Текст книги "The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams

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Chapter 26

Yes, very salutary,” said Arthur, after Slartibartfast had related the salient points of this story to him, “but I don’t understand what all this has got to do with the Earth and mice and things.” “That is but the first half of the story, Earthman,” said the old man. “If you would care to discover what happened seven and a half million years later, on the great day of the Answer, allow me to invite you to my study where you can experience the events yourself on our Sens-O-Tape records. That is, unless you would care to take a quick stroll on the surface of New Earth. It’s only half completed, I’m afraid – we haven’t even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet, then we have the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods of the Cenozoic Era to lay down, and …”

“No, thank you,” said Arthur, “it wouldn’t be quite the same.”

“No,” said Slartibartfast, “it won’t be,” and he turned the aircar round and headed back toward the mind-numbing wall.

Chapter 27

Slartibartfast’s study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library. The old man frowned as they stepped in.

“Terribly unfortunate,” he said, “a diode blew in one of the life-support computers. When we tried to revive our cleaning staff we discovered they’d been dead for nearly thirty thousand years. Who’s going to clear away the bodies, that’s what I want to know. Look, why don’t you sit yourself down over there and let me plug you in?”

He gestured Arthur toward a chair which looked as if it had been made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus.

“It was made out of the rib cage of a stegosaurus,” explained the old man as he pottered about fishing bits of wire out from under tottering piles of paper and drawing instruments. “Here,” he said, “hold these,” and passed a couple of stripped wire ends to Arthur.

The instant he took hold of them a bird flew straight through him.

He was suspended in midair and totally invisible to himself. Beneath him was a pretty tree-lined city square, and all around it as far as the eye could see were white concrete buildings of airy spacious design but somewhat the worse for wear – many were cracked and stained with rain. Today, however, the sun was shining, a fresh breeze danced lightly through the trees, and the odd sensation that all the buildings were quietly humming was probably caused by the fact that the square and all the streets around it were thronged with cheerful excited people. Somewhere a band was playing, brightly colored flags were fluttering in the breeze and the spirit of carnival was in the air.

Arthur felt extraordinarily lonely stuck up in the air above it all without so much as a body to his name, but before he had time to reflect on this a voice rang out across the square and called for everyone’s attention.

A man standing on a brightly dressed dais before the building which clearly dominated the square was addressing the crowd over a tannoy.

“O people who wait in the shadow of Deep Thought!” he cried out. “Honored Descendants of Vroomfondel and Majikthise, the Greatest and Most Truly Interesting Pundits the Universe has ever known, the Time of Waiting is over!”

Wild cheers broke out among the crowd. Flags, streamers and wolf whistles sailed through the air. The narrower streets looked rather like centipedes rolled over on their backs and frantically waving their legs in the air.

“Seven and a half million years our race has waited for this Great and Hopefully Enlightening Day!” cried the cheerleader. “The Day of the Answer!”

Hurrahs burst from the ecstatic crowd.

“Never again,” cried the man, “never again will we wake up in the morning and think Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Does it really, cosmically speaking, matter if I don’t get up and go to work? For today we will finally learn once and for all the plain and simple answer to all these nagging little problems of Life, the Universe and Everything!”

As the crowd erupted once again, Arthur found himself gliding through the air and down toward one of the large stately windows on the first floor of the building behind the dais from which the speaker was addressing the crowd.

He experienced a moment’s panic as he sailed straight toward the window, which passed when a second or so later he found he had gone right through the solid glass without apparently touching it.

No one in the room remarked on his peculiar arrival, which is hardly surprising as he wasn’t there. He began to realize that the whole experience was merely a recorded projection which knocked six-track seventy-millimeter into a cocked hat.

The room was much as Slartibartfast had described it. In seven and a half million years it had been well looked after and cleaned regularly every century or so. The ultramahogany desk was worn at the edges, the carpet a little faded now, but the large computer terminal sat in sparkling glory on the desk’s leather top, as bright as if it had been constructed yesterday.

Two severely dressed men sat respectfully before the terminal and waited.

“The time is nearly upon us,” said one, and Arthur was surprised to see a word suddenly materialize in thin air just by the man’s neck. The word was LOONQUAWL, and it flashed a couple of times and then disappeared again. Before Arthur was able to assimilate this the other man spoke and the word PHOUCHG appeared by his neck.

“Seventy-five thousand generations ago, our ancestors set this program in motion,” the second man said, “and in all that time we will be the first to hear the computer speak.”

“An awesome prospect, Phouchg,” agreed the first man, and Arthur suddenly realized he was watching a recording with subtitles.

“We are the ones who will hear,” said Phouchg, “the answer to the great question of Life …!”

“The Universe …!” said Loonquawl.

“And Everything …!”

“Shhh,” said Loonquawl with a slight gesture, “I think Deep Thought is preparing to speak!”

There was a moment’s expectant pause while panels slowly came to life on the front of the console. Lights flashed on and off experimentally and settled down into a businesslike pattern. A soft low hum came from the communication channel.

“Good morning,” said Deep Thought at last.

“Er …good morning, O Deep Thought,” said Loonquawl nervously, “do you have … er, that is …”

“An answer for you?” interrupted Deep Thought majestically. “Yes. I have.”

The two men shivered with expectancy. Their waiting had not been in vain.

“There really is one?” breathed Phouchg.

“There really is one,” confirmed Deep Thought.

“To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything?”

“Yes.”

Both of the men had been trained for this moment, their lives had been a preparation for it, they had been selected at birth as those who would witness the answer, but even so they found themselves gasping and squirming like excited children.

“And you’re ready to give it to us?” urged Loonquawl.

“I am.”

“Now?”

“Now,” said Deep Thought.

They both licked their dry lips.

“Though I don’t think,” added Deep Thought, “that you’re going to like it.”

“Doesn’t matter!” said Phouchg. “We must know it! Now!”

“Now?” inquired Deep Thought.

“Yes! Now …”

“All right,” said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable.

“You’re really not going to like it,” observed Deep Thought. “Tell us!”

“All right,” said Deep Thought. “The Answer to the Great Question …”

“Yes …!”

“Of Life, the Universe and Everything …” said Deep Thought.

“Yes …!”

“Is …” said Deep Thought, and paused.

“Yes …!”

“Is …”

“Yes …!!! …?”

“Forty-two,” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Chapter 28

It was a long time before anyone spoke.

Out of the corner of his eye Phouchg could see the sea of tense expectant faces down in the square outside.

“We’re going to get lynched, aren’t we?” he whispered.

“It was a tough assignment,” said Deep Thought mildly.

“Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?”

“I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

“But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything,” howled Loonquawl.

“Yes,” said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, “but what actually is it?”

A slow stupefied silence crept over the men as they stared at the computer and then at each other.

“Well, you know, it’s just Everything … everything …” offered Phouchg weakly.

“Exactly!” said Deep Thought. “So once you do know what the question actually is, you’ll know what the answer means.”

“Oh, terrific,” muttered Phouchg, flinging aside his notebook and wiping away a tiny tear.

“Look, all right, all right,” said Loonquawl, “can you just please tell us the question?”

“The Ultimate Question?”

“Yes!”

“Of Life, the Universe and Everything?”

“Yes!”

Deep Thought pondered for a moment.

“Tricky,” he said.

“But can you do it?” cried Loonquawl.

Deep Thought pondered this for another long moment.

Finally: “No,” he said firmly.

Both men collapsed onto their chairs in despair.

“But I’ll tell you who can,” said Deep Thought.

They both looked up sharply.

“Who? Tell us!”

Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently nonexistent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward toward the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part of whoever had made the recording, he assumed.

“I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate – and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called … the Earth.”

Phouchg gaped at Deep Thought.

“What a dull name,” he said, and great incisions appeared down the length of his body. Loonquawl too suddenly sustained horrific gashes from nowhere. The Computer console blotched and cracked, the walls flickered and crumbled and the room crashed upward into its own ceiling.…

Slartibartfast was standing in front of Arthur holding the two wires.

“End of the tape,” he explained.

Chapter 29

Zaphod! Wake up!”

“Mmmmmwwwwwerrrr?”

“Hey, come on, wake up.”

“Just let me stick to what I’m good at, yeah?” muttered Zaphod, and rolled away from the voice back to sleep.

“Do you want me to kick you?” said Ford.

“Would it give you a lot of pleasure?” said Zaphod, blearily.

“No.”

“Nor me. So what’s the point? Stop bugging me.” Zaphod curled himself up.

“He got a double dose of the gas,” said Trillian, looking down at him, “two windpipes.”

“And stop talking,” said Zaphod, “it’s hard enough trying to sleep anyway. What’s the matter with the ground? It’s all cold and hard.”

“It’s gold,” said Ford.

With an amazingly balletic movement Zaphod was standing and scanning the horizon, because that was how far the gold ground stretched in every direction, perfectly smooth and solid. It gleamed like … it’s impossible to say what it gleamed like because nothing in the Universe gleams in quite the same way that a planet made of solid gold does.

“Who put all that there?” yelped Zaphod, goggle-eyed.

“Don’t get excited,” said Ford, “it’s only a catalog.”

“A who?”

“A catalog,” said Trillian, “an illusion.”

“How can you say that?” cried Zaphod, falling to his hands and knees and staring at the ground. He poked it and prodded it. It was very heavy and very slightly soft – he could mark it with his fingernail. It was very yellow and very shiny, and when he breathed on it his breath evaporated off it in that very peculiar and special way that breath evaporates off solid gold.

“Trillian and I came round a while ago,” said Ford. “We shouted and yelled till somebody came and then carried on shouting and yelling till they got fed up and put us in their planet catalog to keep us busy till they were ready to deal with us. This is all Sens-O-Tape.”

Zaphod stared at him bitterly.

“Ah, shit,” he said, “you wake me up from my own perfectly good dream to show me somebody else’s.” He sat down in a huff.

“What’s that series of valleys over there?” he said.

“Hallmark,” said Ford. “We had a look.”

“We didn’t wake you earlier,” said Trillian. “The last planet was knee-deep in fish.”

“Fish?”

“Some people like the oddest things.”

“And before that,” said Ford, “we had platinum. Bit dull. We thought you’d like to see this one though.”

Seas of light glared at them in one solid blaze wherever they looked.

“Very pretty,” said Zaphod petulantly.

In the sky a huge green catalog number appeared. It flickered and changed, and when they looked around again so had the land.

As with one voice they all went, “Yuch.”

The sea was purple. The beach they were on was composed of tiny yellow and green pebbles, presumably terribly precious stones. The mountains in the distance seemed soft and undulating and red peaks. Nearby stood a solid silver beach table with a frilly mauve parasol and silver tassles.

In the sky a huge sign appeared, replacing the catalog number. It said, Whatever your tastes, Magrathea can cater for you. We are not proud.

And five hundred entirely naked women dropped out of the sky on parachutes.

In a moment the scene vanished and left them in a springtime meadow full of cows.

“Ow!” said Zaphod. “My brains!”

“You want to talk about it?” said Ford.

“Yeah, okay,” said Zaphod, and all three sat down and ignored the scenes that came and went around them.

“I figure this,” said Zaphod. “Whatever happened to my mind, I did it. And I did it in such a way that it wouldn’t be detected by the Government screening tests. And I wasn’t to know anything about it myself. Pretty crazy, right?”

The other two nodded in agreement.

“So I reckon, what’s so secret that I can’t let anybody know I know it, not the Galactic Government, not even myself? And the answer is I don’t know. Obviously. But I put a few things together and I can begin to guess. When did I decide to run for President? Shortly after the death of President Yooden Vranx. You remember Yooden, Ford?”

“Yeah,” said Ford, “he was that guy we met when we were kids, the Arcturan captain. He was a gas. He gave us conkers when you bust your way into his megafreighter. Said you were the most amazing kid he’d ever met.”

“What’s all this?” said Trillian.

“Ancient history,” said Ford, “when we were kids together on Betelgeuse. The Arcturan megafreighters used to carry most of the bulky trade between the Galactic Center and the outlying regions. The Betelgeuse trading scouts used to find the markets and the Arcturans would supply them. There was a lot of trouble with space pirates before they were wiped out in the Dordellis wars, and the megafreighters had to be equipped with the most fantastic defense shields known to Galactic science. They were real brutes of ships, and huge. In orbit round a planet they would eclipse the sun.

“One day, young Zaphod here decides to raid one. On a trijet scooter designed for stratosphere work, a mere kid. I mean forget it, it was crazier than a mad monkey. I went along for the ride because I’d got some very safe money on him not doing it, and didn’t want him coming back with fake evidence. So what happens? We get in his trijet which he had souped up into something totally other, crossed three parsecs in a matter of weeks, bust our way into a megafreighter I still don’t know how, marched on to the bridge waving toy pistols and demanded conkers. A wilder thing I have not known. Lost me a year’s pocket money. For what? Conkers.”

“The captain was this really amazing guy, Yooden Vranx,” said Zaphod. “He gave us food, booze – stuff from really weird parts of the Galaxy – lots of conkers, of course, and we had just the most incredible time. Then he teleported us back. Into the maximum security wing of the Betelgeuse state prison. He was a cool guy. Went on to become President of the Galaxy.”

Zaphod paused.

The scene around them was currently plunged into gloom. Dark mists swirled round them and elephantine shapes lurked indistinctly in the shadows. The air was occasionally rent with the sounds of illusory beings murdering other illusory beings. Presumably enough people must have liked this sort of thing to make it a paying proposition.

“Ford,” said Zaphod quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Just before Yooden died he came to see me.”

“What? You never told me.”

“No.”

“What did he say? What did he come to see you about?”

“He told me about the Heart of Gold. It was his idea that I should steal it.”

“His idea?”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod, “and the only possible way of stealing it was to be at the launching ceremony.”

Ford gaped at him in astonishment for a moment, and then roared with laughter.

“Are you telling me,” he said, “that you set yourself up to become President of the Galaxy just to steal that ship?”

“That’s it,” said Zaphod with the sort of grin that would get most people locked away in a room with soft walls.

“But why?” said Ford. “What’s so important about having it?”

“Dunno,” said Zaphod. “I think if I’d consciously known what was so important about it and what I would need it for it would have showed up on the brain screening tests and I would never have passed. I think Yooden told me a lot of things that are still locked away.”

“So you think you went and mucked about inside your own brain as a result of Yooden talking to you?”

“He was a hell of a talker.”

“Yeah, but Zaphod, old mate, you want to look after yourself, you know.”

Zaphod shrugged.

“I mean, don’t you have any inkling of the reasons for all this?” asked Ford.

Zaphod thought hard about this and doubts seemed to cross his mind.

“No,” he said at last, “I don’t seem to be letting myself into any of my secrets. Still,” he added on further reflection, “I can understand that. I wouldn’t trust myself further than I could spit a rat.”

A moment later, the last planet in the catalog vanished from beneath them and the solid world resolved itself again.

They were sitting in a plush waiting room full of glasstop tables and design awards.

A tall Magrathean man was standing in front of them.

“The mice will see you now,” he said.

Chapter 30

So there you have it,” said Slartibartfast, making a feeble and perfunctory attempt to clear away some of the appalling mess of his study. He picked up a piece of paper from the top of a pile, but then couldn’t think of anywhere else to put it, so he put it back on top of the original pile which promptly fell over. “Deep Thought designed the Earth, we built it and you lived on it.”

“And the Vogons came and destroyed it five minutes before the program was completed,” added Arthur, not unbitterly. “Yes,” said the old man, pausing to gaze hopelessly round the room. “Ten million years of planning and work gone just like that. Ten million years, Earthman, can you conceive of that kind of time span? A galactic civilization could grow from a single worm five times over in that time. Gone.” He paused. “Well, that’s bureaucracy for you,” he added.

“You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “all this explains a lot of things. All through my life I’ve had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was.”

“No,” said the old man, “that’s just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that.”

“Everyone?” said Arthur. “Well, if everyone has that perhaps it means something! Perhaps somewhere outside the Universe we know …”

“Maybe. Who cares?” said Slartibartfast before Arthur got too excited. “Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied. Look at me: I design coastlines. I got an award for Norway.”

He rummaged around in a pile of debris and pulled out a large Plexiglas block with his name on it and a model of Norway molded into it.

“Where’s the sense in that?” he said. “None that I’ve been able to make out. I’ve been doing fjords all my life. For a fleeting moment they become fashionable and I get a major award.”

He turned it over in his hands with a shrug and tossed it aside carelessly, but not so carelessly that it didn’t land on something soft.

“In this replacement Earth we’re building they’ve given me Africa to do and of course I’m doing it with all fjords again because I happen to like them, and I’m old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. And they tell me it’s not equatorial enough. Equatorial!” He gave a hollow laugh. “What does it matter? Science has achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

“And are you?”

“No. That’s where it all falls down, of course.”

“Pity,” said Arthur with sympathy. “It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise.”

Somewhere on the wall a small white light flashed.

“Come,” said Slartibartfast, “you are to meet the mice. Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe.”

“What were the first two?”

“Oh, probably just coincidences,” said Slartibartfast carelessly. He opened the door and stood waiting for Arthur to follow.

Arthur glanced around him once more, and then down at himself, at the sweaty disheveled clothes he had been lying in the mud in on Thursday morning.

“I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style,” he muttered to himself.

“I beg your pardon?” asked the old man mildly.

“Oh, nothing,” said Arthur, “only joking.”