It was, of course, by far the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Bournemouth.
Crowds gathered daily along the perimeter which was staked out and guarded as the robot’s recreation area, and tried to see what it was doing.
It was doing nothing. It was lying on the beach. It was lying a little awkwardly on its face.
It was a journalist from a local paper who, late one night, managed to do what no one else in the world had so far managed, which was to strike up a brief intelligible conversation with one of the service robots guarding the perimeter.
It was an extraordinary breakthrough.
“I think there’s a story in it,” confided the journalist over a cigarette shared through the steel link fence, “but it needs a good local angle. I’ve got a little list of questions here,” he went on, rummaging awkwardly in an inner pocket, “perhaps you could get him, it, whatever you call him, to run through them quickly.”
The little flying ratchet screwdriver said it would see what it cold do and screeched off.
A reply was never forthcoming.
Curiously, however, the questions on the piece of paper more or less exactly matched the questions that were going through the massive battle-scarred industrial quality circuits of the robot’s mind. They were these:
“How do you feel about being a robot?”
“How does it feel to be from outer space?” and
“How do you like Bournemouth?”
Early the following day things started to be packed up and within a few days it became apparent that the robot was preparing to leave for good.
“The point is,” said Fenchurch to Ford, “can you get us on board?”
Ford looked wildly at his watch.
“I have some serious unfinished business to attend to,” he exclaimed.
Chapter 38
Crowds thronged as close as they could to the giant silver craft, which wasn’t very. The immediate perimeter was fenced off and patrolled by the tiny flying service robots. Staked out around that was the army, who had been completely unable to breach that inner perimeter, but were damned if anybody was going to breach them. They in turn were surrounded by a cordon of police, though whether they were there to protect the public from the army or the army from the public, or to guarantee the giant ship’s diplomatic immunity and prevent it getting parking tickets was entirely unclear and the subject of much debate.
The inner perimeter fence was now being dismantled. The army stirred uncomfortably, uncertain of how to react to the fact that the reason for their being there seemed as if it was simply going to get up and go.
The giant robot had lurched back aboard the ship at lunchtime, and now it was five o’clock in the afternoon and no further sign had been seen of it. Much had been heard – more grindings and rumblings from deep within the craft, the music of a million hideous malfunctions; but the sense of tense expectation among the crowd was born of the fact that they tensely expected to be disappointed. This wonderful extraordinary thing had come into their lives, an now it was simply going to go without them.
Two people were particularly aware of this sensation. Arthur and Fenchurch scanned the crowd anxiously, unable to find Ford Prefect in it anywhere, or any sign that he had the slightest intention of being there.
“How reliable is he?” asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice.
“How reliable?” said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. “How shallow is the ocean?” he said. “How cold is the sun?”
The last parts of the robot’s gantry transport were being carried on board, and the few remaining sections of the perimeter fence were now stacked at the bottom of the ramp waiting to follow them. The soldiers on guard round the ramp bristled meaningfully, orders were barked back and forth, hurried conferences were held, but nothing, of course, could be done about any of it.
Hopelessly, and with no clear plan now, Arthur and Fenchurch pushed forward through the crowd, but since the whole crowd was also trying to push forward through the crowd, this got them nowhere.
And within a few minutes more nothing remained outside the ship, every last link of the fence was aboard. A couple of flying fret saws and a spirit level seemed to do one last check around the site, and then screamed in through the giant hatchway themselves.
A few seconds passed.
The sounds of mechanical disarray from within changed in intensity, and slowly, heavily, the huge steel ramp began to lift itself back out of the Harrods Food Halls. The sound that accompanied it was the sound of thousands of tense, excited people being completely ignored.
“Hold it!”
A megaphone barked from a taxi which screeched to a halt on the edge of the milling crowd.
“There has been,” barked the megaphone, “a major scientific break-in! Through. Breakthrough,” it corrected itself. The door flew open and a small man from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse leapt out wearing a white coat.
“Hold it!” he shouted again, and this time brandished a short squad black rod with lights on it. The lights winked briefly, the ramp paused in its ascent, and then in obedience to the signals from the Thumb (which half the electronic engineers in the galaxy are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming, while the other half are constantly trying to find fresh ways of jamming the jamming signals), slowly ground its way downwards again.
Ford Prefect grabbed his megaphone from out of the taxi and started bawling at the crowd through it.
“Make way,” he shouted, “make way, please, this is a major scientific breakthrough. You and you, get the equipment from the taxi.”
Completely at random he pointed at Arthur and Fenchurch, who wrestled their way back out of the crowd and clustered urgently round the taxi.
“All right, I want you to clear a passage, please, for some important pieces of scientific equipment,” boomed Ford. “Just everybody keep calm. It’s all under control, there’s nothing to see. It is merely a major scientific breakthrough. Keep calm now. Important scientific equipment. Clear the way.”
Hungry for new excitement, delighted at this sudden reprieve from disappointment, the crowd enthusiastically fell back and started to open up.
Arthur was a little surprised to see what was printed on the boxes of important scientific equipment in the back of the taxi.
“Hang your coat over them,” he muttered to Fenchurch as he heaved them out to her. Hurriedly he manoeuvred out the large supermarket trolley that was also jammed against the back seat. It clattered to the ground, and together they loaded the boxes into it.
“Clear a path, please,” shouted Ford again. “Everything’s under proper scientific control.”
“He said you’d pay,” said the taxi-driver to Arthur, who dug out some notes and paid him. There was the distant sound of police sirens.
“Move along there,” shouted Ford, “and no one will get hurt.”
The crowd surged and closed behind them again, as frantically they pushed and hauled the rattling supermarket trolley through the rubble towards the ramp.
“It’s all right,” Ford continued to bellow. “There’s nothing to see, it’s all over. None of this is actually happening.”
“Clear the way, please,” boomed a police megaphone from the back of the crowd. “There’s been a break-in, clear the way.”
“Breakthrough,” yelled Ford in competition. “A scientific breakthrough!”
“This is the police! Clear the way!”
“Scientific equipment! Clear the way!”
“Police! Let us through!”
“Walkmen!” yelled Ford, and pulled half a dozen miniature tape players from his pockets and tossed them into the crowd. The resulting seconds of utter confusion allowed them to get the supermarket trolley to the edge of the ramp, and to haul it up on to the lip of it.
“Hold tight,” muttered Ford, and released a button on his Electronic Thumb. Beneath them, the huge ramp juddered and began slowly to heave its way upwards.
“Ok, kids,” he
said as the milling crowd dropped away beneath them and they started to lurch their way along the tilting ramp into the bowels of the ship, “looks like we’re on our way.”
Chapter 39
Arthur Dent was irritated to be continually wakened by the sound of gunfire.
Being careful not to wake Fenchurch, who was still managing to sleep fitfully, he slid his way out of the maintenance hatchway which they had fashioned into a kind of bunk for themselves, slung himself down the access ladder and prowled the corridors moodily.
They were claustrophobic and ill-lit. The lighting circuits buzzed annoyingly.
This wasn’t it, though.
He paused and leaned backwards as a flying power drill flew past him down the dim corridor with a nasty screech, occasionally clanging against the walls like a confused bee as it did so.
That wasn’t it either.
He clambered through a bulkhead door and found himself in a larger corridor. Acrid smoke was drifting up from one end so he walked towards the other.
He came to an observation monitor let into the wall behind a plate of toughened but still badly scratched perspex.
“Would you turn it down please?” he said to Ford Prefect who was crouching in front of it in the middle of a pile of bits of video equipment he’d taken from a shop window in Tottenham Court Road, having first hurled a small brick through it, and also a nasty heap of empty beer cans.
“Shhhh!” hissed Ford, and peered with manic concentration at the screen. He was watching The Magnificent Seven.
“Just a bit,” said Arthur.
“No!” shouted Ford. “We’re just getting to the good bit! Listen, I finally got it all sorted out, voltage levels, line conversion, everything, and this is the good bit!”
With a sigh and a headache, Arthur sat down beside him and watched the good bit. He listened to Ford’s whoops and yells and “yeehay!”s as placidly as he could.
“Ford,” he said eventually, when it was all over, and Ford was hunting through a stack of cassettes for the tape of Casablanca, “how come, if…”
“This is the big one,” said Ford. “This is the one I came back for. Do you realize I never saw it all through? Always I missed the end. I saw half of it again the night before the Vogons came. When they blew the place up I thought I’d never get to see it. Hey, what happened with all that anyway?”
“Just life,” said Arthur, and plucked a beer from a six-pack.
“Oh, that again,” said Ford. “I thought it might be something like that. I prefer this stuff,” he said as Rick’s Bar flickered on to the screen. “How come if what?”
“What?”
“You started to say, ‘how come if…’”
“How come if you’re so rude about the Earth, that you… oh never mind, let’s just watch the movie.”
“Exactly,” said Ford.
Chapter 40
There remains little still to tell.
Beyond what used to be known as the Limitless Lightfields of Flanux until the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine were discovered lying behind them, lie the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. Within the Grey Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine lies the star named Zarss, around which orbits the planet Preliumtarn in which is the land of Sevorbeupstry, and it was to the land of Sevorbeupstry that Arthur and Fenchurch came at last, a little tired by the journey.
And in the land of Sevorbeupstry, they came to the Great Red Plain of Rars, which was bounded on the South side by the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, on the further side of which, according to the dying words of Prak, they would find in thirty-foot-high letters of fire God’s Final Message to His Creation.
According to Prak, if Arthur’s memory saved him right, the place was guarded by the Lajestic Vantrashell of Lob, and so, after a manner, it proved to be. He was a little man in a strange hat and he sold them a ticket.
“Keep to the left, please,” he said, “keep to the left,” and hurried on past them on a little scooter.
They realized they were not the first to pass that way, for the path that led around the left of the Great Plain was well-worn and dotted with booths. At one they bought a box of fudge, which had been baked in an oven in a cave in the mountain, which was heated by the fire of the letters that formed God’s Final Message to His Creation. At another they bought some postcards. The letters had been blurred with an airbrush, “so as not to spoil the Big Surprise!” it said on the reverse.
“Do you know what the message is?” they asked the wizened little lady in the booth.
“Oh yes,” she piped cheerily, “oh yes!”
She waved them on.
Every twenty miles or so there was a little stone hut with showers and sanitary facilities, but the going was tough, and the high sun baked down on the Great Red Plain, and the Great Red Plain rippled in the heat.
“Is it possible,” asked Arthur at one of the larger booths, “to rent one of those little scooters? Like the one Lajestic Ventrawhatsit had.”
“The scooters,” said the little lady who was serving at an ice cream bar, “are not for the devout.”
“Oh well, that’s easy then,” said Fenchurch, “we’re not particularly devout. We’re just interested.”
“Then you must turn back now,” said the little lady severely, and when they demurred, sold them a couple of Final Message sunhats and a photograph of themselves with their arms tight around each other on the Great Red Plain of Rars.
They drank a couple of sodas in the shade of the booth and then trudged out into the sun again.
“We’re running out of border cream,” said Fenchurch after a few more miles. “We can go to the next booth, or we can return to the previous one which is nearer, but means we have to retrace our steps again.”
They stared ahead at the distant black speck winking in the heat haze; they looked behind themselves. They elected to go on.
They then discovered that they were not only not the first ones to make this journey, but that they were not the only ones making it now.
Some way ahead of them an awkward low shape was heaving itself wretchedly along the ground, stumbling painfully slowly, half-limping, half-crawling.
It was moving so slowly that before too long they caught the creature up and could see that it was made of worn, scarred and twisted metal.
It groaned at them as they approached it, collapsing in the hot dry dust.
“So much time,” it groaned, “oh so much time. And pain as well, so much of that, and so much time to suffer it in too. One or the other on its own I could probably manage. It’s the two together that really get me down. Oh hello, you again.”
“Marvin?” said Arthur sharply, crouching down beside it. “Is that you?”
“You were always one,” groaned the aged husk of the robot, “for the super-intelligent question, weren’t you?”
“What is it?” whispered Fenchurch in alarm, crouching behind Arthur, and grasping on to his arm. “He’s sort of an old friend,” said Arthur. “I…”
“Friend!” croaked the robot pathetically. The word died away in a kind of crackle and flakes of rust fell out of its mouth. “You’ll have to excuse me while I try and remember what the word means. My memory banks are not what they were you know, and any word which falls into disuse for a few zillion years has to get shifted down into auxiliary memory back-up. Ah, here it comes.”
The robot’s battered head snapped up a bit as if in thought.
“Hmm,” he said, “what a curious concept.”
He thought a little longer.
“No,” he said at last, “don’t think I ever came across one of those. Sorry, can’t help you there.”
He scraped a knee along pathetically in the dust, an then tried to twist himself up on his misshapen elbows.
“Is there any last service you would like me to perform for you perhaps?” he asked in a kind of hollow rattle. “A piece of paper that perhaps you would like me to pick up for you? Or maybe you would like me,” he continued, “to open a do
or?”
His head scratched round in its rusty neck bearings and seemed to scan the distant horizon.
“Don’t seem to be any doors around at present,” he said, “but I’m sure that if we waited long enough, someone would build one. And then,” he said slowly twisting his head around to see Arthur again, “I could open it for you. I’m quite used to waiting you know.”
“Arthur,” hissed Fenchurch in his ear sharply, “you never told me of this. What have you done to this poor creature?”
“Nothing,” insisted Arthur sadly, “he’s always like this…”
“Ha!” snapped Marvin. “Ha!” he repeated. “What do you know of always? You say ‘always’ to me, who, because of the silly little errands your organic lifeforms keep on sending me through time on, am now thirty-seven times older than the Universe itself? Pick your words with a little more care,” he coughed, “and tact.”
He rasped his way through a coughing fit and resumed.
“Leave me,” he said, “go on ahead, leave me to struggle painfully on my way. My time at last has nearly come. My race is nearly run. I fully expect,” he said, feebly waving them on with a broken finger, “to come in last. It would be fitting. Here I am, brain the size…”
Between them they picked him up despite his feeble protests and insults. The metal was so hot it nearly blistered their fingers, but he weighed surprisingly little, and hung limply between their arms.
They carried him with them along the path that ran along the left of the Great Red Plain of Rars toward the encircling mountains of Quentulus Quazgar.
Arthur attempted to explain to Fenchurch, but was too often interrupted by Marvin’s dolorous cybernetic ravings.
They tried to see if they could get him some spare parts at one of the booths, but Marvin would have none of it.
“I’m all spare parts,” he droned.
“Let me be!” he groaned.
“Every part of me,” he moaned, “has been replaced at least fifty times… except…” He seemed almost imperceptibly to brighten for a moment. His head bobbed between them with the effort of memory. “Do you remember, the first time you ever met me,” he said at last to Arthur. “I had been given the intellect-stretching task of taking you up to the bridge? I mentioned to you that I had this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side? That I had asked for them to be replaced but they never were?”
So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish tuhgttg-4 Page 14
