– Uhuh, - muttered Zipo and rested his head back on the jewelled 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 which 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 which 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 for ever.
She smiled, and ran a little more Essence of Qualactin on to 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.
– Weeeeelaaaaah!
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 16
– Nothing is lost for ever, - said Slartibartfast, his face flickering redly in the light of the candle which 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 his story. The robot waiter moved through the space-time matrices in a way which spectacularly combined the surly with the obsequious, made a snatch for the candle and got it. They had had the bill, had argued convincingly about who had had the cannelloni and how many bottles of wine they had had, and, as Arthur had been dimly aware, had thereby successfully manoeuvred the ship out of subjective space and into a 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 that Slartibartfast unravelled 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 gave one of his smiles which made people twitch.
Slartibartfast had hoped for an easy retirement.
He had been planning to learn to play the octraventral 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 which 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 hap?
– 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 a 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 which explodes at almost half the speed of light and burns with the brightness of a billion suns and then collapses as a super-heavy neutron star. It’s a star which 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 dilletantes, eccentrics, layabouts, fartarounds 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 leant 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 17
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 hypermathematics, 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 the single event which 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 being 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 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 drier.
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 on that effect.
They travelled 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 an effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write which 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 chat 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 a stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to, 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 sure 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 for ever. The Campaign for Real Timers 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 18
Arthur materialized, and did so with all the customary staggering about and clasping at his throat, heart and various limbs which 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, whilst his eyes were closed, that his brain began to register what his eyes had been looking at whilst 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 everybody 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 of something - there was insufficient light to tell. All was darkness, a damp shiny darkness. The only sounds were the echoes of his own breathing, which sounded worried. He coughed very slightly, and then had to listen to the thin ghostly echo of his cough trailing away amongst winding corridors and sightless chambers, as of some great labyrinth, and eventually returning to him via the same unseen corridors, as if to say…
– Yes?
This happened to every slightest 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 which 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 reflected. Or at least, inhuman 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 about 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 beating, it was somebody down the corridor beating on a bass drum.
Beads of sweat formed on his brow, tensed themselves, and leapt off. He put a hand out on 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:
Life, the Universe and Everything Page 9
