The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “The Earth,” said Random.

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s where you came from, and where Mum came from?”

  “Yes.”

  Random took the watch back from him and looked at it again, clearly baffled by something. Then she held it up to her ear and listened in puzzlement.

  “What’s that noise?”

  “It’s ticking. That’s the mechanism that drives the watch. It’s called clockwork. It’s all kind of interlocking cogs and springs that work to turn the hands around at exactly the right speed to mark the hours and minutes and days and so on.”

  Random carried on peering at it.

  “There’s something puzzling you,” said Arthur. “What is it?”

  “Yes,” said Random, at last. “Why’s it all in hardware?”

  Arthur suggested they go for a walk. He felt there were things they should discuss, and for once Random seemed, if not precisely amenable and willing, then at least not growling.

  From Random’s point of view this was also all very weird. It wasn’t that she wanted to be difficult, as such, it was just that she didn’t know how or what else to be.

  Who was this guy? What was this life she was supposed to lead? What was this world she was supposed to lead it in? And what was this universe that kept coming at her through her eyes and ears? What was it for? What did it want?

  She’d been born in a spaceship that had been going from somewhere to somewhere else, and when it had got to somewhere else, somewhere else had only turned out to be another somewhere that you had to get to somewhere else again from, and so on.

  It was her normal expectation that she was supposed to be somewhere else. It was normal for her to feel that she was in the wrong place.

  Then, constant time travel had only compounded this problem and had led to the feeling that she was not only always in the wrong place, but she was also almost always there at the wrong time.

  She didn’t notice that she felt this, because it was the only way she ever felt, just as it never seemed odd to her that nearly everywhere she went she needed either to wear weights or antigravity suits and usually special apparatus for breathing as well. The only places you could ever feel were right were worlds you designed for yourself to inhabit—virtual realities in the electric clubs. It had never occurred to her that the real Universe was something you could actually fit into.

  And that included this Lamuella place her mother had dumped her in. And it also included this person who had bestowed on her this precious and magical gift of life in return for a seat upgrade. It was just as well he had turned out to be rather kind and friendly or there would have been trouble. Really. She’d got a specially sharpened stone in her pocket she could cause a lot of trouble with.

  It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training.

  They sat on the spot that Arthur particularly liked, on the side of a hill overlooking the valley. The sun was going down over the village.

  The only thing that Arthur wasn’t quite so fond of was being able to see a little way into the next valley, where a deep, dark, mangled furrow in the forest marked the spot where his ship had crashed. But maybe that was what kept bringing him back here. There were plenty of spots from which you could survey the lush rolling countryside of Lamuella, but this was the one he was drawn to, with its nagging dark spot of fear and pain nesding just on the edge of his vision.

  He had never been there again since he had been pulled out of the wreckage.

  Wouldn’t.

  Couldn’t bear it.

  In fact he had gone some of the way back to it the very next day, while he was still numb and spinning with shock. He had a broken leg, a couple of broken ribs, some bad burns and was not really thinking coherently but had insisted that the villagers take him, which, uneasily, they had. He had not managed to get right to the actual spot where the ground had bubbled and melted, however, and had at last hobbled away from the horror forever.

  Soon, word had got around that the whole area was haunted and no one had ventured back there ever since. The land was full of beautiful, verdant and delightful valleys—no point in going to a highly worrying one. Let the past hold on to itself and let the present move forward into the future.

  Random cradled the watch in her hands, slowly turning it to let the long light of the evening sun shine warmly in the scratches and scuffs of the thick glass. It fascinated her watching the spidery little second hand ticking its way around. Every time it completed a full circle, the longer of the two main hands had moved on exactly to the next of the sixty small divisions around the dial. And when the long hand had made its own full circle, the smaller hand had moved on to the next of the main digits.

  “You’ve been watching it for over an hour,” said Arthur, quietly.

  “I know,” she said. “An hour is when the big hand has gone all the way around, yes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I’ve been watching it for an hour and seventeen … minutes.”

  She smiled with a deep and mysterious pleasure and moved very slightly so that she was resting just a little against his arm. Arthur felt that a small sigh escaped from him that had been pent up inside his chest for weeks. He wanted to put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders, but felt it was too early yet and that she would shy away from him. But something was working. Something was easing inside her. The watch meant something to her that nothing in her life had so far managed to do. Arthur was not sure that he had really understood what it was yet, but he was profoundly pleased and relieved that something had reached her.

  “Explain to me again,” said Random.

  “There’s nothing really to it,” said Arthur. “Clockwork was something that developed over hundreds of years—”

  “Earth years.”

  “Yes. It became finer and finer and more and more intricate. It was highly skilled and delicate work. It had to be made very small, and it had to carry on working accurately however much you waved it around or dropped it.”

  “But only on one planet?”

  “Well, that was where it was made, you see. It was never expected to go anywhere else and deal with different suns and moons and magnetic fields and things. I mean the thing still goes perfectly well, but it doesn’t really mean much this far from Switzerland.”

  “From where?”

  “Switzerland. That’s where these were made. Small hilly country. Tiresomely neat. The people who made them didn’t really know there were other worlds.”

  “Quite a big thing not to know.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “So where did they come from?”

  “They, that is we … we just sort of grew there. We evolved on the Earth. From, I don’t know, some kind of sludge or something.”

  “Like this watch.”

  “Um. I don’t think the watch grew out of sludge.”

  “You don’t understand!”

  Random suddenly leapt to her feet, shouting.

  “You don’t understand! You don’t understand me, you don’t understand anything! I hate you for being so stupid!”

  She started to run hectically down the hill, still clutching the watch and shouting that she hated him.

  Arthur jumped up, startled and at a loss. He started to run after her through the stringy and clumpy grass. It was hard and painful for him. When he had broken his leg in the crash, it had not been a clean break, and it had not healed cleanly. He was stumbling and wincing as he ran.

  Suddenly she turned and faced him, her face dark with anger.

  She brandished the watch at him. “You don’t understand that there’s somewhere this belongs? Somewhere it works? Somewhere that it fits?”

  She turned and ran again. She was fit and fleet-footed and Arthur could not remotely keep up with her.

  It wasn’t that he had not expected being a father to be this difficult, it was that he hadn’t expected to be a father at all, particula
rly not suddenly and unexpectedly on an alien planet.

  Random turned to shout at him again. For some reason he stopped each time she did.

  “Who do you think I am?” she demanded angrily. “Your upgrade? Who do you think Mum thought I was? Some sort of ticket to the life she didn’t have?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Arthur, panting and hurting.

  “You don’t know what anybody means by anything!”

  “What do you mean?” “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  “Tell me! Please tell me! What does she mean by saying ‘the life she didn’t have’?”

  “She wished she’d stayed on Earth! She wished she hadn’t gone off with that stupid brain-dead fruit gum, Zaphod! She thinks she would have had a different life!”

  “But,” said Arthur, “she would have been killed! She would have been killed when the world was destroyed!”

  “That’s a different life, isn’t it?”

  “That’s …”

  “She wouldn’t have had to have me! She hates me!”

  “You can’t mean that! How could anyone possibly, er, I mean …”

  “She had me because I was meant to make things fit for her. That was my job. But I fitted even worse than she did! So she just shut me off and carried on with her stupid life.”

  “What’s stupid about her life? She’s fantastically successful, isn’t she? She’s all over time and space, all over the Sub-Etha TV networks …”

  “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!”

  Random turned and ran off again. Arthur couldn’t keep up with her and at last he had to sit down for a bit and let the pain in his leg subside. The turmoil in his head he didn’t know what to do with at all.

  He hobbled into the village an hour later. It was getting dark. The villagers he passed said hello, but there was a sense of nervousness and of not quite knowing what was going on or what to do about it in the air. Old Thrashbarg had been seen pulling on his beard a fair bit and looking at the moon, and that was not a good sign either.

  Arthur went into his hut.

  Random was sitting hunched quietly over the table.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” said Arthur as gently as he knew how. “It’s good to, well, to have a little chat. There’s so much we have to learn and understand about each other, and life isn’t, well, it isn’t all just tea and sandwiches …”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again, sobbing.

  Arthur went up to her and put his arm around her shoulder. She didn’t resist or pull away. Then Arthur saw what it was she was so sorry about.

  In the pool of light thrown by a Lamuellan lantern lay Arthur’s watch. Random had forced the back off it with the back edge of the butter-spreading knife and all of the minute cogs and springs and levers were lying in a tiny cockeyed mess where she’d been fiddling with them.

  “I just wanted to see how it worked,” said Random, “how it all fitted together. I’m so sorry! I can’t get it back together. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. I’ll get it repaired! Really! I’ll get it repaired!”

  The following day Thrashbarg came around and said all sorts of Bob stuff. He tried to exert a calming influence by inviting Random to let her mind dwell on the ineffable mystery of the giant earwig, and Random said there was no giant earwig and Thrashbarg went very cold and silent and said she would be cast into outer darkness. Random said good, she had been born there, and the next day the parcel arrived.

  This was all getting a bit eventful.

  In fact, when the parcel arrived, delivered by a kind of robot drone that dropped out of the sky making droning robot noises, it brought with it a sense, which gradually began to permeate through the whole village, that it was almost one event too many.

  It wasn’t the robot drone’s fault. All it required was Arthur Dent’s signature or thumbprint, or just a few scrapings of skin cells from the nape of his neck, and it would be on its way again. It hung around waiting, not quite sure what all this resentment was about. Meanwhile, Kirp had caught another fish with a head at both ends, but on closer inspection it turned out that it was in fact two fish cut in half and sewn together rather badly, so not only had Kirp failed to rekindle any great interest in two-headed fish, but he had seriously cast doubt on the authenticity of the first one. Only the pikka birds seemed to feel that everything was exactly normal.

  The robot drone got Arthur’s signature and made its escape. Arthur bore the parcel back to his hut and sat and looked at it.

  “Let’s open it!” said Random, who was feeling much more cheerful this morning now that everything around her had got thoroughly weird, but Arthur said no.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not addressed to me.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s addressed to … well, it’s addressed to Ford Prefect, in care of me.”

  “Ford Prefect? Is he the one who—”

  “Yes,” said Arthur, tartly.

  “I’ve heard about him.”

  “I expect you have.”

  “Let’s open it anyway. What else are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Arthur, who really wasn’t sure.

  He had taken his damaged knives over to the forge bright and early that morning and Strinder had had a look at them and said that he would see what he could do.

  They had tried the usual business of waving the knives through the air, feeling for the point of balance and the point of flex and so on, but the joy was gone from it, and Arthur had a sad feeling that his sandwich-making days were probably numbered.

  He hung his head.

  The next appearance of the Perfectly Normal Beasts was imminent, but Arthur felt that the usual festivities of hunting and feasting were going to be rather muted and uncertain. Something had happened here on Lamuella, and Arthur had a horrible feeling that it was him.

  “What do you think it is?” urged Random, turning the parcel over in her hands.

  “I don’t know,” said Arthur. “Something bad and worrying, though.”

  “How do you know?” Random protested.

  “Because anything that’s to do with Ford Prefect is bound to be worse and more worrying than something that isn’t,” said Arthur. “Believe me.”

  “You’re upset about something, aren’t you?” said Random.

  Arthur sighed.

  “I’m just feeling a little jumpy and unsettled, I think,” said Arthur.

  “I’m sorry,” said Random, and put the package down again. She could see that it really would upset him if she opened it. She would just have to do it when he wasn’t looking.

  Chapter 16

  Arthur wasn’t quite certain which he noticed as being missing first. When he noticed that the one wasn’t there, his mind instantly leapt to the other and he knew immediately that they were both gone and that something insanely bad and difficult to deal with would happen as a result.

  Random was not there. And neither was the parcel.

  He had left it up on a shelf all day, in plain view. It was an exercise in trust.

  He knew that one of the things he was supposed to do as a parent was to show trust in his child, to build a sense of trust and confidence into the bedrock of relationship between them. He had had a nasty feeling that that might be an idiotic thing to do, but he did it anyway, and sure enough it had turned out to be an idiotic thing to do. You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

  You also panic.

  Arthur ran out of the hut. It was the middle of the evening. The light was getting dim and a storm was brewing. He could not see her anywhere, nor any sign of her. He asked. No one had seen her. He asked again. No one else had seen her. They were going home for the night. A little wind was whipping around the edge of the village, picking things up and tossing them around in a dangerously casual manner.

  He found Old Thrashbarg and asked him. Thrash
barg looked at him stonily, and then pointed in the one direction that Arthur had dreaded and had therefore instinctively known was the way she would have gone.

  So now he knew the worst.

  She had gone where she thought he would not follow her.

  He looked up at the sky, which was sullen, streaked and livid, and reflected that it was the sort of sky that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse wouldn’t feel like a bunch of complete idiots riding out of.

  With a heavy sense of the utmost foreboding he set off on the track that led to the forest in the next valley. The first heavy blobs of rain began to hit the ground as Arthur tried to drag himself to some sort of run.

  Random reached the crest of the hill and looked down into the next valley. It had been a longer and harder climb than she had anticipated. She was a little worried that doing the trip at night was not that great an idea, but her father had been mooching around near the hut all day trying to pretend to either her or himself that he wasn’t guarding the parcel. At last he’d had to go over to the forge to talk with Strinder about the knives, and Random had seized her opportunity and done a runner with the parcel.

  It was perfectly clear that she couldn’t just open the thing there, in the hut, or even in the village. He might have come across her at any moment. Which meant that she had to go where she wouldn’t be followed.

  She could stop where she was now. She had gone this way in the hope that he wouldn’t follow her, and even if he did he would never find her up in the wooded parts of the hill with night drawing in and the rain starting.

  All the way up, the parcel had been jiggling under her arm. It was a satisfyingly hunky sort of thing: a box with a square top about the length of her forearm on each side, and about the length of her hand deep, wrapped up in brown plasper with an ingenious new form of self-knotting string. It didn’t rattle as she shook it, but she sensed that its weight was concentrated excitingly at the center.

  Having come so far, though, there was a certain satisfaction in not stopping here, but carrying on down into what seemed to be almost a forbidden area—where her father’s ship had come down. She wasn’t exactly certain what the word “haunted” meant, but it might be fun to find out. She would keep going and save the parcel for when she got there.