The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (11 page)

“Well, do you think this is Southend?”

“Oh yes.”

“So do I.”

“Therefore we must be mad.”

“Nice day for it.”

“Yes,” said a passing maniac.

“Who was that?” asked Arthur.

“Who—the man with the five heads and the elderberry bush full of kippers?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Just someone.”

“Ah.”

They both sat on the pavement and watched with a certain unease as huge children bounced heavily along the sand and wild horses thundered through the sky taking fresh supplies of reinforced railings to the Uncertain Areas.

“You know,” said Arthur with a slight cough, “if this is Southend, there’s something very odd about it.…”

“You mean the way the sea stays steady as a rock and the buildings keep washing up and down?” said Ford. “Yes, I thought that was odd too. In fact,” he continued as with a huge bang Southend split itself into six equal segments which danced and spun giddily round each other in lewd and licentious formations, “there is something altogether very strange going on.”

Wild yowling noises of pipes and strings seared through the wind, hot doughnuts popped out of the road for ten pence each, horrid fish stormed out of the sky and Arthur and Ford decided to make a run for it.

They plunged through heavy walls of sound, mountains of archaic thought, valleys of mood music, bad shoe sessions and footling bats and suddenly heard a girl’s voice.

It sounded quite a sensible voice, but it just said, “Two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against and falling,” and that was all.

Ford skidded down a beam of light and spun round trying to find a source for the voice but could see nothing he could seriously believe in.

“What was that voice?” shouted Arthur.

“I don’t know,” yelled Ford, “I don’t know. It sounded like a measurement of probability.”

“Probability? What do you mean?”

“Probability. You know, like two to one, three to one, five to four against. It said two to the power of one hundred thousand to one against. That’s pretty improbable, you know.”

A million-gallon vat of custard upended itself over them without warning.

“But what does it mean?” cried Arthur.

“What, the custard?”

“No, the measurement of improbability!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know at all. I think we’re on some kind of spaceship.”

“I can only assume,” said Arthur, “that this is not the first-class compartment.”

Bulges appeared in the fabric of space-time. Great ugly bulges.

“Haaaauuurrgghhh …” said Arthur, as he felt his body softening and bending in unusual directions. “Southend seems to be melting away … the stars are swirling … a dustbowl … my legs are drifting off into the sunset … my left arm’s come off too.” A frightening thought struck him. “Hell,” he said, “how am I going to operate my digital watch now?” He wound his eyes desperately around in Ford’s direction.

“Ford,” he said, “you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”

Again came the voice.

“Two to the power of seventy-five thousand to one against and falling.”

Ford waddled around his pond in a furious circle.

“Hey, who are you?” he quacked. “Where are you? What’s going on and is there any way of stopping it?”

“Please relax,” said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines, one of which is on fire, “you are perfectly safe.”

“But that’s not the point!” raged Ford. “The point is that I am now a perfectly safe penguin, and my colleague here is rapidly running out of limbs!”

“It’s all right, I’ve got them back now,” said Arthur.

“Two to the power of fifty thousand to one against and falling,” said the voice.

“Admittedly,” said Arthur, “they’re longer than I usually like them, but …”

“Isn’t there anything,” squawked Ford in avian fury, “you feel you ought to be telling us?”

The voice cleared its throat. A giant petit four lolloped off into the distance.

“Welcome,” the voice said, “to the Starship Heart of Gold.”

The voice continued.

“Please do not be alarmed,” it said, “by anything you see or hear around you. You are bound to feel some initial ill effects as you have been rescued from certain death at an improbability level of two to the power of two hundred and seventy-six thousand to one against—possibly much higher. We are now cruising at a level of two to the power of twenty-five thousand to one against and falling, and we will be restoring normality just as soon as we are sure what is normal anyway. Thank you. Two to the power of twenty thousand to one against and falling.”

The voice cut out.

Ford and Arthur were in a small luminous pink cubicle.

Ford was wildly excited.

“Arthur!” he said, “this is fantastic! We’ve been picked up by a ship powered by the Infinite Improbability Drive! This is incredible! I heard rumors about it before! They were all officially denied, but they must have done it! They’ve built the Improbability Drive! Arthur, this is … Arthur? What’s happening?”

Arthur had jammed himself against the door to the cubicle, trying to hold it closed, but it was ill fitting. Tiny furry little hands were squeezing themselves through the cracks, their fingers were ink-stained; tiny voices chattered insanely.

Arthur looked up.

“Ford!” he said, “there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for
Hamlet
they’ve worked out.”

T
he Infinite Improbability Drive is a wonderful new method of crossing vast interstellar distances in a mere nothingth of a second, without all that tedious mucking about in hyperspace. It was discovered by a lucky chance, and then developed into a governable form of propulsion by the Galactic Government’s research team on Damogran.

This, briefly, is the story of its discovery.

The principle of generating small amounts of
finite
improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood—and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sorts of parties.

Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the
infinite
improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing-distances between the farthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually impossible.

Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particularly unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:

If, he thought to himself, such a machine is a
virtual
impossibility, then it must logically be a
finite
improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea … and turn it on!

He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long-sought-after golden Infinite Improbability generator out of thin air.

It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smart-ass.

T
he improbability-proof control cabin of the Heart of Gold looked like a perfectly conventional spaceship except that it was perfectly clean because it was so new. Some of the control seats hadn’t had the plastic wrapping taken off yet. The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn’t perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners of the cabin were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable. As it was the cabin looked excitingly purposeful, with large video screens ranged over the control and guidance system panels on the concave wall, and long banks of computers set into the convex wall. In one corner a robot sat humped, its gleaming brushed steel head hanging loosely between its gleaming brushed steel knees. It too was fairly new, but though it was beautifully constructed and polished it somehow looked as if the various parts of its more or less humanoid body didn’t quite fit properly. In fact they fitted perfectly well, but something in its bearing suggested that they might have fitted better.

Zaphod Beeblebrox paced nervously up and down the cabin, brushing his hands over pieces of gleaming equipment and giggling with excitement.

Trillian sat hunched over a clump of instruments reading off figures. Her voice was carried round the tannoy system of the whole ship.

“Five to one against and falling
…” she said,
“four to one against and falling … three to one … two … one … probability factor of one to one … we have normality, I repeat we have normality
.” She turned her microphone off-then turned it back on—with a slight smile and continued:
“Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. Please relax. You will be sent for soon.”

Zaphod burst out in annoyance, “Who are they, Trillian?”

Trillian spun her seat round to face him and shrugged.

“Just a couple of guys we seem to have picked up in open space,” she said. “Section ZZ, Plural Z Alpha.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a very sweet thought, Trillian,” complained Zaphod,
“but do you really think it’s wise under the circumstances? I mean, here we are on the run and everything, we must have the police of half the Galaxy after us by now, and we stop to pick up hitchhikers. Okay, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?”

He tapped irritably at a control panel. Trillian quietly moved his hand before he tapped anything important. Whatever Zaphod’s qualities of mind might include—dash, bravado, conceit—he was mechanically inept and could easily blow the ship up with an extravagant gesture. Trilllian had come to suspect that the main reason he had had such a wild and successful life was that he never really understood the significance of anything he did.

“Zaphod,” she said patiently, “they were floating unprotected in open space … you wouldn’t want them to have died, would you?”

“Well, you know … no. Not as such, but …”

“Not as such? Not die as such? But?” Trillian cocked her head on one side.

“Well, maybe someone else might have picked them up later.”

“A second later and they would have been dead.”

“Yeah, so if you’d taken the trouble to think about the problem a bit longer it would have gone away.”

“You’d have been happy to let them die?”

“Well, you know, not happy as such, but …”

“Anyway,” said Trillian, turning back to the controls, “I didn’t pick them up.”

“What do you mean? Who picked them up then?”

“The ship did.”

“Huh?”

“The ship did. All by itself.”

“Huh?”

“While we were in Improbability Drive.”

“But that’s incredible.”

“No, Zaphod. Just very very improbable.”

“Er, yeah.”

“Look, Zaphod,” she said, patting his arm, “don’t worry about the aliens. They’re just a couple of guys, I expect. I’ll send the robot down to get them and bring them up here. Hey, Marvin!”

In the corner, the robot’s head swung up sharply, but then wobbled about imperceptibly. It pulled itself up to its feet as if it was about five pounds heavier than it actually was, and made what an outside observer would have thought was a heroic effort to cross the room. It stopped in front of Trillian and seemed to stare through her left shoulder.

“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed,” it said. Its voice was low and hopeless.

“Oh God,” muttered Zaphod, and slumped into a seat.

“Well,” said Trillian in a bright compassionate tone, “here’s something to occupy you and keep your mind off things.”

“It won’t work,” droned Marvin, “I have an exceptionally large mind.”

“Marvin!” warned Trillian.

“All right,” said Marvin, “what do you want me to do?”

“Go down to number two entry bay and bring the two aliens up here under surveillance.”

With a microsecond pause, and a finely calculated micromodulation of pitch and timbre—nothing you could actually take offense at—Marvin managed to convey his utter contempt and horror of all things human.

“Just that?” he said.

“Yes,” said Trillian firmly.

“I won’t enjoy it,” said Marvin.

Zaphod leaped out of his seat.

“She’s not asking you to enjoy it,” he shouted, “just do it, will you?”

“All right,” said Marvin, like the tolling of a great cracked bell, “I’ll do it.”

“Good …” snapped Zaphod, “great … thank you …”

Marvin turned and lifted his flat-topped triangular red eyes up toward him.

“I’m not getting you down at all, am I?” he said pathetically.

“No no, Marvin,” lilted Trillian, “that’s just fine, really.…”

“I wouldn’t like to think I was getting you down.”

“No, don’t worry about that,” the lilt continued, “you just act as comes naturally and everything will be just fine.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” probed Marvin.

“No, no, Marvin,” lilted Trillian, “that’s just fine, really … just part of life.”

Marvin flashed her an electronic look.

“Life,” said Marvin, “don’t talk to me about life.”