The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “Yeah, well, just for safety, okay?” said Zaphod.

  “Whose? Yours or mine?”

  “Good lad. Okay, here we go.”

  Zaphod scrambled down into the passage, followed by Trillian and Ford.

  “Well, I hope you all have a really miserable time,” complained Arthur.

  “Don’t worry,” Marvin assured him, “they will.”

  In a few seconds they had disappeared from view.

  Arthur stamped around in a huff, and then decided that a whale’s graveyard is not on the whole a good place to stamp around in.

  Marvin eyed him balefully for a moment, and then turned himself off.

  Zaphod marched quickly down the passageway, nervous as hell, but trying to hide it by striding purposefully. He flung the beam around. The walls were covered in dark tiles and were cold to the touch, the air thick with decay.

  “There, what did I tell you?” he said. “An inhabited planet. Magrathea,” and he strode on through the dirt and debris that littered the tile floors.

  Trillian was reminded unavoidably of the London Underground, though it was less thoroughly squalid.

  At intervals along the walls the tiles gave way to large mosaics—simple angular patterns in bright colors. Trillian stopped and studied one of them but could not interpret any sense in them. She called to Zaphod.

  “Hey, have you any idea what these strange symbols are?”

  “I think they’re just strange symbols of some kind,” said Zaphod, hardly glancing back.

  Trillian shrugged and hurried after him.

  From time to time a doorway led either to the left or right into smallish chambers which Ford discovered to be full of derelict computer equipment. He dragged Zaphod into one to have a look. Trillian followed.

  “Look,” said Ford, “you reckon this is Magrathea …”

  “Yeah,” said Zaphod, “and we heard the voice, right?”

  “Okay, so I’ve bought the fact that it’s Magrathea—for the moment. What you have so far said nothing about is how in the Galaxy you found it. You didn’t just look it up in a star atlas, that’s for sure.”

  “Research. Government archives. Detective work. Few lucky guesses. Easy.”

  “And then you stole the Heart of Gold to come and look for it with?”

  “I stole it to look for a lot of things.”

  “A lot of things?” said Ford in surprise. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  “What not?”

  “Because … because … I think it might be because if I knew I wouldn’t be able to look for them.”

  “What, are you crazy?”

  “It’s a possibility I haven’t ruled out yet,” said Zaphod quietly. “I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.”

  For a long time nobody said anything as Ford gazed at Zaphod with a mind suddenly full of worry.

  “Listen, old friend, if you want to …” started Ford eventually.

  “No, wait … I’ll tell you something,” said Zaphod. “I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I’ll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it’s easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It’s like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the checks. And then whenever I stop and think—why did I want to do something?—how did I work out how to do it?—I get a very strong desire just to stop thinking about it. Like I have now. It’s a big effort to talk about it.”

  Zaphod paused for a while. For a while there was silence. Then he frowned and said, “Last night I was worrying about this again. About the fact that part of my mind just didn’t seem to work properly. Then it occurred to me that the way it seemed was that someone else was using my mind to have good ideas with, without telling me about it. I put the two ideas together and decided that maybe that somebody had locked off part of my mind for that purpose, which was why I couldn’t use it. I wondered if there was a way I could check.

  “I went to the ship’s medical bay and plugged myself into the encephalographic screen. I went through every major screening test on both my heads—all the tests I had to go through under Government medical officers before my nomination for presidency could be properly ratified. They showed up nothing. Nothing unexpected at least. They showed that I was clever, imaginative, irresponsible, untrustworthy, extrovert, nothing you couldn’t have guessed. And no other anomalies. So I started inventing further tests, completely at random. Nothing. Then I tried superimposing the results from one head on top of the results from the other head. Still nothing. Finally I got silly, because I’d given it all up as nothing more than an attack of paranoia. Last thing I did before I packed it in was take the superimposed picture and look at it through a green filter. You remember I was always superstitious about the color green when I was a kid? I always wanted to be a pilot on one of the trading scouts?”

  Ford nodded.

  “And there it was,” said Zaphod, “clear as day. A whole section in the middle of both brains that related only to each other and not to anything else around them. Some bastard had cauterized all the synapses and electronically traumatized those two lumps of cerebellum.”

  Ford stared at him, aghast. Trillian had turned white.

  “Somebody did that to you?” whispered Ford.

  “Yeah.”

  “But have you any idea who? Or why?”

  “Why? I can only guess. But I do know who the bastard was.”

  “You know? How do you know?”

  “Because they left their initials burned into the cauterized synapses. They left them there for me to see.”

  Ford stared at him in horror and felt his skin begin to crawl.

  “Initials? Burned into your brain?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, what were they, for God’s sake?”

  Zaphod looked at him in silence again for a moment. Then he looked away.

  “Z.B.,” he said quietly.

  At that moment a steel shutter slammed down behind them and gas started to pour into the chamber.

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” choked Zaphod as all three passed out.

  Chapter 21

  On the surface of Magrathea Arthur wandered about moodily. Ford had thoughtfully left him his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to while away the time with. He pushed a few buttons at random.

  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.

  One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he’d bought over the past few years.

  There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centers of ballpoint loss throughout the Galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid life-style, responding to highly ballpoint-oriented stimuli, and generally leading the
ballpoint equivalent of the good life.

  And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig suddenly claimed to have found this planet, and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who are determined to make fools of themselves in public.

  When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

  There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious sixty thousand Altairian dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox’s highly profitable secondhand ballpoint business.

  Arthur read this, and put the book down.

  The robot still sat there, completely inert.

  Arthur got up and walked to the top of the crater. He walked around the crater. He watched two suns set magnificently over Magrathea.

  He went back down into the crater. He woke the robot up because even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

  “Night’s falling,” he said. “Look, robot, the stars are coming out.”

  From the heart of a dark nebula it is possible to see very few stars, and only very faintly, but they were there to be seen.

  The robot obediently looked at them, then looked back.

  “I know,” he said. “Wretched, isn’t it?”

  “But that sunset! I’ve never seen anything like it in my wildest dreams … the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space.”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Marvin. “It’s rubbish.”

  “We only ever had the one sun at home,” persevered Arthur. “I came from a planet called Earth, you know.”

  “I know,” said Marvin, “you keep going on about it. It sounds awful.”

  “Ah no, it was a beautiful place.”

  “Did it have oceans?”

  “Oh yes,” said Arthur with a sigh, “great wide rolling blue oceans …”

  “Can’t bear oceans,” said Marvin.

  “Tell me,” inquired Arthur, “do you get on well with other robots?”

  “Hate them,” said Marvin. “Where are you going?”

  Arthur couldn’t bear any more. He had got up again.

  “I think I’ll just take another walk,” he said.

  “Don’t blame you,” said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven billion sheep before falling asleep again a second later.

  Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job. He trudged back up the wall of the crater.

  Because the atmosphere was so thin and because there was no moon, nightfall was very rapid and it was by now very dark. Because of this, Arthur practically walked into the old man before he noticed him.

  Chapter 22

  He was standing with his back to Arthur watching the very last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. He was tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long gray robe. When he turned, his face was thin and distinguished, careworn but not unkind, the sort of face you would happily bank with. But he didn’t turn yet, not even to react to Arthur’s yelp of surprise.

  Eventually the last rays of the sun vanished completely, and he turned. His face was still illuminated from somewhere, and when Arthur looked for the source of the light he saw that a few yards away stood a small craft of some kind—a small Hovercraft, Arthur guessed. It shed a dim pool of light around it.

  The man looked at Arthur, sadly it seemed.

  “You choose a cold night to visit our dead planet,” he said.

  “Who … who are you?” stammered Arthur.

  The man looked away. Again a look of sadness seemed to cross his face.

  “My name is not important,” he said.

  He seemed to have something on his mind. Conversation was clearly something he felt he didn’t have to rush at. Arthur felt awkward.

  “I … er … you startled me …” he said, lamely.

  The man looked round to him again and slightly raised his eyebrows.

  “Hmmm?” he said.

  “I said you startled me.”

  “Do not be alarmed, I will not harm you.”

  Arthur frowned at him. “But you shot at us! There were missiles …” he said.

  The man gazed into the pit of the crater. The slight glow from Marvin’s eyes cast very faint red shadows on the huge carcass of the whale.

  The man chuckled slightly.

  “An automatic system,” he said and gave a small sigh. “Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they take the occasional potshot to relieve the monotony.”

  He looked gravely at Arthur and said, “I’m a great fan of science, you know.”

  “Oh … er, really?” said Arthur, who was beginning to find the man’s curious, kindly manner disconcerting.

  “Oh yes,” said the old man and simply stopped talking again.

  “Ah,” said Arthur, “er …” He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman’s husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

  “You seem ill at ease,” said the old man with polite concern.

  “Er, no … well, yes. Actually, you see, we weren’t really expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that you were all dead or something …”

  “Dead?” said the old man. “Good gracious me, no, we have but slept.”

  “Slept?” said Arthur incredulously.

  “Yes, through the economic recession, you see,” said the old man, apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word he was talking about or not.

  Arthur had to prompt him again.

  “Er, economic recession?”

  “Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see …”

  He paused and looked at Arthur.

  “You know we built planets, do you?” he asked solemnly.

  “Well, yes,” said Arthur, “I’d sort of gathered …”

  “Fascinating trade,” said the old man, and a wistful look came into his eyes, “doing the coastlines was always my favorite. Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords … so anyway,” he said, trying to find his thread again, “the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.”

  The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.

  “The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.”

  Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.

  “That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” asked the old man mildly. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of touch.”

  He pointed down into the crater.

  “Is that robot yours?” he said.

  “No,” came a thin metallic voice from the crater, “I’m mine.”

  “If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”

  “Bring it,” said the old man. Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man’s voice. He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn’t.

  “On second thoughts,” said the old man, “leave it here. You must come with me. Great things are afoot.” He turned toward his c
raft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

  Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again muttering sour nothings to himself.

  “Come,” called the old man, “come now or you will be late.”

  “Late?” said Arthur. “What for?”

  “What is your name, human?”

  “Dent. Arthur Dent,” said Arthur.

  “Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent,” said the old man, sternly. “It’s a sort of threat, you see.” Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. “I’ve never been very good at them myself, but I’m told they can be very effective.”

  Arthur blinked at him.

  “What an extraordinary person,” he muttered to himself.

  “I beg your pardon?” said the old man.

  “Oh, nothing, I’m sorry,” said Arthur in embarrassment. “All right, where do we go?”

  “In my aircar,” said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. “We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes.”

  Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

  He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

  “Excuse me,” he said to him, “what is your name, by the way?”

  “My name?” said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again. He paused. “My name,” he said, “is Slartibartfast.”

  Arthur practically choked.

  “I beg your pardon?” he spluttered.

  “Slartibartfast,” repeated the old man quietly.

  “Slartibartfast?”

  The old man looked at him gravely.

  “I said it wasn’t important,” he said.

  The aircar sailed through the night.