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

Автор книги: Douglas Noel Adams

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Текущая страница: 60 (всего у книги 62 страниц)

She stuffed her fist into her mouth.

She must get help.

Then there had been Eric Bartlett banging on about alien spacecraft landing on her lawn. And before that … New York had been, well, very hot and stressful. The high hopes and the bitter disappointment. The astrology stuff.

She must have had a nervous breakdown.

That was it. She was exhausted and she had had a nervous breakdown and had started hallucinating some time after she got home. She had dreamed the whole story. An alien race of people dispossessed of their own lives and histories, stuck on a remote outpost of our solar system and filling their cultural vacuum with our cultural junk. Ha! It was nature’s way of telling her to check into an expensive medical establishment very quickly.

She was very, very sick. She looked at how many large coffees she’d got through as well, and realized how heavily she was breathing and how fast.

Part of solving any problem, she told herself, was realizing that you had it. She started to bring her breathing under control. She had caught herself in time. She had seen where she was. She was on the way back from whatever psychological precipice she had been on the brink of. She started to calm down, to calm down, to calm down. She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes.

After a while, now that she was breathing normally again, she opened them again.

So where had she got this tape from, then?

• • •

It was still running.

All right. It was a fake.

She had faked it herself, that was it.

It must have been her who had faked it because her voice was all over the soundtrack, asking questions. Every now and then the camera would swing down at the end of a shot and she would see her own feet in her own shoes. She had faked it and she had no recollection of faking it or any idea of why she had done it.

Her breathing was getting hectic again as she watched the snowy, flickering screen.

She must still be hallucinating.

She shook her head, trying to make it go away. She had no memory of faking any of this very obviously fake stuff. On the other hand she did seem to have memories that were very like the faked stuff. She continued to watch in a bewildered trance.

The person she imagined to be called the Leader was questioning her about astrology and she was answering smoothly and calmly. Only she could detect the well-disguised rising panic in her own voice.

The Leader pushed a button and a maroon velvet wall slid aside, revealing a large bank of flat TV monitors.

Each of the monitors was showing a kaleidoscope of different images: a few seconds from a game show, a few seconds from a cop show, a few seconds from a supermarket warehouse security system, a few seconds from somebody’s holiday movies, a few seconds of sex, a few seconds of news, a few seconds of comedy. It was clear that the Leader was very proud of all this stuff, and he was waving his hands like a conductor while continuing at the same time to talk complete gibberish.

Another wave of his hands, and all the screens cleared to form one giant computer screen showing in diagrammatic form all the planets of the solar system, mapped out against a background of the stars in their constellations. The display was completely static.

“We have great skills,” the Leader was saying. “Great skills in computation, in cosmological trigonometry, in three-dimensional navigational calculus. Great skills. Great, great skills. Only we have lost them. It is too bad. We like to have skills, only they have gone. They are in space somewhere, hurtling. With our names and the details of our homes and loved ones. Please,” he said, gesturing her forward to sit at the computer’s console, “be skillful for us.”

Obviously what happened next was that Tricia quickly set the video camera up on its tripod to capture the whole scene. She then walked into the shot herself and sat down calmly in front of the giant computer display, spent a few moments familiarizing herself with the interface and then started smoothly and competently to pretend that she had the faintest idea what she was doing.

It hadn’t been that difficult, in fact.

She was, after all, a mathematician and astrophysicist by training and a television presenter by experience, and what science she had forgotten over the years she was more than capable of making up by bluffing.

The computer she was working on was clear evidence that the Grebulons came from a far more advanced and sophisticated culture than their current vacuous state suggested, and with its aid she was able, within about half an hour, to cobble together a rough working model of the solar system.

It wasn’t particularly accurate or anything, but it looked good. The planets were whizzing around in reasonably good simulations of their orbits, and you could watch the movement of the whole piece of virtual cosmological clockwork from any point within the system – very roughly. You could watch from Earth, you could watch from Mars, etc. You could watch from the surface of the planet Rupert. Tricia had been quite impressed with herself, but also very impressed with the computer system she was working on. The task would probably have taken a year or so of programming, using a computer workstation on Earth.

When she was finished, the Leader came up behind her and watched. He was very pleased and delighted with what she had achieved.

“Good,” he said. “And now, please, I would like you to demonstrate how to use the system you have just designed to translate the information in this book for me.”

Quietly he put a book down in front of her.

It was You and Your Planets by Gail Andrews.

Tricia stopped the tape again.

She was definitely feeling very wobbly indeed. The feeling that she was hallucinating had now receded, but had not left anything any easier or clearer in her head.

She pushed her seat back from the editing desk and wondered what to do. Years ago she had left the field of astronomical research because she knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that she had met a being from another planet. At a party. And she had also known, without any doubt whatsoever, that she would have made herself a laughingstock if she had ever said so. But how could she study cosmology and not say anything about the single most important thing she knew about it? She had done the only thing she could do. She had left.

Now she worked in television and the same thing had happened again.

She had videotape, actual videotape of the most astounding story in the history of, well, anything: a forgotten outpost of an alien civilization marooned on the outermost planet of our own solar system.

She had the story.

She had been there.

She had seen it.

She had the videotape, for God’s sake.

And if she ever showed it to anybody, she would be a laughingstock.

How could she prove any of this? It wasn’t even worth thinking about. The whole thing was a nightmare from virtually any angle she cared to look at it from. Her head was beginning to throb.

She had some aspirin in her bag. She went out of the little editing suite to the water dispenser down the corridor. She took the aspirin and drank several cups of water.

The place seemed to be very quiet. Usually there were more people bustling about the place, or at least some people bustling around the place. She popped her head around the door of the editing suite next to hers but there was no one there.

She had gone rather overboard keeping people out of her own suite. DO NOT DISTURB, the notice read. DO NOT EVEN THINK OF ENTERING. I DON’T CARE WHAT IT IS. GO AWAY. I’M BUSY!

When she went back in she noticed that the message light on her phone extension was winking and wondered how long it had been on.

“Hello?” she said to the receptionist.

“Oh, Miss McMillan, I’m so glad you called. Everybody’s been trying to reach you. Your TV company. They’re desperate to reach you. Can you call them?”

“Why didn’t you put them through?” said Tricia.

“You said I wasn’t to put anybody through for anything. You said I was to deny that you were even here. I didn’t know what to do. I came up to give you a message, but …”

“Okay,” said Tricia, cursing herself. She phoned her office.

“Tricia! Where the hemorrhaging fuck are you?”

“At the editing …”

“They said …”

“I know. What’s up?”

“What’s up? Only a bloody alien spaceship!”

“What? Where?”

“Regent’s Park. Big silver job. Some girl with a bird. She speaks English and throws rocks at people and wants someone to repair her watch. Just get there.”

Tricia stared at it.

It wasn’t a Grebulon ship. Not that she was suddenly an expert on extraterrestrial craft, but this was a sleek and beautiful silver and white thing about the size of a large oceangoing yacht, which is what it most resembled. Next to this, the structures of the huge half-dismantled Grebulon ship looked like gun turrets on a battleship. Gun turrets. That’s what those blank gray buildings had looked like. And what was odd about them was that by the time she passed them again on her way to reboarding the small Grebulon craft, they had moved. These things flitted briefly through her head as she ran from the taxi to meet her camera crew.

“Where’s the girl?” she shouted above the noise of helicopters and police sirens.

“There!” shouted the producer while the sound engineer hurried to clip a radio mike to her. “She says her mother and father came from here in some parallel dimension or something like that, and she’s got her father’s watch, and … I don’t know. What can I tell you? Busk it. Ask her what it feels like to be from outer space.”

“Thanks a lot, Ted,” muttered Tricia. She checked that her mike was securely clipped, gave the engineer some level, took a deep breath, tossed her hair back and switched into her role of professional reporter, on home ground, ready for anything

At least, nearly anything.

She turned to look for the girl. That must be her, with the wild hair and wild eyes. The girl turned toward her. And stared.

“Mother!” she screamed, and started to hurl rocks at Tricia.

Chapter 22

Daylight exploded around them. Hot, heavy sun. A desert plain stretched out ahead in a haze of heat. They thundered out into it.

“Jump!” shouted Ford Prefect.

“What?” shouted Arthur Dent, holding on for dear life.

There was no reply.

“What did you say?” shouted Arthur again, and then realized that Ford Prefect was no longer there. He looked around in panic and started to slip. Realizing he couldn’t hold on any longer, he pushed himself sideways as hard as he could and rolled into a ball as he hit the ground, rolling, rolling away from the pounding hooves.

What a day, he thought, as he started furiously coughing dust up out of his lungs. He hadn’t had a day as bad as this since the Earth had been blown up. He staggered up to his knees, and then up to his feet and started to run away. He didn’t know what from or what to, but running away seemed a prudent move.

He ran straight into Ford Prefect, who was standing there surveying the scene.

“Look,” said Ford. “That is precisely what we need.”

Arthur coughed up some more dust and wiped some other dust out of his hair and eyes. He turned, panting, to look at what Ford was looking at.

It didn’t look much like the domain of a King, or the King, or any kind of King. It looked quite inviting, though.

First, the context. This was a desert world. The dusty earth was packed hard and had neatly bruised every last bit of Arthur that hadn’t been already bruised by the festivities of the previous night. Some way ahead of them were great cliffs that looked like sandstone, eroded by the wind and what little rain presumably fell in these parts into wild and fantastic shapes, which matched the fantastic shapes of the giant cacti that sprouted here and there from the arid, orange landscape.

For a moment Arthur dared to hope they had unexpectedly arrived in Arizona or New Mexico or maybe South Dakota, but there was plenty of evidence that this was not the case.

The Perfectly Normal Beasts, for a start, were still thundering, still pounding. They swept up in their tens of thousands from the far horizon, disappeared completely for about half a mile, then swept off, thundering and pounding to the distant horizon opposite.

Then there were the spaceships parked in front of the bar & grill. Ah. The Domain of the King Bar & Grill. Bit of an anticlimax, thought Arthur to himself.

In fact only one of the spaceships was parked in front of the Domain of the King Bar & Grill. The other three were in a parking lot by the side of the bar & grill. It was the one in front that caught the eye, though. Wonderful-looking thing. Wild fins all over it, far, far too much chrome all over the fins and most of the actual bodywork painted in a shocking pink. It crouched there like an immense brooding insect and looked as if it was at any moment about to jump on something about a mile away.

The Domain of the King Bar & Grill was slap bang in the middle of where the Perfectly Normal Beasts would be charging if they didn’t take a minor transdimensional diversion on the way. It stood on its own, undisturbed. An ordinary bar & grill. A truck-stop diner. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Quiet. The Domain of the King.

“Gonna buy that spaceship,” said Ford, quietly.

“Buy it?” said Arthur. “That’s not like you. I thought you usually pinched them.”

“Sometimes you have to show a little respect,” said Ford.

“Probably have to show a little cash as well,” said Arthur. “How the hell much is that thing worth?”

With a tiny movement, Ford brought his Dine-O-Charge credit card up out of his pocket. Arthur noticed that the hand holding it was trembling very slightly.

“I’ll teach them to make me the restaurant critic …” breathed Ford.

“What do you mean?” asked Arthur.

“I’ll show you,” said Ford with a nasty glint in his eye. “Let’s go and run up a few expenses, shall we?”

“Couple beers,” said Ford, “and, I dunno, a couple bacon rolls, whatever you got – oh, and that pink thing outside.”

He flipped his card on the top of the bar and looked around casually.

There was a kind of silence.

There hadn’t been a lot of noise before, but there was definitely a kind of silence now. Even the distant thunder of the Perfectly Normal Beasts carefully avoiding the Domain of the King seemed suddenly a little muted.

“Just rode into town,” said Ford as if nothing was odd about that or about anything else. He was leaning against the bar at an extravagantly relaxed angle.

There were about three other customers in the place, sitting at tables, nursing beers. About three. Some people would say there were exactly three, but it wasn’t that kind of a place, not the kind of a place that you felt like being that specific in. There was some big guy setting up some stuff on the little stage as well. Old drum kit. Couple guitars. Country and Western kind of stuff.

The barman was not moving very swiftly to get in Ford’s order. In fact he wasn’t moving at all.

“Not sure that the pink thing’s for sale,” he said at last in the kind of accent that went on for quite a long time.

“Sure it is,” said Ford. “How much you want?”

“Well …”

“Think of a number, I’ll double it.”

“Tain’t mine to sell,” said the barman.

“So, whose?”

The barman nodded at the big guy setting up on the stage. Big fat guy, moving slow, balding.

Ford nodded. He grinned.

“Okay,” he said. “Get the beers, get the rolls. Keep the tab open.”

Arthur sat at the bar and rested. He was used to not knowing what was going on. He felt comfortable with it. The beer was pretty good and made him a little sleepy, which he didn’t mind at all. The bacon rolls were not bacon rolls. They were Perfectly Normal Beast rolls. He exchanged a few professional roll-making remarks with the barman and just let Ford get on with whatever Ford wanted to do.

“Okay,” said Ford, returning to his stool. “It’s cool. We got the pink thing.”

The barman was very surprised. “He’s selling it to you?”

“He’s giving it to us for free,” said Ford, taking a gnaw at his roll. “Hey, no, keep the tab open, though. We have some items to add to it. Good roll.”

He took a deep pull of beer.

“Good beer,” he added. “Good ship, too,” he said, eyeing the big pink and chrome insectlike thing, bits of which could be seen through windows of the bar. “Good everything, pretty much. You know,” he said, sitting back, reflectively, “it’s at times like this that you kind of wonder if it’s worth worrying about the fabric of space-time and the causal integrity of the multidimensional probability matrix and the potential collapse of all waveforms in the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash and all that sort of stuff that’s been bugging me. Maybe I feel that what the big guy says is right. Just let it all go. What does it matter? Let it go.”

“Which big guy?” said Arthur.

Ford just nodded toward the stage. The big guy was saying, “One, two” into the mike a couple of times. Couple other guys were on the stage now. Drums. Guitar.

The barman, who had been silent for a moment or two, said, “You say he’s letting you have his ship?”

“Yeah,” said Ford. “ ‘Let it all go’ is what he said. ‘Take the ship. Take it with my blessing. Be good to her.’ I will be good to her.”

He took a pull at his beer again.

“Like I was saying,” he went on. “It’s at times like this that you kind of think, let it all go. But then you think of guys like InfiniDim Enterprises and you think, they are not going to get away with it. They are going to suffer. It is my sacred and holy duty to see those guys suffer. Here, let me put something on the tab for the singer. I asked for a special request and we agreed. It’s to go on the tab, okay?”

“Okay,” said the barman, cautiously. Then he shrugged. “Okay, however you want to do it. How much?”

Ford named a figure. The barman fell over among the bottles and glasses. Ford vaulted quickly over the bar to check that he was all right and help him back up to his feet. He’d cut his finger and his elbow a bit and was feeling a little woozy but was otherwise fine. The big guy started to sing. The barman hobbled off with Ford’s credit card to get authorization.

“Is there stuff going on here that I don’t know about?” said Arthur to Ford.

“Isn’t there usually?” said Ford.

“No need to be like that,” said Arthur. He began to wake up. “Shouldn’t we be going?” he said, suddenly. “Will that ship get us to Earth?”

“Sure will,” said Ford.

“That’s where Random will be going!” said Arthur with a start. “We can follow her! But … er …”

Ford let Arthur get on with thinking things out for himself while he got out his old edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

“But where are we on the probability axis thing?” said Arthur. “Will the Earth be there or not there? I spent so much time looking for it. All I found was planets that were a bit like it or not at all like it, though it was clearly the right place because of the continents. The worst version was called NowWhat, where I got bitten by some wretched little animal. That’s how they communicated, you know, by biting each other. Bloody painful. Then half the time, of course, the Earth isn’t even there because it’s been blown up by the bloody Vogons. How much sense am I making?”

Ford didn’t comment. He was listening to something. He passed the Guide over to Arthur and pointed at the screen. The active entry read “Earth. Mostly harmless.”

“You mean it’s there!” said Arthur, excitedly. “The Earth is there! That’s where Random will be going! The bird was showing her the Earth in the rainstorm!”

Ford motioned Arthur to shout a little less loudly. He was listening.

Arthur was growing impatient. He’d heard bar singers sing “Love Me Tender” before. He was a bit surprised to hear it here, right in the middle of wherever the hell this was, certainly not Earth, but then things tended not to surprise him these days as much as formerly. The singer was quite good, as bar singers went, if you liked that sort of thing, but Arthur was getting fretful.

He glanced at his watch. This only served to remind him that he didn’t have his watch anymore. Random had it, or at least the remains of it.

“Don’t you think we should be going?” he said, insistently.

“Shhh!” said Ford. “I paid to hear this song.” He seemed to have tears in his eyes, which Arthur found a bit disturbing. He’d never seen Ford moved by anything other than very, very strong drink. Probably the dust. He waited, tapping his fingers irritably, out of time with the music.

The song ended. The singer went on to do “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“Anyway,” Ford whispered, “I’ve got to review the restaurant.”

“What?”

“I have to write a review.”

“Write a review? Of this place?”

“Filing the review validates the expenses claim. I’ve fixed it so that it happens completely automatically and untraceably. This bill is going to need some validation,” he added, quietly, staring into his beer with a nasty smirk.

“For a couple of beers and a roll?”

“And a tip for the singer.”

“Why, how much did you tip him?”

Ford named a figure again.

“I don’t know how much that is,” said Arthur. “What’s it worth in pounds sterling? What would it buy you?”

“It would probably buy you, roughly … er …” Ford screwed his eyes up as he did some calculations in his head. “Switzerland,” he said at last. He picked up his Hitchhiker’s Guide and started to type.

Arthur nodded intelligently. There were times when he wished he understood what on earth Ford was talking about, and other times, like now, when he felt it was probably safer not even to try. He looked over Ford’s shoulder. “This isn’t going to take long, is it?” he said.

“Nah,” said Ford. “Piece of piss. Just mention that the rolls were quite good, the beer good and cold, local wildlife nicely eccentric, the bar singer the best in the known universe and that’s about it. Doesn’t need much. Just a validation.”

He touched an area on the screen marked “ENTER” and the message vanished into the Sub-Etha.

“You thought the singer was pretty good, then?”

“Yeah,” said Ford. The barman was returning with a piece of paper, which seemed to be trembling in his hand.

He pushed it over to Ford with a kind of nervous, reverential twitch.

“Funny thing,” said the barman. “The system rejected it first couple times. Can’t say it surprised me.” Beads of sweat were standing on his brow. “Then suddenly it’s, Oh yeah, that’s okay, and the system … er, validates it. Just like that. You wanna … sign it?”

Ford scanned the form quickly. He sucked his teeth. “This is going to hurt InfiniDim a lot,” he said, with an appearance of concern. “Oh well,” he added softly, “screw ’em.”

He signed with a flourish and handed it back to the barman.

“More money,” he said, “than the Colonel made for him in an entire career of doing crap movies and casino gigs. Just for doing what he does best. Standing up and singing in a bar. And he negotiated it himself. I think this is a good moment for him. Tell him I said thanks and buy him a drink.” He tossed a few coins on the bar. The barman pushed them away.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said, slightly hoarsely.

“’Tis to me,” said Ford. “Okay, we are outta here.”

They stood out in the heat and the dust and looked at the big pink and chrome thing with amazement and admiration. Or, at least Ford looked at it with amazement and admiration.

Arthur just looked at it. “You don’t think it’s a bit overdone, do you?”

He said it again when they climbed inside it. The seats and quite a lot of the controls were covered in fine fur skin or suede. There was a big gold monogram on the main control panel which just read “EP.”

“You know,” said Ford as he fired up the ship’s engines, “I asked him if it was true that he had been abducted by aliens, and you know what he said?”

“Who?” said Arthur.

“The King.”

“Which King? Oh, we’ve had this conversation, haven’t we?”

“Never mind,” said Ford. “For what it’s worth, he said no. He went of his own accord.”

“I’m still not sure who we’re talking about,” said Arthur.

Ford shook his head. “Look,” he said, “there are some tapes over in the compartment to your left. Why don’t you choose some music and put it on?”

“Okay,” said Arthur, and flipped through the cartons. “Do you like Elvis Presley?” he said.

“Yeah, I do as a matter of fact,” said Ford. “Now. I hope this machine can leap like it looks like it can.” He engaged the main drive.

“Yeeehaah!” shouted Ford as they shot upward at face-tearing speed.

It could.