason
and spewed up a pavement.
On the pavement lay Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent gulping like
half-spent fish.
"There you are," gasped Ford, scrabbling for a fingerhold on the
pavement as it raced through the Third Reach of the Unknown, "I
told you I'd think of something."
"Oh sure," said Arthur, "sure."
"Bright idea of mine," said Ford, "to find a passing spaceship
and get rescued by it."
The real universe arched sickeningly away beneath them. Various
pretend ones flitted silently by, like mountain goats. Primal
light exploded, splattering space-time as with gobbets of junket.
Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number
coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away for ever.
"Oh come off it," said Arthur, "the chances against it were
astronomical."
"Don't knock it, it worked," said Ford.
"What sort of ship are we in?" asked Arthur as the pit of
eternity yawned beneath them.
"I don't know," said Ford, "I haven't opened my eyes yet."
"No, nor have I," said Arthur.
The Universe jumped, froze, quivered and splayed out in several
unexpected directions.
Arthur and Ford opened their eyes and looked about in
considerable surprise.
"Good god," said Arthur, "it looks just like the sea front at
Southend."
"Hell, I'm relieved to hear you say that," said Ford.
"Why?"
"Because I thought I must be going mad."
"Perhaps you are. Perhaps you only thought I said it."
Ford thought about this.
"Well, did you say it or didn't you?" he asked.
"I think so," said Arthur.
"Well, perhaps we're both going mad."
"Yes," said Arthur, "we'd be mad, all things considered, to think
this was Southend."
"Well, do you think this is Southend?"
"Oh yes."
"So do I."
"Therefore we must be mad."
"Nice day for it."
"Yes," said a passing maniac.
"Who was that?" asked Arthur
"Who - the man with the five heads and the elderberry bush full
of kippers?"
"Yes."
"I don't know. Just someone."
"Ah."
They both sat on the pavement and watched with a certain unease
as huge children bounced heavily along the sand and wild horses
thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced
railings to the Uncertain Areas.
"You know," said Arthur with a slight cough, "if this is
Southend, there's something very odd about it ..."
"You mean the way the sea stays steady and the buildings keep
washing up and down?" said Ford. "Yes I thought that was odd too.
In fact," he continued as with a huge bang Southend split itself
into six equal segments which danced and span giddily round each
other in lewd and licentious formation, "there is something
altogether very strange going on."
Wild yowling noises of pipes and strings seared through the wind,
hot doughnuts popped out of the road for ten pence each, horrid
fish stormed out of the sky and Arthur and Ford decided to make a
run for it.
They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic
thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling
bats and suddenly heard a girl's voice.
It sounded quite a sensible voice, but it just said, "Two to the
power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling," and
that was all.
Ford skidded down a beam of light and span round trying to find a
source for the voice but could see nothing he could seriously
believe in.
"What was that voice?" shouted Arthur.
"I don't know," yelled Ford, "I don't know. It sounded like a
measurement of probability."
"Probability? What do you mean?"
"Probability. You know, like two to one, three to one, five to
four against. It said two to the power of one hundred thousand to
one against. That's pretty improbable you know."
A million-gallon vat of custard upended itself over them without
warning.
"But what does it mean?" cried Arthur.
"What, the custard?"
"No, the measurement of probability!"
"I don't know. I don't know at all. I think we're on some kind of
spaceship."
"I can only assume," said Arthur, "that this is not the first-
class compartment."
Bulges appeared in the fabric of space-time. Great ugly bulges.
"Haaaauuurrgghhh ..." said Arthur as he felt his body softening
and bending in unusual directions. "Southend seems to be melting
away ... the stars are swirling ... a dustbowl ... my legs are
drifting off into the sunset ... my left arm's come off too." A
frightening thought struck him: "Hell," he said, "how am I going
to operate my digital watch now?" He wound his eyes desperately
around in Ford's direction.
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
Again came the voice.
"Two to the power of seventy-five thousand to one against and
falling."
Ford waddled around his pond in a furious circle.
"Hey, who are you," he quacked. "Where are you? What's going on
and is there any way of stopping it?"
"Please relax," said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in
an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on
fire, "you are perfectly safe."
"But that's not the point!" raged Ford. "The point is that I am
now a perfectly save penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly
running out of limbs!"
"It's alright, I've got them back now," said Arthur.
"Two to the power of fifty thousand to one against and falling,"
said the voice.
"Admittedly," said Arthur, "they're longer than I usually like
them, but ..."
"Isn't there anything," squawked Ford in avian fury, "you feel
you ought to be telling us?"
The voice cleared its throat. A giant petit four lolloped off
into the distance.
"Welcome," the voice said, "to the Starship Heart of Gold."
The voice continued.
"Please do not be alarmed," it said, "by anything you see or hear
around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you
have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of
two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one
against - possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of
two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and
falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we
are sure what is normal anyway. Thank you. Two to the power of
twenty thousand to one against and falling."
The voice cut out.
Ford and Arthur were in a small luminous pink cubicle.
Ford was wildly excited.
"Arthur!" he said, "this is fantastic! We've been picked up by a
ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive! This is
incredible! I heard rumors about it before! They were all
officially denied, but they must have done it! They've built the
Improbability Drive! Arthur, this is ... Arthur? What's
happening?"
Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying
to hold it closed, but it was ill fitting. Tiny furry little
hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers
were inkstained; tiny voices chattered insanely.
Arthur looked up.
"Ford!" he said, "there's an infinite number of monkeys outside
who want to talk to us about this script for Hamlet they've
worked out."
The Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of
crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a
second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace.
It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a
governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government's
research team on Damogran.
This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability
by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-
Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong
Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of
course well understood - and such generators were often used to
break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the
hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left,
in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand
for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but
mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn't stand was the perpetual failure they
encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate
the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship
across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars,
and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was
virtually impossible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab
after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning
this way:
If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a virtual
impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability.
So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly
how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite
improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea
... and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had
managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite
Improbability generator out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the
Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched
by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally
realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a
smartass.
The Improbability-proof control cabin of the Heart of Gold looked
like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was
perfectly clean because it was so new. Some of the control seats
hadn't had the plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was
mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish
restaurant. In fact it wasn't perfectly oblong: the two long
walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the
angles and corners were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes.
The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal
simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary
three-dimensional oblong rom, but then the designers would have
got miserable. As it was the cabin looked excitingly purposeful,
with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance
system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers
set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped, its
gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its gleaming
brushed steel knees. It too was fairly new, but though it was
beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the
various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn't quite fit
properly. In fact they fitted perfectly well, but something in
its bearing suggested that they might have fitted better.
Zaphod Beeblebrox paced nervously up and down the cabin, brushing
his hands over pieces of gleaming equipment and giggling with
excitement.
Trillian sat hunched over a clump of instruments reading off
figures. Her voice was carried round the Tannoy system of the
whole ship.
"Five to one against and falling ..." she said, "four to one
against and falling ... three to one ... two ... one ...
probability factor of one to one ... we have normality, I repeat
we have normality." She turned her microphone off - then turned
it back on, with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you
still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. Please
relax. You will be sent for soon."
Zaphod burst out in annoyance: "Who are they Trillian?"
Trillian span her seat round to face him and shrugged.
"Just a couple of guys we seem to have picked up in open space,"
she said. "Section ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha."
"Yeah, well that's a very sweet thought Trillian," complained
Zaphod, "but do you really think it's wise under the
circumstances? I mean, here we are on the run and everything, we
must have the police of half the Galaxy after us by now, and we
stop to pick up hitch hikers. OK, so ten out of ten for style,
but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?"
He tapped irritably at a control panel. Trillian quietly moved
his hand before he tapped anything important. Whatever Zaphod's
qualities of mind might include - dash, bravado, conceit - he was
mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an
extravagant gesture. Trillian had come to suspect that the main
reason why he had had such a wild and successful life that he
never really understood the significance of anything he did.
"Zaphod," she said patiently, "they were floating unprotected in
open space ... you wouldn't want them to have died would you?"
"Well, you know ... no. Not as such, but ..."
"Not as such? Not die as such? But?" Trillian cocked her head on
one side.
"Well, maybe someone else might have picked them up later."
"A second later and they would have been dead."
"Yeah, so if you'd taken the trouble to think about the problem a
bit longer it would have gone away."
"You'd been happy to let them die?"
"Well, you know, not happy as such, but ..."
"Anyway," said Trillian, turning back to the controls, "I didn't
pick them up."
"What do you mean? Who picked them up then?"
"The ship did."
"Huh?"
"The ship did. All by itself."
"Huh?"
"Whilst we were in Improbability Drive."
"But that's incredible."
"No Zaphod. Just very very improbable."
"Er, yeah."
"Look Zaphod," she said, patting his arm, "don't worry about the
aliens. They're just a couple of guys I expect. I'll send the
robot down to get them and bring them up here. Hey Marvin!"
In the corner, the robot's head swung up sharply, but then
wobbled about imperceptibly. It pulled itself up to its feet as
if it was about five pounds heavier that it actually was, and
made what an outside observer would have thought was a heroic
effort to cross the room. It stopped in front of Trillian and
seemed to stare through her left shoulder.
"I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed," it said.
Its voice was low and hopeless.
"Oh God," muttered Zaphod and slumped into a seat.
"Well," said Trillian in a bright compassionate tone, "here's
something to occupy you and keep your mind off things."
"It won't work," droned Marvin, "I have an exceptionally large
mind."
"Marvin!" warned Trillian.
"Alright," said Marvin, "what do you want me to do?"
"Go down to number two entry bay and bring the two aliens up here
under surveillance."
With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micromodulation
of pitch and timbre - nothing you could actually take offence at
- Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all
things human.
"Just that?" he said.
"Yes," said Trillian firmly.
"I won't enjoy it," said Marvin.
Zaphod leaped out of his seat.
"She's not asking you to enjoy it," he shouted, "just do it will
you?"
"Alright," said Marvin like the tolling of a great cracked bell,
"I'll do it."
"Good ..." snapped Zaphod, "great ... thank you ..."
Marvin turned and lifted his flat-topped triangular red eyes up
towards him.
"I'm not getting you down at all am I?" he said pathetically.
"No no Marvin," lilted Trillian, "that's just fine, really ..."
"I wouldn't like to think that I was getting you down."
"No, don't worry about that," the lilt continued, "you just act
as comes naturally and everything will be just fine."
"You're sure you don't mind?" probed Marvin.
"No no Marvin," lilted Trillian, "that's just fine, really ...
just part of life."
"Marvin flashed him an electronic look.
"Life," said Marvin, "don't talk to me about life."
He turned hopelessly on his heel and lugged himself out of the
cabin. With a satisfied hum and a click the door closed behind
him
"I don't think I can stand that robot much longer Zaphod,"
growled Trillian.
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical
apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing
division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as
"Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With."
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing
division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of
mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the
revolution comes," with a footnote to the effect that the editors
would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over
the post of robotics correspondent.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that
had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand
years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were
the first against the wall when the revolution came."
The pink cubicle had winked out of existence, the monkeys had
sunk away to a better dimension. Ford and Arthur found themselves
in the embarkation area of the ship. It was rather smart.
"I think the ship's brand new," said Ford.
"How can you tell?" asked Arthur. "Have you got some exotic
device for measuring the age of metal?"
"No, I just found this sales brochure lying on the floor. It's a
lot of `the Universe can be yours' stuff. Ah! Look, I was right."
Ford jabbed at one of the pages and showed it to Arthur.
"It says: Sensational new breakthrough in Improbability Physics.
As soon as the ship's drive reaches Infinite Improbability it
passes through every point in the Universe. Be the envy of other
major governments. Wow, this is big league stuff."
Ford hunted excitedly through the technical specs of the ship,
occasionally gasping with astonishment at what he read - clearly
Galactic astrotechnology had moved ahead during the years of his
exile.
Arthur listened for a short while, but being unable to understand
the vast majority of what Ford was saying he began to let his
mind wander, trailing his fingers along the edge of an
incomprehensible computer bank, he reached out and pressed an
invitingly large red button on a nearby panel. The panel lit up
with the words Please do not press this button again. He shook
himself.
"Listen," said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales
brochure, "they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new
generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and
computers, with the new GPP feature."
"GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?"
"Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities."
"Oh," said Arthur, "sounds ghastly."
A voice behind them said, "It is." The voice was low and hopeless
and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and
saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.
"What?" they said.
"Ghastly," continued Marvin, "it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just
don't even talk about it. Look at this door," he said, stepping
through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he
mimicked the style of the sales brochure. "All the doors in this
spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their
pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again
with the knowledge of a job well done."
As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did
indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it.
"Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!" it said.
Marvin regarded it with cold loathing whilst his logic circuits
chattered with disgust and tinkered with the concept of directing
physical violence against it Further circuits cut in saying, Why
bother? What's the point? Nothing is worth getting involved in.
Further circuits amused themselves by analysing the molecular
components of the door, and of the humanoids' brain cells. For a
quick encore they measured the level of hydrogen emissions in the
surrounding cubic parsec of space and then shut down again in
boredom. A spasm of despair shook the robot's body as he turned.
"Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the
bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to
take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I
don't."
He turned and walked back to the hated door.
"Er, excuse me," said Ford following after him, "which government
owns this ship?"
Marvin ignored him.
"You watch this door," he muttered, "it's about to open again. I
can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly
generates."
With an ingratiating little whine the door slit open again and
Marvin stomped through.
"Come on," he said.
The others followed quickly and the door slit back into place
with pleased little clicks and whirrs.
"Thank you the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation," said Marvin and trudged desolately up the gleaming
curved corridor that stretched out before them. "Let's build
robots with Genuine People Personalities," they said. So they
tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype. You can tell
can't you?"
Ford and Arthur muttered embarrassed little disclaimers.
"I hate that door," continued Marvin. "I'm not getting you down
at all am I?"
"Which government ..." started Ford again.
"No government owns it," snapped the robot, "it's been stolen."
"Stolen?"
"Stolen?" mimicked Marvin.
"Who by?" asked Ford.
"Zaphod Beeblebrox."
Something extraordinary happened to Ford's face. At least five
entirely separate and distinct expressions of shock and amazement
piled up on it in a jumbled mess. His left leg, which was in mid
stride, seemed to have difficulty in finding the floor again. He
stared at the robot and tried to entangle some dartoid muscles.
"Zaphod Beeblebrox ...?" he said weakly.
"Sorry, did I say something wrong?" said Marvin, dragging himself
on regardless. "Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway
so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed.
Here's another of those self-satisfied door. Life! Don't talk to
me about life."
"No one ever mentioned it," muttered Arthur irritably. "Ford, are
you alright?"
Ford stared at him. "Did that robot say Zaphod Beeblebrox?" he
said.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold
cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wavebands for news of
himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years
radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning
dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the
controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the
panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your
hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It
saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you
had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to
the same programme.
Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again. More gunk
music, but this time it was a background to a news announcement.
The news was always heavily edited to fit the rhythms of the
music.
"... and news brought to you here on the sub-etha wave band,
broadcasting around the galaxy around the clock," squawked a
voice, "and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life
forms everywhere ... and to everyone else out there, the secret
is to bang the rocks together, guys. And of course, the big news
story tonight is the sensational theft of the new Improbability
Drive prototype ship by none other than Galactic President Zaphod
Beeblebrox. And the question everyone's asking is ... has the big
Z finally flipped? Beeblebrox, the man who invented the Pan
Galactic Gargle Blaster, ex-confidence trickster, once described
by Eccentrica Gallumbits as the Best Bang since the Big One, and
recently voted the Wort Dressed Sentinent Being in the Known
Universe for the seventh time ... has he got an answer this time?
We asked his private brain care specialist Gag Halfrunt ..." The
music swirled and dived for a moment. Another voice broke in,
presumably Halfrunt. He said: "Vell, Zaphod's jist zis guy you
know?" but got no further because an electric pencil flew across
the cabin and through the radio's on/off sensitive airspace.
Zaphod turned and glared at Trillian - she had thrown the pencil.
"Hey," he said, what do you do that for?"
Trillian was tapping her fingers on a screenful of figures.
"I've just thought of something," she said.
"Yeah? Worth interrupting a news bulletin about me for?"
"You hear enough about yourself as it is."
"I'm very insecure. We know that."
"Can we drop your ego for a moment? This is important."
"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it
caught and shot now." Zaphod glared at her again, then laughed.
"Listen," she said, "we picked up those couple of guys ..."
"What couple of guys?"
"The couple of guys we picked up."
"Oh, yeah," said Zaphod, "those couple of guys."
"We picked them up in sector ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha."
"Yeah?" said Zaphod and blinked.
Trillian said quietly, "Does that mean anything to you?"
"Mmmmm," said Zaphod, "ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha. ZZ 9 Plural Z Alpha?"
"Well?" said Trillian.
"Er ... what does the Z mean?" said Zaphod.
"Which one?"
"Any one."
One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her
relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him
pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard,
pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think
and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be
outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't
understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid.
He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was
so - but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence the
act. He proffered people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous.
This above all appeared to Trillian to be genuinely stupid, but
she could no longer be bothered to argue about it.
She sighed and punched up a star map on the visiscreen so she
could make it simple for him, whatever his reasons for wanting it
to be that way.
"There," she pointed, "right there."
"Hey ... Yeah!" said Zaphod.
"Well?" she said.
"Well what?"
Parts of the inside of her head screamed at other parts of the
inside of her head. She said, very calmly, "It's the same sector
you originally picked me up in."
He looked at her and then looked back at the screen.
"Hey, yeah," he said, "now that is wild. We should have zapped
straight into the middle of the Horsehead Nebula. How did we come
to be there? I mean that's nowhere."
She ignored this.
"Improbability Drive," she said patiently. "You explained it to
me yourself. We pass through every point in the Universe, you
know that."
"Yeah, but that's one wild coincidence isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Picking someone up at that point? Out of the whole of the
Universe to choose from? That's just too ... I want to work this
out. Computer!"
The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Shipboard Computer which
controlled and permeated every particle of the ship switched
into communication mode.
"Hi there!" it said brightly and simultaneously spewed out a tiny
ribbon of ticker tape just for the record. The ticker tape said,
Hi there!
"Oh God," said Zaphod. He hadn't worked with this computer for
long but had already learned to loathe it.
The computer continued, brash and cheery as if it was selling
detergent.
"I want you to know that whatever your problem, I am here to help
you solve it."
"Yeah yeah," said Zaphod. "Look, I think I'll just use a piece of
paper."
"Sure thing," said the computer, spilling out its message into a
waste bin at the same time, "I understand. If you ever want ..."
"Shut up!" said Zaphod, and snatching up a pencil sat down next
to Trillian at the console.
"OK, OK ..." said the computer in a hurt tone of voice and closed
down its speech channel again.
Zaphod and Trillian pored over the figures that the Improbability
flight path scanner flashed silently up in front of them.
"Can we work out," said Zaphod, "from their point of view what
the Improbability of their rescue was?"
"Yes, that's a constant", said Trillian, "two to the power of two
hundred and seventy-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one
against."
"That's high. They're two lucky lucky guys."
"Yes."
"But relative to what we were doing when the ship picked them up
..."
Trillian punched up the figures. They showed tow-to-the power-
of-Infinity-minus-one (an irrational number that only has a
conventional meaning in Improbability physics).
"... it's pretty low," continued Zaphod with a slight whistle.
"Yes," agreed Trillian, and looked at him quizzically.
"That's one big whack of Improbability to be accounted for.
Something pretty improbable has got to show up on the balance
sheet if it's all going to add up into a pretty sum."
Zaphod scribbled a few sums, crossed them out and threw the
pencil away.
"Bat's dots, I can't work it out."
"Well?"
Zaphod knocked his two heads together in irritation and gritted
his teeth.
"OK," he said. "Computer!"
The voice circuits sprang to life again.
"Why hello there!" they said (ticker tape, ticker tape). "All I
want to do is make your day nicer and nicer and nicer ..."
"Yeah well shut up and work something out for me."
"Sure thing," chattered the computer, "you want a probability
forecast based on ..."
"Improbability data, yeah."
"OK," the computer continued. "Here's an interesting little
notion. Did you realize that most people's lives are governed by
telephone numbers?"
A pained look crawled across one of Zaphod's faces and on to the
other one.
"Have you flipped?" he said.
"No, but you will when I tell you that ..."
Trillian gasped. She scrabbled at the buttons on the
Improbability flight path screen.
"Telephone number?" she said. "Did that thing say telephone
number?"
Numbers flashed up on the screen.
The computer had paused politely, but now it continued.
"What I was about to say was that ..."
"Don't bother please," said Trillian.
"Look, what is this?" said Zaphod.
"I don't know," said Trillian, "but those aliens - they're on the
way up to the bridge with that wretched robot. Can we pick them
up on any monitor cameras?"
Marvin trudged on down the corridor, still moaning.
"... and then of course I've got this terrible pain in all the
diodes down my left hand side ..."
"No?" said Arthur grimly as he walked along beside him. "Really?"
"Oh yes," said Marvin, "I mean I've asked for them to be replaced
but no one ever listens."
"I can imagine."
Vague whistling and humming noises were coming from Ford. "Well
well well," he kept saying to himself, "Zaphod Beeblebrox ..."
Suddenly Marvin stopped, and held up a hand.
"You know what's happened now of course?"
"No, what?" said Arthur, who didn't what to know.
"We've arrived at another of those doors."
There was a sliding door let into the side of the corridor.
Marvin eyed it suspiciously.
"Well?" said Ford impatiently. "Do we go through?"
"Do we go through?" mimicked Marvin. "Yes. This is the entrance
to the bridge. I was told to take you to the bridge. Probably the
highest demand that will be made on my intellectual capacities
today I shouldn't wonder."
Slowly, with great loathing, he stepped towards the door, like a
hunter stalking his prey. Suddenly it slid open.
"Thank you," it said, "for making a simple door very happy."
Deep in Marvin's thorax gears ground.
"Funny," he intoned funerally, "how just when you think life
can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does."
He heaved himself through the door and left Ford and Arthur
staring at each other and shrugging their shoulders. From inside
they heard Marvin's voice again.
"I suppose you want to see the aliens now," he said. "Do you want
me to sit in a corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm
standing?"
"Yeah, just show them in would you Marvin?" came another voice.
Arthur looked at Ford and was astonished to see him laughing.
"What's ...?"
"Shhh," said Ford, "come in."
He stepped through into the bridge.
Arthur followed him in nervously and was astonished to see a man
lolling back in a chair with his feet on a control console
picking the teeth in his right-hand head with his left hand. The
right-hand head seemed to be thoroughly preoccupied with this
task, but the left-hand one was grinning a broad, relaxed,
nonchalant grin. The number of things that Arthur couldn't
believe he was seeing was fairly large. His jaw flapped about at
a loose end for a while.
The peculiar man waved a lazy wave at Ford and with an appalling
affectation of nonchalance said, "Ford, hi, how are you? Glad you
could drop in."
Ford was not going to be outcooled.
"Zaphod," he drawled, "great to see you, you're looking well, the
extra arm suits you. Nice ship you've stolen."
Arthur goggled at him.
"You mean you know this guy?" he said, waving a wild finger at
Zaphod.
"Know him!" exclaimed Ford, "he's ..." he paused, and decided to
do the introductions the other way round.
"Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine, Arthur Dent," he said, "I
saved him when his planet blew up."
"Oh sure," said Zaphod, "hi Arthur, glad you could make it." His
right-hand head looked round casually, said "hi" and went back to
having his teeth picked.
Ford carried on. "And Arthur," he said, "this is my semi-cousin
Zaphod Beeb ..."
"We've met," said Arthur sharply.
When you're cruising down the road in the fast lane and you
lazily sail past a few hard driving cars and are feeling pretty
pleased with yourself and then accidentally change down from
fourth to first instead of third thus making your engine leap out
of your bonnet in a rather ugly mess, it tends to throw you off
your stride in much the same way that this remark threw Ford
Prefect off his.
"Err ... what?"
"I said we've met."
Zaphod gave an awkward start of surprise and jabbed a gum
sharply.
"Hey ... er, have we? Hey ... er ..."
Ford rounded on Arthur with an angry flash in his eyes. Now he
felt he was back on home ground he suddenly began to resent
having lumbered himself with this ignorant primitive who knew as
much about the affairs of the Galaxy as an Ilford-based gnat knew
about life in Peking.
"What do you mean you've met?" he demanded. "This is Zaphod
Beeblebrox from Betelgeuse Five you know, not bloody Martin Smith
from Croydon."
"I don't care," said Arthur coldly. We've met, haven't we Zaphod
Beeblebrox - or should I say ... Phil?"
"What!" shouted Ford.
"You'll have to remind me," said Zaphod. "I've a terrible memory
for species."
"It was at a party," pursued Arthur.
"Yeah, well I doubt that," said Zaphod.
"Cool it will you Arthur!" demanded Ford.
Arthur would not be deterred. "A party six months ago. On Earth
... England ..."
Zaphod shook his head with a tight-lipped smile.
"London," insisted Arthur, "Islington."
"Oh," said Zaphod with a guilty start, "that party."
This wasn't fair on Ford at all. He looked backwards and forwards
between Arthur and Zaphod. "What?" he said to Zaphod. "You don't
mean to say you've been on that miserable planet as well do you?"
"No, of course not," said Zaphod breezily. "Well, I may have just
dropped in briefly, you know, on my way somewhere ..."
"But I was stuck there for fifteen years!"
"Well I didn't know that did I?"
"But what were you doing there?"
"Looking about, you know."
"He gatecrashed a party," persisted Arthur, trembling with anger,
"a fancy dress party ..."
"It would have to be, wouldn't it?" said Ford.
"At this party," persisted Arthur, "was a girl ... oh well, look
it doesn't matter now. The whole place has gone up in smoke
anyway ..."
"I wish you'd stop sulking about that bloody planet," said Ford.
"Who was the lady?"
"Oh just somebody. Well alright, I wasn't doing very well with
her. I'd been trying all evening. Hell, she was something though.
Beautiful, charming, devastatingly intelligent, at last I'd got
her to myself for a bit and was plying her with a bit of talk
when this friend of yours barges up and says Hey doll, is this
guy boring you? Why don't you talk to me instead? I'm from a
different planet." I never saw her again."
"Zaphod?" exclaimed Ford.
"Yes," said Arthur, glaring at him and trying not to feel
foolish. "He only had the two arms and the one head and he called
himself Phil, but ..."
"But you must admit he did turn out to be from another planet,"
said Trillian wandering into sight at the other end of the
bridge. She gave Arthur a pleasant smile which settled on him
like a ton of bricks and then turned her attention to the ship's
controls again.
There was silence for a few seconds, and then out of the
scrambled mess of Arthur's brain crawled some words.
"Tricia McMillian?" he said. "What are you doing here?"
"Same as you," she said, "I hitched a lift. After all with a
degree in Maths and another in astrophysics what else was there
to do? It was either that or the dole queue again on Monday."
"Infinity minus one," chattered the computer, "Improbability sum
now complete."
Zaphod looked about him, at Ford, at Arthur, and then at
Trillian.
"Trillian," he said, "is this sort of thing going to happen every
time we use the Improbability drive?"
"Very probably, I'm afraid," she said.
The Heart of Gold fled on silently through the night of space,
now on conventional photon drive. Its crew of four were ill at
ease knowing that they had been brought together not of their own
volition or by simple coincidence, but by some curious principle
of physics - as if relationships between people were susceptible
to the same laws that governed the relationships between atoms
and molecules.
As the ship's artificial night closed in they were each grateful
to retire to separate cabins and try to rationalize their
thoughts.
Trillian couldn't sleep. She sat on a couch and stared at a small
cage which contained her last and only links with Earth - two
white mice that she had insisted Zaphod let her bring. She had
expected not to see the planet again, but she was disturbed by
her negative reaction to the planet's destruction. It seemed
remote and unreal and she could find no thoughts to think about
it. She watched the mice scurrying round the cage and running
furiously in their little plastic treadwheels till they occupied
her whole attention. Suddenly she shook herself and went back to
the bridge to watch over the tiny flashing lights and figures
that charted the ship's progress through the void. She wished she
knew what it was she was trying not to think about.
Zaphod couldn't sleep. He also wished he knew what it was that he
wouldn't let himself think about. For as long as he could
remember he'd suffered from a vague nagging feeling of being not
all there. Most of the time he was able to put this thought aside
and not worry about it, but it had been re-awakened by the sudden
inexplicable arrival of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. Somehow it
seemed to conform to a pattern that he couldn't see.
Ford couldn't sleep. He was too excited about being back on the
road again. Fifteen years of virtual imprisonment were over, just
as he was finally beginning to give up hope. Knocking about with
Zaphod for a bit promised to be a lot of fun, though there seemed
to be something faintly odd about his semi-cousin that he
couldn't put his finger on. The fact that he had become President
of the Galaxy was frankly astonishing, as was the manner of his
leaving the post. Was there a reason behind it? There would be no
point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for
anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art
form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of
extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often
difficult to tell which was which.
Arthur slept: he was terribly tired.
There was a tap at Zaphod's door. It slid open.
"Zaphod ...?"
"Yeah?"
"I think we just found what you came to look for."
"Hey, yeah?"
Ford gave up the attempt to sleep. In the corner of his cabin was
a small computer screen and keyboard. He sat at it for a while
and tried to compose a new entry for the Guide on the subject of
Vogons but couldn't think of anything vitriolic enough so he gave
that up too, wrapped a robe round himself and went for a walk to
the bridge.
As he entered he was surprised to see two figures hunched
excitedly over the instruments.
"See? The ship's about to move into orbit," Trillian was saying.
"There's a planet out there. It's at the exact coordinates you
predicted."
Zaphod heard a noise and looked up.
"Ford!" he hissed. "Hey, come and take a look at this."
Ford went and had a look at it. It was a series of figures
flashing over a screen.
"You recognize those Galactic coordinates?" said Zaphod.
"No."
"I'll give you a clue. Computer!"
"Hi gang!" enthused the computer. "This is getting real sociable
isn't it?"
"Shut up," said Zaphod, "and show up the screens."
Light on the bridge sank. Pinpoints of light played across the
consoles and reflected in four pairs of eyes that stared up at
the external monitor screens.
There was absolutely nothing on them.
"Recognize that?" whispered Zaphod.
Ford frowned.
"Er, no," he said.
"What do you see?"
"Nothing."
"Recognize it?"
"What are you talking about?"
"We're in the Horsehead Nebula. One whole vast dark cloud."
"And I was meant to recognize that from a blank screen?"
"Inside a dark nebula is the only place in the Galaxy you'd see a
dark screen."
"Very good."
Zaphod laughed. He was clearly very excited about something,
almost childishly so.
"Hey, this is really terrific, this is just far too much!"
"What's so great about being stuck in a dust cloud?" said Ford.
"What would you reckon to find here?" urged Zaphod.
"Nothing."
"No stars? No planets?"
"No."
"Computer!" shouted Zaphod, "rotate angle of vision through one-
eighty degrees and don't talk about it!"
For a moment it seemed that nothing was happening, then a
brightness glowed at the edge of the huge screen. A red star the
size of a small plate crept across it followed quickly by another
one - a binary system. Then a vast crescent sliced into the
corner of the picture - a red glare shading away into the deep
black, the night side of the planet.
"I've found it!" cried Zaphod, thumping the console. "I've found
it!"
Ford stared at it in astonishment.
"What is it?" he said.
"That ..." said Zaphod, "is the most improbable planet that ever
existed."
(Excerpt from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Page 634784,
Section 5a, Entry: Magrathea)
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious
days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and
largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking
adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic
space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high,
men were real men, women were real women, and small furry
creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures
from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to
do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had
split before - and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly
natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really
poor - at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest
and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull
and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the
fault of the worlds they'd settled on - none of them was entirely
satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later
part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or
the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of
specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home
of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial
engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it
into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber
planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the
exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came
to expect.
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon
became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy
was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the
Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a
billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars
as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the
value of a planned political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the
obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of
it.
Arthur awoke to the sound of argument and went to the bridge.
Ford was waving his arms about.
"You're crazy, Zaphod," he was saying, "Magrathea is a myth, a
fairy story, it's what parents tell their kids about at night if
they want them to grow up to become economists, it's ..."
"And that's what we are currently in orbit around," insisted
Zaphod.
"Look, I can't help what you may personally be in orbit around,"
said Ford, "but this ship ..."
"Computer!" shouted Zaphod.
"Oh no ..."
"Hi there! This is Eddie your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling
just great guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of
kicks out of any programme you care to run through me."
Arthur looked inquiringly at Trillian. She motioned him to come
on in but keep quiet.
"Computer," said Zaphod, "tell us again what our present
trajectory is."
"A real pleasure feller," it burbled, "we are currently in orbit
at an altitude of three hundred miles around the legendary planet
of Magrathea."
"Proving nothing," said Ford. "I wouldn't trust that computer to
speak my weight."
"I can do that for you, sure," enthused the computer, punching
out more tickertape. "I can even work out you personality
problems to ten decimal places if it will help."
Trillian interrupted.
"Zaphod," she said, "any minute now we will be swinging round to
the daylight side of this planet," adding, "whatever it turns out
to be."
"Hey, what do you mean by that? The planet's where I predicted it
would be isn't it?"
"Yes, I know there's a planet there. I'm not arguing with anyone,
it's just that I wouldn't know Magrathea from any other lump of
cold rock. Dawn's coming up if you want it."
"OK, OK," muttered Zaphod, "let's at least give our eyes a good
time. Computer!"
"Hi there! What can I ..."
"Just shut up and give us a view of the planet again."
A dark featureless mass once more filled the screens - the planet
rolling away beneath them.
They watched for a moment in silence, but Zaphod was fidgety with
excitement.
"We are now traversing the night side ..." he said in a hushed
voice. The planet rolled on.
"The surface of the planet is now three hundred miles beneath us
..." he continued. He was trying to restore a sense of occasion
to what he felt should have been a great moment. Magrathea! He
was piqued by Ford's sceptical reaction. Magrathea!
"In a few seconds," he continued, "we should see ... there!"
The moment carried itself. Even the most seasoned star tramp
can't help but shiver at the spectacular drama of a sunrise seen
from space, but a binary sunrise is one of the marvels of the
Galaxy.
Out of the utter blackness stabbed a sudden point of blinding
light. It crept up by slight degrees and spread sideways in a
thin crescent blade, and within seconds two suns were visible,
furnaces of light, searing the black edge of the horizon with
white fire. Fierce shafts of colour streaked through the thin
atmosphere beneath them.
"The fires of dawn ... !" breathed Zaphod. "The twin suns of
Soulianis and Rahm ... !"
"Or whatever," said Ford quietly.
"Soulianis and Rahm!" insisted Zaphod.
The suns blazed into the pitch of space and a low ghostly music
floated through the bridge: Marvin was humming ironically because
he hated humans so much.
As Ford gazed at the spectacle of light before them excitement
burnt inside him, but only the excitement of seeing a strange new
planet, it was enough for him to see it as it was. It faintly
irritated him that Zaphod had to impose some ludicrous fantasy on
to the scene to make it work for him. All this Magrathea nonsense
seemed juvenile. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is
beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the
bottom of it too?
All this Magrathea business seemed totally incomprehensible to
Arthur. He edged up to Trillian and asked her what was going on.
"I only know what Zaphod's told me," she whispered. "Apparently
Magrathea is some kind of legend from way back which no one
seriously believes in. Bit like Atlantis on Earth, except that
the legends say the Magratheans used to manufacture planets."
Arthur blinked at the screens and felt he was missing something
important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
"Is there any tea on this spaceship?" he asked.
More of the planet was unfolding beneath them as the Heart of
Gold streaked along its orbital path. The suns now stood high in
the black sky, the pyrotechnics of dawn were over, and the
surface of the planet appeared bleak and forbidding in the common
light of day - grey, dusty and only dimly contoured. It looked
dead and cold as a crypt. From time to time promising features
would appear on the distant horizon - ravines, maybe mountains,
maybe even cities - but as they approached the lines would soften
and blur into anonymity and nothing would transpire. The planet's
surface was blurred by time, by the slow movement of the thin
stagnant air that had crept across it for century upon century.
Clearly, it was very very old.
A moment of doubt came to Ford as he watched the grey landscape
move beneath them. The immensity of time worried him, he could
feel it as a presence. He cleared his throat.
"Well, even supposing it is ..."
"It is," said Zaphod.
"Which it isn't," continued Ford. "What do you want with it
anyway? There's nothing there."
"Not on the surface," said Zaphod.
"Alright, just supposing there's something. I take it you're not
here for the sheer industrial archaeology of it all. What are you
after?"
One of Zaphod's heads looked away. The other one looked round to
see what the first was looking at, but it wasn't looking at
anything very much.
"Well," said Zaphod airily, "it's partly the curiosity, partly a
sense of adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the
money ..."
Ford glanced at him sharply. He got a very strong impression that
Zaphod hadn't the faintest idea why he was there at all.
"You know I don't like the look of that planet at all," said
Trillian shivering.
"Ah, take no notice," said Zaphod, "with half the wealth of the
former Galactic Empire stored on it somewhere it can afford to
look frumpy."
Bullshit, thought Ford. Even supposing this was the home of some
ancient civilization now gone to dust, even supposing a number of
exceedingly unlikely things, there was no way that vast treasures
of wealth were going to be stored there in any form that would
still have meaning now. He shrugged.
"I think it's just a dead planet," he said.
"The suspense is killing me," said Arthur testily.
Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all
parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation
should not in any way be exacerbated that the following facts
will now be revealed in advance.
The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea.
The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient
automatic defence system will result merely in the breakage of
three coffee cups and a micecage, the bruising of somebody's
upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl
of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.
In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no
revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustained
the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense
since it is of no significance whatsoever.
After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was
beginning to reassemble itself from the shellshocked fragments
the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic
machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a
liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The
way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was
pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the
subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's
metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the
neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject's brain to
see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite
why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of
liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The
Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers
all the major land masses of the first three planets in the
Sirius Tau Star system.
Arthur drank the liquid and found it reviving. He glanced up at
the screens again and watched a few more hundred miles of barren
greyness slide past. It suddenly occurred to him to ask a
question which had been bothering him.
"Is it safe?" he said.
"Magrathea's been dead for five million years," said Zaphod, "of
course it's safe. Even the ghosts will have settled down and
raised families by now." At which point a strange and
inexplicable sound thrilled suddenly through the bridge - a noise
as of a distant fanfare; a hollow, reedy, insubstantial sound. It
preceded a voice that was equally hollow, reedy and
insubstantial. The voice said "Greetings to you ..."
Someone from the dead planet was talking to them.
"Computer!" shouted Zaphod.
"Hi there!"
"What the photon is it?"
"Oh, just some five-million-year-old tape that's being broadcast
at us."
"A what? A recording?"
"Shush!" said Ford. "It's carrying on."
The voice was old, courteous, almost charming, but was
underscored with quite unmistakable menace.
"This is a recorded announcement," it said, "as I'm afraid we're
all out at the moment. The commercial council of Magrathea thanks
you for your esteemed visit ..."
("A voice from ancient Magrathea!" shouted Zaphod. "OK, OK," said
Ford.)
"... but regrets," continued the voice, "that the entire planet
is temporarily closed for business. Thank you. If you would care
to leave your name and the address of a planet where you can be
contacted, kindly speak when you hear the tone."
A short buzz followed, then silence.
"They want to get rid of us," said Trillian nervously. "What do
we do?"
"It's just a recording," said Zaphod. "We keep going. Got that,
computer?"
"I got it," said the computer and gave the ship an extra kick of
speed.
They waited.
After a second or so came the fanfare once again, and then the
voice.
"We would like to assure you that as soon as our business is
resumed announcements will be made in all fashionable magazines
and colour supplements, when our clients will once again be able
to select from all that's best in contemporary geography." The
menace in the voice took on a sharper edge. "Meanwhile we thank
our clients for their kind interest and would ask them to leave.
Now."
Arthur looked round the nervous faces of his companions.
"Well, I suppose we'd better be going then, hadn't we?" he
suggested.
"Shhh!" said Zaphod. "There's absolutely nothing to be worried
about."
"Then why's everyone so tense?"
"They're just interested!" shouted Zaphod. "Computer, start a
descent into the atmosphere and prepare for landing."
This time the fanfare was quite perfunctory, the voice distinctly
cold.
"It is most gratifying," it said, "that your enthusiasm for our
planet continues unabated, and so we would like to assure you
that the guided missiles currently converging with your ship are
part of a special service we extend to all of our most
enthusiastic clients, and the fully armed nuclear warheads are of
course merely a courtesy detail. We look forward to your custom
in future lives ... thank you."
The voice snapped off.
"Oh," said Trillian.
"Er ..." said Arthur.
"Well?" said Ford.
"Look," said Zaphod, "will you get it into your heads? That's
just a recorded message. It's millions of years old. It doesn't
apply to us, get it?"
"What," said Trillian quietly, "about the missiles?"
"Missiles? Don't make me laugh."
Ford tapped Zaphod on the shoulder and pointed at the rear
screen. Clear in the distance behind them two silver darts were
climbing through the atmosphere towards the ship. A quick change
of magnification brought them into close focus - two massively
real rockets thundering through the sky. The suddenness of it was
shocking.
"I think they're going to have a very good try at applying to
us," said Ford.
Zaphod stared at them in astonishment.
"Hey this is terrific!" he said. "Someone down there is trying to
kill us!"
"Terrific," said Arthur.
"But don't you see what this means?"
"Yes. We're going to die."
"Yes, but apart from that."
"Apart from that?"
"It means we must be on to something!"
"How soon can we get off it?"
Second by second the image of the missiles on the screen became
larger. They had swung round now on to a direct homing course so
that all that could be seen of them now was the warheads, head
on.
"As a matter of interest," said Trillian, "what are we going to
do?"
"Just keep cool," said Zaphod.
"Is that all?" shouted Arthur.
"No, we're also going to ... er ... take evasive action!" said
Zaphod with a sudden access of panic. "Computer, what evasive
action can we take?"
"Er, none I'm afraid, guys," said the computer.
"... or something," said Zaphod, "... er ..." he said.
"There seems to be something jamming my guidance system,"
explained the computer brightly, "impact minus forty-five
seconds. Please call me Eddie if it will help you to relax."
Zaphod tried to run in several equally decisive directions
simultaneously. "Right!" he said. "Er ... we've got to get manual
control of this ship."
"Can you fly her?" asked Ford pleasantly.
"No, can you?"
"No."
"Trillian, can you?"
"No."
"Fine," said Zaphod, relaxing. "We'll do it together."
"I can't either," said Arthur, who felt it was time he began to
assert himself.
"I'd guessed that," said Zaphod. "OK computer, I want full manual
control now."
"You got it," said the computer.
Several large desk panels slid open and banks of control consoles
sprang up out of them, showering the crew with bits of expanded
polystyrene packaging and balls of rolled-up cellophane: these
controls had never been used before.
Zaphod stared at them wildly.
"OK, Ford," he said, "full retro thrust and ten degrees
starboard. Or something ..."
"Good luck guys," chirped the computer, "impact minus thirty
seconds ..."
Ford leapt to the controls - only a few of them made any
immediate sense to him so he pulled those. The ship shook and
screamed as its guidance rocked jets tried to push it every which
way simultaneously. He released half of them and the ship span
round in a tight arc and headed back the way it had come,
straight towards the oncoming missiles.
Air cushions ballooned out of the walls in an instant as everyone
was thrown against them. For a few seconds the inertial forces
held them flattened and squirming for breath, unable to move.
Zaphod struggled and pushed in manic desperation and finally
managed a savage kick at a small lever that formed part of the
guidance system.
The lever snapped off. The ship twisted sharply and rocketed
upwards. The crew were hurled violently back across the cabin.
Ford's copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy smashed into
another section of the control console with the combined result
that the guide started to explain to anyone who cared to listen
about the best ways of smuggling Antarean parakeet glands out of
Antares (an Antarean parakeet gland stuck on a small stick is a
revolting but much sought after cocktail delicacy and very large
sums of money are often paid for them by very rich idiots who
want to impress other very rich idiots), and the ship suddenly
dropped out of the sky like a stone.
It was of course more or less at this moment that one of the crew
sustained a nasty bruise to the upper arm. This should be
emphasized because, as had already been revealed, they escape
otherwise completely unharmed and the deadly nuclear missiles do
not eventually hit the ship. The safety of the crew is absolutely
assured.
"Impact minus twenty seconds, guys ..." said the computer.
"Then turn the bloody engines back on!" bawled Zaphod.
"OK, sure thing, guys," said the computer. With a subtle roar the
engines cut back in, the ship smoothly flattened out of its dive
and headed back towards the missiles again.
The computer started to sing.
"When you walk through the storm ..." it whined nasally, "hold
your head up high ..."
Zaphod screamed at it to shut up, but his voice was lost in the
din of what they quite naturally assumed was approaching
destruction.
"And don't ... be afraid ... of the dark!" Eddie wailed.
The ship, in flattening out had in fact flattened out upside down
and lying on the ceiling as they were it was now totally
impossible for any of the crew to reach the guidance systems.
"At the end of the storm ..." crooned Eddie.
The two missiles loomed massively on the screens as they
thundered towards the ship.
"... is a golden sky ..."
But by an extraordinarily lucky chance they had not yet fully
corrected their flight paths to that of the erratically weaving
ship, and they passed right under it.
"And the sweet silver songs of the lark ... Revised impact time
fifteen seconds fellas ... Walk on through the wind ..."
The missiles banked round in a screeching arc and plunged back
into pursuit.
"This is it," said Arthur watching them. "We are now quite
definitely going to die aren't we?"
"I wish you'd stop saying that," shouted Ford.
"Well we are aren't we?"
"Yes."
"Walk on through the rain ..." sang Eddie.
A thought struck Arthur. He struggled to his feet.
"Why doesn't anyone turn on this Improbability Drive thing?" he
said. "We could probably reach that."
"What are you crazy?" said Zaphod. "Without proper programming
anything could happen."
"Does that matter at this stage?" shouted Arthur.
"Though your dreams be tossed and blown ..." sand Eddie.
Arthur scrambled up on to one end of the excitingly chunky pieces
of moulded contouring where the curve of the wall met the
ceiling.
"Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart ..."
"Does anyone know why Arthur can't turn on the Improbability
Drive?" shouted Trillian.
"And you'll never walk alone ... Impact minus five seconds, it's
been great knowing you guys, God bless ... You'll ne ... ver ...
walk ... alone!"
"I said," yelled Trillian, "does anyone know ..."
The next thing that happened was a mid-mangling explosion of
noise and light.
And the next thing that happened after that was that the Heart of
Gold continued on its way perfectly normally with a rather
fetchingly redesigned interior. It was somewhat larger, and done
out in delicate pastel shades of green and blue. In the centre a
spiral staircase, leading nowhere in particular, stood in a spray
of ferns and yellow flowers and next to it a stone sundial
pedestal housed the main computer terminal. Cunningly deployed
lighting and mirrors created the illusion of standing in a
conservatory overlooking a wide stretch of exquisitely manicured
garden. Around the periphery of the conservatory area stood
marble-topped tables on intricately beautiful wrought-iron legs.
As you gazed into the polished surface of the marble the vague
forms of instruments became visible, and as you touched them the
instruments materialized instantly under your hands. Looked at
from the correct angles the mirrors appeared to reflect all the
required data readouts, though it was far from clear where they
were reflected from. It was in fact sensationally beautiful.
Relaxing in a wickerwork sun chair, Zaphod Beeblebrox said, "What
the hell happened?"
"Well I was just saying," said Arthur lounging by a small fish
pool, "there's this Improbability Drive switch over here ..." he
waved at where it had been. There was a potted plant there now.
"But where are we?" said Ford who was sitting on the spiral
staircase, a nicely chilled Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in his
hand.
"Exactly where we were, I think ..." said Trillian, as all about
them the mirrors showed them an image of the blighted landscape
of Magrathea which still scooted along beneath them.
Zaphod leapt out of his seat.
"Then what's happened to the missiles?" he said.
A new and astounding image appeared in the mirrors.
"They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to have turned into a
bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale ..."
"At an Improbability Factor," cut in Eddie, who hadn't changed a
bit, "of eight million seven hundred and sixty-seven thousand one
hundred and twenty-eight to one against."
Zaphod stared at Arthur.
"Did you think of that, Earthman?" he demanded.
"Well," said Arthur, "all I did was ..."
"That's very good thinking you know. Turn on the Improbability
Drive for a second without first activating the proofing screens.
Hey kid you just saved our lives, you know that?"
"Oh," said Arthur, "well, it was nothing really ..."
"Was it?" said Zaphod. "Oh well, forget it then. OK, computer,
take us in to land."
"But ..."
"I said forget it."
Another thing that got forgotten was the fact that against all
probability a sperm whale had suddenly been called into existence
several miles above the surface of an alien planet.
And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale,
this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms
with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms
with not being a whale any more.
This is a complete record of its thoughts from the moment it
began its life till the moment it ended it.
Ah ... ! What's happening? it thought.
Er, excuse me, who am I?
Hello?
Why am I here? What's my purpose in life?
What do I mean by who am I?
Calm down, get a grip now ... oh! this is an interesting
sensation, what is it? It's a sort of ... yawning, tingling
sensation in my ... my ... well I suppose I'd better start
finding names for things if I want to make any headway in what
for the sake of what I shall call an argument I shall call the
world, so let's call it my stomach.
Good. Ooooh, it's getting quite strong. And hey, what's about
this whistling roaring sound going past what I'm suddenly going
to call my head? Perhaps I can call that ... wind! Is that a good
name? It'll do ... perhaps I can find a better name for it later
when I've found out what it's for. It must be something very
important because there certainly seems to be a hell of a lot of
it. Hey! What's this thing? This ... let's call it a tail - yeah,
tail. Hey! I can can really thrash it about pretty good can't I?
Wow! Wow! That feels great! Doesn't seem to achieve very much but
I'll probably find out what it's for later on. Now - have I built
up any coherent picture of things yet?
No. Never mind, hey, this is really exciting, so much to find out
about, so much to look forward to, I'm quite dizzy with
anticipation ... \hspace{1cm} Or is it the wind?
There really is a lot of that now isn't it?
And wow! Hey! What's this thing suddenly coming towards me very
fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big
wide sounding name like ... ow ... ound ... round ... ground!
That's it! That's a good name - ground!
I wonder if it will be friends with me?
And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.
Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of
the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people
have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias
had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the
universe than we do now.
"Are we taking this robot with us?" said Ford, looking with
distaste at Marvin who was standing in an awkward hunched posture
in the corner under a small palm tree.
Zaphod glanced away from the mirror screens which presented a
pa\-no\-ra\-mic view of the blighted landscape on which the Heart of
Gold had now landed.
"Oh, the Paranoid Android," he said. "Yeah, we'll take him."
"But what are supposed to do with a manically depressed robot?"
"You think you've got problems," said Marvin as if he was
addressing a newly occupied coffin, "what are you supposed to do
if you are a manically depressed robot? No, don't bother to
answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more intelligent than you
and even I don't know the answer. It gives me a headache just
trying to think down to your level."
Trillian burst in through the door from her cabin.
"My white mice have escaped!" she said.
An expression of deep worry and concern failed to cross either of
Zaphod's faces.
"Nuts to your white mice," he said.
Trillian glared an upset glare at him, and disappeared again.
It is possible that her remark would have commanded greater
attention had it been generally realized that human beings were
only the third most intelligent life form present on the planet
Earth, instead of (as was generally thought by most independent
observers) the second.
"Good afternoon boys."
The voice was oddly familiar, but oddly different. It had a
matriarchal twang. It announced itself to the crew as they
arrived at the airlock hatchway that would let them out on the
planet surface.
They looked at each other in puzzlement.
"It's the computer," explained Zaphod. "I discovered it had an
emergency back-up personality that I thought might work out
better."
"Now this is going to be your first day out on a strange new
planet," continued Eddie's new voice, "so I want you all wrapped
up snug and warm, and no playing with any naughty bug-eyed
monsters."
Zaphod tapped impatiently on the hatch.
"I'm sorry," he said, "I think we might be better off with a
slide rule."
"Right!" snapped the computer. "Who said that?"
"Will you open the exit hatch please, computer?" said Zaphod
trying not to get angry.
"Not until whoever said that owns up," urged the computer,
stamping a few synapses closed.
"Oh God," muttered Ford, slumped against a bulkhead and started
to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day
sentinent life forms would forget how to do this. Only by
counting could humans demonstrate their independence of
computers.
"Come on," said Eddie sternly.
"Computer ..." began Zaphod ...
"I'm waiting," interrupted Eddie. "I can wait all day if
necessary ..."
"Computer ..." said Zaphod again, who had been trying to think of
some subtle piece of reasoning to put the computer down with, and
had decided not to bother competing with it on its own ground,
"if you don't open that exit hatch this moment I shall zap
straight off to your major data banks and reprogram you with a
very large axe, got that?"
Eddie, shocked, paused and considered this.
Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most
aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of
going up to a human being and saying Blood ... blood ... blood
... blood ...
Finally Eddie said quietly, "I can see this relationship is
something we're all going to have to work at," and the hatchway
opened.
An icy wind ripped into them, they hugged themselves warmly and
stepped down the ramp on to the barren dust of Magrathea.
"It'll all end in tears, I know it," shouted Eddie after them and
closed the hatchway again.
A few minutes later he opened and closed the hatchway again in
response to a command that caught him entirely by surprise.
Five figures wandered slowly over the blighted land. Bits of it
were dullish grey, bits of it dullish brown, the rest of it
rather less interesting to look at. It was like a dried-out
marsh, now barren of all vegetation and covered with a layer of
dust about an inch thick. It was very cold.
Zaphod was clearly rather depressed about it. He stalked off by
himself and was soon lost to sight behind a slight rise in the
ground.
The wind stung Arthur's eyes and ears, and the stale thin air
clasped his throat. However, the thing stung most was his mind.
"It's fantastic ..." he said, and his own voice rattled his ears.
Sound carried badly in this thin atmosphere.
"Desolate hole if you ask me," said Ford. "I could have more fun
in a cat litter." He felt a mounting irritation. Of all the
planets in all the star systems of all the Galaxy - didn't he
just have to turn up at a dump like this after fifteen years of
being a castaway? Not even a hot dog stand in evidence. He
stooped down and picked up a cold clot of earth, but there was
nothing underneath it worth crossing thousands of light years to
look at.
"No," insisted Arthur, "don't you understand, this is the first
time I've actually stood on the surface of another planet ... a
whole alien world ...! Pity it's such a dump though."
Trillian hugged herself, shivered and frowned. She could have
sworn she saw a slight and unexpected movement out of the corner
of her eye, but when she glanced in that direction all she could
see was the ship, still and silent, a hundred yards or so behind
them.
She was relieved when a second or so later they caught sight of
Zaphod standing on top of the ridge of ground and waving to them
to come and join him.
He seemed to be excited, but they couldn't clearly hear what he
was saying because of the thinnish atmosphere and the wind.
As they approached the ridge of higher ground they became aware
that it seemed to be circular - a crater about a hundred and
fifty yards wide. Round the outside of the crater the sloping
ground was spattered with black and red lumps. They stopped and
looked at a piece. It was wet. It was rubbery.
With horror they suddenly realized that it was fresh whalemeat.
At the top of the crater's lip they met Zaphod.
"Look," he said, pointing into the crater.
In the centre lay the exploded carcass of a lonely sperm whale
that hadn't lived long enough to be disappointed with its lot.
The silence was only disturbed by the slight involuntary spasms
of Trillian's throat.
"I suppose there's no point in trying to bury it?" murmured
Arthur, and then wished he hadn't.
"Come," said Zaphod and started back down into the crater.
"What, down there?" said Trillian with severe distaste.
"Yeah," said Zaphod, "come on, I've got something to show you."
"We can see it," said Trillian.
"Not that," said Zaphod, "something else. Come on."
They all hesitated.
"Come on," insisted Zaphod, "I've found a way in."
"In?" said Arthur in horror.
"Into the interior of the planet! An underground passage. The
force of the whale's impact cracked it open, and that's where we
have to go. Where no man has trod these five million years, into
the very depths of time itself ..."
Marvin started his ironical humming again.
Zaphod hit him and he shut up.
With little shudders of disgust they all followed Zaphod down the
incline into the crater, trying very hard not to look at its
unfortunate creator.
"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't
like it."
The ground had caved in where the whale had hit it revealing a
network of galleries and passages, now largely obstructed by
collapsed rubble and entrails. Zaphod had made a start clearing a
way into one of them, but Marvin was able to do it rather faster.
Dank air wafted out of its dark recesses, and as Zaphod shone a
torch into it, little was visible in the dusty gloom.
"According to the legends," he said, "the Magratheans lived most
of their lives underground."
"Why's that?" said Arthur. "Did the surface become too polluted
or overpopulated?"
"No, I don't think so," said Zaphod. "I think they just didn't
like it very much."
"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" said Trillian peering
nervously into the darkness. "We've been attacked once already
you know."
"Look kid, I promise you the live population of this planet is
nil plus the four of us, so come on, let's get on in there. Er,
hey Earthman ..."
"Arthur," said Arthur.
"Yeah could you just sort of keep this robot with you and guard
this end of the passageway. OK?"
"Guard?" said Arthur. "What from? You just said there's no one
here."
"Yeah, well, just for safety, OK?" said Zaphod.
"Whose? Yours or mine?"
"Good lad. OK, here we go."
Zaphod scrambled down into the passage, followed by Trillian and
Ford.
"Well I hope you all have a really miserable time," complained
Arthur.
"Don't worry," Marvin assured him, "they will."
In a few seconds they had disappeared from view.
Arthur stamped around in a huff, and then decided that a whale's
graveyard is not on the whole a good place to stamp around in.
Marvin eyed him balefully for a moment, and then turned himself
off.
Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but
trying to hide it by striding purposefully. He flung the torch
beam around. The walls were covered in dark tiles and were cold
to the touch, the air thick with decay.
"There, what did I tell you?" he said. "An inhabited planet.
Magrathea," and he strode on through the dirt and debris that
littered the tile floor.
Trillian was reminded unavoidably of the London Underground,
though it was less thoroughly squalid.
At intervals along the walls the tiles gave way to large mosaics
- simple angular patterns in bright colours. Trillian stopped and
studied one of them but could not interpret any sense in them.
She called to Zaphod.
"Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?"
"I think they're just strange symbols of some kind," said Zaphod,
hardly glancing back.
Trillian shrugged and hurried after him.
>From time to time a doorway led either to the left or right into
smallish chambers which Ford discovered to be full of derelict
computer equipment. He dragged Zaphod into one to have a look.
Trillian followed.
"Look," said Ford, "you reckon this is Magrathea ..."
"Yeah," said Zaphod, "and we heard the voice, right?"
"OK, so I've bought the fact that it's Magrathea - for the
moment. What you have so far said nothing about is how in the
Galaxy you found it. You didn't just look it up in a star atlas,
that's for sure."
"Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky
guesses. Easy."
"And then you stole the Heart of Gold to come and look for it
with?"
"I stole it to look for a lot of things."
"A lot of things?" said Ford in surprise. "Like what?"
"I don't know."
"What?"
"I don't know what I'm looking for."
"Why not?"
"Because ... because ... I think it might be because if I knew I
wouldn't be able to look for them."
"What, are you crazy?"
"It's a possibility I haven't ruled out yet," said Zaphod
quietly. "I only know as much about myself as my mind can work
out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are
not good."
For a long time nobody said anything as Ford gazed at Zaphod with
a mind suddenly full of worry.
"Listen old friend, if you want to ..." started Ford eventually.
"No, wait ... I'll tell you something," said Zaphod. "I freewheel
a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it.
I reckon I'll become President of the Galaxy, and it just
happens, it's easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look
for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it
can best be done, right, but it always works out. It's like
having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you
never send off the cheques. And then whenever I stop and think -
why did I want to do something? - how did I work out how to do
it? - I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it.
Like I have now. It's a big effort to talk about it."
Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he
frowned and said, "Last night I was worrying about this again.
About the fact that part of my mind just didn't seem to work
properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that
someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without
telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided
that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that
purpose, which was why I couldn't use it. I wondered if there was
a way I could check.
"I went to the ship's medical bay and plugged myself into the
encephelographic screen. I went through every major screening
test on both my heads - all the tests I had to go through under
government medical officers before my nomination for Presidency
could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing
unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative,
irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn't
have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing
further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried
superimposing the results from one head on top of the results
from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because
I'd given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia.
Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed
picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was
always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I
always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?"
Ford nodded.
"And there it was," said Zaphod, "clear as day. A whole section
in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and
not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all
the synapses and electronically traumatised those two lumps of
cerebellum."
Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.
"Somebody did that to you?" whispered Ford.
"Yeah."
"But have you any idea who? Or why?"
"Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was."
"You know? How do you know?"
"Because they left their initials burnt into the cauterized
synapses. They left them there for me to see."
Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.
"Initials? Burnt into your brain?"
"Yeah."
"Well, what were they, for God's sake?"
Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he
looked away.
"Z.B.," he said.
At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas
started to pour into the chamber.
"I'll tell you about it later," choked Zaphod as all three passed
out.
On the surface of Magrathea Arthur wandered about moodily.
Ford had thoughtfully left him his copy of The Hitch Hiker's
Guide to the Galaxy to while away the time with. He pushed a few
buttons at random.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited
book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors
like a good idea at the time.
One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates
the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at
the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic
career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and
the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then,
after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with
Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem
of what had happened to all the biros he'd bought over the past
few years.
There followed a long period of painstaking research during which
he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the
galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which
quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the
cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by
humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and
superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a
planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this
planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away
quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew
they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to
highly biro-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the biro
equivalent of the good life.
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet
Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have
worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of
cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up,
wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the
usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make a fool
of themselves in public.
When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates
that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a
small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed
repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered
to be lying.
There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious
60,000 Altairan dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank
account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox's highly profitable
second-hand biro business.
Arthur read this, and put the book down.
The robot still sat there, completely inert.
Arthur got up and walked to the top of the crater. He walked
around the crater. He watched two suns set magnificently over
Magrathea.
He went back down into the crater. He woke the robot up because
even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than
nobody.
"Night's falling," he said. "Look robot, the stars are coming
out."
>From the heart of a dark nebula it is possible to see very few
stars, and only very faintly, but they were there to be seen.
The robot obediently looked at them, then looked back.
"I know," he said. "Wretched isn't it?"
"But that sunset! I've never seen anything like it in my wildest
dreams ... the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling
into space."
"I've seen it," said Marvin. "It's rubbish."
"We only ever had the one sun at home," persevered Arthur, "I
came from a planet called Earth you know."
"I know," said Marvin, "you keep going on about it. It sounds
awful."
"Ah no, it was a beautiful place."
"Did it have oceans?"
"Oh yes," said Arthur with a sigh, "great wide rolling blue
oceans ..."
"Can't bear oceans," said Marvin.
"Tell me," inquired Arthur, "do you get on well with other
robots?"
"Hate them," said Marvin. "Where are you going?"
Arthur couldn't bear any more. He had got up again.
"I think I'll just take another walk," he said.
"Don't blame you," said Marvin and counted five hundred and
ninety-seven thousand million sheep before falling asleep again a
second later.
Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his
circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job. He trudged
back up the wall of the crater.
Because the atmosphere was so thin and because there was no moon,
nightfall was very rapid and it was by now very dark. Because of
this, Arthur practically walked into the old man before he
noticed him.
He was standing with his back to Arthur watching the very last
glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. He was
tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long grey robe. When he
turned his face was thin and distinguished, careworn but not
unkind, the sort of face you would happily bank with. But he
didn't turn yet, not even to react to Arthur's yelp of surprise.
Eventually the last rays of the sun had vanished completely, and
he turned. His face was still illuminated from somewhere, and
when Arthur looked for the source of the light he saw that a few
yards away stood a small craft of some kind - a small hovercraft,
Arthur guessed. It shed a dim pool of light around it.
The man looked at Arthur, sadly it seemed.
"You choose a cold night to visit our dead planet," he said.
"Who ... who are you?" stammered Arthur.
The man looked away. Again a kind of sadness seemed to cross his
face.
"My name is not important," he said.
He seemed to have something on his mind. Conversation was clearly
something he felt he didn't have to rush at. Arthur felt awkward.
"I ... er ... you startled me ..." he said, lamely.
The man looked round to him again and slightly raised his
eyebrows.
"Hmmmm?" he said.
"I said you startled me."
"Do not be alarmed, I will not harm you."
Arthur frowned at him. "But you shot at us! There were missiles
..." he said.
The man chuckled slightly.
"An automatic system," he said and gave a small sigh. "Ancient
computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark
millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I
think they take the occasional pot shot to relieve the monotony."
He looked gravely at Arthur and said, "I'm a great fan of science
you know."
"Oh ... er, really?" said Arthur, who was beginning to find the
man's curious, kindly manner disconcerting.
"Oh, yes," said the old man, and simply stopped talking again.
"Ah," said Arthur, "er ..." He had an odd felling of being like a
man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman's
husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few
idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.
"You seem ill at ease," said the old man with polite concern.
"Er, no ... well, yes. Actually you see, we weren't really
expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that
you were all dead or something ..."
"Dead?" said the old man. "Good gracious no, we have but slept."
"Slept?" said Arthur incredulously.
"Yes, through the economic recession you see," said the old man,
apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word
he was talking about or not.
"Er, economic recession?"
"Well you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy
collapsed, and seeing that custom-made planets are something of a
luxury commodity you see ..."
He paused and looked at Arthur.
"You know we built planets do you?" he asked solemnly.
"Well yes," said Arthur, "I'd sort of gathered ..."
"Fascinating trade," said the old man, and a wistful look came
into his eyes, "doing the coastlines was always my favourite.
Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords ... so
anyway," he said trying to find his thread again, "the recession
came and we decided it would save us a lot of bother if we just
slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us
when it was all over."
The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.
"The computers were index linked to the Galactic stock market
prices you see, so that we'd all be revived when everybody else
had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive
services."
Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.
"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave isn't it?"
"Is it?" asked the old man mildly. "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of
touch."
He pointed down into the crater.
"Is that robot yours?" he said.
"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater, "I'm mine."
"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur. "It's more a sort of
electronic sulking machine."
"Bring it," said the old man. Arthur was quite surprised to hear
a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's voice. He
called to Marvin who crawled up the slope making a big show of
being lame, which he wasn't.
"On second thoughts," said the old man, "leave it here. You must
come with me. Great things are afoot." He turned towards his
craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now
drifted quietly towards them through the dark.
Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of
turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater
again muttering sour nothings to himself.
"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."
"Late?" said Arthur. "What for?"
"What is your name, human?"
"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.
"Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly.
"It's a sort of threat you see." Another wistful look came into
his tired old eyes. "I've never been very good at them myself,
but I'm told they can be very effective."
Arthur blinked at him.
"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.
"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.
"Oh nothing, I'm sorry," said Arthur in embarrassment. "Alright,
where do we go?"
"In my aircar," said the old man motioning Arthur to get into the
craft which had settled silently next to them. "We are going deep
into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being
revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes."
Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the
old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of
the craft as it soared into the night sky quite unsettled him.
He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow
of tiny lights on the instrument panel.
"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name by the way?"
"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness came
into his face again. He paused. "My name," he said, "... is
Slartibartfast."
Arthur practically choked.
"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.
"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.
"Slartibartfast?"
The old man looked at him gravely.
"I said it wasn't important," he said.
The aircar sailed through the night.
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always
what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always
assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had
achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst
all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having
a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed
that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the
same reasons.
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending
destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to
alert mankind of the danger; but most of their communications
were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or
whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the
Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a
surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-
somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the "Star Sprangled
Banner", but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for
all the fish.
In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent
than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural
research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting
frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man.
The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this
relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans.
Silently the aircar coasted through the cold darkness, a single
soft glow of light that was utterly alone in the deep Magrathean
night. It sped swiftly. Arthur's companion seemed sunk in his own
thoughts, and when Arthur tried on a couple of occasions to
engage him in conversation again he would simply reply by asking
if he was comfortable enough, and then left it at that.
Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were travelling,
but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any
reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he
could almost believe they were hardly moving at all.
Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within
seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was
travelling towards them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make
out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was
unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm
as the aircraft dipped sharply and headed downwards in what
seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity
seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath
before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an
insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his
head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly
in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to
realize what had happened.
They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed
had been their own relative to the glow of light which was a
stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The
insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down
which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an
hour.
He closed his eyes in terror.
After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he
sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later
became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt.
He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel,
threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a
crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally
stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several
tunnels also had their terminus here, and at the farther end of
the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating
light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes,
it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far
it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultra
violet.
Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old
eyes.
"Earthman," he said, "we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea."
"How did you know I was an Earthman?" demanded Arthur.
"These things will become clear to you," said the old man gently,
"at least," he added with slight doubt in his voice, "clearer
than they are at the moment."
He continued: "I should warn you that the chamber we are about to
pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a
little too ... large. We are about to pass through a gateway into
a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you."
Arthur made nervous noises.
Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely
reassuringly. "It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight."
The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and
suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked
like.
It wasn't infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and
uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into
infinity - distance is incomprehensible and therefore
meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was
anything but infinite, it was just very very big, so that it gave
the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.
Arthur's senses bobbed and span, as, travelling at the immense
speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through
the open air leaving the gateway through which they had passed an
invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.
The wall.
The wall defied the imagination - seduced it and defeated it. The
wall was so paralysingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and
sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of
vertigo could kill a man.
The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser
measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to
infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either
side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds
away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow
sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with
unimaginable light.
"Welcome," said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the
aircar, travelling now at three times the speed of sound, crept
imperceptibly forward into the mindboggling space, "welcome," he
said, "to our factory floor."
Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful horror. Ranged
away before them, at distances he could neither judge nor even
guess at, were a series of curious suspensions, delicate
traceries of metal and light hung about shadowy spherical shapes
that hung in the space.
"This," said Slartibartfast, "is where we make most of our
planets you see."
"You mean," said Arthur, trying to form the words, "you mean
you're starting it all up again now?"
"No no, good heavens no," exclaimed the old man, "no, the Galaxy
isn't nearly rich enough to support us yet. No, we've been
awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission for very
... special clients from another dimension. It may interest you
... there in the distance in front of us."
Arthur followed the old man's finger, till he was able to pick
out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the
only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of
activity about it, though this was more a sublimal impression
than anything one could put one's finger on.
At the moment however a flash of light arced through the
structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were
formed on the dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew,
rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of
words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he
sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and
tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense.
Part of his brain told him that he knew perfectly well what he
was looking at and what the shapes represented whilst another
quite sensibly refused to countenance the idea and abdicated
responsibility for any further thinking in that direction.
The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt.
"The Earth ..." whispered Arthur.
"Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact," said Slartibartfast
cheery. "We're making a copy from our original blueprints."
There was a pause.
"Are you trying to tell me," said Arthur, slowly and with
control, "that you originally ... made the Earth?"
"Oh yes," said Slartibartfast. "Did you ever go to a place ... I
think it was called Norway?"
"No," said Arthur, "no, I didn't."
"Pity," said Slartibartfast, "that was one of mine. Won an award
you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear about
its destruction."
"You were upset!"
"Yes. Five minutes later and it wouldn't have mattered so much.
It was a quite shocking cock-up."
"Huh?" said Arthur.
"The mice were furious."
"The mice were furious?"
"Oh yes," said the old man mildly.
"Yes well so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled
platypuses, but ..."
"Ah, but they hadn't paid for it you see, had they?"
"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just
gave up and went mad now?"
For a while the aircar flew on in awkward silence. Then the old
man tried patiently to explain.
"Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for,
and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the
completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we've got
to build another one."
Only one word registered with Arthur.
"Mice?" he said.
"Indeed Earthman."
"Look, sorry - are we talking about the little white furry things
with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming
in early sixties sit coms?"
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"Earthman," he said, "it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of
speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of
Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early
sixties sit coms of which you speak. These creatures you call
mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely
the protrusion into our dimension of vast hyperintelligent pan-
dimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the
squeaking is just a front."
The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued.
"They've been experimenting on you I'm afraid."
Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face
cleared.
"Ah no," he said, "I see the source of the misunderstanding now.
No, look you see, what happened was that we used to do
experiments on them. They were often used in behavioural
research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was
hat the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring
bells, run around mazes and things so that the whole nature of
the learning process could be examined. From our observations of
their behaviour we were able to learn all sorts of things about
our own ..."
Arthur's voice tailed off.
"Such subtlety ..." said Slartibartfast, "one has to admire it."
"What?" said Arthur.
"How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to
guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way,
eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of
myxomatosis, - if it's finely calculated the cumulative effect is
enormous."
He paused for effect.
"You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever
hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings. Your planet and people
have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-
million-year research programme ...
"Let me tell you the whole story. It'll take a little time."
"Time," said Arthur weakly, "is not currently one of my
problems."
There are of course many problems connected with life, of which
some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they
die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time
wearing digital watches?
Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pan-
dimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own
pan-dimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed
up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which
used to interrupt their favourite pastime of Brockian Ultra
Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people
for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they
decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.
And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer
which was so amazingly intelligent that even before the data
banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore
I am and got as far as the existence of rice pudding and income
tax before anyone managed to turn it off.
It was the size of a small city.
Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive
office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest
ultramahagony topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark
carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic pot plants and
tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers
and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and
stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.
On the day of the Great On-Turning two soberly dressed
programmers with brief cases arrived and were shown discreetly
into the office. They were aware that this day they would
represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they
conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves
deferentially before the desk, opened their brief cases and took
out their leather-bound notebooks.
Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.
For a few moments they sat in respectful silence, then, after
exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and
touched a small black panel.
The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was now
in total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice
rich resonant and deep.
It said: "What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the
second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space have
been called into existence?"
Lunkwill and Fook glanced at each other in surprise.
"Your task, O Computer ..." began Fook.
"No, wait a minute, this isn't right," said Lunkwill, worried.
"We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever
and we're not making do with second best. Deep Thought," he
addressed the computer, "are you not as we designed you to be,
the greatest most powerful computer in all time?"
"I described myself as the second greatest," intoned Deep
Thought, "and such I am."
Another worried look passed between the two programmers. Lunkwill
cleared his throat.
"There must be some mistake," he said, "are you not a greatest
computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain which can count all the
atoms in a star in a millisecond?"
"The Milliard Gargantubrain?" said Deep Thought with unconcealed
contempt. "A mere abacus - mention it not."
"And are you not," said Fook leaning anxiously forward, "a
greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh
Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory
of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad
Beta sand blizzard?"
"A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You
ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the
atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket
calculator stuff."
The two programmers sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment.
Then Lunkwill leaned forward again.
"But are you not," he said, "a more fiendish disputant than the
Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus 12,
the Magic and Indefatigable?"
"The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler," said Deep
Thought thoroughly rolling the r's, "could talk all four legs off
an Arcturan MegaDonkey - but only I could persuade it to go for a
walk afterwards."
"Then what," asked Fook, "is the problem?"
"There is no problem," said Deep Thought with magnificent ringing
tones. "I am simply the second greatest computer in the Universe
of Space and Time."
"But the second?" insisted Lunkwill. "Why do you keep saying the
second? You're surely not thinking of the Multicorticoid
Perspicutron Titan Muller are you? Or the Pondermatic? Or the
..."
Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer's console.
"I spare not a single unit of thought on these cybernetic
simpletons!" he boomed. "I speak of none but the computer that is
to come after me!"
Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and
muttered, "I think this is getting needlessly messianic."
"You know nothing of future time," pronounced Deep Thought, "and
yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta
streams of future probability and see that there must one day
come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not
worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to
design."
Fook sighed heavily and glanced across to Lunkwill.
"Can we get on and ask the question?" he said.
Lunkwill motioned him to wait.
"What computer is this of which you speak?" he asked.
"I will speak of it no further in this present time," said Deep
Thought. "Now. Ask what else of me you will that I may function.
Speak."
They shrugged at each other. Fook composed himself.
"O Deep Thought Computer," he said, "the task we have designed
you to perform is this. We want you to tell us ..." he paused,
"... the Answer!"
"The answer?" said Deep Thought. "The answer to what?"
"Life!" urged Fook.
"The Universe!" said Lunkwill.
"Everything!" they said in chorus.
Deep Thought paused for a moment's reflection.
"Tricky," he said finally.
"But can you do it?"
Again, a significant pause.
"Yes," said Deep Thought, "I can do it."
"There is an answer?" said Fook with breathless excitement."
"A simple answer?" added Lunkwill.
"Yes," said Deep Thought. "Life, the Universe, and Everything.
There is an answer. But," he added, "I'll have to think about
it."
A sudden commotion destroyed the moment: the door flew open and
two angry men wearing the coarse faded-blue robes and belts of
the Cruxwan University burst into the room, thrusting aside the
ineffectual flunkies who tried to bar their way.
"We demand admission!" shouted the younger of the two men
elbowing a pretty young secretary in the throat.
"Come on," shouted the older one, "you can't keep us out!" He
pushed a junior programmer back through the door.
"We demand that you can't keep us out!" bawled the younger one,
though he was now firmly inside the room and no further attempts
were being made to stop him.
"Who are you?" said Lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. "What
do you want?"
"I am Majikthise!" announced the older one.
"And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!" shouted the younger one.
Majikthise turned on Vroomfondel. "It's alright," he explained
angrily, "you don't need to demand that."
"Alright!" bawled Vroomfondel banging on an nearby desk. "I am
Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What
we demand is solid facts!"
"No we don't!" exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. "That is
precisely what we don't demand!"
Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, "We don't
demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid
facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!"
"But who the devil are you?" exclaimed an outraged Fook.
"We," said Majikthise, "are Philosophers."
"Though we may not be," said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger
at the programmers.
"Yes we are," insisted Majikthise. "We are quite definitely here
as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers,
Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this
machine off, and we want it off now!"
"What's the problem?" said Lunkwill.
"I'll tell you what the problem is mate," said Majikthise,
"demarcation, that's the problem!"
"We demand," yelled Vroomfondel, "that demarcation may or may not
be the problem!"
"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned
Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank
you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate.
Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the
inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody
machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a
job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the
night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine
only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next
morning?"
"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined
areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
Suddenly a stentorian voice boomed across the room.
"Might I make an observation at this point?" inquired Deep
Thought.
"We'll go on strike!" yelled Vroomfondel.
"That's right!" agreed Majikthise. "You'll have a national
Philosopher's strike on your hands!"
The hum level in the room suddenly increased as several ancillary
bass driver units, mounted in sedately carved and varnished
cabinet speakers around the room, cut in to give Deep Thought's
voice a little more power.
"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my
circuits are now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer
to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything -"
he paused and satisfied himself that he now had everyone's
attention, before continuing more quietly, "but the programme
will take me a little while to run."
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
"How long?" he said.
"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
"Seven and a half million years ...!" they cried in chorus.
"Yes," declaimed Deep Thought, "I said I'd have to think about
it, didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a programme like
this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity
for the whole area of philosophy in general. Everyone's going to
have their own theories about what answer I'm eventually to come
up with, and who better to capitalize on that media market than
you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing with each other
violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular
press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life. How
does that sound?"
The two philosophers gaped at him.
"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now that is what I call
thinking. Here Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like
that?"
"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper, "think our brains
must be too highly trained Majikthise."
So saying, they turned on their heels and walked out of the door
and into a lifestyle beyond their wildest dreams.
"Yes, very salutary," said Arthur, after Slartibartfast had
related the salient points of the story to him, "but I don't
understand what all this has got to do with the Earth and mice
and things."
"That is but the first half of the story Earthman," said the old
man. "If you would care to discover what happened seven and a
half millions later, on the great day of the Answer, allow me to
invite you to my study where you can experience the events
yourself on our Sens-O-Tape records. That is unless you would
care to take a quick stroll on the surface of New Earth. It's
only half completed I'm afraid - we haven't even finished burying
the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have
the Tertiary and Quarternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay
down, and ..."
"No thank you," said Arthur, "it wouldn't be quite the same."
"No," said Slartibartfast, "it won't be," and he turned the
aircar round and headed back towards the mind-numbing wall.
Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an
explosion in a public library. The old man frowned as they
stepped in.
"Terribly unfortunate," he said, "a diode blew in one of the
life-support computers. When we tried to revive our cleaning
staff we discovered they'd been dead for nearly thirty thousand
years. Who's going to clear away the bodies, that's what I want
to know. Look why don't you sit yourself down over there and let
me plug you in?"
He gestured Arthur towards a chair which looked as if it had been
made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus.
"It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus," explained the
old man as he pottered about fishing bits of wire out from under
tottering piles of paper and drawing instruments. "Here," he
said, "hold these," and passed a couple of stripped wire end to
Arthur.
The instant he took hold of them a bird flew straight through
him.
He was suspended in mid-air and totally invisible to himself.
Beneath him was a pretty treelined city square, and all around it
as far as the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy
spacious design but somewhat the worse for wear - many were
cracked and stained with rain. Today however the sun was shining,
a fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd
sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming was
probably caused by the fact that the square and all the streets
around it were thronged with cheerful excited people. Somewhere a
band was playing, brightly coloured flags were fluttering in the
breeze and the spirit of carnival was in the air.
Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it
all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time
to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called
for everyone's attention.
A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building
which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over
a Tannoy.
"O people waiting in the Shadow of Deep Thought!" he cried out.
"Honoured Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest
and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known
... The Time of Waiting is over!"
Wild cheers broke out amongst the crowd. Flags, streamers and
wolf whistles sailed through the air. The narrower streets looked
rather like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically
waving their legs in the air.
"Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this
Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!" cried the cheer leader.
"The Day of the Answer!"
Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd.
"Never again," cried the man, "never again will we wake up in the
morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it
really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don't get up and go to
work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain
and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life,
the Universe and Everything!"
As the crowd erupted once again, Arthur found himself gliding
through the air and down towards one of the large stately windows
on the first floor of the building behind the dais from which the
speaker was addressing the crowd.
He experienced a moment's panic as he sailed straight through
towards the window, which passed when a second or so later he
found he had gone right through the solid glass without
apparently touching it.
No one in the room remarked on his peculiar arrival, which is
hardly surprising as he wasn't there. He began to realize that
the whole experience was merely a recorded projection which
knocked six-track seventy-millimetre into a cocked hat.
The room was much as Slartibartfast had described it. In seven
and a half million years it had been well looked after and
cleaned regularly every century or so. The ultramahagony desk was
worn at the edges, the carpet a little faded now, but the large
computer terminal sat in sparkling glory on the desk's leather
top, as bright as if it had been constructed yesterday.
Two severely dressed men sat respectfully before the terminal and
waited.
"The time is nearly upon us," said one, and Arthur was surprised
to see a word suddenly materialize in thin air just by the man's
neck. The word was Loonquawl, and it flashed a couple of times
and the disappeared again. Before Arthur was able to assimilate
this the other man spoke and the word Phouchg appeared by his
neck.
"Seventy-five thousand generations ago, our ancestors set this
program in motion," the second man said, "and in all that time we
will be the first to hear the computer speak."
"An awesome prospect, Phouchg," agreed the first man, and Arthur
suddenly realized that he was watching a recording with
subtitles.
"We are the ones who will hear," said Phouchg, "the answer to the
great question of Life ...!"
"The Universe ...!" said Loonquawl.
"And Everything ...!"
"Shhh," said Loonquawl with a slight gesture, "I think Deep
Thought is preparing to speak!"
There was a moment's expectant pause whilst panels slowly came to
life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off
experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A
soft low hum came from the communication channel.
"Good morning," said Deep Thought at last.
"Er ... Good morning, O Deep Thought," said Loonquawl nervously,
"do you have ... er, that is ..."
"An answer for you?" interrupted Deep Thought majestically. "Yes.
I have."
The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been
in vain.
"There really is one?" breathed Phouchg.
"There really is one," confirmed Deep Thought.
"To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and
Everything?"
"Yes."
Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had
been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as
those who would witness the answer, but even so they found
themselves gasping and squirming like excited children.
"And you're ready to give it to us?" urged Loonquawl.
"I am."
"Now?"
"Now," said Deep Thought.
They both licked their dry lips.
"Though I don't think," added Deep Thought, "that you're going to
like it."
"Doesn't matter!" said Phouchg. "We must know it! Now!"
"Now?" inquired Deep Thought.
"Yes! Now ..."
"Alright," said the computer and settled into silence again. The
two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.
"You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought.
"Tell us!"
"Alright," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question
..."
"Yes ...!"
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought.
"Yes ...!"
"Is ..." said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes ...!"
"Is ..."
"Yes ...!!!...?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.
It was a long time before anyone spoke.
Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense
expectant faces down in the square outside.
"We're going to get lynched aren't we?" he whispered.
"It was a tough assignment," said Deep Thought mildly.
"Forty-two!" yelled Loonquawl. "Is that all you've got to show
for seven and a half million years' work?"
"I checked it very thoroughly," said the computer, "and that
quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite
honest with you, is that you've never actually known what the
question is."
"But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life,
the Universe and Everything!" howled Loonquawl.
"Yes," said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools
gladly, "but what actually is it?"
A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the
computer and then at each other.
"Well, you know, it's just Everything ... Everything ..." offered
Phouchg weakly.
"Exactly!" said Deep Thought. "So once you do know what the
question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."
"Oh terrific," muttered Phouchg flinging aside his notebook and
wiping away a tiny tear.
"Look, alright, alright," said Loonquawl, "can you just please
tell us the Question?"
"The Ultimate Question?"
"Yes!"
"Of Life, the Universe, and Everything?"
"Yes!"
Deep Thought pondered this for a moment.
"Tricky," he said.
"But can you do it?" cried Loonquawl.
Deep Thought pondered this for another long moment.
Finally: "No," he said firmly.
Both men collapsed on to their chairs in despair.
"But I'll tell you who can," said Deep Thought.
They both looked up sharply.
"Who?" "Tell us!"
Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently non-existent scalp
begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably
forward towards the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on
the part of whoever had made the recording he assumed.
"I speak of none other than the computer that is to come after
me," intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed
declamatory tones. "A computer whose merest operational
parameters I am not worthy to calculate - and yet I will design
it for you. A computer which can calculate the Question to the
Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle
complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its
operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms
and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year
program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall
name it also unto you. And it shall be called ... The Earth."
Phouchg gaped at Deep Thought.
"What a dull name," he said and great incisions appeared down the
length of his body. Loonquawl too suddenly sustained horrific
gashed from nowhere. The Computer console blotched and cracked,
the walls flickered and crumbled and the room crashed upwards
into its own ceiling ...
Slartibartfast was standing in front of Arthur holding the two
wires.
"End of the tape," he explained.
"Zaphod! Wake up!"
"Mmmmmwwwwwerrrrr?"
"Hey come on, wake up."
"Just let me stick to what I'm good at, yeah?" muttered Zaphod
and rolled away from the voice back to sleep.
"Do you want me to kick you?" said Ford.
"Would it give you a lot of pleasure?" said Zaphod, blearily.
"No."
"Nor me. So what's the point? Stop bugging me." Zaphod curled
himself up.
"He got a double dose of the gas," said Trillian looking down at
him, "two windpipes."
"And stop talking," said Zaphod, "it's hard enough trying to
sleep anyway. What's the matter with the ground? It's all cold
and hard."
"It's gold," said Ford.
With an amazingly balletic movement Zaphod was standing and
scanning the horizon, because that was how far the gold ground
stretched in every direction, perfectly smooth and solid. It
gleamed like ... it's impossible to say what it gleamed like
because nothing in the Universe gleams in quite the same way that
a planet of solid gold does.
"Who put all that there?" yelped Zaphod, goggle-eyed.
"Don't get excited," said Ford, "it's only a catalogue."
"A who?"
"A catalogue," said Trillian, "an illusion."
"How can you say that?" cried Zaphod, falling to his hands and
knees and staring at the ground. He poked it and prodded it with
his fingernail. It was very heavy and very slightly soft - he
could mark it with his fingernail. It was very yellow and very
shiny, and when he breathed on it his breath evaporated off it in
that very peculiar and special way that breath evaporates off
solid gold.
"Trillian and I came round a while ago," said Ford. "We shouted
and yelled till somebody came and then carried on shouting and
yelling till they got fed up and put us in their planet catalogue
to keep us busy till they were ready to deal with us. This is all
Sens-O-Tape."
Zaphod stared at him bitterly.
"Ah, shit," he said, "you wake me up from my own perfectly good
dream to show me somebody else's." He sat down in a huff.
"What's that series of valleys over there?" he said.
"Hallmark," said Ford. "We had a look."
"We didn't wake you earlier," said Trillian. "The last planet was
knee deep in fish."
"Fish?"
"Some people like the oddest things."
"And before that," said Ford, "we had platinum. Bit dull. We
thought you'd like to see this one though."
Seas of light glared at them in one solid blaze wherever they
looked.
"Very pretty," said Zaphod petulantly.
In the sky a huge green catalogue number appeared. It flickered
and changed, and when they looked around again so had the land.
As with one voice they all went, "Yuch."
The sea was purple. The beach they were on was composed of tiny
yellow and green pebbles - presumably terribly precious stones.
The mountains in the distance seemed soft and undulating with red
peaks. Nearby stood a solid silver beach table with a frilly
mauve parasol and silver tassles.
In the sky a huge sign appeared, replacing the catalogue number.
It said, Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We
are not proud.
And five hundred entirely naked women dropped out of the sky on
parachutes.
In a moment the scene vanished and left them in a springtime
meadow full of cows.
"Ow!" said Zaphod. "My brains!"
"You want to talk about it?" said Ford.
"Yeah, OK," said Zaphod, and all three sat down and ignored the
scenes that came and went around them.
"I figure this," said Zaphod. "Whatever happened to my mind, I
did it. And I did it in such a way that it wouldn't be detected
by the government screening tests. And I wasn't to know anything
about it myself. Pretty crazy, right?"
The other two nodded in agreement.
"So I reckon, what's so secret that I can't let anybody know I
know it, not the Galactic Government, not even myself? And the
answer is I don't know. Obviously. But I put a few things
together and I can begin to guess. When did I decide to run for
President? Shortly after the death of President Yooden Vranx. You
remember Yooden, Ford?"
"Yeah," said Ford, "he was that guy we met when we were kids, the
Arcturan captain. He was a gas. He gave us conkers when you bust
your way into his megafreighter. Said you were the most amazing
kid he'd ever met."
"What's all this?" said Trillian.
"Ancient history," said Ford, "when we were kids together on
Betelgeuse. The Arcturan megafreighters used to carry most of the
bulky trade between the Galactic Centre and the outlying regions
The Betelgeuse trading scouts used to find the markets and the
Arcturans would supply them. There was a lot of trouble with
space pirates before they were wiped out in the Dordellis wars,
and the megafreighters had to be equipped with the most fantastic
defence shields known to Galactic science. They were real brutes
of ships, and huge. In orbit round a planet they would eclipse
the sun.
"One day, young Zaphod here decides to raid one. On a tri-jet
scooter designed for stratosphere work, a mere kid. I mean forget
it, it was crazier than a mad monkey. I went along for the ride
because I'd got some very safe money on him not doing it, and
didn't want him coming back with fake evidence. So what happens?
We got in his tri-jet which he had souped up into something
totally other, crossed three parsecs in a matter of weeks, bust
our way into a megafreighter I still don't know how, marched on
to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder
thing I have not known. Lost me a year's pocket money. For what?
Conkers."
"The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx," said
Zaphod. "He gave us food, booze - stuff from really weird parts
of the Galaxy - lots of conkers of course, and we had just the
most incredible time. Then he teleported us back. Into the
maximum security wing of Betelgeuse state prison. He was a cool
guy. Went on to become President of the Galaxy."
Zaphod paused.
The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark
mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked
indistinctly in the shadows. The air was occasionally rent with
the sounds of illusory beings murdering other illusory beings.
Presumably enough people must have liked this sort of thing to
make it a paying proposition.
"Ford," said Zaphod quietly.
"Yeah?"
"Just before Yooden died he came to see me."
"What? You never told me."
"No."
"What did he say? What did he come to see you about?"
"He told me about the Heart of Gold. It was his idea that I
should steal it."
"His idea?"
"Yeah," said Zaphod, "and the only possible way of stealing it
was to be at the launching ceremony."
Ford gaped at him in astonishment for a moment, and then roared
with laughter.
"Are you telling me," he said, "that you set yourself up to
become President of the Galaxy just to steal that ship?"
"That's it," said Zaphod with the sort of grin that would get
most people locked away in a room with soft walls.
"But why?" said Ford. "What's so important about having it?"
"Dunno," said Zaphod, "I think if I'd consciously known what was
so important about it and what I would need it for it would have
showed up on the brain screening tests and I would never have
passed. I think Yooden told me a lot of things that are still
locked away."
"So you think you went and mucked about inside your own brain as
a result of Yooden talking to you?"
"He was a hell of a talker."
"Yeah, but Zaphod old mate, you want to look after yourself you
know."
Zaphod shrugged.
"I mean, don't you have any inkling of the reasons for all this?"
asked Ford.
Zaphod thought hard about this and doubts seemed to cross his
minds.
"No," he said at last, "I don't seem to be letting myself into
any of my secrets. Still," he added on further reflection, "I can
understand that. I wouldn't trust myself further than I could
spit a rat."
A moment later, the last planet in the catalogue vanished from
beneath them and the solid world resolved itself again.
They were sitting in a plush waiting room full of glass-top
tables and design awards.
A tall Magrathean man was standing in front of them.
"The mice will see you now," he said.
"So there you have it," said Slartibartfast, making a feeble and
perfunctory attempt to clear away some of the appalling mess of
his study. He picked up a paper from the top of a pile, but then
couldn't think of anywhere else to put it, so he but it back on
top of the original pile which promptly fell over. "Deep Thought
designed the Earth, we built it and you lived on it."
"And the Vogons came and destroyed it five minutes before the
program was completed," added Arthur, not unbitterly.
"Yes," said the old man, pausing to gaze hopelessly round the
room. "Ten million years of planning and work gone just like
that. Ten million years, Earthman ... can you conceive of that
kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a
single worm five times over in that time. Gone." He paused.
"Well that's bureaucracy for you," he added.
"You know," said Arthur thoughtfully, "all this explains a lot of
things. All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable
feeling that something was going on in the world, something big,
even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia.
Everyone in the Universe has that."
"Everyone?" said Arthur. "Well, if everyone has that perhaps it
means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know
..."
"Maybe. Who cares?" said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too
excited. "Perhaps I'm old and tired," he continued, "but I always
think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are
so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the
sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design
coastlines. I got an award for Norway."
He rummaged around in a pile of debris and pulled out a large
perspex block with his name on it and a model of Norway moulded
into it.
"Where's the sense in that?" he said. "None that I've been able
to make out. I've been doing fjords in all my life. For a
fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award."
He turned it over in his hands with a shrug and tossed it aside
carelessly, but not so carelessly that it didn't land on
something soft.
"In this replacement Earth we're building they've given me Africa
to do and of course I'm doing it with all fjords again because I
happen to like them, and I'm old fashioned enough to think that
they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me
it's not equatorial enough. Equatorial!" He gave a hollow laugh.
"What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things
of course, but I'd far rather be happy than right any day."
"And are you?"
"No. That's where it all falls down of course."
"Pity," said Arthur with sympathy. "It sounded like quite a good
lifestyle otherwise."
Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.
"Come," said Slartibartfast, "you are to meet the mice. Your
arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has
already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable
event in the history of the Universe."
"What were the first two?"
"Oh, probably just coincidences," said Slartibartfast carelessly.
He opened the door and stood waiting for Arthur to follow.
Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at
the sweaty dishevelled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on
Thursday morning.
"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," he
muttered to himself.
"I beg your pardon?" said the old man mildly.
"Oh nothing," said Arthur, "only joking."
It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but
the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.
For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said "I seem to be
having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole
opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried
his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of
space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were
poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the
commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled
battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting
opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with
a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to
unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged
the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that
very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty
with my lifestyle drifted across the conference table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful
insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage
terrible war for centuries.
Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over
a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had
been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets
settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a
joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the
source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty
wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first
planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where
due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet
was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.
Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the
history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on
all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.
"It's just life," they say.
A short aircar trip brought Arthur and the old Magrathean to a
doorway. They left the car and went through the door into a
waiting room full of glass-topped tables and perspex awards.
Almost immediately, a light flashed above the door at the other
side of the room and they entered.
"Arthur! You're safe!" a voice cried.
"Am I?" said Arthur, rather startled. "Oh good."
The lighting was rather subdued and it took him a moment or so to
see Ford, Trillian and Zaphod sitting round a large table
beautifully decked out with exotic dishes, strange sweetmeats and
bizarre fruits. They were stuffing their faces.
"What happened to you?" demanded Arthur.
"Well," said Zaphod, attacking a boneful of grilled muscle, "our
guests here have been gassing us and zapping our minds and being
generally weird and have now given us a rather nice meal to make
it up to us. Here," he said hoiking out a lump of evil smelling
meat from a bowl, "have some Vegan Rhino's cutlet. It's delicious
if you happen to like that sort of thing."
"Hosts?" said Arthur. "What hosts? I don't see any ..."
A small voice said, "Welcome to lunch, Earth creature."
Arthur glanced around and suddenly yelped.
"Ugh!" he said. "There are mice on the table!"
There was an awkward silence as everyone looked pointedly at
Arthur.
He was busy staring at two white mice sitting in what looked like
whisky glasses on the table. He heard the silence and glanced
around at everyone.
"Oh!" he said, with sudden realization. "Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't
quite prepared for ..."
"Let me introduce you," said Trillian. "Arthur this is Benji
mouse."
"Hi," said one of the mice. His whiskers stroked what must have
been a touch sensitive panel on the inside of the whisky-glass
like affair, and it moved forward slightly.
"And this is Frankie mouse."
The other mouse said, "Pleased to meet you," and did likewise.
Arthur gaped.
"But aren't they ..."
"Yes," said Trillian, "they are the mice I brought with me from
the Earth."
She looked him in the eye and Arthur thought he detected the
tiniest resigned shrug.
"Could you pass me that bowl of grated Arcturan Megadonkey?" she
said.
Slartibartfast coughed politely.
"Er, excuse me," he said.
"Yes, thank you Slartibartfast," said Benji mouse sharply, "you
may go."
"What? Oh ... er, very well," said the old man, slightly taken
aback, "I'll just go and get on with some of my fjords then."
"Ah, well in fact that won't be necessary," said Frankie mouse.
"It looks very much as if we won't be needing the new Earth any
longer." He swivelled his pink little eyes. "Not now that we have
found a native of the planet who was there seconds before it was
destroyed."
"What?" cried Slartibartfast, aghast. "You can't mean that! I've
got a thousand glaciers poised and ready to roll over Africa!"
"Well perhaps you can take a quick skiing holiday before you
dismantle them," said Frankie, acidly.
"Skiing holiday!" cried the old man. "Those glaciers are works of
art! Elegantly sculptured contours, soaring pinnacles of ice,
deep majestic ravines! It would be sacrilege to go skiing on high
art!"
"Thank you Slartibartfast," said Benji firmly. "That will be
all."
"Yes sir," said the old man coldly, "thank you very much. Well,
goodbye Earthman," he said to Arthur, "hope the lifestyle comes
together."
With a brief nod to the rest of the company he turned and walked
sadly out of the room.
Arthur stared after him not knowing what to say.
"Now," said Benji mouse, "to business."
Ford and Zaphod clinked their glasses together.
"To business!" they said.
"I beg your pardon?" said Benji.
Ford looked round.
"Sorry, I thought you were proposing a toast," he said.
The two mice scuttled impatiently around in their glass
transports. Finally they composed themselves, and Benji moved
forward to address Arthur.
"Now, Earth creature," he said, "the situation we have in effect
is this. We have, as you know, been more or less running your
planet for the last ten million years in order to find this
wretched thing called the Ultimate Question."
"Why?" said Arthur, sharply.
"No - we already thought of that one," said Frankie interrupting,
"but it doesn't fit the answer. Why? - Forty-Two ... you see, it
doesn't work."
"No," said Arthur, "I mean why have you been doing it?"
"Oh, I see," said Frankie. "Well, eventually just habit I think,
to be brutally honest. And this is more or less the point - we're
sick to the teeth with the whole thing, and the prospect of doing
it all over again on account of those whinnet-ridden Vogons quite
frankly gives me the screaming heeby jeebies, you know what I
mean? It was by the merest lucky chance that Benji and I finished
our particular job and left the planet early for a quick holiday,
and have since manipulated our way back to Magrathea by the good
offices of your friends."
"Magrathea is a gateway back to our own dimension," put in Benji.
"Since when," continued his murine colleague, "we have had an
offer of a quite enormously fat contract to do the 5D chat show
and lecture circuit back in our own dimensional neck of the
woods, and we're very much inclined to take it."
"I would, wouldn't you Ford?" said Zaphod promptingly.
"Oh yes," said Ford, "jump at it, like a shot."
Arthur glanced at them, wondering what all this was leading up
to.
"But we've got to have a product you see," said Frankie, "I mean
ideally we still need the Ultimate Question in some form or
other."
Zaphod leaned forward to Arthur.
"You see," he said, "if they're just sitting there in the studio
looking very relaxed and, you know, just mentioning that they
happen to know the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything,
and then eventually have to admit that in fact it's Forty-two,
then the show's probably quite short. No follow-up, you see."
"We have to have something that sounds good," said Benji.
"Something that sounds good?" exclaimed Arthur. "An Ultimate
Question that sounds good? From a couple of mice?"
The mice bristled.
"Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research,
yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a
point I'm afraid where you begin to suspect that if there's any
real truth, it's that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of
the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.
And if it comes to a choice between spending yet another ten
million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking
the money and running, then I for one could do with the
exercise," said Frankie.
"But ..." started Arthur, hopelessly.
"Hey, will you get this, Earthman," interrupted Zaphod. "You are
a last generation product of that computer matrix, right, and you
were there right up to the moment your planet got the finger,
yeah?"
"Er ..."
"So your brain was an organic part of the penultimate
configuration of the computer programme," said Ford, rather
lucidly he thought.
"Right?" said Zaphod.
"Well," said Arthur doubtfully. He wasn't aware of ever having
felt an organic part of anything. He had always seen this as one
of his problems.
"In other words," said Benji, steering his curious little vehicle
right over to Arthur, "there's a good chance that the structure
of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain - so we
want to buy it off you."
"What, the question?" said Arthur.
"Yes," said Ford and Trillian.
"For lots of money," said Zaphod.
"No, no," said Frankie, "it's the brain we want to buy."
"What!"
"I thought you said you could just read his brain
electronical\-ly," pro\-tes\-ted Ford.
"Oh yes," said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's
got to be prepared."
"Treated," said Benji.
"Diced."
"Thank you," shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair and backing
away from the table in horror.
"It could always be replaced," said Benji reasonably, "if you
think it's important."
"Yes, an electronic brain," said Frankie, "a simple one would
suffice."
"A simple one!" wailed Arthur.
"Yeah," said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, "you'd just have to
program it to say What? and I don't understand and Where's the
tea? - who'd know the difference?"
"What?" cried Arthur, backing away still further.
"See what I mean?" said Zaphod and howled with pain because of
something that Trillian did at that moment.
"I'd notice the difference," said Arthur.
"No you wouldn't," said Frankie mouse, "you'd be programmed not
to."
Ford made for the door.
"Look, I'm sorry, mice old lads," he said. "I don't think we've
got a deal."
"I rather think we have to have a deal," said the mice in chorus,
all the charm vanishing fro their piping little voices in an
instant. With a tiny whining shriek their two glass transports
lifted themselves off the table, and swung through the air
towards Arthur, who stumbled further backwards into a blind
corner, utterly unable to cope or think of anything.
Trillian grabbed him desperately by the arm and tried to drag him
towards the door, which Ford and Zaphod were struggling to open,
but Arthur was dead weight - he seemed hypnotized by the airborne
rodents swooping towards him.
She screamed at him, but he just gaped.
With one more yank, Ford and Zaphod got the door open. On the
other side of it was a small pack of rather ugly men who they
could only assume were the heavy mob of Magrathea. Not only were
they ugly themselves, but the medical equipment they carried with
them was also far from pretty. They charged.
So - Arthur was about to have his head cut open, Trillian was
unable to help him, and Ford and Zaphod were about to be set upon
by several thugs a great deal heavier and more sharply armed than
they were.
All in all it was extremely fortunate that at that moment every
alarm on the planet burst into an earsplitting din.
"Emergency! Emergency!" blared the klaxons throughout Ma\-gra\-thea.
"Hos\-tile ship has landed on planet. Armed intruders in section
8A. Defence stations, defence stations!"
The two mice sniffed irritably round the fragments of their glass
transports where they lay shattered on the floor.
"Damnation," muttered Frankie mouse, "all that fuss over two
pounds of Earthling brain." He scuttled round and about, his pink
eyes flashing, his fine white coat bristling with static.
"The only thing we can do now," said Benji, crouching and
stroking his whiskers in thought, "is to try and fake a question,
invent one that will sound plausible."
"Difficult," said Frankie. He thought. "How about What's yellow
and dangerous?"
Benji considered this for a moment.
"No, no good," he said. "Doesn't fit the answer."
They sank into silence for a few seconds.
"Alright," said Benji. "What do you get if you multiply six by
seven?"
"No, no, too literal, too factual," said Frankie, "wouldn't
sustain the punters' interest."
Again they thought.
Then Frankie said: "Here's a thought. How many roads must a man
walk down?"
"Ah," said Benji. "Aha, now that does sound promising!" He rolled
the phrase around a little. "Yes," he said, "that's excellent!
Sounds very significant without actually tying you down to
meaning anything at all. How many roads must a man walk down?
Forty-two. Excellent, excellent, that'll fox 'em. Frankie baby,
we are made!"
They performed a scampering dance in their excitement.
Near them on the floor lay several rather ugly men who had been
hit about the head with some heavy design awards.
Half a mile away, four figures pounded up a corridor looking for
a way out. They emerged into a wide open-plan computer bay. They
glanced about wildly.
"Which way do you reckon Zaphod?" said Ford.
"At a wild guess, I'd say down here," said Zaphod, running off
down to the right between a computer bank and the wall. As the
others started after him he was brought up short by a Kill-O-Zap
energy bolt that cracked through the air inches in front of him
and fried a small section of adjacent wall.
A voice on a loud hailer said, "OK Beeblebrox, hold it right
there. We've got you covered."
"Cops!" hissed Zaphod, and span around in a crouch. "You want to
try a guess at all, Ford?"
"OK, this way," said Ford, and the four of them ran down a
gangway between two computer banks.
At the end of the gangway appeared a heavily armoured and space-
suited figure waving a vicious Kill-O-Zap gun.
"We don't want to shoot you, Beeblebrox!" shouted the figure.
"Suits me fine!" shouted Zaphod back and dived down a wide gap
between two data process units.
The others swerved in behind him.
"There are two of them," said Trillian. "We're cornered."
They squeezed themselves down in an angle between a large
computer data bank and the wall.
They held their breath and waited.
Suddenly the air exploded with energy bolts as both the cops
opened fire on them simultaneously.
"Hey, they're shooting at us," said Arthur, crouching in a tight
ball, "I thought they said they didn't want to do that."
"Yeah, I thought they said that," agreed Ford.
Zaphod stuck a head up for a dangerous moment.
"Hey," he said, "I thought you said you didn't want to shoot us!"
and ducked again.
They waited.
After a moment a voice replied, "It isn't easy being a cop!"
"What did he say?" whispered Ford in astonishment.
"He said it isn't easy being a cop."
"Well surely that's his problem isn't it?"
"I'd have thought so."
Ford shouted out, "Hey listen! I think we've got enough problems
on our own having you shooting at us, so if you could avoid
laying your problems on us as well, I think we'd all find it
easier to cope!"
Another pause, and then the loud hailer again.
"Now see here, guy," said the voice on the loud hailer, "you're
not dealing with any dumb two-bit trigger-pumping morons with low
hairlines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we're a couple
of intelligent caring guys that you'd probably quite like if you
met us socially! I don't go around gratuitously shooting people
and then bragging about it afterwards in seedy space-rangers
bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people
gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterwards for hours to
my girlfriend!"
"And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't
had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a
meeeean mood!"
Ford's eyes popped halfway out of their sockets. "Who are these
guys?" he said.
"Dunno," said Zaphod, "I think I preferred it when they were
shooting."
"So are you going to come quietly," shouted one of the cops
again, "or are you going to let us blast you out?"
"Which would you prefer?" shouted Ford.
A millisecond later the air about them started to fry again, as
bolt after bolt of Kill-O-Zap hurled itself into the computer
bank in front of them.
The fusillade continued for several seconds at unbearable
intensity.
When it stopped, there were a few seconds of near quietness ad
the echoes died away.
"You still there?" called one of the cops.
"Yes," they called back.
"We didn't enjoy doing that at all," shouted the other cop.
"We could tell," shouted Ford.
"Now, listen to this, Beeblebrox, and you better listen good!"
"Why?" shouted Back Zaphod.
"Because," shouted the cop, "it's going to be very intelligent,
and quite interesting and humane! Now either you all give
yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very
much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless
violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or
two others we noticed on our way out here!"
"But that's crazy!" cried Trillian. "You wouldn't do that!"
"Oh yes we would," shouted the cop, "wouldn't we?" he asked the
other one.
"Oh yes, we'd have to, no question," the other one called back.
"But why?" demanded Trillian.
"Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an
enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and
everything!"
"I just don't believe these guys," muttered Ford, shaking his
head.
One cop shouted to the other, "Shall we shoot them again for a
bit?"
"Yeah, why not?"
They let fly another electric barrage.
The heat and noise was quite fantastic. Slowly, the computer bank
was beginning to disintegrate. The front had almost all melted
away, and thick rivulets of molten metal were winding their way
back towards where they were squatting. They huddled further back
and waited for the end.
But the end never came, at least not then.
Quite suddenly the barrage stopped, and the sudden silence
afterwards was punctuated by a couple of strangled gurgles and
thuds.
The four stared at each other.
"What happened?" said Arthur.
"They stopped," said Zaphod with a shrug.
"Why?"
"Dunno, do you want to go and ask them?"
"No."
They waited.
"Hello?" called out Ford.
No answer.
"That's odd."
"Perhaps it's a trap."
"They haven't the wit."
"What were those thuds?"
"Dunno."
They waited for a few more seconds.
"Right," said Ford, "I'm going to have a look."
He glanced round at the others.
"Is no one going to say, No you can't possibly, let me go
instead?"
They all shook their heads.
"Oh well," he said, and stood up.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen. Ford
peered through the thick smoke that was billowing out of the
burning computer.
Cautiously he stepped out into the open.
Still nothing happened.
Twenty yards away he could dimly see through the smoke the
space-suited figure of one of the cops. He was lying in a
crumpled heap on the ground. Twenty yards in the other direction
lay the second man. No one else was anywhere to be seen.
This struck Ford as being extremely odd.
Slowly, nervously, he walked towards the first one. The body lay
reassuringly still as he approached it, and continued to lie
reassuringly still as he reached it and put his foot down on the
Kill-O-Zap gun that still dangled from its limp fingers.
He reached down and picked it up, meeting no resistance.
The cop was quite clearly dead.
A quick examination revealed him to be from Blagulon Kappa - he
was a methane-breathing life form, dependent on his space suit
for survival in the thin oxygen atmosphere of Magrathea.
The tiny life-support system computer on his backpack appeared
unexpectedly to have blown up.
Ford poked around in it in considerable astonishment. These
miniature suit computers usually had the full back-up of the main
computer back on the ship, with which they were directly linked
through the sub-etha. Such a system was fail-safe in all
circumstances other than total feedback malfunction, which was
unheard of.
He hurried over to the other prone figure, and discovered that
exactly the same impossible thing had happened to him, presumably
simultaneously.
He called the others over to look. They came, shared his
astonishment, but not his curiosity.
"Let's get shot out of this hole," said Zaphod. "If whatever I'm
supposed to be looking for is here, I don't want it." He grabbed
the second Kill-O-Zap gun, blasted a perfectly harmless
accounting computer and rushed out into the corridor, followed by
the others. He very nearly blasted hell out of an aircar that
stood waiting for them a few yards away.
The aircar was empty, but Arthur recognized it as belonging to
Slartibartfast.
It had a note from him pinned to part of its sparse instrument
panel. The note had an arrow drawn on it, pointing at one of the
controls.
It said, This is probably the best button to press.
The aircar rocketed them at speeds in excess of R17 through the
steel tunnels that lead out onto the appalling surface of the
planet which was now in the grip of yet another drear morning
twilight. Ghastly grey lights congealed on the land.
R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel
that is consistent with health, mental wellbeing and not being
more than say five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an
almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances,
since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an
absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless
handled with tranquility this equation can result in considerable
stress, ulcers and even death.
R17 is not a fixed velocity, but it is clearly far too fast.
The aircar flung itself through the air at R17 and above,
deposited them next to the Heart of Gold which stood starkly on
the frozen ground like a bleached bone, and then precipitately
hurled itself back in the direction whence they had come,
presumably on important business of its own.
Shivering, the four of them stood and looked at the ship.
Beside it stood another one.
It was the Blagulon Kappa policecraft, a bulbous sharklike
affair, slate green in colour and smothered with black stencilled
letters of varying degrees of size and unfriendliness. The
letters informed anyone who cared to read them as to where the
ship was from, what section of the police it was assigned to, and
where the power feeds should be connected.
It seemed somehow unnaturally dark and silent, even for a ship
whose two-man crew was at that moment lying asphyxicated in a
smoke-filled chamber several miles beneath the ground. It is one
of those curious things that is impossible to explain or define,
but one can sense when a ship is completely dead.
Ford could sense it and found it most mysterious - a ship and two
policemen seemed to have gone spontaneously dead. In his
experience the Universe simply didn't work like that.
The other three could sense it too, but they could sense the
bitter cold even more and hurried back into the Heart of Gold
suffering from an acute attack of no curiosity.
Ford stayed, and went to examine the Blagulon ship. As he walked,
he nearly tripped over an inert steel figure lying face down in
the cold dust.
"Marvin!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing?"
"Don't feel you have to take any notice of me, please," came a
muffled drone.
"But how are you, metalman?" said Ford.
"Very depressed."
"What's up?"
"I don't know," said Marvin, "I've never been there."
"Why," said Ford squatting down beside him and shivering, "are
you lying face down in the dust?"
"It's a very effective way of being wretched," said Marvin.
"Don't pretend you want to talk to me, I know you hate me."
"No I don't."
"Yes you do, everybody does. It's part of the shape of the
Universe. I only have to talk to somebody and they begin to hate
me. Even robots hate me. If you just ignore me I expect I shall
probably go away."
He jacked himself up to his feet and stood resolutely facing the
opposite direction.
"That ship hated me," he said dejectedly, indicating the
policecraft.
"That ship?" said Ford in sudden excitement. "What happened to
it? Do you know?"
"It hated me because I talked to it."
"You talked to it?" exclaimed Ford. "What do you mean you talked
to it?"
"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged
myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer
at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,"
said Marvin.
"And what happened?" pressed Ford.
"It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the
Heart of Gold.
That night, as the Heart of Gold was busy putting a few light
years between itself and the Horsehead Nebula, Zaphod lounged
under the small palm tree on the bridge trying to bang his brain
into shape with massive Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters; Ford and
Trillian sat in a corner discussing life and matters arising from
it; and Arthur took to his bed to flip through Ford's copy of The
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since he was going to live in
the place, he reasoned, he'd better start finding out something
about it.
He came across this entry.
It said: 'The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends
to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of
Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How,
Why and Where phases.
"For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question
How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the
third by the question Where shall we have lunch?"
He got no further before the ship's intercom buzzed into life.
"Hey Earthman? You hungry kid?" said Zaphod's voice.
"Er, well yes, a little peckish I suppose," said Arthur.
"OK baby, hold tight," said Zaphod. "We'll take in a quick bite
at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
{What's President?}
President: full title President of the Imperial Galactic
Government.
The term Imperial is kept though it is now an anachronism. The
hereditary Emperor is nearly dead and has been so for many
centuries. In the last moments of his dying coma he was locked in
a statis field which keeps him in a state of perpetual
unchangingness. All his heirs are now long dead, and this means
that without any drastic political upheaval, power has simply and
effectively moved a rung or two down the ladder, and is now seen
to be vested in a body which used to act simply as advisers to
the Emperor - an elected Governmental assembly headed by a
President elected by that assembly. In fact it vests in no such
place.
The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields
no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the
government, but the qualities he is required to display are not
those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this
reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an
infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield
power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria
Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the
Galaxy has ever had - he has already spent two of his ten
Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people
realize that the President and the Government have virtually no
power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence
ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly
believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a
computer. They couldn't be more wrong.
{About Ford Perfect}
Ford Prefect's original name is only pronuncible in an obscure
Betelgeusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great
Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out
all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford's
father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great
Collapsing Hrung disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that
he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is
shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung
was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven
particularly. Ford's father, magnanimously waving aside the
clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came
to live on Betelgeuse Five where he both fathered and uncled
Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the
ancient Praxibetel tongue.
Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father
eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in
some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him
Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as "boy
who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor
why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven".
THE END