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THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE |
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Down on the dry, red world of Kakrafoon, in the middle of the vast Rudlit Desert, the stage technicians were testing the sound system. That is to say, the sound system was in the desert, not the technicians. They had retreated to the safety of Disaster Area's giant control ship which hung in orbit some four hundred miles above the surface of the planet, and they were testing the sound from there. Anyone within five miles of the speaker silos wouldn't have survived the tuning up. If Arthur Dent had been within five miles of the speaker silos then his expiring thought would have been that in both size and shape the sound rig closely resembled Manhattan. Risen out of the silos, the neutron phase speaker stacks towered monstrously against the sky, obscuring the banks of plutonium reactors and seismic amps behind them. Buried deep in concrete bunkers beneath the city of speakers lay the instruments that the musicians would control from their ship, the massive photon-ajuitar, the bass detonator and the Megabang drum complex. It was going to be a noisy show. Aboard the giant control ship, all was activity and bustle. Hotblack Desiato's limoship, a mere tadpole beside it, had arrived and docked, and the lamented gentleman was being transported down the high vaulted corridors to meet the medium who was going to interpret his psychic impulses onto the ajuitar keyboard. A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board. Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light-years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend. The band's manager was profoundly relieved. It meant that for the seventeenth time on this tour the drums would be played by a robot and that therefore the timing of the cymbalistics would be right. The sub-ether was buzzing with the communications of the stage technicians testing the speaker channels, and it was this that was being relayed to the interior of the black ship. Its dazed occupants lay against the back wall of the cabin, and listened to the voices on the monitor speakers. "Okay, channel nine on power," said a voice, "testing channel fifteen ..." Another thumping crack of noise walloped through the ship. "Channel fifteen A-okay," said another voice. A third voice cut in. "The black stuntship is now in position," it said, "it's looking good. Gonna be a great sundive. Stage computer on line?" A computer voice answered. "On line," it said. "Take control of the black ship." "Black ship locked into trajectory program, on standby." "Testing channel twenty." Zaphod leaped across the cabin and switched frequencies on the sub ether receiver before the next mind-pulverizing noise hit them. He stood there quivering. "What," said Trillian in a small quiet voice, "does sundive mean?" "It means," said Marvin, "that the ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun ... Dive. It's very simple to understand. What do you expect if you steal Hotblack Desiato's stuntship?" "How do you know," said Zaphod in a voice that would make a Vegan snow lizard feel chilly, "that this is Hotblack Desiato's stuntship? "Simple," said Marvin. "I parked it for him." "Then why ... didn't ... you ... tell us!" "You said you wanted excitement and adventure and really wild things." "This is awful," said Arthur unnecessarily in the pause which followed. "That's what I said," confirmed Marvin. On a different frequency, the sub-ether receiver had picked up a public broadcast, which now echoed around the cabin. " ... fine weather for the concert here this afternoon. I'm standing here in front of the stage," the reporter lied, "in the middle of the Rudlit Desert, and with the aid of hyperbinoptic glasses I can just about make out the huge audience cowering there on the horizon all around me. Behind me the speaker stacks rise like a sheer cliff face, and high above me the sun is shining away and doesn't know what's going to hit it. The environmentalist lobby do know what's going to hit it, and they claim that the concert will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, irreparable damage to the atmosphere and all the usual things that environmentalists usually go on about. "But I've just had a report that a representative of Disaster Area met with the environmentalists at lunchtime, and had them all shot, so nothing now lies in the way of ..." Zaphod switched it off. He turned to Ford. "You know what I'm thinking?" he said. "I think so," said Ford. "Tell me what you think I'm thinking." "I think you're thinking it's time we got off this ship." "I think you're right," said Zaphod. "I think you're right," said Ford. "How?" said Arthur. "Quiet," said Ford and Zaphod, "we're thinking." "So this is it," said Arthur, "we're going to die." "I wish you'd stop saying that," said Ford. It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die." His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up. After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this -- "lf human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working." In fact, this second theory is more literally true of the Belcerebon people of Kakrafoon. The Belcerebon people used to cause great resentment and insecurity among neighboring races by being one of the most enlightened, accomplished and, above all, quiet civilizations in the Galaxy. As a punishment for this behavior, which was held to be offensively self- righteous and provocative, a Galactic Tribunal inflicted on them that most cruel of all social diseases, telepathy. Consequently, in order to prevent themselves broadcasting every slightest thought that crosses their minds to anyone within a five mile radius, they now have to talk very loudly and continuously about the weather, their little aches and pains, the match this afternoon and what a noisy place Kakrafoon has suddenly become. Another method of temporarily blotting out their minds is to play host to a Disaster Area concert. The timing of the concert was critical. The ship had to begin its dive before the concert began in order to hit the sun six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the climax of the song to which it related, so that the light of the solar flares had time to travel out o Kakrafoon. The ship had already been diving for several minutes by the time that Ford Prefect had completed his search of the other compartments of the black ship. He burst back into the cabin. The sun of Kakrafoon loomed terrifyingly large on the vision screen, its blazing white inferno of fusing hydrogen nuclei growing moment by moment as the ship plunged onward, unheeding the thumping and banging of Zaphod's hands on the control panel. Arthur and Trillian had the fixed expressions of rabbits on a night road who think that the best way of dealing with approaching headlights is to stare them out. Zaphod spun around, wild-eyed. "Ford," he said, "how many escape capsules are there?" "None," said Ford. Zaphod gibbered. "Did you count them?" he yelled. "Twice," said Ford. "Did you manage to raise the stage crew on the radio?" "Yeah," said Zaphod bitterly, "I said there were a whole bunch of people on board, and they said to say 'hi' to everybody." Ford goggled. "Didn't you tell them who you were?" "Oh yeah. They said it was a great honor. That and something about a restaurant bill and my executors." Ford pushed Arthur aside roughly and leaned forward over the control console. "Does none of this function?" he said savagely. "All overridden." "Smash the autopilot." "Find it first. Nothing connects." There was a moment's cold silence. Arthur was stumbling around the back of the cabin. He stopped suddenly. "Incidentally," he said, "what does teleport mean?" Another moment passed. Slowly, the others turned to face him. "Probably the wrong moment to ask," said Arthur. "It's just I remember hearing you use the word a short while ago and I only bring it up because ..." "Where," said Ford Prefect quietly, "does it say teleport?" "Well, just over here in fact," said Arthur, pointing at a dark control box in the rear of the cabin. "Just under the word emergency, above the word system and beside the sign saying out of order." In the pandemonium that instantly followed, the only action to follow was that of Ford Prefect lunging across the cabin to the small black box that Arthur had indicated and stabbing repeatedly at the single small black button set into it. A six-foot square panel slid open beside it revealing a compartment which resembled a multiple shower unit that had found a new function in life as an electrician's junk store. Half-finished wiring hung from the ceiling, a jumble of abandoned components lay strewn on the floor, and the programming panel lolled out of the cavity in the wall into which it should have been secured. A junior Disaster Area accountant, visiting the shipyard where this ship was being constructed, had demanded to know of the works foreman why the hell they were fitting an extremely expensive teleport into a ship which only had one important journey to make, and that unmanned. The foreman had explained that the teleport was available at a ten percent discount and the accountant had explained that this was immaterial; the foreman had explained that it was the finest, most powerful and sophisticated teleport that money could buy and the accountant had explained that the money did not wish to buy it; the foreman had explained that people would still need to enter and leave the ship and the accountant had explained that the ship sported a perfectly serviceable door; the foreman had explained that the accountant could go and boil his head and the accountant had explained to the foreman that the thing approaching him rapidly from his left was a knuckle sandwich. After the explanations had been concluded, work was discontinued on the teleport which subsequently passed unnoticed on the invoice as "Sund. explns." at five times the price. "Hell's donkeys," muttered Zaphod as he and Ford attempted to sort through the tangle of wiring. After a moment or so Ford told him to stand back. He tossed a coin into the teleport and jiggled a switch on the lolling control panel. With a crackle and spit of light, the coin vanished. "That much of it works," said Ford, "however, there is no guidance system. A matter transference teleport with no guidance programming could put you ... well, anywhere." The sun of Kakrafoon loomed huge on the screen. "Who cares," said Zaphod; "we go where we go." "And," said Ford, "there is no autosystem. We couldn't all go. Someone would have to stay and operate it." A solemn moment shuffled past. The sun loomed larger and larger. "Hey, Marvin kid," said Zaphod brightly, "how you doing?" "Very badly I suspect," muttered Marvin. *** A shortish while later, the concert on Kakrafoon reached an unexpected climax. The black ship with its single morose occupant had plunged on schedule into the nuclear furnace of the sun. Massive solar flares licked out from it millions of miles into space, thrilling and in a few cases spilling the dozen or so flare riders who had been coasting close to the surface of the sun in anticipation of the moment. Moments before the flare light reached Kakrafoon the pounding desert cracked along a deep faultline. A huge and hitherto undetected underground river lying far beneath the surface gushed to the surface to be followed seconds later by the eruption of millions of tons of boiling lava that flowed hundreds of feet into the air, instantaneously vaporizing the river both above and below the surface in an explosion that echoed to the far side of the world and back again. Those -- very few -- who witnessed the event and survived swear that the whole hundred thousand square miles of the desert rose into the air like a mile-thick pancake, flipped itself over and fell back down. At that precise moment the solar radiation from the flares filtered through the clouds of vaporized water and struck the ground. A year later, the hundred thousand square mile desert was thick with flowers. The structure of the atmosphere around the planet was subtly altered. The sun blazed less harshly in the summer, the cold bit less bitterly in the winter, pleasant rain fell more often and slowly the desert world of Kakrafoon became a paradise. Even the telepathic power with which the people of Kakrafoon had been cursed was permanently dispersed by the force of the explosion. A spokesman for Disaster Area -- the one who had had all the environmentalists shot -- was later quoted as saying that it had been "a good gig." Many people spoke movingly of the healing powers of music. A few skeptical scientists examined the records of the events more closely, and claimed that they had discovered faint vestiges of a vast artificially induced Improbability Field drifting in from a nearby region of space. Arthur woke up and instantly regretted it. Hangovers he'd had, but never anything on this scale. This was it, this was the big one, this was the ultimate pits. Matter transference beams, he decided, were not as much fun as, say, a good solid kick in the head. Being for the moment unwilling to move on account of a dull stomping throb he was experiencing, he lay awhile and thought. The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth -- when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass -- the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another -- particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish. And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the sub-ether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news. Many people had thought exactly this before Arthur Dent and had even gone to the lengths of writing songs about it. Here is one that used regularly to be chanted by huge crowds outside the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Teleport Systems factory on Happi-Werld III: Aldebaran's great, okay, Singing, Sirius is paved with gold Singing, ...and so on. Another favorite song was much shorter: I teleported home one night Arthur felt the waves of pain slowly receding, though he was still aware of a dull stomping throb. Slowly, carefully, he stood up. "Can you hear a dull stomping throb?" said Ford Prefect. Arthur spun around and wobbled uncertainly. Ford Prefect was approaching, looking red-eyed and pasty. "Where are we?" gasped Arthur. Ford looked around. They were standing in a long curving corridor which stretched out of sight in both directions. The outer steel wall -- which was painted in that sickly shade of pale green which they use in schools, hospitals and mental asylums to keep the inmates subdued -- curved over the tops of their heads to where it met the inner perpendicular wall which, oddly enough, was covered in dark brown hessian wall weave. The floor was of dark green ribbed rubber. Ford moved over to a very thick dark transparent panel set in the outer wall. It was several layers deep, yet through it he could see pinpoints of distant stars. "I think we're in a spaceship of some kind," he said. Down the corridor came the sound of a dull stomping throb. "Trillian?" called Arthur nervously. "Zaphod?" Ford shrugged. "Nowhere about," he said, "I've looked. They could be anywhere. An unprogrammed teleport can throw you light-years in any direction. Judging by the way I feel I should think we've traveled a very long way indeed." "How do you feel?" "Bad." "Do you think they're ..." "Where they are, how they are, there's no way we can know and no way we can do anything about it. Do what I do." "What?" "Don't think about it." Arthur turned this thought over in his mind, reluctantly saw the wisdom of it, tucked it up and put it away. He took a deep breath. "Footsteps!" exclaimed Ford suddenly. "Where?" "That noise. That stomping throb. Pounding feet. Listen!" Arthur listened. The noise echoed round the corridor at them from an indeterminate distance. It was the muffled sound of pounding footsteps, and it was noticeably louder. "Let's move," said Ford sharply. They both moved -- in opposite directions. "Not that way," said Ford. "That's where they're coming from." "No, it's not," said Arthur. "They're coming from that way." "They're not, they're ..." They both stopped. They both turned. They both listened intently. They both agreed with each other. They both set off in opposite directions again. Fear gripped them. From both directions the noise was getting louder. A few yards to their left another corridor ran at right angles to the inner wall. They ran to it and hurried along it. It was dark, immensely long and, as they passed down it, gave them the impression that it was getting colder and colder. Other corridors gave off it to the left and right, each very dark and each subjecting them to sharp blasts of icy air as they passed. They stopped for a moment in alarm. The further down the corridor they went, the louder became the sound of pounding feet. They pressed themselves back against the cold wall and listened furiously. The cold, the dark and the drumming of disembodied feet was getting to them badly. Ford shivered, partly with the cold, but partly with the memory of stories his favorite mother used to tell him when he was a mere slip of a Betelgeusian, ankle high to an Arcturan Megagrasshopper: stories of death ships, haunted hulks that roamed restlessly round the obscurer regions of deep space infested with demons or the ghosts of forgotten crews; stories too of incautious travelers who found and entered such ships; stories of -- Then Ford remembered the brown hessian wall weave in the first corridor and pulled himself together. However ghosts and demons may choose to decorate their death hulks, he thought to himself, he would lay any money you liked it wasn't with hessian wall weave. He grasped Arthur by the arm. "Back the way we came," he said firmly and they started to retrace their steps. A moment later they leaped like startled lizards down the nearest corridor junction as the owners of the drumming feet suddenly hove into view directly in front of them. Hidden behind the corner they goggled in amazement as about two dozen overweight men and women pounded past them in track suits panting and wheezing in a manner that would make a heart surgeon gibber. Ford Prefect stared after them. "Joggers!" he hissed, as the sound of their feet echoed away up and down the network of corridors. "Joggers?" whispered Arthur Dent. "Joggers," said Ford Prefect with a shrug. The corridor they were concealed in was not like the others. It was very short, and ended at a large steel door. Ford examined it, discovered the opening mechanism and pushed it wide. The first thing that hit their eyes was what appeared to be a coffin. And the next four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine things that hit their eyes were also coffins. The vault was low ceilinged, dimly lit and gigantic. At the far end, about three hundred yards away, an archway let through to what appeared to be a similar chamber, similarly occupied. Ford Prefect let out a low whistle as he stepped down to the floor of the vault. "Wild," he said. "What's so great about dead people?" asked Arthur, nervously stepping down after him. "Dunno," said Ford. "Let's find out, shall we?" On closer inspection the coffins seemed to be more like sarcophagi. They stood about waist high and were constructed of what appeared to be white marble, which is almost certainly what it was -- something that only appeared to be white marble. The tops were semitranslucent, and through them could dimly be perceived the features of their late and presumably lamented occupants. They were humanoid, and had clearly left the troubles of whatever world it was they came from far behind them, but beyond that little else could be discerned. Rolling slowly round the floor between the sarcophagi was a heavy, oily white gas which Arthur at first thought might be there to give the place a little atmosphere until he discovered that it also froze his ankles. The sarcophagi too were intensely cold to the touch. Ford suddenly crouched down beside one of them. He pulled a corner of his towel out of his satchel and started to rub furiously at something. "Look, there's a plaque on this one," he explained to Arthur. "It's frosted over." He rubbed the frost clear and examined the engraved characters. To Arthur they looked like the footprints of a spider that had had one too many of whatever it is that spiders have on a night out, but Ford instantly recognized an early form of Galactic Eezzeereed. "It says 'Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B, Hold Seven, Telephone Sanitizer Second Class' -- and a serial number." "A telephone sanitizer?" said Arthur. "A dead telephone sanitizer?" "Best kind." "But what's he doing here?" Ford peered through the top at the figure within. "Not a lot," he said, and suddenly flashed one of those grins of his which always made people think he'd been overdoing things recently and should try to get some rest. He scampered over to another sarcophagus. A moment's brisk towel work and he announced: "This one's a dead hairdresser. Hoopy!" The next sarcophagus revealed itself to be the last resting place of an advertising account executive; the one after that contained a secondhand car salesman, third class. An inspection hatch let into the floor suddenly caught Ford's attention, and he squatted down to unfasten it, thrashing away at the clouds of freezing gas that threatened to envelope him. A thought occurred to Arthur. "If these are just coffins," he said, "why are they kept so cold?" "Or, indeed, why are they kept anyway," said Ford, tugging the hatchway open. The gas poured down through it. "Why in fact is anyone going to all the trouble and expense of carting five thousand dead bodies through space?" "Ten thousand," said Arthur, pointing at the archway through which the next chamber was dimly visible. Ford stuck his head down through the floor hatchway. He looked up again. "Fifteen thousand," he said. "There's another lot down there." "Fifteen million," said a voice. "That's a lot," said Ford. "A lot a lot." "Turn around slowly," barked the voice, "and put your hands up. Any other move and I blast you into tiny tiny bits." "Hello?" said Ford, turning round slowly, putting his hands up and not making any other move. "Why," said Arthur Dent, "isn't anyone ever pleased to see us?" *** Standing silhouetted in the doorway through which they had entered the vault was the man who wasn't pleased to see them. His displeasure was communicated partly by the barking hectoring quality of his voice and partly by the viciousness with which he waved a long silver Kill-O-Zap gun at them. The designer of the gun had clearly not been instructed to beat about the bush. "Make it evil," he'd been told. "Make it totally clear that this gun has a right end and a wrong end. Make it totally clear to anyone standing at the wrong end that things are going badly for them. If that means sticking all sort of spikes and prongs and blackened bits all over it then so be it. This is not a gun for hanging over the fireplace or sticking in the umbrella stand, it is a gun for going out and making people miserable with." Ford and Arthur looked at the gun unhappily. The man with the gun moved from the door and circled around them. As he came into the light they could see his black and gold uniform on which the buttons were so highly polished that they shone with an intensity that would have made an approaching motorist flash his lights in annoyance. He gestured at the door. "Out," he said. People who can supply that amount of firepower don't need to supply verbs as well. Ford and Arthur went out, closely followed by the wrong end of the Kill-O-Zap gun and the buttons. Turning into the corridor they were jostled by twenty-four oncoming joggers, now showered and changed, who swept on past them into the vault. Arthur turned to watch them in confusion. "Move!" screamed their captor. Arthur moved. Ford shrugged and moved. In the vault the joggers went to twenty-four empty sarcophagi along the side wall, opened them, climbed in and fell into twenty-four dreamless sleeps. "Er, Captain ..." "Yes, Number One?" "Just had a sort of report thingy from Number Two." "Oh dear." High up in the bridge of the ship, the Captain stared out into the infinite reaches of space with mild irritation. From where he reclined beneath a wide domed bubble he could see before and above him the vast panorama of stars through which they were moving -- a panorama that had thinned out noticeably during the course of the voyage. Turning and looking backward, over the vast two-mile bulk of the ship he could see the far denser mass of stars behind them which seemed to form almost a solid band. This was the view through the Galactic center from which they were traveling, and indeed had been traveling for years, at a speed that he couldn't quite remember at the moment, but he knew it was terribly fast. It was something approaching the speed of something or other, or was it three times the speed of something else? Jolly impressive anyway. He peered into the bright distance behind the ship, looking for something. He did this every few minutes or so, but never found what he was looking for. He didn't let it worry him though. The scientists chaps had been very insistent that everything was going to be perfectly all right providing nobody panicked and everybody got on and did their bit in an orderly fashion. He wasn't panicking. As far as he was concerned everything was going splendidly. He dabbed at his shoulder with a large frothy sponge. It crept back into his mind that he was feeling mildly irritated about something. Now what was all that about? A slight cough alerted him to the fact that the ship's first officer was still standing nearby. Nice chap, Number One. Not of the very brightest, had the odd spot of difficulty tying his shoelaces, but jolly good officer material for all that. The Captain wasn't a man to kick a chap when he was bending over trying to do up his shoelaces, however long it took him. Not like that ghastly Number Two, strutting about all over the place, polishing his buttons, issuing reports every hour: "Ship's still moving, Captain." "Still on course, Captain." "Oxygen levels still being maintained, Captain." "Give it a miss," was the Captain's vote. Ah yes, that was the thing that had been irritating him. He peered down at Number One. "Yes, Captain, he was shouting something or other about having found some prisoners ..." The Captain thought about this. Seemed pretty unlikely to him, but he wasn't one to stand in his officers' way. "Well, perhaps that'll keep him happy for a bit," he said. "He's always wanted some." *** Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent trudged onward up the ship's apparently endless corridors. Number Two marched behind them barking the occasional order about not making any false moves or trying any funny stuff. They seemed to have passed at least a mile of continuous brown hessian wall weave. Finally they reached a large steel door which slid open when Number Two shouted at it. They entered. To the eyes of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent, the most remarkable thing about the ship's bridge was not the fifty-foot diameter hemispherical dome which covered it, and through which the dazzling display of stars shone down on them: to people who have eaten at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, such wonders are commonplace. Nor was it the bewildering array of instruments that crowded the long circumferential wall around them. To Arthur this was exactly what spaceships were traditionally supposed to look like, and to Ford it looked thoroughly antiquated: it confirmed his suspicions that Disaster Area's stuntship had taken them back at least a million, if not two million, years before their own time. No, the thing that really caught them off balance was the bathtub. The bathtub stood on a six-foot pedestal of rough-hewn blue water crystal and was of a baroque monstrosity not often seen outside the Maximegalon Museum of Diseased Imaginings. An intestinal jumble of plumbing had been picked out in gold leaf rather than decently buried at midnight in an unmarked grave; the taps and shower attachment would have made a gargoyle jump. As the dominant centerpiece of a starship bridge it was terribly wrong, and it was with the embittered air of a man who knew this that Number Two approached it. "Captain, sir!" he shouted through clenched teeth -- a difficult trick but he'd had years during which to perfect it. A large genial face and genial foam-covered arm popped up above the rim of the monstrous bath. "Ah, hello, Number Two," said the Captain, waving a cheery sponge, "having a nice day?" Number Two snapped even further to attention than he already was. "I have brought you the prisoners I located in freezer bay seven, sir!" he yapped. Ford and Arthur coughed in confusion. "Er ... hello," they said. The Captain beamed at them. So Number Two had really found some prisoners. Well, good for him, thought the Captain, nice to see a chap doing what he's best at. "Oh, hello there," he said to them. "Excuse me not getting up, just having a quick bath. Well, jynnan tonnyx all round then. Look in the fridge Number One." "Certainly, sir." It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85 percent of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N-N-T'N-ix, or jinond-nicks, or anyone of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian "chinanto / mnigs" which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan "tzjin-anthony-ks" which kills cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds. What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs. Number Two stood before the Captain's bathtub trembling with frustration. "Don't you want to interrogate the prisoners, sir?" he squealed. The Captain peered at him in bemusement. "Why on Golgafrincham should I want to do that?" he asked. "To get information out of them, sir! To find out why they came here!" "Oh no, no, no," said the Captain. "I expect they just dropped in for a quick jynnan tonnyx, don't you?" "But, sir, they're my prisoners! I must interrogate them!" The Captain looked at them doubtfully. "Oh all right," he said, "if you must. Ask them what they want to drink." A hard cold gleam came into Number Two's eyes. He advanced slowly on Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. "All right, you scum," he growled, "you vermin ..." He jabbed Ford with the Kill-O-Zap gun. "Steady on, Number Two," admonished the Captain gently. "What do you want to drink?!!" Number Two screamed. "Well the jynnan tonnyx sounds very nice to me," said Ford. "What about you, Arthur?" Arthur blinked. "What? Oh, er, yes," he said. "With ice or without?!" bellowed Number Two. "Oh, with, please," said Ford. "Lemon??!!" "Yes, please," said Ford, "and do you have any of those little biscuits? You know, the cheesey ones?" "I'm asking the questions!!!!" howled Number Two, his body quaking with apoplectic fury. "Er, Number Two ..." said the Captain softly. "Sir?!" "Shove off, would you, there's a good chap. I'm trying to have a relaxing bath." Number Two's eyes narrowed and became what are known in the Shouting and Killing People trade as cold slits, the idea presumably being to give your opponent the impression that you have lost your glasses or are having difficulty keeping awake. Why this is frightening is an, as yet, unresolved problem. He advanced on the Captain, his (Number Two's) mouth a thin hard line. Again, tricky to know why this is understood as fighting behavior. If, while wandering through the jungle of Traal, you were suddenly to come upon the fabled Ravenous Bugblatter Beast, you would have reason to be grateful if its mouth was a thin hard line rather than, as it usually is, a gaping mass of slavering fangs. "May I remind you, sir," hissed Number Two at the Captain, "that you have now been in that bath for over three years?!" This final shot delivered, Number Two spun on his heel and stalked off to a corner to practice darting eye movements in the mirror. The Captain squirmed in his bath. He gave Ford Prefect a lame smile. "Well, you need to relax a lot in a job like mine," he said. Ford slowly lowered his hands. It provoked no reaction. Arthur lowered his. Treading very slowly and carefully, Ford moved over to the bath pedestal. He patted it. "Nice," he lied. He wondered if it was safe to grin. Very slowly and carefully, he grinned. It was safe. "Er ..." he said to the Captain. "Yes?" said the Captain. "I wonder," said Ford, "could I ask you actually what your job is in fact?" A hand tapped him on the shoulder. He spun around. It was the first officer. "Your drinks," he said. "Ah, thank you," said Ford. He and Arthur took their jynnan tonnyx. Arthur sipped his, and was surprised to discover it tasted very like a whisky and soda. "I mean, I couldn't help noticing," said Ford, also taking a sip, "the bodies. In the hold." "Bodies?" said the Captain in surprise. Ford paused and thought to himself. Never take anything for granted, he thought. Could it be that the Captain doesn't know he's got fifteen million dead bodies on his ship? The Captain was nodding cheerfully at him. He also appeared to be playing with a rubber duck. Ford looked around. Number Two was staring at him in the mirror, but only for an instant: his eyes were constantly on the move. The first officer was just standing there holding the drinks tray and smiling benignly. "Bodies?" said the Captain again. Ford licked his lips. "Yes," he said, "all those dead telephone sanitizers and account executives, you know, down in the hold." The Captain stared at him. Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed. "Oh, they're not dead," he said. "Good Lord, no, no, they're frozen. They're going to be revived." Ford did something he very rarely did. He blinked. Arthur seemed to come out of a trance. "You mean you've got a hold full of frozen hairdressers?" he said. "Oh yes," said the Captain. "Millions of them. Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name it. We're going to colonize another planet." Ford wobbled very slightly. "Exciting, isn't it?" said the Captain. "What, with that lot?" said Arthur. "Ah, now don't misunderstand me," said the Captain. "We're just one of the ships in the Ark Fleet. We're the 'B' Ark, you see. Sorry, could I just ask you to run a bit more hot water for me?" Arthur obliged, and a cascade of pink frothy water swirled around the bath. The Captain let out a sigh of pleasure. "Thank you so much, my dear fellow. Do help yourselves to more drinks of course." Ford tossed down his drink, took the bottle from the first officer's tray and refilled his glass to the top. "What," he said, "is a 'B' Ark?" "This is," said the Captain, and swished the foamy water around joyfully with the duck. "Yes," said Ford, "but --" "Well, what happened you see was," said the Captain, "our planet, the world from which we have come, was, so to speak, doomed." "Doomed?" "Oh yes. So what everyone thought was, let's pack the whole population into some giant spaceships and go and settle on another planet." Having told this much of his story, he settled back with a satisfied grunt. "You mean a less doomed one?" prompted Arthur. "What did you say dear fellow?" "A less doomed planet. You were going to settle on." "Are going to settle on, yes. So it was decided to build three ships, you see, three Arks in Space, and ... I'm not boring you, am I?" "No, no," said Ford firmly, "it's fascinating." "You know it's delightful," reflected the Captain, "to have someone else to talk to for a change." Number Two's eyes darted feverishly about the room again and then settled back on the mirror, like a pair of flies briefly distracted from their favorite piece of month-old meat. "Trouble with a long journey like this," continued the Captain, "is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you're going to say next." "Only half the time?" asked Arthur in surprise. The Captain thought for a moment. "Yes, about half, I'd say. Anyway -- where's the soap?" He fished around and found it. "Yes, so anyway," he resumed, "the idea was that into the first ship, the 'A' ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and then into the third, or 'C' ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the 'B' ship -- that's us -- would go everyone else, the middlemen, you see." He smiled happily at them. "And we were sent off first," he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune. The little bathing tune, which had been composed for him by one of his world's most exciting and prolific jingle writers (who was currently asleep in hold thirty-six some nine hundred yards behind them} covered what would otherwise have been an awkward moment of silence. Ford and Arthur shuffled their feet and furiously avoided each other's eyes. "Er ..." said Arthur after a moment, "what exactly was it that was wrong with your planet then?" "Oh, it was doomed, as I said," said the Captain. "Apparently it was going to crash into the sun or something. Or maybe it was that the moon was going to crash into us. Something of the kind. Absolutely terrifying prospect whatever it was." "Oh," said the first officer suddenly, "I thought it was that the planet was going to be invaded by a gigantic swarm of twelve-foot piranha bees. Wasn't that it?" Number Two spun around, eyes ablaze with a cold hard light that only comes with the amount of practice he was prepared to put in. "That's not what I was told!" he hissed. "My commanding officer told me that the entire planet was in imminent danger of being eaten by an enormous mutant star goat!" "Oh really ..." said Ford Prefect. "Yes! A monstrous creature from the pit of hell with scything teeth ten thousand miles long, breath that would boil oceans, claws that could tear continents from their roots, a thousand eyes that burned like the sun, slavering jaws a million miles across, a monster such as you have never ... never ... ever ..." "And they made sure they sent you lot off first, did they?" inquired Arthur. "Oh yes," said the Captain, "well, everyone said, very nicely I thought, that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where the phones were clean." "Oh yes," agreed Ford, "I can see that would be very important. And the other ships, er ... they followed on after you, did they?" For a moment the Captain did not answer. He twisted round in his bath and gazed backward over the huge bulk of the ship toward the bright galactic center. He squinted into the inconceivable distance. "Ah. Well, it's funny you should say that," he said and allowed himself a slight frown at Ford Prefect, "because curiously enough we haven't heard a peep out of them since we left five years ago ... But they must be behind us somewhere." He peered off into the distance again. Ford peered with him and gave a thoughtful frown. "Unless of course," he said softly, "they were eaten by the goat ..." "Ah yes ..." said the Captain with a slight hesitancy creeping into his voice, "the goat ..." His eyes passed over the solid shapes of the instruments and computers that lined the bridge. They winked away innocently at him. He stared out at the stars, but none of them said a word. He glanced at his first and second officers, but they seemed lost in their own thoughts for a moment. He glanced at Ford Prefect who raised his eyebrows at him. "It's a funny thing, you know," said the Captain at last, "but now that I actually come to tell the story to someone else ... I mean does it strike you as odd, Number One?" "Errrrrrrrrrrr ..." said Number One. "Well," said Ford, "I can see that you've got a lot of things you're going to want to talk about, so, thanks for the drinks, and if you could sort of drop us off at the nearest convenient planet ..." "Ah, well that's a little difficult you see," said the Captain, "because our trajectory thingy was preset before we left Golgafrincham, I think partly because I'm not very good with figures ..." "You mean we're stuck here on this ship?" exclaimed Ford, suddenly losing patience with the whole charade. "When are you meant to be reaching this planet you're meant to be colonizing?" "Oh, we're nearly there I think," said the Captain, "any second now. It's probably time I was getting out of this bath in fact. Oh, I don't know though, why stop just when I'm enjoying it?" "So we're actually going to land in a minute?" said Arthur. "Well, not so much land, in fact, not actually land as such, no ...er --" "What are you talking about?" asked Ford sharply. "Well," said the Captain, picking his way through the words carefully, "I think as far as I can remember we were programmed to crash on it." "Crash?" shouted Ford and Arthur. "Er, yes," said the Captain, "yes, it's all part of the plan, I think. There was a terribly good reason for it which I can't quite remember at the moment. It was something to do with ...er ..." Ford exploded. "You're a load of useless bloody loonies!" he shouted. "Ah yes, that was it," beamed the Captain, "that was the reason." The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has this to say about the planet of Golgafrincham: It is a planet with an ancient and mysterious history, rich in legend, red, and occasionally green with the blood of those who sought in times gone by to conquer her; a land of parched and barren landscapes, of sweet and sultry air heady with the scent of the perfumed springs that trickle over its hot and dusty rocks and nourish the dark and musky lichens beneath; a land of fevered brows and intoxicated imaginings, particularly among those who taste the lichens; a land also of cool and shaded thoughts among those who have learned to forswear the lichens and find a tree to sit beneath; a land also of steel and blood and heroism; a land of the body and of the spirit. This was its history. And in all this ancient and mysterious history, the most mysterious figures of all were without doubt those of the Great Circling poets of Arium. These Circling Poets used to live in remote mountain passes where they would lie in wait for small bands of unwary travelers, circle around them, and throw rocks at them. And when the travelers cried out, saying why didn't they go away and get on with writing some poems instead of pestering people with all this rock-throwing business, they would suddenly stop, and then break into one of the seven hundred and ninety-four great Song Cycles of Vassillian. These songs were all of extraordinary beauty, and even more extraordinary length, and all fell into exactly the same pattern. The first part of each song would tell how there once went forth from the City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished. The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back. All this lay in the planet's remote past. It was, however, a descendant of one of these eccentric poets who invented the spurious tales of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
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