The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (82 page)

O
n the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.

They talked quietly to themselves.

“I still have to know,” said Fenchurch, “and I strongly feel that you know something that you’re not telling me.”

Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.

“Do you have a pencil?” he said.

She dug around and found one.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?” she said, after he had spent twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil again, and grunting irritably to himself.

“Trying to remember an address someone once gave me.”

“Your life would be an awful lot simpler,” she said, “if you bought yourself an address book.”

Finally he passed the paper to her.

“You look after it,” he said.

She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out were the words “Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry. Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma.”

“And what’s there?”

“Apparently,” said Arthur, “it’s God’s Final Message to His Creation.”

“That sounds a bit more like it,” said Fenchurch. “How do we get there?”

“You really …?”

“Yes,” said Fenchurch firmly, “I really want to know.”

Arthur looked out of the little scratchy Plexiglas window at the open sky outside.

“Excuse me,” said the woman who had been looking at them rather oddly, suddenly, “I hope you don’t think I’m rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it’s nice to talk to somebody. My name’s Enid Kapelsen, I’m from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?”

T
hey went to Arthur’s house in the West Country, shoved a couple of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every galactic hitchhiker ends up spending most of his time doing.

They waited for a flying saucer to come by.

“Friend of mine did this for fifteen years,” said Arthur one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.

“Who was that?”

“Called Ford Prefect.”

He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again.

He wondered where Ford Prefect was.

By an extraordinary coincidence the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incident with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs.

Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hungover and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.

In fact he looked extremely ill, not merely as if he’d been pulled through a hedge backward, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backward through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur’s sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort of waving caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur eventually had to drag him to the sofa.

“Thank you,” said Ford, “thank you very much. Have you …” he said, and fell asleep for three hours.

“ … the faintest idea,” he continued suddenly, when he revived, “how hard it is to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven’t, so I’ll tell you,” he said, “over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me.”

He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.

“Stupid operators keep asking you where you’re calling from and you try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn’t be if you’re coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?”

“Making you some black coffee.”

“Oh.” Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about the place forlornly.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Rice Krispies.”

“And this?”

“Paprika.”

“I see,” said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, on top of the other, but that didn’t seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and that seemed to work.

“A little space-lagged,” he said. “What was I saying?”

“About not phoning from Letchworth.”

“I wasn’t. I explained this to the lady. ‘Bugger Letchworth,’ I said, ‘if that’s your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed leg of a journey between the stars known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.’ I said ‘dear lady,’ ” explained Ford Prefect, “because I didn’t want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin—”

“Tactful,” said Arthur Dent.

“Exactly,” said Ford, “tactful.”

He frowned.

“Space-lag,” he said, “is very bad for sub-clauses. You’ll have to assist me again,” he continued, “by reminding me what I was talking about.”

“ ‘Between the stars,’ ” said Arthur, “ ‘known to your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as—’ ”

“Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,” concluded Ford triumphantly. “This conversation lark is quite a gas, isn’t it?”

“Have some coffee.”

“Thank you, no. ‘And the reason,’ I said, ‘why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialing direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny-pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast starship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?’ ”

“And could she?”

“I don’t know. She had hung up,” said Ford, “by this time. So! What do you suppose,” he asked fiercely, “I did next?”

“I’ve no idea, Ford,” said Arthur.

“Pity,” said Ford, “I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate
those guys, you know. They really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing round the celestial infinite with their junky little machines that never work properly or, when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and,” he added savagely, “go beep to tell you when they’ve done it!”

This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right-thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right-thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that
“it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

“In other words—and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxywide success is founded—their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. “

“And this guy,” ranted Ford, “was on a drive to sell more of them! His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators, and wine bars! Or if they didn’t have restaurants, elevators, and wine bars yet, to artificially accelerate their civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where’s that coffee!”

“I threw it away.”

“Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next. I saved civilization as we know. I knew it was something like that.”

He stumbled determinedly back into the sitting room, where he seemed to carry on talking to himself, tripping over the furniture and making beep-beep noises.

A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid face, Arthur followed him.

Ford looked stunned.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“Making some coffee,” said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford’s company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times.

“You missed the best bit!” raged Ford. “You missed the bit where I jumped the guy! Now,” he said, “I shall have to jump him all over again!”

He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.

“It was better,” he said sullenly, “last time,” and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table.

“I see,” said Arthur, casting a placid eye over the trussed-up wreckage, “and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?”

“What?” screamed Ford. “What? You missed that bit, too? That’s the suspended animation facility! I put the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well, I had to, didn’t I?”

“So it would seem,” said Arthur, in his placid voice.

“Don’t touch that!!!” yelled Ford.

Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which was for some mysterious reason lying on the table, off the hook, paused, placidly.

“Okay,” said Ford, calming down, “listen to it.”

Arthur put the phone to his ear.

“It’s the speaking clock,” he said.

“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “beep, beep, beep.”

“I see,” said Arthur, with every ounce of placidness he could muster.

“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “is exactly what is being heard all over that guy’s ship, while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little known moon of Sesefras Magna. The London speaking clock!”

“I see,” said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time to ask the big one.

“Why?” he said, acidly.

“With a bit of luck,” said Ford, “the phone bill will bankrupt the buggers.”

He threw himself, sweating, onto the sofa.

“Anyway,” he said, “dramatic arrival, don’t you think?”

T
he flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world.

Finally there was no doubt, no possibility of mistake, no hallucinations, no mysterious CIA agents found floating in reservoirs.

This time it was real, it was definite. It was quite definitely definite.

It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything beneath it and crushed a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods.

The thing was massive, nearly a mile across, some said, dull silver in color, pitted, scorched, and disfigured with the scars of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces by the light of suns unknown to man.

A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods Food Halls, demolished Harvey Nichols, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.

After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.

It held up a hand.

“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see.…”

“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”

“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him,
“nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”

“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”

“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”

“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?”

“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”

“You mean they actually
vote
for the lizards?”

“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”

“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”

“What?”

“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”

“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”

Ford shrugged again.

“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”

“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.

“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin. But I haven’t and I am. Anyway, what are you looking so placid and moon-eyed for? Are you in love?”

Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.

“With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?”

He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with a pile of newspapers she’d been into the village to buy. She stopped in astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the wreckage from Betelgeuse on the sofa.

“Where’s the gin?” said Ford to Fenchurch, and to Arthur, “What happened to Trillian, by the way?”

“Er, this is Fenchurch,” said Arthur, awkwardly. “There was nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last.”

“Oh yeah,” said Ford, “she went off with Zaphod somewhere. They had some kids or something. At least,” he added, “I think that’s what they were. Zaphod’s calmed down a lot, you know.”

“Really?” said Arthur, clustering hurriedly round Fenchurch to relieve her of the shopping.

“Yeah,” said Ford, “at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid.”