The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

Chapter 23

  It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

  Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

  The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

  In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.

  Chapter 24

  Silently the aircar coasted through the cold darkness, a single soft glow of light that was utterly alone in the deep Magrathean night. It sped swiftly. Arthur’s companion seemed sunk in his own thoughts, and when Arthur tried on a couple of occasions to engage him in conversation again he would simply reply by asking if he was comfortable enough, and then left it at that.

  Arthur tried to gauge the speed at which they were traveling, but the blackness outside was absolute and he was denied any reference points. The sense of motion was so soft and slight he could almost believe they were hardly moving at all.

  Then a tiny glow of light appeared in the far distance and within seconds had grown so much in size that Arthur realized it was traveling toward them at a colossal speed, and he tried to make out what sort of craft it might be. He peered at it, but was unable to discern any clear shape, and suddenly gasped in alarm as the aircar dipped sharply and headed downward in what seemed certain to be a collision course. Their relative velocity seemed unbelievable, and Arthur had hardly time to draw breath before it was all over. The next thing he was aware of was an insane silver blur that seemed to surround him. He twisted his head sharply round and saw a small black point dwindling rapidly in the distance behind them, and it took him several seconds to realize what had happened.

  They had plunged into a tunnel in the ground. The colossal speed had been their own, relative to the glow of light which was a stationary hole in the ground, the mouth of the tunnel. The insane blur of silver was the circular wall of the tunnel down which they were shooting, apparently at several hundred miles an hour.

  He closed his eyes in terror.

  After a length of time which he made no attempt to judge, he sensed a slight subsidence in their speed and some while later became aware that they were gradually gliding to a gentle halt.

  He opened his eyes again. They were still in the silver tunnel, threading and weaving their way through what appeared to be a crisscross warren of converging tunnels. When they finally stopped it was in a small chamber of curved steel. Several tunnels also had their termini here, and at the farther end of the chamber Arthur could see a large circle of dim irritating light. It was irritating because it played tricks with the eyes, it was impossible to focus on it properly or tell how near or far it was. Arthur guessed (quite wrongly) that it might be ultraviolet.

  Slartibartfast turned and regarded Arthur with his solemn old eyes.

  “Earthman,” he said, “we are now deep in the heart of Magrathea.”

  “How did you know I was an Earthman?” demanded Arthur.

  “These things will become clear to you,” said the old man gently, “at least,” he added with slight doubt in his voice, “clearer than they are at the moment.”

  He continued: “I should warn you that the chamber we are about to pass into does not literally exist within our planet. It is a little too … large. We are about to pass through a gateway into a vast tract of hyperspace. It may disturb you.”

  Arthur made nervous noises.

  Slartibartfast touched a button and added, not entirely reassuringly, “It scares the willies out of me. Hold tight.”

  The car shot forward straight into the circle of light, and suddenly Arthur had a fairly clear idea of what infinity looked like.

  It wasn’t infinity in fact. Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity—distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. The chamber into which the aircar emerged was anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.

  Arthur’s senses bobbed and spun as, traveling at the immense speed he knew the aircar attained, they climbed slowly through the open air, leaving the gateway through which they had passed an invisible pinprick in the shimmering wall behind them.

  The wall.

  The wall defied the imagination—seduced it and defeated it. The wall was so paralyzingly vast and sheer that its top, bottom and sides passed away beyond the reach of sight. The mere shock of vertigo could kill a man.

  The wall appeared perfectly flat. It would take the finest laser-measuring equipment to detect that as it climbed, apparently to infinity, as it dropped dizzily away, as it planed out to either side, it also curved. It met itself again thirteen light seconds away. In other words the wall formed the inside of a hollow sphere, a sphere over three million miles across and flooded with unimaginable light.

  “Welcome,” said Slartibartfast as the tiny speck that was the aircar, traveling now at three times the speed of sound, crept imperceptibly forward into the mind-boggling space, “welcome,” he said, “to our factory floor.”

  Arthur stared about him in a kind of wonderful horror. Ranged away before them, at distances he could neither judge nor even guess at, were a series of curious suspensions, delicate traceries of metal and light hung about shadowy spherical shapes that hung in the space.

  “This,” said Slartibartfast, “is where we make most of our planets, you see.”

  “You mean,” said Arthur, trying to form the words, “you mean you’re starting it all up again now?”

  “No no, good heavens, no,” exclaimed the old man, “no, the Galaxy isn’t nearly rich enough to support us yet. No, we’ve been awakened to perform just one extraordinary commission for very … special clients from another dimension. It may interest you … there in the distance in front of us.”

  Arthur followed the old man’s finger till he was able to pick out the floating structure he was pointing out. It was indeed the only one of the many structures that betrayed any sign of activity about it, though this was more a subliminal impression than anything one could put one’s finger on.

  At that moment, however, a flash of light arced through the structure and revealed in stark relief the patterns that were formed on the dark sphere within. Patterns that Arthur knew, rough blobby shapes that were as familiar to him as the shapes of words, part of the furniture of his mind. For a few seconds he sat in stunned silence as the images rushed around his mind and tried to find somewhere to settle down and make sense.

  Part of his brain told him that he knew perfectly well what he was looking at and what the shapes represented while another quite sensibly refused to countenance the idea and abdicated responsibility for any further thinking in that direction.

  The flash came again, and this time there could be no doubt.

  “The Earth …” whispered Arthur.

  “Well, the Earth Mark Two in fact,” said Slartibartfast cheerfully. “We’re making
a copy from our original blueprints.”

  There was a pause.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” said Arthur, slowly and with control, “that you originally … made the Earth?”

  “Oh yes,” said Slartibartfast. “Did you ever go to a place … I think it was called Norway?”

  “No,” said Arthur, “no, I didn’t.”

  “Pity,” said Slartibartfast, “that was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges. I was most upset to hear of its destruction.”

  “You were upset!”

  “Yes. Five minutes later and it wouldn’t have mattered so much. It was a quite shocking cock-up.”

  “Huh?” said Arthur.

  “The mice were furious.”

  “The mice were furious?”

  “Oh yes,” said the old man mildly.

  “Yes, well, so I expect were the dogs and cats and duckbilled platypuses, but …”

  “Ah, but they hadn’t paid for it, you see, had they?”

  “Look,” said Arthur, “would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?”

  For a while the aircar flew on in awkward silence. Then the old man tried patiently to explain.

  “Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we’ve got to build another one.”

  Only one word was registering with Arthur.

  “Mice?” he said.

  “Indeed, Earthman.”

  “Look, sorry, are we talking about the little white furry things with the cheese fixation and women standing on tables screaming in early sixties sitcoms?”

  Slartibartfast coughed politely.

  “Earthman,” he said, “it is sometimes hard to follow your mode of speech. Remember I have been asleep inside this planet of Magrathea for five million years and know little of these early sixties sitcoms of which you speak. These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. The whole business with the cheese and the squeaking is just a front.”

  The old man paused, and with a sympathetic frown continued. “They’ve been experimenting on you, I’m afraid.”

  Arthur thought about this for a second, and then his face cleared.

  “Ah no,” he said, “I see the source of the misunderstanding now. No, look, you see what happened was that we used to do experiments on them. They were often used in behavioral research, Pavlov and all that sort of stuff. So what happened was that the mice would be set all sorts of tests, learning to ring bells, run round mazes and things so that the whole nature of the learning process could be examined. From our observations of their behavior we were able to learn all sorts of things about our own.…”

  Arthur’s voice trailed off.

  “Such subtlety …” said Slartibartfast, “one has to admire it.”

  “What?” said Arthur.

  “How better to disguise their real natures, and how better to guide your thinking. Suddenly running down a maze the wrong way, eating the wrong bit of cheese, unexpectedly dropping dead of myxomatosis. If it’s finely calculated the cumulative effect is enormous.”

  He paused for effect.

  “You see, Earthman, they really are particularly clever hyperintelligent pandimensional beings. Your planet and people have formed the matrix of an organic computer running a ten-million-year research program.… Let me tell you the whole story. It’ll take a little time.”

  “Time,” said Arthur weakly, “is not currently one of my problems.”

  Chapter 25

  There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

  Many many millions of years ago a race of hyperintelligent pandimensional beings (whose physical manifestation in their own pandimensional universe is not dissimilar to our own) got so fed up with the constant bickering about the meaning of life which used to interrupt their favorite pastime of Brockian Ultra Cricket (a curious game which involved suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away) that they decided to sit down and solve their problems once and for all.

  And to this end they built themselves a stupendous super computer which was so amazingly intelligent that even before its data banks had been connected up it had started from I think therefore I am and got as far as deducing the existence of rice pudding and income tax before anyone managed to turn it off.

  It was the size of a small city.

  Its main console was installed in a specially designed executive office, mounted on an enormous executive desk of finest ultramahogany topped with rich ultrared leather. The dark carpeting was discreetly sumptuous, exotic pot plants and tastefully engraved prints of the principal computer programmers and their families were deployed liberally about the room, and stately windows looked out upon a tree-lined public square.

  On the day of the Great On-Turning two soberly dressed programmers with briefcases arrived and were shown discreetly into the office. They were aware that this day they would represent their entire race in its greatest moment, but they conducted themselves calmly and quietly as they seated themselves deferentially before the desk, opened their briefcases and took out their leather-bound notebooks.

  Their names were Lunkwill and Fook.

  For a few moments they sat in respectful silence, then, after exchanging a quiet glance with Fook, Lunkwill leaned forward and touched a small black panel.

  The subtlest of hums indicated that the massive computer was now in total active mode. After a pause it spoke to them in a voice rich, resonant and deep.

  It said: “What is this great task for which I, Deep Thought, the second greatest computer in the Universe of Time and Space, have been called into existence?”

  Lunkwill and Fook glanced at each other in surprise.

  “Your task, O computer …” began Fook.

  “No, wait a minute, this isn’t right,” said Lunkwill, worried. “We distinctly designed this computer to be the greatest one ever and we’re not making do with second best. Deep Thought,” he addressed the computer, “are you not as we designed you to be, the greatest, most powerful computer in all time?”

  “I described myself as the second greatest,” intoned Deep Thought, “and such I am.”

  Another worried look passed between the two programmers. Lunkwill cleared his throat.

  “There must be some mistake,” he said, “are you not a greater computer than the Milliard Gargantubrain at Maximegalon which can count all the atoms in a star in a millisecond?”

  “The Milliard Gargantubrain?” said Deep Thought with unconcealed contempt. “A mere abacus—mention it not.”

  “And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?”

  “A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.”

  The two programmers sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment. Then Lunkwill leaned forward again.

  “But are you not,” he said, “a more fiendish disputant than the Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler of Ciceronicus Twelve, the Magic and Indefatigable?”

  “The Great Hyperlobic Omni-Cognate Neutron Wrangler,” said Deep Thought, thoroughly rolling the r’s, “could talk all four legs off an Arcturan Mega-Donkey—but only I could persuade it to go for a walk afterward.”

  “Then what,” asked Fook, “is the problem?”

  “There is no problem,” said Deep Thought with magnificent ringin
g tones. “I am simply the second greatest computer in the Universe of Space and Time.”

  “But the second?” insisted Lunkwill. “Why do you keep saying the second? You’re surely not thinking of the Multicorticoid Perspicutron Titan Muller, are you? Or the Pondermatic? Or the …”

  Contemptuous lights flashed across the computer’s console.

  “I spare not a single unit of thought on these cybernetic simpletons!” he boomed. “I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me!”

  Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”

  “You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”

  Fook sighed heavily and glanced across to Lunkwill.

  “Can we get on and ask the question?” he said.

  Lunkwill motioned him to wait.

  “What computer is this of which you speak?” he asked.

  “I will speak of it no further in this present time,” said Deep Thought. “Now. Ask what else of me you will that I may function. Speak.”

  They shrugged at each other. Fook composed himself.

  “O Deep Thought computer,” he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us …” he paused, “the Answer!”

  “The Answer?” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to what?”

  “Life!” urged Fook.

  “The Universe!” said Lunkwill.

  “Everything!” they said in chorus.

  Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection.

  “Tricky,” he said finally.

  “But can you do it?”

  Again, a significant pause.

  “Yes,” said Deep Thought, “I can do it.”

  “There is an answer?” said Fook with breathless excitement.

  “A simple answer?” added Lunkwill.