The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (25 page)

“Hey, what? Only President you know! Of the whole Galaxy!”

“Conceited little megapuppy.”

Zaphod blinked in bewilderment.

“Hey—er, what are you at, man? I mean Great-grandfather.”

The hunched up little figure stalked up to his great-grandson and tapped him sternly on the knee. This had the effect of reminding Zaphod that he was talking to a ghost because he didn’t feel a thing.

“You know and I know what being President means, young Zaphod. You know because you’ve been it, and I know because I’m dead and it gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective. We have a saying up here. ‘Life is wasted on the living.’ ”

“Yeah,” said Zaphod bitterly, “very good. Very deep. Right now I need aphorisms like I need holes in my heads.”

“Fifty seconds,” grunted Ford Prefect.

“Where was I?” said Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth.

“Pontificating,” said Zaphod Beeblebrox.

“Oh yes.”

“Can this guy,” muttered Ford quietly to Zaphod, “actually in fact help us?”

“Nobody else can,” whispered Zaphod.

Ford nodded despondently.

“Zaphod!” the ghost was saying, “you became President of the Galaxy for a reason. Have you forgotten?”

“Could we go into this later?”

“Have you forgotten?” insisted the ghost.

“Yeah! Of course I forgot! I had to forget. They screen your brain when you get the job, you know. If they’d found my head full of tricksy ideas I’d have been right out on the streets again with nothing but a fat pension, secretarial staff, a fleet of ships and a couple of slit throats.”

“Ah,” nodded the ghost in satisfaction, “then you do remember!”

He paused for a moment.

“Good,” he said and the noise stopped.

“Forty-eight seconds,” said Ford. He looked again at his watch and tapped it. He looked up.

“Hey, the noise has stopped,” he said.

A mischievous twinkle gleamed in the ghost’s hard little eyes.

“I’ve slowed down time for a moment,” he said, “just for a moment you understand. I would hate you to miss all I have to say.”

“No, you listen to me, you see-through old bat,” said Zaphod leaping out of his chair, “A—Thanks for stopping time and all that, great, terrific, wonderful, but B—no thanks for the homily, right? I don’t know what this great thing I’m meant to be doing is, and it looks to me as if I was supposed not to know. And I resent that, right?

“The old me knew. The old me cared. Fine, so far so good. Except that the old me cared so much that he actually got inside his own brain—my own brain—and locked off the bits that knew and cared, because if I knew and cared I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wouldn’t be able to go and be President, and I wouldn’t be able to steal this ship, which must be the important thing.

“But this former self of mine killed himself off, didn’t he, by changing my brain? Okay, that was his choice. This new me has its own choices to make, and by a strange coincidence those choices involve not knowing and
not caring about this big number, whatever it is. That’s what he wanted, that’s what he got.

“Except this old self of mine tried to leave himself in control, leaving orders for me in the bit of my brain he locked off. Well, I don’t want to know, and I don’t want to hear them. That’s my choice. I’m not going to be anybody’s puppet, particularly not my own.”

Zaphod banged on the console in fury, oblivious of the dumbfounded looks he was attracting.

“The old me is dead!” he raved. “Killed himself! The dead shouldn’t hang about trying to interfere with the living!”

“And yet you summon me up to help you out of a scrape,” said the ghost.

“Ah,” said Zaphod, sitting down again, “well that’s different, isn’t it?”

He grinned at Trillian weakly.

“Zaphod,” rasped the apparition, “I think the only reason I waste my breath on you is that being dead I don’t have any other use for it.”

“Okay,” said Zaphod, “why don’t you tell me what the big secret is. Try me.”

“Zaphod, you knew when you were President of the Galaxy, as did Yooden Vranx before you, that the President is nothing. A cipher. Somewhere in the shadows behind is another man, being, something, with ultimate power. That man, or being, or something, you must find—the man who controls this Galaxy, and—we suspect—others. Possibly the entire Universe.”

“Why?”

“Why?” exclaimed an astonished ghost. “Why? Look around you, lad, does it look to you as if it’s in very good hands?”

“It’s all right.”

The old ghost glowered at him.

“I will not argue with you. You will simply take this ship, this Improbability Drive ship, to where it is needed. You will do it. Don’t think you can escape your purpose. The Improbability Field controls you, you are in its grip. What’s this?”

He was standing tapping at one of the terminals of Eddie the Shipboard Computer. Zaphod told him.

“What’s it doing?”

“It is trying,” said Zaphod with wonderful restraint, “to make tea.”

“Good,” said his great-grandfather, “I approve of that. Now Zaphod,” he said, turning and wagging a finger at him, “I don’t know if you are
really capable of succeeding in your job. I think you will not be able to avoid it. However, I am too long dead and too tired to care as much as I did. The principal reason I am helping you now is that I couldn’t bear the thought of you and your modern friends slouching about up here. Understood?”

“Yeah, thanks a bundle.”

“Oh, and Zaphod?”

“Er, yeah?”

“If you ever find you need help again, you know, if you’re in trouble, need a hand out of a tight corner …”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t hesitate to get lost.”

Within the space of one second, a bolt of light flashed from the wizened old ghost’s hands to the computer, the ghost vanished, the bridge filled with billowing smoke and the
Heart of Gold
leaped an unknown distance through the dimensions of time and space.

T
en light-years away, Gag Halfrunt jacked up his smile by several notches. As he watched the picture on his vision screen, relayed across the sub-ether from the bridge of the Vogon ship, he saw the final shreds of the
Heart of Gold’
s force shield ripped away, and the ship itself vanish in a puff of smoke.

Good, he thought.

The end of the last stray survivors of the demolition he had ordered on the planet Earth, he thought.

The final end of this dangerous (to the psychiatric profession) and subversive (also to the psychiatric profession) experiment to find the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything, he thought.

There would be some celebration with his fellows tonight, and in the morning they would meet again their unhappy, bewildered and highly profitable patients, secure in the knowledge that the Meaning of Life would not now be, once and for all, well and truly sorted out, he thought.

“Family’s always embarrassing, isn’t it?” said Ford to Zaphod as the smoke began to clear.

He paused, he looked about.

“Where’s Zaphod?” he said.

Arthur and Trillian looked about blankly. They were pale and shaken and didn’t know where Zaphod was.

“Marvin?” said Ford, “where’s Zaphod?”

A moment later he said:

“Where’s Marvin?”

The robot’s corner was empty.

The ship was utterly silent. It lay in thick black space. Occasionally it rocked and swayed. Every instrument was dead, every vision screen was dead. They consulted the computer. It said:

“I regret I have been temporarily closed to all communication. Meanwhile, here is some light music.”

They turned off the light music.

They searched every corner of the ship in increasing bewilderment and alarm. Everywhere was dead and silent. Nowhere was there any trace of Zaphod or of Marvin.

One of the last areas they checked was the small bay in which the Nutri-Matic machine was located.

On the delivery plate of the Nutri-Matic Drink Synthesizer was a small tray, on which sat three bone china cups and saucers, a bone china jug of milk, a silver teapot full of the best tea Arthur had ever tasted and a small printed note saying “Wait.”

U
rsa Minor Beta is, some say, one of the most appalling places in the known Universe.

Although it is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny and more full of wonderfully exciting people than a pomegranate is of pips, it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of
Playbeing
magazine headlined an article with the words “When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life,” the suicide rate there quadrupled overnight.

Not that there are any nights on Ursa Minor Beta.

It is a West zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of subtropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relastatics, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close.

No adequate explanation for this has been forthcoming from the dominant life forms on Ursa Minor Beta, who spend most of their time attempting to achieve spiritual enlightenment by running round swimming pools, and inviting Investigation Officials from the Galactic Geo-Temporal Control Board to “have a nice diurnal anomaly.”

There is only one city on Ursa Minor Beta, and that is only called a city because the swimming pools are slightly thicker on the ground there than elsewhere.

If you approach Light City by air—and there is no other way of approaching it, no roads, no port facilities—if you don’t fly they don’t want to see you in Light City—you will see why it has this name. Here the sun shines brightest of all, glittering on the swimming pools, shimmering on the white, palm-lined boulevards, glistening on the healthy bronzed specks moving up and down them, gleaming off the villas, the hazy airpads, the beach bars and so on.

Most particularly it shines on a building, a tall, beautiful building consisting of two thirty-story white towers connected by a bridge halfway up their length.

The building is the home of a book, and was built here on the proceeds of an extraordinary copyright lawsuit fought between the book’s editors and a breakfast cereal company.

The book is a guide book, a travel book.

It is one of the most remarkable, certainly the most successful, books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor—more popular than
Life Begins at Five Hundred and Fifty
, better selling than
The Big Bang Theory—A Personal View
by Eccentrica Gallumbits (the tripled-breasted whore of Eroticon Six) and more controversial then Oolon Colluphid’s latest blockbusting title
Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Sex but Have Been Forced to Find Out
.

(And in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, it has long supplanted the great
Encyclopedia Galactica
as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words
DON’T PANIC
printed in large friendly letters on its cover.)

It is of course that invaluable companion for all those who want to see the marvels of the known Universe for less than thirty Altairian dollars a day—
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
.

If you stood with your back to the main entrance lobby of the
Guide
offices (assuming you had landed by now and freshened up with a quick dip and shower) and then walked east, you would pass along the leafy shade of Life Boulevard, be amazed by the pale golden color of the beaches stretching away to your left, astounded by the mind-surfers floating carelessly along two feet above the waves as if this was nothing special, surprised and eventually slightly irritated by the giant palm trees that hum tuneless nothings throughout the daylight hours, in other words continuously.

If you then walked to the end of Life Boulevard you would enter the Lalamatine district of shops, bolonut trees and pavement cafés where the UM-Betans come to relax after a hard afternoon’s relaxation on the beach. The Lalamatine district is one of those very few areas which doesn’t enjoy a perpetual Saturday afternoon—it enjoys instead the cool of a perpetual early Saturday evening. Behind it lie the nightclubs.

If, on this particular day, afternoon, stretch of eveningtime—call it what you will—you had approached the second pavement café on the right, you would have seen the usual crowd of UM-Betans chatting, drinking, looking very relaxed and casually glancing at each other’s watches to see how expensive they were.

You would also have seen a couple of rather disheveled-looking hitchhikers
from Algol who had recently arrived on an Arcturan Megafreighter aboard which they had been roughing it for a few days. They were angry and bewildered to discover that here, within sight of the
Hitchhiker’s Guide
building itself, a simple glass of fruit juice cost the equivalent of over sixty Altairian dollars.

“Sell out,” one of them said, bitterly.

If at that moment you had then looked at the next table you would have seen Zaphod Beeblebrox sitting and looking very startled and confused.

The reason for his confusion was that five seconds earlier he had been sitting on the bridge of the starship
Heart of Gold
.

“Absolute sell out,” said the voice again.

Zaphod looked nervously out of the corners of his eyes at the two disheveled hitchhikers at the next table. Where the hell was he? How had he got there? Where was his ship? His hand felt the arm of the chair on which he was sitting, and then the table in front of him. They seemed solid enough. He sat very still.

“How can they sit and write a guide for hitchhikers in a place like this?” continued the voice. “I mean look at it. Look at it!”

Zaphod was looking at it. Nice place, he thought. But where? And why?

He fished in his pocket for his two pairs of sunglasses. In the same pocket he felt a hard, smooth, unidentified lump of very heavy metal. He pulled it out and looked at it. He blinked at it in surprise. Where had he got that? He returned it to his pocket and put on the sunglasses, annoyed to discover that the metal object had scratched one of the lenses. Nevertheless, he felt much more comfortable with them on. They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.