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

Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 62 страниц)

The tide of opinion was beginning to turn against him. What had started out as excellent entertainment had now, in the crowd’s view, deteriorated into mere abuse, and since this abuse was in the main directed at them they wearied of it.

Sensing this shift in the wind, the marketing girl turned on him.

“Is it perhaps in order,” she demanded, “to inquire what you’ve been doing all these months then? You and that other interloper have been missing since the day we arrived.”

“We’ve been on a journey,” said Ford. “We went to try and find out something about this planet.”

“Oh,” said the girl archly, “doesn’t sound very productive to me.”

“No? Well, have I got news for you, my love. We have discovered this planet’s future.”

Ford waited for this statement to have its effect. It didn’t have any. They didn’t know what he was talking about.

He continued.

“It doesn’t matter a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys what you all choose to do from now on. Burn down the forests, anything, it won’t make a scrap of difference. Your future history has already happened. Two million years you’ve got and that’s it. At the end of that time your race will be dead, gone and good riddance to you. Remember that, two million years!”

The crowd muttered to itself in annoyance. People as rich as they had suddenly become shouldn’t be obliged to listen to this sort of gibberish. Perhaps they could tip the fellow a leaf or two and he would go away.

They didn’t need to bother. Ford was already stalking out of the clearing, pausing only to shake his head at Number Two who was already firing his Kill-O-Zap into some neighboring trees.

He turned back once.

“Two million years!” he said and laughed.

“Well,” said the Captain with a soothing smile, “still time for a few more baths. Could someone pass me the sponge? I just dropped it over the side.”

Chapter 33

A mile or so away through the wood, Arthur Dent was too busily engrossed with what he was doing to hear Ford Prefect approach.

What he was doing was rather curious, and this is what it was: on a wide flat piece of rock he had scratched out the shape of a large square, subdivided into one hundred and sixty-nine smaller squares, thirteen to a side.

Furthermore he had collected together a pile of smallish flattish stones and scratched the shape of a letter on to each. Sitting morosely around the rock were a couple of the surviving local native men to whom Arthur Dent was trying to introduce the curious concept embodied in these stones.

So far they had not done well. They had attempted to eat some of them, bury others and throw the rest of them away. Arthur had finally encouraged one of them to lay a couple of stones on the board he had scratched out, which was not even as far as he’d managed to get the day before. Along with the rapid deterioration in the morale of these creatures, there seemed to be a corresponding deterioration in their actual intelligence.

In an attempt to egg them along, Arthur set out a number of letters on the board himself, and then tried to encourage the natives to add some more themselves.

It was not going well.

Ford watched quietly from beside a nearby tree.

“No,” said Arthur to one of the natives who had just shuffled some of the letters round in a fit of abysmal dejection, “Q scores ten you see, and it’s on a triple word score, so … look, I’ve explained the rules to you … no, no, look please, put down that jawbone … All right, we’ll start again. And try to concentrate this time.”

Ford leaned his elbow against the tree and his hand against his head.

“What are you doing, Arthur?” he asked quietly.

Arthur looked up with a start. He suddenly had a feeling that all this might look slightly foolish. All he knew was that it had worked like a dream on him when he was a child. But things were different then, or rather would be.

“I’m trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble,” he said.

“They’re not cavemen,” said Ford.

“They look like cavemen.”

Ford let it pass.

“I see,” he said.

“It’s uphill work,” said Arthur wearily. “The only word they know is grunt and they can’t spell it.”

He sighed and sat back.

“What’s that supposed to achieve?” asked Ford.

“We’ve got to encourage them to evolve! To develop!” Arthur burst out angrily. He hoped that the weary sigh and then the anger might do something to counteract the overriding feeling of foolishness from which he was currently suffering. It didn’t. He jumped to his feet.

“Can you imagine what a world would be like descended from those … cretins we arrived with?” he said.

“Imagine?” said Ford, raising his eyebrows. “We don’t have to imagine. We’ve seen it.”

“But …” Arthur waved his arms about hopelessly.

“We’ve seen it,” said Ford, “there’s no escape.”

Arthur kicked at a stone.

“Did you tell them what we’d discovered?” he asked.

“Hmmmm?” said Ford, not really concentrating.

“Norway,” said Arthur. “Slartibartfast’s signature in the glacier. Did you tell them?”

“What’s the point?” said Ford. “What would it mean to them?”

“Mean?” said Arthur. “Mean? You know perfectly well what it means. It means that this planet is the Earth! It’s my home! It’s where I was born!”

“Was?” said Ford.

“All right, will be.”

“Yes, in two million years’ time. Why don’t you tell them that? Go and say to them, ’excuse me, I’d just like to point out that in two million years’ time I will be born just a few miles from here.’ See what they say. They’ll chase you up a tree and set fire to it.”

Arthur absorbed this unhappily.

“Face it,” said Ford, “those zeebs over there are your ancestors, not these poor creatures here.”

He went over to where the apemen creatures were rummaging listlessly with the stone letters. He shook his head.

“Put the Scrabble away, Arthur,” he said, “it won’t save the human race, because this lot aren’t going to be the human race. The human race is currently sitting around a rock on the other side of this hill making documentaries about themselves.”

Arthur winced.

“There must be something we can do,” he said. A terrible sense of desolation thrilled through his body that he should be here, on the Earth, the Earth which had lost its future in a horrifying arbitrary catastrophe and which now seemed set to lose its past as well.

“No,” said Ford, “there’s nothing we can do. This doesn’t change the history of the Earth, you see, this is the history of the Earth. Like it or leave it, the Golgafrinchans are the people you are descended from. In two million years they get destroyed by the Vogons. History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn’t it?”

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away.

During the following weeks Ford Prefect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox. The only moral it is possible to draw from this story is that one should never throw the letter Q into a privet bush, but unfortunately there are times when it is unavoidable.

Like most of the really crucial things in life, this chain of events was completely invisible to Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. They were looking sadly at one of the natives morosely pushing the other letters around.

“Poor bloody caveman,” said Arthur.

“They’re not …”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind,” said Ford.

The wretched creature let out a pathetic howling noise and banged on the rock.

“It’s all been a bit of a waste of time for them, hasn’t it?” said Arthur.

“Uh uh urghhhhh,” muttered the native and banged on the rock again.

“They’ve been outevolved by telephone sanitizers.”

“Urgh, grr grr, gruh!” insisted the native, continuing to bang on the rock.

“Why does he keep banging on the rock?” said Arthur.

“I think he probably wants you to Scrabble with him again,” said Ford. “He’s pointing at the letters.”

“Probably spelled crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor bastard. I keep on telling him there’s only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.”

The native banged on the rock again.

They looked over his shoulder.

Their eyes popped.

There among the jumble of letters were eight that had been laid out in a clear straight line.

They spelled two words.

The words were these:

“Forty-Two.”

“Grrrurgh guh guh,” explained the native. He swept the letters angrily away and went and mooched under a nearby tree with his colleague.

Ford and Arthur stared at him. Then they stared at each other.

“Did that say what I thought it said?” they both said to each other.

“Yes,” they both said.

“Forty-two,” said Arthur.

“Forty-two,” said Ford.

Arthur ran over to the two natives.

“What are you trying to tell us?” he shouted. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

One of them rolled over on the ground, kicked his legs up in the air, rolled over again and went to sleep.

The other bounded up the tree and threw horse chestnuts at Ford Prefect. Whatever it was they had to say, they had already said it.

“You know what this means,” said Ford.

“Not entirely.”

“Forty-two is the number Deep Thought gave as being the Ultimate Answer.”

“Yes.”

“And the Earth is the computer Deep Thought designed and built to calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer.”

“So we are led to believe.”

“And organic life was part of the computer matrix.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. That means that these natives, these apemen are an integral part of the computer program, and that we and the Golgafrinchans are not.”

“But the cavemen are dying out and the Golgafrinchans are obviously set to replace them.”

“Exactly. So you do see what this means.”

“What?”

“Cock up,” said Ford Prefect.

Arthur looked around him.

“This planet is having a pretty bloody time of it,” he said.

Ford puzzled for a moment.

“Still, something must have come out of it,” he said at last, “because Marvin said he could see the Question printed in your brain wave patterns.”

“But …”

“Probably the wrong one, or a distortion of the right one. It might give us a clue though if we could find it. I don’t see how we can though.”

They moped about for a bit. Arthur sat on the ground and started pulling up bits of grass, but found that it wasn’t an occupation he could get deeply engrossed in. It wasn’t grass he could believe in, the trees seemed pointless, the rolling hills seemed to be rolling to nowhere and the future seemed just a tunnel to be crawled through.

Ford fiddled with his Sub-Etha Sens-O-Matic. It was silent. He sighed and put it away.

Arthur picked up one of the letter stones from his homemade Scrabble set. It was a T. He sighed and put it down again. The letter he put it down next to was an I. That spelled IT. He tossed another couple of letters next to them. They were an S and an H as it happened. By a curious coincidence the resulting word perfectly expressed the way Arthur was feeling about things just then. He stared at it for a moment. He hadn’t done it deliberately, it was just a random chance. His brain got slowly into first gear.

“Ford,” he said suddenly, “look, if that Question is printed in my brain wave patterns but I’m not consciously aware of it it must be somewhere in my unconscious.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“There might be a way of bringing that unconscious pattern forward.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, by introducing some random element that can be shaped by that pattern.”

“Like how?”

“Like by pulling Scrabble letters out of a bag blindfolded.”

Ford leaped to his feet.

“Brilliant!” he said. He tugged his towel out of his satchel and with a few deft knots transformed it into a bag.

“Totally mad,” he said, “utter nonsense. But we’ll do it because it’s brilliant nonsense. Come on, come on.”

The sun passed respectfully behind a cloud. A few small sad raindrops fell.

They piled together all the remaining letters and dropped them into the bag. They shook them up.

“Right,” said Ford, “close your eyes. Pull them out. Come on, come on, come on.”

Arthur closed his eyes and plunged his hand into the towelful of stones. He jiggled them about, pulled out four and handed them to Ford. Ford laid them along the ground in the order he got them.

“W,” said Ford, “H, A, T … What!”

He blinked.

“I think it’s working!” he said.

Arthur pushed three more at him.

“D, O, Y … Doy. Oh, perhaps it isn’t working,” said Ford.

“Here’s the next three.”

“O, U, G … Doyoug.… It’s not making sense I’m afraid.”

Arthur pulled another two from the bag. Ford put them in place.

“E, T, doyouget.… Do you get!” shouted Ford. “It is working! This is amazing, it really is working!”

“More here.” Arthur was throwing them out feverishly as fast as he could go.

“I, F,” said Ford, “Y, O, U … M, U, L, T, I, P, L, Y … What do you get if you multiply … S, I, X … six … B, Y, by, six by … what do you get if you multiply six by … N, I, N, E … six by nine …” He paused. “Come on, where’s the next one?”

“Er, that’s the lot,” said Arthur, “that’s all there were.”

He sat back, nonplussed.

He rooted around again in the knotted up towel but there were no more letters.

“You mean that’s it?” said Ford.

“That’s it.”

“Six by nine. Forty-two.”

“That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Chapter 34

The sun came out and beamed cheerfully at them. A bird sang. A warm breeze wafted through the trees and lifted the heads of the flowers, carrying their scent away through the woods. An insect droned past on its way to do whatever it is that insects do in the late afternoon. The sound of voices lilted through the trees followed a moment later by two girls who stopped in surprise at the sight of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent apparently lying on the ground in agony, but in fact rocking with noiseless laughter.

“No, don’t go,” called Ford Prefect between gasps, “we’ll be with you in just a moment.”

“What’s the matter?” asked one of the girls. She was the taller and slimmer of the two. On Golgafrincham she had been a junior personnel officer, but hadn’t liked it much.

Ford pulled himself together.

“Excuse me,” he said, “hello. My friend and I were just contemplating the meaning of life. Frivolous exercise.”

“Oh, it’s you,” said the girl, “you made a bit of a spectacle of yourself this afternoon. You were quite funny to begin with but you did bang on a bit.”

“Did I? Oh yes.”

“Yes, what was all that for?” asked the other girl, a shorter, round-faced girl who had been an art director for a small advertising company on Golgafrincham. Whatever the privations of this world were, she went to sleep every night profoundly grateful for the fact that whatever she had to face in the morning it wouldn’t be a hundred almost identical photographs of moodily lit tubes of toothpaste.

“For? For nothing. Nothing’s for anything,” said Ford Prefect happily. “Come and join us, I’m Ford, this is Arthur. We were just about to do nothing at all for a while but it can wait.”

The girls looked at them doubtfully.

“I’m Agda,” said the tall one, “this is Mella.”

“Hello, Agda, hello, Mella,” said Ford.

“Do you talk at all?” said Mella to Arthur.

“Oh, eventually,” said Arthur with a smile, “but not as much as Ford.”

“Good.”

There was a slight pause.

“What did you mean,” asked Agda, “about only having two million years? I couldn’t make sense of what you were saying.”

“Oh that,” said Ford. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that the world gets demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass,” said Arthur with a shrug. “But that’s two million years away, and anyway it’s just Vogons doing what Vogons do.”

“Vogons?” said Mella.

“Yes, you wouldn’t know them.”

“Where’d you get this idea from?”

“It really doesn’t matter. It’s just like a dream from the past, or the future.” Arthur smiled and looked away.

“Does it worry you that you don’t talk any kind of sense?” asked Agda.

“Listen, forget it,” said Ford, “forget all of it. Nothing matters. Look, it’s a beautiful day, enjoy it. The sun, the green of the hills, the river down in the valley, the burning trees.”

“Even if it’s only a dream, it’s a pretty horrible idea,” said Mella, “destroying a world just to make a bypass.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of worse,” said Ford. “I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people.”

“That’s mad,” said Mella.

“Yes, only scored thirty points too.”

Agda and Mella exchanged glances.

“Look,” said Agda, “there’s a party after the committee meeting tonight. You can come along if you like.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Ford.

“I’d like to,” said Arthur.

Many hours later Arthur and Mella sat and watched the moon rise over the dull red glow of the trees.

“That story about the world being destroyed …” began Mella.

“In two million years, yes.”

“You say it as if you really think it’s true.”

“Yes, I think it is. I think I was there.”

She shook her head in puzzlement.

“You’re very strange,” she said.

“No, I’m very ordinary,” said Arthur, “but some very strange things have happened to me. You could say I’m more differed from than differing.”

“And that other world your friend talked about, the one that got pushed into a black hole.”

“Ah, that I don’t know about. It sounds like something from the book.”

“What book?”

Arthur paused.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” he said at last.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, just something I threw into the river this evening. I don’t think I’ll be wanting it any more,” said Arthur Dent.

Life, the Universe and Everything

For Sally

Chapter 1

The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.

It wasn’t just that the cave was cold, it wasn’t just that it was damp and smelly. It was that the cave was in the middle of Islington and there wasn’t a bus due for two million years.

Time is the worst place, so to speak, to get lost in, as Arthur Dent could testify, having been lost in both time and space a good deal. At least being lost in space kept you busy.

He was stranded on prehistoric Earth as the result of a complex sequence of events that had involved his being alternately blown up and insulted in more bizarre regions of the Galaxy than he had ever dreamed existed, and though life had now turned very, very, very quiet, he was still feeling jumpy.

He hadn’t been blown up now for five years.

He had hardly seen anyone since he and Ford Prefect had parted company four years previously, and he hadn’t been insulted in all that time either.

Except just once.

It had happened on a spring evening about two years ago.

He was returning to his cave just a little after dusk when he became aware of lights flashing eerily through the clouds. He turned and stared, with hope suddenly clambering through his heart. Rescue. Escape. The castaway’s impossible dream – a ship.

And as he watched, as he stared in wonder and excitement, a long silver ship descended through the warm evening air, quietly, without fuss, its long legs unlocking in a smooth ballet of technology.

It alighted gently on the ground, and what little hum it had generated died away, as if lulled by the evening calm.

A ramp extended itself.

Light streamed out.

A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway. It walked down the ramp and stood in front of Arthur.

“You’re a jerk, Dent,” it said simply.

It was alien, very alien. It had a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar alien flattened head, peculiar slitty little alien eyes, extravagantly draped golden robes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and pale gray green alien skin that had that lustrous sheen about it that most gray green races can acquire only with plenty of exercise and very expensive soap.

Arthur boggled at it.

It gazed levelly at him.

Arthur’s first sensations of hope and trepidation had instantly been overwhelmed by astonishment, and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the use of his vocal cords at this moment.

“Whh …?” he said.

“Bu … hu … uh …” he added.

“Ru … ra … wah … who?” he managed finally to say and lapsed into a frantic kind of silence. He was feeling the effects of not having said anything to anybody for as long as he could remember.

The alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to be some species of clipboard that it was holding in its thin and spindly alien hand.

“Arthur Dent?” it said.

Arthur nodded helplessly.

“Arthur Philip Dent?” pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.

“Er … er … yes … er … er,” confirmed Arthur.

“You’re a jerk,” repeated the alien, “a complete kneebiter.”

“Er.…”

The creature nodded to itself, made a peculiar alien check on its clipboard and turned briskly back toward its ship.

“Er …” said Arthur desperately, “er.…”

“Don’t give me that,” snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp, through the hatchway and disappeared into its ship. The ship sealed itself. It started to make a low throbbing hum.

“Er, hey!” shouted Arthur, and started to run helplessly toward it.

“Wait a minute!” he called. “What is this? What? Wait a minute!”

The ship rose, as if shedding its weight like a cloak falling to the ground, and hovered briefly. It swept strangely up into the evening sky. It passed up through the clouds, illuminating them briefly, and then was gone, leaving Arthur alone in an immensity of land dancing a helplessly tiny little dance.

“What?” he screamed. “What? What? Hey, what? Come back here and say that!”

He jumped and danced until his legs trembled, and shouted till his lungs rasped. There was no answer from anyone. There was no one to hear him or speak to him.

The alien ship was already thundering toward the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void that separates the very few things there are in the Universe from one another.

Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose, and it did at least keep him on the move.

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was – indeed, is – one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.

Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship’s stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn’t been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.

To begin with it was fun; he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.

In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.

This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?”

And so he had started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built to last with a computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.

His ship fled through the inner orbits of the Sol star system, preparing to slingshot around the sun and fling itself out into interstellar space.

“Computer,” he said.

“Here,” yipped the computer.

“Where next?”

“Computing that.”

Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic jewelry of the night, the billions of tiny diamond worlds that dusted the infinite darkness with light. Every one, every single one was on his itinerary. Most of them he would be going to millions of times over.

He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting all the dots in the sky like a child’s numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.

The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it had finished its calculations.

“Folfanga,” it said. It beeped.

“Fourth world of the Folfanga system,” it continued. It beeped again.

“Estimated journey time, three weeks,” it continued further. It beeped again.

“There to meet with a small slug,” it beeped, “of the genus A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu.

“I believe,” it added, after a slight pause during which it beeped, “that you had decided to call it a brainless prat.”

Wowbagger grunted. He watched the majesty of creation outside his window for a moment or two.

“I think I’ll take a nap,” he said, and then added, “What network areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?”

The computer beeped.

“Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box,” it said, and beeped.

“Any movies I haven’t seen thirty thousand times already?”

“No.” “Uh.”

“There’s Angst in Space. You’ve only seen that thirty-three thousand five hundred and seventeen times.”

“Wake me for the second reel “

The computer beeped.

“Sleep well,” it said.

The ship sped on through the night.

Meanwhile, on Earth, it began to rain heavily and Arthur Dent sat in his cave and had one of the most rotten evenings of his entire life, thinking of things he could have said to the alien, and swatting flies, which also had a rotten evening.

The next day he made himself a pouch out of rabbit skin because he thought it would be useful to keep things in.