The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (37 page)

“But I’ve just had a report that a representative of Disaster Area met with the environmentalists at lunchtime, and had them all shot, so nothing now lies in the way of …”

Zaphod switched it off. He turned to Ford.

“You know what I’m thinking?” he said.

“I think so,” said Ford.

“Tell me what you think I’m thinking.”

“I think you’re thinking it’s time we got off this ship.”

“I think you’re right,” said Zaphod.

“I think you’re right,” said Ford.

“How?” said Arthur.

“Quiet,” said Ford and Zaphod, “we’re thinking.”

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “we’re going to die.”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” said Ford.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in “It’s a nice day,” or “You’re very tall,” or “So this is it, we’re going to die.”

His first theory was that if human beings didn’t keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.

After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this—“If human beings don’t keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.”

In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon.

The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished and, above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy.

As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self-righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to
anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become.

Another method of temporarily blotting out their minds is to play host to a Disaster Area concert.

The timing of the concert was critical.

The ship had to begin its dive before the concert began in order to hit the sun six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the climax of the song to which it related, so that the light of the solar flares had time to travel out to Kakrafoon.

The ship had already been diving for several minutes by the time that Ford Prefect had completed his search of the other compartments of the black ship. He burst back into the cabin.

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 onward, 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 spun around, 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 you were?”

“Oh yeah. They said it was a great honor. That and something about a restaurant bill and my executors.”

Ford pushed Arthur aside roughly 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 around 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 percent 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 with no 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 skeptical 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.

A
rthur 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 awhile and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is 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, okay,
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.

 … and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter:

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 spun around 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 to 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 traveled 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.”