The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (36 page)

T
he Restaurant continued existing, but everything else had stopped. Temporal relastatics held it and protected it in a nothingness that wasn’t merely a vacuum, it was simply nothing—there was nothing in which a vacuum could be said to exist. The force-shielded dome had once again been rendered opaque, the party was over, the diners were leaving, Zarquon had vanished along with the rest of the Universe, the Time Turbines were preparing to pull the Restaurant back across the brink of time in readiness for the lunch sitting, and Max Quordlepleen was back in his small curtained dressing room trying to raise his agent on the tempophone.

In the parking lot stood the black ship, closed and silent.

Into the parking lot came the late Mr. Hotblack Desiato, propelled along the moving catwalk by his bodyguard.

They descended one of the tubes. As they approached the limoship a hatchway swung down from its side, engaged the wheels of the wheelchair and drew it inside. The bodyguard followed, and having seen his boss safely connected up to his death-support system, moved up to the small cockpit. Here he operated the remote control system which activated the autopilot in the black ship lying next to the limo, thus causing great relief to Zaphod Beeblebrox who had been trying to start the thing for over ten minutes.

The black ship glided smoothly forward out of its bay, turned and moved down the central causeway swiftly and quietly. At the end it accelerated rapidly, flung itself into the temporal launch chamber and began the long journey back into the distant past.

The Milliways Lunch Menu quotes, by permission, a passage from
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
. The passage is this:

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases
.

For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question “How can we eat?”
,
the second by the question “Why do we eat?” and the third by the question, “Where shall we have lunch?”

The Menu goes on to suggest that Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, would be a very agreeable and sophisticated answer to that third question.

What it doesn’t go on to say is that though it will usually take a large civilization many thousands of years to pass through the How, Why and Where phases, small social groupings under stressful conditions can pass through them with extreme rapidity.

“How are we doing?” said Arthur Dent.

“Badly,” said Ford Prefect.

“Where are we going?” said Trillian.

“I don’t know,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox.

“Why not?” demanded Arthur Dent.

“Shut up,” suggested Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect.

“Basically, what you’re trying to say,” said Arthur Dent, ignoring this suggestion, “is that we’re out of control.”

The ship was rocking and swaying sickeningly as Ford and Zaphod tried to wrest control from the autopilot. The engines howled and whined like tired children in a supermarket.

“It’s the wild color scheme that freaks me,” said Zaphod whose love affair with this ship had lasted almost three minutes into the flight. “Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labeled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you’ve done it. What is this? Some kind of galactic hyperhearse?”

The walls of the swaying cabin were also black, the ceiling was black, the seats—which were rudimentary since the only important trip this ship was designed for was supposed to be unmanned—were black, the control panel was black, the instruments were black, the little screws that held them in place were black, the thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when they had lifted up a corner of it they had discovered that the foam underlay also was black.

“Perhaps whoever designed it had eyes that responded to different wavelengths,” offered Trillian.

“Or didn’t have much imagination,” muttered Arthur.

“Perhaps,” said Marvin, “he was feeling very depressed.”

In fact, though they weren’t to know it, the decor had been chosen in honor of its owner’s sad, lamented, and tax deductible condition.

The ship gave a particularly sickening lurch.

“Take it easy,” pleaded Arthur, “you’re making me space sick.”

“Time sick,” said Ford. “We’re plummeting backward through time.”

“Thank you,” said Arthur, “now I think I really am going to be ill.”

“Go ahead,” said Zaphod, “we could do with a little color about the place.”

“This is meant to be polite afterdinner conversation, is it?” snapped Arthur.

Zaphod left the controls to Ford to figure out, and lurched over to Arthur.

“Look, Earthman,” he said angrily, “you’ve got a job to do, right? The Question to the Ultimate Answer, right?”

“What, that thing?” said Arthur. “I thought we’d forgotten about that.”

“Not me, baby. Like the mice said, it’s worth a lot of money in the right quarters. And it’s all locked up in that head thing of yours.”

“Yes but-”

“But nothing! Think about it. The Meaning of Life! We get our fingers on that we can hold every shrink in the Galaxy up to ransom, and that’s worth a bundle. I owe mine a mint.”

Arthur took a deep breath without much enthusiasm.

“All right,” he said, “but where do we start? How should I know? They say the Ultimate Answer or whatever is Forty-two, how am I supposed to know what the question is? It could be anything. I mean, what’s six times seven?”

Zaphod looked at him hard for a moment. Then his eyes blazed with excitement.

“Forty-two!” he cried.

Arthur wiped his palm across his forehead.

“Yes,” he said patiently, “I know that.”

Zaphod’s faces fell.

“I’m just saying the question could be anything at all,” said Arthur, “and I don’t see how I’m meant to know.”

“Because,” hissed Zaphod, “you were there when your planet did the big firework.”

“We have a thing on Earth …” began Arthur.

“Had,” corrected Zaphod.

“ … called tact. Oh, never mind. Look, I just don’t know.”

A low voice echoed dully around the cabin.

“I know,” said Marvin.

Ford called out from the controls he was still fighting a losing battle with.

“Stay out of this, Marvin,” he said. “This is organism talk.”

“It’s printed in the Earthman’s brainwave patterns,” continued Marvin, “but I don’t suppose you’ll be very interested in knowing that.”

“You mean,” said Arthur, “you mean you can see into my mind?”

“Yes,” said Marvin.

Arthur stared in astonishment.

“And …?” he said.

“It amazes me how you can manage to live in anything that small.”

“Ah,” said Arthur, “abuse.”

“Yes,” confirmed Marvin.

“Ah, ignore him,” said Zaphod, “he’s only making it up.”

“Making it up?” said Marvin, swiveling his head in a parody of astonishment. “Why should I want to make anything up? Life’s bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.”

“Marvin,” said Trillian in the gentle, kindly voice that only she was still capable of assuming in talking to this misbegotten creature, “if you knew all along, why then didn’t you tell us?”

Marvin’s head swiveled back to her.

“You didn’t ask,” he said simply.

“Well, we’re asking you now, metal man,” said Ford, turning round to look at him.

At that moment the ship suddenly stopped rocking and swaying, the engine pitch settled down to a gentle hum.

“Hey, Ford,” said Zaphod, “that sounds good. Have you worked out the controls on this boat?”

“No,” said Ford, “I just stopped fiddling with them. I reckon we just go to wherever this ship is going and get off it fast.”

“Yeah, right,” said Zaphod.

“I could tell you weren’t really interested,” murmured Marvin to himself and slumped into a corner and switched himself off.

“Trouble is,” said Ford, “that the one instrument in this whole ship that is giving any reading is worrying me. If it is what I think it is, and if it’s saying what I think it’s saying, then we’ve already gone too far back into the past. Maybe as much as two million years before our own time.”

Zaphod shrugged.

“Time is bunk,” he said.

“I wonder who this ship belongs to anyway,” said Arthur.

“Me,” said Zaphod.

“No. Who it really belongs to.”

“Really me,” insisted Zaphod. “Look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore this ship is mine, okay?”

“Tell the ship that,” said Arthur. Zaphod strode over to the console.

“Ship,” he said, banging on the panels, “this is your new owner speaking to …”

He got no further. Several things happened at once.

The ship dropped out of time travel mode and reemerged into real space.

All the controls on the console, which had been shut down for the time trip, now lit up.

A large vision screen above the console winked into life revealing a wide starscape and a single very large sun dead ahead of them.

None of these things, however, were responsible for the fact that Zaphod was at the same moment hurled bodily backward against the rear of the cabin, as were all the others.

They were hurled back by a single thunderous clap of noise that thudded out of the monitor speakers surrounding the vision screen.

D
own on the dry, red world of Kakrafoon, in the middle of the vast Rudlit Desert, the stage technicians were testing the sound system. That is to say, the sound system was in the desert, not the technicians.

They had retreated to the safety of Disaster Area’s giant control ship which hung in orbit some four hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and they were testing the sound from there. Anyone within five miles of the speaker silos wouldn’t have survived the tuning up.

If Arthur Dent had been within five miles of the speaker silos then his expiring thought would have been that in both size and shape the sound rig closely resembled Manhattan. Risen out of the silos, the neutron phase speaker stacks towered monstrously against the sky, obscuring the banks of plutonium reactors and seismic amps behind them.

Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath the city of speakers lay the instruments that the musicians would control from their ship, the massive photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex.

It was going to be a noisy show.

Aboard the giant control ship, all was activity and bustle. Hotblack Desiato’s limoship, a mere tadpole beside it, had arrived and docked, and the lamented gentleman was being transported down the high vaulted corridors to meet the medium who was going to interpret his psychic impulses onto the ajuitar keyboard.

A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn’t a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.

Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light-years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend.

The band’s manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the
seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymbalistics would be right.

The sub-ether was buzzing with the communications of the stage technicians testing the speaker channels, and it was this that was being relayed to the interior of the black ship.

Its dazed occupants lay against the back wall of the cabin, and listened to the voices on the monitor speakers.

“Okay, channel nine on power,” said a voice, “testing channel fifteen.…”

Another thumping crack of noise walloped through the ship.

“Channel fifteen A-okay,” said another voice.

A third voice cut in.

“The black stuntship is now in position,” it said, “it’s looking good. Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?”

A computer voice answered.

“On line,” it said.

“Take control of the black ship.”

“Black ship locked into trajectory program, on standby.”

“Testing channel twenty.”

Zaphod leaped across the cabin and switched frequencies on the sub-ether receiver before the next mind-pulverizing noise hit them. He stood there quivering.

“What,” said Trillian in a small quiet voice, “does sundive mean?”

“It means,” said Marvin, “that the ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun.… Dive. It’s very simple to understand. What do you expect if you steal Hotblack Desiato’s stuntship?”

“How do you know,” said Zaphod in a voice that would make a Vegan snow lizard feel chilly, “that this is Hotblack Desiato’s stuntship?”

“Simple,” said Marvin. “I parked it for him.”

“Then why … didn’t … you … tell us!”

“You said you wanted excitement and adventure and really wild things.”

“This is awful,” said Arthur unnecessarily in the pause which followed.

“That’s what I said,” confirmed Marvin.

On a different frequency, the sub-ether receiver had picked up a public broadcast, which now echoed around the cabin.

“ … fine weather for the concert here this afternoon. I’m standing here in front of the stage,” the reporter lied, “in the middle of the Rudlit Desert, and with the aid of hyperbinoptic glasses I can just about make out the huge audience cowering there on the horizon all around me. Behind me
the speaker stacks rise like a sheer cliff face, and high above me the sun is shining away and doesn’t know what’s going to hit it. The environmentalist lobby do know what’s going to hit it, and they claim that the concert will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, irreparable damage to the atmosphere and all the usual things that environmentalists usually go on about.