Volume 2 - The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe Page 6

  Zaphod was badly shaken by the crash. He lay for a while in the silent dusty rubble to which most of the room had been reduced. He felt that he was at the lowest ebb he had ever reached in his life. He felt bewildered, he felt lonely, he felt unloved. Eventually he felt he ought to get whatever it was over with.

  He looked around the cracked and broken room. The wall had split round the door frame, and the door hung open. The window, by some miracle, was closed and unbroken. For a while he hesitated, then he thought that if his strange and recent companion had been through all that he had been through just to tell him what he had told him, then there must be a good reason for it. With Marvin’s help he got the window open. Outside it, the cloud of dust aroused by the crash, and the hulks of the other buildings with which this one was surrounded, effectively prevented Zaphod from seeing anything of the world outside.

  Not that this concerned him unduly. His main concern was what he saw when he looked down. Zarniwoop’s office was on the fifteenth floor. The building had landed at a tilt of about forty-five degrees, but still the descent looked heart-stopping.

  Eventually, stung by the continuous series of contemptuous looks that Marvin appeared to be giving him, he took a deep breath and clambered out on to the steeply inclined side of the building. Marvin followed him, and together they began to crawl slowly and painfully down the fifteen floors that separated them from the ground.

  As he crawled, the dank air and dust choked his lungs, his eyes smarted and the terrific distance down made his heads spin.

  The occasional remark from Marvin of the order of “This is the sort of thing you life forms enjoy, is it? I ask merely for information,” did little to improve his state of mind.

  About halfway down the side of the shattered building they stopped to rest. It seemed to Zaphod as he lay there panting with fear and exhaustion that Marvin seemed a mite more cheerful than usual. Eventually he realized this wasn’t so. The robot just seemed cheerful in comparison with his own mood.

  A large, scraggy black bird came flapping through the slowly settling clouds of dust and, stretching down its scrawny legs, landed on an inclined window ledge a couple of yards from Zaphod. It folded its ungainly wings and teetered awkwardly on its perch.

  Its wingspan must have been something like six feet, and its head and neck seemed curiously large for a bird. Its face was flat, the beak underdeveloped, and halfway along the underside of its wings the vestiges of something handlike could be clearly seen.

  In fact, it looked almost human.

  It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its beak in a desultory fashion.

  “Go away,” said Zaphod.

  “Okay,” muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.

  Zaphod watched its departure in bewilderment.

  “Did that bird just talk to me?” he asked Marvin nervously. He was quite prepared to believe the alternative explanation, that he was in fact hallucinating.

  “Yes,” confirmed Marvin.

  “Poor souls,” said a deep, ethereal voice in Zaphod’s ear.

  Twisting around violently to find the source of the voice nearly caused Zaphod to fall off the building. He grabbed savagely at a protruding window fitting and cut his hand on it. He hung on, breathing heavily.

  The voice had no visible source whatsoever—there was no one there. Nevertheless, it spoke again.

  “A tragic history behind them, you know. A terrible blight.”

  Zaphod looked wildly about. The voice was deep and quiet. In other circumstances it would even be described as soothing. There is, however, nothing soothing about being addressed by a disembodied voice out of nowhere, particularly when you are, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, not at your best and hanging from a ledge eight stories up a crashed building.

  “Hey, er …” he stammered.

  “Shall I tell you their story?” inquired the voice quietly.

  “Hey, who are you?” panted Zaphod. “Where are you?”

  “Later then, perhaps,” murmured the voice. “I am Gargravarr. I am the Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex.”

  “Why can’t I see …?”

  “You will find your progress down the building greatly facilitated,” the voice lifted, “if you move about two yards to your left. Why don’t you try it?”

  Zaphod looked and saw a series of short horizontal grooves leading all the way down the side of the building. Gratefully he shifted himself across to them.

  “Why don’t I see you again at the bottom?” said the voice in his ear, and as it spoke it faded.

  “Hey,” called out Zaphod, “where are you …?”

  “It’ll only take you a couple of minutes …” said the voice very faintly.

  “Marvin,” said Zaphod earnestly to the robot squatting dejectedly next to him, “did a … did a voice just …?”

  “Yes,” Marvin replied tersely.

  Zaphod nodded. He took out his Peril Sensitive Sunglasses again. They were completely black, and by now quite badly scratched by the unexpected metal object in his pocket. He put them on. He would find his way down the building more comfortably if he didn’t actually have to look at what he was doing.

  Minutes later he clambered over the ripped and mangled foundations of the building and, once more removing his sunglasses, he dropped to the ground.

  Marvin joined him a moment or so later and lay face down in the dust and rubble, from which position he seemed disinclined to move.

  “Ah, there you are,” said the voice suddenly in Zaphod’s ear. “Excuse me leaving you like that; it’s just that I have a terrible head for heights. At least,” it added wistfully, “I did have a terrible head for heights.”

  Zaphod looked around slowly and carefully, just to see if he had missed something which might be the source of the voice. All he saw, however, was the dust, the rubble and the towering hulks of the encircling buildings.

  “Hey, er, why can’t I see you?” he said. “Why aren’t you here?”

  “I am here,” said the voice slowly. “My body wanted to come but it’s a bit busy at the moment. Things to do, people to see.” After what seemed like a sort of ethereal sigh it added, “You know how it is with bodies.”

  Zaphod wasn’t sure about this.

  “I thought I did,” he said.

  “I only hope it’s gone in for a rest cure,” continued the voice; “the way it’s been living recently it must be on its last elbows.”

  “Elbows?” said Zaphod. “Don’t you mean last legs?”

  The voice said nothing for a while. Zaphod looked around uneasily. He didn’t know if it had gone or was still there or what it was doing. Then the voice spoke again.

  “So, you are to be put into the Vortex, yes?”

  “Er, well,” said Zaphod with a very poor attempt at nonchalance, “this cat’s in no hurry, you know. I can just slouch about and take in a look at the local scenery, you know?”

  “Have you seen the local scenery?” asked the voice of Gargravarr.

  “Er, no.”

  Zaphod clambered over the rubble, and rounded the corner of one of the wrecked buildings that was obscuring his view.’

  He looked out at the landscape of Frogstar World B.

  “Ah, okay,” he said, “I’ll just sort of slouch about then.”

  “No,” said Gargravarr, “the Vortex is ready for you now. You must come. Follow me.”

  “Er, yeah?” said Zaphod. “And how am I meant to do that?”

  “I’ll hum for you,” said Gargravarr. “Follow the humming.”

  A soft keening sound drifted through the air, a pale, sad sound that seemed to be without any kind of focus. It was only by listening very carefully that Zaphod was able to detect the direction from which it was coming. Slowly, dazedly, he stumbled off in its wake. What else was there to do?

  10

  The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ign
ore.

  Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

  For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire “intelligent” population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

  In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.

  Exotic though this behavior may seem, there is no life form in the galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.

  For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.”

  The gray plain stretched before Zaphod, a ruined, shattered plain. The wind whipped wildly over it.

  Visible in the middle was the steel pimple of the dome. This, gathered Zaphod, was where he was going. This was the Total Perspective Vortex.

  As he stood and gazed bleakly at it, a sudden inhuman wail of terror emanated from it as of a man having his soul burned from his body. It screamed above the wind and died away.

  Zaphod started with fear and his blood seemed to turn to liquid helium.

  “Hey, what was that?” he muttered voicelessly.

  “A recording,” said Gargravarr, “of the last man who was put in the Vortex. It is always played to the next victim. A sort of prelude.”

  “Hey, it really sounds bad …” stammered Zaphod. “Couldn’t we maybe slope off to a party or something for a while, think it over?”

  “For all I know,” said Gargravarr’s ethereal voice, “I’m probably at one. My body that is. It goes to a lot of parties without me. Says I only get in the way. Hey ho.”

  “What is all this with your body?” said Zaphod, anxious to delay whatever it was that was going to happen to him.

  “Well, it’s … it’s busy you know,” said Gargravarr hesitantly.

  “You mean it’s got a mind of its own?” said Zaphod.

  There was a long and slightly chilly pause before Gargravarr spoke again.

  “I have to say,” he replied eventually, “that I find that remark in rather poor taste.”

  Zaphod muttered a bewildered and embarrassed apology.

  “No matter,” said Gargravarr, “you weren’t to know.”

  The voice fluttered unhappily.

  “The truth is,” it continued in tones which suggested he was trying very hard to keep it under control, “the truth is that we are currently undergoing a period of legal trial separation. I suspect it will end in divorce.”

  The voice was still again, leaving Zaphod with no idea of what to say. He mumbled uncertainly.

  “I think we were probably not very well-suited,” said Gargravarr again at length; “we never seemed to be happy doing the same things. We always had the greatest arguments over sex and fishing. Eventually we tried to combine the two, but that only led to disaster, as you can probably imagine. And now my body refuses to let me in. It won’t even see me.…”

  He paused again, tragically. The wind whipped across the plain.

  “It says I only inhibit it. I pointed out that in fact I was meant to inhabit it, and it said that that was exactly the sort of smart alec remark that got right up a body’s left nostril, and so we left it. It will probably get custody of my forename.”

  “Oh …?” said Zaphod faintly. “And what’s that?”

  “Pizpot,” said the voice. “My name is Pizpot Gargravarr. Says it all really, doesn’t it?”

  “Errr …” said Zaphod sympathetically.

  “And that is why I, as a disembodied mind, have this job, Custodian of the Total Perspective Vortex. No one will ever walk on the ground of this planet. Except the victims of the Vortex—they don’t really count I’m afraid.”

  “Ah …”

  “I’ll tell you the story. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Er …”

  “Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet—people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result—collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds—you’ve seen one of them—who cursed their feet, cursed the ground and vowed that none should walk on it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must take you to the Vortex.”

  Zaphod shook his head in bemusement and stumbled forward across the plain.

  “And you,” he said, “you come from this hellhole pit, do you?”

  “No no,” said Gargravarr, taken aback, “I come from the Frogstar World C. Beautiful place. Wonderful fishing. I flit back there in the evenings. Though all I can do now is watch. The Total Perspective Vortex is the only thing on this planet with any function. It was built here because no one else wanted it on their doorstep.”

  At that moment another dismal scream rent the air and Zaphod shuddered.

  “What can do that to a guy?” he breathed.

  “The Universe,” said Gargravarr simply, “the whole infinite Universe. The infinite suns, the infinite distances between them and yourself an invisible dot on an invisible dot, infinitely small.”

  “Hey, I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox, man, you know,” muttered Zaphod trying to flap the last remnants of his ego.

  Gargravarr made no reply, but merely resumed his mournful humming till they reached the tarnished steel dome in the middle of the plain.

  As they reached it, a door hummed open in the side, revealing a small darkened chamber within.

  “Enter,” said Gargravarr.

  Zaphod started with fear.

  “Hey, what, now?” he said.

  “Now.”

  Zaphod peered nervously inside. The chamber was very small. It was steel-lined and there was hardly space in it for more than one man.

  “It … er … it doesn’t look like any kind of Vortex to me,” said Zaphod.

  “It isn’t,” said Gargravarr, “it’s just the elevator. Enter.”

  With infinite trepidation Zaphod stepped into it. He was aware of Gargravarr being in the elevator with him, though the disembodied man was not for the moment speaking.

  The elevator began its descent.

  “I must get myself into the right frame of mind for this,” muttered Zaphod.

  “There is no right frame of mind,” said Gargravarr sternly.

  “You really know how to make a guy feel inadequate.”

  “I don’t. The Vortex does.”

  At the bottom of the shaft, the rear of the elevator opened up and Zaphod stumbled out into a smallish, functional, steel-lined chamber.

  At the far side of it stood a single upright steel box, just large enough for a man to stand in.

  It was that simple.

  It connected to a small pile of components and instruments
via a single thick wire.

  “Is that it?” said Zaphod in surprise.

  “That is it.”

  Didn’t look too bad, thought Zaphod.

  “And I get in there, do I?” said Zaphod.

  “You get in there,” said Gargravarr, “and I’m afraid you must do it now.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Zaphod.

  He opened the door of the box and stepped in.

  Inside the box he waited.

  After five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box with him.

  11

  The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

  To explain—since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation—every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

  The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

  Trin Tragula—for that was his name—was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

  And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

  “Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

  And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex—just to show her.

  And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.