The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  Flare riding is one of the most exotic and exhilarating sports in existence, and those who can dare and afford to do it are among 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 Après-Flare 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 look like something it wasn’t. Nice lines though. They passed on.

  The next one was a big one and thirty yards long—a coach-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, “multicluster quark drive, perspulex running boards. Got to be a Lazlar Lyricon custom job.”

  He examined every inch.

  “Yes,” he said, “look, the infrapink lizard emblem on the neutrino cowling. Lazlar’s trademark. 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 see,” he called out, “there’s a big mural painted on this side. A bursting sun—Disaster Area’s trademark. 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 stuntships 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 … block!” 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 this 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 toward 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 exicitement 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 around.

  “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 who 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, quite 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 wineglass 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 were 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 and seventy-six thousand and two million years ago. Had you been looking forward to it?”

  The fork rose again, paused, waggled in a noncommittal 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. Okay?”

  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 center 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 swiveled 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 leaped 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 twinkled 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 points of that wholly remarkable travel book, The Hitchhiker’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 three hundred and twenty-four and nine hundred and thirty-eight thousand three hundred 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 footnotes 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 backward 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.

  AREA: Infinite.

  The Hitchhiker’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, real “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.

  IMPORTS. None.

  It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.

  EXPORTS: None.

  See Imports.

  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.

  MONETARY UNITS: None.

  In fact there are three freely convertible currencies in the Galaxy, but none of them count. The Altairian Dollar has recently collapsed, the Flainian Pobble Bead is only exchangeable for other Flainian 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 along 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.

  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.

  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 nonexistent 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 parking lot stood the black ship, closed and silent.

  Into the parking lot 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 Hitchhiker’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 t
he 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 engines howled and whined like tired children in a supermarket.

  “It’s the wild color 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 one of these weird black controls that are labeled 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.