Volume 3 - Life, The Universe And Everything Read online

  And on the tablecloth sat some dozen half-eaten Italian meals, hedged about with half-eaten breadsticks and half-drunk glasses of wine, and toyed with listlessly by robots.

  It was all completely artificial. The robot customers were attended by a robot waiter, a robot wine waiter and a robot maître d’. The furniture was artificial, the tablecloth artificial and each particular piece of food was clearly capable of exhibiting all the mechanical characteristics of, say, a pollo sorpreso, without actually being one.

  And all participated in a little dance together—a complex routine involving the manipulation of menus, check pads, wallets, check books, credit cards, watches, pencils and paper napkins, which seemed to be hovering constantly on the edge of violence, but never actually getting anywhere.

  Slartibartfast hurried in, and then appeared to pass the time of day quite idly with the maître d’, while one of the customer robots, an autorory, slid slowly under the table, mentioning what he intended to do to some guy over some girl.

  Slartibartfast took over the seat that had been thus vacated and passed a shrewd eye over the menu. The tempo of the routine around the table seemed somehow imperceptibly to quicken. Arguments broke out, people attempted to prove things on napkins. They waved fiercely at each other, and attempted to examine each other’s pieces of chicken. The waiter’s hand began to move on the check pad more quickly than a human hand could manage, and then more quickly than a human eye could follow. The pace accelerated. Soon, an extraordinary and insistent politeness overwhelmed the group, and seconds later it seemed that a moment of consensus was suddenly achieved. A new vibration thrilled through the ship.

  Slartibartfast emerged from the glass room.

  “Bistromathics,” he said, “the most powerful computational force known to parascience. Come to the room of Informational Illusions.”

  He swept past and carried them, bewildered, in his wake.

  5

  The Bistromathic Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances without all that dangerous mucking about with Improbability Factors.

  Bistromathics itself is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the behavior of numbers. Just as Einstein observed that space was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.

  The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.

  The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of those most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic, equations used to engineer the Somebody Else’s Problem field.

  The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the check, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon in this field.)

  The baffling discrepancies that used to occur at this point remained uninvestigated for centuries simply because no one took them seriously. They were at the time put down to such things as politeness, rudeness, meanness, flashiness, tiredness, emotionality or the lateness of the hour, and completely forgotten about on the following morning. They were never tested under laboratory conditions, of course, because they never occurred in laboratories—not in reputable laboratories at least.

  And so it was only with the advent of pocket computers that the startling truth became finally apparent, and it was this:

  Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe.

  This single statement took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of math was put back by years.

  Slowly, however, the implications of the idea began to be understood. To begin with it had been too stark, too crazy, too much like what the man in the street would have said “Oh, yes, I could have told you that.” Then some phrases like “Interactive Subjectivity Frameworks” were invented, and everybody was able to relax and get on with it.

  The small groups of monks who had taken up hanging around the major research institutes singing strange chants to the effect that the Universe was only a figment of its own imagination were eventually given a street theater grant and went away.

  6

  In space travel, you see,” said Slartibartfast, as he fiddled with some instruments in the room of Informational Illusions, “in space travel …”

  He stopped and looked about him.

  The room of Informational Illusions was a welcome relief after the visual monstrosities of the central computational area. There was nothing in it. No information, no illusions, just themselves, white walls and a few small instruments that looked as if they were meant to plug into something that Slartibartfast couldn’t find.

  “Yes?” urged Arthur. He had picked up Slartibartfast’s sense of urgency but didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Yes what?” said the old man.

  “You were saying?”

  Slartibartfast looked at him sharply.

  “The numbers,” he said, “are awful.” He resumed his search.

  Arthur nodded wisely to himself. After a while he realized that this wasn’t getting him anywhere and decided that he would say “What?” after all.

  “In space travel,” repeated Slartibartfast, “all the numbers are awful.”

  Arthur nodded again and looked around to Ford for help, but Ford was practicing being sullen and getting quite good at it.

  “I was only,” said Slartibartfast with a sigh, “trying to save you the trouble of asking me why all the ship’s computations were being done on a waiter’s check pad.”

  Arthur frowned.

  “Why,” he said, “were all the ship’s computations being done on a wait—”

  He stopped.

  Slartibartfast said, “Because in space travel all the numbers are awful.”

  He could tell that he wasn’t getting his point across.

  “Listen,” he said, “on a waiter’s check pad numbers dance. You must have encountered the phenomenon.”

  “Well …”

  “On a waiter’s check pad,” said Slartibartfast, “reality and unreality collide on such a fundamental level that each becomes the other and anything is possible, within certain parameters.”

  “What parameters?”

  “It’s impossible to say,” said Slartibartfast. “That’s one of them. Strange but true. At least, I think it’s strange,” he added, “and I am assured that it’s true.”

  At that moment he located the slot in the wall for which he had been searching, and clicked the instrument he was holding into it.

  “Do not be alarmed,” he said, and then suddenly darted an alarmed look at it himself, and lunged back, “it’s …”

  They didn’t hear what he said, because at that moment the ship winked out of existence around them and a star battleship the size of a small Midlands industrial city plunged out of the sunder
ed night toward them, star lasers ablaze.

  A nightmare storm of blistering light seared through the blackness and smacked a fair bit off the planet directly behind them.

  They gaped, pop-eyed, and were unable to scream.

  7

  Another world, another day, another dawn.

  The early morning’s thinnest sliver of light appeared silently. Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.

  There is a moment in every dawn when light floats, there is the possibility of magic. Creation holds its breath.

  The moment passed as it regularly did on Sqornshellous Zeta, without incident.

  The mist clung to the surface of the marshes. The swamp trees were gray with it, the tall reeds indistinct. It hung motionless like held breath.

  Nothing moved.

  There was silence.

  The sun struggled feebly with the mist, tried to impart a little warmth here, shed a little light there, but clearly today was going to be just another long haul across the sky.

  Nothing moved.

  Again, silence.

  Nothing moved.

  Silence.

  Nothing moved.

  Very often on Sqornshellous Zeta, whole days would go on like this, and this was indeed going to be one of them.

  Fourteen hours later the sun sank hopelessly beneath the opposite horizon with a sense of totally wasted effort.

  And a few hours later it reappeared, squared its shoulders and started on up the sky again.

  This time, however, something was happening. A mattress had just met a robot.

  “Hello, robot,” said the mattress.

  “Bleah,” said the robot and continued what it was doing, which was walking round very slowly in a very tiny circle.

  “Happy?” said the mattress.

  The robot stopped and looked at the mattress. It looked at it quizzically.

  It was clearly a very stupid mattress. It looked back at him with wide eyes.

  After what it had calculated to ten significant decimal places as being the precise length of pause most likely to convey a general contempt for all things mattressy, the robot continued to walk round in tight circles.

  “We could have a conversation,” said the mattress. “Would you like that?”

  It was a large mattress, and probably one of quite high quality. Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. (A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit is quite interesting. Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin that crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of a hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.)

  No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.

  “No,” said Marvin.

  “My name,” said the mattress, “is Zem. We could discuss the weather a little.”

  Marvin paused again in his weary circular plod.

  “The dew,” he observed, “has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning.”

  He resumed his walk, as if inspired by this conversational outburst to fresh heights of gloom and despondency. He plodded tenaciously. If he had had teeth he would have gritted them at this point. He hadn’t. He didn’t. The mere plod said it all.

  The mattress flolloped around. This is a thing that only live mattresses in swamps are able to do, which is why the word is not in common usage. It flolloped in a sympathetic sort of way, moving a fair-size body of water as it did so. It blew a few bubbles up through the water engagingly. Its blue and white stripes glistened briefly in a sudden feeble ray of sun that had unexpectedly made it through the mist, causing the creature to bask momentarily. Marvin plodded.

  “You have something on your mind, I think,” said the mattress, floopily.

  “More than you can possibly imagine,” dreared Marvin. “My capacity for mental activity of all kinds is as boundless as the infinite reaches of space itself. Except of course for my capacity for happiness.”

  Stomp, stomp, he went.

  “My capacity for happiness,” he added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.”

  The mattress globbered. This is the noise made by a live, swamp-dwelling mattress that is deeply moved by a story of personal tragedy. The word can also, according to the Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary of Every Language Ever, mean the noise made by the Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop on discovering that he has forgotten his wife’s birthday for the second year running. Since there was only ever one Lord High Sanvalvwag of Hollop and he never married, the word is only used in a negative or speculative sense, and there is an ever-increasing body of opinion that holds that the Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary is not worth the fleet of trucks it takes to cart its microstored edition around in. Strangely enough, the dictionary omits the word “floopily,” which simply means “in the manner of something which is floopy.”

  The mattress globbered again.

  “I sense a deep dejectedness in your diodes,” it vollued (for the meaning of the word “vollue,” buy a copy of Sqornshellous Swamptalk at any bookstore selling remaindered books, or alternatively buy the Ultra-Complete Maximegalon Dictionary, as the university will be very glad to get if off their hands and regain some valuable parking lots), “and it saddens me. You should be more mattresslike. We live quiet retired lives in the swamp, where we are content to flollop and vollue and regard the wetness in a fairly floopy manner. Some of us are killed, but all of us are called Zem, so we never know which and globbering is thus kept to a minimum. Why are you walking in circles?”

  “Because my leg is stuck,” said Marvin simply.

  “It seems to me,” said the mattress, eying it compassionately, “that it is a pretty poor sort of leg.”

  “You are right,” said Marvin, “it is.”

  “Voon,” said the mattress.

  “I expect so,” said Marvin, “and I also expect that you find the idea of a robot with an artificial leg pretty amusing. You should tell your friends, Zem and Zem, when you see them later; they’ll laugh, if I know them, which I don’t of course, except insofar as I know all organic life forms, which is much better than I would wish to. Ha, but my life is but a box of wormgears.”

  He stomped around again in his tiny circle, around his thin steel pegleg that revolved in the mud but seemed otherwise stuck.

  “But why do you just keep walking round and round?” asked the mattress.

  “Just to make the point,” said Marvin, and continued, round and round.

  “Consider it made, my dear friend,” flurbled the mattress, “consider it made.”

  “Just another million years,” said Marvin, “just another quick million. Then I might try it backward. Just for the variety, you understand.”

  The mattress could feel deep in his innermost spring pockets that the robot dearly wished to be asked how long he had been trudging in this futile and fruitless manner, and with another quiet flurble he did so.

  “Oh, just over the one point five million mark, just over,” said Marvin airily; “ask me if I ever get bored, go on, ask me.”

  The mattress did.

  Marvin ignored the question, he merely trudge
d with added emphasis.

  “I gave a speech once,” he said suddenly and apparently unconnectedly. “You may not instantly see why I bring the subject up, but that is because my mind works so phenomenally fast, and I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number.”

  “Er, five,” said the mattress.

  “Wrong,” said Marvin. “You see?”

  The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind. It willomied along its entire length sending excited little ripples through its shallow algae-covered pool.

  It gupped.

  “Tell me,” it urged, “of the speech you once made, I long to hear it.”

  “It was received very badly,” said Marvin, “for a variety of reasons. I delivered it,” he added, pausing to make an awkward humping sort of gesture with his not-exactly-good arm, but his arm that was better than the other one that was dishearteningly welded to his left side, “over there, about a mile distant.”

  He was pointing as well as he could manage, and he obviously wanted to make it totally clear that this was as well as he could manage, through the mist, over the reeds, to a part of the marsh that looked exactly the same as every other part of the marsh.

  “There,” he repeated, “I was somewhat of a celebrity at the time.”

  Excitement gripped the mattress. It had never heard of speeches being delivered on Sqornshellous Zeta, and certainly not by celebrities. Water spattered off it as a thrill glurried across its back.

  It did something that mattresses very rarely bother to do. Summoning every bit of its strength, it reared its oblong body, heaved it up into the air and held it quivering there for a few seconds until it peered through the mist over the reeds at the part of the marsh that Marvin had indicated, observing, without disappointment, that it was exactly the same as every other part of the marsh. The effort was too much, and it flodged back into its pool, deluging Marvin with smelly mud, moss and weeds.