The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (12 page)

Chapter 21

On the surface of Magrathea Arthur wandered about moodily.

Ford had thoughtfully left him his copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to while away the time with. He pushed a few buttons at random.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
is a very unevenly edited
book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like
a good idea at the time.

One of these
(the one Arthur now came across)
supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the
University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career
studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking
Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he’d bought over the past few years.

There followed a long period of painstaking research during which
he visited all the major centers of ballpoint loss throughout the Galaxy
and eventually came up with a quaint little theory that quite caught the
public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along
with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walkingtreeoids and superintelligent shades of the color blue, there was also a
planet entirely given over to ballpoint life forms. And it was to this planet
that unattended ballpoints would make their way, slipping away quietly
through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could
enjoy a uniquely ballpointoid life-style, responding to highly ballpoint-orientedstimuli, and generally leading the ballpoint equivalent of the
good life.

And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet
Voojagig suddenly claimed to have
found
this planet, and to have worked
there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green retractables, whereupon he was taken away, locked up, wrote a book and was
finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved for those who
are determined to make fools of themselves in public.

When one day an expedition was sent to the spatial coordinates
that Voojagig had claimed for this planet they discovered only a small asteroid inhabited by a solitary old man who claimed repeatedly that nothing was true, though he was later discovered to be lying.

There did, however, remain the question of both the mysterious
sixty thousand Altairian dollars paid yearly into his Brantisvogan bank
account, and of course Zaphod Beeblebrox’s highly profitable secondhand ballpoint business.

Arthur read this, and put the book down.

The robot still sat there, completely inert.

Arthur got up and walked to the top of the crater. He walked around the crater. He watched two suns set magnificently over Magrathea.

He went back down into the crater. He woke the robot up because even a manically depressed robot is better to talk to than nobody.

“Night’s falling,” he said. “Look, robot, the stars are coming out.”

From the heart of a dark nebula it is possible to see very few stars, and only very faintly, but they were there to be seen.

The robot obediently looked at them, then looked back.

“I know,” he said. “Wretched, isn’t it?”

“But that sunset! I’ve never seen anything like it in my wildest dreams . . . the two suns! It was like mountains of fire boiling into space.”

“I’ve seen it,” said Marvin. “It’s rubbish.”

“We only ever had the one sun at home,” persevered Arthur. “I came from a planet called Earth, you know.”

“I know,” said Marvin, “you keep going on about it. It sounds awful.”

“Ah no, it was a beautiful place.”

“Did it have oceans?”

“Oh yes,” said Arthur with a sigh, “great wide rolling blue oceans . . .”

“Can’t bear oceans,” said Marvin.

“Tell me,” inquired Arthur, “do you get on well with other robots?”

“Hate them,” said Marvin. “Where are you going?”

Arthur couldn’t bear any more. He had got up again.

“I think I’ll just take another walk,” he said.

“Don’t blame you,” said Marvin and counted five hundred and ninety-seven billion sheep before falling asleep again a second later.

Arthur slapped his arms about himself to try and get his circulation a little more enthusiastic about its job. He trudged back up the wall of the crater.

Because the atmosphere was so thin and because there was no moon, nightfall was very rapid and it was by now very dark. Because of this, Arthur practically walked into the old man before he noticed him.

Chapter 22

He was standing with his back to Arthur watching the very last glimmers of light sink into blackness behind the horizon. He was tallish, elderly and dressed in a single long gray robe. When he turned, his face was thin and distinguished, careworn but not unkind, the sort of face you would happily bank with. But he didn’t turn yet, not even to react to Arthur’s yelp of surprise.

Eventually the last rays of the sun vanished completely, and he turned. His face was still illuminated from somewhere, and when Arthur looked for the source of the light he saw that a few yards away stood a small craft of some kind—a small Hovercraft, Arthur guessed. It shed a dim pool of light around it.

The man looked at Arthur, sadly it seemed.

“You choose a cold night to visit our dead planet,” he said.

“Who . . . who are you?” stammered Arthur.

The man looked away. Again a look of sadness seemed to cross his face.

“My name is not important,” he said.

He seemed to have something on his mind. Conversation was clearly something he felt he didn’t have to rush at. Arthur felt awkward.

“I . . . er . . . you startled me . . .” he said, lamely.

The man looked round to him again and slightly raised his eyebrows.

“Hmmm?” he said.

“I said you startled me.”

“Do not be alarmed, I will not harm you.”

Arthur frowned at him. “But you shot at us! There were missiles . . .” he said.

The man gazed into the pit of the crater. The slight glow from Marvin’s eyes cast very faint red shadows on the huge carcass of the whale.

The man chuckled slightly.

“An automatic system,” he said and gave a small sigh. “Ancient computers ranged in the bowels of the planet tick away the dark millennia, and the ages hang heavy on their dusty data banks. I think they take the occasional potshot to relieve the monotony.”

He looked gravely at Arthur and said, “I’m a great fan of science, you know.”

“Oh . . . er, really?” said Arthur, who was beginning to find the man’s curious, kindly manner disconcerting.

“Oh yes,” said the old man, and simply stopped talking again.

“Ah,” said Arthur, “er . . .” He had an odd feeling of being like a man in the act of adultery who is surprised when the woman’s husband wanders into the room, changes his trousers, passes a few idle remarks about the weather and leaves again.

“You seem ill at ease,” said the old man with polite concern.

“Er, no . . . well, yes. Actually, you see, we weren’t really expecting to find anybody about in fact. I sort of gathered that you were all dead or something . . .”

“Dead?” said the old man. “Good gracious me, no, we have but slept.”

“Slept?” said Arthur incredulously.

“Yes, through the economic recession, you see,” said the old man, apparently unconcerned about whether Arthur understood a word he was talking about or not.

Arthur had to prompt him again.

“Er, economic recession?”

“Well, you see, five million years ago the Galactic economy collapsed, and seeing that custom-built planets are something of a luxury commodity, you see . . .”

He paused and looked at Arthur.

“You know we built planets, do you?” he asked solemnly.

“Well, yes,” said Arthur, “I’d sort of gathered . . .”

“Fascinating trade,” said the old man, and a wistful look came into his eyes, “doing the coastlines was always my favorite. Used to have endless fun doing the little bits in fjords . . . so anyway,” he said, trying to find his thread again, “the recession came and we decided it would save a lot of bother if we just slept through it. So we programmed the computers to revive us when it was all over.”

The man stifled a very slight yawn and continued.

“The computers were index-linked to the Galactic stock-market prices, you see, so that we’d all be revived when everybody else had rebuilt the economy enough to afford our rather expensive services.”

Arthur, a regular
Guardian
reader, was deeply shocked at this.

“That’s a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” asked the old man mildly. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of touch.”

He pointed down into the crater.

“Is that robot yours?” he said.

“No,” came a thin metallic voice from the crater, “I’m mine.”

“If you’d call it a robot,” muttered Arthur. “It’s more a sort of electronic sulking machine.”

“Bring it,” said the old man. Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man’s voice. He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn’t.

“On second thoughts,” said the old man, “leave it here. You must come with me. Great things are afoot.” He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.

Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again muttering sour nothings to himself.

“Come,” called the old man, “come now or you will be late.”

“Late?” said Arthur. “What for?”

“What is your name, human?”

“Dent. Arthur Dent,” said Arthur.

“Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent,” said the old man, sternly. “It’s a sort of threat, you see.” Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. “I’ve never been very good at them myself, but I’m told they can be very effective.”

Arthur blinked at him.

“What an extraordinary person,” he muttered to himself.

“I beg your pardon?” said the old man.

“Oh, nothing, I’m sorry,” said Arthur in embarrassment. “All right, where do we go?”

“In my aircar,” said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. “We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes.”

Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.

He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.

“Excuse me,” he said to him, “what is your name, by the way?”

“My name?” said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again. He paused. “My name,” he said, “is Slartibartfast.”

Arthur practically choked.

“I beg your pardon?” he spluttered.

“Slartibartfast,” repeated the old man quietly.

“Slartibartfast?”

The old man looked at him gravely.

“I said it wasn’t important,” he said.

The aircar sailed through the night.

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 duck-billed 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.”