The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (14 page)

The sun of Kakrafoon loomed terrifyingly large on the vision screen, its blazing white inferno of fusing hydrogen nuclei growing moment by moment as the ship plunged onwards, unheeding the thumping and banging of Zaphod's hands on the control panel. Arthur and Trillian had the fixed expressions of rabbits on a night road who think that the best way of dealing with approaching headlights is to stare them out.
Zaphod span round, wild-eyed.
"Ford," he said, "how many escape capsules are there?"
"None," said Ford.
Zaphod gibbered.
"Did you count them?" he yelled.
"Twice," said Ford, "did you manage to raise the stage crew on the radio?"
"Yeah," said Zaphod, bitterly, "I said there were a whole bunch of people on board, and they said to say `hi' to everybody."
Ford goggled.
"Didn't you tell them who we were?"
"Oh yeah. They said it was a great honour. That and something about a restaurant bill and my executors."
Ford pushed Arthur aside and leaned forward over the control console.
"Does none of this function?" he said savagely.
"All overridden."
"Smash the autopilot."
"Find it first. Nothing connects."
There was a moment's cold silence.
Arthur was stumbling round the back of the cabin. He stopped suddenly.
"Incidentally," he said, "what does teleport mean?"
Another moment passed.
Slowly, the others turned to face him.
"Probably the wrong moment to ask," said Arthur, "It's just I remember hearing you use the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because ..."
"Where," said Ford Prefect quietly, "does it say teleport?"
"Well, just over here in fact," said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in the rear of the cabin, "Just under the word `emergency', above the word `system' and beside the sign saying `out of order'."
In the pandemonium that instantly followed, the only action to follow was that of Ford Prefect lunging across the cabin to the small black box that Arthur had indicated and stabbing repeatedly at the single small black button set into it.
A six-foot square panel slid open beside it revealing a compartment which resembled a multiple shower unit that had found a new function in life as an electrician's junk store. Half- finished wiring hung from the ceiling, a jumble of abandoned components lay strewn on the floor, and the programming panel lolled out of the cavity in the wall into which it should have been secured.
A junior Disaster Area accountant, visiting the shipyard where this ship was being constructed, had demanded to know of the works foreman why the hell they were fitting an extremely expensive teleport into a ship which only had one important journey to make, and that unmanned. The foreman had explained that the teleport was available at a ten per cent discount and the accountant had explained that this was immaterial; the foreman had explained that it was the finest, most powerful and sophisticated teleport that money could buy and the accountant had explained that the money did not wish to buy it; the foreman had explained that people would still need to enter and leave the ship and the accountant had explained that the ship sported a perfectly serviceable door; the foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him rapidly from his left was a knuckle sandwich. After the explanations had been concluded, work was discontinued on the teleport which subsequently passed unnoticed on the invoice as "Sund. explns." at five times the price.
"Hell's donkeys," muttered Zaphod as he and Ford attempted to sort through the tangle of wiring.
After a moment or so Ford told him to stand back. He tossed a coin into the teleport and jiggled a switch on the lolling control panel. With a crackle and spit of light, the coin vanished. "That much of it works," said Ford, "however, there is no guidance system. A matter transference teleport without guidance programming could put you ... well, anywhere."
The sun of Kakrafoon loomed huge on the screen.
"Who cares," said Zaphod, "we go where we go."
"And," said Ford, "there is no autosystem. We couldn't all go. Someone would have to stay and operate it."
A solemn moment shuffled past. The sun loomed larger and larger.
"Hey, Marvin kid," said Zaphod brightly, "how you doing?"
"Very badly I suspect," muttered Marvin.
A shortish while later, the concert on Kakrafoon reached an unexpected climax.
The black ship with its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar flares licked out from it millions of miles into space, thrilling and in a few cases spilling the dozen or so Flare Riders who had been coasting close to the surface of the sun in anticipation of the moment.
Moments before the flare light reached Kakrafoon the pounding desert cracked along a deep faultline. A huge and hitherto undetected underground river lying far beneath the surface gushed to the surface to be followed seconds later by the eruption of millions of tons of boiling lava that flowed hundreds of feet into the air, instantaneously vaporizing the river both above and below the surface in an explosion that echoed to the far side of the world and back again.
Those - very few - who witnessed the event and survived swear that the whole hundred thousand square miles of the desert rose into the air like a mile-thick pancake, flipped itself over and fell back down. At that precise moment the solar radiation from the flares filtered through the clouds of vaporized water and struck the ground.
A year later, the hundred thousand square mile desert was thick with flowers. The structure of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered. The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain fell more often, and slowly the desert world of Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which the people of Kakrafoon had been cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the explosion.
A spokesman for Disaster Area - the one who had had all the environmentalists shot - was later quoted as saying that it had been "a good gig".
Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few sceptical scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and claimed that they had discovered faint vestiges of a vast artificially induced Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space.
Section 21
Arthur woke up and instantly regretted it. Hangovers he'd had, but never anything on this scale. This was it, this was the big one, this was the ultimate pits. Matter transference beams, he decided, were not as much fun as, say, a good solid kick in the head.
Being for the moment unwilling to move on account of a dull stomping throb he was experiencing, he lay a while and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth - when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass - the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another - particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.
And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub-ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.
Many people had thought exactly this before Arthur Dent and had even gone to the lengths of writing songs about it. Here is one that used regularly to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III:
Aldebaran's great, OK,
Algol's pretty neat,
Betelgeuse's pretty girls,
Will knock you off your feet.
They'll do anything you like,
Real fast and then real slow,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
Then I don't want to go.
Singing, Take me apart, take me apart,
What a way to roam,
And if you have to take me apart to get me there,
I'd rather stay at home.
Sirius is paved with gold
So I've heard it said
By nuts who then go on to say
"See Tau before you're dead."
I'll gladly take the high road
Or even take the low,
But if you have to take me apart to get me there,
Then I, for one, won't go.
Singing,
Take me apart, take me apart, You must be off your head,
And if you try to take me apart to get me there,
I'll stay right here in bed.
I teleported home one night,
With Ron and Sid and Meg,
Ron stole Meggie's heart away,
And I got Sidney's leg.
Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was still aware of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up.
"Can you hear a dull stomping throb?" said Ford Prefect.
Arthur span round and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching looking red eyed and pasty.
"Where are we?" gasped Arthur.
Ford looked around. They were standing in a long curving corridor which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall - which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the inmates subdued - curved over the tops of their heads where it met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber.
Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set in the outer wall. It was several layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of distant stars.
"I think we're in a spaceship of some kind," he said.
Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb.
"Trillian?" called Arthur nervously, "Zaphod?"
Ford shrugged.
"Nowhere about," he said, "I've looked. They could be anywhere. An unprogrammed teleport can throw you light years in any direction. Judging by the way I feel I should think we've travelled a very long way indeed."
"How do you feel?"
"Bad."
"Do you think they're ..."
"Where they are, how they are, there's no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do."
"What?"
"Don't think about it."
Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath.
"Footsteps!" exclaimed Ford suddenly.
"Where?"
"That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!"
Arthur listened. The noise echoed round the corridor at them from an indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it was noticeably louder.
"Let's move," said Ford sharply. They both moved - in opposite directions.
"Not that way," said Ford, "that's where they're coming from."
"No it's not," said Arthur, "They're coming from that way."
"They're not, they're ..."
They both stopped. They both turned. They both listened intently. They both agreed with each other. They both set off into opposite directions again. Fear gripped them.
From both directions the noise was getting louder.
A few yards to their left another corridor ran at right angles to the inner wall. They ran to it and hurried along it. It was dark, immensely long and, as they passed down it, gave them the impression that it was getting colder and colder. Other corridors gave off it to the left and right, each very dark and each subjecting them to sharp blasts of icy air as they passed.
They stopped for a moment in alarm. The further down the corridor they went, the louder became the sound of pounding feet.
They pressed themselves back against the cold wall and listened furiously. The cold, the dark and the drumming of disembodied feet was getting to them badly. Ford shivered, partly with the cold, but partly with the memory of stories his favourite mother used to tell him when he was a mere slip of a Betelgeusian, ankle high to an Arcturan Megagrasshopper: stories of dead ships, haunted hulks that roamed restlessly round the obscurer regions of deep space infested with demons or the ghosts of forgotten crews; stories too of incautious travellers who found and entered such ships; stories of ... - then Ford remembered the brown hessian wall weave in the first corridor and pulled himself together. However ghosts and demons may choose to decorate their death hulks, he thought to himself, he would lay any money you liked it wasn't with hessian wall weave. He grasped Arthur by the arm.
"Back the way we came," he said firmly and they started to retrace their steps.
A moment later they leap like startled lizards down the nearest corridor junction as the owners of the drumming feet suddenly hove into view directly in front of them.
Hidden behind the corner they goggled in amazement as about two dozen overweight men and women pounded past them in track suits panting and wheezing in a manner that would make a heart surgeon gibber.
Ford Prefect stared after them.
"Joggers!" he hissed, as the sound of their feet echoed away up and down the network of corridors.
"Joggers?" whispered Arthur Dent.
"Joggers," said Ford prefect with a shrug.
The corridor they were concealed in was not like the others. It was very short, and ended at a large steel door. Ford examined it, discovered the opening mechanism and pushed it wide.
The first thing that hit their eyes was what appeared to be a coffin.
And the next four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine things that hit their eyes were also coffins.
Section 22
The vault was low ceilinged, dimly lit and gigantic. At the far end, about three hundred yards away an archway let through to what appeared to be a similar chamber, similarly occupied.
Ford Prefect let out a low whistle as he stepped down on to the floor of the vault.
"Wild," he said.
"What's so great about dead people?" asked Arthur, nervously stepping down after him.
"Dunno," said Ford, "Let's find out shall we?"
On closer inspection the coffins seemed to be more like sarcophagi. They stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was - something that only appeared to be white marble. The tops were semi-translucent, and through them could dimly be perceived the features of their late and presumably lamented occupants. They were humanoid, and had clearly left the troubles of whatever world it was they came from far behind them, but beyond that little else could be discerned.