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Douglas Adams. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe


To Jane and James with many thanks
    to Geoffrey Perkins for achieving the Improbable
    to Paddy Kingsland, Lisa Braun and Alick Hale Munro for helping him
    to John Lloyd for his help with the original Milliways script
    to Simon Brett for starting the whole thing off
    to  the  Paul  Simon  album  One  Trick  Pony which I played
incessantly while writing this book. Five years is far too long
    And with very special thanks to Jacqui Graham for infinite
patience, kindness and food in adversity

       There  is a theory which states that if ever anyone
discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here,  it
will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more
bizarre and inexplicable.

    There is another theory which states that this has already happened.


Chapter 1

    The story so far:
    In the beginning the Universe was created.
    This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad
move.
    Many races believe that it was created by some sort  of  God,  though  the
Jatravartid  people  of  Viltvodle  VI believe that the entire Universe was in
fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.
    The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the  time  they  call  The
Coming  of  The  Great  White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more
than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique  in  being  the  only  race  in
history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.
    However,  the  Great  Green  Arkleseizure  Theory  is  not widely accepted
outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being  the  puzzling  place  it  is,
other explanations are constantly being sought.
    For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built
themselves  a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and
for all the Answer to  the  Ultimate  Question  of  Life,  the  Universe,  and
Everything.
    For  seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated,
and in the end announced that the answer  was  in  fact  Forty-two  -  and  so
another,  even  bigger,  computer  had to be built to find out what the actual
question was.
    And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large  that  it  was
frequently  mistaken  for a planet - especially by the strange ape-like beings
who roamed its surface, totally unaware  that  they  were  simply  part  of  a
gigantic computer program.
    And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece
of knowledge,  nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the
slightest bit of sense.
    Sadly however, just before the critical moment of readout, the  Earth  was
unexpectedly  demolished  by  the Vogons to make way - so they claimed - for a
new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for  life  was
lost for ever.
    Or so it would seem.
    Two of there strange, ape-like creatures survived.
    Arthur  Dent escaped at the very last moment because an old friend of his,
Ford Prefect, suddenly turned out to be from a small planet in the vicinity of
Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he had hitherto claimed; and, more to the
point, he knew how to hitch rides on flying saucers.
    Tricia McMillian - or Trillian - had skipped the planet six months earlier
with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the then President of the Galaxy.
    Two survivors.
    They are all that remains of the greatest experiment ever conducted  -  to
find  the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and
Everything.
    And, less than half a million miles from where their starship is  drifting
lazily  through  the  inky  blackness  of space, a Vogon ship is moving slowly
towards them.

Chapter 2

    Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much  designed  as
congealed.  The unpleasant yellow lumps and edifices which protuded from it at
unsightly angles would have disfigured the looks of most ships,  but  in  this
case  that was sadly impossible. Uglier things have been spotted in the skies,
but not by reliable witnesses.
    In fact to see anything much uglier than a Vogon ship you would have to go
inside and look at a Vogon. If you are wise, however, this is  precisely  what
you  will  avoid  doing  because the average Vogon will not think twice before
doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never
been born - or (if you are a clearer minded thinker) that the Vogon had  never
been born.
    In  fact,  the  average  Vogon probably wouldn't even think once. They are
simple-minded, thick-willed,  slug-brained  creatures,  and  thinking  is  not
really  something  they  are  cut  out  for.  Anatomical analysis of the Vogon
reveals that  its  brain  was  originally  a  badly  deformed,  misplaced  and
dyspeptic  liver. The fairest thing you can say about them, then, is that they
know what they like, and what they like generally involves hurting people and,
wherever possible, getting very angry.
    One thing they don't like is leaving a job unfinished - particularly  this
Vogon, and particularly - for various reasons - this job.
    This  Vogon  was Captain Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace
Planning Council, and he was it who had had the job  of  demolishing  the  so+
called "planet" Earth.
    He  heaved his monumentally vile body round in his ill-fitting, slimy seat
and stared at the monitor screen on which the starship Heart of Gold was being
systematically scanned.
    It mattered little to him that  the  Heart  of  Gold,  with  its  Infinite
Improbability Drive, was the most beautiful and revolutionary ship ever built.
Aesthetics  and  technology  were closed books to him and, had he had his way,
burnt and buried books as well.
    It mattered even less to him that Zaphod  Beeblebrox  was  aboard.  Zaphod
Beeblebrox  was  now  the  ex-President of the Galaxy, and though every police
force in the Galaxy was currently pursuing both  him  and  this  ship  he  had
stolen, the Vogon was not interested.
    He had other fish to fry.
    It has been said that Vogons are not above a little bribery and corruption
in the  same  way that the sea is not above the clouds, and this was certainly
true in his case. When he heard the words "integrity" or "moral rectitude", he
reached for his dictionary, and when he heard the  chink  of  ready  money  in
large quantities he reached for the rule book and threw it away.
    In seeking so implacably the destruction of the Earth and all that therein
lay he was moving somewhat above and beyond the call of his professional duty.
There  was even some doubt as to whether the said bypass was actually going to
be built, but the matter had been glossed over.
    He grunted a repellent grunt of satisfaction.
    "Computer," he croaked, "get me my brain care specialist on the line."
    Within a few seconds the face of Gag  Halfrunt  appeared  on  the  screen,
smiling the smile of a man who knew he was ten light years away from the Vogon
face  he  was looking at. Mixed up somewhere in the smile was a glint of irony
too. Though the Vogon persistently referred to him as "my private  brain  care
specialist"  there  was not a lot of brain to take care of, and it was in fact
Halfrunt who was employing the Vogon. He was paying him an awful lot of  money
to  do  some  very  dirty  work.  As  one  of  the Galaxy's most prominent and
successful psychiatrists, he and a consortium of  his  colleagues  were  quite
prepared  to spend an awful lot of money when it seemed that the entire future
of psychiatry might be at stake.
    "Well," he said, "hello my Captain of Vogons Prostetnic, and  how  are  we
feeling today?"
    The  Vogon  captain  told  him that in the last few hours he had wiped out
nearly half his crew in a disciplinary exercise.
    Halfrunt's smile did not flicker for an instant.
    "Well," he said, "I think this is perfectly normal behaviour for a  Vogon,
you know? The natural and healthy channelling of the aggressive instincts into
acts of senseless violence."
    "That," rumbled the Vogon, "is what you always say."
    "Well  again,"  said  Halfrunt,  "I  think  that  this is perfectly normal
behaviour for a psychiatrist. Good. We are clearly both very well adjusted  in
our mental attitudes today. Now tell me, what news of the mission?"
    "We have located the ship."
    "Wonderful," said Halfrunt, "wonderful! and the occupants?"
    "The Earthman is there."
    "Excellent! And ...?"
    "A female from the same planet. They are the last."
    "Good, good," beamed Halfrunt, "Who else?"
    "The man Prefect."
    "Yes?"
    "And Zaphod Beeblebrox."
    For an instant Halfrunt's smile flickered.
    "Ah yes," he said, "I had been expecting this. It is most regrettable."
    "A  personal  friend?"  inquired  the  Vogon, who had heard the expression
somewhere once and decided to try it out.
    "Ah, no," said Halfrunt, "in my  profession  you  know,  we  do  not  make
personal friends."
    "Ah," grunted the Vogon, "professional detachment."
    "No," said Halfrunt cheerfully, "we just don't have the knack."
    He paused. His mouth continued to smile, but his eyes frowned slightly.
    "But  Beeblebrox,  you  know,"  he  said, "he is one of my most profitable
clients. He had personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts."
    He toyed with this thought a little before reluctantly dismissing it.
    "Still," he said, "you are ready for your task?"
    "Yes."
    "Good. Destroy the ship immediately."
    "What about Beeblebrox?"
    "Well," said Halfrunt brightly, "Zaphod's just this guy, you know?"
    He vanished from the screen.
    The Vogon Captain pressed a communicator button which connected  him  with
the remains of his crew.
    "Attack," he said.
    At  that  precise  moment Zaphod Beeblebrox was in his cabin swearing very
loudly. Two hours ago, he had said that they would go for a quick bite at  the
Restaurant at the End of the Universe, whereupon he had had a blazing row with
the  ship's  computer and stormed off to his cabin shouting that he would work
out the Improbability factors with a pencil.
    The Heart of Gold's Improbability Drive made  it  the  most  powerful  and
unpredictable  ship  in  existence. There was nothing it couldn't do, provided
you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing  you  wanted  it  to  do
would ever happen.
    He  had  stolen it when, as President, he was meant to be launching it. He
didn't know exactly why he had stolen it, except that he liked it.
    He didn't know why he had become President of the Galaxy, except  that  it
seemed a fun thing to be.
    He  did know that there were better reasons than these, but that they were
buried in a dark, locked off section of his two brains. He  wished  the  dark,
locked  off  section of his two brains would go away because they occasionally
surfaced momentarily and put strange thoughts into the light, fun sections  of
his mind and tried to deflect him from what he saw as being the basic business
of his life, which was to have a wonderfully good time.
    At the moment he was not having a wonderfully good time. He had run out of
patience and pencils and was feeling very hungry.
    "Starpox!" he shouted.
    At  that  same  precise  moment, Ford Prefect was in mid air. This was not
because of anything wrong  with  the  ship's  artificial  gravity  field,  but
because  he  was  leaping down the stair-well which led to the ship's personal
cabins. It was a very high jump to do in one bound and  he  landed  awkwardly,
stumbled,  recovered,  raced  down  the corridor sending a couple of miniature
service robots flying, skidded round the corner, burst into Zaphod's door  and
explained what was on his mind.
    "Vogons," he said.
    A  short  while  before  this,  Arthur  Dent had set out from his cabin in
search of a cup of tea. It was not a quest he embarked upon with a great  deal
of optimism., because he knew that the only source of hot drinks on the entire
ship  was  a  benighted  piece of equipment produced by the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation. It was called  a  Nutri-Matic  Drinks  Synthesizer,  and  he  had
encountered it before.
    It  claimed  to  produce  the  widest  possible range of drinks personally
matched to the tastes and metabolism of whoever cared to use it. When  put  to
the  test,  however, it invariably produced a plastic cup filled with a liquid
that was almost, but nit quite, entirely unlike tea.
    He attempted to reason with the thing.
    "Tea," he said.
    "Share and Enjoy," the machine replied and provided him with  yet  another
cup of the sickly liquid.
    He threw it away.
    "Share and enjoy," the machine repeated and provided him with another one.
    "Share  and  Enjoy"  is  the company motto of the hugely successful Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation Complaints division, which now covers the  major  land
masses  of  three medium sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation
to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.
    The motto stands - or rather  stood  -  in  three  mile  high  illuminated
letters  near the Complaints Department spaceport on Eadrax. Unfortunately its
weight was such that shortly after it was  erected,  the  ground  beneath  the
letters  caved  in  and  they dropped for nearly half their length through the
offices of many talented young complaints executives - now deceased.
    The protruding upper halves of  the  letters  now  appear,  in  the  local
language,  to  read  "Go  stick  your  head  in  a  pig",  and  are  no longer
illuminated, except at times of special celebration.
    Arthur threw away a sixth cup of the liquid.
    "Listen, you machine," he said, "you claim you can synthesize any drink in
existence, so why do you keep giving me the same undrinkable stuff?"
    "Nutrition and pleasurable sense data," burbled the  machine.  "Share  and
Enjoy."
    "It tastes filthy!"
    "If you have enjoyed the experience of this drink," continued the machine,
"why not share it with your friends?"
    "Because,"  said  Arthur  tartly,  "I  want  to keep them. Will you try to
comprehend what I'm telling you? That drink ..."
    "That drink," said the machine sweetly, "was individually tailored to meet
your personal requirements for nutrition and pleasure."
    "Ah," said Arthur, "so I'm a masochist on diet am I?"
    "Share and Enjoy."
    "Oh shut up."
    "Will that be all?"
    Arthur decided to give up.
    "Yes," he said.
    Then he decided he'd be dammed if he'd give up.
    "No," he said, "look, it's very, very simple ... all I want ... is  a  cup
of tea. You are going to make one for me. Keep quiet and listen."
    And  he  sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China,
he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the  sun.  He
told  it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn.
He told it about putting in the  milk  before  the  tea  so  it  wouldn't  get
scalded.  He  even  told  it  (briefly)  about  the  history of the East India
Company.
    "So that's it, is it?" said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished.
    "Yes," said Arthur, "that is what I want."
    "You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?"
    "Er, yes. With milk."
    "Squirted out of a cow?"
    "Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose ..."
    "I'm going to need some help with this one," said the machine tersely. All
the cheerful burbling had dropped out of its voice and it now meant business.
    "Well, anything I can do," said Arthur.
    "You've done quite enough," the Nutri-Matic informed him.
    It summoned up the ship's computer.
    "Hi there!" said the ship's computer.
    The Nutri-Matic explained about tea to the ship's computer.  The  computer
boggled,  linked  logic circuits with the Nutri-Matic and together they lapsed
into a grim silence.
    Arthur watched and waited for a while, but nothing further happened.
    He thumped it, but still nothing happened.
    Eventually he gave up and wandered up to the bridge.
    In the empty wastes of space, the Heart of  Gold  hung  still.  Around  it
blazed  the  billion pinpricks of the Galaxy. Towards it crept the ugly yellow
lump of the Vogon ship.

Chapter 3

    "Does anyone have a kettle?" Arthur asked as he walked on to  the  bridge,
and instantly began to wonder why Trillian was yelling at the computer to talk
to her, Ford was thumping it and Zaphod was kicking it, and also why there was
a nasty yellow lump on the vision screen.
    He put down the empty cup he was carrying and walked over to them.
    "Hello?" he said.
    At  that  moment Zaphod flung himself over to the polished marble surfaces
that contained the instruments that controlled the conventional photon  drive.
They  materialized beneath his hands and he flipped over to manual control. He
pushed, he pulled, he pressed and he swore. The photon  drive  gave  a  sickly
judder and cut out again.
    "Something up?" said Arthur.
    "Hey,  didja  hear  that?"  muttered Zaphod as he leapt now for the manual
controls of the Infinite Improbability Drive, "the monkey spoke!"
    The Improbability Drive gave two small whines and then also cut out.
    "Pure history, man," said Zaphod,  kicking  the  Improbability  Drive,  "a
talking monkey!"
    "If you're upset about something ..." said Arthur.
    "Vogons!" snapped Ford, "we're under attack!"
    Arthur gibbered.
    "Well what are you doing? Let's get out of here!"
    "Can't. Computer's jammed."
    "Jammed?"
    "It  says  all its circuits are occupied. There's no power anywhere in the
ship."
    Ford moved away from the computer terminal,  wiped  a  sleeve  across  his
forehead and slumped back against the wall.
    "Nothing we can do," he said. He glared at nothing and bit his lip.
    When  Arthur  had  been  a  boy  at school, long before the Earth had been
demolished, he had used to play football. He had not been at all good  at  it,
and his particular speciality had been scoring own goals in important matches.
Whenever  this  happened  he  used to experience a peculiar tingling round the
back of his neck that would slowly creep up across his  cheeks  and  heat  his
brow.  The  image of mud and grass and lots of little jeering boys flinging it
at him suddenly came vividly to his mind at this moment.
    A peculiar tingling sensation at the back of  his  neck  was  creeping  up
across his cheeks and heating his brow.
    He started to speak, and stopped.
    He started to speak again and stopped again.
    Finally he managed to speak.
    "Er," he said. He cleared his throat.
    "Tell  me,"  he  continued,  and  said it so nervously that the others all
turned to stare at him. He glanced at  the  approaching  yellow  blob  on  the
vision screen.
    "Tell  me,"  he said again, "did the computer say what was occupying it? I
just ask out of interest ..."
    Their eyes were riveted on him.
    "And, er ... well that's it really, just asking."
    Zaphod put out a hand and held Arthur by the scruff of the neck.
    "What have you done to it, Monkeyman?" he breathed.
    "Well," said Arthur, "nothing in fact. It's just  that  I  think  a  short
while ago it was trying to work out how to ..."
    "Yes?"
    "Make me some tea."
    "That's  right  guys,"  the  computer sang out suddenly, "just coping with
that problem right now, and wow, it's a biggy. Be with you  in  a  while."  It
lapsed  back  into  a silence that was only matched for sheer intensity by the
silence of the three people staring at Arthur Dent.
    As if to relieve the tension,  the  Vogons  chose  that  moment  to  start
firing.
    The  ship  shook, the ship thundered. Outside, the inch thick force-shield
around it blistered, crackled and spat  under  the  barrage  of  a  dozen  30+
Megahurt  Definit-Kil Photrazon Cannon, and looked as if it wouldn't be around
for long. Four minutes is how long Ford Prefect  gave  it."Three  minutes  and
fifty seconds," he said a short while later.
    "Forty-five seconds," he added at the appropriate time. He flicked idly at
some useless switches, then gave Arthur an unfriendly look.
    "Dying for a cup of tea, eh?" he said. "Three minutes and forty seconds."
    "Will you stop counting!" snarled Zaphod.
    "Yes," said Ford Prefect, "in three minutes and thirty-five seconds."
    Aboard the Vogon ship, Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz was puzzled. He had expected
a chase,  he  had  expected  an  exciting  grapple  with tractor beams, he had
expected to have to use the specially installed Sub-Cyclic  Normality  Assert+
i-Tron  to  counter  the Heart of Gold's Infinite Improbability Drive, but the
Sub-Cyclic Normality Assert-i-Tron lay idle as the  Heart  of  Gold  just  sat
there and took it.
    A  dozen  30-Megahurt Definit-Kil Photrazon Cannon continued to blaze away
at the Heart of Gold, and still it just sat there and took it.
    He tested every sensor at his disposal to see  if  there  was  any  subtle
trickery afoot, but no subtle trickery was to be found.
    He didn't know about the tea of course.
    Nor  did  he  know  exactly  how  the  occupants of the Heart of Gold were
spending the last three minutes and thirty seconds of life they  had  left  to
spend.
    Quite  how  Zaphod  Beeblebrox  arrived at the idea of holding a seance at
this point is something he was never quite clear on.
    Obviously the subject of death was in the air, but more as something to be
avoided than harped upon.
    Possibly the horror that Zaphod  experienced  at  the  prospect  of  being
reunited  with  his  deceased  relatives led on to the thought that they might
just feel the same way about him and, what's more, be  able  to  do  something
about helping to postpone this reunion.
    Or  again  it  might  just  have  been  one of the strange promptings that
occasionally surfaced from that dark area of his mind that he had inexplicably
locked off prior to becoming President of the Galaxy.
    "You want to talk to your great grandfather?" boggled Ford.
    "Yeah."
    "Does it have to be now?"
    The ship continued to shake and thunder. The temperature was  rising.  The
light  was  getting  dimmer  -  all the energy the computer didn't require for
thinking about tea was being pumped into the rapidly fading force-field.
    "Yeah!" insisted Zaphod. "Listen Ford, I think he may be able to help us."
    "Are you sure you mean think? Pick your words with care."
    "Suggest something else we can do."
    "Er, well ..."
    "OK, round the central console. Now. Come on! Trillian, Monkeyman, move."
    They clustered round the central  console  in  confusion,  sat  down  and,
feeling  exceptionally  foolish, held hands. With his third hand Zaphod turned
off the lights.
    Darkness gripped the ship.
    Outside, the thunderous roar of the Definit-Kil cannon continued to rip at
the force-field.
    "Concentrate," hissed Zaphod, "on his name."
    "What is it?" asked Arthur.
    "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth."
    "What?"
    "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth. Concentrate!"
    "The Fourth?"
    "Yeah. Listen, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox, my father was Zaphod Beeblebrox  the
Second, my grandfather Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third ..."
    "What?"
    "There  was  an  accident  with  a  contraceptive  and a time machine. Now
concentrate!"
    "Three minutes," said Ford Prefect.
    "Why," said Arthur Dent, "are we doing this?"
    "Shut up," suggested Zaphod Beeblebrox.
    Trillian said nothing. What, she thought, was there to say?
    The only light on the bridge came from two dim  red  triangles  in  a  far
corner where Marvin the Paranoid Android sat slumped, ignoring all and ignored
by all, in a private and rather unpleasant world of his own.
    Round  the  central  console  four  figures hunched in tight concentration
trying to blot from their minds the terrifying shuddering of the ship and  the
fearful roar that echoed through it.
    They concentrated.
    Still they concentrated.
    And still they concentrated.
    The seconds ticked by.
    On  Zaphod's  brow  stood  beads of sweat, first of concentration, then of
frustration and finally of embarrassment.
    At last he let out a cry of anger, snatched back his hands  from  Trillian
and Ford and stabbed at the light switch.
    "Ah,  I  was  beginning  to  think you'd never turn the lights on," said a
voice. "No, not too bright please, my eyes aren't what they once were."
    Four figures jolted upright in their seats. Slowly they turned their heads
to look, though their scalps showed a distinct propensity to try and  stay  in
the same place.
    "Now.  Who  disturbs  me at this time?" said the small, bent, gaunt figure
standing by the sprays of fern at the far end of the  bridge.  His  two  small
wispy-haired  heads  looked  so  ancient  that  it  seemed they might hold dim
memories of the birth of the galaxies themselves. One lolled in sleep, but the
other squinted sharply at them. If his eyes weren't what they once were,  they
must once have been diamond cutters.
    Zaphod  stuttered  nervously  for  a  moment. He gave the intricate little
double nod which is the traditional Betelgeusian gesture of familial respect.
    "Oh ... er, hi Great Granddad ..." he breathed.
    The little old figure moved closer towards them. He peered through the dim
light. He thrust out a bony finger at his great grandson.
    "Ah," he snapped. "Zaphod Beeblebrox. The last of our great  line.  Zaphod
Beeblebrox the Nothingth."
    "The First."
    "The Nothingth," spat the figure. Zaphod hated his voice. It always seemed
to him  to  screech like fingernails across the blackboard of what he liked to
think of as his soul.
    He shifted awkwardly in his seat.
    "Er, yeah," he muttered, "Er, look, I'm really sorry about the flowers,  I
meant  to send them along, but you know, the shop was fresh out of wreaths and
..."
    "You forget!" snapped Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth.
    "Well ..."
    "Too busy. Never think of other people. The living are all the same."
    "Two minutes, Zaphod," whispered Ford in an awed whisper.
    Zaphod fidgeted nervously.
    "Yeah, but I did mean to send them," he said. "And I'll write to my  great
grandmother as well, just as soon as we get out of this ..."
    "Your great grandmother," mused the gaunt little figure to himself.
    "Yeah,"  said Zaphod, "Er, how is she? Tell you what, I'll go and see her.
But first we've just got to ..."
    "Your  late  great  grandmother  and  I  are  very  well,"  rasped  Zaphod
Beeblebrox the Fourth.
    "Ah. Oh."
    "But very disappointed in you, young Zaphod ..."
    "Yeah  well  ..."  Zaphod  felt strangely powerless to take charge of this
conversation, and Ford's heavy breathing at his side told him that the seconds
were ticking away fast. The noise  and  the  shaking  had  reached  terrifying
proportions.  He  saw  Trillian and Arthur's faces white and unblinking in the
gloom.
    "Er, Great Grandfather ..."
    "We've been following your progress with considerable despondency ..."
    "Yeah, look, just at the moment you see ..."
    "Not to say contempt!"
    "Could you sort of listen for a moment ..."
    "I mean what exactly are you doing with your life?"
    "I'm  being  attacked  by  a  Vogon  fleet!"  cried  Zaphod.  It  was   an
exaggeration,  but  it  was  his  only opportunity so far of getting the basic
point of the exercise across.
    "Doesn't surprise me in the least," said the  little  old  figure  with  a
shrug.
    "Only it's happening right now you see," insisted Zaphod feverishly.
    The spectral ancestor nodded, picked up the cup Arthur Dent had brought in
and looked at it with interest.
    "Er ... Great Granddad ..."
    "Did  you  know,"  interrupting  the  ghostly figure, fixing Zaphod with a
stern look, "that Betelgeuse Five has developed a very  slight  eccentricy  in
its orbit?"
    Zaphod  didn't  and found the information hard to concentrate on what with
all the noise and the imminence of death and so on.
    "Er, no ... look," he said.
    "Me spinning in my grave!" barked the ancestor. He slammed  the  cup  down
and pointed a quivering, stick-like see-through finger at Zaphod.
    "Your fault!" he screeched.
    "One minute thirty," muttered Ford, his head in his hands.
    "Yeah, look Great Granddad, can you actually help because ..."
    "Help?" exclaimed the old man as if he'd been asked for a stoat.
    "Yeah, help, and like, now, because otherwise ..."
    "Help!"  repeated  the old man as if he'd been asked for a lightly grilled
stoat in a bun with French fries. He stood amazed.
    "You go swanning your way round the Galaxy with  your  ..."  the  ancestor
waved  a  contemptuous  hand, "with your disreputable friends, too busy to put
flowers on my grave, plastic ones would  have  done,  would  have  been  quite
appropriate  from  you, but no. Too busy. Too modern. Too sceptical - till you
suddenly find yourself  in  a  bit  of  a  fix  and  come  over  suddenly  all
astrallyminded!"
    He  shook  his  head  - carefully, so as not to disturb the slumber of the
other one, which was already becoming restive.
    "Well, I don't know, young Zaphod," he continued, "I think  I'll  have  to
think about this one."
    "One minute ten," said Ford hollowly.
    Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth peered at him curiously.
    "Why does that man keep talking in numbers?" he said.
    "Those  numbers,"  said  Zaphod  tersely,  "are the time we've got left to
live."
    "Oh," said his great grandfather. He grunted to himself. "Doesn't apply to
me, of course," he said and moved off to a dimmer  recess  of  the  bridge  in
search of something else to poke around at.
    Zaphod  felt  he  was  teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he
shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.
    "Great Grandfather," he said, "It applies to us! We are still  alive,  and
we are about to lose our lives."
    "Good job too."
    "What?"
    "What  use  is your life to anyone? When I think of what you've made of it
the phrase `pig's ear' comes irresistibly to my mind."
    "But I was President of the Galaxy, man!"
    "Huh," muttered his ancestor, "And what kind  of  a  job  is  that  for  a
Beeblebrox?"
    "Hey, what? Only President you know! Of the whole Galaxy!"
    "Conceited little megapuppy."
    Zaphod blinked in bewilderment.
    "Hey, er, what are you at, man? I mean Great Grandfather."
    The  hunched  up little figure stalked up to his great grandson and tapped
him sternly on the knee. This had the effect of reminding Zaphod that  he  was
talking to a ghost because he didn't feel a thing.
    "You  know  and  I know what being President means, young Zaphod. You know
because you've been it, and I know because I'm dead and it gives  one  such  a
wonderfully uncluttered perspective. We have a saying up here. `Life is wasted
on the living.'"
    "Yeah,"  said  Zaphod  bitterly,  "very  good. Very deep. Right now I need
aphorisms like I need holes in my heads."
    "Fifty seconds," grunted Ford Prefect.
    "Where was I?" said Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth.
    "Pontificating," said Zaphod Beeblebrox.
    "Oh yes."
    "Can this guy," muttered Ford quietly to Zaphod, "actually  in  fact  help
us?"
    "Nobody else can," whispered Zaphod.
    Ford nodded despondently.
    "Zaphod!"  the ghost was saying, "you became President of the Galaxy for a
reason. Have you forgotten?"
    "Could we go into this later?"
    "Have you forgotten!" insisted the ghost.
    "Yeah! Of course I forgot! I had to forget. They screen  your  brain  when
you  get  the  job you know. If they'd found my head full of tricksy ideas I'd
have been right out on the streets again  with  nothing  but  a  fat  pension,
secretarial staff, a fleet of ships and a couple of slit throats."
    "Ah," nodded the ghost in satisfaction, "then you do remember!"
    He paused for a moment.
    "Good," he said and the noise stopped.
    "Forty-eight  seconds," said Ford. He looked again at his watch and tapped
it. He looked up.
    "Hey, the noise has stopped," he said.
    A mischievous twinkle gleamed in the ghost's hard little eyes.
    "I've slowed down time for a moment," he said,  "just  for  a  moment  you
understand. I would hate you to miss all I have to say."
    "No,  you  listen to me, you see-through old bat," said Zaphod leaping out
of his chair, "A - thanks for stopping time and  all  that,  great,  terrific,
wonderful,  but  B  -  no thanks for the homily, right? I don't know what this
great think I'm meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was  supposed
not to know. And I resent that, right?
    "The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so hoopy. Except that the
old me  cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain - my own brain
- and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and  cared  I
wouldn't  be  able  to do it. I wouldn't be able to go and be President, and I
wouldn't be able to steal this ship, which must be the important thing.
    "But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn't he,  by  changing
my  brain?  OK,  that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make,
and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and not  caring
about  this  big number, whatever it is. That's what he wanted, that's what he
got.
    "Except this old self of mine tried to leave himself in  control,  leaving
orders  for  me  in  the  bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don't want to
know, and I don't want to hear them. That's my choice. I'm  not  going  to  be
anybody's puppet, particularly not my own."
    Zaphod  banged  the  console in fury, oblivious to the dumbfolded looks he
was attracting.
    "The old me is dead!" he raved, "Killed himself! The dead  shouldn't  hang
about trying to interfere with the living!"
    "And yet you summon me up to help you out of a scrape," said the ghost.
    "Ah," said Zaphod, sitting down again, "well that's different isn't it?"
    He grinned at Trillian, weakly.
    "Zaphod,"  rasped  the  apparition,  "I  think  the only reason I waste my
breath on you is that being dead I don't have any other use for it."
    "OK," said Zaphod, "why don't you tell me what the big secret is. Try me."
    "Zaphod, you knew when you were President of the  Galaxy,  as  did  Yooden
Vranx  before  you,  that the President is nothing. A cipher. Somewhere in the
shadows behind is another man, being, something,  with  ultimate  power.  That
man, or being, or something, you must find - the man who controls this Galaxy,
and - we suspect - others. Possibly the entire Universe."
    "Why?"
    "Why?"  exclaimed  an astonished ghost, "Why? Look around you lad, does it
look to you as if it's in very good hands?"
    "It's alright."
    The old ghost glowered at him.
    "I will not  argue  with  you.  You  will  simply  take  this  ship,  this
Improbability  Drive  ship  to where it is needed. You will do it. Don't think
you can escape your purpose. The Improbability Field controls you, you are  in
its grip. What's this?"
    He  was  standing  tapping  at one of the terminals of Eddie the Shipboard
Computer. Zaphod told him.
    "What's it doing?"
    "It is trying," said Zaphod with wonderful restraint, "to make tea."
    "Good," said his great grandfather, "I approve of that.  Now  Zaphod,  "he
said,  turning  and  wagging  a finger at him, "I don't know if you are really
capable of succeeding in your job. I think you will not be able to  avoid  it.
However,  I  am  too  long  dead  and  too tired to care as much as I did. The
principal reason I am helping you now is that I couldn't bear the  thought  of
you and your modern friends slouching about up here. Understood?"
    "Yeah, thanks a bundle."
    "Oh, and Zaphod?"
    "Er, yeah?"
    "If  you  ever  find  you need help again, you know, if you're in trouble,
need a hand out of a tight corner ..."
    "Yeah?"
    "Please don't hesitate to get lost."
    Within the space of one second, a bolt of light flashed from  the  wizened
old  ghost's hands to the computer, the ghost vanished, the bridge filled with
billowing smoke and the Heart of Gold leapt an unknown  distance  through  the
dimensions of time and space.

Chapter 4

    Ten light years away, Gag Halfrunt jacked up his smile by several notches.
As he  watched  the picture on his vision screen, relayed across the sub-ether
from the bridge of the Vogon ship, he saw the final shreds  of  the  Heart  of
Gold's  force-shield  ripped  away,  and  the  ship itself vanish in a puff of
smoke.
    Good, he thought.
    The end of the last stray survivors of the demolition he  had  ordered  on
the planet Earth, he thought.
    The  final  end  of  this  dangerous  (to  the psychiatric profession) and
subversive (also  to  the  psychiatric  profession)  experiment  to  find  the
Question  to  the  Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, he
thought.
    There would be some celebration with  his  fellows  tonight,  and  in  the
morning  they would meet again their unhappy, bewildered and highly profitable
patients, secure in the knowledge that the Meaning of Life would not  now  be,
once and for all, well and truly sorted out, he thought.
    "Family's  always embarrassing isn't it?" said Ford to Zaphod as the smoke
began to clear.
    He paused, then looked about.
    "Where's Zaphod?" he said.
    Arthur and Trillian looked about blankly. They were pale  and  shaken  and
didn't know where Zaphod was.
    "Marvin?" said Ford, "Where's Zaphod?"
    A moment later he said:
    "Where's Marvin?"
    The robot's corner was empty.
    The  ship was utterly silent. It lay in thick black space. Occasionally it
rocked and swayed. Every instrument was dead, every vision  screen  was  dead.
They consulted the computer. It said:
    "I  regret  that  I  have  been  temporarily  closed to all communication.
Meanwhile, here is some light music."
    They turned off the light music.
    They searched every corner of the  ship  in  increasing  bewilderment  and
alarm.  Everywhere  was dead and silent. Nowhere was there any trace of Zaphod
or of Marvin.
    One of the last areas they checked was the small bay in which  the  Nutri+
Matic machine was located.
    On  the  delivery  plate  of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small
tray, on which sat three bone china cups and saucers,  a  bone  china  jug  of
milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted, and a small
printed note saying "Wait".

Chapter 5

    Ursa  Minor  Beta  is,  some  say, one of the most appalling places in the
known Universe.
    Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and  more  full  of
wonderfully  exciting  people  than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be
insignificant that when a recent edition of Playbeing  magazine  headlined  an
article with the words "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of
life", the suicide rate quadrupled overnight.
    Not that there are any nights on Ursa Minor Beta.
    It  is a West Zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious
freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline.  By  an
equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday
afternoon just before the beach bars close.
    No  adequate  explanation  for this has been forthcoming from the dominant
lifeforms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend  most  of  their  time  attempting  to
achieve  spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting
Investigation Officials form the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to  "have
a nice diurnal anomaly".
    There  is only one city on Ursa Minor Beta, and that is only called a city
because the swimming pools are slightly  thicker  on  the  ground  there  than
elsewhere.
    If  you  approach  Light  City  by  air  -  and  there  is no other way of
approaching it, no roads, no port facilities - if you  don't  fly  they  don't
want  to  see  you in Light City - you will see why it has this name. Here the
sun shines brightest of all, glittering on the swimming pools,  shimmering  on
the  white,  palm-lined  boulevards,  glistening on the healthy bronzed specks
moving up and down them, gleaming off the villas, the hazy airpads, the  beach
bars and so on.
    Most  particularly  it  shines  on  a  building, a tall beautiful building
consisting of two thirty-storey white towers connected by a bridge half-way up
their length.
    The building is the home of a book, and was built here on the proceeds  of
an  extraordinary  copyright  law suit fought between the book's editors and a
breakfast cereal company.
    The book is a guide book, a travel book.
    It is one of the most remarkable, certainly  the  most  successful,  books
ever  to  come  out  of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - more
popular than Life Begins at Five Hundred and Fifty, better  selling  than  The
Big  Bang  Theory  -  A  Personal  View  by  Eccentrica Gallumbits (the triple
breasted whore of Eroticon Six) and more controversial than Oolon  Colluphid's
latest  blockbusting  title  Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But
Have Been Forced To Find Out.
    (And in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of
the Galaxy, it has long surplanted the great Encyclopaedia  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 and more pedestrian work in two  important  respects.
First,  it  is  slightly  cheaper,  and  secondly it has the words Don't Panic
printed in large friendly letters on its cover.)
    It is of course that invaluable companion for all those who  want  to  see
the  marvels of the known Universe for less than thirty Altairan Dollars a day
- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
    If you stood with your back to  the  main  entrance  lobby  of  the  Guide
offices  (assuming you had landed by now and freshened up with a quick dip and
shower) and then walked east, you would pass along the  leafy  shade  of  Life
Boulevard,  be amazed by the pale golden colour of the beaches stretching away
to your left, astounded by the mind-surfers floating carelessly along two feet
above the waves as  if  it  was  nothing  special,  surprised  and  eventually
slightly  irritated  by  the  giant  palm  trees  that  hum  toneless nothings
throughout the daylight hours, in other words continuously.
    If you then walked to the end  of  Life  Boulevard  you  would  enter  the
Lalamatine  district  of shops, bolonut trees and pavement cafes where the UM+
Betans come to relax after a hard afternoon's relaxation  on  the  beach.  The
Lalamatine  district  is  one  of  those  very few areas which doesn't enjoy a
perpetual Saturday afternoon - it enjoys instead the cool of a perpetual early
Saturday evening. Behind it lie the night clubs.
    If, on this particular day, afternoon, stretch of eveningtime  -  call  it
what  you  will - you had approached the second pavement cafe on the right you
would have seen the usual crowd of UMBetans chatting, drinking,  looking  very
relaxed,  and  casually  glancing at each other's watches to see how expensive
they were.
    You would also have seen a couple of  rather  dishevelled  looking  hitch+
hikers from Algol who had recently arrived on an Arcturan Megafreighter aboard
which they had been roughing it for a few days. They were angry and bewildered
to  discover  that  here,  within  sight  of  the Hitch Hiker's Guide building
itself, a simple glass of fruit  juice  cost  the  equivalent  of  over  sixty
Altairan dollars.
    "Sell out," one of them said, bitterly.
    If  at that moment you had then looked at the next table but one you would
have seen Zaphod Beeblebrox sitting and looking very startled and confused.
    The reason for his confusion was that five seconds  earlier  he  had  been
sitting on the bridge of the starship Heart of Gold.
    "Absolute sell out," said the voice again.
    Zaphod  looked  nervously  out  of  the  corners  of  his  eyes at the two
dishevelled hitch-hikers at the next table. Where the hell was he? How had  he
got  there? Where was his ship? His hand felt the arm of the chair on which he
was sitting, and then the table in front of him. They seemed solid enough.  He
sat very still.
    "How  can  they  sit  and  write  a guide for hitch-hikers in a place like
this?" continued the voice. "I mean look at it. Look at it!"
    Zaphod was looking at it. Nice place, he thought. But where? And why?
    He fished in his pocket for his two  pairs  of  sunglasses.  In  the  same
pocket he felt a hard smooth, unidentified lump of very heavy metal. He pulled
it  out and looked at it. He blinked at it in surprise. Where had he got that?
He returned it to his pocket and put on the sunglasses,  annoyed  to  discover
that  the  metal object had scratched one of the lenses. Nevertheless, he felt
much more comfortable with them on. They were a double pair of Joo  Janta  200
Super-Chromatic  Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed
to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger.  At  the  first  hint  of
trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that
might alarm you.
    Apart  from  the  scratch  the  lenses  were clear. He relaxed, but only a
little bit.
    The angry hitch-hiker continued to  glare  at  his  monstrously  expensive
fruit juice.
    "Worst  thing that ever happened to the Guide, moving to Ursa Minor Beta,"
he grumbled, "they've all gone soft. You know, I've even  heard  that  they've
created a whole electronically synthesized Universe in one of their offices so
they can go and research stories during the day and still go to parties in the
evening. Not that day and evening mean much in this place."
    Ursa  Minor  Beta,  thought  Zaphod. At least he knew where he was now. He
assumed that this must be his great grandfather's doing, but why?
    Much to his annoyance, a thought popped into his mind. It was  very  clear
and  very  distinct,  and he had now come to recognize these thoughts for what
they were. His instinct  was  to  resist  them.  They  were  the  pre-ordained
promptings from the dark and locked off parts of his mind.
    He  sat  still  and  ignored  the  thought furiously. It nagged at him. He
ignored it. It nagged at him. He ignored it. It nagged at him. He gave  in  to
it.
    What  the  hell,  he thought, go with the flow. He was too tired, confused
and hungry to resist. He didn't even know what the thought meant.

Chapter 6

    "Hello? Yes? Megadodo Publications, home of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, the most totally remarkable book in the whole of the  known  Universe,
can  I  help  you?"  said the large pink-winged insect into one of the seventy
phones lined up along the vast chrome expanse of the  reception  desk  in  the
foyer of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offices. It fluttered its wings
and  rolled  its  eyes.  It  glared at all the grubby people cluttering up the
foyer, soiling the carpets and leaving dirty handmarks on the  upholstery.  It
adored working for the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it just wished there
was  some  way  of keeping all the hitch-hikers away. Weren't they meant to be
hanging round dirty spaceports or something? It was certain that it  had  read
something  somewhere  in  the book about the importance of hanging round dirty
spaceports. Unfortunately most of them seemed to come and hang around in  this
nice clean shiny foyer after hanging around in extremely dirty spaceports. And
all they ever did was complain. It shivered its wings.
    "What?"  it  said  into  the  phone.  "Yes, I passed on your message to Mr
Zarniwoop, but I'm afraid he's too cool to see  you  right  now.  He's  on  an
intergalactic cruise."
    It  waved  a petulant tentacle at one of the grubby people who was angrily
trying to engage its attention.  The  petulant  tentacle  directed  the  angry
person  to  look at the notice on the wall to its left and not to interrupt an
important phone call.
    "Yes," said the insect, "he is in his office, but he's on an intergalactic
cruise. Thank you so much for calling." It slammed down the phone.
    "Read the notice," it said to the angry man who  was  trying  to  complain
about  one  of  the  more  ludicrous  and  dangerous  pieces of misinformation
contained in the book.
    The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all
those who are keen to  make  sense  of  life  in  an  infinitely  complex  and
confusing  Universe,  for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on
all matters, it does at least make the reassuring  claim,  that  where  it  is
inaccurate it is at least definitely inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy
it's always reality that's got it wrong.
    This was the gist of the notice. It said "The Guide is definitive. Reality
is frequently inaccurate."
    This  has  led  to  some  interesting consequences. For instance, when the
Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those  who  had  died  as  a
result  of  taking  the entry on the planet Traal literally (it said "Ravenous
Bugblatter beasts often make a very good meal for visiting  tourists"  instead
of  "Ravenous  Bugblatter  beasts  often  make  a  very  good meal of visiting
tourists") they claimed that the first version of the sentence  was  the  more
aesthetically  pleasing,  summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that
beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby  to  prove  that  the  guilty
party  was  Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges
concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself  was  in  contempt  of
court,  and  duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off
to enjoy a pleasant evening's ultragolf.
    Zaphod  Beeblebrox  entered  the  foyer.  He  strode  up  to  the   insect
receptionist.
    "OK," he said, "Where's Zarniwoop? Get me Zarniwoop."
    "Excuse  me,  sir?" said the insect icily. It did not care to be addressed
in this manner.
    "Zarniwoop. Get him, right? Get him now."
    "Well, sir," snapped the fragile little  creature,  "if  you  could  be  a
little cool about it ..."
    "Look,"  said Zaphod, "I'm up to here with cool, OK? I'm so amazingly cool
you could keep a side of meat inside me for a  month.  I  am  so  hip  I  have
difficulty seeing over my pelvis. Now will you move before you blow it?"
    "Well,  if  you'd  let  me explain, sir," said the insect tapping the most
petulant of all the tentacles at its disposal, "I'm afraid that isn't possible
right now as Mr Zarniwoop is on an intergalactic cruise."
    Hell, thought Zaphod.
    "When he's going to be back?" he said.
    "Back sir? He's in his office."
    Zaphod paused while he tried to sort this particular thought  out  in  his
mind. He didn't succeed.
    "This  cat's  on  an  intergalactic  cruise  ... in his office?" He leaned
forward and gripped the tapping tentacle.
    "Listen, three eyes," he said, "don't  you  try  to  outweird  me.  I  get
stranger things than you free with my breakfast cereal."
    "Well,  just  who  do  you  think  you  are,  honey?"  flounced the insect
quivering its wings in rage, "Zaphod Beeblebrox or something?"
    "Count the heads," said Zaphod in a low rasp.
    The insect blinked at him. It blinked at him again.
    "You are Zaphod Beeblebrox?" it squeaked.
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, "but don't shout it out or they'll all want one."
    "The Zaphod Beeblebrox?"
    "No, just a Zaphod Beeblebrox, didn't you hear I come in six packs?"
    The insect rattled its tentacles together in agitation.
    "But sir," it squealed, "I just heard on the sub-ether  radio  report.  It
said that you were dead ..."
    "Yeah,  that's  right,"  said  Zaphod, "I just haven't stopped moving yet.
Now. Where do I find Zarniwoop?"
    "Well, sir, his office is on the fifteenth floor, but ..."
    "But he's on an intergalactic cruise, yeah, yeah, how do I get to him."
    "The  newly  installed  Sirius  Cybernetics  Corporation  Vertical  People
Transporters are in the far corner sir. But sir ..."
    Zaphod was turning to go. He turned back.
    "Yeah?" he said.
    "Can I ask you why you want to see Mr Zarniwoop?"
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, who was unclear on this point himself, "I told myself
I had to."
    "Come again sir?"
    Zaphod leaned forward, conspirationally.
    "I just materialized out of thin air in one of your cafes," he said, "as a
result  of an argument with the ghost of my great grandfather. No sooner had I
got there that my former self, the one that operated on my brain, popped  into
my  head  and  said `Go see Zarniwoop'. I have never heard of the cat. That is
all I know. That and the fact that I've got to find  the  man  who  rules  the
Universe."
    He winked.
    "Mr Beeblebrox, sir," said the insect in awed wonder, "you're so weird you
should be in movies."
    "Yeah," said Zaphod patting the thing on a glittering pink wing, "and you,
baby, should be in real life."
    The  insect  paused  for  a  moment to recover from its agitation and then
reached out a tentacle to answer a ringing phone.
    A metal hand restrained it.
    "Excuse me," said the owner of the metal hand in a voice that  would  have
made an insect of a more sentimental disposition collapse in tears.
    This was not such an insect, and it couldn't stand robots.
    "Yes, sir," it snapped, "can I help you?"
    "I doubt it," said Marvin.
    "Well  in  that case, if you'll just excuse me ..." Six of the phones were
now ringing. A million things awaited the insect's attention.
    "No one can help me," intoned Marvin.
    "Yes, sir, well ..."
    "Not that anyone tried of course." The restraining metal hand fell  limply
by Marvin's side. His head hung forward very slightly.
    "Is that so," said the insect tartly.
    "Hardly worth anyone's while to help a menial robot is it?"
    "I'm sorry, sir, if ..."
    "I  mean  where's the percentage in being kind or helpful to a robot if it
doesn't have any gratitude circuits?"
    "And you don't have any?" said the insect, who didn't seem to be  able  to
drag itself out of this conversation.
    "I've never had occasion to find out," Marvin informed it.
    "Listen, you miserable heap of maladjusted metal ..."
    "Aren't you going to ask me what I want?"
    The insect paused. Its long thin tongue darted out and licked its eyes and
darted back again.
    "Is it worth it?" it asked.
    "Is anything?" said Marvin immediately.
    "What ... do ... you ... want?"
    "I'm looking for someone."
    "Who?" hissed the insect.
    "Zaphod Beeblebrox," said Marvin, "he's over there."
    The insect shook with rage. It could hardly speak.
    "Then why did you ask me?" it screamed.
    "I just wanted something to talk to," said Marvin.
    "What!"
    "Pathetic isn't it?"
    With a grinding of gears Marvin turned and trundled off. He caught up with
Zaphod approaching the elevators. Zaphod span round in astonishment.
    "Hey ... Marvin!" he said, "Marvin! How did you get here?"
    Marvin was forced to say something which came very hard to him.
    "I don't know," he said.
    "But ..."
    "One  moment  I  was  sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the
next moment I was standing here feeling utterly  miserable.  An  Improbability
Field I expect."
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, "I expect my great grandfather sent you along to keep
me company."
    "Thanks a bundle grandad," he added to himself under his breath.
    "So, how are you?" he said aloud.
    "Oh,  fine," said Marvin, "if you happen to like being me which personally
I don't."
    "Yeah, yeah," said Zaphod as the elevator doors opened.
    "Hello," said the elevator sweetly, "I am to be  your  elevator  for  this
trip  to  the  floor  of  your  choice.  I  have  been  designed by the Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation to take you, the visitor to the Hitch Hiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, into these their offices. If you enjoy your ride,  which  will  be
swift  and  pleasurable,  then  you  may  care to experience some of the other
elevators which have recently been installed in the offices  of  the  Galactic
tax  department,  Boobiloo  Baby  Foods  and the Sirian State Mental Hospital,
where many ex-Sirius Cybernetics Corporation executives will be  delighted  to
welcome your visits, sympathy, and happy tales of the outside world."
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, stepping into it, "what else do you do besides talk?"
    "I go up," said the elevator, "or down."
    "Good," said Zaphod, "We're going up."
    "Or down," the elevator reminded him.
    "Yeah, OK, up please."
    There was a moment of silence.
    "Down's very nice," suggested the elevator hopefully.
    "Oh yeah?"
    "Super."
    "Good," said Zaphod, "Now will you take us up?"
    "May  I  ask  you," inquired the elevator in its sweetest, most reasonable
voice, "if you've considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?"
    Zaphod knocked one of his heads against the inside wall.  He  didn't  need
this,  he  thought to himself, this of all things he had no need of. He hadn't
asked to be here. If he was asked at this moment where he would like to be  he
would  probably have said he would like to be lying on the beach with at least
fifty beautiful women and a small team of experts working out  new  ways  they
could  be  nice  to  him, which was his usual reply. To this he would probably
have added something passionate on the subject of food.
    One thing he didn't want to be doing was chasing after the man  who  ruled
the Universe, who was only doing a job which he might as well keep at, because
if  it wasn't him it would only be someone else. Most of all he didn't want to
be standing in an office block arguing with an elevator.
    "Like what other possibilities?" he asked wearily.
    "Well," the voice  trickled  on  like  honey  on  biscuits,  "there's  the
basement, the microfiles, the heating system ... er ..."
    It paused.
    "Nothing particularly exciting," it admitted, "but they are alternatives."
    "Holy  Zarquon,"  muttered  Zaphod,  "did  I  ask  for  an  existentialist
elevator?" he beat his fists against the wall.
    "What's the matter with the thing?" he spat.
    "It doesn't want to go up," said Marvin simply, "I think it's afraid."
    "Afraid?" cried Zaphod, "Of what? Heights? An elevator  that's  afraid  of
heights?"
    "No," said the elevator miserably, "of the future ..."
    "The  future?"  exclaimed  Zaphod,  "What  does the wretched thing want, a
pension scheme?"
    At that moment a commotion broke out in the reception  hall  behind  them.
From the walls around them came the sound of suddenly active machinery.
    "We  can  all see into the future," whispered the elevator in what sounded
like terror, "it's part of our programming."
    Zaphod looked out of the elevator - an agitated crowd had  gathered  round
the elevator area, pointing and shouting.
    Every elevator in the building was coming down, very fast.
    He ducked back in.
    "Marvin,"  he  said,  "just get this elevator go up will you? We've got to
get to Zarniwoop."
    "Why?" asked Marvin dolefully.
    "I don't know," said Zaphod, "but when I find him, he'd better have a very
good reason for me wanting to see him."
    Modern elevators are strange and complex entities.  The  ancient  electric
winch  and  "maximum-capacity-eight-persons"  jobs  bear as much relation to a
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as  a  packet
of  mixed  nuts  does  to  the  entire  west  wing  of the Sirian State Mental
Hospital.
    This is because  they  operate  on  the  curios  principle  of  "defocused
temporal  perception". In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into
the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right  floor  to
pick  you  up  even  before  you  knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the
tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends  that  people  were  previously
forced to do whist waiting for elevators.
    Not  unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition
became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up
and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of
existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and
finally took to squatting in basements sulking.
    An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system
these days can pick up  easy  money  working  as  a  counsellor  for  neurotic
elevators.
    At the fifteenth floor the elevator doors opened quickly.
    "Fifteenth," said the elevator, "and remember, I'm only doing this because
I like your robot."
    Zaphod  and Marvin bundled out of the elevator which instantly snapped its
doors shut and dropped as fast as its mechanism would take it.
    Zaphod looked around warily. The corridor was deserted and silent and gave
no clue as to where Zarniwoop might be found. All the doors that led  off  the
corridor were closed and unmarked.
    They  were standing close to the bridge which led across from one tower of
the building to the other. Through a large window the brilliant  sun  of  Ursa
Minor  Beta  threw  blocks  of  light  in which danced small specks of dust. A
shadow flitted past momentarily.
    "Left in the lurch by a lift," muttered Zaphod, who  was  feeling  at  his
least jaunty.
    They both stood and looked in both directions.
    "You know something?" said Zaphod to Marvin.
    "More that you can possibly imagine."
    "I'm dead certain this building shouldn't be shaking," Zaphod said.
    It  was  just  a  light tremor through the soles of his feet - and another
one. In the sunbeams the flecks of dust danced more vigorously. Another shadow
flitted past.
    Zaphod looked at the floor.
    "Either," he said, not very confidently, "they've got  some  vibro  system
for toning up your muscles while you work, or ..."
    He  walked  across  to  the  window  and suddenly stumbled because at that
moment his Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive sunglasses had turned
utterly black. A large shadow flitted past the window with a sharp buzz.
    Zaphod ripped off his sunglasses, and as he did so the building shook with
a thunderous roar. He leapt to the window.
    "Or," he said, "this building's being bombed!"
    Another roar cracked through the building.
    "Who in the Galaxy would want to bomb a publishing company?" asked Zaphod,
but never heard Marvin's reply because at that moment the building shook  with
another  bomb  attack.  He tried to stagger back to the elevator - a pointless
manoeuvre he realized, but the only one he could think of.
    Suddenly, at the end of the corridor leading at  right  angles  from  this
one,  he  caught  sight of a figure as it lunged into view, a man. The man saw
him.
    "Beeblebrox, over here!" he shouted.
    Zaphod eyed him with distrust as another bomb blast rocked the building.
    "No," called Zaphod, "Beeblebrox over here! Who are you?"
    "A friend!" shouted back the man. He ran towards Zaphod.
    "Oh yeah?" said Zaphod, "Anyone's friend in particular, or just  generally
well disposed of people?"
    The  man raced along the corridor, the floor bucking beneath his feet like
an excited blanket. He was short, stocky and  weatherbeaten  and  his  clothes
looked as if they'd been twice round the Galaxy and back with him in them.
    "Do you know," Zaphod shouted in his ear when he arrived, "your building's
being bombed?"
    The man indicated his awareness.
    It  suddenly stopped being light. Glancing round at the window to see why,
Zaphod gaped as a huge sluglike, gunmetal-green spacecraft crept  through  the
air past the building. Two more followed it.
    "The  government  you deserted is out to get you, Zaphod," hissed the man,
"they've sent a squadron of Frogstar Fighters."
    "Frogstar Fighters!" muttered Zaphod, "Zarquon!"
    "You get the picture?"
    "What are Frogstar Fighters?" Zaphod was  sure  he'd  heard  someone  talk
about them when he was President, but he never paid much attention to official
matters.
    The  man  was  pulling  him  back through a door. He went with him. With a
searing whine a small black  spider-like  object  shot  through  the  air  and
disappeared down the corridor.
    "What was that?" hissed Zaphod.
    "Frogstar Scout robot class A out looking for you," said the man.
    "Hey yeah?"
    "Get down!"
    From  the  opposite  direction  came a larger black spider-like object. It
zapped past them.
    "And that was ...?"
    "A Frogstar Scout robot class B out looking for you."
    "And that?" said Zaphod, as a third one seared through the air.
    "A Frogstar Scout robot class C out looking for you."
    "Hey," chuckled Zaphod to himself, "pretty stupid robots eh?"
    From over the bridge came a massive rumbling hum. A gigantic  black  shape
was moving over it from the opposite tower, the size and shape of a tank.
    "Holy photon, what's that?"
    "A tank," said the man, "Frogstar Scout robot class D come to get you."
    "Should we leave?"
    "I think we should."
    "Marvin!" called Zaphod.
    "What do you want?"
    Marvin  rose from a pile of rubble further down the corridor and looked at
them.
    "You see that robot coming towards us?"
    Marvin looked at the gigantic black shape edging forward towards them over
the bridge. He looked down at his own small metal body. He looked back  up  at
the tank.
    "I suppose you want me to stop it," he said.
    "Yeah."
    "Whilst you save your skins."
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, "get in there!"
    "Just so long," said Marvin, "as I know where I stand."
    The  man  tugged  at  Zaphod's  arm,  and Zaphod followed him off down the
corridor.
    A point occurred to him about this.
    "Where are we going?" he said.
    "Zarniwoop's office."
    "Is this any time to keep an appointment?"
    "Come on."

Chapter 7

    Marvin stood at the end of the bridge corridor.  He  was  not  in  fact  a
particularly  small  robot.  His silver body gleamed in the dusty sunbeams and
shook with the continual barrage which the building was still undergoing.
    He did, however, look pitifully small as the gigantic black tank rolled to
a halt in front of him.  The  tank  examined  him  with  a  probe.  The  probe
withdrew.
    Marvin stood there.
    "Out of my way little robot," growled the tank.
    "I'm afraid," said Marvin, "that I've been left here to stop you."
    The probe extended again for a quick recheck. It withdrew again.
    "You? Stop me?" roared the tank. "Go on!"
    "No, really I have," said Marvin simply.
    "What are you armed with?" roared the tank in disbelief.
    "Guess," said Marvin.
    The  tank's  engines  rumbled, its gears ground. Molecule-sized electronic
relays  deep  in  its  micro-brain   flipped   backwards   and   forwards   in
consternation.
    "Guess?" said the tank.
    Zaphod  and  the as yet unnamed man lurched up one corridor, down a second
and along a third. The building continued to rock and judder and this  puzzled
Zaphod. If they wanted to blow the building up, why was it taking so long?
    With difficulty they reached one of a number of totally anonymous unmarked
doors and heaved at it. With a sudden jolt it opened and they fell inside.
    All  this way, thought Zaphod, all this trouble, all this notlying-on-the+
beach-having-a-wonderful-time, and for what? A single chair, a single desk and
a single dirty ashtray in an undecorated office. The desk, apart from a bit of
dancing dust and single, revolutionary form of paper clip, was empty.
    "Where," said Zaphod, "is Zarniwoop?" feeling  that  his  already  tenuous
grasp of the point of this whole exercise was beginning to slip.
    "He's on an intergalactic cruise," said the man.
    Zaphod tried to size the man up. Earnest type, he thought, not a barrel of
laughs.  He  probably  apportioned  a fair whack of his time to running up and
down heaving corridors, breaking down doors  and  making  cryptic  remarks  in
empty offices.
    "Let  me  introduce myself," the man said, "My name is Roosta, and this is
my towel."
    "Hello Roosta," said Zaphod.
    "Hello, towel," he added as Roosta held out to  him  a  rather  nasty  old
flowery towel. Not knowing what to do with it, he shook it by the corner.
    Outside  the  window, one of the huge slug-like, gunmetal-green spaceships
growled past.
    "Yes, go on," said Marvin  to  the  huge  battle  machine,  "you'll  never
guess."
    "Errmmm ..." said the machine, vibrating with unaccustomed thought, "laser
beams?"
    Marvin shook his head solemnly.
    "No,"  muttered  the  machine  in  its deep guttural rumble, "Too obvious.
Anti-matter ray?" it hazarded.
    "Far too obvious," admonished Marvin.
    "Yes," grumbled the machine,  somewhat  abashed,  "Er  ...  how  about  an
electron ram?"
    This was new to Marvin.
    "What's that?" he said.
    "One of these," said the machine with enthusiasm.
    From  its turret emerged a sharp prong which spat a single lethal blaze of
light. Behind Marvin a wall roared and collapsed as a heap of dust.  The  dust
billowed briefly, then settled.
    "No," said Marvin, "not one of those."
    "Good though, isn't it?"
    "Very good," agreed Marvin.
    "I  know,"  said  the  Frogstar  battle  machine,  after  another moment's
consideration,  "you  must  have  one  of  those  new   Xanthic   Re-Structron
Destabilized Zenon Emitters!"
    "Nice, aren't they?" said Marvin.
    "That's what you've got?" said the machine in considerable awe.
    "No," said Marvin.
    "Oh," said the machine, disappointed, "then it must be ..."
    "You're  thinking  along the wrong lines," said Marvin, "You're failing to
take into account something fairly basic in the relationship between  men  and
robots."
    "Er,  I  know,"  said  the  battle machine, "is it ..." it tailed off into
thought again.
    "Just think," urged Marvin, "they left me, an ordinary, menial  robot,  to
stop  you,  a  gigantic heavy-duty battle machine, whilst they ran off to save
themselves. What do you think they would leave me with?"
    "Oooh,  er,"  muttered  the  machine  in  alarm,  "something  pretty  damn
devastating I should expect."
    "Expect!" said Marvin, "oh yes, expect. I'll tell you what they gave me to
protect myself with shall I@"
    "Yes, alright," said the battle machine, bracing itself.
    "Nothing," said Marvin.
    There was a dangerous pause.
    "Nothing?" roared the battle machine.
    "Nothing at all," intoned Marvin dismally, "not an electronic sausage."
    The machine heaved about with fury.
    "Well,  doesn't that just take the biscuit!" it roared, "Nothing, eh? Just
don't think, do they?"
    "And me," said Marvin in a soft low voice, "with this terrible pain in all
the diodes down my left side."
    "Makes you spit, doesn't it?"
    "Yes," agreed Marvin with feeling.
    "Hell that makes me angry," bellowed the machine, "think I'll  smash  that
wall down!"
    The  electron  ram stabbed out another searing blaze of light and took out
the wall next to the machine.
    "How do you think I feel?" said Marvin bitterly.
    "Just ran off and left you, did they?" the machine thundered.
    "Yes," said Marvin.
    "I think I'll shoot down their bloody ceiling as well!" raged the tank.
    It took out the ceiling of the bridge.
    "That's very impressive," murmured Marvin.
    "You ain't seeing nothing yet," promised the machine, "I can take out this
floor too, no trouble!"
    It took out the floor, too.
    "Hell's bells!" the machine roared as it  plummeted  fifteen  storeys  and
smashed itself to bits on the ground below.
    "What a depressingly stupid machine," said Marvin and trudged away.

Chapter 8

    "So,  do  we  just sit here, or what?" said Zaphod angrily, "what do these
guys out here want?"
    "You, Beeblebrox," said Roosta, "they're going to take you to the Frogstar
- the most totally evil world in the Galaxy."
    "Oh, yeah?" said Zaphod. "They'll have to come and get me first."
    "They have come and got you," said Roosta, "look out of the window."
    Zaphod looked, and gaped.
    "The ground's going away!" he gasped, "where are they taking the ground?"
    "They're taking the building," said Roosta, "we're airborne."
    Clouds streaked past the office window.
    Out in the open air again Zaphod could see the ring of dark green Frogstar
Fighters round the uprooted tower of the building. A network  of  force  beams
radiated in from them and held the tower in a firm grip.
    Zaphod shook his head in perplexity.
    "What have I done to deserve this?" he said, "I walk into a building, they
take it away."
    "It's not what you've done they're worried about," said Roosta, "it's what
you're going to do."
    "Well don't I get a say in that?"
    "You  did,  years ago. You'd better hold on, we're in for a fast and bumpy
journey."
    "If I ever meet myself," said Zaphod, "I'll hit myself  so  hard  I  won't
know what's hit me."
    Marvin  trudged  in through the door, looked at Zaphod accusingly, slumped
in a corner and switched himself off.
    On the bridge of the Heart of Gold, all was silent. Arthur stared  at  the
rack  in  front of him and thought. He caught Trillian's eyes as she looked at
him inquiringly. He looked back at the rack.
    Finally he saw it.
    He picked up five small plastic squares and laid them on  the  board  that
lay just in front of the rack.
    The  five  squares  had on them the five letters E, X, Q, U and I. He laid
them next to the letters S, I, T, E.
    "Exquisite," he said, "on a triple word score. Scores  rather  a  lot  I'm
afraid."
    The ship bumped and scattered some of the letters for the 'n'th time.
    Trillian sighed and started to sort them out again.
    Up  and down the silent corridors echoed Ford Prefect's feet as he stalked
the ship thumping dead instruments.
    Why did the ship keep shaking? he thought.
    Why did it rock and sway?
    Why could he not find out where they were?
    Where, basically, were they?
    The left-hand tower of the Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  to  the  Galaxy  offices
streaked through interstellar space at a speed never equalled either before or
since by any other office block in the Universe.
    In a room halfway up it, Zaphod Beeblebrox strode angrily.
    Roosta sat on the edge of the desk doing some routine towel maintenance.
    "Hey, where did you say this building was flying to?" demanded Zaphod.
    "The  Frogstar,"  said  Roosta,  "the  most  totally  evil  place  in  the
Universe."
    "Do they have food there?" said Zaphod.
    "Food? You're going to the Frogstar and you're worried about whether  they
got food?"
    "Without food I may not make it to the Frogstar."
    Out  of the window, they could see nothing but the flickering light of the
force beams, and vague green  streaks  which  were  presumably  the  distorted
shapes  of  the  Frogstar Fighters. At this speed, space itself was invisible,
and indeed unreal.
    "Here, suck this," said Roosta, offering Zaphod his towel.
    Zaphod stared at him as if he  expected  a  cuckoo  to  leap  out  of  his
forehead on a small spring.
    "It's soaked in nutrients," explained Roosta.
    "What are you, a messy eater or something?" said Zaphod.
    "The yellow stripes are high in protein, the green ones have vitamin B and
C complexes, the little pink flowers contain wheatgerm extracts."
    Zaphod took and looked at it in amazement.
    "What are the brown stains?" he asked.
    "Bar-B-Q sauce," said Roosta, "for when I get sick of wheatgerm."
    Zaphod sniffed it doubtfully.
    Even more doubtfully, he sucked a corner. He spat it out again.
    "Ugh," he stated.
    "Yes," said Roosta, "when I've had to suck that end I usually need to suck
the other end a bit too."
    "Why," asked Zaphod suspiciously, "what's in that?"
    "Anti-depressants," said Roosta.
    "I've gone right off this towel, you know," said Zaphod handing it back.
    Roosta took it back from him, swung himself off the desk, walked round it,
sat in the chair and put his feet up.
    "Beeblebrox,"  he  said, sticking his hands behind his head, "have you any
idea what's going to happen to you on the Frogstar?"
    "They're going to feed me?" hazarded Zaphod hopefully.
    "They're going to feed you," said  Roosta,  "into  the  Total  Perspective
Vortex!"
    Zaphod  had  never heard of this. He believed that he had heard of all the
fun things in the Galaxy, so he assumed that the Total Perspective Vortex  was
not fun. He asked what it was.
    "Only,"  said  Roosta,  "the most savage psychic torture a sentinent being
can undergo."
    Zaphod nodded a resigned nod.
    "So," he said, "no food, huh?"
    "Listen!" said Roosta urgently, "you can kill a  man,  destroy  his  body,
break his spirit, but only the Total Perspective Vortex can annihilate a man's
soul!  The  treatment  lasts  seconds,  but  the effect lasts the rest of your
life!"
    "You ever had a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster?" asked Zaphod sharply.
    "This is worse."
    "Phreeow!" admitted Zaphod, much impressed.
    "Any idea why these guys might want to do this to me?" he added  a  moment
later.
    "They  believe  it  will  be the best way of destroying you for ever. They
know what you're after."
    "Could they drop me a note and let me know as well?"
    "You know," said Roosta, "you know, Beeblebrox. You want to meet  the  man
who rules the Universe."
    "Can he cook?" said Zaphod. On reflection he added:
    "I  doubt  if he can. If he could cook a good meal he wouldn't worry about
the rest of the Universe. I want to meet a cook."
    Roosta sighed heavily.
    "What are you doing here anyway?" demanded Zaphod, "what's all this got to
so with you?"
    "I'm just one of those who planned this thing, along with Zarniwoop, along
with Yooden  Vranx,  along  with  your  great  grandfather,  along  with  you,
Beeblebrox."
    "Me?"
    "Yes, you. I was told you had changed, I didn't realize how much."
    "But ..."
    "I am here to do one job. I will do it before I leave you."
    "What job, man, what are you talking about?"
    "I will do it before I leave you."
    Roosta lapsed into an impenetrable silence.
    Zaphod was terribly glad.

Chapter 9

    The  air  around  the  second  planet of the Frogstar system was stale and
unwholesome.
    The dank winds that swept continually over its  surface  swept  over  salt
flats,  dried  up  marshland, tangled and rotting vegetation and the crumbling
remains of ruined cities. No life moved across its surface. The  ground,  like
that of many planets in this part of the Galaxy, had long been deserted.
    The  howl  of  the  wind  was desolate enough as it gusted through the old
decaying houses of the cities; it was more desolate as it  whipped  about  the
bottoms of the tall black towers that swayed uneasily here and there about the
surface  of  this  world.  At the top of these towers lived colonies of large,
scraggy, evil smelling birds, the sole survivors of the civilization that once
lived here.
    The howl of the wind was at its most desolate,  however,  when  it  passed
over  a  pimple  of  a  place  set  in  the middle of a wide grey plain on the
outskirts of the largest of the abandoned cities.
    This pimple of a place was the  thing  that  had  earned  this  world  the
reputation of being the most totally evil place in the Galaxy. From without it
was simply a steel dome about thirty feet across. From within it was something
more monstrous than the mind can comprehend.
    About  a  hundred  yards or so away, and separated from it by a pockmarked
and blasted stretch of the most barren land imaginable was what would probably
have to be described as a landing pad of sorts. That is to say that  scattered
over a largish area were the ungainly hulks of two or three dozen crash-landed
buildings.
    Flitting  over  and  around  these  buildings  was a mind, a mind that was
waiting for something.
    The mind directed its attention into the  air,  and  before  very  long  a
distant speck appeared, surrounded by a ring of smaller specks.
    The larger speck was the left-hand tower of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the
Galaxy  office building, descending through the stratosphere of Frogstar World
B.
    As it descended, Roosta suddenly broke the long uncomfortable silence that
had grown up between the two men.
    He stood up and gathered his towel into a bag. He said:
    "Beeblebrox, I will now do the job I was sent here to do."
    Zaphod looked up at him from where he was  sitting  in  a  corner  sharing
unspoken thoughts with Marvin.
    "Yeah?" he said.
    "The building will shortly be landing. When you leave the building, do not
go out of the door," said Roosta, "go out of the window."
    "Good  luck,"  he  added,  and  walked  out of the door, disappearing from
Zaphod's life as mysteriously as he had entered it.
    Zaphod leapt up and tried the door, but Roosta had already looked  it.  He
shrugged and returned to the corner.
    Two  minutes  later,  the building crashlanded amongst the other wreckage.
Its escort of Frogstar Fighters deactivated their force beams and  soared  off
into  the  air again, bound for Frogstar World A, an altogether more congenial
spot. They never landed on Frogstar World B. No one did. No one ever walked on
its surface other than the intended victims of the Total Perspective Vortex.
    Zaphod was badly shaken by the crash. He lay for a  while  in  the  silent
dusty  rubble  to which most of the room had been reduced. He felt that he was
at the lowest ebb he had ever reached in his life. He felt bewildered, he felt
lonely, he felt unloved. Eventually he felt he ought to get  whatever  it  was
over with.
    He looked around the cracked and broken room. The wall had split round the
door frame, and the door hung open. The window, by some miracle was closed and
unbroken.  For  a  while he hesitated, then he thought that if his strange and
recent companion had been through all that he had been through  just  to  tell
him  what  he  had  told  him,  then  there must be a good reason for it. With
Marvin's help he got the window open. Outside it, the cloud of dust aroused by
the crash, and the hulks of the  other  buildings  with  which  this  one  was
surrounded,  effectively  prevented  Zaphod  from seeing anything of the world
outside.
    Not that this concerned him unduly. His main concern was what he saw  when
he  looked  down.  Zarniwoop's office was on the fifteenth floor. The building
had landed at a tilt of about forty-five degrees, but still the descent looked
heart-stopping.
    Eventually, stung by the continuous  series  of  contemptuous  looks  that
Marvin  appeared  to be giving him, he took a deep breath and clambered out on
to the steeply inclined  side  of  the  building.  Marvin  followed  him,  and
together they began to crawl slowly and painfully down the fifteen floors that
separated them from the ground.
    As  he  crawled,  the dank air and dust choked his lungs, his eyes smarted
and the terrifying distance down made his heads spin.
    The occasional remark from Marvin of the order of "This  is  the  sort  of
thing  you lifeforms enjoy is it? I ask merely for information," did little to
improve his state of mind.
    About half-way down the side of the shattered  building  they  stopped  to
rest.  It  seemed  to  Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaustion
that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than  usual.  Eventually  he  realized
this  wasn't  so.  The  robot  just seemed cheerful in comparison with his own
mood.
    A large, scraggy black bird came  flapping  through  the  slowly  settling
clouds  of  dust  and, stretching down its scrawny legs, landed on an inclined
window ledge a couple of yards from Zaphod. It folded its ungainly  wings  and
teetered awkwardly on its perch.
    Its wingspan must have been something like six feet, and its head and neck
seemed curiously large for a bird. Its face was flat, the beak underdeveloped,
and half-way  along  the  underside  of  its  wings  the vestiges of something
handlike could be clearly seen.
    In fact, it looked almost human.
    It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its  beak  in  a  desultory
fashion.
    "Go away," said Zaphod.
    "OK," muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.
    Zaphod watched its departure in bewilderment.
    "Did  that  bird just talk to me?" he asked Marvin nervously. He was quite
prepared  to  believe  the  alternative  explanation,  that  he  was  in  fact
hallucinating.
    "Yes," confirmed Marvin.
    "Poor souls," said a deep, ethereal voice in Zaphod's ear.
    Twisting  round  violently  to  find the source of the voice nearly caused
Zaphod to fall off the building. He grabbed savagely at  a  protruding  window
fitting and cut his hand on it. He hung on, breathing heavily.
    The  voice  had  no  visible  source  whatever  -  there was no one there.
Nevertheless, it spoke again.
    "A tragic history behind them, you know. A terrible blight."
    Zaphod looked wildly about.  The  voice  was  deep  and  quiet.  In  other
circumstances  it  would  even  be  described  as soothing. There is, however,
nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of  nowhere,
particularly  if you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your best and hanging
from a ledge eight storeys up a crashed building.
    "Hey, er ..." he stammered.
    "Shall I tell you their story?" inquired the voice quietly.
    "Hey, who are you?" panted Zaphod. "Where are you?"
    "Later then, perhaps," murmured the voice. "I  am  Gargravarr.  I  am  the
Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex."
    "Why can't I see ..."
    "You  will  find your progress down the building greatly facilitated," the
voice lifted, "if you move about two yards to your left.  Why  don't  you  try
it?"
    Zaphod looked and saw a series of short horizontal grooves leading all the
way down  the  side  of  the building. Gratefully he shifted himself across to
them.
    "Why don't I see you again at the bottom?" said the voice in his ear,  and
as it spoke it faded.
    "Hey," called out Zaphod, "Where are you ..."
    "It'll only take a couple of minutes ..." said the voice very faintly.
    "Marvin,"  said Zaphod earnestly to the robot squatting dejectedly next to
him, "Did a ... did a voice just ..."
    "Yes," Marvin replied tersely.
    Zaphod nodded. He took out his Peril Sensitive Sunglasses again. They were
completely black, and by now quite badly scratched  by  the  unexpected  metal
object  in his pocket. He put them on. He would find his way down the building
more comfortably if he didn't actually have to look at what he was doing.
    Minutes later he clambered over the ripped and mangled foundations of  the
building and, once more removing his sunglasses, he dropped to the ground.
    Marvin  joined  him a moment or so later and lay face down in the dust and
rubble, from which position he seemed too disinclined to move.
    "Ah, there you are," said the voice suddenly in Zaphod's ear,  "excuse  me
leaving  you  like that, it's just that I have a terrible head for heights. At
least," it added wistfully, "I did have a terrible head for heights."
    Zaphod looked around slowly and carefully, just to see if  he  had  missed
something which might be the source of the voice. All he saw, however, was the
dust, the rubble and the towering hulks of the encircling buildings.
    "Hey, er, why can't I see you?" he said, "why aren't you here?"
    "I am here," said the voice slowly, "my body wanted to come but it's a bit
busy  at  the  moment.  Things to do, people to see." After what seemed like a
sort of ethereal sigh it added, "You know how it is with bodies."
    Zaphod wasn't sure about this.
    "I thought I did," he said.
    "I only hope it's gone for a rest cure," continued  the  voice,  "the  way
it's been living recently it must be on its last elbows."
    "Elbows?" said Zaphod, "don't you mean last legs?"
    The  voice  said  nothing  for  a while. Zaphod looked around uneasily. He
didn't know if it was gone or was still there or what it was doing.  Then  the
voice spoke again.
    "So, you are to be put into the Vortex, yes?"
    "Er,  well,"  said  Zaphod  with a very poor attempt at nonchalance, "this
cat's in no hurry, you know. I can just slouch about and take in a look at the
local scenery, you know?"
    "Have you seen the local scenery?" asked the voice of Gargravarr.
    "Er, no."
    Zaphod clambered over the rubble, and rounded the corner  of  one  of  the
wrecked buildings that was obscuring his view.
    He looked out at the landscape of Frogstar World B.
    "Ah, OK," he said, "I'll just sort of slouch about then."
    "No,"  said  Gargravarr,  "the Vortex is ready for you now. You must come.
Follow me."
    "Er, yeah?" said Zaphod, "and how am I meant to do that?"
    "I'll hum for you," said Gargravarr, "follow the humming."
    A soft keening sound drifted through the  air,  a  pale,  sad  sound  that
seemed  to  be  without  any  kind  of  focus.  It  was only by listening very
carefully that Zaphod was able to detect  the  direction  from  which  it  was
coming.  Slowly,  dazedly, he stumbled off in its wake. What else was there to
do?

Chapter 10

    The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a
fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.
    Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising,
and this is what most beings in fact do.
    For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic  Arm  lies  the  large
forest  planet  Oglaroon,  the  entire "intelligent" population of which lives
permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree  they  are
born,  live,  fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the
meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance  of  birth  control,
fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside
of some of the less accessible outer branches.
    In  fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are
hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of  the  other
trees  might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other
trees are anything  other  than  illusions  brought  on  by  eating  too  many
Oglanuts.
    Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy
which  is  not  in  some  way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total
Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.
    For when you are put into the Vortex you  are  given  just  one  momentary
glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a
tiny  little  marker,  a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You
are here."
    The grey plain stretched before Zaphod, a  ruined,  shattered  plain.  The
wind whipped wildly over it.
    Visible  in  the  middle  was the steel pimple of the dome. This, gathered
Zaphod, was where he was going. This was the Total Perspective Vortex.
    As he stood and gazed bleakly at it,  a  sudden  inhuman  wail  of  terror
emanated  from it as of a man having his soul burnt from his body. It screamed
above the wind and died away.
    Zaphod started with fear and his blood seemed to turn to liquid helium.
    "Hey, what was that?" he muttered voicelessly.
    "A recording," said Gargravarr, "of the  last  man  who  was  put  in  the
Vortex. It is always played to the next victim. A sort of prelude."
    "Hey, it really sounds bad ..." stammered Zaphod, "couldn't we maybe slope
off to a party or something for a while, think it over?"
    "For  all I know," said Gargravarr's ethereal voice, "I'm probably at one.
My body that is. It goes to a lot of parties without me. Says I  only  get  in
the way. Hey ho."
    "What  is all this with your body?" said Zaphod, anxious to delay whatever
it was that was going to happen to him.
    "Well, it's ... it's busy you know," said Gargravarr hesitantly.
    "You mean it's got a mind of its own?" said Zaphod.
    There was a long and slightly chilly pause before Gargravarr spoke again.
    "I have to say," he replied eventually, "that I find that remark in rather
poor taste."
    Zaphod muttered a bewildered and embarrassed apology.
    "No matter," said Gargravarr, "you weren't to know."
    The voice fluttered unhappily.
    "The truth is," it continued in tones which suggested he was  trying  very
hard  to keep it under control, "the truth is that we are currently undergoing
a period of legal trial separation. I suspect it will end in divorce."
    The voice was still again, leaving Zaphod with no idea of what to say.  He
mumbled uncertainly.
    "I  think  we are probably not very well suited," said Gargravarr again at
length, "we never seemed to be happy doing the same things. We always had  the
greatest  arguments  over  sex and fishing. Eventually we tried to combine the
two, but that only led to disaster, as you can probably imagine.  And  now  my
body refuses to let me in. It won't even see me ..."
    He paused again, tragically. The wind whipped across the plain.
    "It  says  I  only  inhibit  it. I pointed out that in fact I was meant to
inhibit it, and it said that that was exactly the sort of  smart  alec  remark
that  got  right up a body's left nostril, and so we left it. It will probably
get custody of my forename."
    "Oh ..." said Zaphod faintly, "and what's that?"
    "Pizpot," said the voice, "My name  is  Pizpot  Gargravarr.  Says  it  all
really doesn't it?"
    "Errr ..." said Zaphod sympathetically.
    "And that is why I, as a disembodied mind, have this job, Custodian of the
Total  Perspective Vortex. No one will ever walk on the ground of this planet.
Except the victims of the Vortex - they don't really count I'm afraid."
    "Ah ..."
    "I'll tell you the story. Would you like to hear it?"
    "Er ..."
    "Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet - people, cities  shops,
a  normal  world.  Except  that on the high streets of these cities there were
slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought  necessary.  And  slowly,
insidiously,  the  numbers  of  these  shoe shops were increasing. It's a well
known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe
shops there were, the more shoes they had to  make  and  the  worse  and  more
unwearable  they  became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had
to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the
whole economy of the place passed what I believe  is  termed  the  Shoe  Event
Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other
than  shoe  shops.  Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population
died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into
birds - you've seen one of them - who cursed their feet,  cursed  the  ground,
and  vowed  that  none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must take
you to the Vortex."
    Zaphod shook his head in bemusement and stumbled forward across the plain.
    "And you," he said, "you come from this hellhole pit do you?"
    "No no," said Gargravarr, taken aback, "I come from the Frogstar World  C.
Beautiful  place. Wonderful fishing. I flit back there in the evenings. Though
all I can do now is watch. The Total Perspective Vortex is the only  thing  on
this planet with any function. It was built here because no one else wanted it
on their doorstep."
    At that moment another dismal scream rent the air and Zaphod shuddered.
    "What can do that to a guy?" he breathed.
    "The  Universe," said Gargravarr simply, "the whole infinite Universe. The
infinite suns, the infinite distances between them, and yourself an  invisible
dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small."
    "Hey,  I'm  Zaphod  Beeblebrox,  man, you know," muttered Zaphod trying to
flap the last remnants of his ego.
    Gargravarr made no reply, but merely resumed  his  mournful  humming  till
they reached the tarnished steel dome in the middle of the plain.
    As  they  reached  it,  a  door hummed open in the side, revealing a small
darkened chamber within.
    "Enter," said Gargravarr.
    Zaphod started with fear.
    "Hey, what, now?" he said.
    "Now."
    Zaphod peered nervously inside. The chamber was very small. It was  steel+
lined and there was hardly space in it for more than one man.
    "It  ...  er  ...  it  doesn't  look  like any kind of Vortex to me," said
Zaphod.
    "It isn't," said Gargravarr, "it's just the elevator. Enter."
    With infinite  trepidation  Zaphod  stepped  into  it.  He  was  aware  of
Gargravarr  being in the elevator with him, though the disembodied man was not
for the moment speaking.
    The elevator began its descent.
    "I must get myself into the  right  frame  of  mind  for  this,"  muttered
Zaphod.
    "There is no right frame of mind," said Gargravarr sternly.
    "You really know how to make a guy feel inadequate."
    "I don't. The Vortex does."
    At  the bottom of the shaft, the rear of the elevator opened up and Zaphod
stumbled out into a smallish, functional, steel-lined chamber.
    At the far side of it stood a single upright steel box, just large  enough
for a man to stand in.
    It was that simple.
    It  connected  to  a small pile of components and instruments via a single
thick wire.
    "Is that it?" said Zaphod in surprise.
    "That is it."
    Didn't look too bad, thought Zaphod.
    "And I get in there do I?" said Zaphod.
    "You get in there," said Gargravarr, "and I'm afraid you must do it now."
    "OK, OK," said Zaphod.
    He opened the door of the box and stepped in.
    Inside the box he waited.
    After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in
the box with him.

Chapter 11

    The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe  on
the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
    To  explain  -  since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way
affected by every other piece of matter in  the  Universe,  it  is  in  theory
possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their
orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one
small piece of fairy cake.
    The  man  who  invented  the  Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in
order to annoy his wife.
    Trin Tragula - for that was his  name  -  was  a  dreamer,  a  thinker,  a
speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
    And  she  would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of
time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of  safety
pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
    "Have  some  sense  of  proportion!"  she would say, sometimes as often as
thirty-eight times in a single day.
    And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.
    And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as  extrapolated  from  a
piece  of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when
he turned it on she saw in one instant the  whole  infinity  of  creation  and
herself in relation to it.
    To  Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but
to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that  if  life
is  going  to  exist  in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot
afford to have is a sense of proportion.
    The door of the Vortex swung open.
    From his disembodied mind Gargravarr watched  dejectedly.  He  had  rather
liked Zaphod Beeblebrox in a strange sort of way. He was clearly a man of many
qualities, even if they were mostly bad ones.
    He waited for him to flop forwards out of the box, as they all did.
    Instead, he stepped out.
    "Hi!" he said.
    "Beeblebrox ..." gasped Gargravarr's mind in amazement.
    "Could I have a drink please?" said Zaphod.
    "You ... you ... have been in the Vortex?" stammered Gargravarr.
    "You saw me, kid."
    "And it was working?"
    "Sure was."
    "And you saw the whole infinity of creation?"
    "Sure. Really neat place, you know that?"
    Gargravarr's  mind was reeling in astonishment. Had his body been with him
it would have sat down heavily with its mouth hanging open.
    "And you saw yourself," said Gargravarr, "in relation to it all?"
    "Oh, yeah, yeah."
    "But ... what did you experience?"
    Zaphod shrugged smugly.
    "It just told me what I knew all the time. I'm a really terrific and great
guy. Didn't I tell you, baby, I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox!"
    His gaze passed over the machinery which powered the vortex  and  suddenly
stopped, startled.
    He breathed heavily.
    "Hey," he said, "is that really a piece of fairy cake?"
    He  ripped the small piece of confectionery from the sensors with which it
was surrounded.
    "If I told you how much I needed this," he said  ravenously,  "I  wouldn't
have time to eat it."
    He ate it.

Chapter 12

     A  short  while later he was running across the plain in the direction of
the ruined city.
    The dank air wheezed heavily in his lungs and he frequently stumbled  with
the  exhaustion he was still feeling. Night was beginning to fall too, and the
rough ground was treacherous.
    The elation of his recent experience was still with him though. The  whole
Universe.  He  had seen the whole Universe stretching to infinity around him -
everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he
was the most important thing in it. Having  a  conceited  ego  is  one  thing.
Actually being told by a machine is another.
    He didn't have time to reflect on this matter.
    Gargravarr had told him that he would have to alert his masters as to what
had happened, but that he was prepared to leave a decent interval before doing
so. Enough time for Zaphod to make a break and find somewhere to hide.
    What  he  was going to do he didn't know, but feeling that he was the most
important person in the Universe gave  him  the  confidence  to  believe  that
something would turn up.
    Nothing  else  on  this  blighted  planet  could give him much grounds for
optimism.
    He ran on, and soon reached the outskirts of the abandoned city.
    He walked along cracked and gaping roads riddled with scrawny  weeds,  the
holes  filled with rotting shoes. The buildings he passed were so crumbled and
decrepit he thought it unsafe to enter any of them. Where could  he  hide?  He
hurried on.
    After  a  while  the  remains of a wide sweeping road led off from the one
down which he was walking, and at its end lay a vast low building,  surrounded
with  sundry  smaller ones, the whole surrounded by the remains of a perimeter
barrier. The large main building still seemed  reasonably  solid,  and  Zaphod
turned off to see if it might provide him with ... well with anything.
    He approached the building. Along one side of it - the front it would seem
since  it faced a wide concreted apron area - were three gigantic doors, maybe
sixty feet high. The far one of these was open, and towards this, Zaphod ran.
    Inside, all  was  gloom,  dust  and  confusion.  Giant  cobwebs  lay  over
everything.  Part of the infrastructure of the building had collapsed, part of
the rear wall had caved in, and a thick  choking  dust  lay  inches  over  the
floor.
    Through the heavy gloom huge shapes loomed, covered with debris.
    The  shapes  were sometimes cylindrical, sometimes bulbous, sometimes like
eggs, or rather cracked eggs. Most of them were split open or  falling  apart,
some were mere skeletons.
    They were all spacecraft, all derelict.
    Zaphod  wandered  in  frustration  among the hulks. There was nothing here
that remotely approached the serviceable.  Even  the  mere  vibration  of  his
footsteps caused one precarious wreck to collapse further into itself.
    Towards  the  rear  of the building lay one old ship, slightly larger than
the others, and buried beneath even deeper piles  of  dust  and  cobwebs.  Its
outline,  however, seemed unbroken. Zaphod approached it with interest, and as
he did so, he tripped over an old feedline.
    He tried to toss the feedline aside, and to his surprise  discovered  that
it was still connected to the ship.
    To  his  utter astonishment he realized that the feedline was also humming
slightly.
    He stared at the ship in disbelief, and then back down at the feedline  in
his hands.
    He tore off his jacket and threw it aside. Crawling along on his hands and
knees  he followed the feedline to the point where it connected with the ship.
The connection was sound, and the slight humming vibration was more distinct.
    His heart was beating fast. He wiped away  some  grime  and  laid  an  ear
against the ship's side. He could only hear a faint, indeterminate noise.
    He rummaged feverishly amongst the debris lying on the floor all about him
and found a short length of tubing, and a nonbiodegradable plastic cup. Out of
this  he  fashioned  a crude stethoscope and placed it against the side of the
ship.
    What he heard made his brains turn somersaults.
    The voice said:
    "Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologize to  passengers  for  the
continuing  delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our
complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your  comfort,  refreshment
and  hygiene during the journey. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The
cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again."
    Zaphod staggered backwards, staring wildly at the ship.
    He walked around for a few moments in a daze.  In  so  doing  he  suddenly
caught  sight  of  a  giant  departure  board  still  hanging, but by only one
support, from the ceiling above him. It was covered with grime,  but  some  of
the figures were still discernible.
    Zaphod's   eyes  searched  amongst  the  figures,  then  made  some  brief
calculations. His eyes widened.
    "Nine hundred years ..." he breathed to himself. That  was  how  late  the
ship was.
    Two minutes later he was on board.
    As  he  stepped  out of the airlock, the air that greeted him was cool and
fresh - the air conditioning was still working.
    The lights were still on.
    He moved out of the small entrance chamber into a  short  narrow  corridor
and stepped nervously down it.
    Suddenly a door opened and a figure stepped out in front of him.
    "Please return to your seat sir," said the android stewardess and, turning
her back on him, she walked on down the corridor in front of him.
    When  his  heart had started beating again he followed her. She opened the
door at the end of the corridor and walked through.
    He followed her through the door.
    They were now in the passenger  compartment  and  Zaphod's  heart  stopped
still again for a moment.
    In every seat sat a passenger, strapped into his or her seat.
    The  passengers'  hair  was long and unkempt, their fingernails were long,
the men wore beards.
    All of them were quite clearly alive - but sleeping.
    Zaphod had the creeping horrors.
    He walked slowly down the aisle as in a dream. By the time he was half-way
down the aisle, the stewardess had reached  the  other  end.  She  turned  and
spoke.
    "Good  afternoon  ladies  and gentlemen," she said sweetly, "Thank you for
bearing with us during this slight delay. We will be taking off as soon as  we
possibly  can.  If  you  would like to wake up now I will serve you coffee and
biscuits."
    There was a slight hum.
    At that moment, all the passengers awoke.
    They awoke screaming and clawing at their straps and life support  systems
that  held  them tightly in their seats. They screamed and bawled and hollered
till Zaphod thought his ears would shatter.
    They struggled and writhed as the stewardess patiently moved up the  aisle
placing a small cup of coffee and a packet of biscuits in front of each one of
them.
    Then one of them rose from his seat.
    He turned and looked at Zaphod.
    Zaphod's  skin  was  crawling all over his body as if it was trying to get
off. He turned and ran from the bedlam.
    He plunged through the door and back into the corridor.
    The man pursued him.
    He raced in a frenzy to the end of  the  corridor,  through  the  entrance
chamber and beyond. He arrived on the flight deck, slammed and bolted the door
behind him. He leant back against the door breathing hard.
    Within seconds, a hand started beating on the door.
    From somewhere on the flight deck a metallic voice addressed him.
    "Passengers  are  not  allowed  on  the flight deck. Please return to your
seat, and wait for the ship to take off. Coffee and biscuits are being served.
This is your autopilot speaking. Please return to your seat."
    Zaphod said nothing. He breathed hard, behind him, the hand  continued  to
knock on the door.
    "Please  return to your seat," repeated the autopilot. "Passengers are not
allowed on the flight deck."
    "I'm not a passenger," panted Zaphod.
    "Please return to your seat."
    "I am not a passenger!" shouted Zaphod again.
    "Please return to your seat."
    "I am not a ... hello, can you hear me?"
    "Please return to your seat."
    You're the autopilot?" said Zaphod.
    "Yes," said the voice from the flight console.
    "You're in charge of this ship?"
    "Yes," said the voice again, "there has been a delay. Passengers are to be
kept temporarily in suspended animation, for their  comfort  and  convenience.
Coffee  and  biscuits  are being served every year, after which passengers are
returned to suspended animation for their continued comfort  and  convenience.
Departure  will  take  place when the flight stores are complete. We apologize
for the delay."
    Zaphod moved away from the door, on which the pounding had now ceased.  He
approached the flight console.
    "Delay?"  he  cried,  "Have  you  seen the world outside this ship? It's a
wasteland, a desert. Civilization's been and gone, man. There  are  no  lemon+
soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere!"
    "The  statistical  likelihood,"  continued  the autopilot primly, "is that
other civilizations will arise. There  will  one  day  be  lemon-soaked  paper
napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat."
    "But ..."
    But  at  that moment the door opened. Zaphod span round to see the man who
had pursued him standing there. He carried a large briefcase. He  was  smartly
dressed, and his hair was short. He had no beard and no long fingernails.
    "Zaphod  Beeblebrox," he said, "My name is Zarniwoop. I believe you wanted
to see me."
    Zaphod Beeblebrox wittered. His mouths said  foolish  things.  He  dropped
into a chair.
    "Oh man, oh man, where did you spring from?" he said.
    "I've been waiting here for you," he said in a businesslike tone.
    He put the briefcase down and sat in another chair.
    "I  am glad you followed instructions," he said, "I was a bit nervous that
you might have left my office by the door rather than  the  window.  Then  you
would have been in trouble."
    Zaphod shook his heads at him and burbled.
    "When  you  entered  the  door of my office, you entered my electronically
synthesized Universe," he explained, "if you had left by the  door  you  would
have been back in the real one. The artificial one works from here."
    He patted the briefcase smugly.
    Zaphod glared at him with resentment and loathing.
    "What's the difference?" he muttered.
    "Nothing,"  said  Zarniwoop, "they are identical. Oh - except that I think
the Frogstar Fighters are grey in the real Universe."
    "What's going on?" spat Zaphod.
    "Simple," said Zarniwoop. His self  assurance  and  smugness  made  Zaphod
seethe.
    "Very  simple," repeated Zarniwoop, "I discovered the coordinated at which
this man could be found - the man who rules the Universe, and discovered  that
his  world was protected by an Unprobability field. To protect my secret - and
myself - I retreated to the safety of this totally artificial Universe and hid
myself away in a forgotten cruise liner. I was secure. Meanwhile,  you  and  I
..."
    "You and I?" said Zaphod angrily, "you mean I knew you?"
    "Yes," said Zarniwoop, "we knew each other well."
    "I had no taste," said Zaphod and resumed a sullen silence.
    "Meanwhile,  you  and  I  arranged  that you would steal the Improbability
Drive ship - the only one which could reach the ruler's world - and  bring  it
to me here. This you have now done I trust, and I congratulate you." He smiled
a tight little smile which Zaphod wanted to hit with a brick.
    "Oh,  and in case you were wondering," added Zarniwoop, "this Universe was
created specifically for you to come to. You are therefore the most  important
person in this Universe. You would never," he said with an even more brickable
smile,  "have  survived the Total Perspective Vortex in the real one. Shall we
go?"
    "Where?" said Zaphod sullenly. He felt collapsed.
    "To your ship. The Heart of Gold. You did bring it I trust?"
    "No."
    "Where is your jacket?"
    Zaphod looked at him in mystification.
    "My jacket? I took it off. It's outside."
    "Good, we will go and find it."
    Zarniwoop stood up and gestured to Zaphod to follow him.
    Out in the entrance chamber again, they could  hear  the  screams  of  the
passengers being fed coffee and biscuits.
    "It has not been a pleasant experience waiting for you," said Zarniwoop.
    "Not pleasant for you!" bawled Zaphod, "How do you think ..."
    Zarniwoop  held  up  a  silencing finger as the hatchway swung open. A few
feet away from them they could see Zaphod's jacket lying in the debris.
    "A very remarkable and very powerful ship," said Zarniwoop, "watch."
    As they watched, the pocket on the jacket suddenly bulged.  It  split,  it
ripped.  The  small  metal  model  of  the  Heart of Gold that Zaphod had been
bewildered to discover in his pocket was growing.
    It grew, it continued to grow. It reached, after  two  minutes,  its  full
size.
    "At  an Improbability Level," said Zarniwoop, "of ... oh I don't know, but
something very large."
    Zaphod swayed.
    "You mean I had it with me all the time?"
    "Zarniwoop smiled. He lifted up his briefcase and opened it.
    He twisted a single switch inside it.
    "Goodbye artificial Universe," he said, "hello real one!"
    The scene before them  shimmered  briefly  -  and  reappeared  exactly  as
before.
    "You see?" said Zarniwoop, "exactly the same."
     "You mean," repeated Zaphod tautly, "that I had it with me all the time?"
    "Oh yes," said Zarniwoop, "of course. That was the whole point."
    "That's  it,"  said  Zaphod, "you can count me out, from hereon in you can
count me out. I've had all I want of this. You play your own games."
    "I'm afraid you cannot leave," said Zarniwoop, "you are  entwined  in  the
Improbability field. You cannot escape."
    He smiled the smile that Zaphod had wanted to hit and this time Zaphod hit
it.

Chapter 13

    Ford Prefect bounded up to the bridge of the Heart of Gold.
    "Trillian! Arthur!" he shouted, "it's working! The ship's reactivated!"
    Trillian and Arthur were asleep on the floor.
    "Come  on  you  guys,  we're  going  off, we're off," he said kicking them
awake.
    "Hi there guys!" twittered the computer, "it's really  great  to  be  back
with you again, I can tell you, and I just want to say that ..."
    "Shut up," said Ford, "tell us where the hell we are."
    "Frogstar  World  B,  and  man it's a dump," said Zaphod running on to the
bridge, "hi, guys, you must be so amazingly glad to see me you don't even find
words to tell me what a cool frood I am."
    "What a what?" said Arthur blearily, picking himself up from the floor and
not taking any of this in.
    "I know how you feel," said Zaphod, "I'm so great even I  get  tongue-tied
talking  to  myself.  Hey it's good to see you Trillian, Ford, Monkeyman. Hey,
er, computer ...?"
    "Hi there, Mr Beeblebrox sir, sure is a great honor to ..."
    "Shut up and get us out of here, fast fast fast."
    "Sure thing, fella, where do you want to go?"
    "Anywhere, doesn't matter," shouted Zaphod, "yes it does!" he said  again,
"we want to go to the nearest place to eat!"
    "Sure thing," said the computer happily and a massive explosion rocket the
bridge.
    When  Zarniwoop entered a minute or so later with a black eye, he regarded
the four wisps of smoke with interest.

Chapter 14

    Four inert bodies sank through spinning blackness. Consciousness had died,
cold oblivion pulled the bodies down and down into the  pit  of  unbeing.  The
roar  of silence echoed dismally around them and they sank at last into a dark
and bitter sea of heaving red that slowly engulfed them, seemingly for ever.
    After what seemed an eternity the sea receded and left  them  lying  on  a
cold  hard  shore, the flotsam and jetsam of the stream of Life, the Universe,
and Everything.
    Cold spasms shook them, lights danced sickeningly around  them.  The  cold
hard  shore  tipped  and span and then stood still. It shone darkly - it was a
very highly polished cold hard shore.
    A green blur watched them disapprovingly.
    It coughed.
    "Good evening, madam, gentlemen," it said, "do you have a reservation?"
    Ford Prefect's consciousness snapped back like elastic, making  his  brain
smart. He looked up woozily at the green blur.
    "Reservation?" he said weakly. "Yes, sir," said the green blur.
    "Do you need a reservation for the afterlife?"
    In  so  far  as  it  is  possible  for  a  green blur to arch its eyebrows
disdainfully, this is what the green blur now did.
    "Afterlife, sir?" it said.
    Arthur Dent was grappling with his consciousness the way one grapples with
a lost bar of soap in the bath.
    "Is this the afterlife?" he stammered.
    "Well I assume so," said Ford Prefect trying to work out which way was up.
He tested the theory that it must lie in the opposite direction from the  cold
hard  shore  on  which  he  was lying, and staggered to what he hoped were his
feet.
    "I mean," he said, swaying gently, "there's no way we could have  survived
that blast is there?"
    "No,"  muttered  Arthur.  He  had  raised  himself on to his elbows but it
didn't seem to improve things. He slumped down again.
    "No," said Trillian, standing up, "no way at all."
    A dull hoarse gurgling sound came from the floor. It was Zaphod Beeblebrox
attempting to speak. "I certainly didn't survive," he gurgled, "I was a  total
goner. Wham bang and that was it."
    "Yeah,  thanks to you," said Ford, "We didn't stand a chance. We must have
been blown to bits. Arms, legs everywhere."
    "Yeah," said Zaphod struggling noisily to his feet.
    "If the lady and gentlemen would like to order drinks ..." said the  green
blur, hovering impatiently beside them.
    "Kerpow,  splat,"  continued  Zaphod,  "instantaneously  zonked  into  our
component molecules. Hey, Ford,"  he  said,  identifying  one  of  the  slowly
solidifying  blurs  around  him,  "did  you  get that thing of your whole life
flashing before you?"
    "You got that too?" said Ford, "your whole life?"
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, "at least I assume it was mine. I spent a lot of time
out of my skulls you know."
    He looked at around him at the various shapes that were at  last  becoming
proper shapes instead of vague and wobbling shapeless shapes.
    "So ..." he said.
    "So what?" said Ford.
    "So here we are," said Zaphod hesitantly, "lying dead ..."
    "Standing," Trillian corrected him.
    "Er, standing dead," continued Zaphod, "in this desolate ..."
    "Restaurant," said Arthur Dent who had got to his feet and could now, much
to his surprise, see clearly. That is to say, the thing that surprised him was
not that he could see, but what he could see.
    "Here  we are," continued Zaphod doggedly, "standing dead in this desolate
..."
    "Five star ..." said Trillian.
    "Restaurant," concluded Zaphod.
    "Odd isn't it?" said Ford.
    "Er, yeah."
    "Nice chandeliers though," said Trillian.
    They looked about themselves in bemusement.
    "It's not so much an afterlife," said Arthur, "more a sort of apres vie."
    The chandeliers were in fact a little on  the  flashy  side  and  the  low
vaulted  ceiling  from  which  they hung would not, in an ideal Universe, have
been painted in that particular shade of deep turquoise, and even  if  it  had
been it wouldn't have been highlighted by concealed moodlighting. This is not,
however,  an  ideal  Universe,  as  was  further evidenced by the eye-crossing
patterns of the inlaid marble floor, and the way in which the fronting for the
eighty-yard long marble-topped bar had been made. The fronting for the eighty+
yard long marble-topped bar had been made by stitching together nearly  twenty
thousand  Antarean  Mosaic  Lizard  skins,  despite  the  fact that the twenty
thousand lizards concerned had needed them to keep their insides in.
    A few smartly dressed creatures were  lounging  casually  at  the  bar  or
relaxing in the richly coloured body-hugging seats that were deployed here and
there about the bar area. A young Vl'Hurg officer and his green steaming young
lady  passed  through  the  large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar
into the dazzling light of the main body of the Restaurant beyond.
    Behind Arthur was a large curtained bay window. He pulled aside the corner
of the curtain and looked out at a landscape which under normal  circumstances
would  have given Arthur the creeping horrors. These were not, however, normal
circumstances, for the thing that froze his blood and made  his  skin  try  to
crawl up his back and off the top of his head was the sky. The sky was ...
    An attendant flunkey politely drew the curtain back into place.
    "All in good time, sir," he said.
    Zaphod's eyes flashed.
    "Hey,  hang  about  you  dead  guys," he said, "I think we're missing some
ultra-important thing here you know. Something somebody  said  and  we  missed
it."
    Arthur was profoundly relieved to turn his attention from what he had just
seen.
    He said, "I said it was a sort of apres ..."
    "Yeah, and don't you wish you hadn't?" said Zaphod, "Ford?"
    "I said it was odd."
    "Yeah, shrewd but dull, perhaps it was ..."
    "Perhaps,"  interrupted  the green blur who had by this time resolved into
the shape of a small wizened dark-suited green waiter, "perhaps you would care
to discuss the matter over drinks ..."
    "Drinks!" cried Zaphod, "that was it! See what you miss if you don't  stay
alert."
    "Indeed  sir," said the waiter patiently. "If the lady and gentlemen would
care to order drinks before dinner ..."
    "Dinner!" Zaphod exclaimed with passion, "Listen, little green person,  my
stomach could take you home and cuddle you all night for the mere idea."
    "...  and  the  Universe,"  concluded  the  waiter,  determined  not to be
deflected on his home stretch, "will explode later for your pleasure."
    Ford's head swivelled towards him. He spoke with feeling.
    "Wow," he said, "What sort of drinks do you serve in this place?"
    The waiter laughed a polite little waiter's laugh.
    "Ah," he said, "I think sir has perhaps misunderstood me."
    "Oh, I hope not," breathed Ford.
    The waiter coughed a polite little waiter's cough.
    "It is not unusual for our customers to be a  little  disoriented  by  the
time journey," he said, "so if I might suggest ..."
    "Time journey?" said Zaphod.
    "Time journey?" said Ford.
    "Time journey?" said Trillian.
    "You mean this isn't the afterlife?" said Arthur.
    The  waiter smiled a polite little waiter's smile. He had almost exhausted
his polite little waiter repertoire and would soon be slipping into  his  role
of a rather tight lipped and sarcastic little waiter.
    "Afterlife sir?" he said, "No sir."
    "And we're not dead?" said Arthur.
    The waiter tightened his lips.
    "Aha,  ha,"  he  said, "Sir is most evidently alive, otherwise I would not
attempt to serve sir."
    In an extraordinary gesture which is  pointless  attempting  to  describe,
Zaphod  Beeblebrox  slapped both his foreheads with two of his arms and one of
his thighs with the other.
    "Hey guys," he said, "This is crazy. We finally did it. We finally got  to
where we were going. This is Milliways!"
    "Yes sir," said the waiter, laying on the patience with a trowel, "this is
Milliways - the Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
    "End of what?" said Arthur.
    "The  Universe,"  repeated  the  waiter,  very  clearly  and unnecessarily
distinctly.
    "When did that end?" said Arthur.
    "In just a few minutes, sir," said the waiter. He took a deep  breath.  He
didn't  need  to  do  this  since  his  body  was  supplied  with the peculiar
assortment of gases it required for survival from a small  intravenous  device
strapped  to  his leg. There are times, however, when whatever your metabolism
you have to take a deep breath.
    "Now, if you would care to order drinks at last," he said,  "I  will  then
show you to your table."
    Zaphod  grinned two manic grins, sauntered over to the bar and bought most
of it.

Chapter 15

    The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary
ventures in the  entire  history  of  catering.  It  has  been  built  on  the
fragmented  remains  of  ... it will be built on the fragmented ... that is to
say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been -
    One of the major problems encountered  in  time  travel  is  not  that  of
accidentally  becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved
in becoming your own father or mother that  a  broadminded  and  well-adjusted
family  can't cope with. There is also no problem about changing the course of
history - the course of history does not change because it all  fits  together
like  a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they
were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.
    The major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and  the  main  work  to
consult  in  this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook
of 1001 Tense Formations. It will  tell  you  for  instance  how  to  describe
something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by
time-jumping  forward  two  days  in  order  to  avoid  it.  The event will be
described differently according to whether you are talking about it  from  the
standpoint  of  your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a
time in the further past and is further  complicated  by  the  possibility  of
conducting  conversations  whilst you are actually travelling from one time to
another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother.
    Most  readers  get  as  far  as  the  Future  Semi-Conditionally  Modified
Subinverted  Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact
in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have  been  left
blank to save on printing costs.
    The  Hitch  Hikers  Guide  to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of
academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect"  has
been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.
    To resume:
    The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary
ventures in the entire history of catering.
    It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which
is (wioll  haven  be)  enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in
time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.
    This is, many would say, impossible.
    In it, guests take (willan on-take) their places at table and eat  (willan
on-eat)  sumptuous  meals  whilst  watching  (willing  watchen)  the  whole of
creation explode around them.
    This is, many would say, equally impossible.
    You can arrive (mayan arivan on-when) for any  sitting  you  like  without
prior (late fore-when) reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it
were  when you return to your own time. (you can have on-book haventa forewhen
presooning returningwenta retrohome.)
    This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.
    At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with (mayan meetan con with  dinan
on  when)  a  fascinating  cross-section of the entire population of space and
time.
    This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.
    You can visit it as many times as you like  (mayan  on-visit  reonvisiting
...  and  so  on  - for further tense-corrections consult Dr Streetmentioner's
book) and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this
usually causes.
    This, even if the rest were true, which it isn't, is patently  impossible,
say the doubters.
    All  you  have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own
era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest
means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.
    This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly  insane,  which  is
why  the  advertising  executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with
this slogan: "If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round
it off with  breakfast  at  Milliways,  the  Restaurant  at  the  End  of  the
Universe?"

Chapter 16

    At  the  bar,  Zaphod  was  rapidly becoming as tired as a newt. His heads
knocked together and his smiles were coming out of  synch.  He  was  miserably
happy.
    "Zaphod,"  said  Ford,  "whilst  you're still capable of speech, would you
care to tell me what the photon happened? Where have you been? Where  have  we
been? Small matter, but I'd like it cleared up."
    Zaphod's  left head sobered up, leaving his right to sink further into the
obscurity of drink.
    "Yeah," he said, "I've been around. They want me to find the man who rules
the Universe, but I don't care to meet him. I believe the man can't cook."
    His left head watched his right head saying this and then nodded.
    "True," it said, "have another drink."
    Ford had another Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the  drink  which  has  been
described as the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging - expensive and bad for the
head. Whatever had happened, Ford decided, he didn't really care too much.
    "Listen Ford," said Zaphod, "everything's cool and froody."
    "You mean everything's under control."
    "No,"  said  Zaphod, "I do not mean everything's under control. That would
not be cool and froody. If you want to know what happened let's just say I had
the whole situation in my pocket. OK?"
    Ford shrugged.
    Zaphod giggled into his drink. It frothed up over the side  of  the  glass
and started to eat its way into the marble bar top.
    A  wild-skinned  sky-gypsy  approached  them and played electric violin at
them until Zaphod gave him a lot of money and he agreed to go away again.
    The gypsy approached Arthur and Trillian sitting in another  part  of  the
bar.
    "I  don't  know what this place is," said Arthur, "but I think it gives me
the creeps."
    "Have another drink," said Trillian, "Enjoy yourself."
    "Which?" said Arthur, "the two are mutually exclusive."
    "Poor Arthur, you're not really cut out for this life are you?"
    "You call this life?"
    "You're beginning to sound like Marvin."
    "Marvin's the clearest thinker I know. How  do  you  think  we  make  this
violinist go away?"
    The waiter approached.
    "Your table is ready," he said.
    Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant
glittering  starfish  beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms houses the
bars, the  kitchens,  the  forcefield  generators  which  protect  the  entire
structure and the decayed planet on which it sits, and the Time Turbines which
slowly rock the whole affair backwards and forwards across the crucial moment.
    In  the centre sits the gigantic golden dome, almost a complete globe, and
it was into this area that Zaphod, Ford, Arthur and Trillian now passed.
    At least five tons of glitter alone had gone  into  it  before  them,  and
covered every available surface. The other surfaces were not available because
they were already encrusted with jewels, precious sea shells from Santraginus,
gold   leaf,   mosaic   tiles,  lizard  skins  and  a  million  unidentifiable
embellishments and decorations. Glass glittered, silver shone,  gold  gleamed,
Arthur Dent goggled.
    "Wowee," said Zaphod, "Zappo."
    "Incredible!" breathed Arthur, "the people ... ! The things ... !"
    "The things," said Ford Prefect quietly, "are also people."
    "The people ..." resumed Arthur, "the ... other people ..."
    "The lights ... !" said Trillian.
    "The tables ..." said Arthur.
    "The clothes ... !" said Trillian.
    The waiter thought they sounded like a couple of bailiffs.
    "The  End  of the Universe is very popular," said Zaphod threading his way
unsteadily through the throng of tables, some made of  marble,  some  of  rich
ultra-mahagony, some even of platinum, and at each a party of exotic creatures
chatting amongst themselves and studying menus.
    "People  like  to dress up for it," continued Zaphod, "Gives it a sense of
occasion."
    The tables were fanned out in a large circle around a central  stage  area
where  a  small  band were playing light music, at least a thousand tables was
Arthur's guess, and interspersed amongst  them  were  swaying  palms,  hissing
fountains,  grotesque  statuary,  in short all the paraphernalia common to all
Restaurants where little expense has been spared to give the  impression  that
no  expense  has  been  spared.  Arthur  glanced around, half expecting to see
someone making an American Express commercial.
    Zaphod lurched into Ford, who lurched back into Zaphod.
    "Wowee," said Zaphod.
    "Zappo," said Ford.
    "My great granddaddy must have really screwed up the computer's works, you
know," said Zaphod, "I told it to take us to the nearest place to eat  and  it
sends us to the End of the Universe. Remind me to be nice to it one day."
    He paused.
    "Hey, everybody's here you know. Everybody who was anybody."
    "Was?" said Arthur.
    "At  the  End  of the Universe you have to use the past tense a lot," said
Zaphod, "'cos everything's been done you know. Hi, guys," he called out  to  a
nearby party of giant iguana lifeforms, "How did you do?"
    "Is that Zaphod Beeblebrox?" asked one iguana of another iguana.
    "I think so," replied the second iguana.
    "Well doesn't that just take the biscuit," said the first iguana.
    "Funny old thing, life," said the second iguana.
    "It's  what  you  make  of  it,"  said the first and they lapsed back into
silence. They were waiting for the greatest show in the Universe.
    "Hey, Zaphod," said Ford, grabbing for his arm  and,  on  account  of  the
third Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, missing. He pointed a swaying finger.
    "There's  an old mate of mine," he said, "Hotblack Desiato! See the man at
the platinum table with the platinum suit on?"
    Zaphod tried to follow Ford's finger with his eyes but it  made  him  feel
dizzy. Finally he saw.
    "Oh  yeah," he said, then recognition came a moment later. "Hey," he said,
"did that guy ever make it megabig! Wow, bigger than the biggest  thing  ever.
Other than me."
    "Who's he supposed to be?" asked Trillian.
    "Hotblack  Desiato?"  said  Zaphod  in  astonishment, "you don't know? You
never heard of Disaster Area?"
    "No," said Trillian, who hadn't.
    "The biggest," said Ford, "loudest ..."
    "Richest ..." suggested Zaphod.
    "... rock band in the history of ..." he searched for the word.
    "... history itself," said Zaphod.
    "No," said Trillian.
    "Zowee," said Zaphod, "here we are at the End  of  the  Universe  and  you
haven't even lived yet. Did you miss out."
    He  led  her off to where the waiter had been waiting all this time at the
table. Arthur followed them feeling very lost and alone.
    Ford waded off through the throng to renew an old acquaintance.
    "Hey, er, Hotblack," he called out, "how you doing? Great to see  you  big
boy,  how's the noise? You're looking great, really very, very fat and unwell.
Amazing." He slapped the man on the back and  was  mildly  surprised  that  it
seemed  to  elict no response. The Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters swirling round
inside him told him to plunge on regardless.
    "Remember the old days?" he said, "We used to hang out, right? The  Bistro
Illegal, remember? Slim's Throat Emporium? The Evildrome Boozarama, great days
eh?"
    Hotblack  Desiato offered no opinion as to whether they were great days or
not. Ford was not perturbed.
    "And when we were hungry  we'd  pose  as  public  health  inspectors,  you
remember  that? And go around confiscating meals and drinks right? Till we got
food poisoning. Oh, and then  there  were  the  long  nights  of  talking  and
drinking in those smelly rooms above the Cafe Lou in Gretchen Town, New Betel,
and you were always in the next room trying to write songs on your ajuitar and
we all hated them. And you said you didn't care, and we said we did because we
hated them so much." Ford's eyes were beginning to mist over.
    "And  you  said  you didn't want to be a star," he continued, wallowing in
nostalgia, "because you despised the star  system.  And  we  said,  Hadra  and
Sulijoo  and  me,  that we didn't think you had the option. And what do you do
now? You buy star systems!"
    He turned and solicited the attention of those at nearby tables.
    "Here," he said, "is a man who buys star systems!"
    Hotblack Desiato made no attempt either to confirm or deny this fact,  and
the attention of the temporary audience waned rapidly.
    "I think someone's drunk," muttered a purple bush-like being into his wine
glass.
    Ford staggered slightly, and sat down heavily on the chair facing Hotblack
Desiato.
    "What's  that  number  you do?" he said, unwisely grabbing at a bottle for
support and tipping it over - into a nearby glass as it happened. Not to waste
a happy accident, he drained the glass.
    "That really huge number," he continued, "how does it go?  `Bwarm!  Bwarm!
Baderr!!'  something,  and  in  the stage act you do it ends up with this ship
crashing right into the sun, and you actually do it!"
    Ford crashed his  fist  into  his  other  hand  to  illustrate  this  feat
graphically. He knocked the bottle over again.
    "Ship!  Sun!  Wham  bang!"  he cried. "I mean forget lasers and stuff, you
guys are into solar flares and real sunburn! Oh, and terrible songs."
    His eyes followed the stream of liquid glugging out of the  bottle  on  to
the table. Something ought to be done about it, he thought.
    "Hey,  you  want  a  drink?" he said. It began to sink into his squelching
mind that something was missing  from  this  reunion,  and  that  the  missing
something  was  in  some  way connected with the fact that the fat man sitting
opposite him in the platinum suit and the silvery trilby had not yet said "Hi,
Ford" or "Great to see you after all this time," or in fact anything  at  all.
More to the point he had not yet even moved.
    "Hotblack?" said Ford.
    A  large  meaty  hand  landed  on  his shoulder from behind and pushed him
aside. He slid gracelessly off his seat and peered upwards to see if he  could
spot  the  owner of this discourteous hand. The owner was not hard to spot, on
account of his being something of  the  order  of  seven  feet  tall  and  not
slightly built with it. In fact he was built the way one builds leather sofas,
shiny,  lumpy  and  with lots of solid stuffing. The suit into which the man's
body had been  stuffed  looked  as  if  it's  only  purpose  in  life  was  to
demonstrate  how  difficult  it  was to get this sort of body into a suit. The
face had the texture of an orange and the colour of an apple,  but  there  the
resemblance to anything sweet ended.
    "Kid  ..."  said  a  voice which emerged from the man's mouth as if it had
been having a really rough time down in his chest.
    "Er, yeah?" said Ford conversationally. He  staggered  back  to  his  feet
again and was disappointed that the top of his head didn't come further up the
man's body.
    "Beat it," said the man.
    "Oh yeah?" said Ford, wondering how wise he was being, "and who are you?"
    The  man  considered this for a moment. He wasn't used to being asked this
sort of question. Nevertheless, after a while he came up with an answer.
    "I'm the guy who's telling you to beat it," he said, "before  you  get  it
beaten for you."
    "Now  listen,"  said  Ford  nervously  -  he  wished  his  head would stop
spinning, settle down and get to grips with the situation - "Now  listen,"  he
continued, "I am one of Hotblack's oldest friends and ..."
    He  glanced  at  Hotblack  Desiato,  who  still hadn't moved so much as an
eyelash.
    "... and ..." said Ford again, wondering what would be a good word to  say
after "and".
    The large man came up with a whole sentence to go after "and". He said it.
    "And  I am Mr Desiato's bodyguard," it went, "and I am responsible for his
body, and I am not responsible for yours, so  take  it  away  before  it  gets
damaged."
    "Now wait a minute," said Ford.
    "No  minutes!"  boomed the bodyguard, "no waiting! Mr Desiato speaks to no
one!"
    "Well perhaps you'd let him say what he thinks about the matter  himself,"
said Ford.
    "He speaks to no one!" bellowed the bodyguard.
    Ford  glanced  anxiously  at  Hotblack  again  and  was forced to admit to
himself that the bodyguard seemed to have the facts on  his  side.  There  was
still  not  the  slightest sign of movement, let alone keen interest in Ford's
welfare.
    "Why?" said Ford, "What's the matter with him?"
    The bodyguard told him.

Chapter 17

    The Hitch Hiker's  Guide  to  the  Galaxy  notes  that  Disaster  Area,  a
plutonium  rock  band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be
not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of
any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best  sound  balance  is
usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles
from  the  stage,  whilst  the  musicians themselves play their instruments by
remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in  orbit
around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
    Their  songs  are  on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar
theme of boy-being  meets  girl-being  beneath  a  silvery  moon,  which  then
explodes for no adequately explored reason.
    Many  worlds  have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic
reasons,  but  most  commonly  because  the  band's  public   address   system
contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.
    This  has  not,  however,  stopped  their  earnings  from pushing back the
boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research  accountant  has
recently  been  appointed  Professor  of  Neomathematics  at the University of
Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his  Special  Theories  of
Disaster  Area  Tax  Returns,  in which he proves that the whole fabric of the
spacetime continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
    Ford staggered back to the table where Zaphod, Arthur  and  Trillian  were
sitting waiting for the fun to begin.
    "Gotta have some food," said Ford.
    "Hi, Ford," said Zaphod, "you speak to the big noise boy?"
    Ford waggled his head noncommittally.
    "Hotblack? I sort of spoke to him, yeah."
    "What'd he say?"
    "Well, not a lot really. He's ... er ..."
    "Yeah?"
    "He's spending a year dead for tax reasons. I've got to sit down."
    He sat down.
    The waiter approached.
    "Would  you like to see the menu?" he said, "or would you like to meet the
Dish of the Day?"
    "Huh?" said Ford.
    "Huh?" said Arthur.
    "Huh?" said Trillian.
    "That's cool," said Zaphod, "we'll meet the meat."
    In a small room in one of the arms of the Restaurant complex a tall, thin,
gangling figure pulled aside a curtain and oblivion looked him in the face.
    It was not a pretty face, perhaps because oblivion had looked him in it so
many times. It was too long for a start, the eyes too sunken and  too  hooded,
the  cheeks  too  hollow,  his  lips were too thin and too long, and when they
parted his teeth looked too much like a  recently  polished  bay  window.  The
hands  that held the curtain were long and thin too: they were also cold. They
lay lightly along the folds of the curtain and gave the impression that if  he
didn't watch them like a hawk they would crawl away of their own accord and do
something unspeakable in a corner.
    He  let  the  curtain  drop  and the terrible light that had played on his
features went off to play somewhere more healthy. He prowled around his  small
chamber  like a mantis contemplating an evening's preying, finally settling on
a rickety chair by a trestle table, where he leafed through a  few  sheets  of
jokes.
    A bell rang.
    He  pushed  the thin sheaf of papers aside and stood up. His hands brushed
limply over some of the one million rainbow-coloured sequins  with  which  his
jacket was festooned, and he was gone through the door.
    In the Restaurant the lights dimmed, the band quickened its pace, a single
spotlight  stabbed  down  into the darkness of the stairway that led up to the
centre of the stage.
    Up the stairs bounded bounded a tall brilliantly coloured figure. He burst
on to the stage, tripped lightly up to the microphone,  removed  it  from  its
stand  with one swoop of his long thin hand and stood for a moment bowing left
and right to the audience acknowledging their applause and displaying to  them
his bay window. He waved to his particular friends in the audience even though
there weren't any there, and waited for the applause to die down.
    He  held up his hand and smiled a smile that stretched not merely from ear
to ear, but seemed to extend some way beyond the mere confines of his face.
    "Thank you ladies and gentlemen!" he cried, "thank you  very  much.  Thank
you so much."
    He eyed them with a twinkling eye.
    "Ladies  and gentlemen," he said, "The Universe as we know it has now been
in existence for over one hundred and seventy thousand million  billion  years
and  will  be ending in a little over half an hour. So, welcome one and all to
Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!"
    With a gesture he deftly conjured another round of  spontaneous  applause.
With another gesture he cut it.
    "I  am  your host for tonight," he said, "my name is Max Quordlepleen ..."
(Everybody knew this, his act was famous throughout the known Galaxy,  but  he
said  it  for  the  fresh  applause it generated, which he acknowledged with a
disclaiming smile and wave.) "... and I've just come straight  from  the  very
very  other end of time, where I've been hosting a show at the Big Bang Burger
Bar - where I can tell you we had a very exciting evening ladies and gentlemen
- and I will be with you right through this  historic  occasion,  the  End  of
History itself!"
    Another  burst  of  applause  died  away quickly as the lights dimmed down
further. On every table candles ignited themselves spontaneously, eliciting  a
slight  gasp  from  all  the  diners  and  wreathing  them  in a thousand tiny
flickering lights and a million  intimate  shadows.  A  tremor  of  excitement
thrilled  through  the  darkened Restaurant as the vast golden dome above them
began very very slowly to dim, to darken, to fade.
    Max's voice was hushed as he continued.
    "So, ladies and gentlemen," he breathed, "the candles are  lit,  the  band
plays softly, and as the force-shielded dome above us fades into transparency,
revealing  a  dark  and  sullen sky hung heavy with the ancient light of livid
swollen stars, I can see we're all in for a fabulous evening's apocalypse!"
    Even the soft tootling of the band faded away as stunned  shock  descended
on all those who had not seen this sight before.
    A monstrous, grisly light poured in on them,
    - a hideous light,
    - a boiling, pestilential light,
    - a light that would have disfigured hell.
    The Universe was coming to an end.
    For  a  few  interminable seconds the Restaurant span silently through the
raging void. Then Max spoke again.
    "For those of you who ever hoped to see  the  light  at  the  end  of  the
tunnel," he said, "this is it."
    The band struck up again.
    "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen," cried Max, "I'll be back with you again
in just  a  moment,  and meanwhile I leave you in the very capable hands of Mr
Reg Nullify and his cataclysmic Combo. Big hand please  ladies  and  gentlemen
for Reg and the boys!"
    The baleful turmoil of the skies continued.
    Hesitantly  the  audience  began  to  clap and after a moment or so normal
conversation resumed. Max began his  round  of  the  tables,  swapping  jokes,
shouting with laughter, earning his living.
    A  large  dairy  animal  approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat
meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery  eyes,  small  horns  and
what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.
    "Good  evening,"  it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the
main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?"  It  harrumphed
and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position
and gazed peacefully at them.
    Its  gaze  was  met  by  looks  of  startled  bewilderment from Arthur and
Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect  and  naked  hunger  from  Zaphod
Beeblebrox.
    "Something  off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a
white wine sauce?"
    "Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.
    "But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the  animal  contentedly,  "nobody
else's is mine to offer."
    Zaphod  leapt  to  his  feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's
shoulder appreciatively.
    "Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising  it
and  eating  plenty  of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a
mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the  cud
again.
    "Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.
    "You  mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to
Ford.
    "Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."
    "That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting  thing
I've ever heard."
    "What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention
to the animal's enormous rump.
    "I  just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to,"
said Arthur, "it's heartless."
    "Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.
    "That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it  for  a
moment.  "Alright,"  he  said,  "maybe  it is the point. I don't care, I'm not
going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."
    The Universe raged about him in its death throes.
    "I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.
    "May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be  very
rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."
    "A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.
    "A  green  salad?"  said  the  animal,  rolling his eyes disapprovingly at
Arthur.
    "Are you going to tell me," said Arthur,  "that  I  shouldn't  have  green
salad?"
    "Well,"  said  the  animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on
that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut  through  the  whole
tangled  problem  and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was
capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."
    It managed a very slight bow.
    "Glass of water please," said Arthur.
    "Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of  the
issues.  Four  rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred
and seventy-six thousand million years."
    The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.
    "A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just
nip off and shoot myself."
    He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.
    "Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."
    It waddled unhurriedly off into the kitchen.
    A matter of minutes later the  waiter  arrived  with  four  huge  steaming
steaks.  Zaphod  and  Ford  wolfed  straight  into  them  without  a  second's
hesitation. Trillian paused, then shrugged and started into hers.
    Arthur stared at his feeling slightly ill.
    "Hey, Earthman," said Zaphod with a malicious grin on the face that wasn't
stuffing itself, "what's eating you?"
    And the band played on.
    All around the Restaurant people and things relaxed and chatted.  The  air
was  filled  with talk of this and that, and with the mingled scents of exotic
plants, extravagant foods and insidious wines. For an infinite number of miles
in every direction the universal  cataclysm  was  gathering  to  a  stupefying
climax. Glancing at his watch, Max returned to the stage with a flourish.
    "And  now,  ladies and gentlemen," he beamed, "is everyone having one last
wonderful time?"
    "Yes," called out the sort of people who call out "yes" when comedians ask
them if they're having a wonderful time.
    "That's wonderful," enthused Max, "absolutely wonderful. And as the photon
storms gather in swirling crowds around us, preparing to tear apart  the  last
of  the red hot suns, I know you're all going to settle back and enjoy with me
what I know we will find all an immensely exciting and terminal experience."
    He paused. He caught the audience with a glittering eye.
    "Believe me, ladies and gentlemen," he said, "there's nothing  penultimate
about this one."
    He paused again. Tonight his timing was immaculate. Time after time he had
done  this  show,  night  after night. Not that the word night had any meaning
here at the extremity of time. All there was was the endless repetition of the
final moment, as the Restaurant rocked slowly forward over the brink of time's
furthest edge - and back again. This "night" was good though, the audience was
writhing in the palm of his sickly hand. His voice dropped. They had to strain
to hear him.
    "This,"  he  said,  "really  is  the  absolute  end,  the  final  chilling
desolation,  in  which  the  whole majestic sweep of creation becomes extinct.
This ladies and gentlemen is the proverbial `it'."
    He dropped his voice still lower. In the stillness, a fly would  not  have
dared cleat its throat.
    "After  this,"  he  said,  "there  is  nothing. Void. Emptiness. Oblivion.
Absolute nothing ..."
    His eyes glittered again - or did they twinkle?"
    "Nothing ... except of course for the sweet trolley, and a fine  selection
of Aldebaran liqueurs!"
    The band gave him a musical sting. He wished they wouldn't, he didn't need
it, not  an  artist  of  his  calibre. He could play the audience like his own
musical instrument. They were laughing with relief. He followed on.
    "And for once," he cried cheerily, "you don't need to worry about having a
hangover in the morning - because there won't be any more mornings!"
    He beamed at his happy, laughing audience. He glanced up at the sky, going
through the same dead routine every night, but  his  glance  was  only  for  a
fraction  of a second. He trusted it to do its job, as one professional trusts
another.
    "And now," he said, strutting about the stage, "at the risk of  putting  a
damper  on the wonderful sense of doom and futility here this evening, I would
like to welcome a few parties."
    He pulled a card from his pocket.
    "Do we have ..." he put up a hand to hold back the cheers, "Do we  have  a
party  here  from  the  Zansellquasure  Flamarion  Bridge Club from beyond the
Vortvoid of Qvarne? Are they here?"
    A rousing cheer came from the back, but  he  pretended  not  to  hear.  He
peered around trying to find them.
    "Are they here?" he asked again, to elict a louder cheer.
    He got it, as he always did.
    "Ah, there they are. Well, last bids lads - and no cheating, remember this
is a very solemn moment."
    He lapped up the laughter.
    "And  do  we  also  have, do we have ... a party of minor deities from the
Halls of Asgard?"
    Away to his right came a rumble of thunder.  Lightning  arced  across  the
stage.  A  small group of hairy men with helmets sat looking very pleased with
themselves, and raised their glasses to him.
    Hasbeens, he thought to himself.
    "Careful with that hammer, sir," he said.
    They did their trick with the lightning again. Max gave them a  very  thin
lipped smile.
    "And  thirdly,"  he  said,  "thirdly  a  party of Young Conservatives from
Sirius B, are they here?"
    A party of smartly dressed young dogs stopped throwing rolls at each other
and started  throwing  rolls  at   the   stage.   They   yapped   and   barked
unintelligibly.
    "Yes," said Max, "well this is all your fault, you realize that?"
    "And  finally,"  said  Max,  quieting the audience down and putting on his
solemn face, "finally I believe we have with  us  here  tonight,  a  party  of
believers,  very devout believers, from the Church of the Second Coming of the
Great Prophet Zarquon."
    There were about twenty of them, sitting right out  on  the  edge  of  the
floor, ascetically dressed, sipping mineral water nervously, and staying apart
from  the festivities. They blinked resentfully as the spotlight was turned on
them.
    "There they are," said Max, "sitting there, patiently. He said  he'd  come
again,  and  he's  kept  you  waiting a long time, so let's hope he's hurrying
fellas, because he's only got eight minutes left!"
    The party of Zarquon's followers sat rigid, refusing to be buffeted by the
waves of uncharitable laughter which swept over them.
    Max restrained his audience.
    "No, but seriously though folks, seriously though, no offence meant. No, I
know we shouldn't make fun of deeply held beliefs,  so  I  think  a  big  hand
please for the Great Prophet Zarquon ..."
    The audience clapped respectfully.
    "... wherever he's got to!"
    He  blew a kiss to the stony-faced party and returned to the centre of the
stage.
    He grabbed a tall stool and sat on it.
    "It's marvellous though," he rattled on, "to  see  so  many  of  you  here
tonight  - no isn't it though? Yes, absolutely marvellous. Because I know that
so many of you come here  time  and  time  again,  which  I  think  is  really
wonderful,  to  come  and  watch this final end of everything, and then return
home to your own eras ... and  raise  families,  strive  for  new  and  better
societies,  fight  terrible  wars  for what you know to be right ... it really
gives one hope for the future of all lifekind. Except of course," he waved  at
the  blitzing  turmoil  above and around them, "that we know it hasn't got one
..."
    Arthur turned to Ford - he hadn't quite got this place worked out  in  his
mind.
    "Look,  surely," he said, "if the Universe is about to end ... don't we go
with it?"
    Ford gave him a three-Pan-Galactic-Gargle-Blaster look, in other  words  a
rather unsteady one.
    "No,"  he  said,  "look," he said, "as soon as you come into this dive you
get held in this sort of amazing force-shielded temporal warp thing. I think."
    "Oh," said Arthur. He turned his attention back to a  bowl  of  soup  he'd
managed to get from the waiter to replace his steak.
    "Look," said Ford, "I'll show you."
    He grabbed at a napkin off the table and fumbled hopelessly with it.
    "Look,"  he  said  again,  "imagine  this  napkin,  right, as the temporal
Universe, right? And this spoon as a transductional mode in the  matter  curve
..."
    It  took  him a while to say this last part, and Arthur hated to interrupt
him.
    "That's the spoon I was eating with," he said.
    "Alright," said Ford, "imagine this spoon ..." he  found  a  small  wooden
spoon  on  a  tray of relishes, "this spoon ..." but found it rather tricky to
pick up, "no, better still this fork ..."
    "Hey would you let go of my fork?" snapped Zaphod.
    "Alright," said Ford, "alright, alright. Why don't we say ... why don't we
say that this wine glass is the temporal Universe ..."
    "What, the one you've just knocked on the floor?"
    "Did I do that?"
    "Yes."
    "Alright," said Ford, "forget that. I mean ... I mean, look, do you know -
do you know how the Universe actually began for a kick off?"
    "Probably not," said Arthur, who wished he'd  never  embarked  on  any  of
this.
    "Alright,"  said  Ford,  "imagine this. Right. You get this bath. Right. A
large round bath. And it's made of ebony."
    "Where from?" said Arthur, "Harrods was destroyed by the Vogons."
    "Doesn't matter."
    "So you keep saying."
    "Listen."
    "Alright."
    "You get this bath, see? Imagine you've got this bath. And it's ebony. And
it's conical."
    "Conical?" said Arthur, "What sort of ..."
    "Shhh!" said Ford. "It's conical. So what you do is, you see, you fill  it
with  fine  white  sand,  alright?  Or  sugar.  Fine white sand, and/or sugar.
Anything. Doesn't matter. Sugar's fine. And when it's full, you pull the  plug
out ... are you listening?"
    "I'm listening."
    "You  pull the plug out, and it all just twirls away, twirls away you see,
out of the plughole."
    "I see."
    "You don't see. You don't see at all. I haven't got to the clever bit yet.
You want to hear the clever bit?"
    "Tell me the clever bit."
    "I'll tell you the clever bit."
    Ford thought for a moment, trying to remember what the clever bit was.
    "The clever bit," he said, "is this. You film it happening."
    "Clever."
    "That's not the clever bit. This is the clever bit, I  remember  now  that
this is the clever bit. The clever bit is that you then thread the film in the
projector ... backwards!"
    "Backwards?"
    "Yes.  Threading  it  backwards is definitely the clever bit. So then, you
just sit and watch it, and everything just appears to spiral  upwards  out  of
the plughole and fill the bath. See?"
    "And that's how the Universe began is it?" said Arthur.
    "No," said Ford, "but it's a marvellous way to relax."
    He reached for his wine glass.
    "Where's my wine glass?" he said.
    "It's on the floor."
    "Ah."
    Tipping  back his chair to look for it, Ford collided with the small green
waiter who was approaching the table carrying a portable telephone.
    Ford excused himself to the waiter explaining that it was because  he  was
extremely drunk.
    The  waiter  said  that  that  was  quite  alright  and  that he perfectly
understood.
    Ford thanked the waiter for his kind  indulgence,  attempted  to  tug  his
forelock, missed by six inches and slid under the table.
    "Mr Zaphod Beeblebrox?" inquired the waiter.
    "Er, yeah?" said Zaphod, glancing up from his third steak.
    "There is a phone call for you."
    "Hey, what?"
    "A phone call, sir."
    "For me? Here? Hey, but who knows where I am?"
    One  of  his  minds raced. The other dawdled lovingly over the food it was
still shovelling in.
    "Excuse me if I carry on, won't you?" said his eating head and carried on.
    There were now so many people after him he'd lost count. He shouldn't have
made such a conspicuous entrance. Hell, why not though, he thought. How do you
know you're having fun if there's no one watching you have it?
    "Maybe someone here  tipped  off  the  Galactic  Police,"  said  Trillian.
"Everyone saw you come in."
    "You  mean they want to arrest me over the phone?" said Zaphod, "Could be.
I'm a pretty dangerous dude when I'm concerned."
    "Yeah," said a voice from under the table,  "you  go  to  pieces  so  fast
people get hit by the shrapnel."
    "Hey, what is this, Judgment Day?" snapped Zaphod.
    "Do we get to see that as well?" asked Arthur nervously.
    "I'm  in  no hurry," muttered Zaphod, "OK, so who's the cat on the phone?"
He kicked Ford. "Hey get up there, kid," he said to him, "I may need you."
    "I am not,"  said  the  waiter,  "personally  acquainted  with  the  metal
gentlemen in question, sir ..."
    "Metal?"
    "Yes, sir."
    "Did you say metal?"
    "Yes,  sir.  I  said  that  I  am not personally acquainted with the metal
gentleman in question ..."
    "OK, carry on."
    "But  I  am  informed  that  he  has  been  awaiting  your  return  for  a
considerable   number   of   millennia.   It  seems  you  left  here  somewhat
precipitately."
    "Left here?" said Zaphod, "are you being strange?  We  only  just  arrived
here."
    "Indeed,  sir,"  persisted  the  waiter  doggedly, "but before you arrived
here, sir, I understand that you left here."
    Zaphod tried this in one brain, then in the other.
    "You're saying," he said, "that before we arrived here, we left here?"
    This is going to be a long night, thought the waiter.
    "Precisely, sir," he said.
    "Put your analyst on danger money, baby," advised Zaphod.
    "No, wait a minute," said Ford, emerging above table level  again,  "where
exactly is here?"
    "To be absolutely exact sir, it is Frogstar World B."
    "But we just left there," protested Zaphod, "we left there and came to the
Restaurant at the End of the Universe."
    "Yes, sir," said the waiter, feeling that he was now into the home stretch
and running well, "the one was constructed on the ruins of the other."
    "Oh,"  said  Arthur brightly, "you mean we've travelled in time but not in
space."
    "Listen you semi-evolved simian," cut in Zaphod, "go  climb  a  tree  will
you?"
    Arthur bristled.
    "Go bang your heads together four-eyes," he advised Zaphod.
    "No, no," the waiter said to Zaphod, "your monkey has got it right, sir."
    Arthur stuttered in fury and said nothing apposite, or indeed coherent.
    "You  jumped  forward  ... I believe five hundred and seventy-six thousand
million years whilst staying in exactly the same place," explained the waiter.
He smiled. He had a wonderful feeling that he had finally won through  against
what had seemed to be insuperable odds.
    "That's it!" said Zaphod, "I got it. I told the computer to send us to the
nearest  place  to  eat, that's exactly what it did. Give or take five hundred
and seventy-six thousand million years, we never moved. Neat."
    They all agreed this was very neat.
    "But who," said Zaphod, "is the cat on the phone?"
    "Whatever happened to Marvin?" said Trillian.
    Zaphod clapped his hands to his heads.
    "The Paranoid Android! I left him moping about on Frogstar B."
    "When was this?"
    "Well, er, five hundred and  seventy-six  thousand  million  years  ago  I
suppose," said Zaphod, "Hey, er, hand me the rap-rod, Plate Captain."
    The little waiter's eyebrows wandered about his forehead in confusion.
    "I beg your pardon, sir?" he said.
    "The phone, waiter," said Zaphod, grabbing it off him. "Shee, you guys are
so unhip it's a wonder your bums don't fall off."
    "Indeed, sir."
    "Hey,  Marvin,  is  that you?" said Zaphod into the phone, "How you doing,
kid?"
    There was a long pause before a thin low voice came up the line.
    "I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed," it said.
    Zaphod cupped his hands over the phone.
    "It's Marvin," he said.
    "Hey, Marvin," he said into the phone again, "we're having a  great  time.
Food,  wine, a little personal abuse and the Universe going foom. Where can we
find you?"
    Again the pause.
    "You don't have to pretend to be interested in me you know,"  said  Marvin
at last, "I know perfectly well I'm only a menial robot."
    "OK, OK," said Zaphod, "but where are you?"
    "`Reverse  primary  thrust,  Marvin,'  that's  what  they say to me, `open
airlock number three, Marvin. Marvin, can you pick up that  piece  of  paper?'
Can  I  pick up that piece of paper! Here I am, brain the size of a planet and
they ask me to ..."
    "Yeah, yeah," sympathized Zaphod hardly at all.
    "But I'm quite used to being humiliated," droned Marvin, "I  can  even  go
and  stick  my  head in a bucket of water if you like. Would you like me to go
and stick my head in a bucket of water? I've got one ready. Wait a minute."
    "Er, hey, Marvin ..." interrupted Zaphod, but it was too late. Sad  little
clunks and gurgles came up the line.
    "What's he saying?" asked Trillian.
    "Nothing," said Zaphod, "he just phoned up to wash his head at us."
    "There,"  said Marvin, coming back on the line and bubbling a bit, "I hope
that gave satisfaction ..."
    "Yeah, yeah," said Zaphod, "now will you please tell us where you are?"
    "I'm in the car park," said Marvin.
    "The car park?" said Zaphod, "what are you doing there?"
    "Parking cars, what else does one do in a car park?"
    "OK, hang in there, we'll be right down."
    In one movement Zaphod leapt to his feet, threw down the phone  and  wrote
"Hotblack Desiato" on the bill.
    "Come on guys," he said, "Marvin's in the car park. Let's get on down."
    "What's he doing in the car park?" asked Arthur.
    "Parking cars, what else? Dum dum."
    "But what about the End of the Universe? We'll miss the big moment."
    "I've seen it. It's rubbish," said Zaphod, "nothing but a gnab gib."
    "A what?"
    "Opposite of a big bang. Come on, let's get zappy."
    Few  of  the other diners paid them any attention as they weaved their way
through the Restaurant to the exit. Their eyes were riveted on the  horror  of
the skies.
    "An  interesting  effect  to  watch for," Max was telling them, "is in the
upper left-hand quadrant of the sky, where if you look very carefully you  can
see  the star system Hastromil boiling away into the ultra-violet. Anyone here
from Hastromil?"
    There were one or two slightly hesitant cheers from somewhere at the back.
    "Well," said Max beaming cheerfully at them, "it's too late to worry about
whether you left the gas on now."

Chapter 18

    The main reception foyer was almost empty but Ford nevertheless weaved his
way through it.
    Zaphod grasped him firmly by the arm and manoeuvred  him  into  a  cubicle
standing to one side of the entrance hall.
    "What are you doing to him?" asked Arthur.
    "Sobering  him  up,"  said  Zaphod  and  pushed a coin into a slot. Lights
flashed, gases swirled.
    "Hi," said Ford stepping out a moment later, "where are we going?"
    "Down to the car park, come on."
    "What about the personnel Time Teleports?" said  Ford,  "Get  us  straight
back to the Heart of Gold."
    "Yeah,  but  I've cooled on that ship. Zarniwoop can have it. I don't want
to play his games. Let's see what we can find."
    A Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical  People  Transporter  took
them  down  deep  into the substrata beneath the Restaurant. They were glad to
see it had been vandalized and didn't try to make them happy as well  as  take
them down.
    At the bottom of the shaft the lift doors opened and a blast of cold stale
air hit them.
    The first thing they saw on leaving the lift was a long concrete wall with
over  fifty  doors  in  it offering lavatory facilities for all of fifty major
lifeforms. Nevertheless, like every car park  in  the  Galaxy  throughout  the
entire history of car parks, this car park smelt predominantly of impatience.
    They  turned  a  corner  and  found  themselves  on  a moving catwalk that
traversed a vast cavernous space that stretched off into the dim distance.
    It was divided off  into  bays  each  of  which  contained  a  space  ship
belonging  to  one  of the diners upstairs, some smallish and utilitarian mass
production models, others vast shining limoships, the playthings of  the  very
rich.
    Zaphod's  eyes  sparkled  with  something  that  may  or may not have been
avarice as he passed over them. In fact it's best to be clear on this point  -
avarice is definitely what it was.
    "There he is," said Trillian, "Marvin, down there."
    They  looked  where  she  was pointing. Dimly they could see a small metal
figure listlessly rubbing a small rag on one remote corner of a  giant  silver
suncruiser.
    At  short  intervals  along the moving catwalk, wide transparent tubes led
down to floor level. Zaphod stepped off  the  catwalk  into  one  and  floated
gently  downwards.  The  others  followed. Thinking back to this later, Arthur
Dent thought it was the single most enjoyable experience of his travels in the
Galaxy.
    "Hey, Marvin," said Zaphod striding over towards to him, "Hey, kid, are we
pleased to see you."
    Marvin turned, and in so far as it is possible for a totally  inert  metal
face to look reproachfully, this is what it did.
    "No you're not," he said, "no one ever is."
    "Suit  yourself," said Zaphod and turned away to ogle the ships. Ford went
with him.
    Only Trillian and Arthur actually went up to Marvin.
    "No, really we are," said Trillian  and  patted  him  in  a  way  that  he
disliked intensely, "hanging around waiting for us all this time."
    "Five  hundred  and  seventy-six  thousand  million,  three  thousand five
hundred and seventy-nine years," said Marvin, "I counted them."
    "Well, here we are now," said  Trillian,  felling  -  quite  correctly  in
Marvin's view - that it was a slightly foolish thing to say.
    "The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second
ten million  years,  they were the worst too. The third million years I didn't
enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of decline."
    He paused just long enough to make them feel they ought to say  something,
and then interrupted.
    "It's  the  people you meet in this job that really get you down," he said
and paused again.
    Trillian cleared her throat.
    "Is that ..."
    "The best conversation I had was over forty million years ago,"  continued
Marvin.
    Again the pause.
    "Oh d ..."
    "And that was with a coffee machine."
    He waited.
    "That's a ..."
    "You don't like talking to me do you?" said Marvin in a low desolate tone.
    Trillian talked to Arthur instead.
    Further down the chamber Ford Prefect had found something of which he very
much liked the look, several such things in fact.
    "Zaphod,"  he  said  in  a quiet voice, "just look at some of these little
star trolleys ..."
    Zaphod looked and liked.
    The craft they were looking at was in fact pretty small but extraordinary,
and very much a rich kid's toy. It was not  much  to  look  at.  It  resembled
nothing  so much as a paper dart about twenty feet long made of thin but tough
metal foil. At the rear end was a small horizontal two-man cockpit. It  had  a
tiny charmdrive engine, which was not capable of moving it at any great speed.
The thing it did have, however, was a heat-sink.
    The  heat-sink  had  a  mass  of  some  two  thousand billion tons and was
contained within a black hole mounted in  an  electromagnetic  field  situated
half-way along the length of the ship, and this heat-sink enabled the craft to
be  manoeuvred  to within a few miles of a yellow sun, there to catch and ride
the solar flares that burst out from its surface.
    Flare-riding is  one  of  the  most  exotic  and  exhilarating  sports  in
existence,  and those who can dare and afford it are amongst the most lionized
men in the Galaxy. It is also of course stupefyingly  dangerous  -  those  who
don't  die  riding  invariably die of sexual exhaustion at one of the Daedalus
Club's ApresFlare parties.
    Ford and Zaphod looked and passed on.
    "And this baby," said Ford, "the  tangerine  star  buggy  with  the  black
sunbusters ..."
    Again,  the  star buggy was a small ship - a totally misnamed one in fact,
because the one thing it couldn't manage was interstellar distances. Basically
it was a sporty planet hopper dolled up to something  it  wasn't.  Nice  lines
though. They passed on.
    The  next one was a big one and thirty yards long - a coach built limoship
and obviously designed with one aim in mind, that of making the beholder  sick
with envy. The paintwork and accessory detail clearly said "Not only am I rich
enough  to  afford this ship, I am also rich enough not to take it seriously."
It was wonderfully hideous.
    "Just look at it," said  Zaphod,  "multi-cluster  quark  drive,  perspulex
running boards. Got to be a Lazlar Lyricon custom job."
    He examined every inch.
    "Yes,"  he  said,  "look,  the  infra-pink  lizard  emblem on the neutrino
cowling. Lazlar's trade mark. The man has no shame."
    "I was passed by one of these mothers once, out by the Axel Nebula,"  said
Ford,  "I  was going flat out and this thing just strolled past me, star drive
hardly ticking over. Just incredible."
    Zaphod whistled appreciatively.
    "Ten seconds later", said Ford, "it smashed straight into the  third  moon
of Jaglan Beta."
    "Yeah, right?"
    "Amazing looking ship though. Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers
like a cow."
    Ford looked round the other side.
    "Hey,  come  and see," he called out, "there's a big mural painted on this
side. A bursting sun - Disaster Area's trade mark.  This  must  be  Hotblack's
ship.  Lucky old bugger. They do this terrible song you know which ends with a
stuntship crashing into the sun. Meant to be an amazing  spectacle.  Expensive
in stunt ships though."
    Zaphod's attention however was elsewhere. His attention was riveted on the
ship standing next to Hotblack Desiato's limo. His mouths hung open.
    "That," he said, "that ... is really bad for the eyes ..."
    Ford looked. He too stood astonished.
    It  was  a ship of classic, simple design, like a flattened salmon, twenty
yards long, very clean, very sleek. There was just one remarkable thing  about
it.
    "It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape
... light just seems to fall into it!"
    Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love.
    The  blackness  of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell
how close you were standing to it.
    "Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional
moment. He bit his lip.
    Zaphod moved forward to it,  slowly,  like  a  man  possessed  -  or  more
accurately  like  a  man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke
it. His hand stopped. His hand reached  out  to  stroke  it  again.  His  hand
stopped again.
    "Come and feel the surface," he said in a hushed voice.
    Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped.
    "You ... you can't ..." he said.
    "See?"  said  Zaphod,  "it's  just  totally frictionless. This must be one
mother of a mover ..."
    He turned to look at Ford seriously. At least, one of his heads did -  the
other stayed gazing in awe at the ship.
    "What do you reckon, Ford?" he said.
    "You  mean ... er ..." Ford looked over his shoulder. "You mean stroll off
with it? You think we should?"
    "No."
    "Nor do I."
    "But we're going to, aren't we?"
    "How can we not?"
    They gazed a little longer, till Zaphod suddenly pulled himself together.
    "We better shift soon," he said. "In a moment or so the Universe will have
ended and all the Captain Creeps will be  pouring  down  here  to  find  their
bourge-mobiles."
    "Zaphod," said Ford.
    "Yeah?"
    "How do we do it?"
    "Simple," said Zaphod. He turned. "Marvin!" he called.
    Slowly,  laboriously,  and  with  a  million  little clanking and creaking
noises that he had learned to simulate, Marvin  turned  round  to  answer  the
summons.
    "Come on over here," said Zaphod, "We've got a job for you."
    Marvin trudged towards them.
    "I won't enjoy it," he said.
    "Yes  you will," enthused Zaphod, "there's a whole new life stretching out
ahead of you."
    "Oh, not another one," groaned Marvin.
    "Will you shut up and listen!" hissed Zaphod, "this time there's going  to
be excitement and adventure and really wild things."
    "Sounds awful," Marvin said.
    "Marvin! All I'm trying to ask you ..."
    "I suppose you want me to open this spaceship for you?"
    "What?  Er  ...  yes.  Yeah,  that's  right,"  said Zaphod jumpily. He was
keeping at least three eyes on the entrance. Time was short.
    "Well I wish you'd just tell me rather than try to engage my  enthusiasm,"
said Marvin, "because I haven't got one."
    He walked on up to the ship, touched it, and a hatchway swung open.
    Ford and Zaphod stared at the opening.
    "Don't mention it," said Marvin, "Oh, you didn't." He trudged away again.
    Arthur and Trillian clustered round.
    "What's happening?" asked Arthur.
    "Look at this," said Ford, "look at the interior of this ship."
    "Weirder and weirder," breathed Zaphod.
    "It's black," said Ford, "Everything in it is just totally black ..."
    In  the  Restaurant,  things  were fast approaching the moment after which
there wouldn't be any more moments.
    All eyes were fixed on the dome, other than those  of  Hotblack  Desiato's
bodyguard,  which  were  looking  intently  at  Hotblack Desiato, and those of
Hotblack Desiato himself which the bodyguard had closed out of respect.
    The bodyguard leaned forward over the table.  Had  Hotblack  Desiato  been
alive,  he probably would have deemed this a good moment to lean back, or even
go for a short  walk.  His  bodyguard  was  not  a  man  which  improved  with
proximity.  On account of his unfortunate condition, however, Hotblack Desiato
remained totally inert.
    "Mr Desiato, sir?" whispered the bodyguard. Whenever he spoke,  it  looked
as  if the muscles on either side of his mouth were clambering over each other
to get out of the way.
    "Mr Desiato? Can you hear me?"
    Hotblack Desiato, quit naturally, said nothing.
    "Hotblack?" hissed the bodyguard.
    Again, quite naturally, Hotblack Desiato did  not  reply.  Supernaturally,
however, he did.
    On the table in front of him a wine glass rattled, and a fork rose an inch
or so and tapped against the glass. It settled on the table again.
    The bodyguard gave a satisfied grunt.
    "It's  time we get going, Mr Desiato," muttered the bodyguard, "don't want
to get caught in the rush, not in your condition. You want to get to the  next
gig nice and relaxed. There was a really big audience for it. One of the best.
Kakrafoon.  Five-hundred  seventy-six  thousand and two million years ago. Had
you will have been looking forward to it?"
    The fork rose again, waggled in a non-committal sort of  way  and  dropped
again.
    "Ah,  come  on,"  said  the bodyguard, "it's going to have been great. You
knocked 'em cold." The bodyguard would have given Dr  Dan  Streetmentioner  an
apoplectic attack.
    "The  black  ship  going into the sun always gets 'em, and the new one's a
beauty. Be real sorry to see it go. If we get on  down  there,  I'll  set  the
black ship autopilot and we'll cruise off in the limo. OK?"
    The  fork  tapped  once  in  agreement, and the glass of wine mysteriously
emptied itself.
    The bodyguard wheeled Hotblack Desiato's chair out of the Restaurant.
    "And now," cried Max from the centre of the stage, "the moment you've  all
been  waiting  for!" He flung his arms into the air. Behind him, the band went
into a frenzy of percussion and rolling synthochords. Max had argued with them
about this but they had claimed it was in their contract that that's what they
would do. His agent would have to sort it out.
    "The skies begin to boil!" he cried. "Nature collapses into the  screaming
void!  In  twenty  seconds'  time,  the Universe itself will be at an end! See
where the light of infinity bursts in upon us!"
    The hideous fury of destruction blazed about them - and at that  moment  a
still small trumpet sounded as from an infinite distance. Max's eyes swivelled
round  to  glare  at  the  band.  None of them seemed to be playing a trumpet.
Suddenly a wisp of smoke was swirling and shimmering on the stage next to him.
The trumpet was joined by more trumpets. Over five hundred times Max had  done
this  show,  and  nothing  like this had ever happened before. He drew back in
alarm from the swirling smoke, and as he did so, a figure slowly  materialized
inside, the figure of an ancient man, bearded, robed and wreathed in light. In
his eyes were stars and on his brow a golden crown.
    "What's this?" whispered Max, wild-eyed, "what's happening?"
    At the back of the Restaurant the stony-faced party from the Church of the
Second  Coming  of  the Great Prophet Zarquon leapt ecstatically to their feet
chanting and crying.
    Max blinked in amazement. He threw up his arms to the audience.
    "A big hand please, ladies and gentlemen," he  hollered,  "for  the  Great
Prophet Zarquon! He has come! Zarquon has come again!"
    Thunderous  applause  broke  out as Max strode across the stage and handed
his microphone to the Prophet.
    Zarquon coughed. He peered round at the assembled gathering. The stars  in
his eyes blinked uneasily. He handled the microphone with confusion.
    "Er ..." he said, "hello. Er, look, I'm sorry I'm a bit late. I've had the
most ghastly time, all sorts of things cropping up at the last moment."
    He seemed nervous of the expectant awed hush. He cleared his throat.
    "Er, how are we for time?" he said, "have I just got a min-"
    And so the Universe ended.

Chapter 19

    One  of the major selling point of that wholly remarkable travel book, the
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, apart from its relative cheapness  and  the
fact  that  it  has the words Don't Panic written in large friendly letters on
its  cover,  is  its  compendious  and  occasionally  accurate  glossary.  The
statistics  relating  to  the geo-social nature of the Universe, for instance,
are deftly set out between pages nine hundred and  thirty-eight  thousand  and
twenty-four and nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand and twenty-six; and the
simplistic  style  in  which  they are written is partly explained by the fact
that the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information
off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it  with  a
few  footnoted  in  order  to  avoid  prosecution  under  the incomprehensibly
tortuous Galactic Copyright laws.
    It is interesting to note that a later and wilier  editor  sent  the  book
backwards  in  time  through  a  temporal warp, and then successfully sued the
breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.
    Here is a sample:
    The Universe - some information to help you live in it.
    1~Area: Infinite.
    The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of  the  word
"Infinite".
    Infinite:  Bigger  than  the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger
than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally  stunning  size,  "wow,
that's  big", time. Infinity is just so big that by comparison, bigness itself
looks  really  titchy.  Gigantic  multiplied   by   colossal   multiplied   by
staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
    2~Imports: None.
    It  is  impossible  to import things into an infinite area, there being no
outside to import things in from.
    3~Exports: None.
    See imports.
    4~Population: None.
    It is known that there are an infinite number of  worlds,  simply  because
there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one
of  them  is  inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited
worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing  as  makes
no  odds,  so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be
said to be zero. From this  it  follows  that  the  population  of  the  whole
Universe  is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are
merely the products of a deranged imagination.
    5~Monetary Units: None.
    In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the  Galaxy,  but
none  of them count. The Altairan Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flaninian
Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flaninian  Pobble  Beads,  and  the
Triganic  Pu  has  its  own  very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight
Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is  a  triangular  rubber
coin  six  thousand  eight  hundred  miles  across  each side, no one has ever
collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency because the
Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic  premise
it  is  very  simple  to prove that the Galactibanks are also the product of a
deranged imagination.
    6~Art: None.
    The function of art is to hold the mirror up to nature, and  there  simply
isn't a mirror big enough - see point one.
    7~Sex: None.
    Well,  in fact there is an awful lot of this, largely because of the total
lack of money, trade, banks, art, or anything else that  might  keep  all  the
non-existent people of the Universe occupied.
    However,  it is not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now because
it really is terribly complicated. For further information see Guide  Chapters
seven,  nine,  ten, eleven, fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one
to eighty-four inclusive, and in fact most of the rest of the Guide.

Chapter 20

    The Restaurant  continued  existing,  but  everything  else  had  stopped.
Temporal  relastatics  held  it  and protected it in a nothingness that wasn't
merely a vacuum, it was simply nothing - there was nothing in which  a  vacuum
could be said to exist.
    The force-shielded dome had once again been rendered opaque, the party was
over, the diners were leaving, Zarquon had vanished along with the rest of the
Universe,  the Time Turbines were preparing to pull the Restaurant back across
the brink of time in readiness for the lunch sitting, and Max Quordlepleen was
back in his small curtained dressing room trying to raise  his  agent  on  the
tempophone.
    In the car park stood the black ship, closed and silent.
    In  to the car park came the late Mr Hotblack Desiato, propelled along the
moving catwalk by his bodyguard.
    They descended one of  the  tubes.  As  they  approached  the  limoship  a
hatchway  swung  down  from its side, engaged the wheels of the wheelchair and
drew it inside. The bodyguard  followed,  and  having  seen  his  boss  safely
connected  up to his death-support system, moved up to the small cockpit. Here
he operated the remote control system which activated  the  autopilot  in  the
black  ship  lying  next  to  the  limo,  thus  causing great relief to Zaphod
Beeblebrox who had been trying to start the thing for over ten minutes.
    The black ship glided smoothly forward out of its bay, turned,  and  moved
down  the  central  causeway  swiftly  and  quietly. At the end it accelerated
rapidly, flung itself into the temporal launch  chamber  and  began  the  long
journey back into the distant past.
    The  Milliways  Lunch Menu quotes, by permission, a passage from the Hitch
Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The passage is this:
    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?"
    The  Menu  goes on to suggest that Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of
the Universe, would be a very agreeable and sophisticated answer to that third
question.
    What it doesn't go on to say is that though it will usually take  a  large
civilization  many  thousands  of years to pass through the How, Why and Where
phases, small social groupings under stressful  conditions  can  pass  through
them with extreme rapidity.
    "How are we doing?" said Arthur Dent.
    "Badly," said Ford Prefect.
    "Where are we going?" said Trillian.
    "I don't know," said Zaphod Beeblebrox.
    "Why not?" demanded Arthur Dent.
    "Shut up," suggested Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect.
    "Basically,  what  you're  trying to say," said Arthur Dent, ignoring this
suggestion, "is that we're out of control."
    The ship was rocking and swaying sickeningly as Ford and Zaphod  tried  to
wrest  control  from  the  autopilot. The engined howled and whined like tired
children in a supermarket.
    "It's the wild colour scheme that  freaks  me,"  said  Zaphod  whose  love
affair  with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight, "Every
time you try to operate on of these weird black controls that are labelled  in
black  on  a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you
know you've done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?"
    The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the
seats - which were rudimentary since the only important  trip  this  ship  was
designed  for  was supposed to be unmanned - were black, the control panel was
black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them  in  place
were  black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had
lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay  also  was
black.
    "Perhaps  whoever  designed  it  had  eyes  that  responded  to  different
wavelengths," offered Trillian.
    "Or didn't have much imagination," muttered Arthur.
    "Perhaps," said Marvin, "he was feeling very depressed."
    In fact, though they weren't to know it, the  decor  had  been  chosen  in
honour of its owner's sad, lamented, and tax-deductible condition.
    The ship gave a particularly sickening lurch.
    "Take it easy," pleaded Arthur, "you're making me space sick."
    "Time sick," said Ford, "we're plummeting backwards through time."
    "Thank you," said Arthur, "now I think I really am going to be ill."
    "Go  ahead,"  said  Zaphod,  "we  could do with a little colour about this
place."
    "This is meant to be a polite after-dinner conversation  is  it?"  snapped
Arthur.
    Zaphod  left  the  controls  for  Ford  to figure out, and lurched over to
Arthur.
    "Look, Earthman," he said angrily, "you've got a job  to  do,  right?  The
Question to the Ultimate Answer, right?"
    "What, that thing?" said Arthur, "I thought we'd forgotten about that."
    "Not  me, baby. Like the mice said, it's worth a lot of money in the right
quarters. And it's all locked up in that head thing of yours."
    "Yes but ..."
    "But nothing! Think about it. The Meaning of Life! We get our  fingers  on
that  we  can hold every shrink in the Galaxy up to ransom, and that's worth a
bundle. I owe mine a mint."
    Arthur took a deep breath without much enthusiasm.
    "Alright," he said, "but where do we start? How should I  know?  They  say
the  Ultimate  Answer or whatever is Forty-two, how am I supposed to know what
the question is? It could be anything. I mean, what's six times seven?"
    Zaphod looked at him  hard  for  a  moment.  Then  his  eyes  blazed  with
excitement.
    "Forty-two!" he cried.
    Arthur wiped his palm across his forehead.
    "Yes," he said patiently," I know that."
    Zaphod's faces fell.
    "I'm just saying that the question could be anything at all," said Arthur,
"and I don't see how I am meant to know."
    "Because,"  hissed  Zaphod,  "you  were there when your planet did the big
firework."
    "We have a thing on Earth ..." began Arthur.
    "Had," corrected Zaphod.
    "... called tact. Oh never mind. Look, I just don't know."
    A low voice echoed dully round the cabin.
    "I know," said Marvin.
    Ford called out from the controls he was still fighting  a  losing  battle
with.
    "Stay out of this Marvin," he said, "this is organism talk."
    "It's  printed  in  the  Earthman's brainwave patterns," continued Marvin,
"but I don't suppose you'll be very interested in knowing that."
    "You mean," said Arthur, "you mean you can see into my mind?"
    "Yes," said Marvin.
    Arthur stared in astonishment.
    "And ...?" he said.
    "It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small."
    "Ah," said Arthur, "abuse."
    "Yes," confirmed Marvin.
    "Ah, ignore him," said Zaphod, "he's only making it up."
    "Making  it  up?"  said  Marvin,  swivelling  his  head  in  a  parody  of
astonishment,  "Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it
is without wanting to invent any more of it."
    "Marvin," said Trillian in the gentle, kindly  voice  that  only  she  was
still  capable  of  assuming  in talking to this misbegotten creature, "if you
knew all along, why then didn't you tell us?"
    Marvin's head swivelled back to her.
    "You didn't ask," he said simply.
    "Well, we're asking you now, metal man," said Ford, turning round to  look
at him.
    At  that  moment the ship suddenly stopped rocking and swaying, the engine
pitch settled down to a gentle hum.
    "Hey, Ford," said Zaphod, "that sounds  good.  Have  you  worked  out  the
controls of this boat?"
    "No,"  said  Ford, "I just stopped fiddling with them. I reckon we just go
to wherever this ship is going and get off it fast."
    "Yeah, right," said Zaphod.
    "I could tell you weren't really interested," murmured Marvin  to  himself
and slumped into a corner and switched himself off.
    "Trouble  is," said Ford, "that the one instrument in this while ship that
is giving any reading is worrying me. If it is what I think it is, and if it's
saying what I think it's saying, then we've already gone too far back into the
past. Maybe as much as two million years before our own time."
    Zaphod shrugged.
    "Time is bunk," he said.
    "I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway," said Arthur.
    "Me," said Zaphod.
    "No. Who it really belongs to."
    "Really me," insisted Zaphod, "look, property is theft,  right?  Therefore
theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, OK?"
    "Tell the ship that," said Arthur.
    Zaphod strode over to the console.
    "Ship,"  he  said, banging on the panels, "this is your new owner speaking
to ..."
    He got no further. Several things happened at once.
    The ship dropped out fo time travel mode and re-emerged into real space.
    All the controls on the console, which had been shut  down  for  the  time
trip now lit up.
    A  large vision screen above the console winked into life revealing a wide
starscape and a single very large sun dead ahead of them.
    None of these things, however, were responsible for the fact  that  Zaphod
was  at the same moment hurled bodily backwards against the rear of the cabin,
as were all the others.
    They were hurled back by a single thunderous clap of noise that  thuddered
out of the monitor speakers surrounding the vision screen.

Chapter 21

    Down  on the dry, red world of Kakrafoon, in the middle of the vast Rudlit
Desert, the stage technicians were testing the sound system.
    That is to say, the  sound  system  was  in  the  desert,  not  the  stage
technicians. They had retreated to the safety of Disaster Area's giant control
ship  which  hung  in  orbit  some four hundred miles above the surface of the
planet, and they were testing the sound system from there. Anyone within  five
miles of the speaker silos wouldn't have survived the tuning up.
    If  Arthur  Dent  had been within five miles of the speaker silos then his
expiring thought would have been that in both size and  shape  the  sound  rig
closely resembled Manhattan. Risen out of the silos, the neutron phase speaker
stacks  towered  monstrously against the sky, obscuring the banks of plutonium
reactors and seismic amps behind them.
    Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath  the  city  of  speakers  lay  the
instruments  that  the  musicians  would  control from their ship, the massive
photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex.
    It was going to be a noisy show.
    Aboard the giant control ship,  all  was  activity  and  bustle.  Hotblack
Desiato's  limoship, a mere tadpole beside it, had arrived and docked, and the
lamented gentleman was being transported down the high  vaulted  corridors  to
meet  the  medium  who  was  going to interpret his psychic impulses on to the
ajuitar keyboard.
    A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just  arrived,  flown
in  at  phenomenal  expense  from  Maximegalon  to try to reason with the lead
singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills  and  was
refusing  to  come  out  till  it  could be proved conclusively to him that he
wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his  bedroom  and  the
drummer was nowhere on board.
    Frantic  inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on
Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he  had  been
happy  over  half  an  hour  now and had found a small stone that would be his
friend.
    The band's  manager  was  profoundly  relieved.  It  meant  that  for  the
seventeenth  time  on  this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that
therefore the timing of the cymbalistics would be right.
    The sub-ether was buzzing with the communications of the stage technicians
testing the speaker channels, and this it was that was being  relayed  to  the
interior of the black ship.
    Its  dazed  occupants lay against the back wall of the cabin, and listened
to the voices on the monitor speakers.
    "OK, channel nine on power," said a voice, "testing channel fifteen ..."
    Another thumping crack of noise walloped through the ship.
    "Channel fifteen AOK," said another voice.
    A third voice cut in.
    "The black stunt ship is now in position," it said,  "it's  looking  good.
Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?"
    A computer voice answered.
    "On line," it said.
    "Take control of the black ship."
    "Black ship locked into trajectory programme, on standby."
    "Testing channel twenty."
    Zaphod  leaped  across the cabin and switched frequencies on the sub-ether
receiver before the next mind-pulverizing  noise  hit  them.  He  stood  there
quivering.
    "What," said Trillian in a small quiet voice, "does sundive mean?"
    "It means," said Marvin, "that the ship os going to dive into the sun. Sun
... Dive.  It's  very  simple  to  understand. What do you expect if you steal
Hotblack Desiato's stunt ship?"
    "How do you know ..." said Zaphod in a voice that would make a Vegan  snow
lizard feel chilly, "that this is Hotblack Desiato's stuntship?"
    "Simple," said Marvin, "I parked it for him."
    "The why ... didn't ... you ... tell us!"
    "You said you wanted excitement and adventure and really wild things."
    "This is awful," said Arthur unnecessarily in the pause which followed.
    "That's what I said," confirmed Marvin.
    On  a  different  frequency, the sub-ether receiver had picked up a public
broadcast, which now echoed round the cabin.
    "... fine weather for the concert here this afternoon. I'm  standing  here
in  front  of  the  stage,"  the  reporter  lied, "in the middle of the Rudlit
Desert, and with the aid of hyperbinoptic glasses I can just  about  make  out
the  huge  audience cowering there on the horizon all around me. Behind me the
speaker stacks rise like a sheer cliff face, and high  above  me  the  sun  is
shining  away  and  doesn't  know what's going to hit it. The environmentalist
lobby do know what's going to hit it, and they claim  that  the  concert  will
cause   earthquakes,  tidal  waves,  hurricanes,  irreparable  damage  to  the
atmosphere, and all the usual things  that  environmentalists  usually  go  on
about.
    "But  I've  just  had  a report that a representative of Disaster Area met
with the environmentalists at lunchtime, and had them all shot, so nothing now
lies in the way of ..."
    Zaphod switched it off. He turned to Ford.
    "You know what I'm thinking?" he said.
    "I think so," said Ford.
    "Tell me what you think I'm thinking."
    "I think you're thinking it's time we get off this ship."
    "I think you're right," said Zaphod.
    "I think you're right," said Ford.
    "How?" said Arthur.
    "Quiet," said Ford and Zaphod, "we're thinking."
    "So this is it," said Arthur, "we're going to die."
    "I wish you'd stop saying that," said Ford.
    It is worth repeating at this point the theories that  Ford  had  come  up
with,  on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar
habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as it  'It's
a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."
    His  first  theory  was  that if human beings didn't keep exercising their
lips, their mouths probably seized up.
    After a few months of observation he had come up  with  a  second  theory,
which  was  this  -  "If  human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their
brains start working."
    In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcebron people
of Kakrafoon.
    The Belcebron people used to cause great resentment and insecurity amongst
neighboring races by being one of  the  most  enlightened,  accomplished,  and
above all quiet civilizations in the Galaxy.
    As  a punishment for this behaviour, which was held to be offensively self
righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted  on  them  that  most
cruel  of  all  social  diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent
themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crossed  their  minds  to
anyone  within  a  five  mile  radius,  they  now have to talk very loudly and
continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the  match  this
afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon had suddenly become.
    Another  method of temporarily blotting out their minds is to play host to
a Disaster Area concert.
    The timing of the concert was critical.
    The ship had to begin its dive before the concert began in  order  to  hit
the  sun six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the climax of the song to
which it related, so that the light of the solar flares had time to travel out
to Kakrafoon.
    The ship had already been diving for several minutes by the time that Ford
Prefect had completed his search of the other compartments of the black  ship.
He burst back into the cabin.
    The  sun  of Kakrafoon loomed terrifyingly large on the vision screen, its
blazing white inferno of fusing hydrogen nuclei growing moment  by  moment  as
the ship plunged onwards, unheeding the thumping and banging of Zaphod's hands
on the control panel. Arthur and Trillian had the fixed expressions of rabbits
on  a  night  road  who  think  that  the best way of dealing with approaching
headlights is to stare them out.
    Zaphod span round, wild-eyed.
    "Ford," he said, "how many escape capsules are there?"
    "None," said Ford.
    Zaphod gibbered.
    "Did you count them?" he yelled.
    "Twice," said Ford, "did you manage to raise the stage crew on the radio?"
    "Yeah," said Zaphod, bitterly, "I said there were a whole bunch of  people
on board, and they said to say `hi' to everybody."
    Ford goggled.
    "Didn't you tell them who we were?"
    "Oh  yeah.  They  said  it  was a great honour. That and something about a
restaurant bill and my executors."
    Ford pushed Arthur aside and leaned forward over the control console.
    "Does none of this function?" he said savagely.
    "All overridden."
    "Smash the autopilot."
    "Find it first. Nothing connects."
    There was a moment's cold silence.
    Arthur was stumbling round the back of the cabin. He stopped suddenly.
    "Incidentally," he said, "what does teleport mean?"
    Another moment passed.
    Slowly, the others turned to face him.
    "Probably the wrong moment to ask," said Arthur,  "It's  just  I  remember
hearing you use the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because ..."
    "Where," said Ford Prefect quietly, "does it say teleport?"
    "Well,  just  over  here in fact," said Arthur, pointing at a dark control
box in the rear of the cabin, "Just under the word `emergency', above the word
`system' and beside the sign saying `out of order'."
    In the pandemonium that instantly followed, the only action to follow  was
that  of  Ford  Prefect  lunging  across the cabin to the small black box that
Arthur had indicated and stabbing repeatedly at the single small black  button
set into it.
    A  six-foot square panel slid open beside it revealing a compartment which
resembled a multiple shower unit that had found a new function in life  as  an
electrician's  junk store. Halffinished wiring hung from the ceiling, a jumble
of abandoned components lay strewn on the floor,  and  the  programming  panel
lolled out of the cavity in the wall into which it should have been secured.
    A  junior  Disaster Area accountant, visiting the shipyard where this ship
was being constructed, had demanded to know of the works foreman why the  hell
they  were  fitting an extremely expensive teleport into a ship which only had
one important journey to make, and that unmanned. The  foreman  had  explained
that  the teleport was available at a ten per cent discount and the accountant
had explained that this was immaterial; the foreman had explained that it  was
the  finest, most powerful and sophisticated teleport that money could buy and
the accountant had explained that the money  did  not  wish  to  buy  it;  the
foreman had explained that people would still need to enter and leave the ship
and the accountant had explained that the ship sported a perfectly serviceable
door; the foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head
and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him
rapidly  from his left was a knuckle sandwich. After the explanations had been
concluded, work was discontinued on the  teleport  which  subsequently  passed
unnoticed on the invoice as "Sund. explns." at five times the price.
    "Hell's donkeys," muttered Zaphod as he and Ford attempted to sort through
the tangle of wiring.
    After  a  moment  or so Ford told him to stand back. He tossed a coin into
the teleport and jiggled a switch on the lolling control panel. With a crackle
and spit of light, the coin vanished.
    "That much of it works," said Ford, "however, there is no guidance system.
A matter transference teleport without guidance programming could put you  ...
well, anywhere."
    The sun of Kakrafoon loomed huge on the screen.
    "Who cares," said Zaphod, "we go where we go."
    "And,"  said  Ford,  "there  is no autosystem. We couldn't all go. Someone
would have to stay and operate it."
    A solemn moment shuffled past. The sun loomed larger and larger.
    "Hey, Marvin kid," said Zaphod brightly, "how you doing?"
    "Very badly I suspect," muttered Marvin.
    A shortish while later, the concert on  Kakrafoon  reached  an  unexpected
climax.
    The  black  ship  with  its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule
into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar flares licked out  from  it
millions  of miles into space, thrilling and in a few cases spilling the dozen
or so Flare Riders who had been coasting close to the surface of  the  sun  in
anticipation of the moment.
    Moments  before  the  flare  light  reached  Kakrafoon the pounding desert
cracked along a deep faultline. A huge  and  hitherto  undetected  underground
river  lying  far  beneath  the  surface  gushed to the surface to be followed
seconds later by the eruption of millions of tons of boiling lava that  flowed
hundreds of feet into the air, instantaneously vaporizing the river both above
and below the surface in an explosion that echoed to the far side of the world
and back again.
    Those  -  very  few  - who witnessed the event and survived swear that the
whole hundred thousand square miles of the desert rose into  the  air  like  a
mile-thick  pancake,  flipped  itself over and fell back down. At that precise
moment the solar radiation from the flares  filtered  through  the  clouds  of
vaporized water and struck the ground.
    A  year  later,  the  hundred  thousand  square mile desert was thick with
flowers. The structure of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered.
The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly  in  the
winter,  pleasant  rain  fell  more  often,  and  slowly  the  desert world of
Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which  the  people
of  Kakrafoon  had  been  cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the
explosion.
    A  spokesman  for  Disaster  Area  -  the  one  who  had   had   all   the
environmentalists  shot  - was later quoted as saying that it had been "a good
gig".
    Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few sceptical
scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and  claimed  that
they   had   discovered   faint   vestiges  of  a  vast  artificially  induced
Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space.

Chapter 22

    Arthur woke up and instantly regretted it. Hangovers he'd had,  but  never
anything  on  this  scale.  This  was  it,  this was the big one, this was the
ultimate pits. Matter transference beams, he decided, were not as much fun as,
say, a good solid kick in the head.
    Being for the moment unwilling to move on account of a dull stomping throb
he was experiencing, he lay a while and thought. The trouble with  most  forms
of  transport,  he  thought,  is basically one of them not being worth all the
bother. On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was  demolished  to
make  way  for  a  new hyperspace bypass - the problem had been with cars. The
disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out  of  the
ground  where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar
to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the  rest  into
the  sea,  all  seemed  to  outweigh  the advantages of being able to get more
quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at
had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the  place  you  had
left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
    And  what  about  matter  transference  beams? Any form of transport which
involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub+
ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they  were  getting
their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.
    Many  people had thought exactly this before Arthur Dent and had even gone
to the lengths of writing songs about it. Here is one that used  regularly  to
be  chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport
Systems factory on Happi-Werld III:
    Aldebaran's great, OK,
    Algol's pretty neat,
    Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
    Will knock you off your feet.
    They'll do anything you like,
    Real fast and then real slow,
    But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
    Then I don't want to go.
    Singing,
    Take me apart, take me apart,
    What a way to roam,
    And if you have to take me apart to get me there,
    I'd rather stay at home.
    Sirius is paved with gold
    So I've heard it said
    By nuts who then go on to say
    "See Tau before you're dead."
    I'll gladly take the high road
    Or even take the low,
    But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
    Then I, for one, won't go.
    Singing,
    Take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head,
    And if you try to take me apart to get me there,
    I'll stay right here in bed.
    I teleported home one night,
    With Ron and Sid and Meg,
    Ron stole Meggie's heart away,
    And I got Sidney's leg.
    Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was  still  aware
of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up.
    "Can you hear a dull stomping throb?" said Ford Prefect.
    Arthur  span  round  and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching
looking red eyed and pasty.
    "Where are we?" gasped Arthur.
    Ford looked around. They were standing in a long  curving  corridor  which
stretched  out  of  sight in both directions. The outer steel wall - which was
painted in that sickly  shade  of  pale  green  which  they  use  in  schools,
hospitals  and  mental  asylums  to keep the inmates subdued - curved over the
tops of their heads where it met the inner  perpendicular  wall  which,  oddly
enough  was  covered  in  dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark
green ribbed rubber.
    Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set  in  the  outer
wall.  It  was  several  layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of
distant stars.
    "I think we're in a spaceship of some kind," he said.
    Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb.
    "Trillian?" called Arthur nervously, "Zaphod?"
    Ford shrugged.
    "Nowhere about," he  said,  "I've  looked.  They  could  be  anywhere.  An
unprogrammed  teleport  can throw you light years in any direction. Judging by
the way I feel I should think we've travelled a very long way indeed."
    "How do you feel?"
    "Bad."
    "Do you think they're ..."
    "Where they are, how they are, there's no way we can know and  no  way  we
can do anything about it. Do what I do."
    "What?"
    "Don't think about it."
    Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of
it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath.
    "Footsteps!" exclaimed Ford suddenly.
    "Where?"
    "That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!"
    Arthur  listened.  The  noise  echoed  round  the corridor at them from an
indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it
was noticeably louder.
    "Let's move," said Ford sharply. They both moved - in opposite directions.
    "Not that way," said Ford, "that's where they're coming from."
    "No it's not," said Arthur, "They're coming from that way."
    "They're not, they're ..."
    They both stopped. They both turned. They  both  listened  intently.  They
both agreed with each other. They both set off into opposite directions again.
    Fear gripped them.
    From both directions the noise was getting louder.
    A  few  yards  to  their  left another corridor ran at right angles to the
inner wall. They ran to it and hurried along it. It was dark,  immensely  long
and,  as  they  passed  down  it, gave them the impression that it was getting
colder and colder. Other corridors gave off it to the  left  and  right,  each
very dark and each subjecting them to sharp blasts of icy air as they passed.
    They  stopped  for  a  moment in alarm. The further down the corridor they
went, the louder became the sound of pounding feet.
    They pressed themselves back against the cold wall and listened furiously.
The cold, the dark and the drumming of disembodied feet was  getting  to  them
badly.  Ford  shivered,  partly  with  the cold, but partly with the memory of
stories his favourite mother used to tell him when he was a  mere  slip  of  a
Betelgeusian,  ankle  high  to  an  Arcturan  Megagrasshopper: stories of dead
ships, haunted hulks that roamed restlessly round the obscurer regions of deep
space infested with demons or the ghosts of forgotten crews;  stories  too  of
incautious  travellers who found and entered such ships; stories of ... - then
Ford remembered the brown hessian wall weave in the first corridor and  pulled
himself together. However ghosts and demons may choose to decorate their death
hulks,  he thought to himself, he would lay any money you liked it wasn't with
hessian wall weave. He grasped Arthur by the arm.
    "Back the way we came," he said firmly and they started to  retrace  their
steps.
    A  moment  later they leap like startled lizards down the nearest corridor
junction as the owners of the drumming feet suddenly hove into  view  directly
in front of them.
    Hidden  behind  the  corner  they  goggled in amazement as about two dozen
overweight men and women pounded past them in track suits panting and wheezing
in a manner that would make a heart surgeon gibber.
    Ford Prefect stared after them.
    "Joggers!" he hissed, as the sound of their feet echoed away up  and  down
the network of corridors.
    "Joggers?" whispered Arthur Dent.
    "Joggers," said Ford prefect with a shrug.
    The  corridor  they were concealed in was not like the others. It was very
short, and ended at a large steel  door.  Ford  examined  it,  discovered  the
opening mechanism and pushed it wide.
    The first thing that hit their eyes was what appeared to be a coffin.
    And  the  next  four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine things that hit
their eyes were also coffins.

Chapter 23

    The vault was low ceilinged, dimly lit and gigantic. At the far end, about
three hundred yards away an archway let through  to  what  appeared  to  be  a
similar chamber, similarly occupied.
    Ford  Prefect  let out a low whistle as he stepped down on to the floor of
the vault.
    "Wild," he said.
    "What's so great about dead people?" asked Arthur, nervously stepping down
after him.
    "Dunno," said Ford, "Let's find out shall we?"
    On closer inspection the coffins seemed to be more like  sarcophagi.  They
stood  about  waist  high  and  were  constructed of what appeared to be white
marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that  only  appeared
to  be  white  marble.  The tops were semi-translucent, and through them could
dimly be  perceived  the  features  of  their  late  and  presumably  lamented
occupants.  They  were humanoid, and had clearly left the troubles of whatever
world it was they came from far behind them, but beyond that little else could
be discerned.
    Rolling slowly round the floor between the sarcophagi was  a  heavy,  oily
white  gas  which  Arthur  at first thought might be there to give the place a
little atmosphere until he discovered that  it  also  froze  his  ankles.  The
sarcophagi too were intensely cold to the touch.
    Ford  suddenly crouched down beside one of them. He pulled a corner of his
towel out of his satchel and started to rub furiously at something.
    "Look, there's a plaque on  this  one,"  he  explained  to  Arthur,  "It's
frosted over."
    He  rubbed the frost clear and examined the engraved characters. To Arthur
they looked like the footprints of a spider that  had  had  one  too  many  of
whatever it is that spiders have on a night out, but Ford instantly recognized
an early form of Galactic Eezeereed.
    "It says `Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B, Hold Seven, Telephone Sanitizer
Second Class' - and a serial number."
    "A telephone sanitizer?" said Arthur, "a dead telephone sanitizer?"
    "Best kind."
    "But what's he doing here?"
    Ford peered through the top at the figure within.
    "Not a lot," he said, and suddenly flashed one of those grins of his which
always made people think he'd been overdoing things recently and should try to
get some rest.
    He  scampered over to another sarcophagus. A moment's brisk towel work and
he announced:
    "This one's a dead hairdresser. Hoopy!"
    The next sarcophagus revealed itself to be the last resting  place  of  an
advertising  account executive; the one after that contained a second-hand car
salesman, third class.
    An inspection hatch let into the floor suddenly caught  Ford's  attention,
and  he squatted down to unfasten it, thrashing away at the clouds of freezing
gas that threatened to envelope him.
    A thought occurred to Arthur.
    "If these are just coffins," he said, "Why are they kept so cold?"
    "Or, indeed, why are they kept anyway," said  Ford  tugging  the  hatchway
open.  The gas poured down through it. "Why in fact is anyone going to all the
trouble and expense of carting five thousand dead bodies through space?"
    "Ten thousand," said Arthur, pointing at the  archway  through  which  the
next chamber was dimly visible.
    Ford stuck his head down through the floor hatchway. He looked up again.
    "Fifteen thousand," he said, "there's another lot down there."
    "Fifteen million," said a voice.
    "That's a lot," said Ford, "A lot a lot."
    "Turn  around slowly," barked the voice, "and put your hands up. Any other
move and I blast you into tiny tiny bits."
    "Hello?" said Ford, turning round slowly, putting his  hands  up  and  not
making any other move.
    "Why," said Arthur Dent, "isn't anyone ever pleased to see us?"
    Standing  silhouetted  in  the  doorway through which they had entered the
vault was the man  who  wasn't  pleased  to  see  them.  His  displeasure  was
communicated  partly  by the barking hectoring quality of his voice and partly
by the viciousness with which he waved a long silver Kill-O-Zap gun  at  them.
The  designer  of  the  gun  had clearly not been instructed to beat about the
bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has
a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing  at  the
wrong  end  that  things  are going badly for them. If that means sticking all
sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be  it.  This
is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand,
it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with."
    Ford and Arthur looked at the gun unhappily.
    The  man  with  the  gun moved from the door and circled round them. As he
came into the light they could see his black and gold  uniform  on  which  the
buttons  were  so highly polished that they shone with an intensity that would
have made an approaching motorist flash his lights in annoyance.
    He gestured at the door.
    "Out," he said. People who can supply that amount of fire power don't need
to supply verbs as well. Ford and Arthur went out,  closely  followed  by  the
wrong end of the Kill-O-Zap gun and the buttons.
    Turning  into  the  corridor  they  were  jostled  by twenty-four oncoming
joggers, now showered and changed, who swept on  past  them  into  the  vault.
Arthur turned to watch them in confusion.
    "Move!" screamed their captor.
    Arthur moved.
    Ford shrugged and moved.
    In  the  vault  the joggers went to twenty-four empty sarcophagi along the
side wall, opened them,  climbed  in,  and  fell  into  twenty-four  dreamless
sleeps.

Chapter 24

    "Er, captain ..."
    "Yes, Number One?"
    "Just heard a sort of report thingy from Number Two."
    "Oh, dear."
    High  up  in  the  bridge  of  the  ship,  the Captain stared out into the
infinite reaches of space with mild irritation. From where he reclined beneath
a wide domed bubble he could see before and above them the  vast  panorama  of
stars  through  which  they  were  moving  -  a  panorama that had thinned out
noticably during the course of the voyage. Turning and looking backwards, over
the vast two-mile bulk of the ship he could see the far denser mass  of  stars
behind  them  which  seemed  to  form  almost  a solid band. This was the view
through the Galactic centre from which they were travelling,  and  indeed  had
been  travelling  for years, at a speed that he couldn't quite remember at the
moment, but he knew it was terribly fast. It  was  something  approaching  the
speed  of  something  or  other,  or was it three times the speed of something
else? Jolly impressive anyway. He peered into the bright distance  behind  the
ship,  looking  for  something. He did this every few minutes or so, but never
found what he was looking  for.  He  didn't  let  it  worry  him  though.  The
scientist  chaps  had  been  very  insistent  that  everything was going to be
perfectly alright providing nobody panicked and everybody got on and did their
bit in an orderly fashion.
    He wasn't panicking. As far as  he  was  concerned  everything  was  going
splendidly.  He  dabbed  at  his shoulder with a large frothy sponge. It crept
back into his mind that he was feeling mildly irritated about  something.  Now
what  was  all  that  about?  A  slight cough alerted him to the fact that the
ship's first officer was still standing nearby.
    Nice chap, Number One. Not of the very brightest,  had  the  odd  spot  of
difficulty  doing  up  his shoe laces, but jolly good officer material for all
that. The Captain wasn't a man to kick a chap when he was bending over  trying
to  do  up  his  shoe  laces,  however long it took him. Not like that ghastly
Number Two, strutting about all over the place, polishing his buttons, issuing
reports  every  hour:  "Ship's  still  moving,  Captain."  "Still  on  course,
Captain."  "Oxygen  levels still being maintained, Captain." "Give it a miss,"
was the Captain's vote. Ah yes, that was the thing that  had  been  irritating
him. He peered down at Number One.
    "Yes,  Captain, he was shouting something or other about having found some
prisoners ..."
    The Captain thought about this. Seemed pretty  unlikely  to  him,  but  he
wasn't one to stand in his officers' way.
    "Well,  perhaps  that'll  keep him happy for a bit," he said, "He's always
wanted some."
    Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent trudged  onwards  up  the  ship's  apparently
endless corridors. Number Two marched behind them barking the occasional order
about  not  making  any  false moves or trying any funny stuff. They seemed to
have passed at least a mile of continuous brown hessian  wall  weave.  Finally
they reached a large steel door which slid open when Number Two shouted at it.
    They entered.
    To  the  eyes  of  Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, the most remarkable thing
about the ship's bridge was not the fifty  foot  diameter  hemispherical  dome
which  covered  it, and through which the dazzling display of stars shone down
on them: to people who have  eaten  at  the  Restaurant  at  the  End  of  the
Universe,  such  wonders  are commonplace. Nor was it the bewildering array of
instruments that crowded the long circumferential wall around them. To  Arthur
this was exactly what spaceships were traditionally supposed to look like, and
to  Ford  it  looked  thoroughly  antiquated: it confirmed his suspicions that
Disaster Area's stuntship had taken them back at least a million, if  not  two
million, years before their own time.
    No, the thing that really caught them off balance was the bath.
    The bath stood on a six foot pedestal of rough hewn blue water crystal and
was of  a baroque monstrosity not often seen outside the Maximegalon Museum of
Diseased Imaginings. An intestinal jumble of plumbing had been picked  out  in
gold  leaf  rather  than decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave; the
taps and shower attachment would have made a gargoyle jump.
    As the dominant centrepiece of a starship bridge it  was  terribly  wrong,
and  it  was  with  the  embittered air of a man who knew this that Number Two
approached it.
    "Captain, sir!" he shouted through clenched teeth - a difficult trick  but
he'd had years during which to perfect it.
    A  large genial face and a genial foam covered arm popped up above the rim
of the monstrous bath.
    "Ah, hello, Number Two," said the Captain, waving a cheery sponge, "having
a nice day?"
    Number Two snapped even further to attention than he already was.
    "I have brought you the prisoners I located in freezer bay seven, sir!" he
yapped.
    Ford and Arthur coughed in confusion.
    "Er ... hello," they said.
    The Captain beamed at them. So Number Two had really found some prisoners.
Well, good for him, thought the Captain, nice to see a chap  doing  what  he's
best at.
    "Oh,  hello  there,"  he said to them, "Excuse me not getting up, having a
quick bath. Well, jynnan tonnyx all round then.  Look  in  the  fridge  Number
one."
    "Certainly sir."
    It  is  a  curious  fact,  and  one  to  which no one knows quite how much
importance to attach, that something like 85%  of  all  known  worlds  in  the
Galaxy,  be  they  primitive  or highly advanced, have invented a drink called
jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a  thousand
or  more  variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not
the same, and vary between the Sivolvian "chinanto/mnigs"  which  is  ordinary
water  server  at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan "tzjin+
anthony-ks" which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact  the  one  common
factor  between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is
that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact
with any other worlds.
    What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any
theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the  graph,  and
yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural
linguists  go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about
it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close  to  something
of  profound  importance,  and end up becoming old structural linguists before
their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics  is
a  bitterly  divided  and  unhappy  discipline,  and  a  large  number  of its
practitioners spend too many  nights  drowning  their  problems  in  Ouisghian
Zodahs.
    Number Two stood before the Captain's bathtub trembling with frustration.
    "Don't you want to interrogate the prisoners sir?" he squealed.
    The Captain peered at him in bemusement.
    "Why on Golgafrincham should I want to do that?" he asked.
    "To get information out of them, sir! To find out why they came here!"
    "Oh  no,  no,  no," said the Captain, "I expect they just dropped in for a
quick jynnan tonnyx, don't you?"
    "But sir, they're my prisoners! I must interrogate them!"
    The Captain looked at them doubtfully.
    "Oh all right," he said, "if you must. Ask them what they want to drink."
    A hard cold gleam came into Number Two's eyes. He advanced slowly on  Ford
Prefect and Arthur Dent.
    "All  right,  you  scum," he growled, "you vermin ..." He jabbed Ford with
the Kill-O-Zap gun.
    "Steady on, Number Two," admonished the Captain gently.
    "What do you want to drink!!!" Number Two screamed.
    "Well the jynnan tonnyx sounds very nice to me," said  Ford,  "What  about
you Arthur?"
    Arthur blinked.
    "What? Oh, er, yes," he said.
    "With ice or without?" bellowed Number Two.
    "Oh, with please," said Ford.
    "Lemon??!!"
    "Yes  please,"  said  Ford, "and do you have any of those little biscuits?
You know, the cheesy ones?"
    "I'm asking the questions!!!!" howled Number Two, his  body  quaking  with
apoplectic fury.
    "Er, Number Two ..." said the Captain softly.
    "Sir?!"
    "Push  off,  would you, there's a good chap. I'm trying to have a relaxing
bath."
    Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the  Shouting  and
Killing  People  trade  as  cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your
opponent the impression  that  you  have  lost  your  glasses  or  are  having
difficulty  keeping  awake.  Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unresolved
problem.
    He advanced on the captain, his (Number Two's) mouth  a  thin  hard  line.
Again, tricky to know why this is understood as fighting behaviour. If, whilst
wandering  through  the  jungle  of  Traal, you were suddenly to come upon the
fabled Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, you would have reason to be grateful if  its
mouth  was  a  thin  hard line rather than, as it usually is, a gaping mass of
slavering fangs.
    "May I remind you sir," hissed Number Two at the Captain, "that  you  have
now  been  in  that  bath  for  over three years?!" This final shot delivered,
Number Two spun on his heel and stalked off to a corner  to  practise  darting
eye movements in the mirror.
    The Captain squirmed in his bath. He gave Ford Prefect a lame smile.
    "Well you need to relax a lot in a job like mine," he said.
    Ford  slowly  lowered  his  hands. It provoked no reaction. Arthur lowered
his.
    Treading very slowly and carefully, Ford moved over to the bath  pedestal.
He patted it.
    "Nice," he lied.
    He wondered if it was safe to grin. Very slowly and carefully, he grinned.
It was safe.
    "Er ..." he said to the Captain.
    "Yes?" said the Captain.
    "I  wonder,"  said  Ford,  "could  I  ask you actually what your job is in
fact?"
    A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He span round.
    It was the first officer.
    "Your drinks," he said.
    "Ah, thank you," said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur
sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very  like  a  whisky  and
soda.
    "I  mean,  I  couldn't  help noticing," said Ford, also taking a sip, "the
bodies. In the hold."
    "Bodies?" said the Captain in surprise.
    Ford paused and thought to himself. Never take anything  for  granted,  he
thought.  Could  it  be that the Captain doesn't know he's got fifteen million
dead bodies on his ship?
    The Captain was nodding cheerfully at him. He also appeared to be  playing
with a rubber duck.
    Ford  looked around. Number Two was staring at him in the mirror, but only
for an instant: his eyes were constantly on the move. The  first  officer  was
just standing there holding the drinks tray and smiling benignly.
    "Bodies?" said the Captain again.
    Ford licked his lips.
    "Yes,"   he  said,  "All  those  dead  telephone  sanitizers  and  account
executives, you know, down in the hold."
    The Captain stared at him. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.
    "Oh they're not dead," he said, "Good Lord no, no they're frozen.  They're
going to be revived."
    Ford did something he very rarely did. He blinked.
    Arthur seemed to come out of a trance.
    "You mean you've got a hold full of frozen hairdressers?" he said.
    "Oh  yes,"  said  the  Captain,  "Millions of them. Hairdressers, tired TV
producers, insurance salesmen, personnel  officers,  security  guards,  public
relations  executives,  management  consultants, you name them. We're going to
colonize another planet."
    Ford wobbled very slightly.
    "Exciting isn't it?" said the Captain.
    "What, with that lot?" said Arthur.
    "Ah, now don't misunderstand me," said the Captain, "we're just one of the
ships in the Ark Fleet. We're the `B' Ark you see. Sorry, could I just ask you
to run a bit more hot water for me?"
    Arthur obliged, and a cascade of pink  frothy  water  swirled  around  the
bath. The Captain let out a sigh of pleasure.
    "Thank  you  so  much my dear fellow. Do help yourselves to more drinks of
course."
    Ford tossed down his drink, took the bottle from the first officer's  tray
and refilled his glass to the top.
    "What," he said, "is a `B' Ark?"
    "This  is,"  said the Captain, and swished the foamy water around joyfully
with the duck.
    "Yes," said Ford, "but ..."
    "Well what happened you see was," said the Captain, "our planet, the world
from which we have come, was, so to speak, doomed."
    "Doomed?"
    "Oh yes. So what everyone thought was, let's  pack  the  whole  population
into some giant spaceships and go and settle on another planet."
    Having  told  this  much  of  his  story, he settled back with a satisfied
grunt.
    "You mean a less doomed one?" promoted Arthur.
    "What did you say dear fellow?"
    "A less doomed planet. You were going to settle on."
    "Are going to settle on, yes. So it was decided to build three ships,  you
see, three Arks in Space, and ... I'm not boring you am I?"
    "No, no," said Ford firmly, "it's fascinating."
    "You  know  it's delightful," reflected the Captain, "to have someone else
to talk to for a change."
    Number Two's eyes darted feverishly about the room again and then  settled
back  on  the  mirror,  like  a  pair  of  flies briefly distracted from their
favourite prey of months old meat.
    "Trouble with a long journey like this," continued the Captain,  "is  that
you  end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because
half the time you know what you're going to say next."
    "Only half the time?" asked Arthur in surprise.
    The Captain thought for a moment.
    "Yes, about half I'd say. Anyway - where's the soap?" He fished around and
found it.
    "Yes, so anyway," he resumed, "the idea was that into the first ship,  the
`A'  ship,  would  go  all  the  brilliant  leaders, the scientists, the great
artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or `C'  ship,  would
go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and
then into the `B' ship - that's us - would go everyone else, the middlemen you
see."
    He smiled happily at them.
    "And  we  were  sent off first," he concluded, and hummed a little bathing
tune.
    The little bathing tune, which had been composed for him  by  one  of  his
world's  most exciting and prolific jingle writer (who was currently asleep in
hold thirty-six some nine  hundred  yards  behind  them)  covered  what  would
otherwise  have  been  an  awkward moment of silence. Ford and Arthur shuffled
their feet and furiously avoided each other's eyes.
    "Er ..." said Arthur after a moment, "what exactly was it that  was  wrong
with your planet then?"
    "Oh, it was doomed, as I said," said the Captain, "Apparently it was going
to crash into the sun or something. Or maybe it was that the moon was going to
crash  into us. Something of the kind. Absolutely terrifying prospect whatever
it was."
    "Oh," said the first officer suddenly, "I thought it was that  the  planet
was  going  to  be  invaded  by  a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees.
Wasn't that it?"
    Number Two span around, eyes ablaze with a cold hard light that only comes
with the amount of practise he was prepared to put in.
    "That's not what I was told!" he hissed, "My commanding  officer  told  me
that  the  entire  planet was in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous
mutant star goat!"
    "Oh really ..." said Ford Prefect.
    "Yes! A monstrous creature from the pit of hell with  scything  teeth  ten
thousand  miles  long,  breath  that  would boil oceans, claws that could tear
continents from their roots,  a  thousand  eyes  that  burned  like  the  sun,
slavering  jaws  a  million miles across, a monster such as you have never ...
never ... ever ..."
    "And they made sure they sent  you  lot  off  first  did  they?"  inquired
Arthur.
    "Oh  yes,"  said  the Captain, "well everyone said, very nicely I thought,
that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a
planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where  the  phones  were
clean."
    "Oh  yes,"  agreed  Ford, "I can see that would be very important. And the
other ships, er ... they followed on after you did they?"
    For a moment the Captain did not answer. He twisted round in his bath  and
gazed  backwards  over  the  huge bulk of the ship towards the bright galactic
centre. He squinted into the inconceivable distance.
    "Ah. Well it's funny you should say that," he said and allowed  himself  a
slight  frown  at  Ford  Prefect, "because curiously enough we haven't heard a
peep out of them since we left five years ago ... but they must be  behind  us
somewhere."
    He peered off into the distance again.
    Ford peered with him and gave a thoughtful frown.
    "Unless of course," he said softly, "they were eaten by the goat ..."
    "Ah  yes  ..."  said the Captain with a slight hesitancy creeping into his
voice, "the goat ..." His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments
and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently  at  him.  He
stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. He glanced at his first
and  second officers, but they seemed lost in their own thoughts for a moment.
He glanced at Ford Prefect who raised his eyebrows at him.
    "It's a funny thing you know," said the Captain at last, "but now  that  I
actually  come to tell the story to someone else ... I mean does it strike you
as odd Number Two?"
    "Errrrrrrrrrrr ..." said Number Two.
    "Well," said Ford, "I can see that you've got a lot of things you're going
to talk about, so, thanks for the drinks, and if you could sort of drop us off
at the nearest convenient planet ..."
    "Ah, well that's a little difficult you see," said the  Captain,  "because
our  trajectory thingy was preset before we left Golgafrincham, I think partly
because I'm not very good with figures ..."
    "You mean we're stuck here on this ship?" exclaimed Ford  suddenly  losing
patience  with  the  whole  charade,  "When  are you meant to be reaching this
planet you're meant to be colonizing?"
    "Oh, we're nearly there I think," said the Captain, "any second now.  It's
probably time I was getting out of this bath in fact. Oh, I don't know though,
why stop just when I'm enjoying it?"
    "So we're actually going to land in a minute?"
    "Well not so much land, in fact, not actually land as such, no ... er ..."
    "What are you talking about?" said Ford sharply.
    "Well,"  said the Captain, picking his way through the words carefully, "I
think as far as I can remember we were programmed to crash on it."
    "Crash?" shouted Ford and Arthur.
    "Er, yes," said the Captain, "yes, it's all part  of  the  plan  I  think.
There  was  a  terribly good reason for it which I can't quite remember at the
moment. It was something to with ... er ..."
    Ford exploded.
    "You're a load of useless bloody loonies!" he shouted.
    "Ah yes, that was it," beamed the Captain, "that was the reason."

Chapter 25

    The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet  of
Golgafrincham:  It is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in
legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood  of  those  who  sought  in
times  gone  by  to  conquer  her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of
sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle
over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musty lichens beneath; a
land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly  amongst  those
who  taste  the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts amongst those
who have learnt to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land
also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body  and  of  the  spirit.
This was its history.
    And  in  all  this  ancient  and  mysterious  history, the most mysterious
figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling Poets of  Arium.
These  Circling  Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would
lie in wait for small bands of unwary travellers, circle round them, and throw
rocks at them.
    And when the travellers cried out, saying why didn't they go away and  get
on  with  writing  some  poems instead of pestering people with all this rock+
throwing business, they would suddenly stop, and then break into  one  of  the
seven hundred and ninety-four great Song Cycles of Vassilian. These songs were
all  of extraordinary beauty, and even more extraordinary length, and all fell
into exactly the same pattern.
    The first part of each song would tell how there once went forth from  the
City  of Vassilian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes,
who are of course brave, noble and  wise,  travel  widely  in  distant  lands,
fought  giant  ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and
rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before  finally  announcing
that  they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore
accomplished.
    The second, and much longer, part of each song  would  then  tell  of  all
their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back.
    All this lay in the planet's remote past. It was, however, a descendant of
one of these eccentric poets who invented the spurious tales of impending doom
which  enabled  the  people  of  Golgafrincham  to rid themselves of an entire
useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at  home
and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by
a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

Chapter 26

    That  night  the  ship  crash-landed on to an utterly insignificant little
green-blue planet which circled a small unregarded yellow sun in the uncharted
backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy.
    In the hours preceding the crash Ford Prefect had fought furiously but  in
vain  to  unlock the controls of the ship from their pre-ordained flight path.
It had quickly become apparent to him that the ship  had  been  programmed  to
convey  its  payload  safely, in uncomfortably, to its new home but to cripple
itself beyond repair in the process.
    Its screaming, blazing descent through the atmosphere  had  stripped  away
most  of  its  superstructure  and  outer  shielding, and its final inglorious
bellyflop into a murky swamp had left its crew only a few  hours  of  darkness
during  which to revive and offload its deep-frozen and unwanted cargo for the
ship began to settle almost at once, slowly upending its gigantic bulk in  the
stagnant  slime.  Once  or  twice  during the night it was starkly silhouetted
against the sky as burning meteors - the detritus of  its  descent  -  flashed
across the sky.
    In  the  grey pre-dawn light it let out an obscene roaring gurgle and sank
for ever into the stinking depths.
    When the sun came up that morning it shed its thin  watery  light  over  a
vast  area  heaving  with  wailing  hairdressers, public relations executives,
opinion pollsters and the rest, all clawing their way desperately to dry land.
    A less strong minded sun would  probably  have  gone  straight  back  down
again, but it continued to climb its way through the sky and after a while the
influence  of  its  warming  rays  began  to have some restoring effect on the
feebly struggling creatures.
    Countless numbers had, unsurprisingly, been  lost  to  the  swamp  in  the
night,  and  millions  more had been sucked down with the ship, but those that
survived still numbered hundreds of thousands and as  the  day  wore  on  they
crawled  out  over  the surrounding countryside, each looking for a few square
feet of solid ground on which to collapse and  recover  from  their  nightmare
ordeal.
    Two figures moved further afield.
    From  a nearby hillside Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent watched the horror of
which they could not feel a part.
    "Filthy dirty trick to pull," muttered Arthur.
    Ford scraped a stick along the ground and shrugged.
    "An imaginative solution to a problem I'd have thought," he said.
    "Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?"  said
Arthur.
    Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh.
    "Forty-two!"  he  said  with  a  malicious  grin, "No, doesn't work. Never
mind."
    Arthur looked at him as if he'd gone mad and, seeing nothing  to  indicate
the  contrary,  realized  that it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that
this had in fact happened.
    "What do you think will happen to them all?" he said after a while.
    "In an infinite Universe anything can happen," said Ford, "Even  survival.
Strange but true."
    A  curious  look  came into his eyes as they passed over the landscape and
then settles again on the scene of misery below them.
    "I think they'll manage for a while," he said.
    Arthur looked up sharply.
    "Why do you say that?" he said.
    Ford shrugged.
    "Just a hunch," he said, and refused to be drawn to any further questions.
    "Look," he said suddenly.
    Arthur followed his pointing finger. Down amongst the sprawling  masses  a
figure  was moving - or perhaps lurching would be a more accurate description.
He appeared to be carrying something on  his  shoulder.  As  he  lurched  from
prostrate  form to prostrate form he seemed to wave whatever the something was
at them in a drunken fashion. After a  while  he  gave  up  the  struggle  and
collapsed in a heap.
    Arthur had no idea what this was meant to mean to him.
    "Movie camera," said Ford. "Recording the historic movement."
    "Well,  I  don't know about you," said Ford again after a moment, "but I'm
off."
    He sat a while in silence.
    After a while this seemed to require comment.
    "Er, when you say you're off, what do you mean exactly?" said Arthur.
    "Good question," said Ford, "I'm getting total silence."
    Looking over his shoulder Arthur saw that he was twiddling with knobs on a
small box. Ford had already introduced this box as  a  Sub-Etha  Sens-O-Matic,
but  Arthur had merely nodded absently and not pursued the matter. In his mind
the Universe still divided into two parts - the Earth,  and  everything  else.
The Earth having been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass meant
that  this view of things was a little lopsided, but Arthur tended to cling to
that lopsidedness as being his last remaining contact with his home.  Sub-Etha
Sens-O-Matics belonged firmly in the "everything else" category.
    "Not a sausage," said Ford, shaking the thing.
    Sausage, thought Arthur to himself as he gazed listlessly at the primitive
world about him, what I wouldn't give for a good Earth sausage.
    "Would  you  believe,"  said  Ford  in  exasperation,  "that  there are no
transmissions of any kind within light years of this benighted  tip?  Are  you
listening to me?"
    "What?" said Arthur.
    "We're in trouble," said Ford.
    "Oh," said Arthur. This sounded like month-old news to him.
    "Until  we  pick  up anything on this machine," said Ford, "our chances of
getting off this planet are zero. It may be some freak standing wave effect in
the planet's magnetic field - in which case we just  travel  round  and  round
till we find a clear reception area. Coming?"
    He picked up his gear and strode off.
    Arthur  looked  down the hill. The man with the movie camera had struggled
back up to his feet just in time to film one of his colleagues collapsing.
    Arthur picked a blade of grass and strode off after Ford.

Chapter 27

    "I trust you had a pleasant meal?" said Zarniwoop to Zaphod  and  Trillian
as  they  rematerialized  on  the bridge of the starship Heart of Gold and lay
panting on the floor.
    Zaphod opened some eyes and glowered at him.
    "You," he spat. He staggered to his feet and stomped off to find  a  chair
to slump into. He found one and slumped into it.
    "I  have  programmed  the  computer  with  the  Improbability  Coordinates
pertinent to our journey," said Zarniwoop, "we will arrive there very shortly.
Meanwhile, why don't you relax and prepare yourself for the meeting?"
    Zaphod said nothing. He got up again and marched over to a  small  cabinet
from which he pulled a bottle of old Janx spirit. He took a long pull at it.
    "And  when  this  is all done," said Zaphod savagely, "it's done, alright?
I'm free to go and do what the hell I like and lie on beaches and stuff?"
    "It depends what transpires from the meeting," said Zarniwoop.
    "Zaphod, who is this man?" said Trillian shakily, wobbling  to  her  feet,
"What's he doing here? Why's he on our ship?"
    "He's  a  very  stupid  man,"  said Zaphod, "who wants to meet the man who
rules the Universe."
    "Ah," said Trillian taking the bottle from Zaphod and helping herself,  "a
social climber."

Chapter 28

    The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one
of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do
it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
    To  summarize: it is a well known fact, that those people who most want to
rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do  it.  To  summarize  the
summary:  anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on
no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the  summary:
people are a problem.
    And  so this is the situation we find: a succession of Galactic Presidents
who so much enjoy the fun and palaver of being in power that they very  rarely
notice that they're not.
    And somewhere in the shadows behind them - who?
    Who can possibly rule if no one who wants to do it can be allowed to?

Chapter 29

    On  a small obscure world somewhere in the middle of nowhere in particular
- nowhere, that is, that could ever be found, since it is protected by a  vast
field  of  unprobability  to which only six men in this galaxy have a key - it
was raining.
    It was bucketing down, and had been for hours. It beat the top of the  sea
into a mist, it pounded the trees, it churned and slopped a stretch of scrubby
land near the sea into a mudbath.
    The  rain pelted and danced on the corrugated iron roof of the small shack
that stood in the middle of this patch of scrubby  land.  It  obliterated  the
small  rough  pathway that led from the shack down to the seashore and smashed
apart the neat piles of interesting shells which had been placed there.
    The noise of the rain on the roof of the shack was deafening  within,  but
went largely unnoticed by its occupant, whose attention was otherwise engaged.
    He  was  a tall shambling man with rough straw-coloured hair that was damp
from the leaking roof. His clothes were shabby, his back was hunched, and  his
eyes, though open, seemed closed.
    In his shack was an old beaten-up armchair, an old scratched table, an old
mattress, some cushions and a stove that was small but warm.
    There  was  also  an  old  and  slightly  weatherbeaten  cat, and this was
currently the focus of the man's attention. He bent his  shambling  form  over
it.
    "Pussy,  pussy, pussy," he said, "coochicoochicoochicoo ... pussy want his
fish? Nice piece of fish ... pussy want it?"
    The cat seemed undecided on the matter. It pawed rather condescendingly at
the piece of fish the man was holding out, and then got distracted by a  piece
of dust on the floor.
    "Pussy not eat his fish, pussy get thin and waste away, I think," said the
man. Doubt crept into his voice.
    "I imagine this is what will happen," he said, "but how can I tell?"
    He proffered the fish again.
    "Pussy think," he said, "eat fish or not eat fish. I think it is better if
I don't get involved." He sighed.
    "I  think  fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to
judge?"
    He left the fish on the floor for the cat, and retired to his seat.
    "Ah, I seem to see you eating it," he said at last, as the  cat  exhausted
the  entertainment  possibilities  of  the speck of dust and pounced on to the
fish.
    "I like it when I see you eat the fish," said the man, "because in my mind
you will waste away if you don't."
    He picked up from the table a piece of paper and the stub of a pencil.  He
held  one  in  one  hand and the other in the other, and experimented with the
different ways of bringing them together. He tried holding  the  pencil  under
the  paper, then over the paper, then next to the paper. He tried wrapping the
paper round the pencil, he tried rubbing the stubby end of the pencil  against
the  paper  and  then he tried rubbing the sharp end of the pencil against the
paper. It made a mark, and he was delighted with  the  discovery,  as  he  was
every  day.  He  picked  up  another piece of paper from the table. This had a
crossword on it. He studied it briefly and filled in a couple of clues  before
losing interest.
    He  tried sitting on one of his hands and was intrigued by the feel of the
bones of his hip.
    "Fish come from far away," he said, "or so I'm told. Or so I  imagine  I'm
told.  When  the  men come, or when in my mind the men come in their six black
ships, do they come in your mind too? What do you see pussy?"
    He looked at the cat, which was more concerned with getting the fish  down
as rapidly as possible than it was with these speculations.
    "And  when  I  hear  their questions, do you hear questions? What do their
voices mean to you? Perhaps you just think they're singing songs to  you."  He
reflected on this, and saw the flaw in the supposition.
    "Perhaps  they  are  singing  songs  to  you,"  he said, "and I just think
they're asking me questions."
    He paused again. Sometimes he would pause for days, just to  see  what  it
was like.
    "Do  you think they came today?" he said, "I do. There's mud on the floor,
cigarettes and whisky on the table, fish on a plate for you and  a  memory  of
them  in  my mind. Hardly conclusive evidence I know, but then all evidence is
circumstantial. And look what else they've left me."
    He reached over to the table and pulled some things off it.
    "Crosswords, dictionaries, and a calculator."
    He played with the calculator for an hour, whilst the cat  went  to  sleep
and  the  rain  outside  continued  to  pour. Eventually he put the calculator
aside.
    "I think I must be right in thinking they ask me questions," he said,  "To
come  all  that  way  and  leave all these things for the privilege of singing
songs to you would be very strange behaviour. Or so it seems to  me.  Who  can
tell, who can tell."
    From  the  table he picked up a cigarette and lit it with a spill from the
stove. He inhaled deeply and sat back.
    "I think I saw another ship in the sky today," he said  at  last.  "A  big
white  one.  I've never seen a big white one, just the six black ones. And the
six green ones. And the others who say they come from so far away. Never a big
white one. Perhaps six small black ones can look like one  big  white  one  at
certain  times.  Perhaps  I would like a glass of whisky. Yes, that seems more
likely."
    He stood up and found a glass that was lying on the floor by the mattress.
He poured in a measure from his whisky bottle. He sat again.
    "Perhaps some other people are coming to see me," he said.
    A hundred yards away, pelted by the torrential  rain,  lay  the  Heart  of
Gold.
    Its  hatchway  opened, and three figures emerged, huddling into themselves
to keep the rain off their faces.
    "In there?" shouted Trillian above the noise of the rain.
    "Yes," said Zarniwoop.
    "That shack?"
    "Yes."
    "Weird," said Zaphod.
    "But it's in the middle of nowhere," said Trillian, "we must have come  to
the wrong place. You can't rule the Universe from a shack."
    They  hurried  through  the pouring rain, and arrived, wet through, at the
door. They knocked. They shivered.
    The door opened.
    "Hello?" said the man.
    "Ah, excuse me," said Zarniwoop, "I have reason to believe ..."
    "Do you rule the Universe?" said Zaphod.
    The man smiled at him.
    "I try not to," he said, "Are you wet?"
    Zaphod looked at him in astonishment.
    "Wet?" he cried, "Doesn't it look as if we're wet?"
    "That's how it looks to me," said the man, "but  how  you  feel  about  it
might  be  an  altogether  different matter. If you feel warmth makes you dry,
you'd better come in."
    They went in.
    They looked  around  the  tiny  shack,  Zarniwoop  with  slight  distaste,
Trillian with interest, Zaphod with delight.
    "Hey, er ..." said Zaphod, "what's your name?"
    The man looked at them doubtfully.
    "I  don't  know. Why, do you think I should have one? It seems very odd to
give a bundle of vague sensory perceptions a name."
    He invited Trillian to sit in the chair. He sat on the edge of the  chair,
Zarniwoop leaned stiffly against the table and Zaphod lay on the mattress.
    "Wowee!" said Zaphod, "the seat of power!" He tickled the cat.
    "Listen," said Zarniwoop, "I must ask you some questions."
    "Alright," said the man kindly, "you can sing to my cat if you like."
    "Would he like that?" asked Zaphod.
    "You'd better ask him," said the man.
    "Does he talk?" said Zaphod.
    "I  have  no  memory  of  him  talking,"  said  the  man,  "but  I am very
unreliable."
    Zarniwoop pulled some notes out of a pocket.
    "Now," he said, "you do rule the Universe, do you?"
    "How can I tell?" said the man.
    Zarniwoop ticked off a note on the paper.
    "How long have you been doing this?"
    "Ah," said the man, "this is a question about the past is it?"
    Zarniwoop looked at him in puzzlement. This wasn't  exactly  what  he  had
been expecting.
    "Yes," he said.
    "How can I tell," said the man, "that the past isn't a fiction designed to
account  for  the  discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my
state of mind?"
    Zarniwoop stared at him. The steam began to rise from his sodden clothes.
    "So you answer all questions like this?" he said.
    The man answered quickly.
    "I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say  things.
More I cannot say."
    Zaphod laughed happily.
    "I'll drink to that," he said and pulled out the bottle of Janx spirit. He
leaped up and handed the bottle to the ruler of the Universe, who took it with
pleasure.
    "Good on you, great ruler," he said, "tell it like it is."
    "No,  listen to me," said Zarniwoop, "people come to you do they? In ships
..."
    "I think so," said the man. He handed the bottle to Trillian.
    "And they ask you," said Zarniwoop, "to take  decisions  for  them?  About
people's  lives,  about  worlds, about economies, about wars, about everything
going on out there in the Universe?"
    "Out there?" said the man, "out where?"
    "Out there!" said Zarniwoop pointing at the door.
    "How can you tell there's anything out there," said the man politely, "the
door's closed."
    The rain continued to pound the roof. Inside the shack it was warm.
    "But you know there's a whole Universe out there!" cried  Zarniwoop.  "You
can't dodge your responsibilities by saying they don't exist!"
    The  ruler  of  the  Universe  thought  for  a long while whilst Zarniwoop
quivered with anger.
    "You're very sure of your facts," he said at last, "I couldn't  trust  the
thinking of a man who takes the Universe - if there is one - for granted."
    Zarniwoop still quivered, but was silent.
    "I only decide about my Universe," continued the man quietly. "My Universe
is my eyes and my ears. Anything else is hearsay."
    "But don't you believe in anything?"
    The man shrugged and picked up his cat.
    "I don't understand what you mean," he said.
    "You  don't understand that what you decide in this shack of yours affects
the lives and fates of millions of people? This is all monstrously wrong!"
    "I don't know. I've never met all these people you speak of. And  neither,
I  suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you
know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if  they  exist.  They
have their own Universes of their own eyes and ears."
    Trillian said:
    "I think I'm just popping outside for a moment."
    She left and walked into the rain.
    "Do you believe other people exist?" insisted Zarniwoop.
    "I have no opinion. How can I say?"
    "I'd better see what's up with Trillian," said Zaphod and slipped out.
    Outside, he said to her:
    "I think the Universe is in pretty good hands, yeah?"
    "Very good," said Trillian. They walked off into the rain.
    Inside, Zarniwoop continued.
    "But don't you understand that people live or die on your word?"
    The  ruler  of  the Universe waited for as long as he could. When he heard
the faint sound of the ship's engines starting he spoke to cover it.
    "It's nothing to do with me," he said, "I am not involved with people. The
Lord knows I am not a cruel man."
    "Ah!" barked Zarniwoop, "you say `The Lord'. You believe in something!"
    "My cat," said the man benignly, picking it up and stroking  it,  "I  call
him The Lord. I am kind to him."
    "Alright,"  said  Zarniwoop,  pressing home his point, "How do you know he
exists? How do you know he knows you to be kind, or enjoys what he  thinks  of
as your kindness?"
    "I  don't,"  said the man with a smile, "I have no idea. It merely pleases
me to behave in a certain way to what appears to be a cat. Do you  behave  any
differently? Please, I think I am tired."
    Zarniwoop heaved a thoroughly dissatisfied sigh and looked about.
    "Where are the other two?" he said suddenly.
    "What  other  two?" said the ruler of the Universe, settling back into his
chair and refilling his whisky glass.
    "Beeblebrox and the girl! The two who were here!"
    "I remember no one. The past is a fiction to account for ..."
    "Stuff it," snapped Zarniwoop and ran out into  the  rain.  There  was  no
ship. The rain continued to churn the mud. There was no sign to show where the
ship  had been. He hollered into the rain. He turned and ran back to the shack
and found it locked.
    The ruler of the Universe dozed lightly in his chair.  After  a  while  he
played  with  the  pencil  and  the  paper  again  and  was  delighted when he
discovered how to make a mark with  the  one  on  the  other.  Various  noises
continued  outside,  but he didn't know whether they were real or not. He then
talked to his table for a week to see how it would react.

Chapter 30

    The stars came out that night, dazzling in their brilliance  and  clarity.
Ford  and  Arthur had walked more miles than they had any means of judging and
finally stopped to rest. The night was cool and balmy, the air pure, the  Sub+
Etha Sens.O.Matic totally silent.
    A  wonderful  stillness hung over the world, a magical calm which combined
with the soft fragrances of the woods, the quiet chatter of  insects  and  the
brilliant  light  of  the  stars  to  soothe  their jangled spirits. Even Ford
Prefect, who had seen more worlds than he could count on a long afternoon, was
moved to wonder if this was the most beautiful he had ever seen. All that  day
they  had  passed through rolling green hills and valleys, richly covered with
grasses, wild scented flowers and tall  thickly  leaved  trees,  the  sun  had
warmed  them,  light  breezes had kept them cool, and Ford Prefect had checked
his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic  at  less  and  less  frequent  intervals,  and  had
exhibited  less  and less annoyance at its continued silence. He was beginning
to think he liked it here.
    Cool though the night air was they slept soundly and  comfortably  in  the
open  and awoke a few hours later with the light dewfall feeling refreshed but
hungry. Ford had stuffed some small rolls into his satchel  at  Milliways  and
they breakfasted off those before moving on.
    So  far they had wandered purely at random, but now they struck out firmly
eastwards, feeling that if they were going to explore this world  they  should
have some clear idea of where they had come from and where they were going.
    Shortly  before  noon  they had their first indication that the world they
had landed on was not an uninhabited one: a half  glimpsed  face  amongst  the
trees,  watching  them.  It  vanished  at the moment they both saw it, but the
image they were both left with was of a humanoid creature, curious to see them
but not alarmed. Half an hour later they glimpsed another such face,  and  ten
minutes after that another.
    A minute later they stumbled into a wide clearing and stopped short.
    Before them in the middle of the clearing stood a group of about two dozen
men and  women. They stood still and quiet facing Ford and Arthur. Around some
of the women huddled some small children and behind the group was a ramshackle
array of small dwellings made of mud and branches.
    Ford and Arthur held their breath.
    The tallest of the men stood a  little  over  five  feet  high,  they  all
stooped  forward  slightly,  had  longish arms and lowish foreheads, and clear
bright eyes with which they stared intently at the strangers.
    Seeing that they carried no weapons and made no move  towards  them,  Ford
and Arthur relaxed slightly.
    For  a  while  the  two  groups  simply stared at each other, neither side
making any move. The natives seemed puzzled by the intruders, and whilst  they
showed  no  sign  of  aggression  they  were  quite  clearly  not  issuing any
invitations.
    For a full two minutes nothing continued to happen.
    After two minutes Ford decided it was time something happened.
    "Hello," he said.
    The women drew their children slightly closer to them.
    The men made hardly any discernible move and yet their  whole  disposition
made  it  clear that the greeting was not welcome - it was not resented in any
great degree, it was just not welcome.
    One of the men, who had been standing slightly forward of the rest of  the
group  and  who  might  therefore have been their leader, stepped forward. His
face was quiet and calm, almost serene.
    "Ugghhhuuggghhhrrrr uh uh ruh uurgh," he said quietly.
    This caught Arthur by surprise. He had  grown  so  used  to  receiving  an
instantaneous and unconscious translation of everything he heard via the Babel
Fish  lodged  in his ear that he had ceased to be aware of it, and he was only
reminded of its presence now by the fact that it didn't seem  to  be  working.
Vague  shadows of meaning had flickered at the back of his mind, but there was
nothing he could get any firm grasp on. He guessed, correctly as  it  happens,
that  these  people  had  as  yet evolved no more than the barest rudiments of
language, and that the Babel Fish was therefore powerless to help. He  glanced
at Ford, who was infinitely more experienced in these matters.
    "I  think,"  said  Ford out of the corner of his mouth, "he's asking us if
we'd mind walking on round the edge of the village."
    A moment later, a gesture from the man-creature seemed to confirm this.
    "Ruurgggghhhh urrgggh; urgh urgh (uh ruh)  rruurruuh  ug,"  continued  the
man-creature.
    "The  general  gist," said Ford, "as far as I can make out, is that we are
welcome to continue our journey in any way we like, but if we would walk round
his village rather than through it it would make them all very happy."
    "So what do we do?"
    "I think we make them happy," said Ford.
    Slowly and watchfully they walked round the  perimeter  of  the  clearing.
This  seemed  to  go  down  very  well with the natives who bowed to them very
slightly and then went about their business.
    Ford and Arthur continued their journey through the wood.  A  few  hundred
yards past the clearing they suddenly came upon a small pile of fruit lying in
their path - berries that looked remarkably like raspberries and blackberries,
and pulpy, green skinned fruit that looked remarkably like pears.
    So  far  they  had  steered  clear of the fruit and berries they had seen,
though the trees and bushed were laden with them.
    "Look at it this way," Ford  Prefect  had  said,  "fruit  and  berries  on
strange  planets  either make you live or make you die. Therefore the point at
which to start toying with them is when you're going to die if you don't. That
way you stay ahead. The secret of healthy hitch-hiking is to eat junk food."
    They looked at the pile that lay in their path with suspicion.  It  looked
so good it made them almost dizzy with hunger.
    "Look at it this way," said Ford, "er ..."
    "Yes?" said Arthur.
    "I'm  trying  to think of a way of looking at it which means we get to eat
it," said Ford.
    The leaf-dappled sun gleamed on the pulp skins of the things which  looked
like  pears.  The  things  which looked like raspberries and strawberries were
fatter and riper than any Arthur had ever seen, even in ice cream commercials.
    "Why don't we eat them and think about it afterwards?" he said.
    "Maybe that's what they want us to do."
    "Alright, look at it this way ..."
    "Sounds good so far."
    "It's there for us to eat. Either it's good or it's bad, either they  want
to feed us or to poison us. If it's poisonous and we don't eat it they'll just
attack us some other way. If we don't eat, we lose out either way."
    "I like the way you're thinking," said Ford, "Now eat one."
    Hesitantly, Arthur picked up one of those things that looked like pears.
    "I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story," said Ford.
    "Eh?"
    "Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?"
    "Yes of course I do."
    "Your  God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do
what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise,  they  eat
it  and  he  leaps  out from behind a bush shouting `Gotcha'. It wouldn't have
made any difference if they hadn't eaten it."
    "Why not?"
    "Because if you're dealing with somebody who has  the  sort  of  mentality
which  likes  leaving  hats  on  the  pavement with bricks under them you know
perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end."
    "What are you talking about?"
    "Never mind, eat the fruit."
    "You know, this place almost looks like the Garden of Eden."
    "Eat the fruit."
    "Sounds quite like it too."
    Arthur took a bite from the thing which looked like a pear.
    "It's a pear," he said.
    A few moments later, when they had eaten  the  lot,  Ford  Prefect  turned
round and called out.
    "Thank you. Thank you very much," he called, "you're very kind."
    They went on their way.
    For  the  next  fifty miles of their journey eastward they kept on finding
the occasional gift of fruit lying in their path,  and  though  they  once  or
twice  had  a  quick  glimpse  of a native mancreature amongst the trees, they
never again made direct contact. They decided they  rather  liked  a  race  of
people who made it clear that they were grateful simply to be left alone.
    The  fruit  and  berries stopped after fifty miles, because that was where
the sea started.
    Having no pressing calls on their time they built a raft and  crossed  the
sea.  It  was  reasonably  calm,  only  about  sixty miles wide and they had a
reasonably pleasant crossing, landing in  a  country  that  was  at  least  as
beautiful as the one they had left.
    Life  was,  in short, ridiculously easy and for a while at least they were
able to cope with the problems of aimlessness and  isolation  by  deciding  to
ignore  them.  When  the  craving for company became too great they would know
where to find it, but for  the  moment  they  were  happy  to  feel  that  the
Golgafrinchans were hundreds of miles behind them.
    Nevertheless,  Ford  Prefect  began  to use his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic more
often again. Only once did he pick up a signal, but that was so faint and from
such enormous distance that it depressed him more than the  silence  that  had
otherwise continued unbroken.
    On  a  whim they turned northwards. After weeks of travelling they came to
another sea, built another raft and crossed it. This time it was harder going,
the climate was getting colder. Arthur suspected a streak of masochism in Ford
Prefect - the increasing difficulty of the journey seemed to give him a  sense
of purpose that was otherwise lacking. He strode onwards relentlessly.
    Their  journey  northwards  brought them into steep mountainous terrain of
breathtaking sweep and beauty. The vast, jagged, snow covered  peaks  ravished
their senses. The cold began to bite into their bones.
    They  wrapped  themselves  in  animal  skins  and  furs which Ford Prefect
acquired by a technique he once learned from  a  couple  of  ex-Pralite  monks
running a Mind-Surfing resort in the Hills of Hunian.
    The galaxy is littered with ex-Pralite monks, all on the make, because the
mental  control  techniques  the  Order  have  evolved as a form of devotional
discipline are, frankly, sensational -  and  extraordinary  numbers  of  monks
leave  the  Order  just after they have finished their devotional training and
just before they take their final vows to stay locked in small metal boxes for
the rest of their lives.
    Ford's technique seemed to consist mainly of standing still  for  a  while
and smiling.
    After  a  while  an animal - a deer perhaps - would appear from out of the
trees and watch him cautiously. Ford would continue to smile at it,  his  eyes
would  soften  and  shine,  and  he would seem to radiate a deep and universal
love, a love which reached  out  to  embrace  all  of  creation.  A  wonderful
quietness  would  descend on the surrounding countryside, peaceful and serene,
emanating from this transfigured man. Slowly the deer would approach, step  by
step, until it was almost nuzzling him, whereupon Ford Prefect would reach out
to it and break its neck.
    "Pheromone  control,"  he  said  it  was,  "you  just  have to know how to
generate the right smell."

Chapter 31

    A few days after landing in this mountainous land  they  hit  a  coastline
which  swept  diagonally  before them from the south-west to the north-east, a
coastline of monumental grandeur: deep majestic ravines, soaring pinnacles  of
ice - fjords.
    For  two  further  days  they  scrambled  and  climbed  over the rocks and
glaciers, awe-struck with beauty.
    "Arthur!" yelled Ford suddenly.
    It was the afternoon of the second day. Arthur was sitting on a high  rock
watching the thundering sea smashing itself against the craggy promontories.
    "Arthur!" yelled Ford again.
    Arthur  looked to where Ford's voice had come from, carried faintly in the
wind.
    Ford had gone to examine a glacier, and Arthur found him  there  crouching
by  the solid wall of blue ice. He was tense with excitement - his eyes darted
up to meet Arthur's.
    "Look," he said, "look!"
    Arthur looked. He saw the solid wall of blue ice.
    "Yes," he said, "it's a glacier. I've already seen it."
    "No," said Ford, "you've looked at it, you haven't seen it. Look!"
    Ford was pointing deep into the heart of the ice.
    Arthur peered - he saw nothing but vague shadows.
    "Move back from it," insisted Ford, "look again."
    Arthur moved back and looked again.
    "No," he said, and shrugged. "What am I supposed to be looking for?"
    And suddenly he saw it.
    "You see it?"
    He saw it.
    His mouth started to speak, but his brain decided it hadn't  got  anything
to  say  yet  and  shut  it  again. His brain then started to contend with the
problem of what his eyes told it  they  were  looking  at,  but  in  doing  so
relinquished  control  of  the mouth which promptly fell open again. Once more
gathering up the jaw, his brain lost control  of  his  left  hand  which  then
wandered  around  in an aimless fashion. For a second or so the brain tried to
catch the left hand without letting go of the mouth and  simultaneously  tried
to think about what was buried in the ice, which is probably why the legs went
and Arthur dropped restfully to the ground.
    The  thing  that  had  been causing all this neural upset was a network of
shadows in the ice, about eighteen inches beneath the surface.  Looked  at  it
from  the  right  angle they resolved into the solid shapes of letters from an
alien alphabet, each about three feet high; and for those,  like  Arthur,  who
couldn't  read  Magrathean  there  was above the letters the outline of a face
hanging in the ice.
    It was an old face, thin and distinguished, careworn but not unkind.
    It was the face of the  man  who  had  won  an  award  for  designing  the
coastline they now knew themselves to be standing on.

Chapter 32

    A  thin  whine  filled  the  air.  It whirled and howled through the trees
upsetting the squirrels. A few birds flew off in disgust. The noise danced and
skittered round the clearing. It whooped, it rasped, it generally offended.
    The Captain, however, regarded the lone bagpiper with  an  indulgent  eye.
Little  could disturb his equanimity; indeed, once he had got over the loss of
his gorgeous bath during that unpleasantness in the swamp all those months ago
he had begun to find his new life remarkably  congenial.  A  hollow  had  been
scooped  out of a large rock which stood in the middle of the clearing, and in
this he would bask  daily  whilst  attendants  sloshed  water  over  him.  Not
particularly  warm water, it must be said, as they hadn't yet worked out a way
of heating it. Never mind, that would come, and in the meantime search parties
were scouring the countryside far and wide for a hot spring, preferably one in
a nice leafy glade, and if it was near a soap mine - perfection. To those  who
said  that  they  had  a  feeling  soap wasn't found in mines, the Captain had
ventured to suggest that perhaps that was  because  no  one  had  looked  hard
enough, and this possibility had been reluctantly acknowledged.
    No,  life was very pleasant, and the greatest thing about it was that when
the hot spring was found, complete with leafy glade en suite, and when in  the
fullness  of  time  the  cry came reverberating across the hills that the soap
mine had been located and was producing five hundred cakes a day it  would  be
more pleasant still. It was very important to have things to look forward to.
    Wail,   wail,  screech,  wail,  howl,  honk,  squeak  went  the  bagpipes,
increasing the Captain's already considerable pleasure at the thought that any
moment now they might stop. That was something he looked forward to as well.
    What else was pleasant, he asked himself? Well, so many  things:  the  red
and  gold  of the trees, now that autumn was approaching; the peaceful chatter
of scissors a few feet from his bath  where  a  couple  of  hairdressers  were
exercising  their  skills  on  a  dozing  art  director and his assistant; the
sunlight gleaming off the six shiny telephones lined up along the edge of  his
rock-hewn  bath.  The  only  thing nicer than a phone that didn't ring all the
time (or indeed at all) was six phones that  didn't  ring  all  the  time  (or
indeed at all).
    Nicest  of  all  was the happy murmur of all the hundreds of people slowly
assembling in the  clearing  around  him  to  watch  the  afternoon  committee
meeting.
    The  Captain  punched his rubber duck playfully on the beak. The afternoon
committee meetings were his favourite.
    Other eyes watched the assembling crowds. High in a tree on  the  edge  of
the clearing squatted Ford Prefect, lately returned from foreign climes. After
his  six  month  journey  he was lean and healthy, his eyes gleamed, he wore a
reindeer-skin coat; his beard was as thick  and  his  face  as  bronzed  as  a
country-rock singer's.
    He  and Arthur Dent had been watching the Golgafrinchans for almost a week
now, and Ford had decided to stir things up a bit.
    The clearing was now full. Hundreds  of  men  and  women  lounged  around,
chatting,  eating  fruit,  playing cards and generally having a fairly relaxed
time of it. Their track suits were now all dirty and even torn, but  they  all
had  immaculately  styled  hair. Ford was puzzled to see that many of them had
stuffed their track suits full of leaves and wondered if this was meant to  be
some  form of insulation against the coming winter. Ford's eyes narrowed. They
couldn't be interested in botany of a sudden could they?
    In the middle of these speculations the Captain's  voice  rose  above  the
hubbub.
    "Alright,"  he  said, "I'd like to call this meeting to some sort of order
if that's at  all  possible.  Is  that  alright  with  everybody?"  He  smiled
genially. "In a minute. When you're all ready."
    The  talking  gradually died away and the clearing fell silent, except for
the bagpiper who seemed to be in some wild and uninhabitable musical world  of
his own. A few of those in his immediate vicinity threw some leaves to him. If
there was any reason for this then it escaped Ford Prefect for the moment.
    A  small  group  of people had clustered round the Captain and one of them
was clearly beginning to speak. He did  this  by  standing  up,  clearing  his
throat  and  then  gazing  off into the distance as if to signify to the crowd
that he would be with them in a minute.
    The crowd of course were riveted and all turned their eyes on him.
    A moment of silence followed, which Ford judged to be the  right  dramatic
moment to make his entry. The man turned to speak.
    Ford dropped down out of the tree.
    "Hi there," he said.
    The crowd swivelled round.
    "Ah my dear fellow," called out the Captain, "Got any matches on you? Or a
lighter? Anything like that?"
    "No," said Ford, sounding a little deflated. It wasn't what he'd prepared.
He decided he'd better be a little stronger on the subject.
    "No I haven't," he continued, "No matches. Instead I bring you news ..."
    "Pity,"  said  the  Captain, "We've all run out you see. Haven't had a hot
bath in weeks."
    Ford refused to be headed off.
    "I bring you news," he said, "of a discovery that might interest you."
    "Is it on the agenda?" snapped the man whom Ford had interrupted.
    Ford smiled a broad country-rock singer smile.
    "Now, come on," he said.
    "Well I'm sorry," said the man huffily,  "but  speaking  as  a  management
consultant  of  many  years'  standing,  I  must  insist  on the importance of
observing the committee structure."
    Ford looked round the crowd.
    "He's mad you know," he said, "this is a prehistoric planet."
    "Address the chair!" snapped the management consultant.
    "There isn't chair," explained Ford, "there's only a rock."
    The management consultant decided that testiness was  what  the  situation
now called for.
    "Well, call it a chair," he said testily.
    "Why not call it a rock?" asked Ford.
    "You  obviously  have  no conception," said the management consultant, not
abandoning testiness in favour of  good  old  fashioned  hauteur,  "of  modern
business methods."
    "And you have no conception of where you are," said Ford.
    A girl with a strident voice leapt to her feet and used it.
    "Shut up, you two," she said, "I want to table a motion."
    "You mean boulder a motion," tittered a hairdresser.
    "Order, order!" yapped the management consultant.
    "Alright,"  said  Ford,  "let's see how you are doing." He plonked himself
down on the ground to see how long he could keep his temper.
    The Captain made a sort of conciliatory harrumphing noise.
    "I would like to call to order," he said pleasantly, "the five hundred and
seventy-third meeting of the colonization committee of Fintlewoodlewix ..."
    Ten seconds, thought Ford as he leapt to his feet again.
    "This is futile," he exclaimed, "five hundred and seventy-three  committee
meetings and you haven't even discovered fire yet!"
    "If  you  would  care," said the girl with the strident voice, "to examine
the agenda sheet ..."
    "Agenda rock," trilled the hairdresser happily.
    "Thank you, I've made that point," muttered Ford.
    "... you ... will ... see ..." continued the girl  firmly,  "that  we  are
having a report from the hairdressers' Fire Development Sub-Committee today."
    "Oh  ...  ah  -"  said  the  hairdresser  with  a  sheepish  look which is
recognized the whole Galaxy over as meaning "Er, will next Tuesday do?"
    "Alright," said Ford, rounding on him, "what have you done? What  are  you
going to do? What are your thoughts on fire development?"
    "Well  I don't know," said the hairdresser, "All they gave me was a couple
of sticks ..."
    "So what have you done with them?"
    Nervously, the hairdresser fished in his track suit top  and  handed  over
the fruits of his labour to Ford.
    Ford held them up for all to see.
    "Curling tongs," he said.
    The crowd applauded.
    "Never mind," said Ford, "Rome wasn't burnt in a day."
    The  crowd  hadn't  the  faintest idea what he was talking about, but they
loved it nevertheless. They applauded.
    "Well, you're obviously being totally naive of  course,"  said  the  girl,
"When  you've  been in marketing as long as I have you'll know that before any
new product can be developed it has to be properly researched.  We've  got  to
find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image
it has for them."
    The crowd were tense. They were expecting something wonderful from Ford.
    "Stick it up your nose," he said.
    "Which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know," insisted the girl,
"Do people want fire that can be applied nasally?"
    "Do you?" Ford asked the crowd.
    "Yes!" shouted some.
    "No!" shouted others happily.
    They didn't know, they just thought it was great.
    "And  the  wheel,"  said  the  Captain,  "What about this wheel thingy? It
sounds a terribly interesting project."
    "Ah," said the marketing girl, "Well, we're  having  a  little  difficulty
there."
    "Difficulty?"  exclaimed  Ford, "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty?
It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
    The marketing girl soured him with a look.
    "Alright, Mr Wiseguy," she said, "you're  so  clever,  you  tell  us  what
colour it should have."
    The  crowd went wild. One up to the home team, they thought. Ford shrugged
his shoulders and sat down again.
    "Almighty Zarquon," he said, "have none of you done anything?"
    As if in answer to his question there was a sudden clamour of  noise  from
the  entrance  to  the  clearing.  The  crowd  couldn't  believe the amount of
entertainment they were getting this afternoon: in marched a squad of about  a
dozen  men  dressed  in the remnants of their Golgafrincham 3rd Regiment dress
uniforms. About half of them still  carried  Kill-O-Zap  guns,  the  rest  now
carried  spears  which  they  struck  together  as  they  marched. They looked
bronzed, healthy, and utterly exhausted and bedraggled. They  clattered  to  a
halt and banged to attention. One of them fell over and never moved again.
    "Captain,  sir!"  cried Number Two - for he was their leader - "Permission
to report sir!"
    "Yes, alright Number  Two,  welcome  back  and  all  that.  Find  any  hot
springs?" said the Captain despondently.
    "No sir!"
    "Thought you wouldn't."
    Number Two strode through the crowd and presented arms before the bath.
    "We have discovered another continent!"
    "When was this?"
    "It  lies  across  the  sea  ..."  said  Number  Two,  narrowing  his eyes
significantly, "to the east!"
    "Ah."
    Number Two turned to face the crowd. He raised his  gun  above  his  head.
This is going to be great, thought the crowd.
    "We have declared war on it!"
    Wild  abandoned  cheering  broke out in all corners of the clearing - this
was beyond all expectation.
    "Wait a minute," shouted Ford Prefect, "wait a minute!"
    He leapt to his feet and demanded silence. After a while he got it, or  at
least  the  best  silence  he  could  hope  for  under  the circumstances: the
circumstances were that the bagpiper was spontaneously  composing  a  national
anthem.
    "Do we have to have the piper?" demanded Ford.
    "Oh yes," said the Captain, "we've given him a grant."
    Ford  considered  opening this idea up for debate but quickly decided that
that way madness lay. Instead he slung a well judged rock  at  the  piper  and
turned to face Number Two.
    "War?" he said.
    "Yes!" Number Two gazed contemptuously at Ford Prefect.
    "On the next continent?"
    "Yes! Total warfare! The war to end all wars!"
    "But there's no one even living there yet!"
    Ah, interesting, thought the crowd, nice point.
    Number  Two's gaze hovered undisturbed. In this respect his eyes were like
a couple of mosquitos that hover purposefully three inches from your nose  and
refuse to be deflected by arm thrashes, fly swats or rolled newspapers.
    "I  know  that,"  he  said, "but there will be one day! So we have left an
open-ended ultimatum."
    "What?"
    "And blown up a few military installations."
    The Captain leaned forward out of his bath.
    "Military installations Number Two?" he said.
    For a moment the eyes wavered.
    "Yes sir, well potential military installations. Alright ... trees."
    The moment of uncertainty passed - his eyes flickered like whips over  his
audience.
    "And," he roared, "we interrogated a gazelle!"
    He  flipped  his  Kill-O-Zap  gun  smartly  under  his arm and marched off
through the pandemonium that had now erupted throughout the ecstatic crowd.  A
few steps was all he managed before he was caught up and carried shoulder high
for a lap of honour round the clearing.
    Ford sat and idly tapped a couple of stones together.
    "So  what else have you done?" he inquired after the celebrations had died
down.
    "We have started a culture," said the marketing girl.
    "Oh yes?" said Ford.
    "Yes.  One  of  our  film  producers  is  already  making  a   fascinating
documentary about the indigenous cavemen of the area."
    "They're not cavemen."
    "They look like cavemen."
    "Do they live in caves?"
    "Well ..."
    "They live in huts."
    "Perhaps  they're  having  their caves redecorated," called out a wag from
the crowd.
    Ford rounded on him angrily.
    "Very funny," he said, "but have you noticed that they're dying out?"
    On their journey back, Ford  and  Arthur  had  come  across  two  derelict
villages  and  the  bodies  of many natives in the woods, where they had crept
away to die. Those that still lived were stricken and  listless,  as  if  they
were  suffering  some  disease  of the spirit rather than the body. They moved
sluggishly and with an infinite sadness. Their future had been taken away from
them.
    "Dying out!" repeated Ford. "Do you know what that means?"
    "Er ... we shouldn't sell them any life insurance?"  called  out  the  wag
again.
    Ford ignored him, and appealed to the whole crowd.
    "Can you try and understand," he said, "that it's just since we've arrived
that they've started dying out!"
    "In  fact  that comes over terribly well in this film," said the marketing
girl, "and just gives it that poignant twist which  is  the  hallmark  of  the
really great documentary. The producer's very committed."
    "He should be," muttered Ford.
    "I  gather,"  said  the  girl,  turning  to  address  the  Captain who was
beginning to nod off, "that he wants to make one about you next, Captain."
    "Oh really?" he said, coming to with a start, "that's awfully nice."
    "He's  got  a  very  strong  angle  on  it,  you  know,  the   burden   of
responsibility, the loneliness of command ..."
    The Captain hummed and hahed about this for a moment.
    "Well,  I  wouldn't  overstress  that  angle,  you know," he said finally,
"one's never alone with a rubber duck."
    He held the duck aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.
    All the while,  the  Management  Consultant  had  been  sitting  in  stony
silence,  his  finger  tips  pressed  to  his  temples to indicate that he was
waiting and would wait all day if it was necessary.
    At this point he decided he would not wait all day  after  all,  he  would
merely pretend that the last half hour hadn't happened.
    He rose to his feet.
    "If,"  he  said  tersely, "we could for a moment move on to the subject of
fiscal policy ..."
    "Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect, "Fiscal policy!"
    The Management Consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could  have
copied.
    "Fiscal policy ..." he repeated, "that is what I said."
    "How can you have money," demanded Ford, "if none of you actually produces
anything? It doesn't grow on trees you know."
    "If you would allow me to continue ..."
    Ford nodded dejectedly.
    "Thank  you.  Since  we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal
tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich."
    Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at
this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which  their  track  suits
were stuffed.
    "But we have also," continued the Management Consultant, "run into a small
inflation  problem  on  account  of the high level of leaf availability, which
means that, I  gather,  the  current  going  rate  has  something  like  three
deciduous forests buying one ship's peanut."
    Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The Management Consultant waved them
down.
    "So  in  order  to  obviate  this problem," he continued, "and effectively
revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation  campaign,
and  ...  er,  burn  down  all  the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a
sensible move under the circumstances."
    The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or  two  until
someone  pointed  out  how much this would increase the value of the leaves in
their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the Management
Consultant a standing ovation. The accountants amongst them looked forward  to
a profitable Autumn.
    "You're all mad," explained Ford Prefect.
    "You're absolutely barmy," he suggested.
    "You're a bunch of raving nutters," he opined.
    The  tide  of opinion started to turn against him. What had started out as
excellent entertainment had now, in the crowd's view, deteriorated  into  mere
abuse,  and  since this abuse was in the main directed at them they wearied of
it.
    Sensing this shift in the wind, the marketing girl turned on him.
    "Is it perhaps in order," she demanded, "to inquire what you've been doing
all these months then? You and that other interloper have been  missing  since
the day we arrived."
    "We've  been  on  a  journey,"  said  Ford,  "We  went to try and find out
something about this planet."
    "Oh," said the girl archly, "doesn't sound very productive to me."
    "No? Well have I got news for  you,  my  love.  We  have  discovered  this
planet's future."
    Ford  waited  for  this  statement to have its effect. It didn't have any.
They didn't know what he was talking about.
    He continued.
    "It doesn't matter a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys what you all choose  to
do  from  now  on.  Burn  down the forests, anything, it won't make a scrap of
difference. Your future history has already happened. Two million years you've
got and that's it. At the end of that time your race will be  dead,  gone  and
good riddance to you. Remember that, two million years!"
    The  crowd  muttered  to  itself  in annoyance. People as rich as they had
suddenly become shouldn't be obliged to listen  to  this  sort  of  gibberish.
Perhaps they could tip the fellow a leaf or two and he would go away.
    They didn't need to bother. Ford was already stalking out of the clearing,
pausing  only to shake his head at Number Two who was already firing his Kill+
O-Zap gun into some neighbouring trees.
    He turned back once.
    "Two million years!" he said and laughed.
    "Well," said the Captain with a soothing smile, "still time for a few more
baths. Could someone pass me the sponge? I just dropped it over the side."

Chapter 33

    A mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too  busily  engrossed
with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.
    What  he  was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide
flat piece of rock  he  had  scratched  out  the  shape  of  a  large  square,
subdivided  into  one  hundred  and  sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to a
side.
    Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish  flattish  stones
and  scratched  the  shape  of a letter on to each. Sitting morosely round the
rock were a couple of the surviving local native  men  whom  Arthur  Dent  was
trying to introduce the curious concept embodied in these stones.
    So  far  they  had  not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them,
bury others and throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally encouraged one
of them to lay a couple of stones on the board he had scratched out, which was
not even as far as he'd managed to get the day before. Along  with  the  rapid
deterioration  in  the  morale  of  these  creatures,  there  seemed  to  be a
corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.
    In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on the
board himself, and then tried to  encourage  the  natives  to  add  some  more
themselves.
    It was not going well.
    Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.
    "No,"  said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some of the
letters round in a fit of abysmal dejection, "Q scores ten you see,  and  it's
on  a  triple  word score, so ... look, I've explained the rules to you ... no
no, look please, put down that jawbone ... alright, we'll start again. And try
to concentrate this time."
    Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.
    "What are you doing, Arthur?" he asked quietly.
    Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a  feeling  that  all  this
might  look  slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream
on him when he was a chid. But things were different then, or rather would be.
    "I'm trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble," he said.
    "They're not cavemen," said Ford.
    "They look like cavemen."
    Ford let it pass.
    "I see," he said.
    "It's uphill work," said Arthur wearily, "the only word they know is grunt
and they can't spell it."
    He sighed and sat back.
    "What's that supposed to achieve?" asked Ford.
    "We've got to encourage them to evolve!  To  develop!"  Arthur  burst  out
angrily. He hoped that the weary sigh and then the anger might do something to
counteract  the  overriding feeling of foolishness from which he was currently
suffering. It didn't. He jumped to his feet.
    "Can you imagine what a world would  be  like  descended  from  those  ...
cretins we arrived with?" he said.
    "Imagine?"  said  Ford,  rising  his  eyebrows. "We don't have to imagine.
We've seen it."
    "But ..." Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.
    "We've seen it," said Ford, "there's no escape."
    Arthur kicked at a stone.
    "Did you tell them what we've discovered?" he asked.
    "Hmmmm?" said Ford, not really concentrating.
    "Norway," said Arthur, "Slartibartfast's signature in the glacier. Did you
tell them?"
    "What's the point?" said Ford, "What would it mean to them?"
    "Mean?" said Arthur, "Mean? You know perfectly  well  what  it  means.  It
means that this planet is the Earth! It's my home! It's where I was born!"
    "Was?" said Ford.
    "Alright, will be."
    "Yes, in two million years' time. Why don't you tell them that? Go and say
to them,  `Excuse  me,  I'd  just like to point out that in two million years'
time I will be born just a few miles from here.' See what  they  say.  They'll
chase you up a tree and set fire to it."
    Arthur absorbed this unhappily.
    "Face  it,"  said  Ford,  "those  zeebs over there are your ancestors, not
these poor creatures here."
    He went over to where the apemen creatures were rummaging listlessly  with
the stone letters. He shook his head.
    "Put  the  Scrabble away, Arthur," he said, "it won't save the human race,
because this lot aren't going  to  be  the  human  race.  The  human  race  is
currently  sitting  round  a  rock  on  the  other  side  of  this hill making
documentaries about themselves."
    Arthur winced.
    "There must be something  we  can  do,"  he  said.  A  terrible  sense  of
desolation thrilled through his body that he should be here, on the Earth, the
Earth  which  had  lost  its  future in a horrifying arbitrary catastrophe and
which now seemed set to lose its past as well.
    "No," said Ford, "there's nothing we  can  do.  This  doesn't  change  the
history  of  the  Earth, you see, this is the history of the Earth. Like it or
leave it, the Golgafrinchans are the people you are  descended  from.  in  two
million  years  they get destroyed by the Vogons. History is never altered you
see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn't it?"
    He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant pivet bush where it
hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn't stop  till  it
was  set  upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on
the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away.
    During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck  up
a  relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham,
and he was terribly upset when  she  suddenly  passed  away  as  a  result  of
drinking  water  from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox.
The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never
throw the letter Q into a pivet bush, but unfortunately there are  times  when
it is unavoidable.
    Like  most  of the really crucial things in life, this chain of events was
completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. They were looking  sadly
at one of the natives morosely pushing the other letters around.
    "Poor bloody caveman," said Arthur.
    "They're not ..."
    "What?"
    "Oh never mind."
    The  wretched  creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged on the
rock.
    "It's all been a bit of waste of time for them, hasn't it?" said Arthur.
    "Uh uh urghhhhh," muttered the native and banged on the rock again.
    "They've been outevolved by telephone sanitizers."
    "Urgh, gr gr, gruh!" insisted the native, continuing to bang on the rock.
    "Why does he keep banging on the rock?" said Arthur.
    "I think he probably wants you to Scrabble with  him  again,"  said  Ford,
"he's pointing at the letters."
    "Probably  spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor bastard. I keep on telling him
there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc."
    The native banged on the rock again.
    They looked over his shoulder.
    Their eyes popped.
    There amongst the jumble of letters were eight that had been laid out in a
clear straight line.
    They spelt two words.
    The words were these:
    "Forty-Two."
    "Grrrurgh guh guh," explained the native. He  swept  the  letters  angrily
away and went and mooched under a nearby tree with his colleague.
    Ford and Arthur stared at him. Then they stared at each other.
    "Did that say what I thought it said?" they both said to each other.
    "Yes," they both said.
    "Forty-two," said Arthur.
    "Forty-two," said Ford.
    Arthur ran over to the two natives.
    "What  are  you  trying  to  tell  us?" he shouted. "What's it supposed to
mean?"
    One of them rolled over on the ground, kicked his  legs  up  in  the  air,
rolled over again and went to sleep.
    The  other  bounded up the tree and threw horse chestnuts at Ford Prefect.
Whatever it was they had to say, they had already said it.
    "You know what this means," said Ford.
    "Not entirely."
    "Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the Ultimate Answer."
    "Yes."
    And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built to calculate
the Question to the Ultimate Answer."
    "So we are led to believe."
    "And organic life was part of the computer matrix."
    "If you say so."
    "I do say so. That means that these natives, these apemen are an  integral
part of the computer program, and that we and the Golgafrinchans are not."
    "But the cavemen are dying out and the Golgafrinchans are obviously set to
replace them."
    "Exactly. So do you see what this means?"
    "What?"
    "Cock up," said Ford Prefect.
    Arthur looked around him.
    "This planet is having a pretty bloody time of it," he said.
    Ford puzzled for a moment.
    "Still,  something  must  have  come out of it," he said at last, "because
Marvin said he could see the Question printed in your brain wave patterns."
    "But ..."
    "Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of the right one. It  might  give
us a clue though if we could find it. I don't see how we can though."
    They  moped  about for a bit. Arthur sat on the ground and started pulling
up bits of grass, but found that it wasn't an occupation he could  get  deeply
engrossed in. It wasn't grass he could believe in, the trees seemed pointless,
the rolling hills seemed to be rolling to nowhere and the future seemed just a
tunnel to be crawled through.
    Ford  fiddled with his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was silent. He sighed and
put it away.
    Arthur picked up one of the letter stones from his home-made Scrabble set.
It was a T. He sighed and out it down again. The letter he put down next to it
was an I. That spelt IT. He tossed another couple of letters next to them They
were an S and an H as it happened. By a curious coincidence the resulting word
perfectly expressed the way Arthur was feeling  about  things  just  then.  He
stared  at  it  for  a  moment.  He hadn't done it deliberately, it was just a
random chance. His brain got slowly into first gear.
    "Ford," he said suddenly, "look, if that Question is printed in  my  brain
wave  patterns  but I'm not consciously aware of it it must be somewhere in my
unconscious."
    "Yes, I suppose so."
    "There might be a way of bringing that unconscious pattern forward."
    "Oh yes?"
    "Yes, by introducing some random  element  that  can  be  shaped  by  that
pattern."
    "Like how?"
    "Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded."
    Ford leapt to his feet.
    "Brilliant!"  he  said.  He tugged his towel out of his satchel and with a
few deft knots transformed it into a bag.
    "Totally mad," he said, "utter nonsense. But  we'll  do  it  because  it's
brilliant nonsense. Come on, come on."
    The  sun  passed  respectfully  behind  a cloud. A few small sad raindrops
fell.
    They piled together all the remaining letters and dropped  them  into  the
bag. They shook them up.
    "Right," said Ford, "close your eyes. Pull them out. Come on come on, come
on."
    Arthur  closed  his eyes and plunged his hand into the towelful of stones.
He jiggled them about, pulled out four and handed them to Ford. Ford laid them
along the ground in the order he got them.
    "W," said Ford, "H, A, T ... What!"
    He blinked.
    "I think it's working!" he said.
    Arthur pushed three more at him.
    "D, O, Y ... Doy. Oh perhaps it isn't working," said Ford.
    "Here's the next three."
    "O, U, G ... Doyoug ... It's not making sense I'm afraid."
    Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.
    "E, T, doyouget ... Do you get!" shouted Ford, "it  is  working!  This  is
amazing, it really is working!"
    "More  here."  Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as fast as he could
go.
    "I, F," said Ford, "Y, O, U, ... M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y, ... What  do  you
get  if  you  multiply, ... S, I, X, ... six, B, Y, by, six by ... what do you
get if you multiply six by ... N, I, N, E, ... six by  nine  ..."  He  paused.
"Come on, where's the next one?"
    "Er, that's the lot," said Arthur, "that's all there were."
    He sat back, nonplussed.
    He  rooted  around  again  in  the knotted up towel but there were no more
letters.
    "You mean that's it?" said Ford.
    "That's it."
    "Six by nine. Forty-two."
    "That's it. That's all there is."

Chapter 34

    The sun came out and beamed cheerfully at them. A bird sang. A warm breeze
wafted through the trees and lifted the heads of the flowers,  carrying  their
scent  away through the woods. An insect droned past on its way to do whatever
it is that insects do in the  late  afternoon.  The  sound  of  voices  lilted
through the trees followed a moment later by two girls who stopped in surprise
at the sight of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent apparently lying on the ground in
agony, but in fact rocking with noiseless laughter.
    "No, don't go," called Ford Prefect between gasps, "we'll be with you in a
moment."
    "What's  the  matter?"  asked  one  of  the  girls. She was the taller and
slimmer of the two. On Golgafrincham she had been a junior personnel  officer,
but hadn't liked it much.
    Ford pulled himself together.
    "Excuse  me," he said, "hello. My friend and I were just contemplating the
meaning of life. Frivolous exercise."
    "Oh it's you," said the girl, "you made a bit of a spectacle  of  yourself
this afternoon. You were quite funny to begin with but you did bang on a bit."
    "Did I? Oh yes."
    "Yes,  what was all that for?" asked the other girl, a shorter round-faced
girl who had  been  an  art  director  for  a  small  advertising  company  on
Golgafrincham.  Whatever  the privations of this world were, she went to sleep
every night profoundly grateful for the fact that whatever she had to face  in
the  morning  it wouldn't be a hundred almost identical photographs of moodily
lit tubes of toothpaste.
    "For? For nothing. Nothing's for anything,"  said  Ford  Prefect  happily.
"Come  and join us. I"m Ford, this is Arthur. We were just about to do nothing
at all for a while but it can wait."
    The girls looked at them doubtfully.
    "I'm Agda," said the tall one, "this is Mella."
    "Hello Agda, hello Mella," said Ford.
    "Do you talk at all?" said Mella to Arthur.
    "Oh, eventually," said Arthur with a smile, "but not as much as Ford."
    "Good."
    There was a slight pause.
    "What did you mean," asked Agda, "about only having two million  years?  I
couldn't make sense of what you were saying."
    "Oh that," said Ford, "it doesn't matter."
    "It's  just  that  the  world gets demolished to make way for a hyperspace
bypass," said Arthur with a shrug, "but that's two  million  years  away,  and
anyway it's just Vogons doing what Vogons do."
    "Vogons?" said Mella.
    "Yes, you wouldn't know them."
    "Where'd you get this idea from?"
    "It  really  doesn't  matter. It's just like a dream from the past, or the
future." Arthur smiled and looked away.
    "Does it worry you that you don't talk any kind of sense?" asked Agda.
    "Listen, forget it," said Ford, "forget all of it. Nothing matters.  Look,
it's  a  beautiful  day,  enjoy it. The sun, the green of the hills, the river
down in the valley, the burning trees."
    "Even if it's only a dream, it's a  pretty  horrible  idea,"  said  Mella,
"destroying a world just to make a bypass."
    "Oh,  I've  heard  of  worse," said Ford, "I read of one planet off in the
seventh dimension that got used as a ball  in  a  game  of  intergalactic  bar
billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people."
    "That's mad," said Mella.
    "Yes, only scored thirty points too."
    Agda and Mella exchanged glances.
    "Look,"  said  Agda, "there's a party after the committee meeting tonight.
You can come along if you like."
    "Yeah, OK," said Ford.
    "I'd like to," said Arthur.
    Many hours later Arthur and Mella sat and watched the moon rise  over  the
dull red glow of the trees.
    "That story about the world being destroyed ..." began Mella.
    "In two million years, yes."
    "You say it as if you really think it's true."
    "Yes, I think it is. I think I was there."
    She shook her head in puzzlement.
    "You're very strange," she said.
    "No,  I'm  very ordinary," said Arthur, "but some very strange things have
happened to me. You could say I'm more differed from than differing."
    "And that other world your friend talked about, the one  that  got  pushed
into a black hole."
    "Ah, that I don't know about. It sounds like something from the book."
    "What book?"
    Arthur paused.
    "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," he said at last.
    "What's that?"
    "Oh,  just  something  I  threw into the river this evening. I don't think
I'll be wanting it any more," said Arthur Dent.
Last-modified: Thu,  4-Sep-97 20:32:09 GMT