“No, first we have to call it something which says it’s ours, not yours, then we set about finding some way of proving it’s not what you said it is, but something we say it is.
“And if it turns out that you’re right, you’ll still be wrong, because we will simply call him a… er ‘Supernormal…’ – not paranormal or supernatural because you think you know what those mean now, no, a ‘Supernormal Incremental Precipitation Inducer’. We’ll probably want to shove a ‘Quasi’ in there somewhere to protect ourselves. Rain God! Huh, never heard such nonsense in my life. Admittedly, you wouldn’t catch me going on holiday with him. Thanks, that’ll be all for now, other than to say ‘Hi!’ to Wonko if he’s watching.”
Chapter 34
On the way home there was a woman sitting next to them on the plane who was looking at them rather oddly.
They talked quietly to themselves.
“I still have to know,” said Fenchurch, “and I strongly feel that you know something that you’re not telling me.”
Arthur sighed and took out a piece of paper.
“Do you have a pencil?” he said. She dug around and found one.
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” she said, after he had spent twenty minutes frowning, chewing the pencil, scribbling on the paper, crossing things out, scribbling again, chewing the pencil again and grunting irritably to himself.
“Trying to remember an address someone once gave me.”
“Your life would be an awful lot simpler,” she said, “if you bought yourself an address book.”
Finally he passed the paper to her.
“You look after it,” he said.
She looked at it. Among all the scratchings and crossings out were the words “Quentulus Quazgar Mountains. Sevorbeupstry. Planet of Preliumtarn. Sun-Zarss. Galactic Sector QQ7 Active J Gamma.”
“And what’s there?”
“Apparently,” said Arthur, “it’s God’s Final Message to His Creation.”
“That sounds a bit more like it,” said Fenchurch. “How do we get there?”
“You really…?”
“Yes,” said Fenchurch firmly, “I really want to know.”
Arthur looked out of the scratchy little perspex window at the open sky outside.
“Excuse me,” said the woman who had been looking at them rather oddly, suddenly, “I hope you don’t think I’m rude. I get so bored on these long flights, it’s nice to talk to somebody. My name’s Enid Kapelsen, I’m from Boston. Tell me, do you fly a lot?”
Chapter 35
They went to Arthur’s house in the West Country, shoved a couple of towels and stuff in a bag, and then sat down to do what every Galactic hitch hiker ends up spending most of his time doing.
They waited for a flying saucer to come by.
“Friend of mine did this for fifteen years,” said Arthur one night as they sat forlornly watching the sky.
“Who was that?”
“Called Ford Prefect.”
He caught himself doing something he had never really expected to do again.
He wondered where Ford Prefect was.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the following day there were two reports in the paper, one concerning the most astonishing incidents with a flying saucer, and the other about a series of unseemly riots in pubs.
Ford Prefect turned up the day after that looking hung over and complaining that Arthur never answered the phone.
In fact he looked extremely ill, not merely as if he’d been pulled through a hedge backwards, but as if the hedge was being simultaneously pulled backwards through a combine harvester. He staggered into Arthur’s sitting room, waving aside all offers of support, which was an error, because the effort caused him to lose his balance altogether and Arthur had eventually to drag him to the sofa.
“Thank you,” said Ford, “thank you very much. Have you…” he said, and fell asleep for three hours.
“… the faintest idea” he continued suddenly, when he revived, “how hard it is to tap into the British phone system from the Pleiades? I can see that you haven’t, so I’ll tell you,” he said, “over the very large mug of black coffee that you are about to make me.”
He followed Arthur wobbily into the kitchen.
“Stupid operators keep asking you where you’re calling from and you try and tell them Letchworth and they say you couldn’t be if you’re coming in on that circuit. What are you doing?”
“Making you some black coffee.”
“Oh.” Ford seemed oddly disappointed. He looked about the place forlornly.
“What’s this?” he said.
“Rice Crispies.”
“And this?”
“Paprika.”
“I see,” said Ford, solemnly, and put the two items back down, one on top of the other, but that didn’t seem to balance properly, so he put the other on top of the one and that seemed to work.
“A little space-lagged,” he said. “What was I saying?”
“About not phoning from Letchworth.”
“I wasn’t. I explained this to the lady. ‘Bugger Letchworth,’ I said, ‘if that’s your attitude. I am in fact calling from a sales scoutship of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, currently on the sub-light-speed leg of a journey between the stars known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady.’ – I said ‘dear lady’,” explained Ford Prefect, “because I didn’t want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin…”
“Tactful,” said Arthur Dent.
“Exactly,” said Ford, “tactful.”
He frowned.
“Space-lag,” he said, “is very bad for sub-clauses. You’ll have to assist me again,” he continued, “by reminding me what I was talking about.”
“’Between the stars,’” said Arthur, “’known on your world, though not necessarily to you, dear lady, as…’”
“’Pleiades Epsilon and Pleiades Zeta,’” concluded Ford triumphantly. “This conversation lark is quite gas isn’t it?”
“Have some coffee.”
“Thank you, no. ‘And the reason,’ I said, ‘why I am bothering you with it rather than just dialling direct as I could, because we have some pretty sophisticated telecommunications equipment out here in the Pleiades, I can tell you, is that the penny pinching son of a starbeast piloting this son of a starbeast spaceship insists that I call collect. Can you believe that?’”
“And could she?”
“I don’t know. She had hung up,” said Ford, “by this time. So! What do you suppose,” he asked fiercely, “I did next?”
“I’ve no idea, Ford,” said Arthur.
“Pity,” said Ford, “I was hoping you could remind me. I really hate those guys you know. They really are the creeps of the cosmos, buzzing around the celestial infinite with their junky little machines that never work properly or, when they do, perform functions that no sane man would require of them and,” he added savagely, “go beep to tell you when they’ve done it!”
This was perfectly true, and a very respectable view widely held by right thinking people, who are largely recognizable as being right thinking people by the mere fact that they hold this view.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product that “it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.
“In other words – and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”
“And this guy,” ranted Ford, “was on a drive to sell more of them! His five-year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and sell Advanced Music Substitute Systems to their restaurants, elevators and wine bar
s! Or if they didn’t have restaurants, elevators and wine bars yet, to artificially accelerate their civilization growth until they bloody well did have! Where’s that coffee!”
“I threw it away.”
“Make some more. I have now remembered what I did next. I saved civilization as we know it. I knew it was something like that.”
He stumbled determinedly back into the sitting room, where he seemed to carry on talking to himself, tripping over the furniture and making beep beep noises.
A couple of minutes later, wearing his very placid face, Arthur followed him.
Ford looked stunned.
“Where have you been?” he demanded.
“Making some coffee,” said Arthur, still wearing his very placid face. He had long ago realized that the only way of being in Ford’s company successfully was to keep a large stock of very placid faces and wear them at all times.
“You missed the best bit!” raged Ford. “You missed the bit where I jumped the guy! Now,” he said, “I shall have to jump him, all over him!”
He hurled himself recklessly at a chair and broke it.
“It was better,” he said sullenly, “last time,” and waved vaguely in the direction of another broken chair which he had already got trussed up on the dining table.
“I see,” said Arthur, casting a placid eye over the trussed up wreckage, “and, er, what are all the ice cubes for?”
“What?” screamed Ford. “What? You missed that bit too? That’s the suspended animation facility! I put the guy in the suspended animation facility. Well I had to didn’t I?”
“So it would seem,” said Arthur, in his placid voice.
“Don’t touch that!!!” yelled Ford.
Arthur, who was about to replace the phone, which was for some mysterious reason lying on the table, off the hook, paused, placidly.
“OK,” said Ford, calming down, “listen to it.”
Arthur put the phone to his ear.
“It’s the speaking clock,” he said.
“Beep, beep, beep,” said Ford, “is exactly what is being heard all over that guy’s ship, while he sleeps, in the ice, going slowly round a little-known moon of Sesefras Magna. The London Speaking Clock!”
“I see,” said Arthur again, and decided that now was the time to ask the big one.
“Why?” he said, placidly.
“With a bit of luck,” said Ford, “the phone bill will bankrupt the buggers.”
He threw himself, sweating, on to the sofa.
“Anyway,” he said, “dramatic arrival don’t you think?”
Chapter 36
The flying saucer in which Ford Prefect had stowed away had stunned the world.
Finally there was no doubt, no possibility of mistake, no hallucinations, no mysterious CIA agents found floating in reservoirs.
This time it was real, it was definite. It was quite definitely definite.
It had come down with a wonderful disregard for anything beneath it and crushed a large area of some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including much of Harrods.
The thing was massive, nearly a mile across, some said, dull silver in colour, pitted, scorched and disfigured with the scars of unnumbered vicious space battles fought with savage forces by the light of suns unknown to man.
A hatchway opened, crashed down through the Harrods Food Halls, demolished Harvey Nicholls, and with a final grinding scream of tortured architecture, toppled the Sheraton Park Tower.
After a long, heart-stopping moment of internal crashes and grumbles of rending machinery, there marched from it, down the ramp, an immense silver robot, a hundred feet tall.
It held up a hand.
“I come in peace,” it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, “take me to your Lizard.”
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the non-stop frenetic news reports on the television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
“It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see…”
“You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?”
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again.
“Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.
“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairan dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin. But I haven’t and I am. Anyway, what are you looking so placid and moon-eyed for? Are you in love?”
Arthur said yes, he was, and said it placidly.
“With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?”
He did because Fenchurch came in at that moment with a pile of newspapers she’d been into the village to buy. She stopped in astonishment at the wreckage on the table and the wreckage from Betelgeuse on the sofa.
“Where’s the gin?” said Ford to Fenchurch. And to Arthur, “What happened to Trillian by the way?”
“Er, this is Fenchurch,” said Arthur, awkwardly. “There was nothing with Trillian, you must have seen her last.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ford, “she went off with Zaphod somewhere. They had some kids or something. At least,” he added, “I think that’s what they were. Zaphod’s calmed down a lot you know.”
“Really?” said Arthur, clustering hurriedly round Fenchurch to relieve her of the shopping.
“Yeah,” said Ford, “at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid.”
“Arthur, who is this?” said Fenchurch.
“Ford Prefect,” said Arthur. “I may have mentioned him in passing.”
Chapter 37
For a total of three days and nights the giant silver robot stood in stunned amazement straddling the remains of Knightsbridge, swaying slightly and trying to work out a number of things.
Government deputations came to see it, ranting journalists by the truckload asked each other questions on the air about what they thought of it, flights of fighter bombers tried pathetically to attack it – but no lizards appeared. It scanned the horizon slowly.
At night it was at its most spectacular, floodlit by the teams of television crews who covered it continuously as it continuo
usly did nothing.
It thought and thought and eventually reached a conclusion.
It would have to send out its service robots.
It should have thought of that before, but it was having a number of problems.
The tiny flying robots came screeching out of the hatchway one afternoon in a terrifying cloud of metal. They roamed the surrounding terrain, frantically attacking some things and defending others.
One of them at last found a pet shop with some lizards, but it instantly defended the pet shop for democracy so savagely that little in the area survived.
A turning point came when a crack team of flying screechers discovered the Zoo in Regent’s Park, and most particularly the reptile house.
Learning a little caution from their previous mistakes in the petshop, the flying drills and fretsaws brought some of the larger and fatter iguanas to the giant silver robot, who tried to conduct high-level talks with them.
Eventually the robot announced to the world that despite the full, frank and wide-ranging exchange of views the high level talks had broken down, the lizards had been retired, and that it, the robot would take a short holiday somewhere, and for some reason selected Bournemouth.
Ford Prefect, watching it on TV, nodded, laughed, and had another beer.
Immediate preparations were made for its departure.
The flying toolkits screeched and sawed and drilled and fried things with light throughout that day and all through the night time, and in the morning, stunningly, a giant mobile gantry started to roll westwards on several roads simultaneously with the robot standing on it, supported within the gantry.
Westward it crawled, like a strange carnival buzzed around by its servants and helicopters and news coaches, scything through the land until at last it came to Bournemouth, where the robot slowly freed itself from it transport system’s embraces and went and lay for ten days on the beach.
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish tuhgttg-4 Page 13
