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

Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams

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Chapter 13

Two months later, Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10⁸ had cut the bottoms off his Galactic State jeans, and was spending part of the enormous fee his judgments commanded lying on a jeweled beach having Essence of Qualactin rubbed into his back by the same rather nice member of the jury. She was a Soolfinian girl from beyond the Cloudworlds of Yaga. She had skin like lemon silk and was very interested in legal bodies.

“Did you hear the news?” she said.

“Weeeeelaaaaah!” said Zipo Bibrok 5 × 10⁸, and you would have had to have been there to know exactly why he said this. None of this was on the tape of Informational Illusions and is all based on hearsay.

“No,” he added, when the thing that had made him say “Weeeeelaaaaah” had stopped happening. He moved his body around slightly to catch the first rays of the third and greatest of primeval Vod’s three suns that was creeping over the ludicrously beautiful horizon, and the sky now glittered with some of the greatest tanning power ever known.

A fragrant breeze wandered up from the quiet sea, trailed along the beach and drifted back to sea again, wondering where to go next. On a mad impulse it went up to the beach again. It drifted back to sea.

“I hope it isn’t good news,” muttered Zipo Bibrok 5 × l0⁸, “’cos I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Your Krikkit judgment was carried out today,” said the girl sumptuously. There was no need to say such a straightforward thing sumptuously, but she went ahead and did it anyway because it was that sort of day. “I heard it on the radio,” she said, “when I went back to the ship for the oil.”

“Uh-huh,” murmured Zipo and rested his head back on the jeweled sand.

“Something happened,” she said.

“Mmmm?”

“Just after the Slo-Time envelope was locked,” she said, and paused a moment from rubbing in the Essence of Qualactin, “a Krikkit warship that had been missing, presumed destroyed, turned out to be just missing after all. It appeared and tried to seize the Key.”

Zipo sat up sharply.

“Hey, what?” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said in a voice that would have calmed the Big Bang down, “apparently there was a short battle. The Key and the warship were disintegrated and blasted into the space-time continuum. Apparently they are lost forever.”

She smiled, and squeezed a little more Essence of Qualactin onto her fingertips. He relaxed and lay back down.

“Do what you did a moment or two ago,” he murmured.

“That?” she said.

“No, no,” he said, “that.”

She tried again.

“That?” she asked.

“Weeeeelaaaaaah!”

Again, you had to be there.

The fragrant breeze drifted up from the sea again.

A magician wandered along the beach, but no one needed him.

Chapter 14

Nothing is lost forever,” said Slartibartfast, his face flickering redly in the light of the candle that the robot waiter was trying to take away, “except for the Cathedral of Chalesm.” “The what?” said Arthur with a start.

“The Cathedral of Chalesm,” repeated Slartibartfast. “It was during the course of my researches at the Campaign for Real Time that I …”

“The what?” said Arthur again.

The old man paused and gathered his thoughts, for what he hoped would be one last onslaught on this story. The robot waiter moved through the space-time matrices in a way that spectacularly combined the surly with the obsequious, made a snatch for the candle and got it. They had the check, had argued convincingly about who had the cannelloni and how many bottles of wine they had had, and, as Arthur had been dimly aware, had thereby successfully maneuvered the ship out of subjective space and into parking orbit round a strange planet. The waiter was now anxious to complete his part of the charade and clear the bistro.

“All will become clear,” said Slartibartfast.

“When?”

“In a minute. Listen. The time streams are now very polluted. There’s a lot of muck floating about in them, flotsam and jetsam, and more and more of it is now being regurgitated into the physical world. Eddies in the space-time continuum, you see.”

“So I hear,” said Arthur.

“Look, where are we going?” said Ford, pushing his chair back from the table with impatience, “because I’m eager to get there.”

“We are going,” said Slartibartfast, in a slow, measured voice, “to try to prevent the war robots of Krikkit from regaining the whole of the Key they need to unlock the planet of Krikkit from the Slo-Time envelope and release the rest of their army and their mad Masters.”

“It’s just,” said Ford, “that you mentioned a party.”

“I did,” said Slartibartfast, and hung his head.

He realized that it had been a mistake, because the idea seemed to exercise a strange and unhealthy fascination on the mind of Ford Prefect.

The more Slartibartfast unraveled the dark and tragic story of Krikkit and its people, the more Ford Prefect wanted to drink a lot and dance with girls.

The old man felt that he should not have mentioned the party until he absolutely had to. But there it was, the fact was out, and Ford Prefect had attached himself to it the way an Arcturan Megaleech attaches itself to its victim before biting his head off and making off with his spaceship.

“When,” said Ford eagerly, “do we get there?”

“When I’ve finished telling you why we have to go there.”

“I know why I’m going,” said Ford, and leaned back, sticking his hands behind his head. He did one of his smiles that made people twitch.

Slartibartfast had hoped for an easy retirement.

He had been planning to learn to play the octaventral heebiephone, a pleasantly futile task, he knew, because he had the wrong number of mouths.

He had also been planning to write an eccentric and relentlessly inaccurate monograph on the subject of equatorial fjords in order to set the record wrong about one or two matters he saw as important.

Instead, he had somehow got talked into doing some part-time work for the Campaign for Real Time and had started to take it all seriously for the first time in his life. As a result he now found himself spending his fast declining years combating evil and trying to save the Galaxy.

He found it exhausting work and sighed heavily.

“Listen,” he said, “at Camtim …”

“What?” said Arthur.

“The Campaign for Real Time, which I will tell you about later. I noticed that five pieces of jetsam that had in relatively recent times plopped back into existence seemed to correspond to the five pieces of the missing Key. Only two I could trace exactly – the Wooden Pillar, which appeared on your planet, and the Silver Bail. It seems to be at some sort of party. We must go there to retrieve it before the Krikkit robots find it, or who knows what may happen.”

“No,” said Ford firmly, “we must go to the party in order to drink a lot and dance with girls.”

“But haven’t you understood everything I …”

“Yes,” said Ford, with sudden and unexpected fierceness, “I’ve understood it all perfectly well. That’s why I want to have as many drinks and dance with as many girls as possible while there are still any left. If everything you’ve shown us is true …”

“True? Of course it’s true.”

“ … then we don’t stand a whelk’s chance in a supernova.”

“A what?” said Arthur sharply again. He had been following the conversation doggedly up to this point, and was keen not to lose the thread now.

“A whelk’s chance in a supernova,” repeated Ford without losing momentum, “the …”

“What’s a whelk got to do with a supernova?” said Arthur.

“It doesn’t,” said Ford levelly, “stand a chance in one.”

He paused to see if the matter was now cleared up. The freshly puzzled looks clambering across Arthur’s face told him that it wasn’t.

“A supernova,” said Ford as quickly and as clearly as he could, “is a star that explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns with the brightness of a billion suns and then collapses as a superheavy neutron star. It’s a star that burns up other stars, got it? Nothing stands a chance in a supernova.”

“I see,” said Arthur.

“The …”

“So why a whelk particularly?”

“Why not a whelk? Doesn’t matter.”

Arthur accepted this, and Ford continued, picking up his early fierce momentum as best he could.

“The point is,” he said, “that people like you and me, Slartibartfast, and Arthur – particularly and especially Arthur – are just dilettantes, eccentrics, layabouts if you like.”

Slartibartfast frowned, partly in puzzlement and partly in umbrage. He started to speak.

“….” is as far as he got.

“We’re not obsessed by anything, you see,” insisted Ford.

“…”

“And that’s the deciding factor. We can’t win against obsession. They care, we don’t. They win.”

“I care about lots of things,” said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty.

“Such as?”

“Well,” said the old man, “life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords.”

“Would you die for them?”

“Fjords?” blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. “No.”

“Well then.”

“Wouldn’t see the point, to be honest.”

“And I still can’t see the connection,” said Arthur, “with whelks.”

Ford could feel the conversation slipping out of his control, and refused to be sidetracked by anything at this point.

“The point is,” he hissed, “that we are not obsessive people, and we don’t stand a chance against …”

“Except for your sudden obsession with whelks,” pursued Arthur, “which I still haven’t understood.”

“Will you please leave whelks out of it?”

“I will if you will,” said Arthur. “You brought the subject up.”

“It was an error,” said Ford, “forget them. The point is this.”

He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the tips of his fingers.

“What was I talking about?” he said wearily.

“Let’s just go down to the party,” said Slartibartfast, “for whatever reason.” He stood up, shaking his head.

“I think that’s what I was trying to say,” said Ford.

For some unexplained reason, the teleport cubicles were in the bathroom.

Chapter 15

Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted.

The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hyper-mathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.

The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.

Here is an example. It may not seem to be an important one to some people, but to others it is crucial. It is certainly significant in that it was this single event that caused the Campaign for Real Time to be set up in the first place (or is it last? It depends which way round you see history as happening, and this, too, is now an increasingly vexed question).

There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.

They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn’t speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of the wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn’t pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that good.

Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.

Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and dryer.

Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words to that effect.

They traveled the time waves; they found him. They explained the situation – with some difficulty – to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write with such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do talk shows, on which he sparkled wittily.

He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and stacks of dried habra leaves to copy them out onto, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.

Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s changed? The first people say that that isn’t the point. They aren’t quite certain what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn’t it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable.

So a lot of history is now gone forever. The Campaigners for Real Time claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. “The past,” they say, “is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.”

Chapter 16

Arthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about and clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs that he still indulged himself in whenever he made any of these hateful and painful materializations that he was determined not to let himself get used to. He looked around for the others.

They weren’t there.

He looked around for the others again.

They still weren’t there.

He closed his eyes.

He opened them.

He looked around for the others.

They obstinately persisted in their absence.

He closed his eyes again, preparatory to making this completely futile exercise once more, and because it was only then, while his eyes were closed, that his brain began to register what his eyes had been looking at while they were open, a puzzled frown crept across his face.

So he opened his eyes again to check his facts and the frown stayed put.

If anything, it intensified, and got a good firm grip. If this was a party, it was a very bad one, so bad, in fact, that everyone else had left. He abandoned this line of thought as futile. Obviously this wasn’t a party. It was a cave, or a labyrinth or a tunnel or something – there was insufficient light to tell, certainly insufficient light to hold a party in. All was darkness, a damp, shiny darkness.

And there was no sound, no noise at all, except for the echoes of his own breathing, which sounded worried. And the more he listened to them, the more worried they began to sound.

He coughed very slightly, in an introductory sort of way. He then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his cough trailing off among winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via further unseen corridors, as if to say … “Yes?”

This happened to every noise he made, and it unnerved him. He tried to hum a cheery tune, but by the time it returned to him it was a hollow dirge and he stopped.

His mind was suddenly full of images from the story that Slartibartfast had been telling him. He half expected suddenly to see lethal white robots step silently from the shadows and kill him. He caught his breath. They didn’t. He let it go again. He didn’t know what he did expect.

Someone or something, however, seemed to be expecting him, for at that moment there lit up suddenly in the dark distance an eerie green neon sign.

It said, silently:

YOU HAVE BEEN DIVERTED

The sign flicked off again, in a way that Arthur was not at all certain he liked. It flicked off with a sort of contemptuous flourish. Arthur then tried to assure himself that this was just a ridiculous trick of his imagination. A neon sign is either on or off, depending on whether it has electricity running through it or not. There was no way, he told himself, that it could possibly effect the transition from one state to the other with a contemptuous flourish. He hugged himself tightly in his dressing gown and shivered, nevertheless.

The neon sign in the depths now suddenly lit up, bafflingly, with just three dots and a comma. Like this:

…,

Only in green neon.

It was trying, Arthur realized after staring at this perplexedly for a second or two, to indicate that there was more to come, that the sentence was not complete. Trying with almost superhuman pedantry, he further reflected. Or at least, nonhuman pedantry.

The sentence then completed itself with these two words:

ARTHUR DENT.

He reeled. He steadied himself to have another clear look at it. It still said ARTHUR DENT, so he reeled again.

Once again, the sign flicked off, and left him blinking in the darkness with just the dim red image of his name jumping on his retina.

WELCOME, the sign now suddenly said.

After a moment, it added:

I DON’T THINK.

The stone-cold fear which had been hovering around Arthur all this time waiting for its moment, recognized that its moment had now come and pounced on him. He tried to fight it off. He dropped into a kind of alert crouch that he had once seen somebody do on television, but it must have been someone with stronger knees. He peered huntedly into the darkness.

“Er, hello?” he said.

He cleared his throat and said it again, more loudly and without the “er.” At some distance down the corridor it seemed suddenly as if somebody started to beat on a bass drum.

He listened to it for a few seconds and realized that it was just his heart beating.

He listened for a few seconds more and realized that it wasn’t his heart, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.

Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves and leaped off. He put out a hand onto the floor to steady his alert crouch, which wasn’t holding up very well. The sign changed itself again. It said:

DO NOT BE ALARMED.

After a pause, it added:

BE VERY, VERY FRIGHTENED, ARTHUR DENT.

Once again it flicked off. Once again it left him in darkness. His eyes seemed to be popping out of his head. He wasn’t certain if this was because they were trying to see more clearly, or if they simply wanted to leave at this point.

“Hello?” he said again, this time trying to put a note of rugged and aggressive self-assertion into it. “Is anyone there?”

There was no reply, nothing.

This unnerved Arthur even more than a reply would have done, and he began to back away from the scary nothingness. And the more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther away from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.

At this point it suddenly occurred to him to turn round rather quickly.

There was nothing there.

Just blackness.

This really unnerved him, and he started to back away from that, back the way he had come.

After doing this for a short while it suddenly occurred to him that he was now backing toward whatever it was he had been backing away from in the first place.

This, he couldn’t help thinking, must be a foolish thing to do. He decided he would be better off backing the way he had first been backing, and turned around again.

It turned out at this point that his second impulse had been the correct one, because there was an indescribably hideous monster standing quietly behind him. Arthur yawed wildly as his skin tried to jump one way and his skeleton the other, while his brain tried to work out which of his ears it most wanted to crawl out of.

“Bet you weren’t expecting to see me again,” said the monster, which Arthur couldn’t help thinking was a strange remark for it to make, seeing that he had never met the creature before. He could tell that he hadn’t met the creature before from the simple fact that he was able to sleep at nights. It was … it was … it was …

Arthur blinked at it. It stood very still. It did look a little familiar.

A terrible cold calm came over him as he realized that what he was looking at was a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly.

He wondered why anybody would be showing him a six-foot-high hologram of a housefly at this time. He wondered whose voice he had heard.

It was a terribly realistic hologram.

It vanished.

“Or perhaps you remember me better,” said the voice suddenly, and it was a deep, hollow, malevolent voice that sounded like molten tar glurping out of a drum with evil on its mind, “as the rabbit.”

With a sudden ping, there was a rabbit there in the black labyrinth with him, a huge, monstrously hideously soft and lovable rabbit – an image again, but one on which every single soft and lovable hair seemed like a real and single thing growing in its soft and lovable coat. Arthur was startled to see his own reflection in its soft and lovable unblinking and extremely huge brown eye.

“Born in darkness,” rumbled the voice, “raised in darkness. One morning I poked my head for the first time into the bright new world and got it split open by what felt like some primitive instrument made of flint.

“Made by you, Arthur Dent, and wielded by you. Rather hard as I recall.

“You turned my skin into a bag for keeping interesting stones in. I happen to know that because in my next life I came back as a fly again and you swatted me. Again. Only this time you swatted me with the bag you’d made of my previous skin.

“Arthur Dent, you are not merely a cruel and heartless man, you are also staggeringly tactless.”

The voice paused while Arthur gawked.

“I see you have lost the bag,” said the voice, “probably got bored with it, did you?”

Arthur shook his head helplessly. He wanted to explain that he had been in fact very fond of the bag and had looked after it very well and had taken it with him wherever he went, but that somehow every time he traveled anywhere he seemed inexplicably to end up with the wrong bag, and that, curiously enough, even as they stood there, he was just noticing for the first time that the bag he had with him at the moment appeared to be made out of rather nasty fake leopard skin, and wasn’t the one he’d had a few moments ago before he arrived in this whatever place it was, and wasn’t one he would have chosen himself and heaven knew what would be in it as it wasn’t his, and he would much rather have his original bag back, except that he was of course terribly sorry for having so peremptorily removed it, or rather its component parts, i.e., the rabbit skin, from its previous owner, viz., the rabbit whom he currently had the honor of attempting vainly to address.

All he actually managed to say was “Erp.”

“Meet the newt you trod on,” said the voice.

And there was, standing in the corridor with Arthur, a giant green scaly newt. Arthur turned, yelped, leaped backward, and found himself standing in the middle of the rabbit. He yelped again, but could find nowhere to leap to.

“That was me, too,” continued the voice in a low menacing rumble, “as if you didn’t know.…”

“Know?” said Arthur with a start, “know?”

“The interesting thing about reincarnation,” rasped the voice, “is that most people, most spirits, are not aware that it is happening to them.”

He paused for effect. As far as Arthur was concerned there was already quite enough effect going on.

“I was aware,” hissed the voice, “that is, I became aware. Slowly. Gradually.”

He, whoever he was, paused again and gathered breath.

“I could hardly help it, could I?” he bellowed, “when the same thing kept happening, over and over and over again! Every life I ever lived, I got killed by Arthur Dent. Any world, any body, any time, I’m just getting settled down, along comes Arthur Dent, pow, he kills me.

“Hard not to notice. Bit of a memory jogger. Bit of a pointer. Bit of a bloody giveaway!

“ ‘That’s funny,’ my spirit would say to itself as it winged its way back to the netherworld after another fruitless Dent-ended venture into the land of the living, ‘that man who just ran me over as I was hopping across the road to my favorite pond, looked a little familiar.…’ And gradually I got to piece it together, Dent, you multiple-me murderer!”

The echoes of his voice roared up and down the corridors. Arthur stood silent and cold, his head shaking with disbelief.

“Here’s the moment, Dent,” shrieked the voice, now reaching a feverish pitch of hatred, “here’s the moment when at last I knew!”

It was indescribably hideous, the thing that suddenly opened up in front of Arthur, making him gasp and gargle with horror, but here’s an attempt at a description of how hideous it was. It was a huge palpitating wet cave with a vast slimy, rough, whale-like creature rolling around in it and sliding over monstrous white tombstones. High above the cave rose a vast promontory in which could be seen the dark recesses of two further fearful caves, which …

Arthur Dent suddenly realized that he was looking at his own mouth, when his attention was meant to be directed at the live oyster that was being tipped helplessly into it.

He staggered back with a cry and averted his eyes.

When he looked again the appalling apparition had gone. The corridor was dark and, briefly, silent. He was alone with his thoughts. They were extremely unpleasant thoughts and he would rather have had a chaperon.

The next noise, when it came, was the low heavy roll of a large section of wall trundling aside, revealing, for the moment, just dark blankness behind it. Arthur looked into it in much the same way that a mouse looks into a dark dog kennel.

And the voice spoke to him again.

“Tell me it was a coincidence, Dent,” it said. “I dare you to tell me it was a coincidence!”

“It was a coincidence,” said Arthur quickly.

“It was not!” came the answering bellow.

“It was,” said Arthur, “it was …”

“If it was a coincidence, then my name,” roared the voice, “is not Agrajag!!!”

“And presumably,” said Arthur, “you would claim that that was your name.”

“Yes!” hissed Agrajag, as if he had just completed a rather deft syllogism.

“Well, I’m afraid it was still a coincidence,” said Arthur.

“Come in here and say that!” howled the voice, in sudden apoplexy again.

Arthur walked in and said that it was a coincidence, or at least, he nearly said it was a coincidence. His tongue rather lost its footing toward the end of the last word because the lights came up and revealed what it was he had walked into.

It was a Cathedral of Hate.

It was the product of a mind that was not merely twisted, but actually sprained.

It was huge. It was horrific.

It had a statue in it.

We will come to the statue in a moment.

The vast, incomprehensibly vast chamber looked as if it had been carved out of the inside of a mountain, and the reason for this was that that was precisely what it had been carved out of. It seemed to Arthur to spin sickeningly round his head as he stood and gaped at it.

It was black.

Where it wasn’t black you were inclined to wish that it was, because the colors with which some of the unspeakable details were picked out ranged horribly across the whole spectrum of eye-defying colors, from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt Hombre and Gan Green on the way.

The unspeakable details that these colors picked out were gargoyles that would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch.

The gargoyles all looked inward from the walls, from the pillars, from the flying buttresses, from the choir stalls, toward the statue, to which we will come in a moment.

And if the gargoyles would have put Francis Bacon off his lunch, then it was clear from the gargoyles’ faces that the statue would have put them off theirs, had they been alive to eat it, which they weren’t, and had anybody tried to serve them some, which they wouldn’t.

Around the monumental walls were vast engraved stone tablets in memory of those who had fallen to Arthur Dent.

The names of some of those commemorated were underlined and had asterisks against them. So, for instance, the name of a cow that had been slaughtered, and of which Arthur had happened to eat a fillet steak, would have the plainest engraving, whereas the name of a fish that Arthur had himself caught and then decided he didn’t like and left on the side of the plate had a double underlining, three sets of asterisks and a bleeding dagger added as decoration, just to make the point.

And what was most disturbing about all this, apart from the statue, to which we are, by degrees, coming, was the very clear implication that all these people and creatures were indeed the same person, over and over again.

And it was equally clear that this person was, however unfairly, extremely upset and annoyed.

In fact it would be fair to say that he had reached a level of annoyance the like of which had never been seen in the Universe. It was an annoyance of epic proportions, a burning, searing flame of annoyance, an annoyance that now spanned the whole of time and space in its infinite umbrage.