Volume 3 - Life, The Universe And Everything Read online

  “Yes, that’s true,” admitted Arthur.

  All, however, that seemed to be afoot was a ceremony of some kind. It was being specially staged for the benefit of television rather than the spectators, and all they could gather about it from where they were standing was what they heard from a nearby radio. Ford was aggressively uninterested.

  He fretted as he heard it explained that the Ashes were about to be presented to the captain of the English team out there on the pitch, fumed when told that this was because they had now won it for the nth time, positively barked with annoyance at the information that the Ashes were the remains of a cricket stump, and when, further to this, he was asked to contend with the fact that the cricket stump in question had been burnt in Melbourne, Australia, in 1882, to signify the “death of English cricket,” he rounded on Slartibartfast, took a deep breath, but didn’t have a chance to say anything because the old man wasn’t there. He was marching out onto the pitch with terrible purpose in his gait; his hair, beard and robes swept behind him, looking very much as Moses would have looked if Sinai had been a well-cut lawn instead of, as it is more usually represented, a fiery smoking mountain.

  “He said to meet him at his ship,” said Arthur.

  “What in the name of zarking fardwarks is the old fool doing?” exploded Ford.

  “Meeting us at his ship in two minutes,” said Arthur with a shrug which indicated total abdication of thought. They started off toward it. Strange sounds reached their ears. They tried not to listen, but could not help noticing that Slartibartfast was querulously demanding that he be given the silver urn containing the Ashes, as they were, he said, “vitally important for the past, present and future safety of the Galaxy,” and that this was causing wild hilarity. They resolved to ignore it.

  What happened next they could not ignore. With a noise like a hundred thousand people saying “whop,” a steely white spaceship suddenly seemed to create itself out of nothing in the air directly above the cricket pitch and hung there with infinite menace and a slight hum.

  Then for a while it did nothing, as if it expected everybody to go about their normal business and not mind its just hanging there.

  Then it did something quite extraordinary. Or rather, it opened up and let something quite extraordinary come out of it, eleven quite extraordinary things.

  They were robots, white robots.

  What was most extraordinary about them was that they appeared to have come dressed for the occasion. Not only were they white, but they carried what appeared to be cricket bats, and not only that but they also carried what appeared to be cricket balls, and not only that but they wore white ribbing pads around the lower parts of their legs. These last were extraordinary because they appeared to contain jets that allowed these curiously civilized robots to fly down from their hovering spaceship and start to kill people, which is what they did.

  “Hello,” said Arthur, “something seems to be happening.”

  “Get to the ship,” shouted Ford. “I don’t want to know, just get to the ship.” He started to run. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to hear,” he yelled as he ran, “this is not my planet, I didn’t choose to be here, I don’t want to get involved, just get me out of here, and get me to a party with people I can relate to!”

  Smoke and flame billowed from the pitch.

  “Well, the supernatural brigade certainly seems to be out in force here today …” burbled a radio happily to itself.

  “What I need,” shouted Ford, by way of clarifying his previous remarks, “is a strong drink and a peer group.” He continued to run, pausing only for a moment to grab Arthur’s arm and drag him along with him. Arthur had adopted his normal crisis role, which was to stand with his mouth hanging open and let it all wash over him.

  “They’re playing cricket,” muttered Arthur, stumbling along after Ford. “I swear they are playing cricket. I do not know why they are doing this, but that is what they are doing. They’re not just killing people, they’re sending them up,” he shouted. “Ford, they’re sending us up!”

  It would have been hard to disbelieve this without knowing a great deal more Galactic history than Arthur had so far managed to pick up in his travels. The ghostly but violent shapes that could be seen moving within the thick pall of smoke seemed to be performing a series of bizarre parodies of batting strokes, the difference being that every ball they struck with their bats exploded wherever it landed. The very first one of these had dispelled Arthur’s initial reaction that the whole thing might just be a publicity stunt by Australian margarine manufacturers.

  And then, as suddenly as it had all started, it was over. The eleven white robots ascended through the seething cloud in a tight formation, and with a few last flashes of flame entered the bowels of their hovering white ship, which, with a noise like a hundred thousand people saying “foop,” promptly vanished into the thin air out of which it had whopped.

  For a moment there was a terrible stunned silence, and then out of the drifting smoke emerged the pale figure of Slartibartfast looking even more like Moses because in spite of the continued absence of the mountain he was at least now striding across a fiery and smoking well-mown lawn.

  He stared wildly about him until he saw the hurrying figures of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect forcing their way through the frightened crowd that was for the moment busy stampeding in the opposite direction. The crowd was clearly thinking to itself what an unusual day this was turning out to be, and not really knowing which way, if any, to turn.

  Slartibartfast was gesticulating urgently at Ford and Arthur and shouting at them, as the three gradually converged on his ship, still parked behind the sight screens and still apparently unnoticed by the crowd stampeding past it who presumably had enough of their own problems to cope with at that time.

  “They’ve garble warble farble!” shouted Slartibartfast in his thin tremulous voice.

  “What did he say?” panted Ford, as he elbowed his way onward.

  Arthur shook his head.

  “They’ve … something or other,” he said.

  “They’ve table warble farble!” shouted Slartibartfast again.

  Ford and Arthur shook their heads at each other.

  “It sounds urgent,” Arthur said. He stopped and shouted. “What?”

  “They’ve garble warble fashes!” cried Slartibartfast, still waving at them.

  “He says,” said Arthur, “that they’ve taken the Ashes. That is what I think he is saying.” They ran on.

  “The …?” said Ford.

  “Ashes,” said Arthur tersely. “The burnt remains of a cricket stump. It’s a trophy. That …” he was panting, “is … apparently … what they … have come and taken.” He shook his head very slightly as if he were trying to get his brain to settle down lower in his skull.

  “Strange thing to want to tell us,” snapped Ford.

  “Strange thing to take.”

  “Strange ship.”

  They had arrived at it. The second strangest thing about the ship was watching the Somebody Else’s Problem field at work. They could now clearly see the ship for what it was simply because they knew it was there. It was quite apparent, however, that nobody else could. This wasn’t because it was actually invisible or anything hyperimpossible like that. The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it. The ultrafamous sciento-magician Effrafax of Wug once bet his life that, given a year, he could render the great megamountain Magramal entirely invisible.

  Having spent most of the year jiggling around with immense Lux-O-Valves and Refracto-Nullifiers and Spectrum-By-Pass-O-Matics, he realized, with nine hours to go, that he wasn’t going to make it.

  So, he and his friends, and his friends’ f
riends, and his friends’ friends’ friends, and his friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company, put in what is now widely recognized as being the hardest night’s work in history and, sure enough, on the following day, Magramal was no longer visible. Effrafax lost his bet—and therefore his life—simply because some pedantic adjudicating official noticed (a) that when walking around the area where Magramal ought to be he didn’t trip over or break his nose on anything, and (b) a suspicious-looking extra moon.

  The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what is more can be run for over a hundred years on a single flashlight battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting or can’t explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, around it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

  And this is precisely what was happening with Slartibartfast’s ship. It wasn’t pink, but if it had been, that would have been the least of its visual problems and people were simply ignoring it like anything.

  The most extraordinary thing about it was that it looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small, upended Italian bistro.

  Ford and Arthur gazed up at it with wonderment and deeply offended sensibilities.

  “Yes, I know,” said Slartibartfast, hurrying up to them at that point, breathless and agitated, “but there is a reason. Come, we must go. The ancient nightmare is come again. Doom confronts us all. We must leave at once.”

  “I fancy somewhere sunny,” said Ford.

  Ford and Arthur followed Slartibartfast into the ship and were so perplexed by what they saw inside it that they were totally unaware of what happened next outside.

  A spaceship, yet another one, but this one sleek and silver, descended from the sky onto the pitch, quietly, without fuss, its long legs unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology.

  It landed gently. It extended a short ramp. A tall gray green figure marched briskly out and approached the small knot of people who were gathered in the center of the pitch tending to the casualties of the recent bizarre massacre. It moved people aside with quiet understated authority, and came at last to a man lying in a desperate pool of blood, clearly now beyond the reach of any earthly medicine, breathing, coughing his last. The figure knelt down quietly beside him.

  “Arthur Philip Deodat?” asked the figure.

  The man, with horrified confusion in eyes, nodded feebly.

  “You’re a no-good dumbo nothing,” whispered the creature. “I thought you should know that before you went.”

  4

  It seemed to Arthur as if the whole sky suddenly just stood aside and let them through.

  It seemed to him that the atoms of his brain and the atoms of the cosmos were streaming through each other. It seemed to him that he was blown on the wind of the Universe, and that the wind was him.

  It seemed to him that he was one of the thoughts of the Universe and that the Universe was a thought of his.

  It seemed to the people at Lord’s Cricket Ground that another north London restaurant had just come and gone as they so often do, and that this was Somebody Else’s Problem.

  “What happened?” whispered Arthur in considerable awe.

  “We took off,” said Slartibartfast.

  Arthur lay in startled stillness on the acceleration couch. He wasn’t certain whether he had just got space-sickness or religion.

  “Nice mover,” said Ford in an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the degree to which he had been impressed by what Slartibartfast’s ship had just done. “Shame about the decor.”

  For a moment or two the old man didn’t reply. He was staring at the instruments with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in his head while his house is burning down. Then his brow cleared and he stared for a moment at the wide panoramic screen in front of him, which displayed a bewildering complexity of stars streaming like silver threads around them. His lips moved as if he were trying to spell something. Suddenly his eyes darted in alarm back to his instruments, but then his expression merely subsided into a steady frown. He looked back up at the screen. He felt his own pulse. His frown deepened for a moment, then he relaxed.

  “It’s a mistake to try to understand machines,” he said, “they only worry me. What did you say?”

  “Decor,” said Ford, “pity about it.”

  “Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe,” said Slartibartfast, “there is a reason.”

  Ford glanced sharply around. He clearly thought this was taking an optimistic view of things.

  The interior of the flight deck was dark green, dark red, dark brown, cramped and moodily lit. Inexplicably, the resemblance to a small Italian bistro had failed to end at the hatchway. Small pools of light picked out pot plants, glazed tiles and all sorts of little unidentifiable brass things.

  Raffia-wrapped bottles lurked hideously in the shadows.

  The instruments that had occupied Slartibartfast’s attention seemed to be mounted in the bottoms of bottles that were set in concrete.

  Ford reached out and touched it.

  Fake concrete. Plastic. Fake bottles set in fake concrete.

  The fundamental heart of mind and Universe can take a running jump, he thought to himself, this is rubbish. On the other hand, it could not be denied that the way the ship had moved made the Heart of Gold seem like an electric pram.

  He swung himself off the couch. He brushed himself off. He looked at Arthur, who was singing quietly to himself. He looked at the screen and recognized nothing. He looked at Slartibartfast.

  “How far did we just travel?” he said.

  “About …” said Slartibartfast, “about two-thirds of the way across the Galactic disc, I would say, roughly. Yes, roughly two-thirds, I think.”

  “It’s a strange thing,” said Arthur quietly, “that the farther and faster one travels across the Universe, the more one’s position in it seems to be largely immaterial, and one is filled with a profound, or rather emptied of a …”

  “Yes, very strange,” said Ford. “Where are we going?”

  “We are going,” said Slartibartfast, “to confront an ancient nightmare of the Universe.”

  “And where are you going to drop us off?”

  “I will need your help.”

  “Tough. Look, there’s somewhere you can take us where we can have fun, I’m trying to think of it; we can get drunk and maybe listen to some extremely evil music. Hold on, I’ll look it up.” He dug out his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and zipped through those parts of the index primarily concerned with sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

  “A curse has arisen from the mists of time,” said Slartibartfast.

  “Yes, I expect so,” said Ford. “Hey,” he said, lighting accidentally on one particular reference entry, “Eccentrica Gallumbits, did you ever meet her? The triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. Some people say her erogenous zones start some four miles from her actual body. Me, I disagree, I say five.”

  “A curse,” said Slartibartfast, “which will engulf the Galaxy in fire and destruction, and possibly bring the Universe to a premature doom. I mean it,” he added.

  “Sounds like a bad time,” said Ford; “with luck I’ll be drunk enough not to notice. Here,” he said, stabbing his finger at the screen of the Guide, “would be a really wicked place to go, and I think we should. What do you say, Arthur? Stop mumbling mantras and pay attention. There’s important stuff you’re missing here.”

  Arthur pushed himself up from his couch and shook his head.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “To confront an ancient night—”

  “Can it,�
� said Ford. “Arthur, we are going out into the Galaxy to have some fun. Is that an idea you can cope with?”

  “What’s Slartibartfast looking so anxious about?” said Arthur.

  “Nothing,” said Ford.

  “Doom,” said Slartibartfast. “Come,” he added, with sudden authority, “there is much I must show and tell you.”

  He walked toward a green wrought-iron spiral staircase set incomprehensibly in the middle of the flight deck and started to ascend. Arthur, with a frown, followed.

  Ford slung the Guide sullenly back into his satchel.

  “My doctor says that I have a malformed public duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fiber,” he muttered to himself, “and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes.”

  Nevertheless, he stomped up the stairs behind them.

  What they found upstairs was just stupid, or so it seemed, and Ford shook his head, buried his face in his hands and slumped against a pot plant, crushing it against the wall.

  “The central computational area,” said Slartibartfast, unperturbed. “This is where every calculation affecting the ship in any way is performed. Yes, I know what it looks like, but it is in fact a complex four-dimensional topographical map of a series of highly complex mathematical functions.”

  “It looks like a joke,” said Arthur.

  “I know what it looks like,” said Slartibartfast, and went into it. As he did so, Arthur had a sudden vague flash of what it might mean, but he refused to believe it. The Universe could not possibly work like that, he thought, cannot possibly. That, he thought to himself, would be as absurd as, as absurd as … he terminated that line of thinking. Most of the absurd things he could think of had already happened.

  And this was one of them.

  It was a large glass cage, or box—in fact a room.

  In it was a table, a long one. Around it were gathered about a dozen chairs, of the bentwood style. On it was a tablecloth—a grubby, red-and-white checked tablecloth, scarred with the occasional cigarette burn, each, presumably, at a precisely calculated mathematical position.