The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “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 skeptical 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 awhile and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is 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, okay,

  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.

  … and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter:

  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 spun around 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 to 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 traveled 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 in 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 impr
ession 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 favorite mother used to tell him when he was a mere slip of a Betelgeusian, ankle high to an Arcturan Megagrasshopper: stories of death 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 travelers 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 leaped 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 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 semitranslucent, 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 Eezzeereed.

  “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 anounced:

  “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 secondhand 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 around 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 firepower 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 had a sort of report thingy from Number Two.”

  “Oh dear.”

  High up in the bridge of the sh
ip, 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 him the vast panorama of stars through which they were moving—a panorama that had thinned out noticeably during the course of the voyage. Turning and looking backward, 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 center from which they were traveling, and indeed had been traveling 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 scientists chaps had been very insistent that everything was going to be perfectly all right 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 tying his shoelaces, 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 shoelaces, 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.…”