The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “It’s getting impossible to talk, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  She shrugged and pointed upward.

  There was a helicopter above them now which seemed to be involved in a side skirmish with the band upstairs. Smoke was billowing from the building. The sound engineer was hanging out the window by his fingertips, and a maddened guitarist was beating on his fingers with a burning guitar. The helicopter was firing at all of them.

  “Can we move?”

  They wandered down the street, away from the noise. They ran into a street theater group who tried to do a short play for them about the problems of the inner city, but then gave up and disappeared into the small restaurant most recently patronized by the pack animal.

  All the time, Ford was poking at the interface panel of the Guide. They ducked into an alleyway. Ford squatted on a garbage can while information began to flood over the screen of the Guide.

  He located his entry.

  “Earth: Mostly harmless.”

  Almost immediately the screen became a mass of system messages.

  “Here it comes,” he said.

  “Please wait,” said the messages. “Entries are being updated over the Sub-Etha Net. This entry is being revised. The system will be down for ten seconds. “

  At the end of the alley a steel-gray limousine crawled past.

  “Hey, look,” said the girl, “if you get paid, look me up. I’m a working girl, and there are people over there who need me. I gotta go.”

  She brushed aside Ford’s half-articulated protests, and left him sitting dejectedly on his garbage can preparing to watch a large swath of his working life being swept away electronically into the ether.

  Out in the street things had calmed down a little. The police battle had moved off to other sectors of the city, the few surviving members of the rock band had agreed to recognize their musical differences and pursue solo careers, the street theater group was reemerging from the Italian restaurant with the pack animal, telling it they would take it to a bar they knew where it would be treated with a little respect, and a little way farther on the steel-gray limousine was parked silently by the curb.

  She hurried toward it.

  Behind her, in the darkness of the alley, a green flickering glow was bathing Ford Prefect’s face, and his eyes were slowly widening in astonishment.

  For where he had expected to find nothing—an erased, closed-off entry—there was instead a continuous stream of data—text, diagrams, figures, and images, moving descriptions of surf on Australian beaches, yogurt on Greek islands, restaurants to avoid in Los Angeles, currency deals to avoid in Istanbul, weather to avoid in London, bars to go everywhere. Pages and pages of it. It was all there, everything he had written.

  With a deepening frown of blank incomprehension he went backward and forward through it, stopping here and there at various entries.

  Tips for aliens in New York:

  Land anywhere, Central Park, anywhere. No one will care or indeed even notice.

  Surviving: get a job as a cabdriver immediately. A cabdriver’s job is to drive people anywhere they want to go in big yellow machines called taxis. Don’t worry if you don’t know how the machine works and you can’t speak the language, don’t understand the geography or indeed the basic physics of the area, and have large green antennae growing out of your head. Believe me, this is the best way of staying inconspicuous.

  If your body is really weird, try showing it to people in the streets for money.

  Amphibious life forms from any of the worlds in the Swulling, Noxios, or Nausalia systems will particularly enjoy the East River, which is said to be richer in those lovely life-giving nutrients than the finest and most virulent laboratory slime yet achieved.

  Having fun: this is the big section. It is impossible to have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure center.…”

  Ford flipped the switch which he saw was marked “Mode Execute Ready” instead of the now old-fashioned “Access Standby” that had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-aged “Off.”

  This was a planet he had seen completely destroyed, seen with his own two eyes or rather, blinded as he had been by the hellish disruption of air and light, felt with his own two feet as the ground had started to pound at him like a hammer, bucking, roaring, gripped by tidal waves of energy pouring out of the loathsome yellow Vogon ships. And then at last, five seconds after the moment he had determined as being the last possible moment had already passed, he felt the gently swinging nausea of dematerialization as he and Arthur Dent had been beamed up through the atmosphere like a sports broadcast.

  There was no mistake, there couldn’t have been. The Earth had definitely been destroyed. Definitely, definitely. Boiled away into space.

  And yet here—he activated the Guide again—was his own entry on how you would set about having a good time in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, which he had always prided himself on as being one of the most baroque pieces of invention he had ever delivered. He read it again and shook his head in sheer wonder.

  Suddenly he realized what the answer to the problem was, and it was this, that something very weird was happening; and if something very weird was happening, he thought, he wanted it to be happening to him.

  He stashed the Guide back in his satchel and hurried out on to the street.

  Walking north again he passed a steel-gray limousine parked by the curb, and from a nearby doorway he heard a soft voice saying, “It’s okay, honey, it’s really okay, you got to learn to feel good about it. Look at the way the whole economy is structured.…”

  Ford grinned, detoured round the next block, which was now in flames, found a police helicopter that was standing unattended in the street, broke into it, strapped himself in, crossed his fingers, and sent it hurtling inexpertly into the sky.

  He weaved terrifyingly up through the canyoned walls of the city, and once clear of them, hurtled through the black-and-red pall of smoke that hung permanently above it.

  Ten minutes later, with all the copter’s sirens blaring and its rapid-fire cannon blasting at random into the clouds, Ford Prefect brought it careening down among the gantries and landing lights at Han Dold City spaceport, where it settled like a gigantic, startled, and very noisy gnat.

  Since he hadn’t damaged it too much he was able to trade it in for a first-class ticket on the next ship leaving the system, and he settled into one of its huge, voluptuous, body-hugging seats.

  This was going to be fun, he thought to himself, as the ship blinked silently across the insane distances of deep space and the cabin service got into its full extravagant swing.

  “Yes, please,” he said to the cabin attendants whenever they glided up to offer him anything at all.

  He smiled with a curious kind of manic joy as he flipped again through the mysteriously reinstated entry on the planet Earth. He had a major piece of unfinished business that he would now be able to attend to, and he was terribly pleased that life had suddenly furnished him with a serious goal to achieve.

  It suddenly occurred to him to wonder where Arthur Dent was, and if he knew.

  Arthur Dent was one thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven light-years away in a Saab and anxious.

  Behind him in the back seat was a girl who had made him crack his head on the door as he had climbed in. He didn’t know if it was just because she was the first female of his own species that he had laid eyes on in years, or what it was, but he felt stupefied with … with … This is absurd, he told himself. Calm down, he told himself. You are not, he continued to himself in the firmest internal voice he could muster, in a fit and rational state. You have just hitchhiked over a hundred thousand light-years across the Galaxy, you are very tired, a little confused, and extremely vulnerable. Relax, don’t panic, concentrate on breathing deeply.

  He twisted round in his seat.

  “Are you sure she’s all right?” he said again.

  Beyond the fact that she was, to him, heart-thumpi
ngly beautiful, he could make out very little, how tall she was, how old she was, the exact shading of her hair. And he couldn’t ask her anything about herself because, sadly, she was completely unconscious.

  “She’s just drugged,” said her brother, shrugging, not moving his eyes from the road ahead.

  “And that’s all right, is it?” said Arthur, in alarm.

  “Suits me,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Arthur. “Er,” he added after a moment’s thought.

  The conversation so far had been going astoundingly badly.

  After an initial flurry of opening helios, he and Russell—the wonderful girl’s brother’s name was Russell, a name which to Arthur’s mind always suggested burly men with blond mustaches and blow-dried hair who would at the slightest provocation start wearing velvet tuxedos and frilly shirt fronts and would then have to be forcibly restrained from commentating on billiards matches—had quickly discovered they didn’t like each other at all.

  Russell was a burly man. He had a blond mustache. His hair was fine and blow-dried. To be fair to him—though Arthur didn’t see any necessity for this beyond the sheer mental exercise of it—he, Arthur, was himself looking pretty grim. A man can’t cross a hundred thousand light-years, mostly in other people’s baggage compartments, without beginning to fray a little, and Arthur had frayed a lot.

  “She’s not a junkie,” said Russell suddenly, as if he clearly thought that someone else in the car might be, “she’s under sedation.”

  “But that’s terrible,” said Arthur, twisting round to look at her again. She seemed to stir slightly and her head slipped sideways on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell across her face, obscuring it.

  “What’s the matter with her, is she ill?”

  “No,” said Russell, “merely barking mad.”

  “What?” said Arthur, horrified.

  “Loopy, completely bananas. I’m taking her back to the hospital and telling them to have another go. They let her out while she still thought she was a hedgehog.”

  “A hedgehog?”

  Russell hooted his horn fiercely at a car that came round the corner toward them halfway across on to their side of the road, making them swerve. The anger seemed to make him feel better.

  “Well, maybe not a hedgehog,” he said after he’d settled down again, “though it would probably be simpler to deal with if she did. If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ’em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves, come down again when they feel better. At least medical science could deal with it, that’s the point. Seems that’s not good enough for Fenny, though.”

  “Fenny …?”

  “You know what I got her for Christmas?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Black’s Medical Dictionary.”

  “Nice present.”

  “I thought so. Thousands of diseases in it, all in alphabetical order.”

  “You say her name is Fenny?”

  “Yeah. Take your pick, I said. Anything in here can be dealt with. The proper drugs can be prescribed. But no, she has to have something different. Just to make life difficult. She was like that at school, you know.”

  “Was she?”

  “She was. Fell over playing hockey and broke a bone nobody had ever heard of.”

  “I can see how that would be irritating,” said Arthur doubtfully. He was rather disappointed to discover her name was Fenny. It was a rather silly, dispiriting name, such as an unlovely maiden aunt might vote herself if she couldn’t sustain the name Fenella properly.

  “Not that I wasn’t sympathetic,” continued Russell, “but it did get a bit irritating. She was limping for months.”

  He slowed down.

  “This is your exit, isn’t it?”

  “Ah no,” said Arthur, “five miles farther on. If that’s all right.”

  “Okay,” said Russell, after a very tiny pause to indicate that it wasn’t, and speeded up again.

  It was in fact Arthur’s exit, but he couldn’t leave without finding out something more about this girl who seemed to have taken such a grip on his mind without even waking up. He could take either of the next two exits.

  They led back to the village that had been his home, though what he would find there he hesitated to imagine. Familiar landmarks had been flitting by, ghostlike, in the dark, giving rise in him to the shudders that only very very normal things can create, when seen where the mind is unprepared for them, and in an unfamiliar light.

  By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.

  Eight years ago, at lunchtime, this planet had been demolished, utterly destroyed, by the huge yellow Vogon ships which had hung in the lunchtime sky as if the law of gravity was no more than a local regulation, and breaking it no more than just a parking offense.

  “Delusions,” said Russell.

  “What?” said Arthur, startled out of his train of thought.

  “She says she suffers from strange delusions that she’s living in the real world. It’s no good telling her that she is living in the real world because she just says that’s why the delusions are so strange. Don’t know about you, but I find that kind of conversation pretty exhausting. Give her the tablets and piss off for a beer is my answer. I mean, you can only muck about so much, can’t you?”

  Arthur frowned, not for the first time. “Well …”

  “And all this dreams and nightmare stuff. And the doctors going on about strange jumps in her brain-wave patterns.”

  “Jumps?”

  “This,” said Fenny.

  Arthur whirled round in his seat and stared into her suddenly open but utterly vacant eyes. Whatever she was looking at wasn’t in the car. Her eyes fluttered, her head jerked once, and then she was sleeping peacefully.

  “What did she say?” he asked anxiously.

  “She said ‘this.’ ”

  “This what?”

  “This what? How the heck should I know? This hedgehog, that chimney pot, the other pair of Don Alfonso’s tweezers. She’s barking mad, I thought I’d mentioned that.”

  “You don’t seem to care very much.” Arthur tried to say it as matter-of-factly as possible but it didn’t seem to work.

  “Look, buster …”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I didn’t mean it to sound like that,” said Arthur. “I know you care a lot, obviously,” he added, lying. “I know that you have to deal with it somehow. You’ll have to excuse me. I just hitched from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula.”

  He stared furiously out the window.

  He was astonished that of all the sensations fighting for room in his head on this night as he returned to the home that he thought had vanished into oblivion forever, the one that was compelling him was an obsession with this bizarre girl of whom he knew nothing other than that she had said “this” to him, and that he wouldn’t wish, her brother on a Vogon.

  “So, er, what were the jumps, these jumps you mentioned,” he went on to say as quickly as he could.

  “Look, this is my sister, I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about—”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Perhaps you’d better let me out. This is …”

  At the moment he said it, it became impossible, because the storm which had passed them by suddenly erupted again. Lightning belted through the sky, and someone seemed to be pouring something which closely resembled the Atlantic Ocean over them, through a sieve.

  Russell swore and steered intently for a few seconds as the sky blattered at them. He worked out his anger by rashly accelerating to pass a lorry marked “McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage.” The tension eased as the rain subsided.

  “It started out
with all that business of the CIA agent they found in the reservoir, when everybody had all the hallucinations and everything, you remember?”

  Arthur wondered for a moment whether to mention again that he had just hitchhiked back from the other side of the Horsehead Nebula and was for this and various other related and astounding reasons a little out of touch with recent events, but he decided it would only confuse matters further.

  “No,” he said.

  “That was the moment she cracked up. She was in a café somewhere. Rickmansworth. Don’t know what she was doing there, but that was where she cracked up. Apparently she stood up, calmly announced that she had undergone some extraordinary revelation or something, wobbled a bit, looked confused, and finally collapsed screaming into an egg sandwich.”

  Arthur winced.

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said a little stiffly.

  Russell made a sort of grumping noise.

  “So what,” said Arthur in an attempt to piece things together, “was the CIA agent doing in the reservoir?”

  “Bobbing up and down, of course. He was dead.”

  “But what-”

  “Come on you remember all that stuff. The hallucinations. Everyone said it was the CIA experimenting with drug warfare or something. Some crackpot theory that instead of invading a country it would be much cheaper and more effective to make everyone think they’d been invaded.”

  “What hallucinations were those exactly …?” said Arthur in a rather quiet voice.

  “What do you mean, what hallucinations? I’m talking about all that stuff with the big yellow ships, everyone going crazy and saying we’re going to die, and then pop, they vanished as the effect wore off. The CIA denied it, which meant it must be true.”

  Arthur’s head went a little swimmy. His hand grabbed at something to steady himself, and gripped it tightly. His mouth made little opening and closing movements as if it was on his mind to say something, but nothing emerged.

  “Anyway,” continued Russell, “whatever drug it was it didn’t seem to wear off so fast with Fenny. I was all for suing the CIA, but a lawyer friend of mine said it would be like trying to attack a lunatic asylum with a banana, so … “