The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (16 page)

"Bodies?" said the Captain again.
Ford licked his lips.
"Yes," he said, "All those dead telephone sanitizers and account executives, you know, down in the hold."
The Captain stared at him. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed.
"Oh they're not dead," he said, "Good Lord no, no they're frozen. They're going to be revived."
Ford did something he very rarely did. He blinked.
Arthur seemed to come out of a trance.
"You mean you've got a hold full of frozen hairdressers?" he said.
"Oh yes," said the Captain, "Millions of them. Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name them. We're going to colonize another planet."
Ford wobbled very slightly.
"Exciting isn't it?" said the Captain.
"What, with that lot?" said Arthur.
"Ah, now don't misunderstand me," said the Captain, "we're just one of the ships in the Ark Fleet. We're the `B' Ark you see. Sorry, could I just ask you to run a bit more hot water for me?"
Arthur obliged, and a cascade of pink frothy water swirled around the bath. The Captain let out a sigh of pleasure.
"Thank you so much my dear fellow. Do help yourselves to more drinks of course."
Ford tossed down his drink, took the bottle from the first officer's tray and refilled his glass to the top.
"What," he said, "is a `B' Ark?" "This is," said the Captain, and swished the foamy water around joyfully with the duck.
"Yes," said Ford, "but ..."
"Well what happened you see was," said the Captain, "our planet, the world from which we have come, was, so to speak, doomed."
"Doomed?"
"Oh yes. So what everyone thought was, let's pack the whole population into some giant spaceships and go and settle on another planet."
Having told this much of his story, he settled back with a satisfied grunt.
"You mean a less doomed one?" promoted Arthur.
"What did you say dear fellow?"
"A less doomed planet. You were going to settle on."
"Are going to settle on, yes. So it was decided to build three ships, you see, three Arks in Space, and ... I'm not boring you am I?"
"No, no," said Ford firmly, "it's fascinating."
"You know it's delightful," reflected the Captain, "to have someone else to talk to for a change."
Number Two's eyes darted feverishly about the room again and then settled back on the mirror, like a pair of flies briefly distracted from their favourite prey of months old meat.
"Trouble with a long journey like this," continued the Captain, "is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next."
"Only half the time?" asked Arthur in surprise.
The Captain thought for a moment.
"Yes, about half I'd say. Anyway - where's the soap?" He fished around and found it.
"Yes, so anyway," he resumed, "the idea was that into the first ship, the `A' ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or `C' ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the `B' ship - that's us - would go everyone else, the middlemen you see."
He smiled happily at them. "And we were sent off first," he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune.
The little bathing tune, which had been composed for him by one of his world's most exciting and prolific jingle writer (who was currently asleep in hold thirty-six some nine hundred yards behind them) covered what would otherwise have been an awkward moment of silence. Ford and Arthur shuffled their feet and furiously avoided each other's eyes.
"Er ..." said Arthur after a moment, "what exactly was it that was wrong with your planet then?"
"Oh, it was doomed, as I said," said the Captain, "Apparently it was going to crash into the sun or something. Or maybe it was that the moon was going to crash into us. Something of the kind. Absolutely terrifying prospect whatever it was."
"Oh," said the first officer suddenly, "I thought it was that the planet was going to be invaded by a gigantic swarm of twelve foot piranha bees. Wasn't that it?"
Number Two span around, eyes ablaze with a cold hard light that only comes with the amount of practise he was prepared to put in.
"That's not what I was told!" he hissed, "My commanding officer told me that the entire planet was in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star goat!"
"Oh really ..." said Ford Prefect.
"Yes! A monstrous creature from the pit of hell with scy thing teeth ten thousand miles long, breath that would boil oceans, claws that could tear continents from their roots, a thousand eyes that burned like the sun, slavering jaws a million miles across, a monster such as you have never ... never ... ever ..."
"And they made sure they sent you lot off first did they?" inquired Arthur.
"Oh yes," said the Captain, "well everyone said, very nicely I thought, that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where the phones were clean."
"Oh yes," agreed Ford, "I can see that would be very important. And the other ships, er ... they followed on after you did they?"
For a moment the Captain did not answer. He twisted round in his bath and gazed backwards over the huge bulk of the ship towards the bright galactic centre. He squinted into the inconceivable distance.
"Ah. Well it's funny you should say that," he said and allowed himself a slight frown at Ford Prefect, "because curiously enough we haven't heard a peep out of them since we left five years ago ... but they must be behind us somewhere."
He peered off into the distance again. Ford peered with him and gave a thoughtful frown.
"Unless of course," he said softly, "they were eaten by the goat ..."
"Ah yes ..." said the Captain with a slight hesitancy creeping into his voice, "the goat ..." His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. He glanced at his first and second officers, but they seemed lost in their own thoughts for a moment. He glanced at Ford Prefect who raised his eyebrows at him.
"It's a funny thing you know," said the Captain at last, "but now that I actually come to tell the story to someone else ... I mean does it strike you as odd Number Two?"
"Errrrrrrrrrrr ..." said Number Two.
"Well," said Ford, "I can see that you've got a lot of things you're going to talk about, so, thanks for the drinks, and if you could sort of drop us off at the nearest convenient planet ..."
"Ah, well that's a little difficult you see," said the Captain, "because our trajectory thingy was preset before we left Golgafrincham, I think partly because I'm not very good with figures ..."
"You mean we're stuck here on this ship?" exclaimed Ford suddenly losing patience with the whole charade, "When are you meant to be reaching this planet you're meant to be colonizing?"
"Oh, we're nearly there I think," said the Captain, "any second now. It's probably time I was getting out of this bath in fact. Oh, I don't know though, why stop just when I'm enjoying it?"
"So we're actually going to land in a minute?"
"Well not so much land, in fact, not actually land as such, no ... er ..."
"What are you talking about?" said Ford sharply.
"Well," said the Captain, picking his way through the words carefully, "I think as far as I can remember we were programmed to crash on it."
"Crash?" shouted Ford and Arthur.
"Er, yes," said the Captain, "yes, it's all part of the plan I think. There was a terribly good reason for it which I can't quite remember at the moment. It was something to with ... er ..."
Ford exploded.
"You're a load of useless bloody loonies!" he shouted. "Ah yes, that was it," beamed the Captain, "that was the reason."
Section 24
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham: It is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musty lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly amongst those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts amongst those who have learnt to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit. This was its history.
And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling Poets of Arium. These Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would lie in wait for small bands of unwary travellers, circle round them, and throw rocks at them.
And when the travellers cried out, saying why didn't they go away and get on with writing some poems instead of pestering people with all this rock-throwing business, they would suddenly stop, and then break into one of the seven hundred and ninety-four great Song Cycles of Vassilian. These songs were all of extraordinary beauty, and even more extraordinary length, and all fell into exactly the same pattern.
The first part of each song would tell how there once went forth from the City of Vassilian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fought giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished.
The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back.
All this lay in the planet's remote past. It was, however, a descendant of one of these eccentric poets who invented the spurious tales of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Section 25
That night the ship crash-landed on to an utterly insignificant little green-blue planet which circled a small unregarded yellow sun in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy.
In the hours preceding the crash Ford Prefect had fought furiously but in vain to unlock the controls of the ship from their pre-ordained flight path. It had quickly become apparent to him that the ship had been programmed to convey its payload safely, in uncomfortably, to its new home but to cripple itself beyond repair in the process.
Its screaming, blazing descent through the atmosphere had stripped away most of its superstructure and outer shielding, and its final inglorious bellyflop into a murky swamp had left its crew only a few hours of darkness during which to revive and offload its deep-frozen and unwanted cargo for the ship began to settle almost at once, slowly upending its gigantic bulk in the stagnant slime. Once or twice during the night it was starkly silhouetted against the sky as burning meteors - the detritus of its descent - flashed across the sky.
In the grey pre-dawn light it let out an obscene roaring gurgle and sank for ever into the stinking depths.
When the sun came up that morning it shed its thin watery light over a vast area heaving with wailing hairdressers, public relations executives, opinion pollsters and the rest, all clawing their way desperately to dry land.
A less strong minded sun would probably have gone straight back down again, but it continued to climb its way through the sky and after a while the influence of its warming rays began to have some restoring effect on the feebly struggling creatures.
Countless numbers had, unsurprisingly, been lost to the swamp in the night, and millions more had been sucked down with the ship, but those that survived still numbered hundreds of thousands and as the day wore on they crawled out over the surrounding countryside, each looking for a few square feet of solid ground on which to collapse and recover from their nightmare ordeal.
Two figures moved further afield.
From a nearby hillside Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent watched the horror of which they could not feel a part.
"Filthy dirty trick to pull," muttered Arthur.
Ford scraped a stick along the ground and shrugged.
"An imaginative solution to a problem I'd have thought," he said.
"Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur.
Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin, "No, doesn't work. Never mind."
Arthur looked at him as if he'd gone mad and, seeing nothing to indicate the contrary, realized that it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that this had in fact happened.
"What do you think will happen to them all?" he said after a while.
"In an infinite Universe anything can happen," said Ford, "Even survival. Strange but true."
A curious look came into his eyes as they passed over the landscape and then settles again on the scene of misery below them.
"I think they'll manage for a while," he said.
Arthur looked up sharply.
"Why do you say that?" he said.
Ford shrugged.
"Just a hunch," he said, and refused to be drawn to any further questions.
"Look," he said suddenly.
Arthur foll owed his pointing finger. Down amongst the sprawling masses a figure was moving - or perhaps lurching would be a more accurate description. He appeared to be carrying something on his shoulder. As he lurched from prostrate form to prostrate form he seemed to wave whatever the something was at them in a drunken fashion. After a while he gave up the struggle and collapsed in a heap.
Arthur had no idea what this was meant to mean to him.
"Movie camera," said Ford. "Recording the historic movement."
"Well, I don't know about you," said Ford again after a moment, "but I'm off."
He sat a while in silence.
After a while this seemed to require comment.
"Er, when you say you're off, what do you mean exactly?" said Arthur.
"Good question," said Ford, "I'm getting total silence."
Looking over his shoulder Arthur saw that he was twiddling with knobs on a small box. Ford had already introduced this box as a Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic, but Arthur had merely nodded absently and not pursued the matter. In his mind the Universe still divided into two parts - the Earth, and everything else. The Earth having been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass meant that this view of things was a little lopsided, but Arthur tended to cling to that lopsidedness as being his last remaining contact with his home. Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matics belonged firmly in the "everything else" category.