The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Read online

  “Oh, good,” he thought, “that should add a little …”

  Then, as his running feet took him nearer he saw more clearly. The batsman standing ready at the wicket was not one of the England cricket team. He was not one of the Australian cricket team. It was one of the robot Krikkit team. It was a cold, hard, lethal white killer robot that presumably had not returned to its ship with the others.

  Quite a few thoughts collided in Arthur Dent’s mind at this moment, but he didn’t seem to be able to stop running. Time suddenly seemed to be going terribly, terribly slowly, but still he didn’t seem to be able to stop running.

  Moving as if through syrup he slowly turned his troubled head and looked at his own hand, the hand that was holding the small hard red ball.

  His feet were pounding slowly onward, unstoppably, as he stared at the ball gripped in his helpless hand. It was emitting a deep red glow, and flashing intermittently. And still his feet were pounding inexorably forward.

  He looked at the Krikkit robot again standing implacably still and purposeful in front of him, battleclub raised in readiness. Its eyes were burning with a deep cold fascinating light, and Arthur could not move his own eyes from them. He seemed to be looking down a tunnel at them—nothing on either side seemed to exist.

  Some of the thoughts that were colliding in his mind at this time were these:

  He felt a hell of a fool.

  He felt that he should have listened rather more carefully to a number of things he had heard said, phrases that now pounded round his mind as his feet pounded onward to the point where he would inevitably release the ball to the Krikkit robot, who would inevitably strike it.

  He remembered Hactar saying, “Have I failed? Failure doesn’t bother me.”

  He remembered the account of Hactar’s dying words, “What’s done is done. I have fulfilled my function.”

  He remembered Hactar saying that he had managed to make “a few things.”

  He remembered the sudden movement in his tote bag that had made him grip it tightly to himself when he was in the Dust Cloud.

  He remembered that he had traveled back in time a couple of days to come to Lord’s again.

  He also remembered that he wasn’t a very good bowler.

  He felt his arm coming round, gripping tightly onto the ball that he now knew for certain was the supernova bomb, which Hactar had built himself and planted on him, the bomb which would cause the Universe to come to an abrupt and premature end.

  He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

  He would feel very, very embarrassed meeting everybody.

  He hoped, he hoped, he hoped that his bowling was as bad as he remembered it to be, because that seemed to be the only thing now standing between this moment and universal oblivion.

  He felt his legs pounding, he felt his arm coming round, he felt his feet connecting with the airline bag he’d stupidly left lying on the ground in front of him, he felt himself falling heavily forward, but having his mind so terribly full of other things at this point, he completely forgot about hitting the ground and didn’t.

  Still holding the ball firmly in his right hand he soared up into the air whimpering with surprise.

  He wheeled and whirled through the air, spinning out of control.

  He twisted down toward the ground, flinging himself hectically through the air, at the same time hurling the bomb harmlessly off into the distance.

  He hurtled toward the astounded robot from behind. It still had its multifunctional battleclub raised, but had suddenly been deprived of anything to hit.

  With a sudden mad outburst of strength, he wrested the battleclub from the grip of the startled robot, executed a dazzling banking turn in the air, hurtled back down in a furious power dive and with one crazy swing knocked the robot’s head from the robot’s shoulders.

  “Are you coming now?” said Ford.

  Chapter 34

  And at the end they traveled again.

  There was a time when Arthur Dent would not. He said that the Bistromathic Drive had revealed to him that time and distance were one, that mind and Universe were one, that perception and reality were one, and that the more one traveled the more one stayed in one place, and that what with one thing and another he would rather just stay put for a while and sort it all out in his mind, which was now at one with the Universe so it shouldn’t take too long and he could get a good rest afterward, put in a little flying practice and learn to cook, which he had always meant to do. The can of Greek olive oil was now his most prized possession, and he said that the way it had unexpectedly turned up in his life had again given him a certain sense of the oneness of things, which, which made him feel that …

  He yawned and fell asleep.

  In the morning as they prepared to take him to some quiet and idyllic planet where they wouldn’t mind his talking like that, they suddenly picked up a computer-driven distress call and diverted to investigate.

  A small but apparently undamaged spacecraft of the Merida class seemed to be dancing a strange little jig through the void. A brief computer scan revealed that the ship was fine, its computer was fine but that its pilot was mad.

  “Half-mad, half-mad,” the man insisted as they carried him, raving, aboard.

  He was a journalist with the Sidereal Daily Mentioner. They sedated him and sent Marvin in to keep him company until he promised to try to talk sense.

  “I was covering a trial,” he said at last, “on Argabuthon.”

  He pushed himself up onto his thin and wasted shoulders; his eyes stared wildly. His white hair seemed to be waving at someone it knew in the next room.

  “Easy, easy,” said Ford. Trillian put a soothing hand on his shoulder.

  The man sank back down again, and stared at the ceiling of the ship’s sick bay.

  “The case,” he said, “is now immaterial, but there was a witness … a witness … a man called … called Prak. A strange and difficult man. They were eventually forced to administer a drug to make him tell the truth, a truth drug.”

  His eyes rolled helplessly in his head.

  “They gave him too much,” he said in a tiny whimper, “they gave him much too much.” He started to cry. “I think the robots must have jogged the surgeon’s arm.”

  “Robots?” asked Zaphod sharply. “What robots?”

  “Some white robots,” whispered the man hoarsely, “broke into the courtroom and stole the Judge’s Scepter, the Argabuthon Scepter of Justice, nasty plastic thing. I don’t know why they wanted it”—he began to cry again—“and I think they jogged the surgeon’s arm.…”

  He shook his head loosely from side to side, helplessly, sadly, his eyes screwed up in pain.

  “And when the trial continued,” he said in a weeping whisper, “they asked Prak a most unfortunate thing. They asked him”—he paused and shivered—“to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. Only, don’t you see?”

  He suddenly hoisted himself up onto his elbows again and shouted at them.

  “They’d given him much too much of the drug!”

  He collapsed again, moaning quietly. “Much too much too much too much too …”

  The group gathered around his bedside glanced at one another. There were goose bumps on backs.

  “What happened?” said Zaphod at last.

  “Oh, he told it all right,” said the man savagely, “for all I know he’s still telling it now. Strange, terrible things … terrible terrible!” he screamed.

  They tried to calm him, but he struggled to his elbows again.

  “Terrible things, incomprehensible things,” he shouted, “things that would drive a man mad!”

  He stared wildly at them.

  “Or in my case,” he said, “half-mad. I’m a journalist.”

  “You mean,” said Arthur quietly, “that you are used to confronting the truth?”

&
nbsp; “No,” said the man with a puzzled frown, “I mean that I made an excuse and left early.”

  He collapsed into a coma from which he recovered only once and briefly.

  On that one occasion, they discovered from him the following:

  When it became clear what was happening, and as it became clear that Prak could not be stopped, that here was truth in its absolute and final form, the court was cleared.

  Not only cleared, it was sealed up, with Prak still in it. Steel walls were erected around it, and, just to be on the safe side, barbed wire, electric fences, crocodile swamps and three major armies were installed, so that no one would ever have to hear Prak speak.

  “That’s a pity,” said Arthur. “I’d like to hear what he has to say. Presumably he would know what the Question to the Ultimate Answer is. It’s always bothered me that we never found out.”

  “Think of a number,” said the computer, “any number.”

  Arthur told the computer the telephone number of King’s Cross railway station passenger inquiries, on the grounds that it must have some function, and this might turn out to be it.

  The computer injected the number into the ship’s reconstituted Improbability Drive.

  In Relativity, Matter tells Space how to curve, and Space tells Matter how to move.

  The Heart of Gold told space to get knotted, and parked itself neatly within the inner steel perimeter of the Argabuthon Chamber of Law.

  The courtroom was an austere place, a large dark chamber, clearly designed for justice rather than, for instance, pleasure. You wouldn’t hold a dinner party there, at least not a successful one. The decor would get your guests down.

  The ceilings were high, vaulted and very dark. Shadows lurked there with grim determination. The paneling for the walls and benches, the cladding of the heavy pillars, all were carved from the darkest and most severe trees in the fearsome Forest of Arglebard. The massive black podium of justice which dominated the center of the chamber was a monster of gravity. If a sunbeam had ever managed to slink this far into the justice complex of Argabuthon it would have turned around and slunk straight back out again.

  Arthur and Trillian were the first in, while Ford and Zaphod bravely kept a watch on their rear.

  At first it seemed totally dark and deserted. Their footsteps echoed hollowly round the chamber. This seemed curious. All the defenses were still in position and operative around the outside of the building, they had run scan checks. Therefore, they had assumed, the truth-telling must still be going on.

  But there was nothing.

  Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness they spotted a dull red glow in a corner, and behind the glow a live shadow. They swung a flashlight round onto it.

  Prak was lounging on a bench, smoking a listless cigarette.

  “Hi,” he said, with a little half-wave. His voice echoed through the chamber. He was a little man with scraggy hair. He sat with his shoulders hunched forward and his head and knees kept jiggling. He took a drag of his cigarette.

  They stared at him.

  “What’s going on?” said Trillian.

  “Nothing,” said the man, and jiggled his shoulders.

  Arthur shone his flashlight full on Prak’s face.

  “We thought,” he said, “that you were meant to be telling the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth.”

  “Oh, that,” said Prak, “yeah. I was. I finished. There’s not nearly as much of it as people imagine. Some of it’s pretty funny though.”

  He suddenly exploded into about three seconds of maniacal laughter and stopped again. He sat there, jiggling his head and knees. He dragged on his cigarette with a strange half-smile.

  Ford and Zaphod came forward out of the shadows.

  “Tell us about it,” said Ford.

  “Oh, I can’t remember any of it now,” said Prak. “I thought of writing some of it down, but first I couldn’t find a pencil, and then I thought, why bother?”

  There was a long silence, during which they thought they could feel the Universe age a little. Prak stared into the light.

  “None of it?” said Arthur at last. “You can remember none of it?”

  “No. Except most of the good bits were about frogs, I remember that.”

  Suddenly he was hooting with laughter again and stamping his feet on the ground.

  “You would not believe some of the things about frogs,” he gasped. “Come on, let’s go out and find ourselves a frog. Boy, will I ever see them in a new light!” He leaped to his feet and did a tiny little dance. Then he stopped and took a long drag at his cigarette.

  “Let’s find a frog I can laugh at,” he said simply. “Anyway, who are you guys?”

  “We came to find you,” said Trillian, deliberately not keeping the disappointment out of her voice. “My name is Trillian.”

  Prak jiggled his head.

  “Ford Prefect,” said Ford Prefect with a shrug.

  Prak jiggled his head.

  “And I,” said Zaphod, when he judged that the silence was once again deep enough to allow an announcement of such gravity to be tossed in lightly, “am Zaphod Beeblebrox.”

  Prak jiggled his head.

  “Who’s this guy?” said Prak, jiggling his shoulder at Arthur, who was standing silent for a moment, lost in disappointed thoughts.

  “Me?” said Arthur. “Oh, my name’s Arthur Dent.”

  Prak’s eyes popped out of his head.

  “No kidding?” he yelped. “You are Arthur Dent? The Arthur Dent?”

  He staggered backward, clutching his stomach and convulsed with fresh paroxysms of laughter.

  “Hey, just think of meeting you!” he gasped. “Boy,” he shouted, “you are the most … wow, you just leave the frogs standing!”

  He howled and screamed with laughter. He fell over backward onto the bench. He hollered and yelled in hysterics. He cried with laughter, kicked his legs in the air, he beat his chest. Gradually he subsided, panting. He looked at them. He looked at Arthur. He fell back again howling with laughter. Eventually he fell asleep.

  Arthur stood there with his lips twitching while the others carried Prak comatose on to the ship.

  “Before we picked up Prak,” said Arthur, “I was going to leave. I still want to, and I think I should do so as soon as possible.”

  The others nodded in silence, a silence only slightly undermined by the heavily muffled and distant sound of hysterical laughter that came drifting from Prak’s cabin at the farthest end of the ship.

  “We have questioned him,” continued Arthur, “or at least, you have questioned him—I, as you know, can’t go near him—on everything, and he doesn’t really seem to have anything to contribute. Just the occasional snippet, and things I don’t wish to hear about frogs.”

  The others tried not to smirk.

  “Now, I am the first to appreciate a joke,” said Arthur, and then had to wait for the others to stop laughing.

  “I am the first …” He stopped again. This time he stopped and listened to the silence. There actually was silence this time, and it had come very suddenly.

  Prak was quiet. For days they had lived with constant maniacal laughter ringing round the ship, only occasionally relieved by short periods of light giggling and sleep. Arthur’s very soul was clenched with paranoia.

  This was not the silence of sleep. A buzzer sounded. A glance at a board told them that the buzzer had been sounded by Prak.

  “He’s not well,” said Trillian, quietly. “The constant laughing is completely wrecking his body.”

  Arthur’s lips twitched but he said nothing.

  “We’d better go and see him,” said Trillian.

  Trillian came out of the cabin wearing her serious face.

  “He wants you to go in,” she said to Arthur, who was wearing his glum and tight-lipped one. He thrust his hands deep into his dressing-gown pockets and tried to think of something to say which wouldn’t sound petty. It seemed terribly unfair, but he cou
ldn’t.

  “Please,” said Trillian.

  He shrugged, and went in, taking his glum and tight-lipped face with him, despite the reaction this always provoked from Prak.

  He looked down at his tormentor, who was lying quietly on the bed, ashen and wasted. His breathing was very shallow. Ford and Zaphod were standing by the bed looking awkward.

  “You wanted to ask me something,” said Prak in a thin voice and coughed slightly.

  Just the cough made Arthur stiffen, but it passed and subsided.

  “How do you know that?” he asked.

  Prak shrugged weakly.

  “’Cos it’s true,” he said simply.

  Arthur took the point.

  “Yes,” he said at last in rather a strained drawl, “I did have a question. Or rather, what I actually have is an answer. I wanted to know what the question was.”

  Prak nodded sympathetically, and Arthur relaxed a little.

  “It’s … well, it’s a long story,” he said, “but the question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating.”

  Prak nodded again.

  “Forty-two,” he said, “yes, that’s right.”

  He paused. Shadows of thought and memory crossed his face like the shadows of clouds crossing the land.

  “I’m afraid,” he said at last, “that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”

  He paused again. Disappointment crept into Arthur’s face and snuggled down into its accustomed place.

  “Except,” said Prak, struggling to sort a thought out, “if it happened, it seems that the Question and the Answer would just cancel each other out, and take the Universe with them, which would then be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable. It is possible that this has already happened,” he added with a weak smile, “but there is a certain amount of uncertainty about it.”

  A little giggle brushed through him.

  Arthur sat down on a stool.